CHAPTER 1

Bloch anda Philosophy ofthe Proterior

Wayne Hudson

The odds against a boom in utopia are high.

—Jürgen Habermas

Utopia has aged. No one believes anymore in a perfect society or in aperfect humanity. On the other hand, the need to imagine a better futureremains. Ernst Bloch was the most original thinker to defend the continuingsignificance of utopia in the twentieth century, yet he remainsrelatively little understood in the English-speaking world. When I beganto study in Oxford almost forty years ago, I was only allowed to workon Bloch because Leszek kolakowski agreed to supervise. In the early1970s Gillian rose and I were among the very few at Oxford trying torethink Marxism in the light of classical German philosophy. When Iwrote The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (1982), I had to establishhis intellectual credentials and to demonstrate his importance for theMarxist tradition at a time when Althusser and Gramsci were morefashionable figures. In the 1980s German classical philosophy wasmainly available in caricature in English, and I did not know enoughabout Schelling to appreciate Bloch's subtlety at some points. Moreover,although I talked at length with Bloch himself, I was too young to entirelyappreciate the dialectical complexity of his thinking, as he notedwith a mixture of astonishment and bemusement in our interchanges.Today, as a result of new translations and exceptionally fine studies, classicalGerman philosophy is being received in English as the major philosophicalachievement of the West after the Greeks. Now, as then, however,Bloch's extraordinary legacy has still not been adequately receivedin the Anglo-Saxon world, despite the labors of many.

In this chapter I draw attention to aspects of Bloch's still largely unrealizedlegacy and propose that it may be possible to inherit this legacyin the context of a philosophy of the proterior.

I

At his death on 4 August 1977 Bloch was known as a utopian Marxistand as the philosopher of hope, characteristics of declining appeal inthe decades that followed. In the English-speaking world, no clear viewof Bloch's importance has emerged. Both Anglo-Saxon good sense andthe arcane nature of his German texts make it hard for us to know whatto make of him. Nonetheless, Bloch's legacy is astonishingly rich, andthe volumes of his collected works contain model ideas of outstandingcontemporary importance. Today, however, there is a need to releaseBloch's legacy from the political as well as the philosophical contexts inwhich it arose.

In political terms, the hope that Marxism can be salvaged along thelines that Bloch and Lukács proposed has passed away. It is now widelyagreed that a reconstruction of Marxism must be more severe than Blochrealized and may have to conform to intellectual canons to which Blochhimself was not sympathetic. Bloch then easily appears as a utopian whofailed to grasp why utopias have to be given up and as a Marxist wholacked the detailed history and economics to provide a powerful frameworkfor Marxist theory. There are those who argue, plausibly withinlimits, that Bloch belongs to a phase of German Jewish cultural historythat is now irretrievably behind us, that Bloch was at best a MarxistSchelling (Habermas), at worst the philosopher of German Expressionismwho failed to develop. Equally, there are those who seek tolocate Bloch within a typology of western Marxism as a religious leftistwho never freed himself from metapolitical satisfactions and who remainedpolitically deluded for most of his career. This is a reading whichvulgarizes the complexity of Bloch's political analyses, including his endorsementsof Lenin and Stalin, the hard political judgments which hemade about the socialist East, and the degree to which he was preparedto tailor his intellectual activities to the attempt to "build socialism." Itis also a reading which fails to account for the shrewdness of Bloch'sanalysis of the nazis, his evaluations of the political potential of a greenpolitics, or Naturpolitik, and his commitment to an alliance of socialistand progressive Christian forces, as well as to the cause of women's liberationand to work for peace.

Because Bloch's work does not conform to the expectations of philosophersof an epistemological bent, he is sometimes presented as aforerunner of postmodernism without the necessary qualifications.However, once it is established that Bloch was not a postmodernist butan advocate of a new edition of the Enlightenment, the relevance of hiswork on multi-temporalism, non-contemporaneity, and the need towork outside and below tertiary...