Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries

Locating Utopian Messianism

Ivan Boldyrev

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472512062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts, Spirit of Utopia and Traces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.

1

Ernst Bloch’s Philosophical Prose

A brief intellectual biography

Unlike his childhood friend, Lukács, Bloch, though being a radical thinker, never radically changed his views.¹ Between his first and last major works there is a long path that could characterize the central events of European intellectual and political life. Bloch’s life followed the rhythm of his philosophy: a systolic-diastolic movement of ‘assembling’ oneself and of the explicatio described by Nicholas of Cusa, the encyclopaedic unfolding of this thought and its realization in the farthest limits of the cultural and historical universe (Holz 1975, p. 103).

Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen in 1885. Despite this being distanced from philosophy, he communicated with the eminent thinkers Ernst Mach, Theodor Lipps, Eduard von Hartmann and Wilhelm Windelband (at that time it was possible to instigate dialogues with famous philosophers). Between 1905 and 1906 he studied philosophy under Lipps in Munich, where he met Max Scheler and other phenomenologists of the Munich school; he then continued his studies under Oswald Külpe in Würzburg in 1907–08 (where he also took physics and musical theory as minors), only to move to Berlin to Georg Simmel between 1908 and 1911 and to Heidelberg to Max Weber between 1912 and 1914.

Even though Bloch’s dissertation Critical Reflections on Heinrich Rickert and the Problem of the Modern Theory of Knowledge (published in Ludwigshafen in 1909, partially reprinted in 1978: TL, pp. 55–107) was written within Simmel’s circle, by the time of the first edition of The Spirit of Utopia, Bloch was criticizing his teacher for being too subjective and emotional, failing to grasp the rhythm of his subject, to find solid ground for his argument (GU1, pp. 246–7). Bloch was discontented with Simmel’s relativism, he called him the maybe-thinker (in German it sounds quite derogatory – Veilleichtsdenker) and sarcastically said that relativism is too strict a characteristic for Simmel (PA, p. 57). Nevertheless, it was Simmel and Weber from whom Bloch had inherited an analysis of the crisis of contemporary culture, the conflict between the intellectuals and the new technical bourgeoisie, and a critique of a civilization powered by the onslaught of reason.

In his dissertation Bloch argued contra to the neo-Kantians that the historical process is not predetermined, emphasizing the role of exceptional personalities and great (unpredictable) events in history. Its final call is for a new metaphysics: one that ‘not only forms the domain of inquiry for the general world-view, but also deepens the lived present down to the total knowledge, containing both the darkness of the first principle and the indication at the mystical outcome to which the things should be led in their process’ (Bloch 1909, p. 77; cited by Münster 1982, p. 50). These words express the essence of Bloch’s lifelong philosophical project.

Like many intellectuals of his epoch, Bloch was deeply affected by the revolutionary events in Russia. During World War I he lived in exile in Switzerland, where he began research on the Swiss utopias and reform programmes for Weber’s journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. In the 1920s Bloch went to Berlin, where he became acquainted with Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and became (together with Döblin and Brecht, as well as Johannes Becher, Max Brod, Robert Musil, Erwin Piscator, Ernst Toller and others) a member of the writers’ Group 1925. He frequently left Berlin for Southern Europe and Africa.

When the Nazi came to power Bloch was deprived of his German citizenship due to his Jewish roots and anti-fascist views, only to leave for Switzerland in 1933, and after roaming around Europe in the meantime, emigrating to the United States in 1938. Before emigration he had published The Spirit of Utopia (1918, 2nd edition – 1923), Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution (1921), the collection of essays, stories and aphorisms Traces (1930), and the social-political and philosophical-ideological work Heritage of Our Times (1935).

Some of the titles themselves are quite telling. Bloch’s first book – The Spirit of Utopia – refers both to Weber and Montesquieu. Thomas Müntzer was partially written as a pendant to Weber’s famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. At the same time, Weber’s idea of the interplay between religious and social-economic forms of thought and social organization is also realized in Bloch, but in a different way: as a connection between mystical atheism and proletarian revolution (Bolz 1987, p. 305).

Traces (Spuren) bears witness not only of Bloch’s fascination with Karl May’s adventure novels, whose heroes track wild animals and Indians, but also of the Latin word for hope – spes or spero (Weissberg 1992, p. 35). Bloch is, of course, concerned with the metaphysical traces, the traces of sudden insights and new ideas found in everyday life; traces that contain both a hint of a solution, a longing for a quest, and an uncertainty as to what this quest might lead to.

In the United States he wrote his opus magnum – three volumes entitled The Principle of Hope (published in 1954–59), a monograph Subjekt-Objekt: Commentaries on Hegel (1949) and a book Natural Law and Human Dignity (published in Bloch’s complete works in 1961). After his return to the GDR in 1949, Bloch became a professor at the University of Leipzig, and then, after his emigration to West Germany in 1961, taught in Tübingen until his death in 1977. In 1959–78 the West German publisher Suhrkamp issued 17 volumes of his work.

Bloch’s political views can be characterized as being broadly left/social-democratic; and always vehemently anti-fascist. When The Principle of Hope was published in 1959 in West Germany, it was perceived as opening a dialogue between the East and the West, while Bloch himself passed for the main philosopher of the GDR. Nevertheless Bloch had already come into conflict with the East German government by 1957. After the erection of the Berlin wall in 1961, he was forced to stay in West Germany, where publishers cautiously deleted his references to Stalin in The Principle of Hope. Bloch’s radicalism and communist convictions were attractive to the revolutionary youth movements of the 1960s, when he continued his political and social work, engaging with Rudi Dutschke and writers from the Group 47.

As early as the late 1910s, readers were taken by Bloch’s prophetic style – both in writing and in speech. Despite all his declared humanism, he was quite an authoritarian thinker. Even in his voice (retained on several recordings) there is something of a Führer, a strictness and uncompromising severety, which won the hearts of some, but frightened others (Weber among them).² It probably reflected a well-known propensity, which is characteristic of the relationship between intellectuals and power: a constant desire for inversion, the aspiration of intellectuals – even the most radical, those most distanced from conformism and opportunism – to take power, to gain authority, to subdue, mesmerize or lead the way. Admittedly, Bloch has also paid tribute to the Soviet propaganda, glorifying the communist state in the 1940s and 1950s. But he became neither the official ideologist of the GDR, nor a dissident: he was forced to leave by those who – quite correctly – did not regard his views as wholly orthodox. The GDR for Bloch could not have become a country of ‘realized’ utopia, for the philosophy of hope compels one to never be satisfied with the current state of affairs and fight for freedom in every instant. Besides, Bloch was always a marginal figure – both with regard to orthodox Marxism and to the right, and even more to scientific streams of philosophy. It is both tragic and inevitable that Bloch and Lukács – the ones who imported a stream of revolutionary emancipation to philosophy – were forced out of the intellectual mainstream into the communist bloc.

An important factor in Bloch’s intellectual evolution was Expressionism,³ which defined both his aesthetic views and his literary style. Like the Expressionists, early Bloch was suspicious of nature and of the external world in general. One of the most representative expressionist poets, Georg Heym, in his anthology The Eternal Day (1911), describes nature as Die Heimat der Toten (The Home of The Dead) – a landscape is penetrated by images of death, the idyll is deliberately destroyed, replaced by images of chaos and decay – for instance, in the poems ‘Der Baum’ (from Umbra Vitae) or ‘Die Tote im Wasser’. Bloch describes nature as a dungeon, a coffin, from which the soul is trying to escape in search of new revelations (GU2, p. 208). Nevertheless, both Heym and Gottfried Benn, despite their infinite contempt for bourgeois life, were much further away from Bloch than politically engaged ‘left-wing’ Expressionists (like early Becher and Toller). Bloch who openly aspired to be the philosopher of Expressionism, shared with Expressionists a conviction that it is necessary to completely destroy the modern world, for that is the only way to renew it.

Bloch’s language is difficult, and at times deliberately enigmatic. Many passages require supplementary commentaries, and his literary style, like that of any other apocalyptic writer, does not really contribute to ‘the clarity of philosophical distinctions’ (Bulgakov 1993, p. 395). But when this philosophy unfolds – in aesthetics, in politics, in a dialogue with the contemporaries – it undoubtedly becomes clearer, as we begin to understand what constitutes its meaning and purpose. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch develops his philosophy of utopia and provides a compendium of utopian motives (in music, literature, religion and politics). Some authors even compare the structure of Bloch’s magnum opus to The Phenomenology of Spirit: Bloch opens his work with a description of expectation and anticipation of the future, then (in the 2nd volume) political, religious and literary utopias are analysed, and towards the end of the book the idea of utopian philosophy is expounded with respect to the forms of the ‘absolute spirit’: in art, religion and philosophy (Widmer 1974). The Tübingen Introduction in Philosophy envisions a specific ontology without being, before being itself can be found – suggesting an ontology of the Not-yet. This is an attempt to reformulate dialectical materialism in the spirit of the naturphilosophic speculation of Bruno, Goethe and the German romanticists.

Bloch, the ‘Marxist Schelling’ (Habermas 1971), systematically laid out this project in his last book Experimentum Mundi (1975). By building a system of categories, he once again demonstrated that his thinking worked against the grain of systematic thought. Recalling the philosophical explorations of his youth, Bloch once cited his early passage:

In systems . . . thoughts are like tin soldiers; one can set them up as one likes, but they will never win an empire. Our philosophy has always been suspended from grammatical hooks or from the systematic of exhausted old men; science takes the root of life, art raises it to a power, and philosophy? Our blood must become as the river, our flesh as the earth, our bones like the mountains, our brain like the clouds, our eye like the sun. (S, p. 70; T, p. 49)

Bloch was familiar with and quite receptive towards the old traditions of Western thought. He was deeply influenced by Aristotle and medieval Aristotelianism (in 1952 he published a book entitled Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left), Neoplatonism and the Jewish and Catholic mystics of the Middle Ages. Hegel’s dialectic was an absolute authority to him, and from the very beginning the conceptual schemes of Eduard von Hartmann are evident in his work (Christen 1979, p. 170ff.).⁴ Bloch even wrote several historical books, in which he tried to reinterpret the philosophy of the past, transforming it into his own schema. In particular, he investigated the development of materialist ideas (The Problem of Materialism, 1972) and Hegel’s system (Subjekt-Objekt, 1949). Bloch actually did not consider his philosophy to be entirely original:

All freedom movements are guided by utopian aspirations, and all Christians know them after their own fashion too . . . from the exodus and messianic parts of the Bible. In addition, the merging of have and have-not constituted by longing and hope, and by the drive to reach home again, has in any case been burrowing in great philosophy. Not only in Plato’s Eros, but also in the far-reaching Aristotelian concept of matter . . . and in Leibniz’s concept of tendency. Hope acts unmediatedly in the Kantian postulates of moral consciousness, it acts in a world-based, mediated way in Hegel’s historical dialectic. (PH, p. 17; PHE, p. 7f.)

Bloch also suggested an anthropological interpretation of religion (Atheism in Christianity, 1968) thus anticipating contemporary discussions in radical theology and ‘theology of action’ (Munich 2008, see also Moltmann 1964).

One would fail to give a satisfactory characteristic of Bloch’s philosophy without mentioning his special relationship with music rooted within the canon of Western aesthetics. Music most clearly expresses the transient nature of the ‘fulfilled instant’, which ‘flowered . . . as sight, as clairvoyance, the visible world, and also God’s traces in the visible world disintegrated’ (GU2, p. 198; SU, p. 156). In music we rid ourselves of the visual images we are accustomed to in everyday life; sound opens to us the inner, pure part of the soul. Music is the most ‘dynamic’ of arts, it manifests the immediacy of the subjective experience, it carries out instantaneous transitions, one can both plunge into the abyss and soar towards the sky, even the most insignificant theme can become crucial. The immediacy of the perception of music conjures the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, the horns of the Apocalypse and those who heed the Word, without seeing God. By no accident Bloch considers music the utopian medium par excellence that preserves duration, enables one to live from the inside out, which, in utopian terms, constitutes the inner restlessness of being (see further Vidal 2010, Korstvedt 2010).

The musical experience also defines the way in which Bloch cultivates the utmost sensitivity to the insignificant objects in The Spirit of Utopia. The coexistence with art, the attempt to see and hear things and sounds in their imperceptible, inconspicuous existence, leads him to try and find behind them the future utopian community and an encounter with oneself.

In the late writings the primary aesthetic category is no longer appearance (Schein), but anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein), the search for real, latent possibilities of the world, a Faustian experiment. The objective content of art always refers to something undisclosed, transcending its own limits. This is precisely the meaning of allegory and other symbolic forms. It is not the artist, but the world itself that transcends its boundaries. The concept of anticipation in the late Bloch is an entirely immanent category, and this explains the necessity of an ‘objective’ utopian hermeneutics, where the act of artistic creation itself is rooted in the utopian drive – as one of the primary features of consciousness.

Bloch’s philosophy combined insights of avant-garde art, creative Marxism and mystical gnosis, and the academic interest to it is by no means accidental. Most commentators agree that Bloch did...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Ernst Bloch’s Philosophical Prose
• 2 Heidelberg’s Apostles: Bloch Reading Lukács Reading Bloch
• 3 Eschatology and Messianism: Bloch with Buber, Landauer and Rosenzweig
• 4 The Form of the Messianic: Bloch and Benjamin
• 5 The Void of Utopia and the Violence of the System: Bloch contra Adorno
• Conclusion: Drawing the Utopian Line
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright