## 1. Short biography



Ernst Bloch was born on the eighth of July 1885 in Ludwigshafen am
Rhein, to a family of a railway employee, almost fully alien to
academic life. But this did not upset his early interest in
philosophy, supported and reinforced by his experiences in the library
and the theater of the neighboring city of Mannheim, as well as by his
correspondence with important thinkers of the time (Ernst Mach,
Theodor Lipps, Eduard von Hartmann and Wilhelm Windelband). Between
1905 and 1908 Bloch studied philosophy (but also physics and musical
theory as minors) in Munich and Wurzburg, eventually defending
his doctoral dissertation, later published under the title
*Critical Reflections on Heinrich Rickert and the Problem of the
Modern Theory of Knowledge* (Bloch 1909). He then moved to Berlin,
where he participated in the private colloquium around Georg Simmel
between 1908 and 1911, and to Heidelberg (between 1912 and 1914),
where the circle around Max Weber was Bloch's main attraction.
In these years, a close friendship with Georg Lukacs played a
prominent role in Bloch's intellectual
development--something Lukacs also acknowledged for
himself while recollecting the encounter with Bloch.



During the World War I, Bloch lived in Swiss exile: he firmly opposed
the war from the beginning, thus radically differing from most German
intellectuals at that time. In Switzerland, he was working on his
first major book, *The Spirit of Utopia* (1918 [2000]). Its
general spiritualist sentiment was very much due to his first wife,
Else Bloch-von Stritzki, a devoted Christian. This book contained, as
a relatively autonomous part, Bloch's most extensive work on the
philosophy of music. Another project was a book on formal logic (Bloch
1985c: 253), which remained a manuscript and was lost in the 1930s
(Zudeick 1985). Parallel to this work, Bloch was active as a
politically engaged public intellectual (Bloch 1923 [1964]; 1985a),
criticizing both the militarist Germany and the authoritarian
bolshevist Soviet Russia (Franz 1985). In 1919, he went back to
Berlin, where he lived most of the years till 1933, with long stays in
Munich, Paris, and in different places in Italy and France. In these
years Bloch, being both a Jew and an unorthodox thinker, had no
prospects for an academic career in Germany and mostly worked as a
free essayist (Bloch 2007). The major writings from that period
include an historically and philosophically informed biography
*Thomas Muntzer as Theologian of Revolution* (1921 [GA
2]); the new, 1923 edition of *The Spirit of Utopia* (of which
the ultimate version appeared in 1964, see Bloch 1918 [2000], [GA 3]);
*Traces* (1930 [2006], [GA 1]), the collection of essays,
anecdotes and short stories, mostly dating back to the 1910s; and the
book on politics and ideology *Heritage of Our Times* (1935
[1991], [GA 4]). In the 1930s, Bloch was also working on a long
systematic manuscript on the theory and history of materialism
(*Theory-Praxis of Matter*), parts of which were eventually
published in 1972 as *The Problem of Materialism, Its History and
Substance* (GA 7) and in 2000 as *The Logos of Matter*
(Bloch 2000a).



In 1933, Bloch had to flee to Switzerland, and began roaming around
Europe (Vienna, Paris, Prague), not least because his wife, Karola,
was active as a secret agent of German and Austrian communist party.
At that time, he became a resolute Marxist (Bloch 1972b) and even paid
tribute to the Stalinist hysteria by supporting the show trials of
1937-1938. Still, in 1938 he emigrated not to the Soviet Union,
as did Lukacs, but to the United States. There, he lived (in
New York; Marlborough, New Hampshire; and, in 1942-1949, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts) concentrated on writing and isolated both
from the American intellectual scene (he hardly spoke English) and
from his fellow emigres (his relations with Adorno's and
Horkheimer's Institute of Social Research were strained). In
1949, Bloch moved with his family to the newly formed German
Democratic Republic to teach philosophy at the University of Leipzig
(Bloch 1985b). His *magnum opus* written mostly in the US,
*The Principle of Hope*, was published there and in West
Germany in 1954-59 (GA 5).



Though enthusiastic in the beginning, having received some academic
recognition, Bloch came increasingly under pressure and, from 1957 on,
when he was made emeritus, was facing a total isolation, while his
philosophy was declared reactionary. The loyalty to Communist power he
had been demonstrating, sometimes in quite conformist ways, since the
1930s, did not change much in the fact that his thinking was clearly
at odds with the official Marxist doctrine (Caysa et al. 1992). In
1961, while being on holiday and having learned about the building of
the Berlin Wall, Bloch decided to stay in West Germany and to make, as
he formulated himself a bit later, the leap from the realm of
necessity into the realm of freedom (interview with J. Ruhle
1964, in Traub & Wieser 1975: 21). Bloch then became, not without
difficulties, a guest professor at the University of Tubingen.
There, he was teaching and working on the edition of his complete
works (published in 1959-1978). In these years, his work became
widely known, he received numerous awards and honorary degrees, was
active as a public speaker (Bloch 1980) and became an icon of the
German Left. In 1961, *Natural Law and Human Dignity* was
published (GA 6), completed in the beginning of the 1940s (see Bloch
1985c: 528), followed by other key systematic and historical texts,
such as *Tubingen Introduction to Philosophy* (1963/64, GA
13), *Atheism in Christianity* (1968, GA 14), and
*Experimentum Mundi* (1975, GA 15). Bloch remained politically
active throughout this last period of his life. He died on the fourth
of August 1977 in Tubingen.


## 2. Bloch's Ontology of the Unfinished


### 2.1 The Core Ideas of Utopian Philosophy



Bloch's philosophy is guided by the interest in the
ontologically grounded incompleteness of the world and the associated
drive towards the future. Genuine future, for Bloch, is radically
uncertain: it is something that has never been before (GA 13: 228;
Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 1375f.]). One could think about this
perspective as an attempt to formulate the specific relation of being
and time, in which the future becomes constitutive modus of being (and
of the present). The main philosophical question to be answered would
then be: how can the future, or utopia, be present--as objective
possibility--and recognized--as anticipation (Holz 1975)?
Philosophy's major task, for Bloch, becomes the exploration of
the possibilities inherent in our world, and the ontological formula
proper to it is "*S* is not yet *P*," meaning
that reality (or matter) is in the process of predication, and the
world itself is on the move searching for its essence. This short
formula captures both the transitory, processual character of being,
and the negativity associated with this
 process.[1]



As an open-ended process, a Not-Yet in the presence, reality must be
grasped both as unfinished *and* in its entirety. Even when a
wish is fulfilled, when the dream comes true, there is an irreducible
remainder to it that does not let one completely satisfied. The major
problem for Bloch's philosophy is thus to find the ways the
future, that becomes the key dimension of
 time,[2]
 could still be discovered, recognized, and explored as part of the
present. This dynamic moment is also referred to as an "utopian
function". The notion of utopia is so central in Bloch precisely
because it captures this anticipatory drive of realizing something
qualitatively new (*novum*), but doing it not in an
"abstract" way, as merely an invocation of a general
normative ideal, but rather in a form of immanent critique and thus of
a dialectical mediation, something Bloch calls "concrete
utopia". The object of anticipation, or what Bloch later
described as "Ultimum", is a reality of non-alienated,
non-exploitative relations of humans among each other and with the
nature. Bloch's philosophy is loaded with this normative meaning
of the directedness towards the unity of the ideal and the real.



Bloch thus conceives of the world as a utopian whole. In this
ontological conception, logic also plays its role--not as the
beginning of knowledge, for Bloch insists on wonder and amazement as
its beginning (see below),--but in its heuristic function
formalizing and structuring the categories needed to grasp a complex
changing reality (Bloch 2000a). Bloch's "speculative
materialism" understands matter as "real
possibility" (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 235f.]), *natura
naturans*, which does not require an external formal
determination, but rather bears its future within itself. Matter is
thus historicized. "Speculative" implies that matter, the
source of radical novelty, is the concept that relates to the totality
of the world, and not just to its single aspect (Moir 2019b). It is
this ontological reference that defines Bloch's key insight:
utopia is not a "mere" phantasy, since it is the whole
world, which is dreaming, or "venturing beyond".



However, early Bloch tries to grasp this dimension of the future
mostly by referring to the subjectivity ("soul", as he
calls it in *The Spirit of Utopia* or "revolutionary
magic of the subject", as in *Thomas Muntzer*) and
community of those who should fulfill the utopian promise the world
gives to itself. In his first books Bloch speaks a spiritualist,
prophetic, performative language and draws heavily on the wealth of
mystical--in particular, gnostic--traditions, in a
paradoxical attempt to synthesize them with Marxist materialism
(Christen 1979). This focus on subjective anticipation led Adorno to
remark that Bloch's key argument is akin to an ontological
proof: the very presence and persistence of utopian anticipation, the
very desire to transcend the *status quo* supports the idea
that the world is pregnant with unrealized possibilities (Bloch 1988:
16).



The important starting point for Bloch's philosophy is, in
various forms, the subjective experience of non-identity and fragility
that goes under the names of "darkness of the lived
moment" or "the shape of inconstruable question"
(denoting the impossibility of formulating the ultimate metaphysical
problem without relying on a pre-given solution) (Czajka 2006). Bloch
emphasizes the non-availability of the very core of our existence and
the associated feeling of lack. Human consciousness can never fully
experience itself and cannot immediately grasp the full meaning of its
momentary state (1969 [GA 10: 74, 145f.]). The darkness of the future
serves as the objective counterpart of this experience.



Dealing with the phenomena of temporality--along with the
episodes of amazement (*Staunen*) or estrangement
(*Verfremdung*)--should demonstrate how the perceived
reality, as well as the traditional epistemology that assumes it fixed
and given, can be destabilized and open to intentional anticipatory
praxis. Bloch considers temporality in its qualitative, intensive
dimension, it is attached to--and is, in its very definition,
dependent on--what is happening existentially and historically
(GA 13: 129, 138; see also Holz 1975; Hartmann 2012). For Bloch,
unlike in the philosophies of duree, the *discontinuity*
of time and its social conditionality are decisive (Levinas 1976).
While estrangement demonstrates the falsity of the given context, the
amazement, that is as ineffable and as transient as the darkness of
the lived moment (Bloch 1918 [2000: 199f.]), reveals the final
identity of subject and object.



Later, Bloch formulated the notion of "front" as the most
actual moment of the process that often requires our ability to grasp
new opportunities (Siebers 2012). For Bloch's idea of
temporality, the concept of fulfilled moment is also important, for
this is the moment that is being anticipated in many utopian
projections. The intensity of Bloch's early thinking rests on
the unresolved contradiction between the insistence on full immediate
presence of the utopian (primarily of ethical nature, such as the
self-evidence of the good), and the impossibility to fully grasp,
articulate, and appropriate it.



In the later work, Bloch is more systematic in putting together his
philosophical intuitions, and less radical in staging the epiphanies
of the world's utopian goal. For example, he tries to codify
different levels of a "possibility" (Bloch 1954-59
[1986a: Ch. 18]). But even later, in the *Tubingen
Introduction to Philosophy*, the starting point of his reflection
is an existential human drive (hunger). Bloch then describes this
process of realization in a more abstract form as a way from the That
(*Dass*), an active potency, to its product, the What
(*Was*). The structures of objective world come to themselves
via the "subjective factor". It is this critical
subjectivity that helps escape the reification of various structures
of reality and allows to study it in its processual complexity (Bloch
2000a), and it is this subjective intervention that is called for in
the open-ended process, because its outcome is uncertain and dependent
on this human praxis (Gekle 1986). Bloch envisions a mutual
dialectical mediation of the subjective and the objective
("naturalization of human and humanization of nature", see
Raulet 1982) and maintains that the matter moves on a higher level
when comprehended and mediated by human practical consciousness that
emerges within it, the laboring individual as its potentiality (Bloch
1954-59 [1986a: 261]). As Bloch puts it, the human is the answer
to the world-as-question, whereby this question itself is understood
in all its existential intensity. This emergence of consciousness and
freedom (Moir 2019b) itself reflects the inherent disposition within
matter as an open process, its autonomous activity, something Bloch
gladly inherits from the "apocryphal" traditions of
materialism--"left" Aristotelianism (Bloch 1952
[2018]) and Renaissance thinkers, notably Giordano Bruno, but also
Schelling (Habermas 1969/1970). As Bloch reads this tradition, the
creation of the world is not a wholly external act, but a
"self-movement, self-fertilization of the matter of God"
(Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 236]). The utopian process for Bloch is
also a realization of the "realizing element" (cf. Bloch
1954-59 [1986a: ch. 20]; GA 15, ch. 49), a fulfillment of an
active subjectivity. In Bloch's ontology--that can always
be also read as an anthropology (Siebers 2013)--the redemption of
nature and of the human being are thus presupposing each other.



Following various strands of philosophy, Bloch thus develops a
qualitative vision of nature, he conceives nature as a creative drive
towards the realization of the possible (or latency), a drive that can
be understood with the concept of nature-subject
(*Natursubjekt*), something that could be reproached as
anthropomorphism (Habermas 1969/1970). A nature-subject itself remains
an internal impulse, an "immanent agency" (Moir 2013:
128f.) within the material world (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 673]).
To put it in aesthetic terminology, Bloch reminds us that the
landscape--a human creation--is a potentiality of nature.
The chance for a better outcome in the history of nature is not only
dependent on the human activity but is--qua this
activity--the potentiality of nature itself.



The concept of *hope* captures the universal anticipatory drive
in human and non-human world--as permeated by futurity. For
Bloch, hope is self-consciousness of human *praxis* (Holz 1975)
that needs an ontological foundation. Many hopes can turn out to be
illusions, but even illusory hopes can give indications to some very
real human wishes and drives. Hope aims at something uncertain and
often beyond the control of the actor (Tegtmeyer 2012), and thus can
always be disappointed. It is this uncertainty that made Riedel (1994)
interpret Bloch's early philosophy as a form of a postmodern
"weak thought" in the spirit of Vattimo (1985 [1988]), a
thought that refuses to seek prior transcendent foundations for
itself.



The inherent
openness of the object of hope is--unlike the existential fear, which,
Bloch remarks, can also anticipate,--enabling, rather than
limiting the human capacities, because this is the uncertainty of
potentialities, that, despite being often disappointed, never cease to
exist (Vidal 2012). Bloch distinguishes hope from quietism and thinks
of it as a practical, transformative attitude to the world. As such,
it cannot be blind and "abstract", but should be grounded
in objective real tendencies, something that also precludes Bloch from
embracing an absolute contingency of the future.



An important anthropological dimension of Bloch's ontology is
the idea of the "Not-Yet-Conscious", which Bloch would
then oppose to the Freudian emphasis on the unconscious as something
"no longer conscious", or repressed. In this critique,
Bloch assumes that the unconscious is merely quantitatively different
from the conscious, complementing it--and not a completely,
qualitatively different domain that limits the conscious, as Freud
believed (Gekle 1986). Unlike Freud, Bloch is more interested in the
ways human desires and drives contribute to the political emancipatory
praxis. He accuses Freud of a tautological closedness associated with
his understanding of the unconscious: for Bloch, Freud's
psychoanalysis aims at merely reconstructing what has already been, or
recollecting, instead of venturing towards the radical and unsettling
novelty of the Not-Yet. Similar critique is voiced against Plato or
Bergson (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a]), but most significantly, in
*Subjekt-Objekt*, against Hegel's dialectics as
"anamnesis" (1951 [GA 8]). The general pattern of this
critique is the distrust toward the arguments that explain phenomena
by grounding them in a deeper essential principle, whereby the
principle itself, as eternal truth, remains posited and unchanged.
Even in Hegel Bloch finds a fetishization of the logical idea and the
tendency to closure, reducing the ontological process to the static
construction of the idealistic absolute.


### 2.2 Some of Bloch's intellectual origins and affinities



Bloch's philosophy is shaped by many previous traditions: he
inherits his account of matter from Aristotle and "Left
Aristotelianism"; his notions of tendencies and drives are
inspired by Leibniz' idea of *appetitus* that denotes the
mode of the future's existence within the present; Bloch's
insistence on immanent objectivity has Spinoza as one of its origins;
the primacy of practical reason, given the fundamental
non-transparency of the world, and the appreciation of the
non-empirical, non-deterministic reality of normativity are for Bloch
associated with Kant; his critical perspective on reality as
consisting of self-transcending social entities and practices is
prompted by Hegel and Marx; his appreciation of a primordial intensity
and contingency, a pre-logical being that precedes and goes beyond the
logic or reason, as an irreducible remainder, is following Schelling;
his process thinking, the urgency to engage with the irrational, or
the Dionysian, the belief in the expressive powers of language, as
well as Bloch's optimism were reflecting his early fascination
with Nietzsche; his attention to everyday experiences and mundane
cultural forms, as well as to the importance of an "individual
law", was shaped by
 Simmel.[3]



Hegel's perspective is also crucial for Bloch's
epistemology. The process of knowing is essentially reconsidered as a
process of self-understanding, or self-articulation, of the open world
(Cunico 2000). The epistemic categories are thus the forms of
existence, but instead of spirit Bloch deals with matter. Since this
material world is unfinished, his epistemology also implies the active
involvement in the world, a network of concepts referring to each
other (Holz 1975), without stable definitions, but rather as being the
outcomes of dialectical processes. It is also by recourse to
dialectics that Bloch is trying to resolve the difficulty of grasping
radical novelty, while maintaining that it has not been revealed.
Bloch often uses the dialectical figures of mediation in, e.g.,
willing to synthesize Kant and Hegel in *The Spirit of Utopia*
(Bloch 1918 [2000: 185f.]), or utopias of freedom (as advanced by
Thomas More) and order (envisioned by
Tommaso Campanella) in *The Principle of
Hope* (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 528f.]). But Bloch eventually
wants to go beyond Hegel because he lacks there the true novelty, the
openness, and sees in it the reduction of the existential experience
to the movement of the totality (something Bloch also bemoans in the
most advanced piece of Hegelian Marxism he was exposed to, namely,
Lukacs' *History and Class Consciousness*) (Hudson
1982).



Bloch's attention to existential experiences and his tendency,
in his aesthetic essays, to reflect on specific, rich thingness (like
that of an old pitcher in *The Spirit of Utopia*) prompt
parallels to Heidegger--to the point that Bloch was sometimes
even referred to as a left-wing Heidegger. Moreover, the
political proclivities of Heidegger are paralleled in Bloch's
Stalinist posture of the 1930s (Munster 1987; Zipes
2019). Indeed, Bloch poses the question of being as early as 1918 and
tries to answer it with the focus on human existence (Riedel 1994),
while Heidegger's gives priority to the future in his analysis
of temporality (Levinas 1976). But for Heidegger, the feeling of
thrownness and the existential fear (*Angst*) are central
affects pertaining to the future, which is obviously opposed to
Bloch's idea of futurity. Bloch's *Heimat*, unlike
Heidegger's, is something to be anticipated, as a horizon of the
utopian movement, and not something that precedes our experience as
its lost foundation (Habermas 1969/1970; Korstvedt 2010), it is,
moreover, something one needs to actively precipitate and not
passively expect.


### 2.3 Preliminary outlook



Bloch's writing style is unorthodox: he prefers to begin with
laconic phrases, resembling/striving to become aphorisms, and indulges
in metaphors while often avoiding precise definitions. The ultimate
aim of this philosophy cast in "open-ended essays" (Holz
1975) is to decipher the not-yet-uncovered utopian elements of the
world by showing--somewhat performatively (Siebers 2013) and
privileging style over (not fully available) content (Edwards
2013)--how various concepts work as applied to particular
cultural domains, rather than by building a logically coherent
theoretical
 system.[4]
 Indeed, such a system's closedness would contradict
Bloch's main ontological stance that implies spelling out the
tensions, rather than resolving them (Adorno 1980).



Utopian anticipation plays an ambiguous role in Bloch's
philosophy. On the one hand, it attaches special meanings to different
elements of material and social reality, to various fragments of
nature and history and thus serves, teleologically, as a unifying
normative force (1951 [GA 8: 487]), sometimes creating the impression
that Bloch overemphasizes the unity of futurity for its own sake
(Eagleton 2015). On the other hand, it suspends any given form or
entity as experimental and preliminary, emphasizes the risk of
fetishizing the utopian goal, the teleology of the pre-given plan, and
insists on the impossibility to fully construe the new from the old,
on radical incompleteness of any achieved state or any present process
(Lyotard 1976). The problem of the absolute is re-stated by Bloch as
the non-availability of the future and even of the tools to fully
grasp it. Crucially, this incompleteness also entails a permanent risk
of failure, which again, dialectically, is just an opposite side of a
fundamental instability and mutability of our world (Bloch
characteristically calls things *Auszugsgestalten ihrer
selbst*, "forms of departure from themselves" [Bloch
1954-59 [1986a: 1345]]). In this sense, the question: where does
utopia go? Or What is the eschatological aim of the utopian
process?--is both necessary *and* unanswerable. It should
be asked for defining the normative orientation of hope and for
establishing a proper critical function of "concrete
utopia". But its answer is never perfect, either. In the state
of absolute fulfillment, there is no place for utopian philosophy.
This philosophy is subject to its own critical scrutiny, its aims are
only formulated in the process, and its business itself is never
complete. That is why the original title of
*The Principle of Hope* was *Dreams of a* Better
*Life*, not of a *best* life. This negative dialectical
vision makes Bloch not a Hegelian of a system (indeed, he attacked
"the system" when it was associated with East European
"socialist" unfreedom), but a Hegelian of a promise.


## 3. Ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion


### 3.1 General ideas in practical philosophy



In view of Bloch's ontology, the central aim of his practical
philosophy is to free the world to its radically, qualitatively new
possibilities. In this, the critical and normative function of utopia
plays a major role (Levitas 1990; Moir 2019b): humans are defined as
inherently utopian beings (GA 13: 239); the world is
amenable to change through human *praxis*; and the subjective
utopian drive paired with objective tendencies condition this
processual vision. In fact, Bloch's whole philosophy is the
investigation into various forms of practical intentionality--or,
as Habermas (1969/1970) puts it, the way to redress Schellingian idea
of potencies in a Marxist interpretation: in Bloch, a working
socialized human being realizing these potencies comes central stage.
Bloch's ontological emphasis on *natura naturans* is
paralleled by the centrality of the productive force in the ontology
of society (Bloch 2000a). It is this historical intersubjective
dimension, always accompanying existential experience and prompting it
to active transformation of its world, that, Bloch believes, makes his
philosophy so different from Heidegger's. Even his early
spiritualist attempts focusing on subjectivity are always accompanied
by the dialectical complement of worldly realization. Bloch's
mysticism--as well as his ontology--was thus always
political, it is used to stage the existential presence of the
forthcoming freedom.



The world Bloch wants to liberate is the world of capitalist
estrangement, which, in his Marxist phase, is also described as a
meaningless "hollow space". In it, the conflicts are due
to the inherently unjust, class based social structure and private
property. In the classless kingdom of the future, based on
"morals without property" (GA 15: 188), neither nature nor
technology will be alienated from or alienating for humans (Bloch also
explores an emancipatory potential in technological utopias). The
prevailing attitude would then be that of affectedness
(*Betroffenheit*) (GA 9: 56).



Bloch's commitment to Marxism is visible already in his early
work (it is present in *The Spirit of Utopia*), but was never
orthodox. The urge to emancipation, the critical perspective on the
human social praxis, and the focus on the laboring individual as the
major motor of history were the elements of Marxist doctrine Bloch was
mostly keen to adopt. Indeed, only after Marx, Bloch believed, utopia
became "concrete". Bloch's major theoretical
proposal was to complement what he termed "cold stream" in
Marxism (analysis of objective social conditions) with the "warm
stream" of utopian "surplus". Bloch was thus
criticizing the lack of a normative and imaginative dimension in
Marxist philosophy. His ultimate aim was not to find its way into
Marxism, but rather to locate, in an Hegelian fashion, Marxist ideas
in a broader realm of utopian thought.


### 3.2 Ethics



Early Bloch re-interprets Kantian postulates--immortality,
freedom, and existence of God--as utopias (GA Erg. Bd.: 318;
Bloch 1918 [2000: 179]) and thus gives ethics an ontological meaning,
stresses the normativity of being, which itself becomes a promise of
utopia (see Schiller 1982, Tegtmeyer 2012). The very idea of the
utopian is, for the early Bloch, immediately apparent (Riedel 1994:
139 calls his position ethical intuitionism) *and* normative at
the same time, while Kantian "thing in itself" is
reinterpreted as "objective phantasy", that is, creative
anticipation (1969 [GA 10: 133]; Bloch 1918 [2000: 201]).
Kant's imperative is important for Bloch insofar as "the
moral As If really appears" there "as a theological Not
Yet" (Bloch 1918 [2000: 177]).



Bloch rethinks the idea of revolutionary violence and, in his early
work, suggests that in a state of exception, that is, in fighting the
injustice of authority, the non-action can represent a bigger evil
than a violent resistance. He thus offers another attempt--a
parallel to the one suggested by Lukacs--of moral
legitimization of revolutionary violence and of a politicization of
ethics, calling it "a categorical imperative with revolver in
hand" (Bloch 1918 [2000: 242]). The community perspective is
important here: for Bloch, in certain historical periods,
non-resistance to evil can be contagious and debilitating, and
Bloch's Muntzer condemns the passivity precisely because of
the present lack of universal emancipation (1921 [GA 2: 174]). In
*The Principle of Hope*, Bloch develops this idea in a
questionable hierarchization of ideals and suggests that
"lower" ideas could be temporarily sacrificed in view of
the highest one, the classless society (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a:
173]). However, elsewhere Bloch retreats from this radicalism and, in
criticizing Pashukanis' Marxist theory of law claims that 



> 
> 
> it is not a matter of finding a substitute for morals, such as turning
> the struggle for a better society itself into a morality and saying
> that morality is only a tautology for this struggle, or that this
> struggle is the only authentic one. (Bloch 1961 [1986b: 241]; see
> Riedel 1994) 
> 
> 
> 



Generally, Bloch's critical utopian posture, his belief that the
foundations of morality cannot be fully evident and fully sublated by
the overarching totalizing political goal (as early Lukacs
believed), something that Bloch thematizes as a fundamental obscurity
of the human soul, functioned as a counterweight to moral absolutism
in his ethical thinking.


### 3.3 Theory of History and Non-Contemporaneity



Applied to the social and political realm, the dynamic ontological
vision of Bloch's philosophy makes it particularly focused on
temporality and non-identity: in the world of the Not-Yet, what
matters is the still unfulfilled promises (heritage) of the past, and
the unrealized possibilities awaiting the society in the future.
Bloch's vision of history is built on the idea of its open-ended
processuality and heterogeneity of historical time--something
that brings Bloch quite close to Walter
 Benjamin.[5]
 Indeed, Bloch criticized a linear model of historical progress as
early as his dissertation (Mendes-Flohr 1983; Pelletier 2019).



This view is most pronounced in *Heritage of Our Times*, the
book, in which Bloch developed a theory of non-contemporaneity (or
non-synchronicity, *Ungleichzeitigkeit*) claiming that various
temporalities can co-exist within one historical
 period[6]
 and that past consciousness and being can still be present in the
present (Rabinbach 1977; Dietschy 2012). This theory captures the
heterogeneity of historical time and emphasizes the unsettled elements
of the past as promises of yet unrealized
possibilities--something Bloch also paradigmatically develops in
his book on Thomas Muntzer. There, he develops the idea of
*actualization*--another name of
"self-encounter" or affectedness-- whereby the
concepts and the figures of history re-emerge on the scene to fulfill
the revolutionary promise.



The synchronicity of the non-synchronous is opposed to the linear
developmental vision of history that took shape in the Enlightenment.
Bloch's idea helps relativize this vision of progress. The
heterogeneity of historical time gives voices to the plurality of
historical temporalities, including non-Western societies. It is
connected to the fundamental non-identity of individual experience: an
individual is never contemporaneous to herself. Various social
formations--such as nations, geographical regions, classes, or
institutional logics--could be non-contemporaneous as
such--and to each other. Various non-contemporaneous elements
could both block the work of emancipation and help revitalize it after
its alleged defeat. Non-contemporaneity is the proper concept for the
utopian vision of society, permeated by revolutionary
discontinuities.



Bloch's theory of modernity developed in *Heritage of our
Times* aims to explain the success of Nazi ideology by
demonstrating how it could incorporate the suppressed
non-contemporaneous elements (the ideas of a nation or kingdom
[*Reich*]). By suggesting, in his review of
Lukacs' *History and Class Consciousness*, to
move, in Marxist dialectics, from the concept of totality to the
concepts of a sphere (GA 10), Bloch in fact tries to rethink the
social analysis as a conglomerate of heterogenous temporalities that,
however, interact with, oppose, and constitute each other. At times,
he appears to wish to overcome the non-contemporaneity in the vision
of a true presence, which should be utopian and dialectically mediated
by the future: 



> 
> 
> [C]ontemporaneity is not such if it is not also super-contemporaneous;
> it is not the capitalist of the uncontrolled, changeable Today who
> stands at par with the real present but only the knower and controller
> of the Tomorrow in the Today together, in short, the active Marxist.
> (Bloch 1935 [1991: 195f.]) 
> 
> 
> 



Bloch's ideal of super-contemporaneity thus means embracing the
intensity of the future in the present.



In the fight against the new conservatism, the non-contemporaneous
social groups--urban bourgeoisie, white-collar workers, peasants,
youth--should play a specific role, often overlooked by textbook
versions of historical materialism that only focused on the conflict
between capitalists and industrial workers. Bloch criticizes the
narrow economistic version of historical materialism already in the
book on Muntzer, by making recourse to Max Weber. In *Heritage
of Our Times*, he argues that German fascists could exploit the
anti-capitalist utopian tendencies in these social strata and
re-function them in their conservative political propaganda, thus
mobilizing the energy of the non-contemporaneity, which should be
regained by the more inclusive
 left.[7]



Bloch thus criticized overly positivist tendencies in Marxism (what
Lenin dubbed "stupid materialism", see on that Levitas
2012) that tended to dismiss all kinds of "irrational"
elements precisely at the point where and when it was critical to
engage with them. The same happens in capitalist society, where these
elements tend to be repressed by the capitalist
"contemporaneity". In co-opting them, Bloch follows the
basic dialectical strategy, forging a new synthesis with the
other--with something heterogeneous to capitalist or Marxist
rationality. The promises and claims from the past serve both as
explanatory elements and as normative justifications for the new
practical engagement with the "heritage" Bloch finds so
crucial.


###  3.4 Bloch on Natural Law



One particularly important case in this work of actualization is
Bloch's analysis of natural law, a legal dimension of utopian
practical philosophy (Wagner 1995). The tradition of natural law as
something more fundamental than statist legal structures, is going
back to antiquity, but also to such scholars as Christian Thomasius
and, for Bloch, to the values of the French revolution. What mostly
interests Bloch is the political dimension of the natural law
doctrine, its role for the critique of the positive law, its
grassroots nature, its focus on individual freedom, dignity, and
rights of a citizen (in contrast to the pursuit of happiness
characteristic for social utopias), as something to be fought for and
defended.



Within Marxism, Bloch reinstates the importance of human rights that
are not inborn, but are something to fight for and uphold. He makes
them as necessary for the left political cause as the end of
exploitation (Bloch 1961 [1986b: xxix]). Following his ontological
beliefs, Bloch does not wish to inherit the ahistorical ideas of human
nature or some fixed universal principles. What remains an historical
invariant of the natural law tradition, for Bloch, is a drive towards
freedom (Gramm 1990). The essence of natural law is the idea of human
dignity, captured in a metaphor of "upright walk". The
content or the foundation of dignity is the openness and the ability
to transcend the frames of one's class or any other fixed
position in the social world. In the class society, positive law and
state are, for Bloch, instruments of domination.



Bloch's utopian ideal is thus natural law, but not positive law,
that would necessarily be misused by the ruling class; and it is an
utopian humanistic community of dignity and love, existing beyond the
state. Note that Bloch's humanism is not built on the idea of an
immutable and immediately and intuitively given human nature. On the
contrary, he emphasizes that the true meaning of the human can only be
anticipated and posited as an aim of history (Bloch 1961 [1986b:
192]). Liberty, equality and fraternity are the utopian ideals of
human individual and communitarian praxis that is in the process of
seeking its most adequate
 realization.[8]


### 3.5 Utopian Philosophy of Religion



Perhaps the most poignant formula characterizing Bloch's general
attitude toward religion is "transcending without any heavenly
transcendence" (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 1288])--or
"transcending into the this-worldly" (*Transzendieren
ins Diesseits*, see Traub & Wieser 1975: 234). This
"horizontal" transcending (Agar 2014) is predicated upon
the utopian anticipation, the premonition of the ideal state, of the
full adequacy of the subject and the object. God is thus expected as a
future utopian human kingdom, while religion is a necessary bearer of
emancipatory utopian drive.



The openness to the future is something associated with the messianic
moment of Bloch's philosophy. The coming of the radically new
must meet the humans who prepare it and practically work towards its
realization. The general sentiment visible in the prophetic style of
Bloch's first writings is that of a tense anticipation of a
radical revolutionary upheaval and of "communist-apostolic
kingdom of Christ" (1921 [GA 2: 53]) coming. In fact, in
Bloch's early thinking, shaped by the feelings of deep social
and cultural crisis, eschatology is a binding force of the whole human
history.



Since the state as an hierarchical and violent institution, new forms
of community, or "fraternal inwardness" (Bloch 1918
[2000: 161]), are called for. *The Spirit of Utopia* ends with
the invocation of the utopian community (indeed, the
"inconstruable question" is a question on
"us")--the community, on which God's own
realization in history is dependent, while *Tubingen
Introduction to Philosophy* begins with the formula that stages
the becoming of community out of mere individual being and the feeling
of subjective
 lack.[9]
 Note that Bloch was skeptical towards the aesthetization of the
political and the synthesis of an ethical and aesthetic genius in a
single political figure of violence and domination. The function of
the spiritual leaders, the agents of creativity, is not to impose
their genius on others, but to open up an anticipatory space of
redemption (*die Sache selbst*, GA 10: 209) and share with the
utopian community the practices and possibilities of this
incompleteness, a yet "hidden human face" (GA 10: 210) of
an individual.



The political media of utopia for Bloch were the anarchist religious
movements that tried to emancipate themselves from the authorities of
the state and the church, to revolutionize existing institutions, and
to establish new forms of democratic solidarity. This refusal to take
the world as it is, the political energy of utopia, is opposed not
only to conformist tendencies in Catholicism, but also to Calvinism
helping establish "capitalism as religion" (1921 [GA 2:
123]) and to Luther's Protestantism that repressed any social
engagement and, in the irrationalism and quietism of its pure passive
inwardness, fetishized the given political order. The mystical hiatus
between action and redemption, between human creatures and
transcendent grace, and the projection of all the real agency on God
stifled the work of emancipation.



In *Atheism in Christianity*, Bloch (1968 [2009]) consistently
demonstrates the entanglement of the political dominance of the ruling
class and intellectual dominance of religious doctrines. He thus
follows Nietzsche in exposing the political dimension of theocracy.
However, his key argument remains that all the religions contain an
utopian heretic core--something Bloch calls Exodus--that
reveals the true meaning of religion: the emancipatory drive to throw
down the political and intellectual hegemony of the ruling class.
Bloch's key insight is to demonstrate that this drive is
essential for the philosophy that emphasizes anticipation of the
future and hope and for that, a non-dogmatic religious myth is a
legitimate ally. The revolutionary figure of Jesus is treated in view
of its human dimension: Christ is a prophet of *this* world,
"messianic kingdom of God--without God" (Bloch
1954-59 [1986a: 1200]). Just as the Marxist orthodoxy could not
see any potential in romanticism and avant-garde, and thus failed
politically, Enlightenment, with its sweeping critique of religion,
went too far and discarded its own emancipatory core with the bath
water. Bloch, inspired by Feuerbach, but also by the gnostic sentiment
of his earlier work, focuses on the not-yet-revealed Judeo-Christian
God of Exodus as a liberating figure and on the heroes of the
Scripture (such as Job), who discover "the processual God"
(Bielik-Robson 2019).




Despite his atheism, something he espoused from the very
 beginning,[10]
 Bloch stated explicitly the link between hope and religion (GA Erg.
Bd.: 347), and some theologians saw in his philosophy of hope a
commitment to liberated version of Christianity that would accept the
God as an immanent eschatological force (see especially Moltmann 1964
[1967], who puts eschatology at the center of theological discourse
and defines its major object in essentially Blochian terms: to capture
the future within the present) (see also Moylan 1997).


## 4. Aesthetics



Works of art, in Bloch's interpretation, are perfect examples of
utopian objects, in that they always transcend their immediate
meanings and contexts and serve as non-contemporaneous indications of
unrealized possibilities (Korstvedt 2010). They are the perfect
embodiments of the highest happiness and intensive openness to the new
(Holz 1975), and an artistic genius is the most proper medium of the
not-yet-conscious (Bloch 1954-59 [1986a: 122f.]). Works of art
thus both embody the incompleteness of the world and mediate an
aesthetic experience that is, in its epistemic role, a primary vehicle
of grasping the utopian, the radically new, by the human mind (Vidal
1994). The term Bloch mostly used for characterizing art is
*Vor-Schein* (pre-appearance, sometimes also translated as
anticipatory illumination), drawing on the classic idea of aesthetic
appearance (*Schein*), which has the meaning of illusion or
fiction. So art is not "mere" illusion, but an utopian
anticipation. Thus, a perfect work of art is always imperfect, is
completeness is complete because it is incomplete, that is, because it
contains within itself the fullness of the Not Yet.



Art is--like the world itself--a laboratory, in which the
inner and the outer interact and exchange identities (Hudson 1982)
thus overcoming the narrowness of private experience and the
estrangement of objectified cultural forms. It is inherently utopian
precisely because it sublimates the sensuous by staying sensuous,
because it elevates the empirical reality by making the ideal happen
in a sensuous form, and because it is an important medium of
imagination. The productivity of an artist, their creative drive, is
for Bloch connected to the experience of lack in the actual present
("something's missing"), and is directed towards the
future absolute, the full adequacy of subject and object.



Tropes as media of reference are for Bloch instruments for
comprehending the unsettled reality and indicating its future
possibilities, the mirrors of not-yet-become (GA 9: 293)--be it
in putting various phenomena together in view of a common telos (as in
the case of symbols) or in creating an irreducible multiplicity of
references (as in the case of allegories). In producing the new by
combining heterogenous elements, these techniques are 



> 
> 
> a form of materialist cognition ... designed to reveal traces of
> world contents not given in the abstract appearance of capitalist
> society. (Hudson 1982: 2) 
> 
> 
> 



Bloch's philosophy of nature leads him to re-evaluate the
concept of the beauty in nature. Since the nature itself is utopian,
it does its own creative work and is permeated by "real"
tropes pertaining to its future potentialities.



Music, for Bloch, provides us with "the utopian sound of [...]
existence" (Bloch 1985d: 212) in the most immediately graspable way.
Music is both dynamic and material, following Bloch's vision of
nature. It creates the way to comprehend an essential reality,
a fulfilled moment, the absolute, to externalize the pure inwardness,
what in *The Spirit of Utopia* coincides with
"self-encounter" (which Bloch also conjures by referring
to Expressionist art) and is later extended to the whole of humanity
encountering itself. Music is paradigmatically incomplete,
non-discursive, ineffable, and is the source of inexhaustible novelty
and variability, a realm, in which the utopian, the future in the
past, should be heard. Importantly, music is created and perceived in
the darkness of the lived moment and affects the subjectivity in the
most direct and profound way, by dynamizing it, bringing it into
motion.



Music begins as "singing-to-oneself", which is conceived
as an analogy to the darkness of the lived moment that should be
overcome in the further dialectical progression of musical formations,
or categories. The general pattern of this progression is gradual
emancipation from immediate practical entanglements of the
"tone", the dialectics playing out between human
expression and objective form, between the material/emotional, and the
technical (Korstvedt 2010). This interplay was first conceived by
Bloch in his analysis of the ornament in *The Spirit of Utopia*
while juxtaposing the Egyptian art as a dead, merely external form and
a Gothic art, in which the human dimension becomes prominent. In
*The Principle of Hope*, Bloch further emphasizes the social
conditioning and direct social influence of music, its powers to
transgress the context, to which it most immediately relates (Levitas
2013). The dialectic of the material and the ideal in
 tone,[11]
 unlike in Hegel's philosophy of music Bloch largely follows, is
not fully resolved in the overarching subjectivity of spirit but keeps
reproducing a tension and a productive utopian indeterminacy (Gallope
2017).



An important feature of Bloch's aesthetics is the focus on the
small, seemingly insignificant, and on the mundane (Jameson 1971): in
*The Spirit of Utopia*, he praises applied art and crafts;
later, while working a lot as a cultural critic, he turns to popular
culture, in particular, fairy tales, adventure stories and detective
novels. *The Principle of Hope*, besides being a work in
philosophy, is also an encyclopedia of utopian motives in visual art,
architecture, but also in all genres of literature, popular culture,
mythology, and everyday life. Bloch was practicing utopian
hermeneutics in discovering the potentialities in various aesthetic
forms and exploring the aspects of poetic non-contemporaneity in
certain works of art that get re-actualized in different historical
contexts, and in literary characters (such as Don Quixote), who
exemplify the utopian transgression.



In the detective novel, the small details are crucial, as well as the
darkness of the lived moment (GA 9: 247, 260, see Bloch 1965 [1998]),
a fundamental obscurity of the crime that is driving the
investigation. It is crucial for Bloch that this obscurity is not
merely something that should be elucidated epistemically. It is rather
still unclear to itself, like in the story of Oedipus (Bloch also
conceded to psychoanalysis its role as hermeneutics of suspicion). The
whole world is thus becoming this investigation into its own obscure
origins, while the detective hermeneutics--including the one
practiced by Benjamin--becomes the major epistemological
strategy.



Fairy tale is for Bloch a genre that represents a victory over the
stiflingly static mythical powers, its imagination is emancipatory and
is directed at the future happiness (GA 9: 131), its general optimist
hopeful attitude is recognized as that of an rational Enlightenment
autonomy (Weissberg 1992). Popular literature of the
 "colportage"[12]
 (particularly Karl May) was important for Bloch because of its
democratic tendency, its grassroots nature, and its genuine wish for
the new, its dream for revolution (Edwards 2013). Romanticism was also
re-functioned in view of its anti-bourgeois pathos. Following
Bloch's political philosophy, the elements of the conservative
German culture--from Hebel (Siebers 2011) to Wagner (Korstvedt
2010)--should also be saved.



Bloch's intellectual strategy became especially salient in the
debates on expressionism, an important aesthetic discussion of the
1930s. Bloch argued, against Lukacs, that in the hollow world
of the contemporaneous capitalism, the avant-garde is the genuine
aesthetic achievement (Schmitt 1973; Ujma 1995). He insisted on the
openness and discontinuity of the true works of art, which he defended
speculatively already in *The Spirit of Utopia* (Riedel 1994),
and focused on a fragment as a technique that conveys an inherently
utopian potential. The aesthetic attitude propagated by Bloch, the
discontinuous, shocking, estranging intervention in reality--such
as the technique of montage, or anacoluthon, a sudden
interruption in the flow of narrative--is for him a true realism,
a mimesis faithful to a ubiquitous utopian surplus of the world,
performatively activating this surplus.