Session 3B: Bloch, Hope and Modern Society

Session 3B: Bloch, Hope and Modern Society
Chair: Shane O’Neill

Ernst Bloch an the Phenomenology of Hope as Fundamental Ontological Question
Cinzia Romagnoli
Università degli Studi di Urbino, Italy

In modern times Hope has been rarely considered through a systematic categorial analysis. Ernst Bloch is the first philosopher after the Second World War who treats it from an ontological point of view. His work can be therefore an important step towards a definition of hope as a philosophical concept. Leitmotiv of his speculation is a definition of hope not only as human affect or simple reverie of a better life, but also as the principle of Being itself intended as not-yet-Being. Bloch’s concept of reality is open, and Being is always concerned as Possibility. From the encounter between hope as gnosiological and practical-political concept (utopian function) and open process of the matter-world, Bloch argues a definition of hope as docta spes, utopy in concrete terms, i.e. materialistic terms, conceived. Such a determination of utopia is then employed by Bloch against nihilism, abstract utopias, ideology as well as against their opposite ideas: naive optimism, trivial materialism and its superficial critic of ideology, unable to look at the world as a great experimentum.

Download Conference Paper –

No one has yet been satisfied by mere waiting. It does not help at all, in fact it weakens, if it is not joined by keen wanting. And with it a keen, circumspect glance, which shows this wanting what can be done.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

In this paper I intend to present the concept of hope as a human driving force aimed at a better future, in accordance with and on the basis of the thought of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, with reference to Albert Camus’ notion of the absurd.
Hope, I shall argue, is situated in the reality of the present; however, insofar as it aspires to the future, it contrasts the actual present and acts as a negating force within it. In the present, human beings are subject to privation, distress and pains; hope stands for the desire to transcend from this present onto a future which is different, new, and always better.
My main focus will be to discuss the affinity which hope constitutes between theory and practice. I will argue that hope may be a reason for an integral relationship between these two facets and that via its mediation philosophy is translated into practice; with the aid of hope, practice, too, can be translated into philosophy. In other words, the hoping person does not only expect a better future but acts in order to change the present, and by this he constitutes by himself – within the boundaries of the possible – his own future.
In this context I intend to inquire into the concept of hope in face of Albert Camus’ concept of the absurd. I will demonstrate the different alternatives these two views present us – both from a logical and an existential point of view – and argue that both of them produce an affinity between theory and practice. However, while hope assumes that the real possibility deduces from theory as to its becoming reality, the absurdist standpoint proceeds to action, as if it is hoping, but at the same time the consciousness accompanying this activity points patently at the real impossibility of its realization.
Finally, I shall argue shortly that hope might constitute a special type of knowledge – “knowledge of hope” – which transcends the traditional philosophic knowledge insofar as it points at possible practice instead of simply remaining within the realm of theory.
Hope, says Bloch, is the most honest, most militant, characterization of man. It points at all that has yet to materialize and testifies that the horizon of human existence is open and changeable, while at the same time does not bring to despair but motivates action.

Download Conference Paper –

Is Utopian thinking a response to pessimism? James’s essay Is Life Worth Living? deals with this question: “In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly” (James, 1956, p. 32).
James offers a number of ways for escaping pessimism. Three possibilities are offered: nature regarded as yielding a “scientific order”, nature regarded “theologically or poetically”. This impression of a three part analysis is sustained as he develops the contrast between i) leaving “the bare facts by themselves” – in construing the scientific order of nature – or permitting ii) a “religious reading to go on” by postulating “supplementary facts which may be discovered” or iii) “believed in”. Yet these three perspectives are reduced merely to “two ways of escape from pessimism”, either by leaving the bare facts by themselves or reading them religiously. His talk of “the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself” which “is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head” in fact masks the two religious possibilities: one “discovered, the other “believed-in” (James, 1956, pp. 41 & 56).
His first option can be characterized by attempts to be “scientific”. Philosophical melancholy can be avoided through “an act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists”. This stance ushers in James’s anticipations of a Camus-like existentialism. Against this first option, James’s two other ways presume “the existence of an unseen order or some kind in which the riddles of the natural order” are to be explained (James, 1956, pp. 44, 46 & 51). The first of these two ways cashes the case for naturalism. Any sense of “a divine Spirit of the universe”, even if only “inadequately revealed” in the natural world, may yet be discovered. And it may be discovered once it is accepted “that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes the world’s experience, is only one portion of the total universe”: “the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can form no positive idea”. Such ‘envelopment’ remains merely a hypothesis, a mere “maybe”, but it would incite the activity of discovery. Here “our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things” incites “possibilities”, “the realities with which we have actively to deal” (James, 1956, pp. 44, 51, 54 & 61-2).
The second of James’s two religious options hold the prospect for a cosmic story, a story to be believed-in which may prove dissonant with any sort of human narrative or “narrative vision” the first of the two religious options can provide. This grander cosmic vision would suggest “what we call visible nature, or this world, must be a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world”. Here we can see the influence of Plato’s Phaedo: “one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal” (James, 1956, pp. 44 & 52).
James rejects the first and the third of his ways of avoiding pessimism. His acceptance of the second way may well anticipate Peirce’s Neglected Argument for God’s Reality rather than Existence (Boulting, 1994, pp. 123-31). James rejects both belief in the world of the scientist and the “invisible world” invoked by “our religious demands” as somehow ultimate. Rather he suggests that we trust the idea that “a still wider world may be there” as a “maybe”, “a mere sign or vision” and then act as if the invisible world thereby suggested was real, enabling us “to live in the light of ” our “religious demands” (James, 1956, pp. 56, 58 & 56).
One way of approaching Ernst Bloch’s philosophy is to see him as dealing with James’s three ways, even if he did express contempt for James’s philosophy in general (Bloch, 1986, pp. 275-6). Like James, he rejected the existential option. He does so on at least three grounds. Existentialism, as the other side of Capitalism, represents the anatomy of prehistory. Existentialism expresses merely the pathology of alienation: nature disconnected from human interests (Bloch, 1976, p. 4). Existentialism represents a reaction to the exploitation of human beings by a societally untransformed science and technology (Bloch, 1986, p. 167; Bloch, 1989, pp. 80 & 129).
A case can be made on behalf of Bloch for naturalism, phenomenologically understood, akin to James’s second way. Abelard’s doctrine of Conformitas can be interpreted as the thesis that an adaptation between humans and nature can occur (Hudson, 1982, p. 202; cf. Bloch, 1986, p. 1375), not to be seen as ontologically already established but rather as an achievement gained through human activity upon nature. His humanistic rejection of traditional ontology, then, allows for a sense of “a real becoming” understood historically, created, that is, by humans to make nature “a home” (Bloch, 1976, pp. 6 & 8). In this way, humans are recreated in focussing upon possibilities to be realized in the future, just as nature can be transformed by what humans create within it.
On the other hand, Bloch could also be regarded as adopting something like James’s third way in terms of a teleologism messianically understood needed to ground the idea of Hope: Hope in a Totality understood in an Expansive sense (Bloch, 1986, p. 1193; Bloch, 1970, p. 153). But in mapping out this conception it is necessary to distinguish what Bloch calls the Novum from the New (das Neue) (Godfrey, 1987, p. 72) as “a breakthrough occurring at the end of time” (Bloch, 1986, p. 1311; Bloch, 1970, p. 240). Anticipations of what such a Novum can yield might be rendered by what Walter Benjamin called ‘ciphers of nature’ indicating either NOTHING or by the achieving of ALL, the IN VAIN or THE MIRACULOUS (Bloch, 1986, p. 1311; Bloch, 1970, p. 240).
My paper finishes by discussing how Bloch’s conception of Utopia is to be understood. It might be interpreted in terms of Theodor Adorno’s conception of a tacit, imageless Utopia longed for within the human condition (cf. Bloch, 1986, p. 1195; Bloch, 1970, p. 155). On the other hand, it might be grasped as a messianic conception to make sense of Bloch’s notion of ens-perfectissum (Bloch, 1986, p. 1201; Bloch, 1970, pp. 162-3), thereby requiring a possible metaphysical explication to make sense of it.