Incipit vita nova

pp. 1-20

in: Wayne Hudson, The Marxist philosophy of Ernst Bloch, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982

Abstract

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 Münzer redivivus: an atheist theologian who unites the moral fervour of an Old Testament prophet with the utopian eschatology of chiliasm; (6) a Marxist Schelling, an anachronistic neo-Romantic who combines a form of identity metaphysics with a materialist world soul.² These characterisations are not entirely mistaken, but they fail to do justice to Bloch's achievement or to the significance of his work in the context of Marxism.