Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope [Das Prinzip der Hoffnung]. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1959 and later. 3 volumes.

 

A work about the power of utopian thought. Some subheadings are: “Small daydreams”, “The anticipating consciousness,” “Phantasies in a mirror (fairy tales, films, etc.)”, “Designs of a better world (in medicine, social systems, architecture, art, etc.)”, “Phantasies of fulfillment (ethics, music etc.)”, “Karl Marx and humanism; matter of hope”, and others. The approach can, perhaps, be described as Marxist-existentialist. The work examines a wide range of literary, social, philosophical, etc., materials, examining their explicit or implicit categories and messages of possibility, hope, fear, the utopian horizon.

 

Quotations:

“It is important to learn hoping. Its work does not despair, it fell in love with succeeding rather than with failure. Hoping, located above fearing, is neither passive like the latter nor imprisoned into nothingness. The emotion of hoping expands out of itself, makes people wider instead of narrower; insatiable, it wants to know what makes people purposeful on the inside and what might be allied with them on the outside.” (p. 1)

 

“Being, which conditions consciousness, and consciousness, which works upon being, understands itself ultimately only from and in that from where and to where it is tending. Being is not having-been; on the contrary: the essence of the world is itself located in the forward (in the front).” (p.18) (my translation)

 

Relating this to world(-)system scholarship, I find it interesting – perhaps, outright provocative, that we can read - in, for example, Boswell, Chase-Dunn, and Wallerstein, statements to the effect that the potential for world(-)system change has increased lately, long cycles notwithstanding. Hmm, Ernst Bloch might comment “I told you so”; for, “being is not having-been”; “it is important to learn hoping”, etc.

 

-Gert