THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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came too early. Here too the wish is then father to the thought, but not, as so often in other cases, to a foolish, extravagant, probably even lying thought, but to a
thought rushing on ahead, even though in an exaggerated way. Such a thought can later also seem much more sober than many poor imitations and pieces of advice
from what happens to exist at the time, which in their day thought they were ever so effective. Of course, the dry assessment of how things are and stand at present is
indispensable and cannot be dry enough. But it is one thing to note the state of things is bad, and another to affirm it or even simply to consider it to be irremediable.
Thus even one of the Seven Sages says: ‘Most people are bad’, which is not far from Hobbes' opinion, which until recently was almost overwhelmingly correct, that
man is a wolf to man. But it is all a question of not agreeing with such opinions; of recognizing the causes from which they will not spring nor need to spring for ever;
knowing how bad so many things still are, but knowing more deeply how good they could be. The latter is in fact to be found, in a hasty way, also often in an abstract
wholesale fashion, in some otherwise not at all very comprehensible philosophical propositions; as for example in Socrates' proposition that nobody voluntarily does
wrong. Such propositions share their, shall we say: cheerful haste with many wishful propositions of a much lesser kind; and they still have the defect that they do not
seem to be conscious of their wish at all. But these propositions are so designed that they simply ironically conceal the wish, together with the well­known distance from
the assertion and the land in which they are indigenous. This makes their seriousness related to the so particularly invisible and unobtrusive one of humour, which again
is not at all hasty but rather stretches a point, because it takes misfortune even less, much less seriously than itself. Though the propositions of the kind intended and
cited above by no means have a smile in common with humour but rather an empirically often so incomprehensible yet never precipitate, thoroughly well­housed
elapsion. So that in them not just thoughts but also things sit easily side by side, in well accentuated pre­appearance. Which therefore does not hover in the air or would
not have to if things were already on the right track everywhere.
Let us take the proposition that no man voluntarily does wrong. By saying this, Socrates is asserting much more than just this, virtue is teachable and learnable. He is
also asserting more than the uniformity of virtue and insight, in the sense that true virtue consists in knowledge or, somewhat restrictively, that ultimately all virtues are
only one: knowledge. And this knowledge for Socrates is only allowed to be one of goodness anyway,