Ernst Bloch and the Principle of Hope
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 08 July 2024 is the 139th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Bloch (08 July 1885–04 August 1977), who was born in Ludwigshafen on this date in 1885.
Ernst Bloch, not to be confused with Marc Bloch, about whom I spoke a couple of days ago, was a Marxist philosopher of history. A great many Marxists are unbearably dull to read, but Bloch was his own man, and he didn’t allow party orthodoxy to dictate his views. We could say that he was an internal critic of Marxism who remained an internal critic throughout his life, neither becoming an orthodox Marxist nor leaving the Marxist fold entirely, always remaining a critic, and always remaining a Marxist, and this is a rare thing in the history of philosophy of history.
Another rare feature of his thought was his interest in religion. Before his major works were available in English translation, a collection of writings from various sources was published as Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Most Marxists followed Marx in their contempt for religion as the opium of the people, but there are mixed motives for this contempt. Bertrand Russell, who was no less contemptuous of religion than most Marxists, called Marxism a surrogate religion, in which Marx is the messiah, the proletariat at the elect, the communist party is the church, the Second Coming is the revolution, hell is the punishment of the capitalists, and the Millennium is the communist commonwealth. Parallel to Russell’s conception of surrogate religion, Eric Voegelin wrote an essay on what he called Erstaz religion, which was a false substitute for the real thing, for genuine religion. What Voegelin calls the Gnostic mass movements of our time are ersatz religions, and Marxism is counted in Voegelin’s category of Gnostic mass movements. Criticisms like this, which have become sufficiently common that most people have heard communism dismissed as a substitute for religious belief, was one of the motivations, but not the only motivation, for Marxist philosophers to distance themselves from religion.
Bloch was different. Rather than rejecting religious concepts and categories, he enthusiastically embraced them, and did not hesitate to apply them to his own ideology as well as to that of others. Block went so far as to say, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.” This may or may not surprise you. 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, though the two were friends. I will talk more about Benjamin next week on his birthday.
Bloch spent more than a decade in the US from 1938 to 1949. It seems that Bloch was not among the in-crowd of German expatriates in the US, as he wasn’t invited to join Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research. Bloch’s wife worked as a waitress and a secretary at an architectural firm to support the couple. Adorno made appeals to help Bloch, but he didn’t use his influence to get Bloch hired at the Institute for Social Research, so there were definite limits to his charity. Like Sayyid Qtub, who was in the US at the same time Bloch, Bloch didn’t much care for the US and its way of life, but he wrote his major work, the 3 volume The Principle of Hope, while in the US. The translators of The Principle of Hope say that the book “bristles with anti-American sentiments.” But he did eventually become a US citizen, and I have read in a couple of sources that his citizenship examiner was so fascinated by his account of the American Revolution that be brought in his colleagues to listen to Bloch. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for that citizenship interview.
In 1949 Bloch was offered a professorship of philosophy at Leipzig, so he returned to Germany to help build the first socialist German state. For a time he was regarded as something like the “official” political philosopher of the German Democratic Republic, similar to how some people have called Jürgen Habermas the de facto official philosopher of the European Union. But Bloch revised his views following the 1956 uprising in Hungary, and the Soviet response to the Hungarian uprising, and was forced into retirement in 1957. In 1961 he was vacationing in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was started, and he stayed in the west, eventually becoming a professor at Tubingen.
I’ve given more biographical detail on Bloch than on most of the philosophers of history I have discussed because I think it’s relevant to the development of his thought. Bloch was, by turns, both embraced and spurned by his fellow Marxists, becoming influential in the GDR and then being effectively exiled, disliking the US but writing his major work there…
Bloch’s major work, The Principle of Hope, is essentially about utopias, surveying utopias in all of their forms — medical utopias, social utopias, technological utopias, architectural utopias, and geographical utopias. The themes of his thought all cluster around the utopian ideal — hope, striving toward and into the future, possibility, and potentiality. One of the key concepts of potentiality that he formulated was the not-yet-conscious. Another concept of potentiality was the quasi-logical formulation, “S is not yet P.” Why do I call this a quasi-logical formulation? For those who are not familiar, in textbooks of traditional philosophical logic, the syllogism was usually given the form:
All S are M.
All M are P.
Therefore, All S are P.
In such renditions of the syllogism, “S” stands for “subject term,” “M” stands for “middle term,” and “P” stands for “predicate term.” Variations on the syllogistic theme yield the various “figures” and “moods” of the syllogism. Bloch gave a twentieth century twist to this ancient formulation of the syllogism. Every philosopher would have been familiar with these terms of traditional logic, so that in taking over “S” and “P” in his proposition he was appealing to something ancient in philosophy, and, for the ancients, the timeless embodiment of rationality is logic. Bloch put the subject and predicate terms into a temporal relation, and, not just a temporal relation, but a relationship of potentiality in time.
“S is not yet P” implies that S may become P, but S and P are still, at this time, distinct, and it is by no means certain that S will become P. S becoming P is a possibility only, you could even say that it is an aspiration, or a hope, that S will become P, but that hope is not yet realized. There is also the possibility that S will not become P, or never fully become P, but may stagnate at a point that falls short of P. “S is not yet P” remains a hope only, unfulfilled. Harvey Cox related an anecdote about this latter idea:
“…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. Bloch’s one-line summary of his philosophy is a formalization of hope, which is eminently appropriate, as Bloch’s magnum opus is his three-volume The Principle of Hope.
In an essay translated as “Man as Possibility” — which is 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. 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.
Could we build on Bloch’s quasi-logical formulation “S is not yet P” and elaborate this beyond what Bloch proposed? Can we transcend Bloch’s “S is not yet P” so that even a philosophy of the net-yet is itself not-yet? How could a Blochean logic of hope be formulated? Would it be valid in a Blochean logic to argue:
S is not yet M;
M is not yet P;
Therefore, S is not yet P
In other words, is hope a transitive relation? Is hope for personal salvation also hope for universal salvation, because our hope for our own fate is a transitive relation that flows on through us to others, and so on, universally? Or do we run into the fatal equivalent of ex falso quodlibet, where a false hope explosively extends itself to contaminate every authentic hope? We stand in need of a schematization that will allow us to systematically distinguish and to interrelate propositions such as:
“S is not yet P”
“S will become P”
“S is becoming P”
“S is almost P”
“S will never become P”
“S was once P”
“S is no longer P”
And so on. Can logic become a logic of hope, even though logic is not yet a logic of hope? Can S become P? 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. In other philosophers these paradoxical expressions would not work as well, but Bloch writes poetically, if not prophetically, and this gives his thought an interest and an urgency lacking in a lot of philosophical thought. Bloch ends his The Principle of Hope with the paradoxical and prophetic claim that,
“True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end…”
I’ll quote more from the final paragraph so as to give some context to this paradoxical thought, though giving more context in this case means bringing in more ambiguous elements that only make it more puzzling:
“There is no doubt at all, and no doubt was left about it: an unilluminated, undirected hope can easily merely lead astray, for the true horizon does not extend beyond the knowledge of realities, but precisely this knowledge, when instead it is Marxist and not mechanistic, shows reality itself as one of — the horizon and informed hope as one commensurate with this reality. The goal as a whole is and remains still concealed, the Absolute of the will and of hope still unfound, in the agent of existing the light of its Whatness, of its essence, of its intended fundamental content itself has not yet dawned, and yet the nunc stans of the driving moment, of the striving filled with its content, stands ahead, utopian and clear… But precisely also the human capacity for such an absolute concept of goal is the tremendous aspect in an existence where the best still remains patchwork, where every end again and again becomes a means to serve the still utterly opaque, indeed in and for itself still unavailable fundamental goal, final goal. Marx describes as his final concern ‘the development of the wealth of human nature’; this human wealth as well as that of nature as a whole lies solely in the tendency-latency in which the world finds itself — vis-à-vis de tout. This glance therefore confirms that man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.”
This is the final paragraph of The Principle of Hope, and that’s only about half of the paragraph. If you read the original you’ll see how much more there is in it — Bloch threw in everything but the kitchen sink. It seems that everything in Bloch is what William James called a live option. All of these disparate elements are intrinsic and essential to Bloch’s thought; we cannot understand what Bloch is getting at if we leave out the philosophy, the logic, the Marxism, the theology, or the prophetic voice in which they are communicated. Maybe it takes this kind of muddle to do justice to the muddle that is history.
