THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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W. Benjamin remarked aptly and conclusively on this strange case that humour was a plant which could be found in very large and very worthless numbers in the
lowlands, but which became all the rarer and especially all the more precious the higher the site on which it occurred. Humour, in such noble and in less noble form, is in
turn noted in several regions, alongside its higher or lower situation, but alongside those regions of stylistic attitude usually only or almost only in works of art, not of
philosophy. This is all the more striking as the phenomenon of the wise man, but also wisdom as such contain a re­emphasis, and precisely a smiling one, of what is
important, a re­emphasis which has always appeared as the wishful landscape of a deep taking­lightly, and hence is associated with humour, of a particularly precious
kind. Lao Tzu, the wise man, admittedly warns against taking things lightly under certain circumstances: ‘The weighty is the root of lightness/By taking things lightly we
lose the root’;(Tao­té­ching, Saying 26), but he warns only against lightness in the sense of levity, indeed of giddy frivolity, which causes a ruler ‘to take the world
lightly’. Whereas in the Tao­té­ching itself the advice of the tender, effortless, and unassuming man shines out concerning all that the element of being truly light in the
course of things means, in the true playful rotation around the true centre. And this advice shines out full of unassuming modesty against everything dressed up, against
heavily armed and thus not merely brutal seriousness. Likewise, even on this side of Lao Tzu's quietest Tao: ‘The fact that humour is possible does not mean smiling
amidst tears in the sense that, always locked in dreams anew, we could lead a happy and refined existence, while the basis of the world is unchanged, really sad. But its
making­light and accentuation means precisely — and here a fine mysterious ray of light, a knowledge nourished only from within, inexplicable, supported by nothing,
and mystical, flashes into life — that something is not right in it, that the tears are not to be taken wholly seriously compared with our immortal soul, however horribly
real they may appear together with the world­basis from which they stem; that Goethe's statement: ‘Verse that's good, like rainbow's arc, is drawn against a ground
that's dark’, is probably true of deep utterances but not of the most essential ones; that therefore dreaming, the apparently so illusory ability to hope, the significant
lightness of being, which is admittedly answered but by no means guaranteed, and incomprehensible delight as such, — is closer to the truth and reality which does not
need to be the world­basis than all the oppressive, verifiable, and indubitable features of factual circumstances with their entire, sensorily most real brutality’ (Ernst
Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 1918, p. 75f.). The