Ernst Bloch and the Spirituality of Utopia

Abstract

This essay outlines the significance of the unknowable and the spiritual in the works of Ernst Bloch. Bloch argued that Marxism needed to generate a “warm stream” of analysis to complement the “cold stream” of socioeconomic categories. His major works, The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia, represent attempts to provide this warm stream. This means that he was one of the few Marxist thinkers who took religion and faith seriously and attempted to find within them and within communism a common root of the anticipatory consciousness of a different world. His central operator was the Not-Yet, meaning that the tendencies latent in human development cannot be fully realized under current conditions. It is therefore spirit that carries these latent tendencies.

Key Words:

• Ernst Bloch
• Marxism
• Metaphysics
• Spirituality
• Utopia

Notes

1 In recent years Marx and Lenin have appeared on the cover of the Economist, where their theories of capitalism have been (inadequately) discussed, and David Harvey has enjoyed a period of fame alongside Thomas Piketty and others. That the prescriptions delivered are at best left-Keynesian is not the issue here.

2 See Bertolt Brecht's libretto and the character Jimmy Mahoney in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an opera by Kurt Weill.

3 For a discussion of this, see Pavlov (2016).

4 See also the translation by Loren Goldmann and Peter Thompson of Bloch's Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.