THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and especially in the future classless one, are no longer antagonistic ones, but just as they do not cease as non­antagonistic ones nor does the function of ideology to
take care of discordances within the leisure generally made possible and to make anticipatory provisions for their solution. Even if these discordances have finally
become purely human ones, ones worthy of human beings, and hence concern the only true existential cares. No activation of a new basis is then necessary any more,
this task was solved by the socialization of the means of production, but rather the ideology that has become communist has the function of activating the ever richer and
deeper fashioning of human relations. For there is precisely in leisure still a powerful career of solidarity, indeed it is only starting to begin. Thus the ideology of illusion
completely passes away, but not however, in any way, that of the social­moral shaping of political consciousness. In all its main features, even in the areas of art and the
more distant superstructure not predominantly related to nature, this kind of ideology will be an ethics. The new neediness of leisure itself thus produces a new
superstructure above a new planned non­economy. It produces an ever more essential ideology of interhuman illumination — and this precisely in the purified service of
leisure, for the promotion of its humane contents.
But all that is discordant and is to be considered goes far beyond the social range. Even where the relation to the economic substructure and its upheavals is either not a
direct one, or where no superstructure at all exists. As in language, in logic, general dialectics, as well as — because of the outside world here visibly independent of
human beings — in natural science (minus its philosophical theories). Now there are of course precisely in the physically organic character of human beings extremely
powerful elements by virtue of which nature is admittedly independent of man but not man of nature. The most powerful of these elements is to be found in death, and
likewise it forms the distinct field of a contradiction, even of a particularly harsh one, which is by no means merely a social one. In fact, death illustrates nothing short of
a double contradiction, which is admittedly indicated by such intensity and quality in social pressure and the reaction to it, but does not occur at all in such a pronounced
form. That contradiction is meant here in which the negation lies both as a protesting one in the subject which denies what opposes it, and in the opposing objectivity, a
hindering and even destroying one. And both in fact operate most harshly in death as the natural phenomenon of discordance per se (in view of the normal will to life,
work, and light); and the double contradiction operates, even if less sharply, by no means in death alone. For socially