.jpeg){kind=small}
Virtually everybody quotes the opening lines to the work: "I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start." Maybe that is because they were unable to get much further into the book... Typical of so many other German philosophers from the period of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel through Martin Heidegger, Bloch buries the reader in a nearly incomprehensible word salad that seems to betray an intellectual inferiority complex, rather than provide any philosophical illumination. Instead of coming out and saying what he means, he exhausts the reader with a lengthy and ill-informed section on music criticism, perhaps inferring that the clever and worthy reader would be able to elicit, extrapolate, and otherwise piece together Bloch's philosophy thereby. Bloch, and several of his German fellows, are precisely what gives philosophy a bad name among lay people today, and what turns them off toward it, despite its necessary and foundational application in life.
This is not to say that reading this unnecessarily long, painful, ranting string of the most uncommonly-used longest multisyllabic words Bloch could find is entirely without benefit. The diligent reader will find everything from pearls of wisdom to very quotable one-liners. It's just that these little treasures are separated by the vast, arid expanse of Bloch convincing himself that he is good enough and smart enough owing to his over-educated-sounding prattle.
Bloch begins by affirming the need for Marxist revolution and returns to that train of thought periodically. The entire rest of the book betrays a rather bourgeois attachment to art, culture, religion, and the finer things of life, such that if Bloch actually lived in the gathering Marxist regime he praised, the Soviet Union, he would have ended up convicted of being an aesthete and in prison sharing a cell with Vladimir Bukovsky.
He claims to be in favor of Socialism, but apart from his bourgeois attachments, he also reveals himself to be quite the German nationalist (vice the internationalist that Socialism is supposed to promote). Don't get me wrong: he accuses imperial Germany of despicable nationalism in causing the late war (his first draft was published during World War I), and he rejects the more extreme versions of nationalism even then percolating into Nazi toxin. However, in the endless pages of music criticism, he reduces composers of any real import to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner, all of whom, you may have noticed, spring from among the German peoples. He tends to discount German Jewish composers for the most part, but was willing to consider his favorite German Jewish composer an "honorary" German, as a sort of condescending, patronizing compliment, I'm sure. Which is to say, the fact that he permits himself a favorite German Jewish composer sets him apart from his young proto-Nazi contemporaries.
In like manner, he reduces the significant cultures of the world to Egypt, Greece, and Germany/Gothic civilization. For that matter, the only real significant philosophers were Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Karl Marx, with Friedrich Nietzsche making a pretty good honorable mention, and a few other mentioned by-the-bye, like Blaise Pascal and that fellow Plato. His ethnocentrism is likely to be shocking to many of today's readers, especially for an "internationalist" Socialist.
So what is he really getting at, through all this dense swamp of almost incomprehensible vocabulary? Despite his paltry nod toward Plato, Bloch is 100% Platonist, and very self-centered/egotistical as a result. He goes so far as to make the astonishing claim:
every organism first became on the way toward human form, which had always been meant by us alone. So little did man appear last and as though fortuitously, that everything that took shape before him is pure larve, indeed deformations and errors, which the proper kind of presentiment had first to remove and eliminate. (p 233, emphasis in original)
Also: "man is not the point of nature, but rather just the strongest, most diurnal, clearest objectivation of Will." (p 147) Let's hope some superior alien race doesn't land near poor old Bloch and dissuade him of the notion of the primacy of humankind...
Other samples showing Bloch's self-centeredness: "we seek the artist who lets us approach ourselves purely, encounter ourselves," (p 43) and, "We hear only ourselves. For we are gradually becoming blind to the outside," (p 47) and, "We have never really wanted anything but to see ourselves openly." (p 18) Or, "one simply cannot omit oneself when one is building with the energies of the Son of Man inside oneself," (p 25) and, "We have become more individual, searching, homeless; we are formed more flowingly, the self of us all rises up close by." (p 27, emphasis in original) One gets the distinct impression that Bloch was the sort of fellow who had to wander around Bohemian-style for a year or six after finishing college to go "find himself." Perhaps some of this self-focus is the result of Bloch's own discomfort around other people being mirror-imaged onto all of humanity: "But we hear only ourselves...This has to do with the highly insecure and derivative way people feel together." (p 94)
What seems to be really bothering Bloch, what prompted him to write this in the first place, was the idea that something so fine as a human being might not live to 100% of his or her potential: "The problem which arose foremost was: who lives this life in its totality." (p 163) Since our mediocrity and failure to live life fully stared Bloch right in the face, his only conclusion was that reincarnation must be taking place, so that we can keep trying until we get it right:
Memory itself is already a very strange gift, where the intimacy of the lived moment is preserved for another time, and the concept of the transmigration of souls, as the unity of Epimetheus and Prometheus, is absolutely able without contradiction to add hope to this gift, a higher metaphysical enigma. (p 261)
And:
from its migrations the soul gains only the power to bend external destiny to itself, to use it, to shape it to be ironically conformal with itself, to use it, like death, as the equipment for very unworldly goals, to achieve this destiny intelligibly, in the midst of the empirical world, by going through this world. (p 265)
In this he breaks hard from Marx and Socialism, criticizing Marx for unnecessarily giving up religion, when only our attachment to and grasping toward God (a rather heterodox God custom-made by Bloch, to be sure) will permit humans to retain the necessary focus and rise above the empirical world that Bloch holds in contempt:
everyone producing according to his abilities, everybody consuming according to his needs, everyone openly "comprehended" according to the degree of his assistance, his moral-spiritual lay ministry and humanity's journey through the world's darkness. (p 246)
However, despite his strong condemnation of the Great War as the defense of the reactionary establishment and big business, he joins Marx in calling for violent, remorseless revolution to bring about his intended utopia: "a revolutionary mission absolutely inscribed in utopia." (p 237) Further:
as a rule the soul must assume guilt in order to destroy the existing evil, in order not to assume even more guilt by an idyllic retreat, a hypocritical connivance in injustice. Dominance and power in themselves are evil, but it is necessary to confront power in terms of power, as a categorical imperative with revolver in hand. (p 242)
Bloch naturally completely fails to address the obvious consequences of such calls for violent revolution, chiefly, the fact that a system born of such violence will tend to continue to perpetuate it, even after the revolution. This of course was witnessed already by the Jacobins, and would later repeat itself in Joseph Stalin's purges and Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution, etc. This is exacerbated by Bloch's own contempt of the rule of law (another trait almost universal with his fellow Socialists): "all law, far and away the preponderance of criminal law, too, is merely the ruling class's means of maintaining a rule of law protecting its interests." (p 239) He reveals his own antipathy toward government itself, "the state as coercive formation culminates in the military state," (p 239) but surely recognizes that collectivism can only be imposed (and has only been imposed) through main force, hence Bloch's own calls for bloody revolution. His version of Socialism leads to:
the basic motif of socialist ideology: to bestow on every human being time outside of work, his own need, boredom, wretchedness, privation and gloom, his own submerged light calling, a life in the Dostoevskyan sense, so that he will have set things right with himself. (p 268)
Yet this Socialism is not the regular, atheist variety, but one of Bloch's heterodox, reincarnating Christian version:
So the basic metaphysical phenomenon of true Christian charity remains this: that it lets one who loves live completely within his fellow, without substituting his soul or the soul of him whom he loves but into the We, into the salvation of all these souls, the preserved And and About Us no longer marked by anything alien to us. (p 212)
Bloch seems to have the young man's fixation on death, perhaps magnified by World War I and the fact that many of his contemporaries either came home from the front as traumatized cripples or not at all. He even posits: "there can never be too much death and end for one person alone." (p 259) But for all his fascination about death, his thoughts about reincarnation seem to allay them, especially as such reincarnation takes place through the action of lovers together.
For all of its flaws, some of Bloch's syncretic approaches to various religions can be provocative, if not especially well-grounded, theologically speaking. And despite its generally verbose nature, Bloch slides in some pithy one-liners that are quite penetrating and insightful. I wish I could easily publish my highlights and notes, but alas!, I could not find a commercial copy for my Kindle, so I had fall back on an available pdf instead.
If one is highly motivated by the study of Utopianism, Socialism, or perhaps philosophy generally, then this book probably belongs on your reading list (though not necessarily right at the top). For all of its occasional benefits, Bloch's maddening style make this much more work than it tends to be worth, so I'm afraid I can't give it more recommendation than that.