The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch
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THE MARXIST PHILOSOPHY OF ERNST BLOCH Wayne Hudson
©Wayne Hudson 1982 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 978-0-333-25664-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission
First published 1982 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-04292-0
ISBN 978-1-349-04290-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04290-6
For Da
Contents Acknowledgements
IX
1 Indpit vita nova
1
2 Marxism and Utopia
21
3 Open System: Marxist Metaphysics I
68
4 Open System: Marxist Metaphysics II
110
5 Bloch's Developments of Marxism
159
6 Exodus
209
Notes
219
Select Bibliography
254
Index
279
Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank the late Ernst Bloch, who granted me two lengthy interviews and approved the plan of the book, and his widow Karola Bloch, who read and criticised the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank Leszek Kofakowski, Martin Jay, Steven Lukes, David McLellan, Burghart Schmidt, Herminia Martins, Gillian Rose, Hiram Caton and Catherine Hudson, who read the manuscript at various stages and were unsparing with encouragement and criticisms. My thanks are also due to the Council of Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, who gave me leave and financial assistance to work in German and Hungarian archives, and to the Governing Body of Linacre College, Oxford, who provided me with a fellowship and ideal working conditions. My special thanks to Eva Wagner of Linacre College, who tirelessly guided me through the darker waters of Bloch's texts, and to John Raffan. I am also grateful to Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to quote from Ernst Bloch's Das Pr£nzip Hoffnung.
1 Incipit vita nova I am. But I do not possess myself. That is why we are only beginning to become. Traces Ernst Bloch: political philosopher of the irrational, hermetic Marxist, utopian, encyclopaedist, process philosopher of our immanence in an unfinished world; a densely timed man who cannot be sifted quickly. This study attempts to introduce Bloch at a time when his thought is little known in the English speaking world and when there is no satisfactory account of his Marxism as a whole in any language. Hitherto, Bloch has often suffered at the hands of his interpreters. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union he has been labelled 'an idealist', 'a religious mystic', 'a pantheist', while in the West a large and rapidly growing literature has only recently shown signs of emergence from misrepresentation and caricature.1 Even thoughtful readers have concluded that Bloch is ( 1) a notoriously unsystematic poetic thinker, best understood through his literary works; (2) a Marxist philosopher of man, who restores an anthropological, voluntaristic perspective to Marxism; ( 3) a Marxist philosopher of hope, of utopia, of the future; {4) a Marxist mystic; (5) a Marxist Messianist, Thomas Munzer redivivus: an atheist theologian who unites the moral
