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Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch (1954)
Full name	Ernst Bloch
Born	July 8, 1885 Ludwigshafen, Germany
Died	August 4, 1977 (aged 92) Tübingen, Germany
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Marxism
Main interests	utopianism, revolutionary ideology, liberation theology
Influenced by Marx, Hegel
Influenced Ernesto Balducci, Jürgen Moltmann

Ernst Simon Bloch (German pronunciation: [ˈɛʁnst ˈziːmɔn ˈblɔx], July 8, 1885 – August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher.

Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx. He was also interested in music (notably Gustav Mahler) and art (notably expressionism). He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on the concept that in a utopian human world where oppression and exploitation have been eliminated there will always be a truly ideological revolutionary force.

Life

Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of an assimilated 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 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. 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 died in Tübingen.

Work

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

Bloch's work became very influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology. It is cited as a key influence by Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope (1967, Harper and Row, New York), and by Ernesto Balducci.

Bloch's Principle of Hope was written during his emigration in the USA, where he lived briefly in New Hampshire before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He wrote the lengthy three volume work in the reading room of Harvard's Widener Library. Bloch originally planned to publish it there under the title Dreams of a Better Life. The Principle of Hope tries to provide an encyclopedic account of mankind's and nature's orientation towards a socially and technologically improved future.

Bibliography

Books

• Geist der Utopie (1918) (trans.: The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford, 2000)
• Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921) (Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution)
• Spuren (1930) (trans.: Traces, Stanford University Press, 2006)
• Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935) (Bequest of this Time)
• Freiheit und Ordnung (1947) (Freedom and Order)
• Subjekt-Objekt (1949)
• Christian Thomasius (1949)
• Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke (1949) (Avicenna and the aristotelian Left)
• Das Prinzip Hoffnung (3 vols.: 1938–1947) (trans.: The Principle of Hope, MIT Press, 1986)
• Naturrecht und menschliche Würde (1961) (trans.: Natural Law and Human Dignity, MIT Press 1986)
• Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (1963) (The Tübingen Introduction in Philosophy)
• Religion im Erbe (1959-66) (trans.: Man on His Own, Herder and Herder, 1970)
• 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

Further reading

• Adorno, Theodor W. (1991). "Ernst Bloch's Spuren," Notes to Literature, Volume One, New York, Columbia University Press
• 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
• Münster, Arno (1989). Ernst Bloch: messianisme et utopie, PUF, Paris

See also

• Exilliteratur

External links

• Illuminations: Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique By Douglas Kellner
• Ernst-Bloch-Zentrum
• Ernst Bloch Assoziation
• Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies, University of Sheffield

From Wikiquote

Ernst Simon Bloch (1885-07-08 – 1977-08-04) was a German Marxist philosopher.

Sourced

• How absurd it must seem for an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or to see oneself objectified as a mechanic! how falsely the usual sunrise waked us, the clock dial, the city street the job! How wrongfully people find themselves in these systems — our time isn't there, our space isn't there, our space isn't even here... the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
  • Traces (1930), p. 27

• In death too, there is always something of the rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it
  • Traces (1930), p. 30

• We hear only ourselves.

• • For we gradually become blind to the outside world.

• • Whatever we shape leads back around ourselves again. It is not so much exclusively self-oriented, not so much hazy, floating, warm, dark and incorporeal as the feeling always of being simply with our-selves, simply self-aware. It is material and it is expeience with alien affiliations. But we walk in the forest and feel we are or might be what the forest is dreaming. We pass between the pillars of its tree-trunks, small, spiritual and invisible to ourselves, as their sound, as that which could not become forest again or external appearance of day and visibility. We do not possess it, that which all this around us - moss, curious flowers, roots, trunks and streaks of light - is or sig-nifies, because we are it itself and are standing too close to it, the spectral and still ineffable nature of consciousness or interiorisation. But the sound burns out of us, the heard note, not the sound itself or its forms. This, however, shows us our path without alien means, our historically inward path, as a fire in which not the vibrating air but we ourselves begin to quiver and to cast off our cloaks.
    • Dream, Essays on the Philosophy of Music (1985), p. 1

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Ernst Bloch