THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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just a logical evidence, but a humane one in mediated terms and in terms of content), which does not lower the flag or surrender the sword to the mere Factum if it is
inadequate to the ideal. Instead the revolutionary reason is admittedly an anticipation corrected by damage but never destroyed by it or even merely refuted au fond.
The real unity of thinking (in this case of a revolutionary­total kind) and world­being must rather first be found; it is least of all dialectically already a given fact, but in the
most eminent sense a dialectical task. Up to the frontier landscape of the fulfilment of this task the historical process holds good, whose continuance would not exist if
something did not exist which ought not to exist. The true thought, still uncompleted for this very reason, is the art of the right way home in this On­the­way.
But the astonishment remains effective, interferes for so long in the trend. It sells itself only dearly, namely at the price of a Being prematurely passed off as ‘authentic’.
Which now has to appear all the more precious, although in view of the bad way in which so much of the world still finds itself this Being can only be deeply tentative
pre­appearance. Unlike­like, like­like — it is significant now that precisely the first surviving proposition of one of the earliest European thinkers contains painful
astonishment of the unlike and afterwards harmony. Namely the proposition of Anaximander, it is as capable and in need of the indication of its darkness and its sought
At­home as not many later ones are. The proposition, for all the darkness in it, is that of a materialist who sought to explain the world in its own terms, an earthy but by
no means simple materialist. His thesis runs in the translation given by Diels (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1912, p. 15) as follows (fr. 9): ‘The beginning of things
alphadash iota oncom vtend vtend iota
is the infinite ( πε о , the misshapen, inexhaustible primal matter). But that which gave them birth (γέ εσ ς) is
oncom omegaacute vtend alphdash netaacute
also the direction of their death in accordance with necessity (χ ε ). For they pay one another ( λλ λо
iota vtend iota vtend alphaacute iota alphaacute
ς) a penalty and forfeit (δíхη хαì τíσ ) for their wickedness ( δ хíα) according to the order (τ ξ
iota vtend omegatilde vtend alphadash vtend
) of time.’ The problem of this proposition is obviously first the multiplicity of individual things (τ τω
vtend oncom omegaacute vtend
, of That­Which­Is in the plural), and then, in accordance with necessity (χ ε , perhaps also: custom), their passing, hence
the very un­illuminating aspect of transitoriness, particularly including man. The ‘solution’ to the problem is first characterized by penalty and forfeit, hence by a kind of
reparation for the emergence of things in their multiplicity; and then in the passing of things their return into the Apeiron is probably also implied. Even though the
alphagrave netaacute iota
important word λλ о ς (i.e., paying a penalty and forfeit ‘mutually to one another’ and