.. } • I I \-4 /1 -( ........ -- --.----. ~ PHILOSOPHY "When this book was first published, it had a profound effect on major thinkers and artists in Weimar Germany. A poetical philosophical treatise with unusual insights into culture and political commentary, Bloch's book laid the groundwork for thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin, who may have disagreed with him but were strongly influenced by his work. The Spirit of Utopia plays a significant role in the hisrory of German social, political, and cultural thinking." -Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the versIon here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt ro rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and ro reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives ro continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his pro­ vocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start. MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS Ernst Bloch (I88S-I977) was one ofthe great philosophers and political intellectuals of twentieth-century Germany. STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WWWSUI'OItG r THE SPIRIT OF UTOPIA MERIDIAN Crossing Aesthetics Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery ! Editors ," Translated by Anthony A. Nassar Stanford \ ( University Press Stanford California TH E SPI RIT OF UTOPIA Ernst Bloch Assistance for the translation has been provided by Inter N'ationes, Bonn. The Spirit of Utopia follows the second edition of the original German text, published in 1964 as Geist der Utopie: Bearbeitete Neuaujlageder zweiten Fassungvon I923 © dieser Fassung Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1964. Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America elP data are at the end of the book '\ AM ¥4lihLj43P.ijl4£jJaQ LttR'fWIM'dt'M'I!l ¢4AlhNdJ.'lfftiQIMiRfIM. ·@. •. 4 . @ilWiifli.ii!!fl. I¥tl4W. .II$( . '.XG$!. .441.'Mil i§iifi,. #'"W4WN"24Il5lt, , i..ii(Ukmq '" IIMJ* In EverlastingMemory of ElseBloch-von Stritzky t 2 JanuaryI92I .. '.J '� J'J. " " - .$-'*. Pi", 6. , .'"H,d &4-\**. .,_*.. 91** #;;;;;::. $%.,",11\4.44(1.4, f,f!!ii/l'Ie..4.1.. .1f.__ '44yaq 4. f . .AII! M ,,'\ ;(.f Rill. 4 iliAC.,.¥;- Contents Objective (1918, 1923) § THE SELF-ENCOUNTER 7 An Old �it cher 7 The Production of the Ornament 10 The Philosophy of Music 34 Dream 34 On the History of Music 34 On the Theory of Music 94 The Mystery 158 The Shape of the Inconstruable Question On the Met aph ysics of Our Darkness, of the No-Longer-Conscious, th�'Not-Yet-Conscious, and the Inconst ruable We-Problem 187 § KARL MARX, DEATH, AND THE APOCALYPSE 233 The Lower Life 233 The Socialist Idea 234 The True Ideol og y of the King dom 246 The Countenance of the Will 275 Tramlator'sNotes Indexof Names OBJECTIVE (1918, 19 23) I am. We are. ! That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It pitches senselessly back and fo rth, but we stand firm, and so we want to be its initiative and we want to be its ends. What just was will probably soon be fo rgotten. Only an empty, awful memory hangs in the air. Who was defended? Foul, wretched profiteers. What was young had to fa ll, was fo rced to die fo r ends so alien and in­ imical to the spirit, but the despicable ones were saved, and now they sit there in their comfortable drawing roolllS.i Not one of them was lost, but those who waved other flags, so much bloom, so much dream, so much hope for the spirit, are dead. Th<:: artists defended the middlemen and kept the home fr ont warm for the instigators. There has never been a more dismal military objective than Imperial Germany's: a suffocating coercion imposed by mediocrities and tolerated by mediocrities; a tri­ umph of stupidity, guarded by the gendarme, acclaimed by the intellec­ tuals who did not have enough brains to provide slogans. So of course it has remained, even up to today, as though we had not been burned badly enough. The War ended, the Revolution began, and along with the Revolution, doors opened. But of course, they soon shut. The black marketeer moved, sat back down, and everything obsolete drifted back into place. The profiteering farmer, the mighty grand bour­ geois truly put out the fire in places, and the panicked petit bourgeois helps I 2 Objective to enfeeble and encrust, as always. Nonproletarian youth itself is more coarse and stupid than youth has ever been; the universities have truly be­ come the spirit's burial mounds, filled with the stink of corruption and immovable gloom. So those who apparently have been restored com­ pletely reenact what the reaction of a century ago auditioned: the slogans about native soil, the traditionalism of Vaterland, and that oblivious Ro­ manticism that forgot the Peasant's War and saw only knights' castles ris­ ing into enchanted, moonlit nights. Once again, predictably, the writer helps to apply the brake; indeed, Expressionism's former votaries-incin­ erating what they had just recently exalted-rush to help incompetent lit­ erary homesteaders patch together misrepresentations from the tasteful ruins of the past, in order to bar the way for the vitally formative con­ sciousness of the future,of the city, of the collective; in order to transform profiteers' lies into ideology; in order to make their lamentable hygiene, their doubly imitative Romanticism absolute. Meanwhile the West with its millions of proletarians has not yet spoken; meanwhile there is a Marx­ ist republic in Russia; meanwhile the eternal questions of our souls, of our religious conscience, still burn, undiminished, unbowed, their absolute claims unredeemed. More than that: we have at least learned from the same outlook on reality that came a century ago. Marx thoroughly puri­ fied socialist logic of all simple, false, disengaged and abstract enthusiasm, mere Jacobinism, and we will certainly not forget the spirit of Kant and Baader above all Realpolitik-whereas the Romanticism of the latest re­ action has inherited absolutely nothing real, is neither objective nor en­ thusiastic nor universalistic, but simply stupid, isolated, without spirit and without Christ, in its pathos of the "autochthonous" capable only of eliciting the decline of Western Civilization into animalistic insensibility and irreligious obliteration: faded bud, faded blossom, and for today just a civilized enervation, a large fleet, and merely the pessimistic registration of the continuing passage of history as the only goal, but for Europe only imminent, eternal death. This is how bad things could, had to get with us. Certainly, :l would sing for QlYsupper. But this dance around the golden calf, better,' the calf­ skin with' nothing underneath: this still came as a surprise. It means we have no idea of socialism. Instead we have become the poorest of verte­ brates; whoever among us does not worship his belly worships the state; everything else has sunk to the level of a joke, of entertainment. We have longing, and brief knowledge, but little deed, and-which also explains Objective 3 this lack-no breadth, no outlook, no ends, no inner threshold, pr�sen­ tiently crossed, no kernel, and at the center no gathering conscience of the Absolute.2 Here, however, in this book, a new begin�ing is posited, and the unlost heritage takes possession of itself; that glow deep inside, over there, is no cowardly "as if," no pointless commentary; rather, what rises above all the masquerades and the expired civilizations is the one, the eter­ nal goal, the one presentiment, the one conscience, the one salvation: rises from our hearts, unbroken in spite of everything, from the deepest part, that is, the realest part of our waking dreams: that is, from the last thing remaining to us, the only thing worthy to remain. This book offersan in­ troduction to our figure, our blossoming gathering: it already begins to ring out through our interpretation of a simple pitcher; then as the a pri­ ori latent theme of all the plastic arts, though it is really central to all the magic of music; then, finally, in the ultimate self-encounter, in the com­ prehended darkness of the lived moment, as this one thing leaps up and hears itself in the inconstruable, absolute question, thJ problem of the We in itself. This is as far as the internal path can at first go, namely toward what we call a self-encounter, 'the preparation of the inner word, without which every gaze outward remains empry, instead of being the magnet, the force that draws forth the inner word and helps it break through the falseness of this world.