Dialectics and HopeAuthor(s): Ernst Bloch and Mark RitterSource: New German Critique, No. 9 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 3-10Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487685 .Accessed: 14/01/2011 06:19

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Dialectics and Hope

by Ernst Bloch*

1. Mankind, as it is, has been called a premature birth. The human being comes into the world more helpless and less finished than any animal, takes

considerably longer to mature, and is threatened in the process even by itself. It wavers and makes mistakes which would never occur to a young animal in its innate environment. It is in the dark, does not know up from down, seldom or only indistinctly has in its body the infallible guide which leads a horse to water, or even a returning swallow to its nest from last year. It comes into unforeseen circumstances, such as the animal seldom experiences, must find its way in situations which have never existed before, and with which it is

consequently not acquainted; whereas the young animal is soon whistled to a

stop. The finished armor of the animal's species is soon hung around its shoulders, and its face, which in young animals often resembles a human

baby's face, soon ossifies. The form of many hundred thousands of years triumphs; the curtain soon falls decisively over its potentiality for

development. Of necessity animals repeat the proven factory pattern of their

body and life, hence, they are beings but also very narrowly bound. Human

beings can participate only very approximately in this boundedness; they do so as the usual mass-produced goods; they did so in a different way, fertilely and distinctly, in the earlier peasant class. But mass-produced goods themselves are historical, and what fit the average yesterday no longer fits

today, for uniformity, at least, has its fashions. It is great that we humans are born unfinished as a species, not only as children. But it is also a hard lot to be

engaged in a development which proceeds so slowly, since it is trapped over and over again by deceivers. Socialist society has been a practical possibility for at least a hundred years; and how many among the educated, of whom there is

always ample number, do not even know its ABC's today. Mankind is the animal who takes detours, yet often in an obdurate and flagrantly foolish

way, not just cunningly. Otherwise, all of outward life would run as easily and

peacefully as now happens, at best, among friends. 2. All being is still built around the Not which induces hunger. There does

not yet exist a food which could calm and fill up the lack entirely, or the boon

*This essay represents a chapter taken from Bloch's Subjekt-Objekt. Erlauterungen zu Hegel which first appeared in the GDR in 1951 and was republished by the Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main) in a slightly expanded edition in 1962. It appears here in English for the first time with the permission of the Suhrkamp Verlag.

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one has incurred would again become a nuisance. And all previous history is still human prehistory, that is, not consciously produced. This history shows human self-alienation in various and variously vehement forms. For the most

part, it still shows "Nature" in the Hegelian sense, in the sense of a being- outside-oneself, in which the powers produced by mankind, but not compre- hended as produced, have broken away and become reified. Hence, they appear as an uncontrollable fate, which they have in fact been in previous history. The so-called iron logic of events proceeds behind the backs of the individual actors and their consciousness, thus completely without the light of

logic. Completely as a blind, external necessity and consequently a contin-

gency, completely without mediation with the human subject, like a landslide or a conflagration in Nature, which is independent of mankind. All human

activity--measured against something completely satisfying, indeed fulfilling -has been called patchwork, and the possible fulfillment lies by nature not within history, but puts an end to it; that is the religious view. But previous history displays this patchwork to an extent that is not even necessary on earth: in the misery of by far the majority of people, in production relationships whose provisionality, whose finiteness as it were, is proved by the fact that they have again and again become strait jackets. Whereupon the human subjects as well as the productive forces constituted or unleashed by them have fallen into a renewed tension with the present objectivities of existence. Dialectics, in the world made by mankind, is the relationship of

subject and object, nothing else; it is subjectivity working its way forward, again and again overtaking the objectivation and objectivity it has attained, and seeking to explode them. In the final analysis, the needy subject, by finding itself and its work inadequately objectified, is always the motor of

historically appearing contradictions. It is the intensive motor which is set into motion as a consequence of the inadequacy of the achieved form of existence, and which, by contradicting the contradiction within the thing itself, activates in a revolutionary way the contradiction stemming from the

inadequacy of these forms to the totum of the subject's content. For if unfulfilled need is the motive and motor of the dialectical-material motion, then-on the basis of the same, not yet present content-the totality of the not present All (Alles) is its cohering goal. Further: omnia sub luna caduca, everything beneath the moon is perishable (likewise above the moon): however, this perishability, this barrier and finiteness, presupposes the

non-resigning desire of a subject as well as a real not yet frozen possibility in the world in order even to appear as a barrier, much less a superable one. The

point has not yet been reached where society can go no further, where an "in vain" would be conferred upon history. Most assuredly the point is not yet

DIALECTICS AND HOPE 5

visible, except in mere anticipations of the direction, where the All of the Real and the General (des Eigentlichen und Ueberhaupt) could rest its head even fleetingly. It would be the same as the truth of phenomenal being; this is not spurious or mere so-called factual truth as a static truth of having- become-so; neither is it, however, truth passed off as being pan-logical, making its peace with the world by presenting its having-become-so as a

having-succeeded. Dialectical truth can least of all be such an apologetic, in

spite of and, in a certain sense, precisely because of Hegel. Truth in the sense meant here of the Real and the General has above all nothing to do with some sort of heavenly light, which allegedly has already come home; such a mytho- logical hypostasis likewise foists off perfection as something already attained and existing, only in an imaginary place. The question of truth which

philosophy poses cannot even be understood, much less answered, by mythology. In this particular sense Hegel very rightly says: "Philosophy must avoid wanting to be edifying" (II, 9); for the superstition of a supra- terrestrial-static empiricism has been for philosophy even more of a barrier before the unattained than has the dogma of a terrestrial-static empiricism. There is quite a different meaning, however, if, instead of various idolatries or the worship of an existing absolute (be it called fact or mechanical matter or hypostasis of God), Hope seeks the truth of history: as its most powerful know-thyself or its uncovered face. As the not yet present truth of the Real and the General extremely threatened in the process leading to its existence, as the still utopian totum of the goal. This truth need by no means beware of being edifying; on the contrary: an intensely illuminating, intensely fulfilling nature is the constituent of truth in this second sense. Hegel did not merely renew the old unchanging condition for truth, that it should be the correspondence of perception with its object, but he immediately turned this into an objective-identifying condition, that truth is the correspondence of the object with itself, in such a way that reality should be appropriate to its

concept, i.e., to reason. In the latter condition, no matter how much it remains situated upon the form of existence or entelechia as marked at any particular time, that volitional, value-predicating character of truth in the

fulfilling sense is operative. The practical Idea of the Good is operative in it: "Untrue means roughly bad, inadequate (unangemessen). In this sense a bad state is an untrue state, and the bad and the untrue in general exist in the contradiction that occurs between the constitution and the concept and the existence of an object." And further, with the most familiar pathos of the Goal and its truth, for which the dialectics is the vehicle: "All finite things have an untruth in them; they have a concept and an existence which, however, is inadequate to their concept. Therefore they must perish, by

6 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

which means the inadequacy of their concept and of their existence is manifested" (Enc. sec. 24, Appendix 2). It requires no great exertion to arrive at that pessimism, which is just as much a militant optimism, that truth in the second sense, in the sense of positive fulfillment of "concepts," will require an

extraordinarily great amount of history in order to appear manifested with even the first few silver rays of existence. After all, what is rational has always become irrational, because it was too narrow; relatively attained being has

passed over into non-being, since it was not really mediated with its foundation. It has passed over into something that must be checked, which, for the sake of the self-realization of mankind and the total ground, demands an ever stronger negation of its negation. The truth-reality of the full totality was called above an entelechia of the All! There are many stages (Instanzen) for it; but there is no attainment while the process is continuing.

3. Therefore, all being is built around the Not, which cannot bear to remain at rest. Since our cause itself has not been brought to a successful conclusion as yet, it acts in the form it has achieved in a contradictory way. Human beings are not slaves, but neither are they masters, not serfs, but not feudal lords either, not proletarians, but certainly not capitalists. What they are has not yet become clear in the division of labor in previously existing class

society. Even the changing prototypes of the right life, even the great cultural works are more than half mixed with the ideology of the respective class

society. And, as it is among people, so it is in the entire world surrounding us, to which we stand in a relation of exchange: the cause of totality is not yet finished, otherwise there would be no process, not even in nature, and no dialectics of this process. Dissatisfaction and hope are the constantly impelling relation to this cause of totality, as a being without alienation from oneself. The teleological content of the totum is represented negatively in dissatisfaction, restlessly impelling, as its own lack, as the non-possession of itself. The same content is represented positively in hope, restlessly illuminating, as its own attraction, as the possibility of possessing itself. In order that it might be something concrete, there corresponds to this actively contradicting relation, on the objective side, precisely the developing contradiction in the cause itself, but again and again as a contradiction which itself results from not yet possessing the essence of the phenomenon, consequently from the continuing untruth, imperfection, unreality in the real. To be sure--a fact which constitutes the restlessness of dialectics in

general--there is more on the objective side than this mere harmless gap between the phenomenon and the total fullness of the essence. Otherwise there would be no such trouble with opening the world up for cultivation, and

DIALECTICS AND HOPE 7

no such resistance of matter to it, alongside the helping tendency. In the negative of objective dialectics (sickness, crisis, imminent decline into barbarism) there is doubtless some association of annihilation, thus not only of the Not, as the active motive force, but also of nothingness, as merely effacing negation, which of itself by no means automatically has the negation of its negation within itself. It is consequently an action which, of itself, without the intervention of the subjectively active contradiction, leads rather to the development of an In Vain than to that of an All. Indeed, a subjectively active counter-move against annihilation can be necessary, in order that the latter can be used for the annihilation of what is worth annihilating and, by this means, for the opening-up of new life. An automatism of objective dialectics towards the good, with the comforting motto: Through the night to the light, simply does not exist. Rather, only a co-move and-in times of

catastrophe--a counter-move of the subjective factor can make the negativity in the objective dialectics completely the servant of a possible success. While negativity of itself--as in the Thirty Years' War, the Peleponnesian War, and all complete downfalls

whatsoever--bears no fruit historically, that is, the

negation of the negation is by no means capable of developing itself from its own objectivity alone.

This very fact summons up the properly timed deed, the more so, the closer human prehistory seems to its end. The deed not as a putsch, abstract spontaneity or whatever, but as the liberation of what is due (das Fallige). What is due lies--since, even in objective dialectics, not only nothingness but essentially the real problem of the All is ever present -what is due lies on the way home, in so far as humanity boards the ship and maintains the drift of tendency. But in the final analysis, this homecoming, as the liberation from the incongruous, as the overcoming of nothingness in the world and in its resistances, is precisely the non-frustratedness of the All. This is again utopia in utopia, but it is at work in dissatisfaction (rejected servitude) as well as in hope (anticipated freedom to be-for-oneself). Hegel, who wanted so much to keep his distance from any dissatisfaction, even from any unwarranted hope, nevertheless stated, in his idealist way, that the truth of hope is simultaneously that of freedom. Freedom denotes the for-itself, in which "the subject finds nothing alien and has no limits or barriers in that which confronts him, but rather finds himself' (X, p. 126). Where Hegel's dialectic says: "Being has attained the meaning of truth," so that the absolute is no longer encumbered, either with alienated objectivity or with mere subjectivity or ideals: that is where the content of hope lies. However, it was necessary that materialist dialectics come along in order to recognize and to push along this content in the real process, instead of in the idealist process of

8 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

Hegel, who only recognizes what is of itself already extant in time and space. That is the limit of idealist dialectics: it is the limit of mere contemplation, which per se ipsum is applied to what is past and its horizons, to an essence which has been revealed in the phenomena that have already come into existence. Dissatisfaction-hope-totum of the teleological content have a function only in a dialectics which do not take place in the head and draw out their purely idealistic movements over something that is objectively static.

Knowledge itself becomes transformative only in these dialectics, a dialectics of events, which are not contemplated, not enclosed within contemplated history. It is not applied merely to the knowable past, but to a real becoming, to that which is occurring and not yet finished, to a knowable and pursuable future content. S is not yet P, the proletariat has not yet been sublated (auf- gehoben), nature is not yet a home, the real is not yet articulated reality: this Not Yet is in process, indeed it has attained or is beginning to carve out its

skyline here and there. At the same time, it creates the believed meaning (Sinnglauben) of true human effort and the effort's militant optimism. Precisely for that reason, the dialectic agent of the Not, which drives forward

through all the stagnation and reification to the articulation and manifes- tation of its own enigmatic, teleological content, is, according to its All, nothing more, but certainly nothing less, than hope. And as tested hope, docta spes, hope is the critically anticipatory dialectic materialist knowledge which is mediated and allied with the objective process. In this way, the dialectical principle, S is not yet P, means with respect to what is inadequately determined (has become restraining): Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. In respect to the imminent adequate determinability (of the contentual Novum) it means: Quidquid latet apparebit.

4. Mankind is not yet finished; therefore, neither is its past. It continues to affect us under a different sign, in the drive of its questions, in the experiment of its answers; we are all in the same boat. The dead return transformed: those whose actions were too bold to have come to an end (like Thomas

Miinzer); those whose work is too all-encompassing to have coincided with the

locality of their times (like Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe). The discovery of the future in the past, that is the philosophy of history, hence, of philosophical history as well. The farewell to Hegel is therefore none at all, no more than the first encounter with him, when it has caught fire, seems like a first one. As far as the power and continued ripening of this work are concerned, Hegel creates a continuous, a happily fruitful, an admiringly

1. "Among other things, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed," was said so

frequently by Cato that it practically became his motto. "Whatever is hidden will appear" recalls the Bible.

DIALECTICS AND HOPE 9

grateful reunion. Times of transition, such as the present age, make one sensitive to the genius of dialectics, to the great teacher. Precisely because the owl of Minerva does not fly in the dusk, among the ruins of contemplation, in the thoroughly false circle of circles, but rather because a thought is rising which belongs to the dawn, to that open time of day which is least alien of all to Minerva, the goddess of light. Times of transition: today there are such times of a very strong type, in the sense of the fermenting and threatened

departure to a form of existence more similar to the human. An evolutionary word of the master of dialectics is very apt here; in it the owl has even become what it really is for Minerva: the allegory of vigilance. In 1816 Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer: "I hold the view that the World Spirit has given the times the order to advance; such an order is obeyed; this being strides forward like an armored, firmly closed phalanx, irresistibly and as imper- ceptibly as the sun moves, through thick and thin; it is flanked by innumerable light troops for and against it; most of them have no idea of what is at stake, and only get knocked on over the head, as if by an invisible hand. All the hesitant fibbing and sophisticated shadow boxing in the world is of no help against it; it can only reach about as high as the shoelaces of this colossus and smear a bit of mud or shoe polish on them, but it cannot loosen them, much less remove the divine shoes with the elastic soles or the seven-

league boots, if the colossus puts them on. The safest game (both inwardly and outwardly) is, I dare say, to keep one's eye on the advancing giant." The drill regulations of the eighteenth century, from which the movements of this simile stem, have been lost, but the image of the advancing giant, mutatis mutandis, is not yet completely incomprehensible even today. The rational can become real, the real rational; it all depends upon the phenomenology or the phenomenal history of true action. This is the action of the true or the

ending of its continuing prehistory, it is the changing of the world in accordance with its understood dialectic-material tendency, it is the agree- ment of human theory-practice with a reality that is in accordance with itself. Passive contemplation has no place here anywhere; on the contrary, knowledge, for which there is theoretically no barrier, must prove itself to be

equally practical in the socialist liberation from the barrier, in the breaking up of servitude and of the rule of necessity. Here, above all, Marxism is quali- tatively differentiated from every previous philosophy, hence from the

Hegelian as well, to which it is closest. For with a leap into the new such as

previous history had never experienced there begins through Marx--with a continuation as well as a sublation of Hegel - the changing of philosophy into a philosophy of changing the world. Philosophy is no longer philosophy zf it is not dialectical-materialist, but, as must be grasped now and for the entire

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future, dialectical materialism is nothing if it is not philosophical, that is, proceeding towards great open horizons. This intervention is theoretical-

practical work against alienation, therefore for the externalization-disposal of

externalization, for the manifestation of that which is homelike, in which the core or what is essential in mankind and the world will finally be able to begin manifesting itself. And at this very time, on this earth, in the realm of our

finally producible content of freedom. Previous prehistory leads there, without consciousness of the matter, but consciously produces history possesses its determining theme in the permanently considered, mediately anticipated totum content of the realm of freedom. Already, partially fulfilled plans and realistic-symbolical figurations have made this real Whither and Why discernible. It is the simple thing that is difficult to do, being-for-onself, whose ways must be won by fighting, whose excellence demands bravery. The more urgent the operation of the means which bring this goal closer becomes, the more evident the goal becomes: objectification of the subjects, subjective mediation of the objects. This goal of a humanized existence always lay close as a dream wish, but was always utopically distant in terms of its presence. The real movement to its reality has finally begun consciously, against the externalization of human beings and of things, for the coming-to of self-being. By liberating from all conditions of existence which bear the features of alienated labor, socialism will liberate the entire

society from alienation and will thus create the foundation for an entire earth as the homeland of humanization. That is the very ancient intention of

happiness, that the interior should become exterior and that the exterior should become as the interior--an intention which does not beautify and yet close the present world, as Hegel did, but which is allied with the not yet present world, with those properties of reality which bear the future.

Translated by Mark Ritter