The point of contact—central even from a geographical point of view—was a small book entitled Prolegomena zur Historiosophie published in 1838 by a Polish nobleman, August Cieszkowski, a fatal splinter in the Hegelian legacy. In just a few pages, which sectioned history by triads, as his master had taught, Cieszkowski unleashed the djinn of praxis—a word apparently bare and secular, in which the new figure of the Paraclete emerged. It sought above all to follow the consequences of a statement that then sounded plausible: “Now, thought itself has thought itself through.”⁵¹⁶ What then is the next step, the “transition” that opens up? It “lies in the recognition that consciousness is not the supreme end but must itself advance over and outside itself and, even better, out of itself.⁵¹⁷ Transition appears as the demand for a substantial unity of thought and being which is not simply in and for itself but must also generate a substratum out of itself.” Behind its coding, the language of Hegelian descent is very exact: that “substratum” is none other than new material, technical material, which is searching timidly for a name. But, for it to flourish, Will has finally to be transferred from its Napoleonic catechism to places that were so far forbidden: “Now it is the absolute will which should be raised to the heights of speculation which reason has already known … Philosophy leaves its own proper position and rises above itself into a domain which is alien but which nevertheless thoroughly conditions its further development, i.e., into the absolutely practical sphere of the will.”⁵¹⁸ This marked the complete reversal of the relationships between thought and will: “According to Hegel, will is only a particular way of thinking, and this is itself the wrong conception: on the contrary, it is thought that is a constituent moment of will, since will and action are thought that returns to being.” The dream of “reconciliation with reality under every aspect and in every field of life,” which obsessed the very young Hegelian Bakunin (and so many others throughout Europe!), could therefore happen through trust in the magic of this entirely new, elementary word: praxis.⁵¹⁹ The fact that barely concealed behind it was the “will of will” in which Heidegger would establish the emblem of nihilism (and therefore technology) could not have been apparent, primarily because they all had so little experience of technology. And yet it was Cieszkowski once again who formulated the maxim that regulated the new times: “Nihil est in voluntate et actu quod prius non fuerit in intellectu—There is nothing in the will or in action that was not already in the intellect.”⁵²⁰ This was to have a crucial consequence. “The will must thus undergo its phenomenological process as reason has already done.⁵²¹ Political life [Staatsleben] must, in its turn, affirm its universal hegemony as art and philosophy have done, one after the other.” And here his pragmatism all of a sudden becomes brutal: “In the future, philosophy must agree to become principally applied.⁵²² Just as the poetry of art passes over into the prose of thought, so must philosophy descend from the height of theory into the field of praxis.” Philosophy, “applied” at last, agrees to die, but penetrating first into every object, as we can now recognize.