Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), a German philosopher and wilfully heterodox Marxist, remains an obscured, but fascinating figure, one who retained an optimism of the intellect just as much as an optimism of the will, despite the disillusioning experience of the Russian Revolution’s descent, his own periods of enforced exile, and his predictably short-lived stint as a university professor in the German Democratic Republic. It was hope, both as an idea and a lived experience, that marked Bloch’s work out.
As Peter Thompson, a reader emeritus at the University of Sheffield and former director of the Centre for Bloch studies, tells the spiked review, Bloch was always prepared to take people’s aspirations, hopes and even daydreams, seriously. While his contemporaries in the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno, viewed contemporary culture contemptuously, Bloch could see the longing for a better life, the glimmer of the utopia, even in a lottery ticket. It was, however, in the religious sphere that Bloch, an atheist, saw the popular longing for a utopian future in its most powerful form. This was evident in his first significant work, The Spirit of Utopia (1918), and even more so in his second, Thomas Muntzer as the Theologian of Revolution (1924), a book which did nearly as much as Friedrich Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany (1850) to establish Muntzer (1489-1525) as the Reformation’s very own proto-communist. To tell us more about Bloch’s view of religion and Muntzer in particular, here’s what Thompson had to say:
spiked review: What role does the concept of utopia play in Bloch’s thought?
Peter Thompson: The first thing to note is that Bloch’s idea of utopia is very much non-teleological. For Bloch, who was always deeply Hegelian, the utopia you arrive at is the product of the process of getting there. So his idea of utopia is entirely processual. It doesn’t exist somewhere out there, as something we just have to find our way towards, with the wise leader guiding our way. No, utopia has an existence, but only as a spirit, as a drive, as a way forward, as a recognition of process. And, to capture this, he comes up with a term which is often misunderstood: concrete utopia. What he means by concrete is not what we usually think of as the meaning of concrete. Rather, he takes it in a philosophical sense, from the original Latin, con crescere, a growing together, which is of course where the word concrete comes from in the first place. So you take all these tendencies, potentialities and latencies, produced by human subjectivity’s intervention in material reality, and put them together, and they coalesce to create this solid substance.
To those who think of communism as a form of religion, Bloch responded that religion is simply communism that hasn't understood itself
For Bloch, then, the concrete utopia was the product of the gradual accretion of all the things human history is going through, and all the things human history is made up of. So it’s this, this historical growing together of tendencies and elements, that will eventually make up the utopia which you arrive at. In that sense it’s the very opposite of a teleological idea of utopia. Utopia has no existence other than as idea and way and process. And it is therefore entirely speculative. Hence it is often said that Bloch was a speculative materialist. The makeup of utopia will be entirely material, but in understanding utopia, we have to move into an entirely speculative dimension. Therefore Bloch was a speculative materialist long before the term’s recent vogue among those who believe they invented it.
review: How does Bloch’s view of religion fit in with his idea of utopia? Does he see it as the working out of desires for human liberation in theological form?
Thompson: He sees religion very much as part of both this speculative dimension, and the concrete utopia. Most materialists, certainly after the French Revolution, wrote off religion, and still write off religion as simply a delusion (think of Richard Dawkins!), as something that gets in the way, as a mental incapacity. But Bloch doesn’t do that. He sees religion and theology as important parts of understanding the utopian dimension to human existence, as a speculative apprehension of the future. In religion, you have what he calls an anticipatory consciousness. Indeed, for most of human history, Bloch contends, it is religion that has carried this consciousness of the future.
It’s often said, for example, that socialism and communism are simply religious concepts that don’t understand themselves as such. Bloch turned that on its head, and said that religion is simply communism that hasn’t understood itself. Within the sermon on the mount, within the Christian message, is an entirely socialist and communist message. Bloch even says at one point that the idea of the withering away of the state, coined by Engels and envisaged by Lenin, is actually the same thing as loving thy neighbour. So rather than having a state intervene and mediate your relations with others, and do it for you, you would look after each other in a communal way, but a way that was not predicated on any ideological understanding or myth or loyalty to a party.
So he’s a communist, but in a way that leaves communism in an open-ended historical system. So there is no dogma, nothing laid down, no hard and fast truth. There is simply a tendency, a latency in history which will take us to communism, but through this speculative and open dimension. And the central idea for Bloch here is that of the ‘not yet’, which sounds very simple, but is actually extremely complex. So it’s not that we are ‘not yet’ able to have communism because of the objective historical development of the productive forces, relations of production and all the other things that Marx writes of. No, we are ‘not yet’ capable of even understanding what it means, therefore it is not yet possible. So although he was in favour of revolutions where they happen – Oskar Negt called Bloch ‘the philosopher of the October Revolution’ – he saw them as part of the process, rather than the end product.