Ver Artículo original publicado en American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 98, Issue 3, Verano 2024.
Resumen
Ernst Bloch formuló problemas de enorme relevancia filosófica y humana. Sostuvo que en nuestra situación contemporánea no tenemos más que dos cuestiones relativas a la dirección fundamental de nuestras vidas y de nuestra historia: debemos elegir, en primer lugar, entre el nihilismo desesperanzado y la esperanza trascendente; y, en segundo lugar, entre la esperanza trascendente con trascendencia y la esperanza trascendente sin trascendencia. Bloch optó por la esperanza trascendente sin trascendencia y formuló una dura crítica a la esperanza con trascendencia.
Josef Piper y Bernard Schumacher han ofrecido una respuesta competente a Bloch desde la perspectiva católica. Sin embargo, ofrecemos aquí un aspecto poco explorado del problema al demostrar que los argumentos metafísicos de Bloch no consideran que (a) una realidad material tiene necesariamente la potencialidad concreta de disolverse y (b) por tanto, abandonada a sí misma, se disolverá necesariamente en un tiempo infinito; y que (c) ningún efecto puede tener una realidad desproporcionada a su causa, razón por la cual (d) ninguna realidad inmortal puede proceder de una realidad mortal sin la intervención de una causa superior.
Abstract
Ernst Bloch formulated problems of enormous philosophical and human relevance. He held that in our contemporary situation we have but two questions concerning the fundamental direction of our lives and history: we must choose, first, between hopeless nihilism and transcendent hope; and, second, between transcendent hope with transcendence and transcendent hope without transcendence. Bloch opted for the transcendent hope without transcendence and formulated a hard critique of hope with transcendence. Josef Pieper and Bernard Schumacher have offered a competent response to Bloch from the Catholic perspective. However, we offer here a little explored aspect of the problem by demonstrating that Bloch’s metaphysical arguments do not consider that (a) a material reality necessarily has the concrete potentiality of dissolving, and (b) therefore, left to itself, it will dissolve necessarily in infinite time; and that (c) no effect can have a reality disproportionate to its cause, which is the reason why (d) no immortal reality can proceed from mortal reality without the intervention of a higher cause.
I. Introduction
Ernst Bloch holds that in our contemporary situation we have but two choices concerning the fundamental direction of our lives and history: we must choose first, between hopeless nihilism and transcendent hope;1 and, second, between transcendent hope with transcendence and transcendent hope without transcendence. He states, moreover, that the movement that offers transcendent hope without transcendence is a revised version of Marxism. As a materialist and a Marxist, Bloch opts for the transcendent hope without transcendence and formulates a hard critique of hope with transcendence, be it Christian and/or classical-metaphysical.
In this context “hope” is not taken as a passion, but as a fundamental movement of the soul that in Christian theology is conceived as a theological virtue. We will understand "hope with transcendence” in the way Thomas Aquinas formulated it. Saint Thomas theoretically assimilates the structure of Christian fundamental hope and in doing so he uses the tools lent by the Greek philosophers’ analyses. He is aware that there is a leap between the two conceptions of hope, but he holds that there are, however, points of contact and important agreement on the direction towards which both conceptions aim. In ST II–II q. 17, a. 2, ad 1 Aquinas states that Christian eternal happiness enters into the human heart and understanding “according to the common notion of the perfect good.” This is extremely close to Plato’s observation in the Symposium concerning the highest form of happiness and immortality: the permanent possession of the perfect good, that is to say, the direct contemplation of the pure Idea of Beauty (tò kalón).2 Thus, Aquinas elucidated the structure of Christian transcendent hope in terms akin to those that appear in the classical Greek philosophers. Against this conception of hope with transcendence, Ernst Bloch addressed sharp criticism scattered in his works. He, for example, held (1) that the philosophy which promotes transcendent hope with transcendence imprisons éros within Platonic anamnesis and in this way prevents it (éros) from opening to what is new, tying it to an ancient way of contemplation; and, therefore (2) transcendent hope with transcendence creates an illusion that makes impossible the progress of history in the right direction.3
We are not going to enter the discussion about what conception of hope, whether transcendent with transcendence or without transcendence, is more plausible, for two reasons. First, there has been a competent answer from the Catholic field in works written by Josef Pieper4 and his disciple Bernard Schumacher.5 Both demonstrated that all human existence is driven by “fundamental hope” and that this kind of hope requires some sort of individual immortality and fulfillment in transcendence. Without this, all human existence is empty and void. Of course, this same problem could be the subject of new and illuminating research, but, and this is the second reason, we think that there is a previous point that has not been examined with due attention: the soundness (or lack thereof ) of Bloch’s philosophical efforts to establish the ontological ground for a transcendent hope without transcendence whose subject is not only a “class” (or another kind of collective entity) but also the individual. This is the leitmotiv of our paper, to offer a new answer to Bloch’s challenge by taking seriously his metaphysical reasoning and demonstrating the untenability of his arguments in favor of a transcendent hope without transcendence.
Bloch was very gifted to cope with the problem of hope. Perhaps in the twentieth century no other author from the Marxist and materialist camp proposed an equally competent solution. Pieper goes farther in his assessment of Bloch’s work: “The most forceful statements on the theme of ‘hope,’ the broadest as well as the deepest analysis in contemporary writing, is undoubtedly to be found in the work of Ernst Bloch.”6 As will be demonstrated, Bloch experienced a great void in his soul when his beloved wife died in the early 1920s. He felt that Marxism with its objective economic Laws did not satisfy his thirst for hope in his hard experiential situation. What use is there in the expectation of a future political utopia when death of the individual and extinction of the species are lurking in the certain future? Bloch was deeply driven by an anguish that he rightly felt lies at the root of human existence and that apparently his commentators are unable to even understand.
Indeed, Bloch’s commentators fail to grasp the depth of his anguish. He was really touched by the apparent absurdity of the human condition without transcendent hope, be it spiritual or be it intra-worldly. Joe Davidson, for example, does not seem to even fathom the tension that Bloch must have felt. To him, “hope” is a matter of constantly striving for a “better world,” not an eschatological expectation that awaits the sudden fulfilment of history.7 Rabinbach considers that the hope for a transfigured reality is just the way in which “myth” strives to transcend what has already been realized. It would seem that Rabinbach has no drive towards immortality and no stress caused by his mortality.8 Something similar may be said of Rainer Zimmermann.9 The depth of the problem of hope escapes even Wayne Hudson’s understanding of Bloch. This seems to be the reason why he proposes to use Bloch’s utopian philosophy for the devising of concrete world reforms.10 Paradoxically, only Josef Pieper grasps the depth of the Blochian problem of hope.11
We agree that there is a vital unsolved problem that his contemporaries failed to see or, rather, to acknowledge. Original Marxism was, in Bloch’s view, lacking in hope. Igor Shafarevich, that clever and profound victim of socialism, stated the same problem from an external viewpoint. The highest thinkers in Marxism, he observed, are unable to propose a real hope for humankind, let alone for the individual: “Engels thought it [the human race] would be [extinguished] because the planet would cool down. . . . Religion predicts the end of our world too, but only after the attainment of its ultimate aim, which also supplies the meaning of its history. But socialism (on the principle of the similarity of diametrical opposites) attributes the end of mankind to some external accident and thus deprives its whole history of any meaning.”12
We think this is the reason why not a few contemporary authors have turned to Bloch’s works. The new twenty-first century utopias, such as transhumanism, seem to need a “militant optimist,” a “herald of hope” as Fernando Savater has called Bloch.13 Slavoj Žižek considers him as “our contemporary” and incorporates Bloch’s insights into his political theology.14
However, examining with care Ernst Bloch’s works on hope could reveal that this man was unable to change the said trait of Marxism. He was perhaps the most capable person to achieve such change. Thus, if we are correct in concluding that Bloch failed to change the spiritual situation of Marxism, and if Bloch was right in the assessment of the situation, it would mean that in our contemporary climate of opinion the real choices that are offered to human beings who experience that radical drive towards hope are between (1) nihilism, (2) a failed attempt to ground a transcendent hope without transcendence, and (3) real transcendent hope with transcendence, be it of the classical, philosophical kind, or be it of the kind based on divine revelation.
Our general thesis will flow from a metaphysical critique of Bloch’s materialist proposal of eschatological hope, demonstrating that the arguments that support it are weak and incoherent. Specifically, they do not consider that (1.a) a material reality (composed of parts) necessarily has the concrete potentiality of dissolving, and that (1.b) therefore it, if left to the principles of its nature without the intervention of a higher cause, will dissolve necessarily in infinite time; and that (2.a) no effect can have a reality and actuality disproportionate to its cause, which is the reason why (2.b) no immortal reality can proceed from mortal reality without the intervention of a higher cause. This metaphysical aspect of Bloch’s work and the weakness derived from omitting these considerations have been little explored. There is literature, of course, on the ontology underlying Bloch’s works, but not a detailed examination of the arguments given by Bloch to try to prove the possibility of the object of hope. We hold that Bloch failed to establish a plausible ground for a transcendent hope without transcendence and that, therefore, in our contemporary situation we are left with just two rational, reflective alternatives: nihilism and transcendent hope with transcendence.
We acknowledge that today Bloch is seen as a marginal author who is received with interest just in small niches. However, we think that his philosophical enterprise in and of itself has enormous philosophical and human relevance. Reviewing the arguments given in favor of a transcendent hope without transcendence, and assessing them metaphysically, seems to us a worthwhile task.
II. The Crux of the Matter, the Problem of Death and Extinction in Ernst Bloch’s Works
Bloch acknowledges that death is “the harshest anti-utopia[,] which in realitate it is.”15 He knows that without conquering death, every hope is delusional: “[natural death] cannot be affected by any social liberation.”16 This is important, because in some places Bloch seems to state that death can be conquered by the individual identifying himself with the collective, but here and elsewhere he rejects that. Bloch asks himself: Doesn’t the red hero defeat the fear of death through a class-hope? To which he replies, “But even what this most moral person of all rejects for himself does not deprive others of the right [n.b., the right!] to complain that they will not be present at the victory. The fact that the name of the martyr is enshrined in the heart of the working class does not restore to this name its eyes, its corporeally present existence—it too lies, a corpse, far from the intended goal.”17
Bloch is also aware of the problem of the final extinction of all life. When he comments on Heine’s poetry, for example, Bloch shows that he knows the problem, and also why some embrace this final extinction as something desired, hoped for, in their hatred and despair.18
In page 1178 of The Principle of Hope, Bloch adds, regarding death: “Because of lack of continuity with life to date it [death] is unwilling to give space to the categories of scientific-concrete utopia; yet it has, hypothetically, space for the future, space for giving birth to our core in abundance.”19 The “yet” marks the point where Bloch has to attempt a strange operation in order to find hope by using, as we shall see, “God’s secret name.” He does it carefully, as a hypothesis, as an alternative of possibilities. Regarding the extinction of life, in turn, Bloch states: “A nature which not only takes its course with the earth as a dead moon at the end or even in the stereotyped destruction and formation of stars and thus, for all its mechanistic change, runs on the spot, can—with hope certainly not dashed—enshrine this fruit [“man’s best part, his found essence” after the process of matter] within itself, indeed it can become this fruit itself and does not need to destroy it.”20 Dialectical matter, unlike “mechanical matter,” may be directed towards the utopia of the new earth and the new man without the intervention of a transcendent being.21 Bloch, then, unlike Heine or Engels, does not state that he hopes for or expects the final disappearance of man and of all life. In fact, he states that our Destiny is an open alternative that depends on our revolutionary action. The end will be either nothing, if our action fails, or the new heaven, if our action succeeds. Actually, according to Bloch, in case our action succeeds, there will be a profound ontological change in the world:
Death, which both as individual death and as the distant possibility of cosmic entropy confronts future-oriented thinking as absolute negation of purpose, this same death, along with its possible future-content, now enters the final conditionality, the core conditionality which is illuminated by still unguaranteed joy and the lights of latency of the authentic. Death is no longer the negation of the utopia and its ranks of purpose but the opposite, the negation of that which does not belong to the utopia in the world.22
That is to say, death will affect only those persons and things that do not embrace socialism, according to Bloch.23
Now, did Bloch really claim that death could be superseded? If so, why did Emmanuel Levinas, in a series of lectures in 1976, state that “[Bloch’s conception] takes nothing away from the ineluctable character of death . . . ,” but “[the emotion of the hope of a future completion of the world] could dominate the ineluctability of death”24? Levinas’s presentation is ambiguous. The reader is unable to determine with clarity whether he accepts the fact that Bloch thought death and extinction could be literally defeated, that man could achieve immortality. This ambiguity appears especially in the following two passages: (i) “[in Bloch’s work,] the old Epicurean principle is justified: when death is there, you are not there. Indeed, for Bloch, there is not yet a you. In the humanized world, man is not touched by death.”25 How does Levinas understand this immortality here? (ii) “[Bloch’s hope extends to] the brightness of a world in which man is no longer opposed,” where “death cannot touch man . . . for humanity has already left the individual.”26 In whatever way one understands these lines by Levinas, the truth is that Bloch’s anguish could not be turned into peace without individual immortality and the real supersession of the threat of extinction. He refused to let his mystical-utopian hope be domesticated.
But how is it possible to defeat death and extinction? This question will be answered in the next section. At this moment, we only want to point out that in The Spirit of Utopia Bloch proposes as a solution the transmigration of souls. In The Principle of Hope, he takes a different path. However, even in this later work Bloch seems to accept the possibility of the metempsychosis when he approvingly explains this doctrine in the orphic myths and the Cabbala, the Rosicrucians, Lessing and Goethe, and even cites Hume as defending this hypothesis.27 So, it is not clear whether Bloch ever abandoned this hope, based on “magical knowledge” in The Spirit of Utopia, as we shall see.
III. The Solution to the Problems of Death and Extinction According to The Spirit of Utopia
The engine of the whole investigation into the meaning of existence that shapes The Spirit of Utopia in its final form is the death of Bloch’s beloved wife, Else Bloch-von Stritzky. Indeed, according to Bloch, one feels “the utmost certainty at the sight of one’s lover: this soul cannot perish.”28 The experience of his beloved’s death, brought Bloch to realize that Marxism is incomplete. The economical-historical dimension is not sufficient, by itself, to lead the Revolution to its final triumph. The Marxist analysis is compared to the Critique of Pure Reason, requiring the writing of the Critique of Practical Reason.29 This is why Ernst Bloch proceeded to write the second part of Marxism, the imagining of a utopian Kingdom that can furnish its meaning to revolutionary action.
Bloch confronts these problems,30 but he imposes on the matter limits that do not arise from the nature of things. Those limits and conditions are the following: whatever the answer to the problem of death, it must be immanent and material, not spiritual or transcendent. Further, in the final kingdom we are prohibited from encountering eternity. We must find nothing but time.31 Let us examine now Bloch’s answer to the problem of death.
According to Bloch, there is “soul,” but it is material. However, it does not perish with the body; it might be immortal. How does Bloch argue for such paradoxical statements? Referencing Bergson, he says that there can be “psychological life without corresponding physiological activity.” (He fails to mention that Bergson was not committed to materialism.) Then he invokes a “phenomenological evidence of being-in-oneself,”32 that is, according to him, superior to physiological psychology. Supposedly, “the corporeal superiority, incomparability, ultimate invulnerability of our soul” implies that before and after death, something “remains identical about the kernel” and it can “be adequately discovered phenomenologically. . . . By no means, then, does personhood simply emerge from the body’s machinery like apostles out of a clock tower, destined to perish along with its empirically knowable mechanism; rather, the soul is defined by its eidetically real nature as indestructible.”33 Well, this sounds plausible! But the problem is that Bloch wants this indestructibility, this immortality, to be material and to have nothing to do with any spirit.
How does Bloch argue for the immortality of a material soul? He starts by citing a variety of “authorities” who have defended metempsychosis during human history. First and foremost, “post-Christian rabbis.” Metempsychosis is an “already mundanely implanted and operative postulate of a white magic we possess against death’s black magic.”34 But after citing such authorities, he adds the “theoretical” arguments: (1) The consensus of the occultists: “in all the world’s occult doctrines, not only in Buddhism, but equally in the central Sudan, in druidic Ireland, among the Sufis, in the Cabbala, among the Cathars, throughout the old Christian Rosicrucianism, this second, more just, more loving doctrine—transmigration, this more apportioned, complicated form of immortality, forms as much the final lesson for the neophyte as the recurrent, comparatively verifiable arcanum of the mysteries.”35 (2) The second theoretical argument is the phenomenological analysis of oneself: “no one can be overcome by fear who is certain of his immortal part, in whom a love from beyond has even taken part, in whom the non omnis confundar above every corporeal and every debasing, mundane empiricism, which he was given and which will again be received, has already united . . . : ‘Do you know,’ cries Alabanda in Hölderlin’s Hyperion, in the same sense, out of this same profound self-awareness, ‘why I have never heeded death? I feel a life within me that no God has created and no mortal begotten. I believe that we exist through ourselves, and are so intimately connected to the cosmos only by free choice’—but the natural contract may also freely be canceled when it fails. Here rests a seed which is indestructible.”36 (3) And the third theoretical argument states that research by Carl du Prel in the realm of “experimental metaphysics,” which is “a coarse kind of magic,”37 have proved the reality of the immortality of the soul and, therefore, of metempsychosis.
Since there have been different ways of conceiving metempsychosis, Bloch has to choose the right one, that is to say, the “intra-worldly” one. This way holds that the number of souls is complete, because it denies that souls are created by the “demiurge.” The number of souls is already fixed, but each soul becomes mature in history.38 At the end, only the elect—the socialists, presumably—will escape the night of annihilation, through the discovered name of God.39 This salvation of the socialists, the “good ones,” is necessary and will be achieved through a strange kind of operation:40 “‘Know this,’ says an old manuscript of the Zohar in a related sense, ‘know that there is a twofold view of any world. One shows its external aspect, namely the general laws of this world in its external form. The other shows the inner essence of this world, namely the quintessence of the souls of men. Accordingly there are also two degrees of action, namely works and ascetic disciplines; works are for perfecting worlds with respect to their externality, but prayers are for causing one world to be contained in the other, and raising it up.’ Within such a functional correlation of disburdening and spirit, Marxism and religion, united in the will to the Kingdom, flows the ultimate master system of all the tributaries.”41 Thus, Bloch’s mysticism has come to give its final meaning to Marxism, and this is the final word of The Spirit of Utopia.
Our next step will be (a) to present Bloch’s attempts to open the possibility of hoping that human beings will transform themselves, through their actions, from mortal into immortal beings and (b) to reflect on the impossibility of a material thing (with parts that can be taken apart from each other) to be or become, by natural means, an immortal being. This we will do in the next section.
IV. The Solution to the Problem of Death and Extinction According to The Principle of Hope
In The Principle of Hope Ernst Bloch attempts to escape from the wreckage of hope against the rocks of death and extinction by imagining that the evolution of matter could end up generating an immortal race of human beings and a new reality where the human race will not run the risk of extinction. This hypothesis involves a third generatio aequivoca of the kind Marx proposed for nature and for man. Supposedly, nature generated itself out of nothing and man generated himself out of nature.42 So, now, out of mortal man, immortal man will generate himself. This constitutes a clear violation of the principle of causality, as we will explain. There is an ontological leap that is presented by Bloch in a mixture of philosophical language and magical intent.
IV.A. How Could a Contingent Reality Become an Indestructible Reality?
In this sub-section, first the metaphysical principles on which we will ground our critique will be established; then Bloch’s argumentation in favor of immortality will be presented and criticized; and, finally, the objection that we are adulterating Bloch’s theory when reproaching its violation of the principle of causality will be answered.
Patrick Lee and Robert P. George have formulated Bloch’s obstacle very well: “If I understand . . . that every organism is mortal, because every composite living thing is mortal, this is possible only if I mentally compare the nature, organism, with the nature, composite living thing, and see that the former entails the latter. That is, my judgment that every composite living thing can be decomposed and thus die, is based on my insight into the nature of a composite living thing.”43 This is the ground for the basic question we have formulated. It arises from the indubitable realization that a being which is composed of physical parts that can be separated from each other, left to itself, without the intervention of an ontologically higher cause, is inevitably and inexorably subject to dissolution. This is so for the following reason:
(i) What is material is contingent and not necessary, because, as Aristotle states, “matter is in potency to either of two opposites [being X and not being X].”44
And
(ii) whatever is in concrete potency to dissolve or not be (as material substance is in concrete potency to be corrupted and physical parts are in concrete potency to be separated from each other), whatever is contingent, in an infinite time will actually dissolve and become non-being: “if it is possible for something not to be, then at some time it is not.”45 Therefore, whatever is material will actually cease to be at some point in time, if left to the principles of its nature without the intervention of a higher cause. 46
But doesn’t this reasoning contradict the traditional Christian view that prior to original sin man was not subject to death? There is no real contradiction because “that immortality and impassibility which man enjoyed in the original state, he did not have out of the principles of his nature . . . but as a benefit from the Creator.”47
Having stated the principle that any composite thing is corruptible and will necessarily be corrupted if left to the principles of its nature, we can address to Bloch the question, how is it possible that the “material soul” postulated in TSU becomes immortal? Bloch’s response to this question is the first step of his procedure for the supersession of death: he claims that it is not impossible for the caterpillar of mortal man to become the butterfly of immortal man.
What is “factually and objectively possible” depends on ground conditions that are not yet “sufficient” to produce it. These conditions must exist factually for the realization of what is possible. At this point, Bloch invokes a Humean or Popperian conception of induction. Through our inductive knowledge, we are able to predict whether those conditions will exist or not. Nevertheless, no matter how extensive an induction might be,
[it] can never express its result other than in a judgement of factually-objective possibility once again. For even the most complete induction cannot be a total one, i.e., a knowledge of all conditional elements as the same in all regions of space, or even remaining the same in time. . . . [Thus, for example:] Caius is necessarily mortal by virtue of his being a man. The middle term of being a man produces here the completely sufficient “essential ground” of being mortal; thus there arises what Aristotle calls a perfect conclusion, that is in fact: a conclusion of necessity. . . . However, the thus asserted impossibility of the capability-of-being-other, let alone of the capability-of-being-opposite, is only to be found in areas of the highest abstraction. . . . and even there only when limited to what can be derived from axioms or to that which is dominantly contained in theorems. . . . However, [the axioms] . . . are limited to particular areas of their purely constructive dominance, and these limits are above all fluid (we only need to think of the mere “limited case” of our Euclidean space and its axioms or of the changes in the proposition of contradiction in elementary, as it were Euclidean logic, and then in dialectically developed logic). But then, all these axioms still far from coincide with the “essential ground” designated by Aristotle (the active Totum of the matter, the “entelechy”48); they are kept much too abstract for that. And the “essential ground” itself, for example the cited fact of Caius being a man as the middle term in the first mood of the first-figure categorical syllogism: even the middle term of this being a man, . . . produces no necessity settled once and for all, in the sense of strict deductive proof. Since even being human (like every other “essential ground”) stands in process, and cannot therefore, in the strict sense, lend logical necessity even to such an exceptionless phenomenon as mortality.49
This leap into immortality presupposes, of course, a “processual”50 metaphysics in which more perfect realities can come from less perfect ones,51 implying the rejection of the principle of causality according to which every change necessarily has a proportionate cause.52 This rejection explains why Bloch explicitly excludes every possible proportionate cause, past, present, or eternal, as origin of the future and, especially, of utopia. He demands that the future be not contained in present or past causes, especially efficient or final. He rejects metaphysical teleology. The future must be entirely new: “this forwards and above can never be resolved into the already Known and Become, and therefore has at bottom an inexhaustible latency.”53 Moreover, the future must be better.54 But it cannot be the work of an eternal, timeless, Cause. It cannot be, as he states it, a part of the “ordo sempiternus rerum.” Thus, Bloch excludes altogether both the Christian and Hebrew reception of God’s revelation, on the one hand, and classical philosophy, on the other.55 In this kind of future must be the point in which life and dreams touch each other, where matter transcends itself unto the utopia, but without the intervention of anything alien to the material world or beyond it. This is the “transcendent [reality] without transcendence.”56
There is a sense in which it is true that the future is not contained in the past. Free will and material contingency introduce this indeterminacy of the future. The analogy of musical composition and the history of music are very appropriate ways of expressing this. This is the element of truth that makes Bloch’s reflections on the future and on human action plausible57 and makes his long musical studies in The Spirit of Utopia relevant. However, unfortunately, Bloch is not just talking about the indeterminacy of the future or of history. Because he is not doing that, he excludes not only the causal determination of the future, but any eternal, timeless reality. Further, he abandons, as has been pointed out, the principle of causality. Anything might come from dialectical matter. Anything. Even immortal humanity and a new world where extinction does not threaten the human race.
However, paradoxically, Bloch postulates that Marxism is scientific and knows the objective, economic laws58 (1) that rule the process of dialectical matter59 and (2) that, therefore, any revolutionary action and hope for utopia must acknowledge and follow. He states, thus, against the supposed absolute novelty of the future, that any development must take place “according to the objective course of things.”60 The variability of dialectical matter, for which the future is entirely open, “is a variability which is not external but mediated in a law-governed and fact-based way.”61 For this reason, a knowledge of the future is possible, as a knowledge of the past is possible. This is curious, because, according to Aristotle, you cannot know the future except in its present causes; and, according to divine revelation, a prophet can know the future if God, Who is beyond time, brings him to share in such knowledge. Yet Bloch denies both that the True Future is contained in causes (including the immanent teleology of existing, developing beings) and that there is such a thing as eternity or divine providence.62 Bloch goes even further, stating that natural science has no idea about the True Future because natural science, unlike “scientific dialectical materialism” deals with “mechanical matter.”63 He states, however, that we can know the future: (a) through premonitions and daydreams; (b) in our planning what is becoming;64 and (c) because there is a seed in matter that aims at the classless society.65 One wonders where those premonitions and daydreams could come from, how what is planned might be True Future, and finally how that seed is not an immanent teleology of an existing, developing being.
Besides and beyond these supposedly objective laws (objective element), Marxism needs the addition of Bloch’s hope for the utopia and some kind of immortality (subjective element).66 The excess of “substance” that allows dialectical matter to leap unto utopia comes from the revolutionary process, but not from the objective laws after all. It comes from the “utopian function” that incorporates in itself all the symbols, archetypes, ideals of the past, including the Christian ones.67 So, Bloch’s addition to Marxism unlocks the gates of hope.68
With this first step of his “science” of immortality, Bloch opens space for the reader to consider that the laws of “mechanical matter” do not preclude the possibility of man leaving his caterpillar state to become a butterfly, to become, from mortal, immortal. His being composed of physical, separable parts is a relevant aspect that Bloch does not take into account, but we pass over that for now, in order to examine what Bloch takes to be the second step of the process by which mortal beings become immortal.
IV.B. Given That Utopia and Immortality Are Not Precluded by the Laws of “Mechanical Matter,” How Exactly Could They Be Achieved?
Ernst Bloch weaves a complicated net of ontological and Cabbalistic considerations ostensibly to prove that death can be overcome by the process of matter. The weaving takes the appearance of a philosophical reflection, but in key steps it seems to attempt to achieve disproportionate effects by the mere use of appropriate words. One naturally wonders: Was Bloch caught in his own net? He states explicitly that he has not proved that death will be overcome, but he also argues that he has proved the possibility of the overcoming of death. Was it so?
Bloch begins stitching this verbal net by attempting to find a clear connection between the darkness in which a person who needs to make an important decision finds himself and the darkness surrounding either the state of man or the soul after death, or the state of humanity in the face of possible extinction. Here is the text: “a supposition is possible—that death has a philosophical root in the darkness of the lived moment, indeed that both have the same root.”69 This is an intelligent move because a decision is open to very different future possibilities, and the decision-maker must deliberate while having in his horizon the ground or root of existence. He needs to hit on that path that leads to the fulfillment of existence, to happiness (as Aristotle or Plato would say),70 despite life’s ultimate known state being the act of dying. One’s decision is made in darkness, about an unknown and contingent future, and with the intent of achieving one’s destiny. Yet what happens after dying certainly is connected to one’s destiny and is also surrounded by darkness. Thus, a connection is possible between the darkness of the “lived moment” and the darkness that surrounds death.
Of course, Bloch would not state that the fulfillment of existence is happiness. He would hold it is utopia. This utopia he conceives as a telos that pulls history and pulls the agents and decision makers towards itself. When a decision is made, one of the future possibilities becomes actual, “objective.” But what is objective today will be superseded tomorrow by the same search for utopia. This is why “the ground of existence, entering into the process [of reality, of history], as ground of becoming is also the ground of transitoriness. . . . But because the central moment of our existing has not yet started out on the process of its objectification and, ultimately, of its realization, it cannot itself be subject to transitoriness.”71
Notice well that Bloch has stated only that “a supposition is possible,” that the root of the darkness in decision-making is the same as the root of the darkness beyond death. However, Bloch is out to secure this “possibility.” Undoubtedly, he says, the darkness of the “lived moment” (the time for decision-making) and the darkness of death have the same processual extension. In Bloch’s words: “the processual extension of this darkness, as transitoriness, undoubtedly has the same content. Chronos devours his children, for the authentic one is not yet born. . . . But also, the core of our existence which has not entered into process does not encounter the process with its transitoriness, and consequently it is not encountered by them either. . . . And if the still sealed core of our existence were to open out of its immediateness, if it were also to enter into process or evolution, then it would no longer . . . need to enter into any-process. . . . There would no longer be any occasion for process, therefore no transitoriness, which is always interwoven with mere Becoming.”72
Playing with words in this way, Bloch proclaims that the achievement of a final utopian state is possible. However, despite Bloch’s will, everything that comes to being in time, will in time cease to be.73 Everything that is composed of parts, as all material beings are, may be dissolved and, therefore, will be dissolved unless a higher cause preserves it. Besides, if that core of our existence is really material, and really pulls history and reality as a whole, how can it be exempt from the process of becoming and ceasing to be? Only an eternal, transcendent reality can be exempt from the process and be the cause of a transcendent state. Does not Bloch know that? At least in the Hegelian conception the Absolute was a Spirit. How can reality be material and be in process so completely that there cannot even exist contemplation of truth that is not involved in action (as presupposed in the “Theses on Feuerbach,” embraced by Bloch),74 on the one hand, and at the same time have a “core” exempt from the process, on the other?
In order to deepen the critique of this apparent hope, a further aspect must be delineated. The texts examined postulate that it is epistemically possible that death will disappear. That is to say, they do not claim that it is actually possible that death will disappear, but just that the word-play allows one to think that perhaps that is the structure of reality, a process that will end in utopia. However, in other passages, Bloch shifts the meaning, as if the utopia is an ontological possibility depending not on the right connection of concepts in our reasoning, but on our revolutionary action. So he forgets what he has actually proved (or not proved), and he assumes that he has proved the ontological possibility of his utopia and states, moreover, that that possibility depends on our action:
The subjective hope is spes, qua speratur, the objective is spes, quae speratur; the former, hoping hope, is therefore also really believed and has, suo modo, confidence; whereas the second, hoped hope, if it already had complete confidence to support it, would not be hope at all. In other words, the matter designated in hoping hope, however inflexible, however actively inspiring to the end, the objective matter of hope in the world itself, is definitely not yet guaranteed sure and certain of itself. . . . And only if the legitimately expectable and attainable goal, namely socialist humanization, is not obscured by the inadequate, is not bitterly led away down false roads, can the objectively valid laws of dialectical development and its more distant possibility also effectively guide and be happily fructified. In itself certainly decided as hoping hope, the outcome itself must yet be decided, in open history, the field of objective-real decision. This is the category of danger . . . ; there is as yet no unwavering situationlessness of a fixed result.75
Here the shift is clear: from the epistemological doubt to the ontological “undecidedness.”76 One begins to suspect that all depends, really, on an act of the will: “there is never anything soft about conscious-known hope, but a will within it insists: it should be so, it must become so.”77 So, the will is what keeps one hoping, not knowledge.
Immediately after the quoted long passage, Bloch vents his hatred of spiritual hope: “And real, best decidedness of all stands just as little somehow or somewhere in a hypostatized other world; as if its ens perfectissimum were an ens realissimum, existing enthroned above. Such accomplished ‘fact’ of a higher order, which not only theistic religions but also metaphysical idealisms apply, on the contrary represents pure hypostasis.”78 So Bloch cannot prove that his object of hope is even possible, he does not discuss any metaphysical proof of God or of the spirituality of the soul, but he is certain [again by an act of his will] that spiritual hope is impossible. At times it seems as if the only thing that mattered for Bloch was that the defeat of death must be “immanent,” material, “without hell and heaven, ‘without fantasies of otherworldly monsters, negative or positive.’”79 The only thing that matters to Bloch seems to be that there is no spirit, or spiritual world, or transcendent hope with transcendence. He would rather have total extinction than accept a spiritual world.
However, precisely due to the rejection of transcendent hope with transcendence, even if we suppose that Bloch proved that the transfiguration of reality into the utopia was possible, he would have left us still in despair. Notice well that in an above-quoted passage he states that the true son of Chronos, who will be immortal, has not yet been born. But we are born already. Since collective hope is no hope, as he stated explicitly in The Spirit of Utopia,80 Bloch truly is proposing real hope neither to himself nor to us, because even supposing that future human beings could achieve Bloch’s immortality, according to him we present human beings cannot.81
IV.C. The Metaphysics of Hope and Metaphysics Tout Court
A final point must be addressed. A person familiar with Bloch’s work might be surprised by a direct application of classical metaphysics to a kind of thought that is very alien to it. So, he could object: “How can one apply the basic tenets of classical metaphysics to Bloch’s ontology? It seems that they do not apply. The link between the darkness of the lived moment and the extra-territoriality that lies within death must be taken in its full implications. There is no need for a rational, grounded, basis for the philosophy of hope. Bloch, indeed, aims to show us that the fact of hope is itself the only presence of a promise of immortality (non omnis confundar) that we have, when we chart its full implications. The wisdom of Bloch consists in showing as well that this fact, though slight, is also enough. This view, moreover, can be connected to Levinas’ observation: that in Bloch’s works ethics and ontology are fused and form one only discipline, an ‘ethical ontology.’ Of course, this would be so because Bloch takes the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ as the founding text of a new processual ontology, where ‘truth’ is not the result of ‘contemplating’ the world as it is, but of the action that attempts to change it.”82
We must not end the current paper without addressing this last, most difficult, objection. We might be sympathetic to one of its points. One could hold that a person who is unable to metaphysically prove the existence of the object of his desire or hope can, however, be certain of it through the fact of the existence of such desire or hope. A similar way of reasoning has been proposed by several important philosophers in history. Thus, for example, Aquinas argues in favor of the immortality of the soul precisely by holding that “nature does nothing in vain,” and we have a natural desire to live forever.83 Josef Seifert argues in a similar way: “How could the necessarily presupposed object of the highest form of love be illusory . . . ?”84 However, these philosophical proofs presuppose insights concerning the structure of the world that are not verbalized: there is teleology in the world, the world is intelligibly structured so that the natural teleology cannot be deceptive, etc. These insights might be grasped by persons without philosophical training: an old lady with no academic training in philosophy might perceive, for example, that the birds building complicated nests are moved by a natural desire that testifies to a pervasive intelligible order of which her own desire for or hope of immortality is just one more instance. Yet in no case can she reasonably think that her own desire or hope can produce a change in reality contrary to the basic tenets of rationality, such as the principle of causality. The first principles impose themselves on our reason willy-nilly. We cannot choose not to be subject to the principle of non-contradiction, or to the principle of causality, for example. Both are at the foundation of any rational understanding of being in general. Aristotle demonstrated this point in Metaphysics Γ. Nietzsche expressed this very point partially but forcefully in the Twilight of the Idols, from his nihilist and anti-rational perspective. According to him, as long as we use reason, we are forced to admit that there is “unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, materiality, what is.” Of course, according to his radically anti-rational stand, this is an error, but “we see ourselves entangled in some measure in error, necessitated to error.”85 In other words, we cannot disentangle ourselves from the first principles of reason.86
That such is the case as well with Bloch’s Marxist philosophy can be proved by applying our reflection to the “Theses on Feuerbach.”87 Indeed, in his eleventh thesis Marx stated: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Bloch understands that this thesis implies: (i) that the truth value of the object of our desires and of our hope (its real existence, at least in its causes, simultaneous with our desire) is irrelevant; and (ii) that it is irrelevant because the “truth” of the object will be demonstrated not by the real existence of the object but through our changing the world by our action and thus producing the object.88 If we accept the eleventh thesis thus understood, then we unavoidably fall into paradoxes analogous to those pointed out already: either we postulate that our action is aimless and meaningless so that before the object miraculously appears we cannot know that it is better to act rather than to abstain from acting, or we introduce surreptitiously a potentiality and a teleology that we had previously expelled openly. Bloch called for an orderly action and thus fell into the latter kind of paradox when, after denying the teleology of the world, wrote that there is a seed that is found in matter and aims at the “classless society.”89
V. Brief Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems clear that (a) the object of hope proposed by Bloch cannot survive rational scrutiny; that (b) the real option that human beings are faced with today is either to embrace the transcendent hope with transcendence offered by revelation and by classical metaphysics or to embrace nihilism. Thus we confirm Josef Pieper’s and Bernard Schumacher’s conclusions, but in a new way. The classical Christian conception of hope with transcendence (along with the classical-metaphysical conception) is the only way in which the contemporary human individual can find meaning and contentment for his life. There is no other standing alternative on the field.90
Carlos A. Casanova
Hamilton Center, University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Santiago, Chile
Ignacio Serrano del Pozo
Universidad Andres Bello
Chile
José Antonio Vidal Robson
Universidad de los Andes
Santiago, Chile
Notas
(1) Bloch stated this dilemma in his last interview. Bernard Schumacher cites it in A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope, trans. D. C. Schindler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 155.
(2) See 206a–212a. Platonis Opera. 5 vols., ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900), 2.
(3) See The Principle of Hope. 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, 18. Henceforth TPH.
(4) See Josef Pieper, Hope and History, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Burns and Oates, 1969), 13–28 and 61–76.
(5) See Bernard Schumacher, A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope
(6) Pieper, Hope and History, 61.
(7) See Joe Davidson, “A Dash of Pessimism? Ernst Bloch, Radical Disappointment and the Militant Excavation of Hope,” Critical Horizons 22, no. 4 (2002): 427–8.
(8) See Anson Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique, no. 11 (1977): 10–1, 19.
(9) See Zimmermann, “Transforming Utopian into Metopian Systems: Bloch’s Principle of Hope Revisited,” in The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, ed. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 246–68, at 248. However, Zimmermann thinks that some kind of individual immortality can be achieved by an “emulation” of the person with linguistic systems (See Zimmermann, “Transforming Utopian into Metopian Systems,” 250). Bloch, we are sure, would have accused Zimmermann of offering a “cold” and “mechanistic” immortality.
(10) See Wayne Hudson, “Bloch and a Philosophy of the Proterior,” in The Privatization of Hope, 21–36, at 33–4.
(11) See Pieper, Hope and History, 69. Pieper grasps the depth of the problem of hope but does not realize that Bloch had grasped it as well.
(12) Igor Shafarevich, “Socialism is Our Past and Future,” in From Under the Rubble, ed. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn et al. (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1981), 63.
(13) See Fernando Savater, “Después de la utopía: el mito (respuesta a Ernst Bloch),” Vuelta 261 (1988): 30–8.
(14) See “Preface: Bloch Ontology of Not-Yet-Being,” in The Privatization of Hope, xv–xx, at xx.
(15) TPH, 3.1178.
(16) TPH, 3.1174.
(17) TPH, 3.1106; cf. 1172–4.
(18) TPH, 3.1152. In an interview given in 1975, Bloch formulated very well the problem of extinction. The interview is cited in Peter Thompson, “Religion, Utopia and the Metaphysics of Contingency,” in The Privatization of Hope, 87.
(19) TPH, 3.1178. Italics added.
(20) TPH, 3.1176.
(21) See TPH, 3.1175. “Nobody knows what lies hidden in the world outside the human working radius, i.e., in the as yet unmediated being of nature” (1176).
(22) TPH, 3.1180.
(23) See Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar, 1st ed. (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 272–3. Henceforth TSU.
(24) See Levinas, “Bloch: Toward a Conclusion,” in God, Death and Time (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 101–5, at 104, 105.
(25) Ibid., 103.
(26) Ibid., 102–3.
(27) See TPH, 3.1112, 1138, 1145–6 (about Hume) and 1182. Bloch mentions Hume’s Essay on the Immortality of the Soul, where Hume actually holds that the metempshýchosis is the only conception of immortality that a “philosopher” may take seriously (See David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Thomas Hill Green , 2 vols. [London & New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1889], 2.399–406, at 404).
(28) TSU, 254. Among the things he considers “sources of myth” and “reification of dreams,” Bloch in THP gives pride of place to religion.
(29) See TSU, 244.
(30) TSU, 254.
(31) See TSU, 127.
(32) See TSU, 253.
(33) TSU, 253.
(34) TSU, 259. Lessing is also cited.
(35) TSU, 259.
(36) TSU, 252.
(37) See TSU, 251. Earlier in the book Bloch pointed to “metapsychology” as the way to know about the world of the soul. See TSU, 237.
(38) See TSU, 260.
(39) See TSU, 272–3.
(40) See TSU, 276–7.
(41) TSU, 278.
(42) Bloch receives from Marx the idea of the generatio aequivoca as the origin of man. See TPH, 1.116, 204, 210, and 258. See also, for example, Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx, trans. John Maxwell (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 68 and 107–10. (Henceforth OKM.) These texts are based on the Third Manuscript of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: in Marx and Engels Collected Works, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 3.304–6. In this work Marx is clearly aware that this generatio aequivoca is impossible and that there are irrefutable proofs of the existence of God. But he abandons the discussion and prohibits further questions. (See Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism [Chicago: Gateway Books, 1968], 22–6). In this context, Bloch postulates a primum agens materiale. Concerning the beginning of the universe, Bloch rejects at the same time revelation (the book of Genesis) and physical research (concretely, the “Big Bang” theory) in a dismissive, unsubstantiated way. See TPH, 1.203–4.
(43) Lee and George, “The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity,” in Human Dignity and Bioethics (Washington, DC: President’s Council on Bioethics, 2008), 409–34, at 421.
(44) Thomas Aquinas, Expositio Peryermeneias, Lib. I, lect. 14, n. 8 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962).
(45) See Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 2, a. 3, c. (Editio Leonina [Roma: Typographia Polyglotta, 1888], 31). Of course, Aquinas is talking about a scenario in which no higher cause, no necessary being, intervenes to change the natural course of things.
(46) This reasoning has been confirmed in modern statistics with the Strong Law of Large Numbers. See D. M. Chibisov, “Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers and the Strong Law of Large Numbers,” Theory of Probability and Its Applications 60, no. 2 (2016): 318–9.
(47) See Aquinas, Super Sent., in Corpus Thomisticum, ed. Enrique Alarcón (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2000), lib. 2, d. 19, q. 1, a. 4, co., https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/snp2016.html.
(48) This phrase reflects Bloch’s peculiar interpretation of Aristotle as a kind of materialist. See TPH, 1.207. See, also, Ernst Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, Werkausgabe 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). According to these Blochian sources, there was an “Aristotelian left” that included in its ranks no less a figure than Avicenna, and that, by espousing a kind of materialism that sank all formality in matter, embraced views very similar to those of Bloch himself.
(49) TPH, 1.228–9. We have slightly corrected the translation to use the right logical vocabulary. See 225–7 and vol. 3, 1108–9, as well. Also, vol. 1, 197: “as long as the reality has not become a completely determined one, as long as it possesses still unclosed possibilities, in the shape of new shoots and new spaces for development, then no absolute objection to utopia can be raised by merely factual reality.” This is an example of ideology’s imperviousness to facts.
(50) See Hudson, “Bloch and a Philosophy of the Proterior,” 21.
(51) It is a Hegelian process but inverted. Matter is the vehicle of the process (TPH, 1.131. See also OKM, 108). This makes Bloch’s conception far less plausible than Hegel’s for the reasons given in the text: Bloch needs to openly abandon the principle of causality. It makes the goal far less attractive, as well, for those who understand and pay attention to the meaning of the actual words that Bloch uses: “naturalization of man and humanization of nature” (ibidem. Also, TPH, 1.240). Without spiritual life, what could the attraction of immortality be, really? To live for ever and ever, enjoying material pleasures (of however refined a kind)?
(52) See Josef Seifert, “¿Qué es filosofía?,” Anuario filosófico 28, no. 1 (1995): 91–108. See Thomas Aquinas, SCG bk.1, chap. 85, para. 4: “non enim potest esse effectus firmioris esse quam sua causa.” (Editio Leonina [Rome: Ricardo Garrone, 1918], 234). Wayne Hudson expresses this problem in a less technical way when he states that Bloch’s materialism “lacks adequate methodological controls” (162) and also fails to “imply objective limitations on hope” (163). Again: “[his] materialism loses coherent definition if it cannot set limits to what in the long term future matter will be” (164). See Hudson, “Ernst Bloch and the Philosophy of Immanence,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2019): 155–64.
(53) TPH, 1.159; cf. 1.138.
(54) See TPH, 1.144.
(55) See TPH, 1.139, 140, 141–4.
(56) TPH, 1.146; see 3.1108.
(57) See, for example, TPH, 1.242.
(58) TPH, 1.444.
(59) As the epistemological and metaphysical conception that is appropriate for this processual dialectics, Bloch assumes the “Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx. Thanks to them, says Bloch, Marxism has developed the vision of utopia into a science (see TPH, 1.147; see, also, TPH, 1.267; and 3.1366). Through revolution, matter will achieve utopia, the last transformation of nature into god and of all human beings into brothers even without a father (see TSU, 212).
(60) TPH, 1.125.
(61) TPH, 1.234.
(62) See TPH, 1.228 and ss., 237–8; and 3.1373.
(63) See TPH, 1.237–8. In Heritage of Our Times, Bloch holds that “materialists must correct their [natural sciences’] valid but delimited perspectives with the warm streams of Renaissance and Romantic naturalism, including, following Engels, Oken’s theosophical nature philosophy.” See Hudson, “Ernst Bloch and the Philosophy of Immanence,” 159.
(64) See TPH, 1.132.
(65) See TPH, 1.238.
(66) See TPH, 1.208. Neither of the two elements may be disregarded. The way to achieve this is by incorporating the proletariat into revolutionary action. See TPH, 1.148 and 199. See also OKM, 40.
(67) See TPH, 1.150. Bloch attempts in his monumental works a re-interpretation and re-signification of the whole body of culture, especially Western and Christian culture (see TPH, 1.156). He tries to assimilate it as premonitions of his utopian dream. In this way he certainly has contributed a wealth of symbols and strategies with powerful strength to subvert the Church (see TPH, 1.157–8 and 445). Actually, Bloch thinks that the post-revolutionary, Communist society must avail itself of the Church: see TSU, 246 (he claims that this was foreseen by a certain Cabbalistic author; see ibid.).
(68) TPH, 1.146; cf. 177.
(69) TPH, 3.1178.
(70) Bloch himself makes this connection. See, for example, Bloch, “Sobre el concepto de utopía,” in ¿Despedida de la utopía?, trans. Sandra Santana Pérez (Madrid: A. Machado Libros, 2017), 42.
(71) TPH, 3.1179.
(72) TPH, 3.1179.
(73) This is what prompted Scipio’s tears when Carthage was destroyed. See the end of book 39, n.5 of Polybius’s Histories (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), Vol. 1.
(74) A commentary on the “Theses” is the place where Bloch expounds the core of his ontology. See TPH 1. 249–86. See also TPH 1.158, 198, 200, and 209.
(75) TPH, 3.1372. See also OKM, 112; and “Sobre el concepto de utopía, ” 43–4. According to Bloch, we have faith not only in the invisible, but also in what does not yet exist but is in the process of being made by human action. If it were otherwise, the object of faith and hope would no longer be made “according to the measure of man’s image” (“Sobre el concepto de utopía,” 44). In this way, Bloch places man “over everything that is called divine” (2 Thess. 2:4).
(76) This undecidedness is clearly perceived by Joe Davidson (see “A Dash of Pessimism?,” 430).
(77) TPH, 1.147.
(78) TPH, 3.1372. In a similar sense, see TPH, 3.1175. Curiously, Bloch uses here an expression similar to that of Marx’s “Invocation of One in Despair:” the “one in despair” wanted to take revenge against “that enthroned Lord.”
(79) TPH, 3.1147.
(80) Josef Pieper points this out as well (Hope and History, 70–1).
(81) See also TPH, 3.1375. “No person is yet really living,” TPH, 1.293; cf. 1.308.
(82) This is the main subject, we think, of Levinas, “Another Thinking of Death Starting From Bloch,” and “A Reading of Bloch (Continued),” in God, Death and Time, 92–96 and 97–100, respectively. See especially 94–95 and 98.
(83) See SCG, bk. 2, chap. 55, para. 13. Editio Leonina (Rome: Riccardo Garrone, 1908), 394.
(84) Seifert holds that through this rhetorical question he is proving the existence of God in Conocimiento de Dios por las vías de la razón y del amor (Madrid: Encuentro, 2010), 178–9.
(85) See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, “On Reason in Philosophy,” n. 5, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3, trans. Thomas Common (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 95–235, at 120.
(86) The only way that Cratylus found to avoid the cogency of the first principles was to avoid speaking. See Metaphysics (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1895), Γ5, 1010a9–13. This point can be felt in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, 122 (“I fear we do not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar.”) And in Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26 (“Philosophy in the only way I still allow it to stand, as the most general form of history, as an attempt somehow to describe Heraclitean becoming and to abbreviate it into signs [so to speak, to translate and mummify it into a kind of illusory being]”).
(87) We can illustrate the necessity about which Nietzsche wrote with the “Second Thesis on Feuerbach.” (See “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, 5.3–5). There Marx claims that truth as correspondence between the contemplative intellect and the world’s being is irrelevant. Bloch follows him in TPH, 1.268. But by reflection we may realize that when they state this supposed irrelevance of truth as correspondence, they are claiming that their statement corresponds with the being of human affairs and, therefore, is true in this sense.
(88) See TPH, 1.282–7, where he accuses all those who do not accept his processual cosmogony as “bourgeois,” or as “anchored in the past,” in a sort of super-Egypt (it is a metaphor, referring, in one of its multiple meanings, to history having superseded Egypt so long ago that it would be petrifying to search for hope in a return to Egypt). This passage of TPH, vol. 1, starting on p. 267, is parallel to the final pages of Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), starting on p. 248.
(89) See supra, section IV.A.
(90) This paper was financed by both the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile (ANID) as part of the Fondecyt Project Number 1220051; and by the Hamilton Center of the University of Florida.
