THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the waters of Lethe, from which Psyche drinks, in which she sinks all pain, forms all hardnesses and darknesses of time into a dream­image and transfigures them into
the brilliant light of the eternal’ (Werke XI, p. 4). The narrower relation to the spirit of humour, namely to an unassuming cheerfulness, is here abandoned of course; the
fine flashing and shining of humour, although it cannot be world­shattering by any means, also comes from a very different peace from that made by Hegel's philosophy
with an imperfect world. But precisely the element which has not been sung to an end itself, and hence the still objectively utopian element is at work around all these
successive ‘light­spots’ (contra gravity), together with a positive element of the final state, without the misuse of which Hegel's philosophy could not have been so
poorly apologetic, and without the use of which it could not have been so finely optimistic. So much here for the second, positive kind of philosophically shining
transparency, thoroughly belonging to the greeting of something that is coming up, although the past­bound thinker buried it in a closed system. But even in the light­spot
of optimism, it is only since Marx that the past has not only been brought into the present and the latter again into the contemplated past, but both have been brought on
to the horizon of the future. And what is conceived in the optative: lightness­cheerfulness­peacefulness is not only set on its feet by Marxism but referred to its hands.
For more than a promise that all that is claimed to be full of light could be so is not to be found, alongside the wish that it may be so, in the closed systems of light even
from the point of view of cheerfulness. We must here recall Spinozism once more, the world claimed to be crystal, and the vast philosophical utopia must be considered
which would like to form and does form the final conclusion of such wisdom: ‘There is nothing in nature which is contrary to intellectual love or can eliminate it’ (Eth. V,
Prop. 37). Such a proposition of light is in its very extremeness without empirical meaning, but in fact a promise is implied in it, and with it the extremeness no longer
alien to meaning, though remaining vast, of the task of keeping the promise thus implied approximative. So that the At­home in this world, the this­world of every Athome,
which is lit in the utopian dimension of such propositions, does not remain unproven even empirically by changing the nature of history and the world. There is
certainly no lack, in the empirical process, of inward­turning or even less inward­turning nocturnal points of negative unity, but even less of light­spots, despite and by
means of these Negativa, and of light in latency. The landscape of the truly essential, with positive resoluteness of its content,