THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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philosophers being quoted as those who are not past, namely from the point of view of their undischarged element, which extends its influence into the future space of
such thoughts which continue to operate. Thus the same also goes for the early, already identified dialectics of Anaximander, the witness of light, a dialectics which is
thoroughly verifiable and collected precisely in the astonishment over the Adikia.
Decisive here is his doctrine as to how the various things materialized in such a transitory way. Just as hot and cold, density and thinness emerged from the Apeiron
which is itself featureless, but these opposites combine further into the elements, into water, earth, air, and fire. But this also gives rise to the state of a lasting imbalance
alphagrave iota
of these elements in relation to one another, in fact an encroachment, a preponderance ( δ хíα) of one over the other, so that the hot seeks to
displace the cold and vice versa, so that water or earth threatens to suppress the air or fire threatens to suppress everything else, and to take its place. Or, as the
Physics of Aristotle says wholly in the spirit of Anaximander against the association of air and infinity in Anaximenes: ‘If a single element were infinite, the others would
have ceased to exist’. But in fact the world consists of nothing but a changing preponderance of elements and also the separate things formed from them: so that it
operates in nothing but such intensified differences, and always newly heightened contrasts. So an objective dialectics is quite unmistakably evident here, obviously also
one which interpreted the relationship of the cosmic elements out of the ever­changing preponderance of Demos and urban nobility in the Ionian trading cities. The
dialectic thus appeared as an Adikia repeatedly corrected and directed in the destructibility of separate things, in the frailty of living things, and in the cycle of matter; but
it is also evident in the extinction of the Adikia, namely in the ultimate relationship of separate things to the Apeiron. These justly destroy one another, because the overintensified
difference of their separate being wears itself down until it annihilates itself; but things are also destroyed because their separate being as a whole turns into
likeness at one end of the world, and cancels itself out in the contrastlessness of the Apeiron. That is then where the unison is, attained by the Dikē which with time
brings everything to light and more than this: which brings it into light, into the harmony of the infinite. And at the same time a very unusual oriental note is sounded here;
unusual because for the Greeks the infinite (as something misshapen, unplastic) was otherwise always something negative. Only in late Hellenism, and hence precisely in
the unrestrained invasion of the Orient, did the revaluation of the infinite reach