THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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humanism is unavowedly always something unclosed. It is the dissolving of circumstances sung to an end precisely as that which is itself not sung to an end, as the
circulation of an absolutely future lightness in the effort and gravity of process. This although the thinker of memory and circles­in­circles seeks to keep future things
absolutely unconceptual and without light: ‘The past is the preservation of the present, as reality, but the future is the opposite of this, or rather the formless …so no
form whatsoever can be viewed in the future’ (Werke XIV, p. 105); — but humour displays in its fluidity, even in Hegel, transparency of form which has not become
manifest. This precisely explains Hegel's aversion to merely arbitrary humour, to ‘saucy and brilliant wryness, the cometary world of smells and sounds, without a core,
the game in unrealistic tones of the hollow spirit’; this explains the classification of true humour with depths which lie very far out. Hegel notes this trend towards the
latter, a trend which has never been wholly indicated by any existing path, and never been wholly authenticated by any existing significant Object, as ‘an unaffected,
light, inconspicuous strolling on, which in its insignificance gives precisely (!) the highest concept of depth, and since it is in fact details which swirl up in disorder, the
inner connection must lie all the deeper and drive out the light­spot of the spirit in what is isolated as such’ (Werke X2, p. 228). Hegel posits here, with the function of
strolling on, merely a certain and not the highest humorous literature for the utopian phenomenon of lightness that is humour per se, yet not only the classification with a
highest concept of depth is described but also — which explodes the mere aesthetics of humour — with light­spots everywhere. In fact it is the joyfulness of light which
is everywhere contrasted with gravity here too and which in this whole system so alien to the future, malgré lui, again and again with further­pointing, further­signifying
transparency allows a glimpse of formations of lightness, far beyond aesthetics. Brightness breaks forth everywhere where ‘the inward­turning nocturnal point of
negative unity’ veers round in a positive direction. As in the philosophy of nature: when light is the first ‘to cheer the gravity of being beside oneself’ and consciousness
finally bursts the crust. As in the philosophy of history when, after the wild splendour of the oriental rising of the light, Greece ‘emerges in its more beautiful naturalness,
freedom, depth and cheerfulness, like the bride from the chamber’. As in the philosophy of religion where Hegel apparently seeks to make the phenomenon of light
culminate in an elapsed way: ‘All sorrow, all care, this sandbank of temporality, hovers in this ether, whether in the present feeling of devotion or of hope. In this region
of the spirit stream