Ernst Bloch
Part of the Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 138th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Bloch (08 July 1885–04 August 1977), who was born in Ludwigshafen on this date in 1885.
Bloch’s work is elusive and defies easy categorization. He was closely associated with Marxism and with communist regimes during this life, even being regarded for a time as the “official” philosopher of the German Democratic Republic. On the other hand, Bloch’s thought is pervasively religious, going so far as to say, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.” One might well not find this surprising. Walter Benjamin, who was a rather more consistent Marxist than Bloch (perhaps we can say he was a more radical Marxist than was Bloch), wrote extensively about messianism in his well-known essay on the concept of history. But anyone who was read On the Concept of History and anything by Bloch will be aware of the great abyss that separates Bloch from Benjamin.
Bloch was intensely interested in utopian ideas, hope, striving toward and into the future, possibility, and potentiality. Harvey Cox related this anecdote about Bloch:
“…what does Bloch help us to see? How would his thought be capsulated if it had to be described in a few words? Bloch himself, Adolph Lowe reports, was once faced with this challenge. A few years back at a late afternoon tea in the home of a friend, someone challenged the old man to sum up his philosophy in one sentence. ‘All great philosophers have been able to reduce their thought to one sentence,’ the friend said. ‘What would your sentence be?’ Bloch puffed on his pipe for a moment and then said, ‘That’s a hard trap to get out of. If I answer, then I’m making myself out to be a great philosopher. But if I’m silent, then it will appear as though I have a great deal in mind but not much to say. But I’ll play the brash one instead of the silent one and give you this sentence: S is not yet P.”
This story does wonderfully encapsulate Bloch’s philosophical interest, which is expressed in many different ways across many books. In an essay translated the “Man as Possibility” — a paradigmatically Blochian theme — Bloch made this observation:
“Openness toward the future is a large category with a sort of step-mother character. One must plunge beyond the horizon into that very difficult sphere of reality, the sphere of the novum. And this is not the reality which is being present (Vorhanden-Sein), nor the reality in process (im Prozess Sein), but the reality of the not yet (noch nicht Sein). This is the sphere of the novum, the place where deeds are measured, the realm of fear as well as hope.”
The idea of “man as possibility” is a special case of the idea that “S is not yet P,” and this above anecdote may also imply a special case of “man and possibility,” and therefore even a narrower sense of “S is not yet P.” A friend pointed out to me that Bloch in saying “S is not yet P” may have been a sly way of saying that Bloch himself was “not yet P,” i.e., that he was not yet a great philosopher and was not yet able to reduce the whole of this thought to a single sentence. And, if this is the case, the anecdote is a beautifully paradoxical summation of his thought, as Bloch has expressed his status as being “not yet” in a way to confirm that he already has, in a sense, arrived at the status of being a great philosopher.
The man who is not yet a great philosopher, and humanity which is still a possibility, and, in the most formal expression, any S and that not yet P, have the possibility of becoming a great philosopher, or fulfilling some possibility of becoming P in an open future, which Bloch discussed in the above quote. If S is not yet P, and S can become P, but will not necessarily become P, then an open, undetermined, and perhaps even undefined future is posed to us. We see, then, how these themes interlock and imply each other, giving a unity to Bloch’s thought. Obviously, an undetermined future in which possibilities may be actualized is a realm of freedom:
“Freedom — and this is something that was not made explicit in any of the previous concepts of freedom — in all of its levels as freedom of choice and of action, as ethical and religious, is only founded contra fatum, thus in a perspective of a still open world, one not yet determined all the way to the end. This is where the continual revolutionary accent on freedom comes from; this is where the essential irreconcilability of freedom with closed determinateness comes from (a determinateness in which there was no possibility of the intervention of the subject that was born of the freedom of choice or action). Only a partial determinability of the world, thus an as yet unclosed possibility, makes freedom possible in this world. Enough said here about the first, most vivid color in the tricolor of natural law and its true place; freedom is the mode of human comportment in the face of objective real possibility. Only thus does its purpose have any margin of play on the path that leads to the content of freedom: the unalienated humanum.”
One can sense the struggle in Bloch’s thought as he tries to come to terms with what possibility means — what is must mean, what it ought to mean — for human beings:
“There is a maxim of verification which involved so little correspondence to the facts that it brought about the English, American and French Revolutions: ‘A thousand years of injustice do not justify one hour of them.’ This basic proposition arising from a consideration of the humanum intimately connected with morality, as presented by classical natural law, was wholly opposed to ‘verification’ on the basis of nothing other than the political status quo, i.e. of injustice as it had come to be, as it was. Hence the difference between this and an accommodation of thought to facts is particularly clear; the illuminating direction of the humane postulate would direct rather than be directed by nothing-but-fact. — All the worse for the facts: which means in this case: Philosophical reason is not imagination that has grown wise through injury in such a way that it behaves only heuristically, and thus attains validity and prevails. Rather there is a primacy of ‘practical reason’: that is, of the concrete humanization of all world situations and conditions, in the logic of philosophy as well. Then mere facticity has no right to interfere, for that right is possessed only by the tendency of the process and — especially — the latency of objective-real possibility. And so the indicated direction of humane supposition did not remain philosophically restricted to morality and its immediate context. Indeed, the right not to be a dog, this large-scale postulatory supposition with so little empirical confirmation, is not so very distant from some of the ‘intellectual fairy tales’ of the great philosophies, insofar as the latter display sublime perfection in the completed initial-experiment.”
Block paradoxically expresses himself in the language of philosophy, and even in the language of formal logic, while calling both into question. Similarly, he paradoxically expresses himself both in the language of Marxism and the language of theology. And all of these disparate elements are intrinsic and essential to his thought; we cannot understand what Bloch is getting at if we leave out the philosophy, the logic, the Marxism, or the theology. Maybe it takes this kind of muddle to do justice e to the muddle that is history.
Further Resources
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