Ernst Bloch Quotes

The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

Man is that which has still much before it. He is repeatedly transformed in his work and by it. [...] The authentic in man and in the world is potential, waiting, living in fear of being frustrated, living in hope of succeeding.

Women with bare arms are not allowed into church, but they let naked Jews dig their own graves.

The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.

Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch's Spirit of Utopia, Hermann Hesse's Glimpse Into Chaos, Edmund Husserl's The Crisis in European Science, Karl Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, René Guenon's The Reign of Quantity, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Colin Wilson's The Outsider—the list could go on.

Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people -- in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for -- although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors.

No dreaming may stand still, for this bodes no good. But if it becomes a dreaming ahead, then its cause appears quite differently and excitingly alive. The dim and weakening features, which may be characteristic of mere yearning, disappears; and then yearning can show what it really is able to accomplish.

Optimism is justified only as militant, never as confirmed

Implicit in Marxism – as the leap from the Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom – there lies the whole so subversive and un-static heritage of the Bible.

Und könnte [das Ich] eine Leere, eine Losgelassenheit, eine disparate, gar absurde Schranke auch noch spüren, wenn keine Bewegung in ihm wäre, die an die Schranke stößt? […] Die Akte des Überschreitens selber lassen sich jedenfalls nicht nihilisieren, nicht einmal dort, wo die härteste Gegenutopie: der Tod jedes irdische Dunkel so unermesslich überbietet, unterbietet.

Once one has tasted Marxist criticism, all ideological hogwash becomes repulsive, and one will discard it. The true poetic aura, the only one remaining and possible, imagination without lie, appears all the more distinctly and does not envy any former era of its subjects. Marxism remains as clarity, non-deceptively even poetically.

ich aufrichtender Mensch und noch nicht ausdeterminierte reale Möglichkeit, das sind für die Entwicklung unseres Lebens, unserer Literatur, Philosophie, Praxis sicher die unabdingbarsten Kategorien.

In Something’s Missing, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch discuss what they term the shrinking of utopian consciousness within technocratic modernism and in so doing make a useful distinction between banal and revolutionary forms of utopia. The first are entrenched in the dominant social order, tending to confirm or perfect it. On this basis they contain nothing that is not already possible and have no potential that is not already known. The second, the revolutionary forms, provoke the genuinely new, and as a consequence, are not yet possible. This kind of utopia, according to Bloch, is [n]ot . . . nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it. Not only if we travel there, but in that we travel there, the island of utopia a rises out of the sea of the possible — utopia, but with new contents.

Der kluge Idealismus steht dem klugen Materialismus näher als der dumme Materialismus.

Spitzfindgikeiten des bloßen Begriffs waren die Gestehungkosten für die Entdeckung der Dialektik, Aristotelisch-Hegelsche Teleologie ging der Tendenz, Augustinisches Sabbatreich dem Reich der Freiheit vorauf. Und nicht zuletzt, ganz zuletzt geht die Aristotelische Deckung des δυνάμει ὄν, des In-Möglichkeit-Seins mit der Materie als tragender Materie jeder utopischen Substraterweiterung der Materie vorher; ob auch der Aristotelische Materie-Begriff in großer Philosophie rückwärts wie großen Teils auf vorwärts oft vereinsamt blieb.

Matter, therefore, also has its utopia; in objective real possibility, it stops being abstract.

The sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested already in 1942 that fascism emerged out of uprooting and tensions produced by uneven economic and social development—an early form of the fascism/modernization problem. In countries that industrialized rapidly and late, like Germany and Italy, Parsons argued, class tensions were particularly acute and compromise was blocked by surviving pre-industrial elites. This interpretation had the merit of treating fascism as a system and as the product of a history, as did the Marxist interpretation, without Marxism’s determinism, narrowness, and shaky empirical foundations. The philosopher Ernst Bloch, a Marxist made unorthodox by an interest in the irrational and in religion, arrived in his own way at another theory of “noncontemporaneity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit). Contemplating Nazi success with archaic and violent “red dreams” of blood, soil, and a precapitalist paradise, utterly incompatible with what he considered the party’s true fealty to big business, he understood that vestigial values flourished long after they had lost any correspondence with economic and social reality. “Not all people exist in the same Now.” Orthodox Marxists, he thought, had missed the boat by “cordoning off the soul.” Uneven development continues to arouse interest as an ingredient of prefascist crises, but the case for it is weakened by France’s notoriously “dual” economy, in which a powerful peasant/artisan sector coexisted with modern industry without fascism reaching power except under Nazi occupation.

Humans still live in prehistory; indeed, all things still stand before the creation of the world. . . . The real Genesis is not in the beginning, but at the end, when society and human existence become radical. When we engage our roots—the history of human as worker, creator, molder—and have grounded our possessions in a genuine democracy without alienation, then there will appear in the world something glimpsed in childhood, a place where nobody has yet been: Home. —Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope 1