Ernst Bloch

Short description: German Marxist philosopher (1885–1977)

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Ernst Bloch

Bloch in 1954

Born| (1885-07-08)July 8, 1885

Ludwigshafen, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire

Died| August 4, 1977(1977-08-04) (aged 92)

Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany

Other names| Karl Jahraus, Jakob Knerz[1]
Education| Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
University of Würzburg
(PhD, 1908)[2]
Era| 20th-century philosophy
Region| Western philosophy
School| Western Marxism
Marxist hermeneutics[3][4]
Institutions| Leipzig University
University of Tübingen

Main interests

| Humanism, philosophy of history,[5] nature, subjectivity, ideology, utopia, religion, theology

Notable ideas

| The principle of hope, non-simultaneity

Ernst Simon Bloch (/blɒk/; de; 8 July 1885 – 4 August 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme.[6] He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.

## Contents

* 1 Life
* 2 Thought
* 3 Influence
* 4 Bibliography
* 4.1 Books
* 4.2 Articles
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 Further reading
* 8 External links

## Life

Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of a Jewish railway employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married in 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, the couple had to flee, first to Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally to the United States. He lived briefly in New Hampshire before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was there, in the reading room of Harvard's Widener Library, that Bloch wrote the lengthy three-volume work The Principle of Hope. He originally planned to publish it there under the title Dreams of a Better Life.

When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He engaged with a Christian-Marxist intellectual dialogue group organized by Milan Machovec and others in the Czechoslovakia of the 1960s.[7] He died in Tübingen.

## Thought

Bloch was a highly original and eccentric thinker. Much of his writing—in particular, his magnum opus The Principle of Hope—is written in a poetic, aphoristic style.[6] The Principle of Hope tries to provide an encyclopedic account of mankind's and nature's orientation towards a socially and technologically improved future. This orientation is part of Bloch's overarching philosophy. Bloch believed the universe is undergoing a transition from its primordial cause (Urgrund) toward its final goal (Endziel).[8] He believed this transition is effected through a subject-object dialectic, and he saw evidence for this process in all aspects of human history and culture.

## Influence

Endlose Treppe by Max Bill, which is dedicated to the Principle of Hope by Bloch

Bloch's work became influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology.[9] It is cited as a key influence by Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope (1967, Harper and Row, New York), by Dorothee Sölle, and by Ernesto Balducci. Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel has praised Bloch as, "the greatest of modern utopian thinkers".[10] Robert S. Corrington has been influenced by Bloch, though he has tried to adapt Bloch's ideas to serve a liberal rather than a Marxist politics.[11]

Bloch's concept of concrete utopias found in The Principle of Hope was used by José Esteban Muñoz to shift the field of performance studies. This shift allowed for the emergence of utopian performativity and a new wave of performance theorizing as Bloch's formulation of utopia shifted how scholars conceptualize the ontology and the staging of performances as imbued with an enduring indeterminacy,[12] as opposed to dominant performance theories found in the work of Peggy Phelan, who view performance as a life event without reproduction.

## Bibliography

### Books

* Geist der Utopie (1918) (The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford, 2000)
* Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921) (Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution)
* Spuren (1930) (Traces, Stanford University Press, 2006)
* Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935) (Heritage of Our Times, Polity, 1991)
* Freiheit und Ordnung (1947) (Freedom and Order)
* Subjekt-Objekt (1949)
* Christian Thomasius (1949)
* Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke (1949) (Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Columbia, 2019)
* Das Prinzip Hoffnung (3 vols.: 1938–1947) (The Principle of Hope, MIT Press, 1986)
* Naturrecht und menschliche Würde (1961) (Natural Law and Human Dignity, MIT Press 1986)
* Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (1963) (A Philosophy of the Future, Herder and Herder 1970)
* Religion im Erbe (1959–66) (trans.: Man on His Own, Herder and Herder, 1970)
* On Karl Marx (1968) Herder and Herder, 1971.
* Atheismus im Christentum (1968) (trans.: Atheism in Christianity, 1972)
* Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz (1970) (Political Measurements, the Plague, Pre-March)
* Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (1972) (The Problem of Materialism, Its History and Substance)
* Experimentum Mundi. Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis (1975) (Experimentum Mundi. Question, Categories of Realization, Praxis)

### Articles

* “Causality and Finality as Active, Objectifying Categories: Categories of Transmission”. Telos 21 (Fall 1974). New York: Telos Press
* “Hitlers Gewalt”. Das Tagebuch 5, April 12, 1924, pp. 474-77 (Hitler’s Violence)

## See also

* Exilliteratur

## References

1. ↑ "Professoren der Uni Leipzig 1945 -1993". https://research.uni-leipzig.de/agintern/CPL/Seiten/Prof_400.html.
2. ↑ His thesis title was Kritische Erörterungen über Rickert und das Problem der modernen Erkenntnistheorie [Critical discussions on Rickert and the problem of modern epistemology] (Thesis). OCLC 27568512.
3. ↑ Amacher, Richard E.; Lange, Victor (2015). New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays. Princeton University Press. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-691-63084-7.
4. ↑ Erasmus: Speculum Scientarium, 25, p. 162: "the different versions of Marxist hermeneutics by the examples of Walter Benjamin's Origins of the German Tragedy [sic], ... and also by Ernst Bloch's Hope the Principle [sic]."
5. ↑ Kaufmann, David (1997). "Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin and the Philosophy of History". in Daniel, Jamie Owen; Moylan, Tom. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London and New York: Verson. p. 33. ISBN 0-86091-439-9.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Kołakowski, Leszek (1985). Main Currents of Marxism Volume 3: The Breakdown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 421–449. ISBN 0-19-285109-8. https://archive.org/details/goldenagemaincur00lesz/page/421.
7. ↑ Žďárský, Pavel (2011). Milan Machovec a jeho filosofická antropologie v 60. letech XX. století [Milan Machovec and His Philosophical Anthropology in the 1960s]. Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Education, Department of Civic Education and Philosophy. Dissertation, supervised by Anna Hogenová (cs).
8. ↑ Levy, Ze'ev (1990). "Utopia and Reality in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch". Utopian Studies 1 (2): 3–12. ISSN 1045-991X. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718997.
9. ↑ McKnight, Heather (2017). "Ernst Bloch's Theories Concerning Religion". Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer. "However, Bloch’ s greatest inﬂuence was on liberation theology where there was a struggle to overcome severe poverty, suffering, and political struggle, in areas such as Latin America, South Africa, South Korea, and the Philippines". . doi:10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9 200130-1
10. ↑ Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 99. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=l0EcAAAAMAAJ&q="ernst+bloch".
11. ↑ Corrington, Robert S. (1992). Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism. New York: Fordham University Press. p. 113. ISBN 0-8232-1363-3. https://archive.org/details/naturespiritessa00corr_0.
12. ↑ Muñoz, José Esteban (2009). Cruising Utopia : The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. pp. 99. ISBN 978-0-8147-5727-7.

## Further reading

* Werner Raupp: Ernst Bloch, in: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL), Vol. 14, Herzberg: Bautz 1998 (ISBN 3-88309-073-5), Col. 783–810 (with detailed bibliography).
* Adorno, Theodor W. (1991). "Ernst Bloch's Spuren," Notes to Literature, Volume One, New York, Columbia University Press
* Dietschy, Beat; Zeilinger, Doris; Zimmermann, Rainer, eds (2012) (in de). Bloch-Wörterbuch: Leitbegriffe der Philosophie Ernst Blochs. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110256710. https://books.google.com/books?id=U4d3GrtzAuIC. Retrieved 2018-08-01.
* Thompson, Peter and Slavoj Žižek (eds.) (2013) "The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia". Durham, NC: Duke University Press
* de Berg, Henk and Cat Moir (eds.) (2024) "Rethinking Ernst Bloch". Leiden: E. J. Brill.
* Boldyrev, Ivan (2014), Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
* Geoghegan, Vincent (1996). Ernst Bloch, London, Routledge
* Hudson, Wayne (1982). The Marxist philosophy of Ernst Bloch, New York, St. Martin's Press
* Schmidt, Burghard. (1985) Ernst Bloch, Stuttgart, Metzler
* Arno Münster (Autor) (de) (1989). Ernst Bloch: messianisme et utopie, PUF, Paris
* Jones, John Miller (1995). Assembling (Post)modernism: The Utopian Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, New York, P Lang. (Studies in European thought, volume 11)
* Korstvedt, Benjamin M. (2010). Listening for utopia in Ernst Bloch’s musical philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
* West, Thomas H. (1991). Ultimate hope without God : the atheistic eschatology of Ernst Bloch, New York, P. Lang (American university studies series 7 Theology religion; volume 97)

## External links

* Ernst Bloch entry by Ivan Boldyrev in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
* Illuminations: Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique By Douglas Kellner
* Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
* Ernst-Bloch-Zentrum
* Ernst Bloch Assoziation

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