Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics 9789004272866

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Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Sébastien Budgen (Paris) David Broder (Rome) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London)

volume 202

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism Ontology, Epistemology, Politics

By

Cat Moir

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moir, Cat, 1983- author. Title: Ernst Bloch’s speculative materialism : ontology, epistemology, politics / by Cat Moir. Description: Leiden : Brill, 2019. | Series: Historical materialism book series, 15701522 ; 202 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019039728 (print) | LCCN 2019039729 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004272866 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004272873 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bloch, Ernst, 1885-1977. | Bloch, Ernst, 1885–1977. Materialismusproblem. | Materialism. Classification: LCC B3209.B754 M65 2019 (print) | LCC B3209.B754 (ebook) | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039728 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039729

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN 978-90-04-27286-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-27287-3 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my parents

∵

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction

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1 The Materialism Problem 26 2 Ontology 49 1 Nature contra Mechanism 50 2 Matter as the Subject of Nature 58 3 The Logic of Matter 62 4 Real Possibility 67 5 Teleology without a Telos 70 3 Epistemology 77 1 The Structure of the Concept 80 2 The Influence of Neo-Kantianism 89 3 The Role of Irony 96 4 Rationalism, Empiricism, and Practice 100 4 Politics 106 1 The German Philosopher of the October Revolution? 2 For Stalin, against Hitler 111 3 The Politics of Speculative Materialism 116 4 Speculation, Totality, and Immanent Critique 122

107

5 Relevance and Critique 130 1 The Speculative Turn: Bloch and Meillassoux 132 2 New Materialism: Bloch and Bennett 139 3 Ecological Materialisms: Bloch, Foster, and Moore 149 Appendix: The Speculative Expanse Bibliography 167 Index 180

159

Preface When I picked up Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope for the first time back in 2009 as a graduate student, I experienced something many readers may recognise: I found ‘my’ thinker. Bloch’s unique brand of ‘militant optimism’ spoke to the political idealist in me, and his unique style of philosophical writing, far more poetic than anything I’d come across before, activated thoughts and affects that the drier prose of some of his contemporaries had always failed to arouse. In fact, the initial opacity of Bloch’s work – the challenge of trying to figure out what was going on in these weird, monumental texts – was in many ways its attraction (something I suspect Bloch, who insisted that the secret path to truth leads us out of ourselves, would have expected and enjoyed). In short, I wanted to figure Bloch out, and this curiosity was only compounded when I dug a little deeper into the literature, which often cast Bloch as a totalitarian or irrationalist thinker. Such interpretations dissatisfied, because they did not accord with my own reading. Bombastic, intransigent, unashamedly speculative, complicatedly partisan – I recognised Bloch to be all these things, but irrationalist and totalitarian? My exegesis told a different story. This book is the fruit of that long process of exegesis, much of which centres on one of Bloch’s least read works, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance). Given that Das Materialismusproblem is yet to appear in English, it is perhaps unsurprising that few English-language commentaries on it exist. Also in the Germanspeaking world, however, sustained engagements with it are scant. Yet as this book argues, Das Materialismusproblem is crucial to a reading of Bloch capable of interrogating some of the most persistent misperceptions of his thought. What follows is thus a historically contextualised, systematic new reading of Bloch’s philosophy based on a reconstruction of the materialism book in its intellectual historical context. Its central argument is that reading Bloch as a speculative materialist in the specific sense outlined in Das Materialismusproblem enables us to correct and nuance some prevalent yet broadly mistaken ideas about Bloch to be found in the literature, particularly concerning the relationship between ontology, epistemology, and politics in his work. The book does not assume any prior knowledge of Bloch or his thought, and is written in such a way as to lay out as clearly as possible the relevant intersections between Bloch and other thinkers with whom he was directly or indirectly in dialogue. Nevertheless, it is addressed primarily to a scholarly audience with interests in the history of philosophy, critical theory, Marxist theory, and twentieth-century

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European and world history, and therefore assumes a certain level of familiarity with historical and intellectual figures, events, movements, and terminologies relevant to these fields. Now that I have finished writing the book, I can say that Bloch is no longer ‘my’ thinker in the way that he was when I began working on it. That is, of course, a good thing, for very good Freudian reasons. That said, every twilight of the idols is ambivalent, and this one none less so. The years I have spent working on Bloch – as the world has been getting hotter and the possible future directions of global society and ecology more inscrutable – have indeed convinced me that his concepts of utopia, material entanglement, and collective agency are highly relevant today, even if the ways in which they may be so are by no means straightforward or indisputable. So even as one’s interests necessarily evolve, my commitment to incorporating Blochian perspectives into our twenty-first-century critical toolkit remains. ‘Utopia or bust’ may be a bold wager, but the insidious attrition of utopian desires in fear of the ‘or bust’ alternative is, in my view at least, a much darker prospect.1 This book is the outcome of my doctoral work, but there are many other people and institutions who helped it come into being. The beginning of my research on Bloch coincided with a certain revival of international interest in his work, and first and foremost my thanks have to go to my former supervisor, Peter Thompson, the previous director of the British Academy-funded Ernst Bloch Centre at the University of Sheffield, where I completed my PhD. Without Peter, I would never have encountered Bloch, and without his support and encouragement this book would never have happened. I am grateful to two other Sheffield colleagues: Henk de Berg, for his ongoing collaboration in this and other projects, and Michael Perraudin, for his academic mentorship. A few years ago, after Peter’s retirement, the Ernst Bloch Centre moved to the University of London’s Institute for Modern Language Research (IMLR) under the new directorship of Johan Siebers. Alongside Peter, Johan is the one to whom I owe the most thanks in the context of this book project. I first met Johan when attending his extraordinary German Philosophy Seminar, which he has run at the School of Advanced Study for several years, and his generous advice and criticism have been invaluable to my work on Bloch. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the IMLR and Sylvia Naish Fellowship fund for supporting this project financially, as well as the Ernst Bloch Archive in Bloch’s birthplace of Ludwigshafen am Rhein, and the Centre for Classical German Philosophy

1 Cf. Kunkel 2014.

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and Hegel Archive at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, for allowing me to conduct some of my research and writing there. Particular thanks go to Frank Degler, the former director of the Bloch Archive, and Birgit Sandkaulen, director of the Centre for Classical German Philosophy and the Hegel Archive. The community of Bloch scholars in Germany, especially Francesca Vidal of the Ernst Bloch Gesellschaft, and Doris Zeilinger of the Ernst Bloch Assoziation, deserve special thanks for continuing to advance Bloch research in German. Internationally, in addition to Peter and Johan, Wayne Hudson and Caitríona Ní Dhúill have done much to rethink Bloch’s place in intellectual and cultural history, and I thank them for paving the way for and supporting this project from near and far. Colleagues at both Historical Materialism and Brill have shown much welcome enthusiasm for this project, as well as for the wider work on Bloch in which I am still engaged. Without the commitment and scrutiny of Esther Leslie, Paul Reynolds, Peter Thomas, Sebastian Budgen, and Steve Edwards, this book would never have been published. Special thanks also to Danny Hayward for his patient assistance in editorial and administrative matters. There are many other colleagues and friends I would like to thank for their roles in helping this book to get over the finish line, but since that list would be very long, I will single out a few of special importance: Natasha Morris and Kirsteen Hardie, for putting up with me on the long journey; and Sebastian Truskolaski and Dan Hartley, whose criticism and friendship throughout the years I’ve been working on Bloch have made a special difference. This book is dedicated to my parents, Lindsey and Bill, and my stepdad Andy. All three of them have influenced me in ways that invisibly impact the book, even if, sadly, only one of them will get to see it in print.

Introduction When the third and final volume of his magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffnung [The Principle of Hope], was published in 1959, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) was living in the German Democratic Republic.1 He and his wife, Polish architect Karola Piotrkowska, had moved there a decade earlier when Bloch was offered the Chair in Philosophy at the newly re-established University of Leipzig. A committed Marxist, Bloch was initially full of enthusiasm for building socialism on German soil, as he reported to the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August 1949.2 However, the honeymoon period would not last long: Bloch’s heterodoxy, combined with the fact that he never joined the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (East German Socialist Unity Party)], made him suspect in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), and by 1957 he had been forced to step down from his position. By the time the last instalment of The Principle of Hope appeared, the book was widely seen to confirm the by then official view of Bloch as a revisionist thinker whose utopianism was beyond the pale of Marxist orthodoxy. Writing in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie in April 1960, Manfred Buhr, Bloch’s erstwhile assistant, argued that had Bloch only put the energy he spent writing The Principle of Hope into the struggle for socialism, he would have been honoured instead of vilified.3 As it was, for Buhr, Bloch’s latest tome put him ‘on paths that lead away from the great military road to socialism’.4 ‘The problems and attempted solutions he raises’, he continued, ‘are anachronistic in the year 1960 and objectively restore a mode of thought beyond which history has marched’.5 Buhr saw Bloch’s work as outmoded, the relic of an idealist philosophy that had been definitively superseded by Marxism. 1 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, GA vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985e [1959]). Cf. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Chicago: MIT Press, 1986). Throughout the book, I refer to the most recent 1985 edition of the Suhrkamp Gesamtausgabe of Bloch’s collected works in German. The original publication dates of the works are given in the bibliography. Where English translations of Bloch’s works exist, I refer to and quote from these, except where a specific translation issue prompted me to return to the German. Das Prinzip Hoffnung was first published in three volumes in East Germany by Aufbau-Verlag in 1954, 1955, and 1959. The first West German volume appeared in two volumes with Suhrkamp in 1959. 2 Cf. Zudeick 1987, p. 186. When quoting from untranslated secondary sources in German, all translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 3 Buhr 1960, pp. 365–79. In fact Bloch had been honoured just five years previously, when he was awarded the Nationalpreis der DDR for his services to philosophy. 4 Buhr 1960, p. 365. 5 Ibid.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004272873_002

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If Bloch was not radical enough for many of his contemporaries in the East, he was nevertheless deemed too orthodox by many on the other side of the iron curtain. Ludwig Marcuse’s review of The Principle of Hope was the sharpest of a number of critical pieces published on Bloch in the Stuttgarter Zeitung in the spring and summer of 1960.6 Marcuse saw in Bloch’s utopianism a philosophical justification for a Stalinist politics that Bloch had indeed failed to condemn in the twenties and thirties. ‘Bloch’s scheme is as weak as it ever was’, he wrote; ‘the devil is here called “the declining class” or “fascism” or “the exploiter” or “America”; the saviour on the other hand has the name “socialism” or “Vor-Schein” or “realest realism” or “Soviet Union”’.7 For Marcuse, Bloch was a totalitarian thinker, whose utopia was little more than an apology for the deficiencies and injustices of the present. It was Jürgen Habermas’ critical review that was to have the greatest impact on Bloch’s reception in both the German and English contexts, however. First published in German in 1960, Habermas’ critique was far more nuanced than either Buhr’s or Marcuse’s, though it reprised some of the same objections.8 Like Marcuse, Habermas considered Bloch’s philosophy politically problematic, arguing that his utopianism ‘border[ed] on the totalitarian’, and that Bloch himself merely ‘dresse[d] his intimate relationship to Lenin’s strategy of violence in Gothic rags’.9 Habermas saw Bloch’s philosophy as passé, indeed ‘obsolete’, not only in its language, whose ‘style of late expressionism’ Habermas believed ‘handicapped’ the reception of Bloch’s work, but also in its substance.10 ‘We are a little tired today’, he claimed, ‘of breaking out into free nature’, and he questioned whether Bloch’s utopianism ‘did not reflect the experience of a past generation, whether new generational experiences may not clash if not with utopia then certainly with Bloch’s initiation into utopia’.11 Here Habermas’ criticism echoes that of Buhr, for whom Bloch’s ideas were also ‘regressive’. 6

7 8 9 10 11

Marcuse, ‘Bewunderung und Abscheu’, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 12 March 1960, reprinted in Ernst Blochs Wirkung. Ein Arbeitsbuch zum 90. Geburtstag, pp. 74–84, and Marcuse 1979, pp. 285–95. Also Siegfried Melchinger, ‘Noch einmal der Fall Ernst Bloch. Nachwort im Hinblick auf die “Spuren” ’, in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 9 April 1960 ders.: Optimismus mit Trauerflor, in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 30 May 1960; Richard Biedrzynski, ‘Ein Aufgeklärter Mystiker. Ernst Bloch vor der Bibliothekgesellschaft’, in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 3 June 1960; ders. ‘Ein energischer Schwärmer. Zur Begegnung mit Ernst Bloch’, in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 11 March 1960. Marcuse 1979, p. 292. Habermas 1960, pp. 1078–1091. Reproduced in Habermas 1981, pp. 141–59. The article was published in English as Habermas 1969, pp. 311–25. I cite from the English version here. Habermas 1969, p. 322. Habermas 1969, p. 315. Habermas 1969, p. 316.

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To be sure, the ideological differences bound up with German division played a part in Habermas’ assessment. He made plain his irritation that this renegade from ‘the opposite banks of the Elbe River’ should put forward a philosophy ‘inspired by the great breath of German idealism’ at a time when he and other thinkers of a ‘surviving European tradition’ were trapped between ‘Soviet materialism’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon positivism’.12 Yet Habermas’ critique was not anti-Marxist as such. Rather, he objected to what he saw as the excessive liberty that Bloch took with Marxian ideas. Taking a position that in some respects paradoxically paralleled Soviet orthodoxy, Habermas argued that Bloch’s attempt to combine Marxism with classical philosophy was both illegitimate and dangerous. Not only did Bloch mistakenly conclude that Marx’s famous thesis on the abolition of philosophy only applied to ‘philosophy hitherto existing’ and not to ‘philosophy as philosophy’, according to Habermas; Bloch was, in his view, also unconcerned with ‘attempting to free us from the societal immobility of existing contradictions’, despite his emancipatory pretensions.13 These charges – that Bloch was unacceptably committed to a full-bodied mode of philosophy that had been irrevocably transcended by Marxian theory, and that he was effectively uninterested in real, practical social struggle – oddly but substantially replicate the points made by Buhr. Yet Habermas’ criticism of Bloch was also motivated by more straightforwardly philosophical concerns. In his view, Bloch’s philosophy was ‘pre-critical’; it had ‘skipped Kant’, returning to the ‘threshold of high speculation’ European philosophy had achieved with Schelling.14 Indeed, Habermas famously dubbed Bloch a ‘Marxist Schelling’, and denounced his uncanny hybrid of Marxism and romantic nature philosophy as a ‘speculative materialism’.15 Habermas’ view of Bloch would find echoes in the reception of his work for years to come, and still leaves its trace on it today. But was Bloch really the anti-Kantian, naïveMarxian, messianic nature-philosopher that Habermas believed? Just what was Bloch’s speculative materialism, and what, if any, meaning can it have for us today? These are the questions this book sets out to answer. Its central argument is that Bloch’s philosophy is indeed best read as a speculative materialism, and the main part of the book is dedicated to reconstructing this position from an ontological, epistemological, and political perspective. However, this is not a sustained critique of Bloch in a Habermasian vein. It is, in many respects, a defence of Bloch, not because there is nothing in Bloch’s thought to criticise: 12 13 14 15

Habermas 1969, p. 325. Ibid. Ibid. Habermas 1969, p. 323.

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indeed, as we will see, there is much. His philosophy of history suffers in places from strong traces of Eurocentrism, his discourse of utopia-qua-Heimat is heavily gendered, and the centrality of religious ideas to his philosophy can at first sight seem obscurantist. While the book addresses some of these criticisms where they arise (particularly in Chapter 5), it does not seek to address them systematically, primarily on grounds of focus. The aim of the book is rather to engage with Bloch’s seemingly paradoxical effort to construct a speculative materialism, and with the real or imagined political consequences of that effort. For despite its flaws, it is argued here that Bloch’s speculative materialism deserves to be revisited, not least because the rich reception of Habermas’ interpretation has helped to propagate a number of Bloch myths and legends.16 Occasionally the influence of Habermas’ assessment on interpreters of Bloch has been quite explicit, as in the case of Inge Münz-Koenen’s engagement with the discourse of utopia in Adorno, Bloch and Habermas, or in Matthias Meyer’s account of Bloch’s place in the reception history of Schelling’s nature philosophy.17 Often, however, its impact is felt more subtly. For instance, Habermas’ charge that Bloch’s philosophy is anthropomorphic, inflating features of human existence to the macro scale of cosmic ontology, also infuses Alfred Schmidt’s engagement with Bloch.18 Schmidt, too, describes Bloch’s ‘anthropological ontology’ as a ‘speculative materialism’, and criticises it in strikingly similar terms to those used by Habermas.19 Thus where Habermas finds in Bloch’s philosophy ‘an inapplicable simile, the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, of man and universe’, it is precisely the fact that ‘anthropology and ontology reflect one another in Bloch’s work like microcosm and macrocosm’ that Schmidt finds objectionable.20 As Vince Geoghegan has noted, Habermas did not explicitly question Bloch’s Marxist credentials as Schmidt did when he argued that Bloch’s emphasis on the idea of a human essence ‘runs against traditional Marxism’.21 Nevertheless, as we have already seen, the idea that Bloch was somehow inauthentically Marxist seems to have united those who identified with the project of Marxism like Buhr, and those who took a more distanced, critical, or het16

17 18

19 20 21

Jon Stewart’s book The Hegel Myths and Legends (Stewart 1996) influences this study insofar as it, too, sets out to critically address certain claims about Bloch’s work that have often been repeated as lore rather than rigorously engaged. Münz-Koenen 1997; Meyer 2014. Schmidt 1981, pp. 117–34. This essay reprises and develops many of the same arguments Schmidt brought against Bloch in his 1962 work Der Begriff der Natur in Marx (see Schmidt 1962, pp. 127–64; English translation Schmidt 1971). See also Schmidt 1978, pp. 325–38. Schmidt 1981, p. 117. Schmidt 1981, pp. 319–20; Habermas 1969, p. 118. Geoghegan 1996, p. 159; Schmidt 1981, p. 119.

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erodox stance, like Habermas and Schmidt. Insofar as Bloch’s materialism draws substantially on Marx’s early writings, Habermas argues it is based on an ‘apocryphal tradition of historical materialism’.22 This critique that Bloch stretches Marxian thought well beyond its intended scope recurs throughout the literature. Leszek Kołakowski has voiced doubts about the legitimacy of Bloch’s attempt ‘to graft onto the inherited doctrine [of Marxism] a complete metaphysic, cosmology, and speculative cosmogony’.23 Martin Jay also suspects Bloch has pushed Marx too far with a ‘cosmic vision of wholeness’ that ‘clearly transcended anything to be found in Marx or any of his other followers’.24 Meanwhile, although Bloch is often identified as a Hegelian Marxist, Habermas’ insistence that Bloch’s philosophy is emphatically ‘not a return from Marx to Hegel’ also finds echoes in the literature.25 Fredric Jameson has argued that Bloch’s Marxism is indebted less to Hegel than it is to Goethe.26 And when David Kaufman writes that ‘there is too much Schelling and too much Stalin’ in The Principle of Hope, he too rehearses Habermas’ suggestion that Bloch combines romanticism and idealism with a political philosophy that is in some sense intrinsically ‘totalitarian’.27 Habermas’ criticism, then, can be seen to have set, or at the very least to represent, a certain tone in the literature on Bloch, one that this book seeks to interrogate and in part to redress. If Habermas already described Bloch as a speculative materialist in 1960, his review predates by over a decade the appearance of the work in which Bloch developed this position most comprehensively: Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz [The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance] (1972).28 There, Bloch explicitly described his own philosophy as a speculative materialism for the first time, quietly subverting Habermas’ critique. To be sure, both Das Materialismusproblem and The Principle of Hope belong to the same production cycle: both works were begun during the 1930s, when Bloch was in exile from fascism. However, as we will see, a fuller exposition of his ontology in Das Materialismusproblem reveals some of the limits of the Habermasian assessment and its legacy. 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Habermas 1969, p. 317. Kołakowski 2005, p. 421. Jay 1984, p. 174. Habermas 1969, p. 313. For characterisations of Bloch as a ‘Hegelian Marxist’, see e.g. Kearney 1984, p. 193; Geoghegan 1996, p. 120; Thornhill 1999, p. 480; Thompson 2013, p. 310; Agar 2014, p. 216; Boldyrev 2014, p. 75. Jameson 1972, p. 140. Kaufman 1997, p. 35. Bloch, 1985g.

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Bloch began writing Das Materialismusproblem while in exile in Prague from 1936 to 1938. In January 1937, he wrote to Walter Benjamin that the book manuscript he was working on had expanded to a thousand pages.29 Four hundred of these were devoted to ‘a history of particularity-universality problems’ and ‘a history of the concept of matter’.30 A year later, early in 1938, Bloch sent a summary of the book to the Deutsche Akademie in New York. Theorie-Praxis des Materialismus [Theory-Practice of Materialism], as it was then titled, was to be a ‘philosophical foundation of dialectical materialism’ in three parts: one on logic, one on epistemology, and the third a historical investigation of the concept of matter.31 The publication of Bloch’s materialism book would have to wait, however, since in March 1938, Hitler invaded Austria, and it seemed certain that Czechoslovakia would be next. In April the Blochs boarded a ship for New York, where they would remain for 11 years. It was thus not until 1972 that the third, historical part of Bloch’s expansive project on the history of materialism was published in revised and expanded form, under the title Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz. The preface reveals that Bloch’s aim in the book was unchanged: it was to ‘rethink the concept of matter within dialectical materialism’, and indeed although it was first published in 1972, it remains primarily an intervention in debates about science and metaphysics that had taken place within the Communist International in the 1920s and 1930s.32 In its final form, Das Materialismusproblem also broadly exhibits the structure alluded to in the letter to Benjamin. Six main sections follow the preface. The first, ‘Der Ruf ins Wirre’ [‘The Call into Turmoil’], begins, as all Bloch’s works do, from the perspective of an embodied experience characterised by lack and desire.33 In Das Materialismusproblem, this is then followed by ‘Zeichen des Fliessenden und des Stehenden’ [‘Signs of the Flowing and Static’], which traces how a dialectical struggle between theories of movement and stasis – in themselves ‘both misleading’ – has shaped the history of philosophy.34 In one aspect, Bloch suggests, this dialectic appears as a question of the relationship between the general and the particular, and this is the focus of the first of two main ‘courses’ in the book: ‘Die Lehren vom Einzelnen-Allgemeinen, den Stoff angehend’ [‘Doctrines of the particular-general, in relation to matter’] ‘leads 29 30 31 32 33 34

Bloch 1985r, p. 664. Ibid. Cunico 2000, p. 455. Bloch 1985g, p. 15. Cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 21–3. The composition of the book is significant for thinking about Bloch’s epistemology, as well as his ontology. See Chapter 3. Bloch 1985g, p. 18; cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 24–31.

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from pre-Socratic incursions to the foundations of the question of universals in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle’ and on through the history of thought up to Marx.35 It is followed by a second course, ‘Die Lehren von der Materie, die Bahnungen ihrer Finalität und Offenheit’ [‘Doctrines of matter, preparations of its finality and openness’], which deals with the question of matter, ‘not only as a history of materialism’, but also presenting it in ‘idealistically rich’ status as an ‘embarrassment’ with which materialist thinking must always be ready to grapple.36 Bloch reaches his speculative ‘conclusion’ in the next two sections: ‘Zum Kältestrom-Wärmestrom in Naturbildern’ [‘On the cold stream-warm stream in images of nature’] deals with the ‘not only formalised, but energetic something in the matter of modern physics’, and includes an extended engagement with Engels’ essay on the Dialectics of Nature.37 The final chapter in this section, Chapter 40, ‘Kältestrom und Wärmestrom, doch beide zugleich’ [‘Cold stream and warm stream, indeed both at once’], concludes the portion of Das Materialismusproblem written during the 1930s as part of the original Theorie-Praxis des Materialismus project.38 The seven chapters in the final section, ‘Zum Verhältnis Sein-Bewusstsein, Zweck und Novum im spekulativen Materialismus’ [‘On the being-consciousness relation, purpose and the new in speculative materialism’] were written in 1969–71, when Bloch ‘revised and expanded’ the manuscript with the help of his assistant Burghardt Schmidt.39 This is the section in which Bloch elaborates his own concept of matter most concretely. The text ‘Avicenna und die aristotelische Linke’ [Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left], written in 1952, is also included as an Appendix (Chapter 48) in the final version of the book.40 Ultimately – and here Habermas’ characterisation is broadly accurate – Das Materialismusproblem develops a concept of matter as the self-realising impersonal agent of nature: the possibility of utopia resides in matter itself, he argues, and human beings, as matter-become-conscious, are capable of realising it. Nevertheless, there are many respects in which a close reading of the materialism book, situated in its intellectual-historical context, can offer valuable correctives to the main points of Habermas’ critique. For instance, whereas Habermas claims that Bloch’s ontology as it is presented in The Principle of Hope is ‘not a return from Marx to Hegel as some might assume’, but rather to Schelling, an analysis of Das Materialismusproblem reveals that Bloch’s spec35 36 37 38 39 40

Bloch 1985g, p. 18; cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 32–131. Ibid. Cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 132–315. Bloch 1985g, p. 20; cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 316–76. Cf. Cunico 2000, p. 455. Cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 377–478. Bloch 2018. See bibliography for reference.

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ulative materialism is at least as much of a Hegelian inheritance as it is a Schellingian one.41 In particular, Bloch’s concept of matter is a speculative construct in the Hegelian sense that it rests on a certain realism about universals that Bloch inherits from Aristotle via Hegel. Moreover, even if the Aristotelian influence on Bloch’s theory of matter is evident in the relevant sections of The Principle of Hope, this picture only becomes fully clear in the materialism book, with the extended discussion of the problem of universals. Certainly, Schelling remains a key influence on Bloch’s ontology; however, where Habermas’ interpretation shifted the emphasis away from Hegel towards Schelling, this book works to shift it back somewhat, to show that and in what way Bloch was a Hegelian Marxist also at the ontological level. If Habermas called Bloch’s Hegelian credentials into question, others have challenged his Marxist pedigree. Detlef Horster notes that the view that Bloch has nothing in common with Marx has united so many otherwise divided Marxists, and as we have already seen, Bloch’s recourse to a naturalistic ontology is one of the objections apt to motivate such a claim.42 For Schmidt, Bloch’s emphasis on the ‘gaping, striving, alogical in the world and the human being’ is at odds with Marxism’s traditional concerns, namely the socio-economic analysis of capitalism and its associated relations of production.43 However, what Schmidt and others miss in their assessment of Bloch’s utopianism as going ‘beyond’ a mature Marx characterised as uniquely preoccupied with questions of political economy is the fact that, for Bloch, the labour of the imagination is itself a historical force. Ernest Mandel acknowledges this when he writes of hope and anticipation as themselves categories of historical materialism in the same way as social labour and self-consciousness.44 The following analysis therefore sets out to show how Bloch’s speculative materialism did not transgress the limits of a Marxian historical materialism, but rather built on and worked productively, originally and critically with it. In so doing, it also seeks to reassess the dual charges of anthropomorphism and teleology that are manifested in Habermas’ criticism of Bloch’s vision of nature as ‘led to its goal by the hand of man’.45 Certainly, human being, and the idea of natural purposiveness associated with it, and with organic life more generally, are central to Bloch’s thought. However, this book seeks to challenge the idea that to reason about nature as a whole on the basis of human 41 42 43 44 45

Cf. Habermas 1969, p. 313. Horster 2006, p. 30. Schmidt 1981, p. 119. Cf. Mandel 2002, pp. 245–59. Habermas 1969, p. 319.

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experience is illegitimate. Hans Jonas has argued in this vein that from the perspective of a monistic ontology – and Bloch’s is not the only ontology of this kind: Jonas reminds us that the theory of evolution that still today dominates both scientific and everyday conceptions of the relationship between being and time is also a monism – ‘the case against anthropomorphism in its extreme form becomes problematical and is on principle reopened’.46 With this in mind, Bloch’s speculative materialism is interpreted here as an attempt to do what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers claimed in the 1980s is the task of all materialist thought: namely, to ‘understand nature in such a way that there would be no absurdity for it to have produced us’.47 The second of Habermas’ major criticisms challenged here concerns Bloch’s epistemology. Habermas’ claim that Bloch’s speculative materialism ‘skipped Kant’, or was ‘pre-critical’ in its epistemology, goes right to the heart of a central issue in the history of Marxism: the legacy of the so-called reflection theory of knowledge. There is by now a standard narrative of this legacy according to which reflection theory represents an anti-Kantian tradition inherited by dialectical materialism via Hegel.48 Whereas Kant had argued that reality as it is in itself remains ultimately inaccessible to human knowledge, Hegel has often been interpreted as reinstating a pre-critical insistence on the absolute identity of thought and being, according to which concepts simply reflect the world as it really is. Although Marx and Engels frequently criticised this idea, which they called Hegel’s method of ‘speculative construction’, Engels in particular – so the argument goes – can nevertheless be seen to have adopted Hegel’s anti-Kantian epistemology, for instance in the polemical work Anti-Dühring, where he criticises the post-Kantian tradition of positivism represented by Eugen Dühring among others.49 According to proponents of this argument, Lenin would then take up Engels’ position in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in which he rejects the positivist epistemology of Ernst Mach, and declares it incompatible with Marxist orthodoxy.50 Habermas’ claim that Bloch’s epistemology ‘regresses’ to a ‘pre-critical’ position puts him in a complex relation to this trajectory. On the one hand, the 46 47 48

49 50

Jonas 2001, p. 37. Stengers 2011, pp. 368–80, 368. Cf. Cornforth 1954; J.E. Blakeley 1964; Sayers 1985; Rockmore 1996. None of these commentators makes this argument in the schematic, condensed, and therefore necessarily rather crude form in which I am making it here. In fact, all of them in different ways also criticise this line of interpretation. Nevertheless, one can find a version of this intellectual genealogy mapped out in each of these works in more detail than it is possible to present here. Cf. Marx and Engels 1975a, pp. 57–60; Engels 2010. Lenin 1977.

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charge of having ignored Kant implies that Bloch espoused the same crude epistemology of which so many dialectical materialists have – often but not always correctly – been accused. However, by reaching back to Schelling as the pinnacle of the pre-critical moment, Habermas disrupts the typical genealogy associated with reflection theory, implicitly identifying Hegel as the heir to the Kantian project. In this respect I agree with his assessment, though I intend to show that Bloch, too, stands in this lineage. This project involves a certain deflationary reading of Hegel as opposed to the boldly metaphysical one that was dominant during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.51 Drawing on contemporary scholarship on Hegelian metaphysics, I make a case for a reading of Hegel that allows us to perceive these connections and their influence on Bloch’s thought more precisely.52 The more direct impact of Kant on Bloch cannot be forgotten here either, however, and the following analysis of Das Materialismusproblem highlights the persistent influence of both Kant and neo-Kantianism on his speculative materialism. Ultimately the book claims that Bloch’s epistemology performs a delicate balancing act between Kantian criticism and Hegelian conceptual realism, in which the world is understood to be neither ultimately resistant nor fully transparent to our knowledge of it. Of course, an alternative epistemological path can be traced from Kant through the history of Marxism, one that places greater emphasis on the practical dimension of knowledge rather than its conceptual dimension. This tradition, too, is visible in Bloch’s work. In particular, Bloch’s epistemology also draws resources from Marx’s theory of praxis and Feuerbach’s concept of embodied cognition. These two elements come together in Bloch’s commentary on the epistemological group of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in The Principle of Hope, where he insists that ‘even when thinking we can only proceed from the sensory. Perception, not the concept which is merely taken from it, is and remains the beginning where all materialist cognition identifies itself’.53 This same idea is repeated at the very beginning of Das Materialismusproblem, in the fragment titled ‘Das Spüren’ (feeling), which reads: ‘We begin with almost nothing. That drives us, wants to feel more. Looks around, feels and grasps’.54 Touch is thus the most immediate sense for Bloch, the one through which the inner drive first comes into contact with the not-I in the world: the first step in the acquisition of knowledge. The centrality of the sense of touch to the mater51 52 53 54

Cf. Pippin 1989. Cf. Stern 2009. Bloch 1986, p. 255. Bloch 1985g, p. 21.

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ialism book is obvious from its composition: beginning with ‘feeling’, it then moves through ‘seeing and thinking’, and ‘thinking the body’, to finally reach the stage of being ‘in one’s own skin’ with speculative materialism. Not only composition, but also an appreciation of Bloch’s literary style thus becomes necessary when considering his epistemology. In addition to tracing a discursive connection in Bloch’s work to these various theories of knowledge, this book claims that, at the formal level of his writing, Bloch’s use of romantic irony punctures the illusion that thought and language have access to a mindindependent totality. Scholarship on Bloch never fails to mention his style, nor to acknowledge his debt to German expressionism, sometimes approvingly, sometimes more critically. Wayne Hudson and Hans Heinz Holz have arguably gone furthest in appreciating the role form plays for Bloch in constructing meaning. For Holz, it is the fact that philosophy is more closely bound to language than any other academic discipline that is behind Bloch’s idiosyncratic style. Whereas science generally ‘finds its object sphere already linguistically captured and preformed’, he argues, ‘philosophical research first has to provide the linguistic means in order to say what it wants in an appropriate way’.55 This explains Bloch’s ‘difficult’ and ‘often dark’ diction for Holz, who nevertheless insists that ‘philologically exact analysis mostly reveals that this difficulty is the mode of adequate expression’. Hudson meanwhile recognises Bloch’s style as a form of ‘recursive modernism’, and argues that, like his friend and contemporary Walter Benjamin, Bloch regarded literary techniques such as allegory, symbolism and montage as ‘a form of materialist cognition … designed to reveal traces of world contents not given in the abstract appearance of capitalist society’.56 Both Holz and Hudson thus recognise Bloch’s style as more than the antique remnant of a bygone age, which is how Habermas saw it. As important as their interpretations are, however, that they too miss the fact that Bloch’s use of these techniques also has an ironic function, signaling his insight into the impossibility – in the present, at least – of fully articulating the absolute. This book pushes their line of argumentation further: by tracing the influence of German romantic thought on his writing, it demonstrates that Bloch’s style actually performs substantial epistemological work. Poetic irony formed an integral part of the romantics’ stance on the relationship between philosophy and poetry after Kant. Bloch’s reception of German romantic thought and literature was enthusiastic, and it is argued here that his stylistic debt to the romantics informed his theory of knowledge. 55 56

Holz 1975, pp. 38–9. Hudson 1982, p. 2.

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The third aspect of Bloch’s interpretation engaged with here concerns the claim that his utopianism is a more or less direct intellectual justification or expression of Soviet totalitarianism. It is well known that during the 1930s, at a time when Stalin’s show trials were cause for many of Bloch’s contemporaries to lose faith in the Soviet project, Bloch clung fast to the idea that the Soviet Union was the only possible bulwark against the global threat of fascism. During precisely the period of the Stalinist purges, Bloch controversially celebrated the Soviet dictator as the ‘real leader [Führer] into happiness’, and an ‘upright figure of love’.57 Bloch rejected the accusations of mass murder and creeping dictatorship as American propaganda, dismissing even his friend Joachim Schumacher when, returning from Moscow, Schumacher told Bloch that he himself, a veteran and committed Communist Party member, had been intimidated and threatened by the Soviet regime. It is considerations such as these that led Jack Zipes in his introduction to a special issue of New German Critique on Bloch and Heidegger from 1988 to ask why, knowing what we know about the political commitments of these two figures, should we engage with their philosophies at all? It is a relevant question, and one with which anybody must grapple who agrees with the raft of ‘European intellectuals’ Zipes cites – Habermas included – that Bloch was ‘the most significant unorthodox Marxist of the 20th century and a philosopher with great integrity’.58 Bloch has been called a ‘left-wing Heidegger’ on account of certain similarities, particularly in his early work, between his ontology and Heidegger’s.59 Whether or not the philosophical comparison sticks, it is certainly politically instructive. For unlike Bloch, who remained officially non-aligned throughout his life, Heidegger was a member of the German Nazi party from its inception, and whereas Heidegger never renounced his allegiance to the party, Bloch did later explicitly retreat from the sympathies he expressed with Stalinist policy in the 1930s. With these considerations in mind, the question Zipes raised, as to why Bloch has so clearly been excluded from mainstream philosophical discourse on account of his political commitments while Heidegger has been given so much attention, bears repeating. Unfortunately, a full answer to that question is beyond the scope of this book. What it is possible, indeed necessary, to do here is to point out that it is entirely plausible to condemn Bloch’s political position in the 1930s without making the illegitimate leap to arguing that his philosophy was tout court an expression of those specific views. For one thing, the foundations of Bloch’s 57 58 59

Bloch, ‘Originalgeschichte des dritten Reichs’ (1935) in Bloch 1985d, pp. 146–7. Zipes 1988, p. 8. Thompson, ‘Religion, Utopia, and the Metaphysics of Contingency’, in Thompson and Žižek (eds.) 2013, p. 82; cf. Riedel 1994, pp. 216–45.

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speculative materialism were laid down well before the Soviet Union even came into being. The idea of the not-yet, which Bloch would later apply to material reality as an incomplete process of self-realisation, has its origins in the phenomenology and neo-Kantianism of the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, utopianism is not the intellectual handmaiden of political totalitarianism, as some have argued; rather, as Bloch and Theodor Adorno – both ‘iconoclastic’ as opposed to ‘blueprint’ utopians – recognise, its primary function is as a mode of criticism.60 To be sure, Bloch’s speculative materialism pushes the model to the extreme by asserting that the fabric of reality itself is utopian in the sense of being literally not yet ‘there’, incomplete. Yet his speculative theory fulfils the same function as any utopia by demonstrating that the current order is not natural and necessary, but contingent, and therefore open to transformation. It is precisely this critical function of utopia that is on display in Das Materialismusproblem. Written during the period when Soviet dogma was hardening, a close analysis of that book reveals that Bloch’s speculative materialism in fact constitutes an immanent critique of orthodox Marxism, oriented towards achieving what Bloch nevertheless saw as Marxism’s fundamental objectives: freedom, equality, peace, justice, and solidarity, including with non-human natural subjects. One might well argue that the contemporary significance of Bloch’s speculative materialism lies in the fact that these are still valid objectives, and still far from being achieved. Perhaps that alone would be enough to counter the charge of obsolescence levelled against Bloch by Habermas, Kołakowski and others. Yet this book aims to go further still, to show how Bloch anticipated certain philosophical concerns that have recently begun to attract attention again. The ‘speculative turn’ in continental materialism and realism has seen contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Quentin Meillassoux grappling with questions of ontological incompleteness and radical possibility in ways that bear striking similarities to Bloch’s work.61 However, whereas Bloch’s and Meillassoux’s speculative materialisms may appear similar on the surface, the differing genealogies of ‘speculation’ and ‘materialism’ that underpin their philosophies are in fact coupled with quite different social and political visions. Bloch’s thought is also at home amid the revival of interest in vitalist materialisms in recent years. In this regard, the book explores the similarities and divergences between concepts of material agency developed by Bloch and

60 61

Cf. Jacoby 2005. Cf. Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman (eds.) 2011; Meillassoux 2008.

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contemporary new materialist Jane Bennett.62 It also situates Bloch in an ecoMarxist genealogy that speaks to the concerns of contemporary figures such as John Bellamy Foster, Jason W. Moore, and Andreas Malm.63 Despite subtle differences in their positions, these figures all argue that the environmental crisis has brought into focus an inextricably entangled, dynamic relationship between social and natural processes that Marx and Engels acknowledged in their critique of capitalism. Indeed, as Bellamy Foster has argued, this entanglement forces us to revisit aspects of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature that were long considered to be beyond the pale.64 With its long excursus on Dialectics of Nature, Bloch’s materialism book undoubtedly stands in this tradition of thought. As this book aims to show, then, not only was Bloch raising, in the midtwentieth century, some of the same questions as these contemporary figures, but he often found illuminating answers to them. Meanwhile, the light thrown back on his work by contemporary theorists also reveals some of the limitations in his work. By bringing Bloch into dialogue with contemporary speculative materialism, new materialism, and eco-Marxism, this book demonstrates that his thought is far from obsolete. Given that Das Materialismusproblem remains untranslated into English, it may be unsurprising that there has been almost no engagement with it in the Anglophone literature on Bloch. However, even in the German context it remains widely overlooked. Holz has been the only figure so far to engage systematically with it, primarily in his 1975 work Logos spermatikos. Holz’s intervention is hugely valuable in that it represents the only sustained engagement to date with Bloch as a speculative materialist.65 By reading Das Materialismusproblem, Holz almost inevitably acknowledges aspects of Bloch’s speculative materialism that Habermas neglected. However, he nevertheless fails in my view to successfully extricate Bloch from the substance of Habermas’ criticisms. Holz is certainly far more thorough in his treatment of Aristotle’s influence on Bloch than Habermas, tracing in detail the way in which Bloch transforms categories from Aristotle’s theory of actuality into a dialectical concept of matter. Holz points in this regard to a traditional ‘confusion’ in the history of philosophy between the concept of matter as ‘the amorphous material that receives its particular way of being through the addition of form and only then becomes 62 63 64 65

Cf. Bennett 2010. For more on the new materialisms, see Coole and Frost (eds.) 2010, and Dolphijn and van der Tuin (eds.) 2012. Bellamy Foster 2000; 2002; Bellamy Foster, Clark, and York 2012; Bellamy Foster and Burkett 2016; Moore 2015; Moore (ed.) 2016; Malm 2016. Cf. Bellamy Foster 2017. Holz 1975. See also Holz 2012, pp. 483–508.

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actual’, and as a designation of the ‘substantial being of the world with regard to the way it is made’.66 The former, Holz claims, is matter as the Urgrund of being as we find it listed in Aristotle’s table of categories; it is likened to the indeterminate grammatical subject, which only becomes actual in its predicated particularity. The latter, meanwhile, is described in terms of a ‘being already endowed with predicates’, which is nevertheless material in its substance.67 This, then, is the logical-ontological problem at the heart of the concept of matter: how can it be used to describe both being in general, and the particular forms that being takes? Holz correctly identifies Bloch’s re-functioning of Aristotle’s theory of possibility and actuality as a solution to precisely this problem. Bloch’s matter is simultaneously dynamei on, or what-is-in-possibility – the ‘subject’ of nature, or the original (un-)ground of being – and kata to dynaton, what-is-according-topossibility – the actual shapes material possibility takes at a particular moment. However, Holz’s insight here – that Bloch’s reception of Aristotle clearly went decisively beyond anything the latter intended – is also important.68 Curiously, however, Schelling is never mentioned in this context, even though he was so central to Bloch’s understanding of the utopian ‘unground’ of being, as Habermas convincingly showed. Even in Holz’s discussion of Bloch’s concept of nature, it is Hegel, not Schelling, whom he singles out as Bloch’s primary influence in this regard. Although it is pleasing to see Hegel returned to this picture from which he had been left out by Habermas, by omitting Schelling entirely, Holz fails to address those aspects of Bloch’s Schelling reception that Habermas raises and with which any assessment of his speculative materialism must engage. Meanwhile, although he usefully reintroduces Hegel into places where he is missing from Habermas’ account, Holz leaves Hegel out where one might expect him. For instance, he argues that it is a ‘Leibnizian approach [which] provides the scheme of a dialectical logic that coincides with ontology’ for Bloch.69 Indeed, Holz insists that key Leibnizian principles underpin Bloch’s, indeed any, speculative materialism. Emphasising Leibniz’s influence on Bloch certainly highlights an insufficiently appreciated aspect of his thought. However, surely it is Hegel, not Leibniz, from whom Bloch inherited the logical framework that informs his theory? Elsewhere Holz does acknowledge the influence of Hegel’s logic, for instance when he argues that Bloch’s ‘concept of a speculative materialism is introduced outside a strict context of deduc66 67 68 69

Holz 1975, p. 49. Holz 1975, p. 120. Holz 1975, p. 125. Holz 1975, p. 130.

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tion, and remains within the Hegelian insight that “totality contains within itself those determinations which from the perspective of dogmatism are valid in their separation as fixed and true”’.70 However, Holz’s acknowledgement of Bloch’s Hegelianism here simultaneously implies the view, which he shares with Habermas, of Bloch as essentially an opponent of Kant. For it is Kant, above all, who is associated with the method of philosophical deduction, which Hegel – and indeed Bloch – eschewed.71 Moreover, Hegel’s speculative method was intended to show that the antinomies of thought identified by Kant were in fact illusory from the perspective of reason, which aims to elucidate the totality of thought and being rather than being satisfied with the fixity and separation characteristic of the logic of the understanding.72 By confronting Bloch and Hegel on the one hand as practitioners of speculative reason, with an implied Kant as the advocate of critical reason on the other, Holz positions Bloch’s speculative materialism as a Hegelian, but anti-Kantian, inheritance. Yet if Holz aligns himself with Habermas in seeing Bloch as Kant’s adversary, he parts company with him in his understanding of Hegel as also essentially a critic of Kant: for, as we have seen, Habermas implies a continuity between the Kantian and Hegelian projects.73 This study aims to draw out the concordances between Kant, Hegel, and Bloch that have fallen between the cracks of Habermas’ and Holz’s analyses. Another question for Bloch’s speculative materialism, which Habermas raises and with which Holz fails successfully to deal, is its relationship to the reflection theory of knowledge. To be sure, Holz assures us that to characterise Bloch’s concept of matter as speculative does not mean that it reflects its object as it is, but rather that it creates it in the construction of its concrete genesis (as a concept) and that the thing it refers to can only be given in this process of creation of its conceptual reflection.74 However, Holz nevertheless persists in using the metaphor of the mirror as a kind of shorthand for the theory of knowledge that he sees underpinning Bloch’s theory. In doing so, he implicitly places Bloch in the same epistemo-

70 71 72 73 74

Holz 1975, p. 125. For Hegel’s criticism of Kantian deduction, see Hegel 1991, pp. 20, 42. For more on Bloch’s criticism, see Bloch 1985t, pp. 45, 77, and 84, and Bloch 1985g, pp. 62, 69, 70. Cf. Hegel 1991, pp. 32, 48, as well as Hegel’s doctrine of the concept in Hegel 2010. Cf. Holz 1975, p. 131. Holz 1975, p. 124.

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logical lineage of dialectical materialism as Habermas does, whereas Bloch’s theory of knowledge, as we will see in due course, is much more complex. In the final assessment, it is not entirely clear from Holz’s perspective how Bloch’s speculative materialism differs from the dialectical materialism of, say, Lenin. Here again his account does not go significantly beyond that of Habermas, for whom Bloch’s philosophy was effectively a transvested Leninism. Certainly, as we will see, Bloch affirms aspects of Lenin’s philosophy, especially his later writings on Hegel, which Bloch, like Holz, distinguishes in theoretical sophistication from the earlier Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.75 Holz follows Habermas, however, in failing to perceive the critique of Lenin implicit in Das Materialismusproblem. This is undoubtedly due in part to the fact that Bloch’s engagement with Lenin always seems on its surface to indicate intellectual approval. Furthermore, during the period in which the first draft of Das Materialismusproblem was written, Bloch was indeed more ideologically disposed to aspects of Leninism than at any time before or after. Nevertheless, the critique of Lenin and Leninism is a seam of Bloch’s thought that runs deep, and as this book argues, it is also present in Das Materialismusproblem. The aim of this book is thus to challenge Habermas’ reading of Bloch’s speculative materialism, which was based on The Principle of Hope, by examining his writings on materialism during the years 1933–8, that is, during the period of his European exile before he emigrated to America, where work on The Principle of Hope began. In doing so, I hope to address and in some cases challenge several of the concerns about Bloch’s speculative materialism raised by Habermas in his influential review of that later work, and repeated by numerous scholars since. The book focuses above all on Das Materialismusproblem, and on related writings dating from the same period, which have been published in Gerardo Cunico’s volume Logos der Materie [The Logos of Matter] (2000). I have also drawn extensively on Bloch’s published letters, from this and other periods. The first four chapters provide an exegesis and analysis of an aspect of Bloch’s speculative materialism, responding in the process to relevant questions raised in Habermas’ review. Chapter 1 sets the scene for the investigation by exploring the conflict between ‘materialist’ and ‘speculative’ modes of thought with which Bloch engaged. Chapter 2 analyses Bloch’s ontology, demonstrating that it was much more than merely a Marxist interpretation of Schelling’s nature philosophy, but also contains elements of Marxist, Feuerbachian, and Hegelian inheritance. Chapter 3 examines Bloch’s epistemology, and

75

Holz 1975, pp. 127–8, and p. 132.

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makes a case for the continued influence of Kant on Bloch’s theory of knowledge. Chapter 4 defends Bloch’s speculative materialism against the charge that it was intrinsically totalitarian, while nevertheless acknowledging that he at times adopted political positions that can be considered extreme. Finally, Chapter 5 takes on the charge of obsolescence by demonstrating the relevance of Bloch’s concerns about freedom and agency to debates within contemporary materialism. The approach taken here resists a prevalent idea in Bloch scholarship that, to quote Jay, Bloch’s ‘intellectual and political character seems to have matured at a specific moment in time and remained relatively unchanged for the remainder of his life’.76 Bloch’s philosophy did change over time, largely though not exclusively in response to the shifting historical circumstances in which he found himself. The world into which Bloch was born on 8 July 1885 was in the grip of rapid change. The rise of industrial capitalism in Imperial Germany had brought prosperity to many, and misery to many more. Nowhere was this contrast more apparent than in the glaring difference in living standards between the workers’ town of Ludwigshafen, where Bloch grew up, and the more affluent Mannheim across the bridge. Bloch would later call Ludwigshafen the ‘merciless, naked face of late capitalism’, and indeed the town was home to the chemicals factory of BASF, the largest concern within IG Farben, which would manufacture the Zyklon B gas used to murder Jews during the Holocaust.77 Meanwhile, Bloch became acquainted with Mannheim by going to the palace library to read the philosophy books that were forbidden at home. If Bloch’s family environment was neither happy nor conducive to study, it was nevertheless economically comfortable: Bloch’s father, Max, was a civil servant working for the royal Bavarian railways, while his mother, Bertha, with whom he had a ‘difficult’ relationship, was a housewife.78 Liberal social reforms had ensured Jewish families like Bloch’s rights and opportunities they had never enjoyed before, but it had come at a price: thorough cultural assimilation, which, however, did nothing to offset increasing anti-Semitism among those resentful of the newly found wealth and social standing of many Jews. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Bloch was disappointed to see German nationalism on display among Jews, including his former teacher Georg Simmel, with whom Bloch broke after Simmel donned the uniform of an imperial reserve officer. 76 77 78

Cf. Jay 1984, p. 176. Zudeick 1987, p. 27. Zudeick 1987, p. 12.

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Bloch’s intellectual development up to 1918 was one of immersion in traditions old and new. After convincing his father to allow him to study philosophy by taking him to a monument erected in memory of Schelling by King Maximilian II of Bavaria, Bloch enrolled to study philosophy, physics, German, and music at the University of Munich. There he studied under Theodor Lipps, whose work on the unconscious Freud so admired. Through Lipps Bloch was introduced to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. He also read Nietzsche, whose thought profoundly influenced the artists and thinkers of the Expressionist generation. Bloch was no exception: Manfred Riedel has emphasised the extent to which Bloch’s early thought is marked by the Nietzscheanism of the turn of the century.79 Lonely in Munich, however, after a semester Bloch transferred to Würzburg, ‘the authentic place of [his] intellectual youth and period of experimentation’, where he studied with Oswald Külpe, the founder of the Würzburg School of Denkpsychologie.80 Here Bloch completed his doctoral thesis in 1908 on the neo-Kantian philosophy of Heinrich Rickert in which he attempted to show how a critique of neoKantianism could lead to a new utopian philosophy. However, although Bloch primarily saw himself as a critic of neo-Kantianism, the movement profoundly influenced his thinking. Indeed, it was his reading of Kant that first led him to the idea of the ‘not yet conscious’, his ‘first and only original thought’.81 After his promotion, Bloch moved to Berlin where he studied with Simmel, whom he and others of his generation saw as the most interesting thinker of their time. Here Bloch also met Georg Lukács, with whom he struck up a crucial friendship. For Lukács, Bloch ‘spoke the mother tongue of classical philosophy’ in an environment of mostly sterile academic discourse.82 Bloch recalled the pair initially being so close that they had to create a ‘nature reserve’ of differences so that they did not always say the same thing in company.83 Indeed, in the years before the First World War they were in almost daily contact, either in person or by letter. It was Lukács who drew Bloch more decisively towards Marxism, though the Hungarian always saw his friend as primarily a utopian thinker, and their friendship became increasingly strained as their political inclinations diverged. Nevertheless, to begin with Bloch had a profound influence on Lukács, whom he followed to Heidelberg in 1912. There, the pair joined the circle around Max and Marianne Weber, who found 79 80 81 82 83

Cf. Riedel 1994. Zudeick 1987, p. 31. Zudeick 1987, p. 37. Zudeick 1987, p. 28. For more on Bloch’s friendship with Lukács, see also Boldyrev, 2013, and Münster 1982. Zudeick 1987, p. 43.

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their prophetic manner off-putting. Weber, too, would disappoint the pacifist Bloch by showing his nationalist stripes when the time came. Like many of his generation, Bloch believed that an apocalyptic renewal was needed to secure humanity’s salvation from what Hegel once called the ‘slaughter-bench’ of history.84 Yet unlike some of his contemporaries, Bloch did not see war as the solution: while in exile in Switzerland after 1917, he moved in pacifist circles and wrote anti-nationalist opinion pieces in the émigré press. Bloch looked to Russia and the promise of socialist revolution as the foundation of a new society, though the utopian future he envisaged was not one cut off from tradition. His first major published work, Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia], combined the romantic force of German expressionism with a brand of Marxism that emphasised Christian values. It was Bloch’s first wife, Elsa von Stritzky, an aristocratic sculptor from Riga, who inspired in Bloch a positive appreciation of Christianity. A person of deep faith, von Stritzky met Bloch in the summer of 1911 and the pair was married two years later. However, Elsa suffered from an obscure recurrent illness, and she died at their home in Garmisch in 1921. Widely admired by all who knew her, Elsa’s loss affected Bloch deeply. A second edition of Spirit of Utopia, published in 1923, was dedicated to her memory. While the chiliast enthusiasm of Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution [Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution] (1921) must have been inspired in part by Elsa’s faith, it also bears the trace of Bloch’s encounter with the founder of the Dada movement Hugo Ball, whom he met in Zürich while the pair were working on the Freie Zeitung.85 Ball’s own Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz [Critique of the German Intelligentsia] (1919) displays some striking parallels with Bloch’s Münzer book, so much so that Ball would reportedly accuse Bloch of plagiarism.86 However, as Anson Rabinbach has shown, Ball’s text is a damning document of his anti-Semitism, which Bloch roundly condemned when it was published, and which very probably caused the end of their friendship. Nevertheless, Bloch’s proximity to Expressionist and other avant-garde artistic circles decisively influenced his philosophy during this period. In Spirit of Utopia, first published in 1918, Bloch advocated a utopian fusion of art and life in order to overcome alienation, though it was an art that valorised craft and ornament over the minimalism of modernist design.87 84 85 86 87

Hegel 2007, p. 21. Bloch 1985b. Cf. Ball 2005; Ball 1993. Bloch 1985c; 2000. The edition history of Geist der Utopie is complex. The first edition, published in 1918 by Duncker & Humblot, differs significantly from the revised 1923 edition

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If Bloch sought to mobilise folk culture in the service of social emancipation, however, he nevertheless vehemently opposed the völkisch nationalist ideas that nourished the growth of fascism in Weimar Germany. In his 1919 pamphlet, Vademecum für heutige Demokraten [Handbook for Contemporary Democrats], Bloch called to the like-minded among his generation to oppose the reactionary forces that would, he was sure, unleash fresh disaster in Europe if the last vestiges of what David Blackbourn has called the Prussian ‘military-agrarian complex’ were not dismantled.88 Bloch predicted that, failing a ‘social revolution of the heart’, chimerical notions of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ would be triumphant, and advocated the establishment of a ‘fully realised moral world parliament’ to facilitate ‘reconciliation’ between Germany and the rest of the world.89 Bloch’s predictions were prescient. As fascist ideas took hold during the 1920s and early 30s, he watched in frustration as the German left seemed capable of talking only in numbers and figures while the fascists appealed to hearts and minds, appropriating the messianic language of Reich and Führer. In Thomas Münzer, Bloch sought an example for the modern left in the history of the radical current of the Reformation, an event he saw as representing a foundational split in Germany’s pre-history between revolutionary and reactionary tendencies. Erbschaft dieser Zeit [Heritage of Our Times] (1935) developed this idea further with a critique of National Socialism that explained its rise partly in terms of a fundamental non-synchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) between different sectors of modern society.90 Bloch identified the Nazis’ uncanny ability to fuse the values and symbols of a traditional, pre-capitalist way of life with those of a modern, technologised industrial society as a defining factor in their appeal. Soon after Hitler came to power, a warrant was issued for Bloch’s arrest, and in 1934 he and Karola, whom he had married that same year, went into exile. They fled first to Paris, then to Prague, then finally in 1938 to the United States, where they remained for over a decade. It was here that Bloch wrote The Principle of Hope, a phenomenological exploration of what he called our ‘anticipatory consciousness’: an awareness of the possibility of a different, better

88 89 90

published by Paul Cassirer Verlag. The Suhrkamp edition was also significantly revised and updated before it was first published in 1964. The English translation, published by Stanford University Press, is based on this revised 1964 version of the text. I refer to the English edition throughout, except where significant changes have been made between the editions. A facsimile of the 1918 edition is included as volume 16 in the German Gesamtausgabe. Blackbourn 2011, p. 26. Cf. Bloch 1985s, pp. 521, 527. Bloch 1985d; Bloch 1991.

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world, so often the subject of art and religion, but which Bloch also glimpsed in everyday life, from the utopia of romantic love to the pursuit of advances in medicine. The ‘principle of hope’ means seeing in things as seemingly banal as the fairground or the lottery the longing for something more, even if their utopian promise remains abstract. The ‘American Dream’ – ‘To each his chicken in the pot and two cars in the garage’ – was thus for Bloch also a ‘revolutionary dream’, though it was far from the utopia he sought.91 ‘In America’, Bloch would later claim, ‘millionaires begin washing dishes, while philosophers finish up doing it’, his irony barely concealing a certain contempt for a society which, in his view, mistakenly valued monetary wealth above culture and ideas.92 Unable to speak English, Bloch led an isolated life in the USA, surrounded only by German émigré scholars and financially dependent on Karola as the breadwinner. Bloch’s hopes of securing a position at the Institute for Social Research in exile were thwarted not only by his linguistic shortcomings, however, but also by his political stance during these years. Bloch’s failure to condemn the Moscow show trials, and his insistence that the hope of socialism was in Stalin’s hands, earned him the scorn of his Frankfurt School contemporaries: the Director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer, rejected him as ‘too communist’.93 In a letter from 1942, meanwhile, Bloch disparages the Institute’s ‘Horkheimerism’, and when Leo Lowenthal later recalled that one of the ‘defenders of the Soviet Union’ – he must have meant one of Wittfogel, Grossman, and Bloch – referred to the members of the Institute as ‘the swine on 117th street’, one suspects that it is Bloch to whom he refers.94 Yet Bloch’s isolation was undoubtedly somewhat cultivated: he longed for the language and traditions of his homeland or Heimat. In a speech to the Association of German Writers in Exile in 1939, Bloch claimed that the German language, and therefore also German culture, was under threat from two sides: in exile from English and at home from its fascist distortion.95 In a letter to Adolph Lowe from June 1946, Bloch makes it clear that he regarded himself as continuing in a tradition of German thought that stretched from Kant through the idealists, Marx and on to his contemporaries. ‘That I have the German standpoint,’ he writes, ‘is, for a philosopher, the opposite of misfortune’.96 It is perhaps little wonder, therefore, that Heimat is elevated in The Principle of Hope to the utopian symbol par excellence. 91 92 93 94 95 96

Bloch 1986, p. 35. Zudeick 1987, p. 352. Bloch 1981, p. 136. Cited in Geoghegan 1995, p. 19. Bloch 1985j, pp. 277–300. Bloch 1985r, p. 757.

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Given Bloch’s unease in America, it was a particular stroke of good fortune when in 1949 he was offered a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, in the newly established East German state. Bloch’s work was little known among his new colleagues. Indeed, the Romanist Werner Krauss, who wrote to offer Bloch the position, apparently had to work hard to get two faculties to agree to his invitation.97 Bloch himself initially hesitated in accepting the invitation – after all, this would be his first official position at 63, an age when others were considering retirement. However, keen to advance with his work and return to his homeland, Bloch accepted the post, and in an interview with the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August 1949, declared himself full of enthusiasm for the project of building a socialist utopia on German soil.98 Bloch’s work during his early GDR years demonstrates a certain conformity with the orthodoxy of the time. The essay ‘Partisanship in science and the world’ [Parteilichkeit in Wissenschaft und Welt] from 1949 clearly demonstrates Bloch’s adherence to the Marxist doctrine of partisanship [Parteilichkeit], according to which academic scholarship was obliged to prioritise the history and interests of the oppressed masses above all else.99 This was not only a matter of scholarly or political obligation, however. According to the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology, partisanship in science reflected the objective truth of historical progress according to which the working classes would triumph where they had not already done so. Bloch’s declaration in his 1949 essay, that ‘Marxism claims all progressive tendencies around the globe for itself; the strongest partisanship [in science] is founded in what is most real about the object’, undeniably sees him toe the party line. Meanwhile, it is no coincidence that Bloch’s depiction of seventeenth-century philosopher and jurist Christian Thomasius as a ‘German scholar without misery’ [ein deutscher Gelehrter ohne Misere] in a long essay published in 1953 came shortly after the SED officially decided at its party congress to abandon the Engelsian ‘misery concept’ of German history that had hitherto dominated official Marxist historiography.100 The picture was, however, more complex than these examples might suggest. East German censorship restrictions undoubtedly influenced some of Bloch’s editorial decisions: the published correspondence between Bloch and his editors at the Aufbau-Verlag clearly demonstrate that he was encouraged to massage more references to Stalin into his manuscripts.101 Furthermore, as the 97 98 99 100 101

Cf. Zudeick 1987, p. 184. Cf. Zudeick 1987, pp. 186–7. Bloch 1985j, pp. 330–45. Cf. Bloch 1985f; Bloch 1996. Bloch 2006, pp. 33, 154.

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introduction to the published version of Bloch’s lectures on the history of philosophy, delivered in Leipzig from 1950 to 1956, makes clear, even Bloch’s choice to teach ‘bourgeois’ philosophy in Leipzig was regarded as a political issue in a context in which philosophy itself had become an ideological battleground.102 Bloch’s insistence on the importance of Marxism’s Hegelian legacy, in particular, made him a subversive figure in a context in which Hegelianism was practically a ‘swearword’. Following the publication of his book Subjekt Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel [Subject-Object. Explanations of Hegel] in 1951, a debate erupted that would eventually see him forced to step down from his position.103 With Bloch accused of revisionism by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht, his students were openly harassed, and his publications blocked. Following his address to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, in which he called on the SED government to abandon the Soviet Union’s Stalinist education policy and promote academic freedom, Bloch’s position as a critic of the GDR regime was beyond doubt. In December 1957 he was summoned before a tribunal where his philosophy was denounced as un-Marxist, and he himself was declared unfit to teach. It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Blochs were visiting West Germany in 1961, and they heard the news that a wall had been erected overnight in Berlin, they decided to seek asylum in the Federal Republic. In his inaugural lecture as honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen, Bloch, now 76, admitted that his hopes for the GDR had been ‘disappointed’.104 Unfettered by the constraints of (self-)censorship, in Tübingen Bloch’s critique of the East became more explicit; later he would claim that ‘those who are now jumping over the wall from East to West Berlin are truly making a leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom’.105 Indeed, this new-found freedom allowed Bloch to concentrate more or less undisturbed on his work. In addition to the revision and long delayed publication of Das Materialismusproblem, three new works emerged during this period. The Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie [Tübingen Introduction to Philosophy] (1963) is the definitive document of Bloch’s thinking during his Tübingen period, and encapsulates his mature philosophy in nuce.106 With the appearance of Atheismus im Christentum [Atheism in Christianity] (1968), Bloch’s complicated relationship to the heritage of messianism would be clarified: here, Christianity emerges for 102 103 104 105 106

Cf. Ruth Römer and Burghardt Schmidt’s introduction to Bloch 1985t, p. 7. Bloch 1985h. Bloch 1998, pp. 339–45. Traub and Wieser (eds.) 1975, p. 20. Bloch 1985m.

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Bloch as ‘a form of communism which was not yet ready or able to recognise or understand itself’, as Peter Thompson puts it.107 Meanwhile with Experimentum Mundi, which the by now almost completely blind Bloch revised with significant assistance from Burghart Schmidt, Bloch was finally able to publish the utopian system of categories he had been working on since the 1930s.108 Bloch’s exile from the GDR was not sufficient reason for him to give up on socialism altogether, however. Until the end of his life, he continued to campaign tirelessly for social justice and freedom of speech, and against fascism and war. With long experience as one of the last remaining of the pre-1918 generation, Bloch was active during the student-led unrest of 1968 in Germany, allied with figures like Rudi Dutschke, and with something of a cult profile himself. Just two weeks before he died at home aged 92 on 4 August, 1977, he wrote a letter to the German anti-nuclear lobby which described the neutron bomb as ‘one of the greatest perversions that human beings have ever created’.109 Bloch never lived to see the ‘end of history’, but even if he had, it is unlikely it would have shaken his faith in utopia: in its critical power to shine a light on the deficiencies of the present state of things, and in its ability to inspire us to fight for something better. That a better world is possible, indeed that its possibility inheres in the fabric of reality itself, is the central claim of Bloch’s speculative materialism. We may not know whether we will achieve it, but it is a powerful claim, one that continues, consciously or unconsciously, to motivate every sort of human action. This is why I argue that Bloch’s speculative materialism bears revisiting, both as a product of its own time, and as a lesson for ours. 107 108 109

Bloch 1985n. Cf. Bloch 2009, p. xviii. Bloch 1985o. Zudeick 1987, p. 310.

chapter 1

The Materialism Problem Between 1936 and 1938, Bloch was living in exile in Prague. During that time, he worked on two manuscripts concurrently, neither of which was ever published in its intended format. Nevertheless, there is plentiful textual evidence for both projects in his correspondence. As Bloch wrote to the Deutsche Akademie in New York in early 1938, the first planned book, Aufklärung und rotes Gesicht [Enlightenment and the Red Face], was to be an ‘investigation of the problems and problematic of the irrational’ – in other words, a systematic continuation of the line of enquiry he had been pursuing in Heritage of Our Times, published in 1935.1 The second was Theorie-Praxis des Materialismus, a ‘philosophical foundation of dialectical materialism’, which would include sections on logic, epistemology, the history of materialism, and a system of categories.2 Bloch mentions this text in a letter he wrote to Joachim and Sylvia Schumacher in May 1936. There, he wondered whether, with this new work, he would ‘declare war’ on his erstwhile friend Lukács, with whom he had been publicly quarrelling for some time.3 In September that year, he wrote to Max Horkheimer that the third section had emerged out of an introduction he intended to write to a proposed anthology of writings on ‘non-mechanical materialism’: excerpts from the works of Robinet, Bruno, Avicebron, Averroes.4 A year later, Bloch declared the book ‘complete’ at 900 pages in a letter to Theodor and Gretel Adorno.5 In November 1944, however, and by now in the USA, he told Adolph Lowe he was revising the manuscript, which had something ‘very refreshing’ about it, after several years working on the ‘wish-image subjectivisms’ of The Principle of Hope.6 In his entry on Bloch’s speculative materialism in the Bloch-Wörterbuch, Holz argues that the interval between the publication of The Principle of Hope and Das Materialismusproblem has led to frequent ‘misunderstandings’ of Bloch’s work, in particular the perception of him as an idealist thinker.7 In

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Cunico 2000, p. 454. Ibid. Bloch 1985r, p. 497. Bloch 1985r, p. 676. Bloch 1985r, p. 438. Bloch 1985r, p. 746. Holz 1975, p. 486.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004272873_003

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particular, Holz sees it as having ‘hidden’ the fact that the ‘half revolutionary, half eschatological system of the subjective factor’ on display in The Principle of Hope was underpinned by a ‘fully devised conception of materialism’.8 As if to highlight this very fact, Das Materialismusproblem opens with a quotation from Chapter 18 of The Principle of Hope, which forms a bridge between Bloch’s phenomenology of hope and his ontology of the not-yet: the transition from the realm of necessity into that of freedom only finds land in unenclosed process-matter. Precisely those extremes that have previously been held as far apart as possible: future and nature, anticipation and matter – collide in the due rigor of historical-dialectical materialism. Without matter no basis of (real) anticipation, without (real) anticipation no horizon of matter is ascertainable.9 Yet Bloch far from abandons his emphasis on the question of consciousness in Das Materialismusproblem. Indeed, the eponymous ‘problem’ at the heart of Bloch’s investigation is not, as Holz has claimed, that it ‘must work out a system of categories that does not allow matter itself to become enraptured into transcendence’.10 To be sure, the question of the concept of matter is central to Das Materialismusproblem. However, concepts and categories themselves already imply the existence of consciousness, and indeed, as Bloch tells us, it is primarily the ‘aporia’ of the being-consciousness relation that poses the most challenging and fertile problem for materialist thought.11 Bloch sees this problem closely related to what he calls the ‘antinomy’ of the quantity-quality relation, arguably even as a species of it – after all, consciousness is a qualitative experience that somehow emerges amid a quantity of non-conscious material phenomena.12 Yet since it is only because there is consciousness that these considerations arise at all, this ‘aporia’ occupies a privileged position. Thus it turns out that Bloch’s ‘materialism problem’ is what the philosopher David Chalmers would later, and in quite a different philosophical register from Bloch’s, call the ‘hard problem of consciousness’: it is the question

8 9

10 11 12

Holz 1975, p. 486. Cf. Bloch 1986, p. x; p. 237. Note that here, as elsewhere, I have adapted the translation of Plaice, Plaice, and Knight in the English version of The Principle of Hope. There, ‘zusammenschlagen’ is rendered as ‘chime together’; I have changed it to ‘collide’. I have also chosen ‘rigour’ instead of ‘groundedness’ for ‘Gründlichkeit’. Holz 1975, p. 495. Bloch 1985g, pp. 459–66. Ibid.

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of how minds, with their qualities of experience and freedom of intentionality, can arise in a world that science tells us is governed by deterministic laws.13 Of course, this question has a long history, but it emerged in its modern form in the context of the so-called materialism debate of the mid-nineteenth century. Herbert Schnädelbach has described the intellectual atmosphere in Germany after Hegel’s death in 1831 as a ‘commonplace polemic against romanticidealist natural philosophy’, and indeed this was a period in which a variety of materialisms flourished in philosophy, politics, and natural science alike. As the dominance of idealism waned, and biology began to emancipate itself from natural philosophy, German scientists and critical thinkers began to call traditional ideas about consciousness and free will into question.14 The emergence of the cell theory of life among young German scientists such as Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Theodor Schwann, and Rudolf Virchow, in particular, began to invite materialist explanations of phenomena that had previously been the preserve of either religion or a still theologically inspired natural philosophy.15 Virchow’s proclamation in 1845 that ‘[l]ife is essentially the activity of cells’ provoked profound questions concerning the emergence of life, human consciousness, and free will.16 Empirical science appeared to have proven that life begets cellular life, but if that was the case, how did the first cell come into being? Even if cell theory could explain the body in natural scientific terms, what about the mind? Was that just the product of cellular activity, too? If it was, what did that mean for the idea of free will and responsibility for one’s actions? For a number of ‘scientific’ or ‘mechanical’ materialists, as they would become known, the answers to these last two questions were relatively simple: from the perspective of modern biology, consciousness was nothing more than an accidental product of the brain’s physical processes. There was no free will, and certainly no God. Carl Vogt was a Professor of Zoology at Giessen, who had studied chemistry there with Justus Liebig, a soil scientist whose work profoundly influenced Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.17 Vogt’s experiments with live subjects had convinced him that ‘the seat of consciousness, the will, and thought must be sought only and exclusively in the brain’.18 Yet since he

13 14 15 16 17 18

Chalmers 1996. Schnädelbach 1983, p. 100. Cf. Wittkau-Horgby 1998, pp. 47–76. Virchow 1845, p. 8. Cf. Bellamy Foster 2000. Vogt 1846, p. 322; Vogt 1852, p. 443, Vogt describes how he ‘cut away the mental functions’ of a live pigeon as he ‘cut away its brain piece by piece’.

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believed that ‘[t]houghts stand in the same relation to the brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys’, it was clear that the materialism he espoused left no room for free will.19 Indeed, Vogt claimed that from the perspective of a consistent materialism, organisms are no more than living machines determined by their biology.20 Needless to say, Vogt’s ideas were controversial, not least on account of their implications in the social, political, and spiritual spheres. Yet although mechanical materialism, like Feuerbach’s materialist anthropology and the materialist conception of history of Marx and Engels, had its roots in the Vormärz period leading up 1848, it was only after the revolution that it really provoked controversy. For Vogt, scientific materialism represented the new outlook that would sweep away the outdated traditions of old. In an exchange in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Vogt singled out Rudolf Wagner, an anatomist and physiologist in Göttingen, as the worst kind of representative of the old regime. Wagner had attacked Vogt in the same press earlier that year, claiming that his materialism replaced God with ‘blind, unconscious necessity’. Vogt retorted that anyone who rejected his findings had not fully realised the consequences of modern science for the religious worldview. This did not play well in the restoration atmosphere of post-1849 Germany, however, and Wagner’s response at the 1854 congress of scientists in Göttingen ignited what would become known as the materialism debate.21 Again Wagner attacked materialism on spiritual grounds, claiming that the insight that certain mental processes follow from certain physical ones did not prove or disprove the biblical doctrine of the immaterial soul. ‘There is in the biblical doctrine of the soul’, he argued, ‘not a single point that would contradict any of the principles of modern physiology and natural science’.22 It was not the job of science, he argued, to make pronouncements about the nature of the spirit. The second point on which Wagner attacked Vogt was political in nature. In an impassioned speech to his peers, he pleaded:

19 20 21

22

Vogt 1846, p. 323. Vogt 1852, p. 445. For a selection of texts by authors involved in the debate, cf. Bayertz, Gerhard and Jaeschke (eds.) 2012. The most complete introduction to the materialism debate in English is still Gregory 1977. A more recent, thorough summary can be found in Beiser 2014, pp. 53–132. The chapters on ‘Naturphilosophie, Romanticism and Nationalism’, and especially ‘The Rise of Materialisms and the Reshaping of Religion and Politics’ in Olson 2008 are also helpful. Wagner 1854, p. 30.

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We who are gathered here today, however differently our worldview may be constituted in each one of us, we, who have together seen and felt the turmoil of our nation in its last battles, in which many of us participated, we must ask ourselves what the consequences of our results and our research will be for the education and future of our great people.23 The ‘battles’ to which Wagner referred here were those of the 1848 revolution. Though Wagner himself had not been on the barricades, Vogt had. Already in the mid-1830s, while still a student, Vogt had fled to Switzerland on suspicion of dissent, completing his studies there. Then during the three years he spent in Paris in the 1840s, he became increasingly politicised, spending time in the company of anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Finally, when the March revolution reached Giessen, Vogt abandoned his position as an academic to join the citizens’ army, or Bürgerwehr, and was eventually elected as a deputy to the Frankfurt National Assembly, the democratic parliament established after the revolution. When the Frankfurt Assembly collapsed in 1849, Vogt was among the 158 representatives who fled to Stuttgart, clinging on to the hope of constitutional monarchy until the rump parliament was dissolved by force by Württemberg troops. The subtext of Wagner’s critique is therefore quite clear: if Vogt’s materialism meant that free will is an illusion, how could he and others be held responsible for their actions? Mechanical materialism may have been under attack from more conservative quarters, but Vogt did have allies, among them Jacob Moleschott, a Professor of Medicine in Heidelberg. Feuerbach had been an early influence on Moleschott, who was particularly interested in diet and metabolism. His 1850 work The Doctrine of Nutrition: For the People [Die Lehre der Nahrungsmittel: Für das Volk] made the findings of Moleschott’s research available to a broad public as one of the first works of popular science in Germany.24 Moleschott believed that materialism must do more than merely deny the existence of God and the immaterial soul, but had to offer something in place of these things by making a positive contribution to society. In particular, he was convinced that nutrition was the foundation of good mental and physical health, and the book contained detailed nutrition plans to improve the health of the poor.25 When

23 24 25

Wagner 1855, p. 25. Moleschott 1822. For more on the popularisation of science in nineteenth-century Germany, cf. Andreas Daum 2002. Although Georg Büchner died in 1837, some thirteen years before Moleschott’s work on popular nutrition was published, he too was influenced by the idea that food was a determining factor of physical and social health. In his play Woyzeck, the central character, a poor

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he sent a copy of the book to Feuerbach in 1850, he wrote a highly approving review of it, entitled ‘Science and Revolution’ [‘Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution’]. There, Feuerbach proclaimed that Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and attitudes. The human diet is the basis of human formation and disposition. If you want to improve the people, give them better food instead of exhorting them not to sin. Human beings are what they eat.26 Having previously declared his own philosophy ‘beyond’ the distinction between idealism and materialism, under Moleschott’s influence, Feuerbach now explicitly positioned himself as a materialist. So too did Ludwig Büchner, a doctor and the younger brother of the playwright and revolutionary Georg Büchner. In his 1855 work Force and Matter [Kraft und Stoff ], Büchner argued that since science had shown that matter and force are one, there could be no immaterial soul, which after all would be a force without a material carrier.27 Although he disagreed with Vogt’s claim that thoughts were ‘secretions’ of the brain (reminding the reader that Vogt prefaced this statement by saying he was expressing the idea ‘coarsely’), Büchner nevertheless insisted that the brain is the ‘carrier’ [Träger] of thought.28 Free will was a ‘chimera’ to the extent that humans believe they act in accordance with it, Büchner argued – however, he did not deny it entirely.29 To be sure, he quotes Moleschott approvingly on the matter, who in his book Der Kreislauf des Lebens [The Life Cycle] argued that there is ‘no free will or act of will that would be free from the sum of influences that condition the human being in every moment, and set limits even on the most powerful’.30 However, Büchner argued controversially that just as human beings, like animals, are conditioned by their instinct, both animals and humans alike have the capacity to make decisions, form memories, and put their experience to use in new situations.31

26 27 28 29 30 31

soldier, is driven mad partly by being forced to participate for money in the experiment of an exploitative doctor who restricts his diet to peas. As Richards 2001, p. 68, confirms, like Vogt, Georg Büchner had studied medicine in Giessen, and the character of the Doctor in the play may have been modelled on Liebig, who conducted experiments to measure the influence of diet on the chemical composition of soldiers’ urine. Feuerbach 1967–2007, p. 22. cf. Büchner 1855. Büchner 1855, p. 172. Büchner 1855, p. 232. Büchner 1855, p. 261; cf. von Moleschott 1852, p. 414. Cf. Büchner 1855, pp. 230–40.

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Marx’s biographer Franz Mehring claimed that Kraft und Stoff had ‘whipped up a storm in the literary and scientific worlds’, and indeed it was an unexpected bestseller, so much so that Hermann Langenbeck, a philosophy lecturer in Göttingen, published a short text in 1865 asking whether a ninth edition was really necessary.32 In fact the book would reach 21 editions, with the last published in 1904, and was translated into fifteen languages. Nevertheless, as Langenbeck’s polemic indicates, Büchner’s ideas and mechanical materialism in general had many adversaries. The academic establishment formed one group: Büchner’s right to teach was revoked after the publication of Kraft und Stoff, and Moleschott was threatened with the same by the rector of Heidelberg University after the publication of Der Kreislauf des Lebens in 1852. Neo-Kantian scholars like Langenbeck formed another. With the rise of the neo-Kantian movement from the 1860s onwards, mechanical materialism faced a serious challenge. Neo-Kantians like Otto Liebmann and Friedrich Albert Lange were dismayed with the direction philosophy had taken in the aftermath of Kant’s death. They saw the kinds of ideas put forward by the German idealists, but also the mechanical materialists, as overstepping the limits to knowledge that had been set down by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In 1866, Lange published his History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance, in which he described the mechanical materialists as ‘philosophical dilettantes’ for having ignored the epistemological dimensions of their claims about the nature of matter. A year earlier, Liebmann had made similar objections in his book Kant und die Epigonen [Kant and the Epigones] (1865), in which every chapter ended with the refrain ‘Therefore we must go back to Kant!’33 At the end of the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment dispute between reason and faith at its height, Immanuel Kant had set out to challenge the claims to absolute knowledge made by traditional metaphysics.34 Traditional metaphysics used what Kant called pure or speculative reason to answer theoretical questions with purely rational answers. Questions of the infinity or otherwise of time and space; whether the world is made up of simple parts (atoms); whether everything takes place according to natural laws or whether there is also spontaneity and therefore freedom in nature; and the question of the existence of God or a necessary being – all these things were speculated about by metaphysicians and theologians, even though nobody can ever have any objectively verifiable experience of any of these things. Kant described these questions as ‘antinomies’, which, when confronted with pure reason, 32 33 34

Mehring 1931, p. 200. Cf. Langenbeck 1865. Liebmann 1865. Kant 1998.

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always result in impossible contradictions.35 For example, it is rationally possible to argue both that God does and does not exist, and there is no way of empirically verifying whether or not that is true. Kant believed that it was ‘a customary fate of human reason in speculation to finish its edifice as early as possible and only then to finish investigating whether the ground has been adequately prepared for it’.36 His own investigation set out to enquire into precisely these fundaments, that is, into the nature of human knowledge itself. In an attempt to bridge the gap between Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism, Kant argued that knowledge can only be gained through experience. However, he argued that our experience does not provide knowledge of the world as it is in itself, but only of how it appears to us as a function of our cognitive structure. That is to say that the empirical data we observe in the world conform to certain structures supplied by our reason, such as categories of quantity and quality, possibility and actuality, cause and effect. These things were not ‘real’ for Kant, but rather they are structures of our mental apparatus. When we say we know an object, what we are really saying is that we know the way it appears to us as a phenomenon, not the way it exists in itself as a noumenon. As such, Kant effectively set limits on what can be objectively known rather than merely speculated about. The existence of God, the infinity or otherwise of the universe – these things could still be articles of faith, but until or unless they could be empirically proven, they were not objects of knowledge in the realm of pure reason. In Kant’s own words, he had to ‘deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’; nevertheless, one might argue that Kant’s injunction against traditional metaphysics played a key role in undermining the latter, too.37 Kant defined speculative reason as reason applied ‘beyond the boundaries of experience’.38 The ‘first usefulness’ of his critique of pure reason, he argued, was that it teaches us ‘never to venture’ beyond these boundaries – or at least, if we do, then never to call what we find there knowledge.39 Yet according to

35

36 37 38 39

Cf. Kant, CPR, A405–583/B432–611. Citations of particular sections of text by Kant usually specify the unit referred to (whether by page or by section, §). There is one important exception: references to the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant produced two editions of this work: the first edition (published in 1781) is cited as CPR A, the second, revised edition (published in 1787) as CPR B. Following convention, citations refer to one or both editions by page, but omit ‘p.’ (e.g., CPR A 324/B 380). Where only the A or B page is given, it refers to material absent from the other edition. Kant, CPR, A5/B9. Kant, CPR, BXXX. Kant, CPR, BXXV. Ibid.

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neo-Kantian scholar Liebmann, that was precisely what the mechanical materialists had done. In Kant und die Epigonen, Liebmann claimed that the scientific materialism of his day ‘considers its doctrine [that the world is made only of matter] to be highly plausible, because it rests on matter as the most solid basis that everyone can grasp with their hands’.40 But, Liebman continued, ‘somebody only has to ask “Yes, but what is matter, in fact?” and its [materialism’s] wisdom is at an end’.41 In Liebman’s view, the ‘matter’ to which the mechanical materialists reduced the entire world including consciousness, was nothing but a product of that consciousness itself, an ‘empty, entirely relative concept’ supposed to designate an ‘unknown original ground’.42 In his History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance, Friedrich Albert Lange pushed this objection further still.43 He accused the materialists of philosophical dilettantism, arguing that they had forgotten that even the scientific explanation of reality is subject to the epistemological limits identified by Kant. Lange argued that by making claims about the composition of the world in itself, beyond our possible experience of it, the scientific materialists had overstepped these limits. Thus Lange believed that the ‘consistent materialistic view’, that is, the ‘belief in material, self-existent things’, paradoxically transformed itself into its opposite, that is, ‘into a consistently idealistic view’.44 If ‘matter’ does not exist anywhere in the world empirically, but is rather only a speculative concept, then, so Lange’s argument went, the claim that the world as a whole is made only of matter was a speculative claim of the highest order. The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz was a third figure in the early development of neo-Kantianism. Helmholtz’s experiments in sensory physiology from the 1850s provided empirical evidence for Kant’s claim that our perception does not reflect the external world as it is in itself. In his 1855 address Über das Sehen des Menschen [On Human Sight], Helmholtz described the physiological basis of visual perception, and argued that the eye does not produce a faithful picture of the external world. Helmholtz argued that his observations of the eye applied equally to the other senses.45 ‘Just as it is with the eye’, he argued, ‘so it is too with the other senses; we never perceive objects in the external world directly, we only perceive the effects of these objects on our nervous system’.46 Helmholtz’s conclusions effectively supported Kant’s claim 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Liebmann 1865, p. 32. Liebmann 1865, p. 34. Ibid. Lange 1866; quotations here are from the third edition of Lange 1950 [1877–81]. Lange 1865, p. 223. Helmholtz 2003. Helmholtz 2003, p. 115.

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that all perception of the external world is already invested with human interpretation, and that as such access to, and knowledge of, things in themselves are impossible. It is worth noting that Kant and the neo-Kantians were not the only ones to reject philosophical speculation ‘beyond the bounds of experience’ as illegitimate. Marx and Engels, too, largely followed Kant in this respect. Already in The Holy Family, Marx called speculative or ‘Hegelian construction’ a ‘mystery’, while in The German Ideology he argued that ‘Where speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive science’.47 Indeed, Marx and Engels can be seen to have anticipated the neo-Kantian critique of mechanical materialism when they framed it in terms of dangerous speculation. Already in his Theses on Feuerbach, written in the mid-1840s, Marx claimed that the ‘chief defect of all previous materialism’ was that it conceived of ‘things, reality, sensuousness … only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’.48 That is, Marx believed that materialists such as Feuerbach had neglected the component of human activity in constructing the object world, whether through the spontaneous mental labour of creating concepts to describe it to which Kant had pointed, or, in a still more radical sense, via their physical labour. Although Marx directed his criticism at Feuerbach here, it applied just as much to mechanical materialism, which he would later, in volume I of Capital, describe as the ‘abstract materialism of natural science that excludes history and its process’.49 In both cases, Marx argued that materialism neglected the constitutive role subjectivity plays in constructing our knowledge of reality, and in doing so it strayed into the realm of speculation. In his review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Engels would even more explicitly pre-empt the neo-Kantians’ arguments, when he claimed to ‘find the narrow-minded philistine mode of thinking of the pre-Kantian period reproduced in its most banal form by Büchner and Vogt’.50 Even Moleschott, he argued, as a disciple of Feuerbach, got himself ‘stuck most amusingly at every turn in the most simple categories’.51 The implications of both the Marxian and neo-Kantian critiques were clear: by mistaking the concept of matter for a thing in itself, the scientific materialists had in fact regressed to a mode of metaphysical thinking that neglected Kant’s critical insights. 47 48 49 50 51

Marx 1975a, p. 57; Marx 1975b, p. 37. Marx 1975b, p. 3. Marx 1996, pp. 375–6. Engels 1980, p. 473. Ibid.

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The mechanists also faced opposition from Marx on political grounds. In 1859, Marx entered into a dispute with Vogt that would occupy him for eighteen months.52 The basic thrust of the matter was that Marx suspected Vogt of being a paid agitator of Napoleon Bonaparte after he supported the latter in the Franco-Austrian War of 1859.53 Marx and Vogt exchanged accusations and counter-accusations, not to mention several lawsuits, and at the end of 1860 Marx published the pamphlet Herr Vogt, in which he openly accused Vogt of every kind of treachery and deceit.54 Later, when the French Republican government published papers proving that Vogt had in fact been in the pay of the emperor, Marx’s accusations were confirmed. Büchner fared no better in Marx’s assessment, though in this case it was the theory with which Marx took issue. In May 1867, Marx wrote to Büchner personally, addressing him respectfully as ‘a man of science and of the party’.55 Marx knew that Kraft und Stoff had been translated into French, and, unable to travel to France himself, having twice been ‘expelled’, he was contacting Büchner in search of a French translator for Capital.56 A year later, however, after Büchner sent Marx his writings on Darwin, Marx mocked Büchner’s work in letters to Engels and Kugelmann as simplistic and lacking erudition.57 Meanwhile in 1870, responding to a favourable review of the French translation of Kraft und Stoff by Henri Verlet, Marx wrote to Paul and Laura Lafargue that, in Germany, ‘people would much wonder at Verlet’s appreciation of Büchner. In our country he is only considered, and justly so, as a vulgarisateur’.58 Marx’s characterisation had a far-reaching impact, including on Engels who would dismiss the mechanical materialists in Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888) as ‘vulgarising pedlars’, who had failed to transcend the limits of eighteenth-century French materialism, which was still bounded by a natural science that could only produce certain results in the field of mech52

53 54 55 56 57

58

Seigel 2004, p. 376, has argued that ‘the Vogt episode had a significant impact on Marx’s life’, interrupting his work on economics just after the publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, and leading him to abandon the plan that would have made this text the first instalment of his work on political economy, which was delayed as a result. Cf. McLellan 1973, p. 311. Cf. Marx 1981, pp. 21–329. Marx, letter to Ludwig Büchner, 1 May 1867, in Marx 1992, 367–8, p. 367. Marx, letter to Büchner, p. 368. See letters of Marx to Engels on 14 and 18 November 1868 in Marx and Engels 1988, pp. 158– 9 and 161–2 respectively. See also letter of Engels to Marx on 23 November 1868, op. cit., pp. 167–8, and Marx to Kugelmann, 5 December 1868, op. cit., pp. 173–5. Letter of Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue, 18 April 1870, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 43, p. 486.

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anics.59 ‘All the advances of natural science which had been made in the meantime’, Engels argued – in particular in chemistry and biology as sciences of complex, self-creating systems – had served the mechanical materialists ‘only as fresh evidence against the existence of a world creator’.60 According to Engels, the desire to refute the existence of God had led Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott to reduce human beings to biological machines, rather than recognising them – as even Feuerbach had – as the creators of their own circumstances and fantasies. In his view, the very same ‘limitation’ that had hampered the French materialists – namely its ‘inability to comprehend the world as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development’ (and moreover a development that human beings as conscious beings are partially able to direct) – also now restricted the sophistication of nineteenth-century mechanical materialism.61 The mechanical materialists seem not to have been unduly moved by the criticisms of either Marx and Engels or the neo-Kantians. However, the arguments put forward by physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond threatened their position rather more. With his lecture Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens [On the limits of our knowledge of nature], Du Bois-Reymond launched another round of the materialism debate as vitriolic as that between Vogt and Wagner in the 1850s.62 This time, however, the materialists were on the defensive. The materialists themselves admitted that they could not explain how the physical brain was supposed to produce consciousness. Yet Du Bois-Reymond argued that this was precisely what was needed to uphold the kind of consistent materialist explanation of the world they sought. The fact that in animal experiments the materialists had observed damage to the brain limiting certain mental functions neither proved the nature of the relationship between matter and mind, nor disproved the existence of an immaterial soul. Upon ‘superficial consideration’, Du-Bois Reymond argued, it may ‘seem as if the certain mental processes and systems are comprehensible to us through knowledge of the material processes in the brain’, but this was ultimately a ‘mistake’.63 According to Du Bois-Reymond, there was no provable relationship between ‘the movement of certain atoms in my brain’ and ‘the for me original, undeniable facts, incapable of further definition, “I feel pain, feel desire; I taste something sweet,

59 60 61 62 63

Engels 1990, pp. 353–98, 370–1; cf. footnote 57. Engels 1990, p. 371. Ibid. Du-Bois Reymond 1872. Du-Bois Reymond 1872, p. 26.

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smell roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red”’.64 Although he admitted that a correspondence could be observed between ‘certain internal conditions of mental life’ and external conditions ‘determined by sense impressions’, he claimed that this correspondence tells us nothing about how the one follows from the other.65 As such, Du-Bois Reymond argued that consciousness as such was beyond the limits of scientific knowledge, asserting that ‘we do not know and will not know’ [ignoramus et ignorabimus] how the brain produces conscious, subjective experience.66 In a bid to overcome both the materialists’ approach, which seemed to reduce thought and consciousness to merely illusory epiphenomena, and DuBois Reymond’s equally unsatisfactory compromise, Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist and philosopher, responded by arguing for a scientific ‘monism’ in an explicitly Spinozist vein.67 Monism, Haeckel argued, recognised ‘only one substance in the universe, which is both God and nature at once; body and mind (or matter and energy) are for it inseparably connected’.68 Haeckel’s monistic view of body and mind as two aspects of a single universal substance seemed to the older generation of materialists to overcome the problem of dualist incommensurability raised by Du Bois-Reymond. In a letter to Haeckel from 1875, Büchner claimed that he had only described himself as a materialist because ‘the public at large knew no other word’ for this tendency.69 Now he too saw Haeckel’s ‘monism’ as the appropriate – if perhaps less readily popularisable – term for a consistent natural scientific worldview. A disciple of Darwin as early as the 1860s, Haeckel became the foremost propagator of Darwin’s ideas in Germany, though as Alfred Kelly has shown, from very early on German Darwinism was marshalled in the service of reactionary social forces.70 Whereas the earlier materialists had defended the scientific worldview against a hostile establishment, Haeckel’s ideas found favour amid a more conservative and reactionary milieu. Bismarck’s culture wars against the Catholic Church gave Haeckel the chance to align his anti-clerical scientism with the politics of Prussian nationalism and militarism. Meanwhile,

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Ibid. Ibid. Du-Bois Reymond 1872, p. 34. Haeckel 2016. First published 1899, 2016 edition based on 11th edition, 1919. Haeckel 2016, p. 23. For more on the history and phenomenon of monism, cf. Weir (ed.) 2012. Letter from Ludwig Büchner to Ernst Haeckel, 30 March 1875, in Kockerbeck (ed.) 1999, p. 145. Kelly 1981.

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Haeckel’s own views became increasingly racist and chauvinistic, and on the eve of the First World War he was one of many prepared to use pseudoscientific arguments to advance the agenda of eugenics.71 It was on primarily philosophical rather than political grounds, however, that Engels took aim at Haeckel in the writings that would later be published as Dialectics of Nature (1883).72 He criticised Haeckel’s replacement of ‘mechanical’ with ‘monistic’ materialism, which he argued did nothing to overcome the problem of reductionism. It was modern natural scientists’ general ‘lack of acquaintance with any other philosophy than the most mediocre vulgar philosophy’, Engels argued, which allowed them ‘to use expressions like “mechanical” … without taking into account, or even suspecting, the consequences with which they thereby necessarily burden themselves’.73 One such consequence, Engels pointed out, was to equate all manner of varied, complex phenomena, from heat and light to life and consciousness, with matter understood as ‘crude mechanical motion’.74 Against the ‘theory of the absolute qualitative identity of matter’, Engels argued that ‘[m]atter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction’, and that if ‘natural science directs its efforts to seeking out uniform matter as such …, it would be doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples’.75 Crucially, for Engels, Haeckel was also a mechanist in this sense, since his assertion that modern physiology ‘allows only of the operation of physico-chemical – or in the wider sense, mechanical – forces’ was tantamount to denying the internal differentiation of material nature.76 In Dialectics of Nature, Engels opposed the flat ontology of mechanical and monistic materialisms with a dialectical materialism that sought to understand human history as simultaneously continuous with and yet irreducible to natural history. To be sure, as John Bellamy Foster has acknowledged, Engels’ efforts in this respect have not always been considered successful.77 For instance, although he rhetorically opposes mechanistic monism, Engels himself can be read as espousing such a position when he claims that nature is an ‘eternal cycle’ in which ‘matter remains eternally the same in all its transforma-

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Cf. Richards 2008, p. 231. Engels 1987, pp. 313–590. Engels 1987, p. 532. Engels 1987, p. 332. Engels 1987, pp. 532–3. Cited in Engels 1987, p. 531. Foster 2017.

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tions’.78 It is Engels’ alleged monism here that has caused some commentators to see him as transgressing the critical limits Kant imposed on knowledge, and using Hegelian dialectics to ground a materialist metaphysics that went far beyond anything intended by Marx. Much more will be said in respect of these points in the course of this study, but it is worth pointing out at this juncture that in Dialectics of Nature Engels criticises Haeckel’s ‘bad reproduction’ of the Hegelian ‘identity of thinking and being’, indicating that he subscribed to a critical distinction between thought and being.79 Engels also clearly recognises Kant and Hegel as part of the same tradition of dialectical thinking with which he identifies himself.80 Although he rejected neo-Kantianism’s dogged emphasis on the ‘eternally unknowable thing in itself’, Engels’ insistence on the fact that matter was a ‘concept’ and an ‘abstraction’ evinces that he nevertheless shared a certain scepticism with the latter concerning absolute knowledge.81 Yet Marx and Engels were further united with the neo-Kantians in their ongoing commitment to the idea that a world independent of the mind exists. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels argued that the premises from which their materialist conception of history began were not arbitrary, but ‘real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination’.82 The ‘existence of living human individuals’ could be ‘verified in a purely empirical way’, they claimed.83 Thus although with their theory of labour they aimed to show how the historical activity of human subjects shapes our reality and our knowledge of it, they were far from denying that a mind-independent reality exists. Similarly, even if Lange believed there are limits to knowledge, he was not interested in denying the existence of reality altogether. When praising Hermann von Helmholtz’s physiology of the sense organs, for instance, he claimed that although Helmholtz ‘leads us to the very limits of our knowledge’, he nonetheless ‘betrays to us at least so much of the sphere beyond it as to convince us of its existence’.84 In the wake of neo-Kantianism, however, positivist thinkers such as the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach pushed the logic of Kant’s critical epistemology to

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Engels 1987, p. 335. Engels 1987, p. 549. Engels 1987, pp. 327, 324, 342. Engels 1987, p. 340. Marx and Engels 1975b, p. 31. Ibid. Lange 1866, p. 202.

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breaking point. Mach argued that ‘[w]hat we represent to ourselves behind the appearances exists only in our understanding’, and has the value of an ‘arbitrary and irrelevant … formula’.85 His critique of materialism was highly provocative, resting as it did on the assertion that ‘the world consists only of our sensations’, a claim that seemed to deny even the existence of a reality external to the human mind.86 Although Mach developed his critical empiricism largely in opposition to the materialism of the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth his ideas became extremely popular among Marxists eager to keep abreast of the latest scientific developments. Mach’s work enjoyed its most controversial reception in Russia, particularly in the work of Alexander Bogdanov who, in his book Empiriomonism (1904–6), attempted to combine Mach’s philosophy of science with the materialist conception of history.87 Bogdanov believed that materialist philosophy had become too abstract, and that the empirio-criticism of Mach, Richard Avenarius and others had ‘restored its sense’, namely ‘the physical complexes, how they are given in experience’.88 In his effort to reinvigorate materialism, Bogdanov clearly saw himself as a ‘good Marxist’.89 His stated aim in Empiriomonism was to put the insights of this new science at the service of what he called the ‘labour point of view’.90 He also clearly believed that Mach’s own perspective was limited, and that he had gone beyond it. He claimed he had taken ‘only one’ idea from Mach, namely that ‘concerning the neutrality of elements of experience with respect to the “physical” and the “psychological”, about the dependence of these characteristics only on the connections of experience’.91 Other than that, Bogdanov claimed to have ‘nothing in common’ with Mach. Yet it was precisely the ‘one idea’ that Bogdanov did take from Mach that drew criticism from his chief political opponent within the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, Vladimir Lenin. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin sought to discredit the ‘Russian Machists’ by denouncing their theoretical inclinations as incompatible with a revolutionary politics.92 According to Lenin, Bogdanov’s

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Mach 2014, p. 49. Mach 1914, p. 12. Empiriomonism will appear in an English translation in the Historical Materialism Book Series in December 2019. Cf. also Bogdanov 2016, ch. 6. Cited in Boll 1981, pp. 41–58, 45. Boll 1981, p. 46. Jensen 1978, p. 117. Boll 1981, pp. 45–6. Lenin 1977, p. 52 and passim.

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theory effectively amounted to the claim that material reality is an imaginary product of the senses. By beginning from the psychological standpoint, Lenin argued, Bogadanov’s work was fundamentally at odds with a materialism which, as he put it, ‘in full agreement with natural science, takes matter as primary and regards consciousness, thought and sensation as secondary’.93 To be sure, Lenin agreed that matter was a ‘philosophical category’; nevertheless, it was a category ‘denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations’.94 For what else could produce sensation if not ‘matter acting upon our sense-organs’?95 The Machists’ rejection of these basic tenets of ‘materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular’, Lenin claimed, amounted to nothing less than ‘fideism’ vis-à-vis the existence of the external world.96 Lenin strongly opposed this ‘doctrine that substitutes faith for knowledge’, and insisted that dialectical materialism delivers knowledge of the world and of objective truth.97 Admittedly Lenin’s recognition of matter as a concept went beyond that of the scientific materialists, for whom matter was still a ‘universal material’, as Büchner put it, an abstraction only to the extent that we try to conceive of it as separate from force.98 Ultimately, however, his intervention reverted to a naïve epistemological realism, simply repeating the problems of the ‘vulgar’ materialists whose ideas Lenin opposed almost as vociferously as those of the Machists themselves.99 When Lenin argued, against the Machists, that matter is a ‘philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man’, he explicitly saw himself as continuing in Engels’ footsteps. However, by reformulating the concept of matter to include the whole of ‘objective reality’ Lenin made the same error of which Engels accused the scientific materialists, who, he claimed, ‘leave out of account the qualitative differences of things in lumping them together … under the concept matter’.100 By claiming that material reality is ‘copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them’, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism neglected the role of consciousness in shaping our experience.101

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Lenin 1977, p. 46. Lenin 1977, p. 130. Lenin 1977, p. 23. Lenin 1977, p. 55. Lenin 1977, p. 19. Büchner 1855, p. 6. Lenin 1977, p. 47. Engels 1987, p. 533. Lenin 1977, p. 13.

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If Materialism and Empirio-Criticism failed philosophically, its ideological legacy was nevertheless long-lived. By the mid-1930s, when Bloch was writing Das Materialismusproblem, Lenin’s book had become the chief weapon in a struggle for political power within the Third International in which philosophy was a key battleground. Through what Dieter Wittich has called a process of ‘dogmatisation’, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism became a disciplinary instrument in the development of Marxist orthodoxy within the Comintern, which it remained under Stalin and in the countries of real socialism.102 Criticism of the book was almost impossible in the Soviet Union, and it was systematically used to ‘educate’ ideological and political dissidents. The example of Georg Lukács, the ‘childhood friend’ to whom Bloch dedicated his materialism book, is illustrative. When Lukács published History and Class Consciousness in 1923, its favourable treatment of Hegel was widely considered heretical among the party cadre.103 Critics such as Abram Deborin publicly compared Lukács to Bogdanov, and advised him to read Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a form of ideological ‘recuperation’.104 That the paper Lukács gave to the Communist Party Congress in January 1934 was titled ‘The Importance of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism for the Bolshevisation of the Communist Party’ suggests these disciplinary measures were at least partly effective in encouraging dissenters to toe the party line.105 The influence of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism did not stop there, though. Lenin’s method of denouncing the theories of his political opponents as reactionary was gradually extended paradigmatically to any text deemed ideologically suspect. Time and again thinkers perceived as straying into the territory of ‘bourgeois’ philosophy, especially those who, like Lukács and Bloch, took seriously Marxism’s roots in German idealism, were accused of thought crime. Bloch himself would later be subjected to this process in the GDR. The publication in 1951 of his Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel ignited a debate that would have serious repercussions for Bloch, whose insistence in the book that the potentials of Hegel’s philosophy remained ‘unresolved’ and ‘unrealised’ by Marxism was anathema to Stalinist ideology.106 In 1956, following the Twentieth Party Congress, Bloch criticised Stalinism, calling for a return to freedom of research and thought after the dictator’s death. The price Bloch

102 103 104 105 106

Wittich 1999, pp. 79–103, 89. Lukács 1977, pp. 161–518. Wittich 1999, p. 90. Wittich 1999, p. 91. Cf. Bloch 1985h.

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paid for speaking out was high. A year later, he was brought before a tribunal in the GDR, where he was told that his philosophy stood ‘in opposition to the basic principle of Marxism-Leninism’ and constituted an attempt ‘to smuggle in an anti-Marxist, essentially idealist philosophy under the banner of Marxism’.107 The denunciation echoes almost verbatim Lenin’s dismissal of Bogdanov, whose attempt to unify Machism and Marxism, he claimed, ‘smuggles in idealistic rubbish’.108 When Bloch thus writes in the preface to Das Materialismusproblem that his book attempts to ‘rethink the concept of matter’ from a Marxist perspective, a task he sees as having hardly been attempted ‘despite Lenin’, his comment is doubly barbed.109 For Bloch not only diagnoses the dogmatisation of Marxism already well underway; he also portends a process that, by the time the book was eventually published in 1972, would have led to him leaving the GDR after being denounced as a revisionist by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht and dismissed from his position as Director of Leipzig University’s Philosophical Institute. The dispute within materialism between mechanists and dialecticians would play itself out again in the Communist International.110 By the early 1920s, Soviet philosophers were debating which of these competing conceptions of materialism provided the best philosophical basis for Marxism. Mechanists such as Timianski, Axelrod, and Stepanov – many of them natural scientists themselves – claimed that the natural scientific explanation of the world was ultimately the correct one, and that dialectical reasoning was valid only when applied to the results of empirical scientific enquiry. The mechanists maintained that the dialectical conception of nature, properly understood, was the mechanical conception. The mechanists defended the natural scientific method against those who, in their eyes, appealed to Hegelian dialectics for a priori answers to problems concerning nature and society with which dialectical reasoning was not qualified to deal. Another group around Deborin argued that the mechanists failed to recognise that Marx and Engels had refashioned dialectics in a materialist mould. The dialecticians or Deborinists upheld the validity of Engels’ dialectical approach to nature, and accused the mechanists of positing a rigid, lifeless account of the natural world that did not correspond to the observation of

107 108 109 110

Cf. Bloch 1991a, pp. 60–78. Lenin 1908, p. 90. Bloch 1985g, p. 15. Cf. Sheehan 1985, and Joravsky 2009 [1961] for more on these debates.

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reality. Not only could mechanism not account for the complexity of biological life, consciousness and so on; it was also inadequate when faced with new developments in physics, such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The debate between mechanists and dialecticians came to a head in 1929 at the meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of the Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions, where the leading figures from both sides of the debate appeared. Deborin gave the leading report, and a resolution was passed condemning mechanism, whose proponents were charged with trying to substitute a vulgar evolutionism for dialectics, and positivism for dialectical materialism. The Deborinist victory was short-lived, however. After all, the debate between mechanists and dialecticians was taking place against the backdrop of the creeping Stalinisation of the Comintern, and the following year the Party intervened, creating what Kołakowski has called a ‘dialectical synthesis of both forms of ignorance’.111 Certainly, as Kołakoswki suggests, both schools of thought defended over-simplified and somewhat dogmatic positions. However, the ontology of mechanism, which insisted on the fundamental causal necessity of all laws, including historical ones, was particularly useful to Stalin in this second year of the Comintern’s Third Period, which saw Communist Parties around the world forced to adopt an uncompromising ultra-left line, applying rigid and often brutal party discipline. In 1930, Stalin proclaimed that although Deborinists had made valid criticisms of mechanism, they had gone too far in advocating for what he now called a form of ‘menshevising idealism’.112 Deborin’s philosophy was declared to be of little practical use for advancing Stalin’s Five Year Plan, and the ontological validity of mechanism was affirmed. However, the principles of Engels’ dialectics of nature on which the Deborinists had placed so much emphasis was also paradoxically affirmed, and this hybrid ontology was officially adopted in Stalin’s codification of dialectical materialism in his History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course, which became official Communist dogma after 1938.113 By the time Bloch was writing Das Materialismusproblem, the politics of the Third Period had given way to the policy of popular frontism as the Nazi

111 112

113

Kołakowski 2005, p. 839. Cited in Todes and Krementsov 2010, pp. 340–67, 345. Deborin and his philosophical mentor Plekhanov, the founding father of dialectical materialism under the Second International, had been mensheviks prior to the October Revolution. Stalin 1939.

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threat grew, but political flexibility was not reflected in the intellectual sphere. Philosophical debate within the Comintern was effectively prohibited under Stalinism. Nevertheless, this was the debate into which Bloch’s materialism book intended to intervene, as an attempt to furnish a ‘philosophical foundation’ for a non-dogmatic dialectical materialism.114 The critical stance Bloch took towards the dogmatisation of Soviet philosophy is clear from his remark in the preface to Das Materialismusproblem that the Comintern had largely abandoned the theoretical development of materialism to ‘the most undialectical’ of fates, ‘namely solidification’.115 Against this ‘solidification’, which included the resolute rejection of philosophical idealism in all its forms, Bloch insisted on the need to draw on the full resources of the history of philosophy. The task of rethinking materialism must be begun again and again, he argued, and always by ‘inviting all kinds of earlier voices’, including ‘idealist’ thinkers from Plato and Avicenna to Kant and Hegel.116 For although, according to Bloch, most thinkers in the history of philosophy were ‘not yet materialists’, he insisted that one could ‘learn a lot about matter’ from idealist thinkers for whom it was ‘a problem and not a self-evident fact’, as he implies it had become for the orthodox Marxism of his time.117 If the mechanical materialism of the nineteenth century was ostensibly Bloch’s target in Das Materialismusproblem, in light of the debate that had taken place within the Comintern in the 1920s, his critique of mechanism must be read as a thinly veiled reference to the mechanist ontology now enshrined in Stalinist orthodoxy. Thus on the one hand Bloch aligns himself with Engels by rejecting vulgar materialism, claiming in the preface that materialism’s good name had been tainted by the ‘smell of old clothes’ associated with the author of Kraft und Stoff (1855).118 He approvingly – though incorrectly – cites Engels, whom he claims described the rise of mechanical materialism in Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy as ‘philosophy in the moment of its deepest humiliation’.119 By asserting that, for Engels, materialism was ‘not

114 115 116 117 118 119

Bloch 1985g, p. 15. Bloch 1985g, p. 17. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 18. Bloch 1985g, p. 15; cf. Büchner 1855. Bloch 1985g, p. 16; cf. Engels 1990, p. 397, where Engels refers to the period following the 1848, when ‘educated Germany lost the great aptitude for theory which had been the glory of Germany in the days of its deepest political humiliation’. It remains unclear from the context of Engels’ essay whether he is referring specifically to scientific materialists like Büchner at this juncture. To be sure, Engels opposed the ‘shallow, vulgarized form in which

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an alibi that releases one from the problems it poses with the enthusiasm of the mechanistic worldview’, Bloch reminds the reader that the confused ontology of Stalinism ran counter to Engels’ clear anti-mechanist position.120 For Bloch, ‘historical-dialectical materialism’ operates ‘without mechanism, rather by sublating it most vitally’.121 By emphasising that attempts among German Social Democrats to rethink materialism had also failed to overcome what he refers to as Büchner’s ‘force and matter nonsense’ [Kraft- und Stoffhuberei], Bloch implicitly associates the philosophical stagnation of the Third International with the failed metaphysics of the Second.122

120 121 122

the materialism of the eighteenth century continues to exist today in the heads of naturalists and doctors, the form on which it was preached on their tours in the fifties by Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott’ (p. 369). The reference to touring here is relevant. Kockerbeck 1999, p. 41, and Kreuter 1995, p. 204, attest to the fact that Büchner did undertake a series of lecture tours, though somewhat later than Engels suggests: Büchner went first to the United States in 1873/1874, then afterwards toured around Germany. Meanwhile, Michler 2001, p. 494, confirms that Vogt gave a series of lectures in Vienna and Graz during the period of the first Vatican Council, 1869–70. What this reminds us is that Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott were among the early popularisers of scientific ideas in Germany, and indeed as Kelly 1981, p. 17, affirms, ‘[i]n the 1850s, popular science was practically synonymous with a radical, materialistic, antireligious Weltanschauung’. Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott were all either dismissed or resigned from their positions as a result of their pursuit of scientific truth in defiance of the illiberal restoration regime. As such, it is difficult to associate them with the representatives of ‘[o]fficial German natural science’ to whom Engels later refers (p. 397). This makes sense, since he declares that official science in Germany largely ‘kept abreast of the times’ after 1848, and as we have seen, he saw the scientific materialists as harking back to eighteenth-century naturalism. His characterisation of scientific materialism as ‘shallow’, and the accusation of vanity and self-importance hinted at in his reference to the tours of its representatives would seem to fit better with his image of an ‘obsessive concern for career and income’ among postrevolutionary scientists (Ibid.). However, yet again, given what we know about the scientific materialists, the idea that they had ‘become the undisguised ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the existing state – but at a time when both stand in open antagonism to the working class’ is too simple. Engels may have seen it this way – and in the end it remains ambiguous whether the scientific materialists are indeed the object of his critique at this point in the text – but neither the materialists themselves nor the state did. While Vogt was a deputy in the Frankfurt National Assembly, he accused his fellow middle-class members of treating the working classes as the aristocracy had once treated them (cf. Horst Grünert 1974, p. 130). Meanwhile the subtitle of his Physiological Letters [Physiologische Briefe] (1854) was ‘for the educated of all classes’. If one takes Prussian literacy rates as roughly indicative for the Empire as a whole, then in 1850 around 85 percent of German-speakers would potentially have had sufficient education to read Vogt’s text. Bloch 1985g, p. 16. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 15.

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The materialism problem with which Bloch grappled during the 1930s thus had three main components: one ontological, one epistemological, and one political. The ontological question the materialist philosopher must answer is: how can we explain the existence of consciousness in a world that natural science tells us is material and law-governed, without appealing to the existence of God? This is a politically important question, since consciousness is associated with freedom of thought and action. However, even in its natural scientific aspect it also rests on a metaphysical premise about the nature of the world in itself, which is open to epistemological challenge. How can we know that our understanding of the world as ‘material’ (whether we mean that mechanically or in some more dynamic sense) corresponds with reality? Bloch’s philosophy addresses all three components of this problem, and although they cannot be neatly separated, in what follows his speculative solution to the materialism problem is reconstructed piece by piece.

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Ontology The world process itself is a utopian function, and the matter of objective possibility is its substance Ernst Bloch

∵ Bloch’s fascination with the concept of matter began very early, when he was still at school. Aged just thirteen, the young Bloch wrote a philosophical treatise on ‘The Cosmos in the Light of Atheism’ [‘Der Kosmos im Lichte des Atheismus’].1 It was a subject he knew something about, having recently declared – at his own bar mizvah, no less – that he was an atheist. For Bloch, atheism and materialism went hand in hand. In the atheism essay, he wrote that ‘Matter is the mother of everything existing. It alone has brought forth everything, and no supernatural being played a role’.2 Much later Bloch would admit that his younger self had connected atheism and the concept of matter in a much more fundamental way, too. When declaring his atheism to the rabbi, he claimed, he had pronounced the central diphthong in the German ‘Atheist’ as one sound, so that it had only two syllables instead of three. The German word for matter, ‘Materie’, got the same treatment: Bloch pronounced it tri-syllabically as ‘Mater-ie’, instead of with four syllables, ‘Ma-ter-i-e’.3 What is striking about Bloch’s reflections on matter in this early essay is just how much they seem to prefigure his later theory, though of course in a much simplified form. In Das Materialismusproblem, Bloch claims that the German word ‘Materie’ is related to Latin ‘mater’, meaning mother.4 In another essay ‘On Force and its Essence’ [‘Über die Kraft und ihr Wesen’], written when Bloch was 17, he begins to grapple with the issue that will continue to vex him in the 1930s, namely the inadequacy of a purely mechanical account of the material world.

1 2 3 4

Cf. Zudeick 1987, p. 18. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 17.

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‘The definition of movement as the cause of force’, the teenage Bloch argues, ‘is just as impertinently meaningless as the definition of the human being as the cause of its own shadow’.5 Perhaps driven by his own impertinence, Bloch felt emboldened to send the essay off to the Frankfurter Zeitung, but was prohibited from doing so by the school headmaster. Later, when he sent it to the historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband, the latter is supposed to have replied that with a few additions and amendments, Bloch could have been awarded a doctorate on the basis of the text.6 Bloch made more than a few amendments and additions to his ideas in Das Materialismusproblem; nevertheless, some key threads of his early thinking remain intact. Bloch tries to develop a theory that, ‘like natural science’, as he put it, ‘not only dissolves all matter and elements into energy’, but also ‘interprets the thing in itself as a general energetic will’, as what Bloch called ‘objective fantasy’.7 The ‘essence of force cannot be calculated’, Bloch argued against the mechanists and positivists, but only ‘experienced in one’s own flesh’.8 He concludes that the ‘essence of the world is the impulse and power to formation; to the opened secret of life in every place’.9 Here we find in nuce the concepts of entelechy and the utopian impulse in matter that Bloch would later oppose to the mechanical materialism he saw as having invaded Marxism. The early emphasis on fantasy and embodied life remains relevant for the mature Bloch, who in Das Materialismusproblem effectively sought to explain the emergence and existence of consciousness from a philosophical materialist perspective. As we have seen, this was as much a question of political freedom in the Soviet context as it was of metaphysical interest. This chapter explores Bloch’s speculative materialism as an ontological account of reality that takes the existence of human consciousness as its starting point. Bloch draws on idealist and romantic philosophies of nature to refute a reductive mechanism that he saw as entailing politically problematic consequences.

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Nature contra Mechanism

Admittedly, Bloch admired the mechanical materialists’ effort to provide an explanation of the world, and of consciousness as part of that world, ‘out of 5 6 7 8 9

Zudeick 1987, p. 19. Ibid. Zudeick 1987, p. 20. Ibid. Ibid.

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itself’.10 ‘Certainly’, he argues, ‘even a most banalised mechanism could let fall the scales of transcendence from our eyes’.11 He shared the mechanists’ rejection of divine or spiritual explanations for natural phenomena, and generally subscribed to the natural scientific claim that the world as a whole is material. Bloch rejected what he saw as Haeckel’s ‘debased’ version of materialist monism; however, he also believed that the question of how consciousness arises amid unconscious being was ‘artificially exaggerated’ by ‘the reduction to matter as mere stuff’.12 According to Bloch, the fact that consciousness ‘emerges from being as conscious being’ is only possible if matter is precisely not ‘the external katexochen’ as it was for the mechanical materialists.13 In order for materialism to make sense as a philosophical position, Bloch thought, the concept of matter on which it is based needed to be able to account for the existence of mind as the determinate negation of material mechanism. In Das Materialismusproblem, then, Bloch developed an emergentist concept of matter as containing the possibility of ‘everything later external within it’ – including consciousness and freedom. In this endeavour he drew heavily on Aristotle, though not primarily on the latter’s concept of matter, which in important ways still resembled that of mechanism. For Aristotle, matter was inert and passive, akin to ‘simple wax’: it had no internal agency or power of its own, and relied on the ‘stamp of form’ being pressed on it from without, whether by God or by the human hand.14 The examples Aristotle uses in the Metaphysics are instructive: whether the particular object in question is a house, a statue, or a bronze sphere, matter must always be given form by an external agent.15 The problem with this view from a post-theological perspective is that the agency and dynamism scientists observe in the material world must be understood to inhere in nature itself, which constantly creates and reproduces its own forms without the need for intervention from outside. Consciousness, too, is just such a form, and Bloch saw the fact that it has emerged amid previously unconscious matter as evidence of its prior possibility at the real, material level. ‘Matter’ for him thus became a name with which to conceptualise the

10 11 12 13 14 15

Bloch 1985g, p. 128. Bloch 1985g, p. 17. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 461. Bloch 1985g, p. 141. Aristotle 1998. Book Z is particularly relevant to this question. In this respect I have found David Bostock’s translation in Aristotle 1994, as well as Bechler 1995, helpful resources.

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‘substrate’ of this ‘objectively real possibility’.16 Bloch refunctioned Aristotle’s modal categories of possibility and actuality in order to help him flesh out his theory. Aristotle’s category of possibility on which Bloch draws has two components: on the one hand it is dynamei on, or ‘What-Is-in-possibility’, which Bloch describes in The Principle of Hope as the ‘real substratum of possibility in the dialectical process’.17 This is the subjective factor in matter, an unconscious yet active driving force that generates, produces, and creates. On the other hand, however, his matter is kata to dynaton or ‘What-Is-according-to possibility, i.e. that which is defined in terms of conditions by what is in each case capable of appearing historically’.18 This corresponds to the limits or conditions matter creates for itself in the process of its self-realisation. Bloch’s dialectical concept of matter thus mapped onto the distinction, common since the Middle Ages, between natura naturans and natura naturata. This terminology entered into medieval scholastic philosophy via Duns Scotus’ translations of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, and was designed to clarify the relationship between God the creator and the natural world as his creation.19 It was taken up by figures such as Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, both of whom likened natura naturans to the principle of divine activity in nature, whereas natura naturata was the product of this activity. For Bloch, Avicebron (Solomon ibn Gabriel), Avicenna and Averroes, Aquinas, and Scotus all conceive of matter as the ‘womb of forms’, an idea he himself takes over.20 Tracing the etymology of the word ‘matter’ to the Latin ‘mater’, ‘mother’, Bloch therefore described matter as ‘the self-bearing womb’ from which all phenomena arise.21 It was Giordano Bruno, however, who first articulated this idea explicitly in his 1584 work De la causa, principio et Uno.22 There, Bruno argued that all natural forms emerge from the womb of matter – dal seno della materia – and he claimed that productive nature was God himself: ‘Natura enim … est Deus ipse’.23 Bloch clearly valued Bruno’s vision of a matter which ‘strives alone towards formation, without cause from any principle of form or purpose

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Bloch 1985g, p. 469. Bloch 1986, p. 1371. Ibid. Cf. Bloch 1985g, pp. 153–64. Bloch 1985g, p. 164. Zeilinger 2006, p. 77, notes that Bloch conflates Avicenna and Averroes as per the tradition common at that time. Bloch 1985g, p. 17. Cf. Bruno 1998. Cf. Beierwaltes, ‘Einleitung’, in Bruno 1993, p. xxiii.

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outside it’.24 With Bruno’s vision of nature, he claims, ‘pantheism was finally broken, and matter, not some separate world soul or world spirit, gave up its substance to this pantheism’.25 Nevertheless, Bloch criticises the persistence of ‘world piety’ [Weltfrömmigkeit] in Bruno’s theory, which as he saw it merely transferred the theological idea of the world as eternally unchanging or predetermined into a new, material-pantheistic framework. Bloch argues that in Bruno’s vision, ‘everything that can be is already there in the universe of matter’.26 For Bloch, the notion of material possibility, which he saw as necessary for explaining the emergence of life and consciousness out of unconscious matter, was absent from Bruno’s theory. Spinoza’s reformulation of the natura naturans-natura naturata relationship pushed Bruno’s equation of God and nature to its logical conclusion. In the Ethics, Spinoza redefines natura naturans explicitly as ‘that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, or those attributes of substance which express eternal and infinite essence … that is to say, God in so far as He is considered a free cause’.27 Natura naturata, meanwhile, he understood as ‘everything which follows from the necessity of God’s nature’ or from ‘the necessity of each one of God’s attributes, or all the modes of God’s attributes’.28 Seen in the light of his view of God as radically immanent within nature, however – expressed in the formula Deus sive natura, ‘God or nature’ – these propositions are invited to be read as applying to nature just as much as to God. With Spinoza, then, natura naturans acquired the sense of the self-causing activity of nature, and natura naturata the product of this activity. Bloch deeply appreciated the ‘view of the world completely free of transcendence’ that he saw inaugurated by Bruno and Spinoza, although he clearly took more inspiration from Bruno’s vision of matter as a ‘bearing mother’ than from Spinoza’s conception of it as mathematisable ‘clarity katexochen, as crystal God’.29 In contrast to the ‘teleological power of nature’ that Bloch saw in Bruno, for him ‘Spinoza’s natura naturans [was] one of equanimity and of purposeless mathematical redundancies’. Bruno ‘still knows in his maximal universe its opposite, so-called minima or monads, as the smallest mirror of the all; Spinoza, on the other hand, turns the world into an all-one without any elementary or individual remainder’.30 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Bloch 1985g, p. 171. Bloch 1985g, p. 172. Ibid. Spinoza 2006, p. 20. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, pp. 178–9. Bloch 1985g, p. 178.

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The ‘lasting truth of Spinozism’, Bloch argues, was the ‘introduction of the previously divinely hypostatized powers of formation into matter’.31 Bloch insists that both thinkers emphasised the ‘being of matter in motion’ as that of ‘life, not death’.32 However, as he sees it, ‘the proper concerns of the human have no place in the cosmos’ in either thinker’s system.33 For both, ‘deus sive natura is at rest and complete within itself’; only through the reception of Spinoza by figures such as Goethe and Schelling would this ‘immanently ruling matter’ cease to be understood ‘statically’, or as an ‘astral myth’, and begin to be grasped as a productive process.34 Indeed, after the pantheism controversy that erupted between Friedrich Jacobi and Gotthold Lessing over the consequences of Spinoza’s philosophy for the traditional Christian worldview, the terms natura naturans and natura naturata disappear from the German-language debate for some years. Kant does not use them, nor does Fichte. Only with Schelling do they reappear as constituents of his renewed interest in the philosophy of nature. In many ways, Schelling’s philosophy of nature can be seen as an attempt to overcome some of the problems raised by the confrontation between Spinoza’s philosophy and Kant’s.35 For Schelling, writing in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), the first in his trilogy of works on nature philosophy (followed by On the World Soul (1798) and First Outline of a System of a Philosophy of Nature (1799)), Spinoza’s system was ‘the first bold outline of a creative imagination’, establishing as it did a non-dualistic understanding of the world that increasingly seemed to be supported by the findings of natural science.36 The problem Schelling perceived with both Spinoza’s system, however, and to some extent 31 32 33 34 35

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Bloch 1985g, p. 179. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. More precisely, it is an attempt to reconcile aspects of Spinozism with problems issuing from Kant’s philosophy that Johann Gottfried Fichte had yet failed to solve. For more on this question, see Nassar 2014, chs. 9 and 10. Schelling 1988, p. 15; 2004. A full English translation of Schelling’s Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus [On the World Soul, a Hypothesis of Higher Physics on the Explanation of the General Organism] has never been published. However, Iain Hamilton Grant has published an excerpt and introduction in Mackay (ed.) 2010, pp. 58–95. Although Schelling’s romantic nature philosophy has sometimes been considered as at odds with the natural scientific view of nature that was becoming dominant at the time, exemplified in Newton’s work, in fact Schelling was deeply influenced by Newton and findings in contemporary natural science. In the Ideas, Schelling argues that, through the discovery of the laws of heat and light, the Newtonian physics of his day had ‘contributed more than most other sciences to extending the limits of human knowledge’ (p. 68).

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also the natural science of his day, was that it seemed to advocate a purely mechanistic understanding of nature that Schelling thought was insufficient to describe the dynamism clearly visible in life processes, up to and including human consciousness and creativity. Meanwhile, although in the 1780s Kant had put forward powerful arguments explaining how human consciousness and freedom could co-exist with natural laws, he had done so at the expense of reintroducing a problematic dualism that made it difficult to understand how knowledge of an external world was possible at all. Schelling wanted the best of both worlds: to understand nature as a living whole, and human consciousness and freedom as part of that whole. ‘To philosophize about nature’, he writes in the First Outline, ‘is to heave it out of the dead mechanism to which it seems predisposed, to quicken it with freedom and to set it into its own free development’.37 In order to achieve this, Schelling returned to Spinoza’s dialectical pair natura naturata and natura naturans, which he reconceptualised as nature in its subjective and objective modes. For Schelling, natura naturans, or nature in its subjective aspect, was a kind of subject that is in a constant process of self-generation and inhibition. He describes this natural productivity as an ‘invisible medium’ that ‘permeates every organism and binds them to one another’.38 He believed that nature’s subjective activity gives rise to higher and higher forms, up to and including human consciousness, art and technology, which differ in their character as products, but are connected via the active force that produces them. Since this is nature’s free activity – it is not the result of any external cause – Schelling was able to argue in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Freiheitsschrift) that human freedom has its ground in the more originary freedom of nature.39 However, since this ‘ground’ is in fact not a concrete, tangible, material thing, but rather a process, Schelling described it as the ‘nonground’ [Ungrund] of freedom in nature.40 Schelling conceived of the primordial ground of nature in which subject and object were identical as having been ruptured by ‘nature as subject’ objectifying itself in an effort to become free.41 ‘Nature must originally be an object to itself’, he argues; and further, ‘this change of the pure subject into an object to itself is unthinkable without an original diremption in Nature itself’.42 Schelling claimed that the prior acceptance of this

37 38 39 40 41 42

Schelling 2004, p. 14. Schelling 2014, p. 52. Cf. Schelling 2006. Schelling 2006, p. 68. Schelling 2004, p. 17; 204; 211. Schelling 2004, p. 205.

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originary diremption [Entzweiung] is the prerequisite not only for knowledge of nature – knowledge implying a non-identical relation between the knower and the thing known – but for freedom. The rupture in the primordial ground of existence, according to Schelling, is the non-ground from which human consciousness and freedom emerge. As for objectified nature, or natura naturata, Schelling understood this as the products of nature’s subjective activity. Nature’s products – whether individual beings and objects, or more general forms and species – were for Schelling ‘points of inhibition’ that represented ‘a determinate sphere which nature always fills anew, and into which the stream of its force incessantly gushes’.43 Schelling understood matter as one such product. To be sure, matter for Schelling was dynamic to the extent that he did not see the products of nature as static and unchanging objects. Because Schelling believed that nature’s productivity is always in excess of the products it brings forth, ‘no product in Nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of Nature entire’.44 Indeed, he likens natural products to whirlpools that are the temporary result of the interplay of opposing forces. Admittedly, matter as such does seem to occupy a central place in Schelling’s nature philosophy to the extent that it is the ‘general seed-corn of the universe, in which is hidden everything that unfolds in later developments’.45 However, it is not the source or agent of natural productivity itself, but rather an ‘effect, albeit indirect and mediate only, of the eternal dichotomizing into subject and object, and of the fashioning of its infinite unity into finitude and multiplicity’.46 Importantly, Schelling insists that this process, this ‘fashioning in eternity contains nothing of the corporeality or materiality of the matter that appears’, and as Iain Hamilton Grant has noted, in On the World Soul (1798), Schelling makes it clear that there is no ‘specifically vital matter or vital force’.47 Rather, nature as a whole is a play of forces of generation and inhibition. In other words, in the context of Schelling’s nature philosophy, matter is part of a dynamic conception of nature, but is not identical with this dynamism itself. Bloch undeniably found much inspiration in romantic and idealist nature philosophy, despite what he describes as the ‘reactionary’ tendency among some thinkers (Fichte, Schlegel) of the restoration period to try to explain

43 44 45 46 47

Schelling 2004, p. 18. Schelling 2004, p. xxix. Schelling 1988, p. 179. Ibid. Grant 2010, p. 62.

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away ‘sensible matter’ as ‘completely constructed by the subject’.48 As ‘startling’ as it may have been, it was nevertheless in this context that Bloch claimed an ‘unparalleled’ vision of the world as ‘saturated with concretion’ emerged as ‘exactly the opposite’ of the mechanical materialism dominant during the Enlightenment.49 The historicist worldview that emerged in post-1789 Europe opened up a view of nature as ‘the way out of mere quantitative categories of calculation’.50 In this context, a qualitative understanding of matter emerged that Bloch believed was vastly more capable of accounting for the place of human consciousness, will, and creativity in the world than the mechanical view. As such, Bloch claimed that ‘[n]ot only materialist dialectics, also dialectical materialism has part of its shell in German speculative philosophy’, a fact he saw Engels as having recognised ‘especially boldly’ in his Dialectics of Nature.51 In Schelling’s hands, in particular, Bloch believed that nature had ‘blossomed into a furiously fraught journey of war and mist on the way to the light, to the eye-opening of human consciousness’, and his own conception of matter undeniably draws much from Schelling’s view of nature.52 Bloch, too, saw a sharp distinction between matter and mind as ultimately unhelpful, preferring instead a dialectical understanding of the relationship between subjective and objective aspects of a complex, dynamic natural whole. Given the fact of consciousness within a world known to pre-exist it, Bloch followed Schelling in positing the primacy of the genetic question ‘how does the object’ – that is, non-conscious matter – ‘come to the subject?’ over the transcendental question ‘how does the subject come to the object?’53 For Bloch as for Schelling, the answer lay in appreciating the generative power of material nature. In Das Materialismusproblem, Bloch argues that Schelling posits the subject of nature (unconscious intelligence, natura naturans) as creator of knowledge, producer of nature, resurrection of history all at once. The subject and origin of matter is the unrest striving toward being-something, being-object; the subject of the open, processually finished matter is the rest of identity of subject and object.54

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Bloch 1985g, p. 212. Bloch 1985g, p. 213. Bloch 1985g, p. 212. Bloch 1985g, p. 214. Bloch 1985g, p. 213. Bloch 1985g, p. 219. Bloch 1985g, p. 223.

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And indeed, Bloch’s process ontology clearly bears the trace of the Schellingian idea of ‘unrest’ as the factor driving the material process. In Bloch’s speculative materialism, the origin of being is a desiring absence from which something emerges, but which is nonetheless preserved in the fabric of being as an original absence. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch describes this original impulse as the Not with which everything starts up and begins, around which every Something is still built … The Not is lack of Something and also escape from this lack: thus it is a driving towards what is missing.55 Key to Bloch’s speculative materialism is thus the concept of ontological incompleteness: the material world is utopian in that it is literally not yet ‘there’ or complete, but is rather in a process of desire-driven becoming.

2

Matter as the Subject of Nature

It is this desirous aspect of the world process that Bloch describes as the ‘subjective factor’ in matter.56 Yet although Bloch explicitly refers to a ‘self of the material’, he did not believe that matter is ‘alive’, nor are life, consciousness and thought simply contained pre-formed within it.57 Like Schelling’s ‘subject of nature’, Bloch’s concept of matter is an ‘unconscious intelligence’, an impersonal ‘agent’, which tends dynamically and energetically towards the actualisation of possibilities latent in its capacity.58 Bloch thus posited a certain transitivity between the subsistence of this material lack and the structure of human subjectivity, claiming that the driving absence at the core of matter is preserved in the human unconscious as the ‘darkness of the lived moment’.59 Bloch therefore saw no rigid discontinuity between the realm of nature and that of the human being, since he understood them as bound by the same material force

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Bloch 1986, p. 307. Paul Ackermann’s line from Bertolt Brecht’s play The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny resounds clearly here. ‘Something’s missing’, Ackermann insists while his friends celebrate life in the capital of pleasure where work has been abolished and money can buy all the fun imaginable. Just as Ackermann’s phantom pain drives him on in Brecht’s play, what drives the dialectical process of matter’s self-realisation in Bloch’s philosophy is also a kind of lack, which Slavoj Žižek (2012, pp. 246, 283, 740) would later describe as the ‘ontological incompleteness of reality itself’. Bloch 1985g, pp. 470–2. Bloch 1985g, p. 470. Bloch 1985g, p. 468. Bloch 1985g, p. 465.

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of self-realisation. Hence why Bloch was able, as Holz has pointed out, to conceive of the species history of the human being as part of natural history at a qualitatively new, higher level.60 There are some significant differences between Bloch’s speculative materialist ontology and Schelling’s nature philosophy, however, which suggest a more nuanced picture than Habermas’ characterisation of him as simply a kind of Marxist Schelling. For one thing, whereas for Schelling matter is the outcome of the dialectical activity of nature in its productive aspect – in other words, it is a product of nature, even if he talks about it in places as having its own generative powers – Bloch gives the name matter to the dialectical process of self-realisation and inhibition. As Bloch explains, for Schelling, neither the force of attraction or repulsion at work in nature could produce matter alone: ‘Only both together create a force field effect that fills space and time; only the synthesis of both [attraction and repulsion] creates matter’ for Schelling.61 For Bloch, on the other hand, matter is not the result of this play of forces; rather it is the play of forces itself. Bloch’s matter is Aristotelian dynamei on, being-in-possibility, the ‘creative, fertile character … of matter’, which constitutes the element of ‘unachieved actuality’ latent within material forms; and at the same time it is kata to dynaton, being-according-to-possibility, which ‘has a limiting effect on the full realization of form, which can only be realized according to the measure of the possible’.62 For Schelling, there is unity at the level of productivity as natura naturans, and difference at the level of product as natura naturata, but crucially, matter itself is located at this level, so is associated above all with the effect of differentiation and inhibition as it had traditionally been in idealist philosophy.63 For Bloch, however, both unity and difference are aspects of matter itself, which now occupies the position of the natural subject. What-is-according-to-possibility is the source of matter’s ‘finitude and alterity’, but also its ‘multiplicity as fullness and worldly richness’.64 Meanwhile, What-is-in-possibility is the logical, driving element that unifies matter in all its forms. Admittedly, at points Bloch appears to take this conception over from Schelling more directly than is in fact the case. Bloch’s comment, for instance, that Schelling’s concept of matter was ‘the most audacious extension of Aristotle’s still unforgotten definition of possibility’ applies much more accurately 60 61 62 63 64

Holz 1975, p. 100. Bloch 1985g p. 227. Bloch 1985g, p. 473. Cf. Schelling 2004, p. xxix. Bloch 1985g, p. 473.

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to his own conception than to Schelling’s.65 Aristotle’s influence on Schelling certainly makes itself felt in the latter’s inheritance of the idea of potency within nature, but as we have seen, Schelling ascribed this potency to the subject of nature, but not primarily to matter itself, as Bloch did. Indeed, Bloch tacitly acknowledges this fact when he argues, in the passage already quoted above, that the ‘unrest striving toward being-something’ is the ‘origin of matter’ for Schelling, whereas in his view this unrest fundamentally constitutes the material process.66 Ultimately, this is what Bloch believed justified his claim that his own speculative philosophy was a form of materialism, while Schelling remained an idealist. As Bloch saw it, in Schelling’s system, the ‘subjective factor’ still came from outside the material realm, whereas for Bloch it was an aspect of matter itself. Similarly, although Bloch clearly drew on Schelling’s understanding of human freedom as continuous with the freedom of nature, he nevertheless rejected Schelling’s idea of an original ground of being as a ‘bottomless mythology’, believing it to reproduce the idea of the human as irredeemably fallen.67 For Bloch, the later Schelling – the Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift – abandons the ‘transcendentally deduced matter’ of his earlier work and makes the ‘origin of the world of senses’ into ‘the darkest of all things’.68 It is ‘characteristic of the concept of freedom … of the restoration period’ he argues, that ‘freedom was only considered to be derived from the “fall”’.69 Bloch identified two key problems with this conception of freedom as issuing from an original rupture in the ground of being. First, as we have seen, for Bloch there was no such originary grounding, no primordial identity between subject and object to be ruptured. As he argues at the end of The Principle of Hope, the idea of an original metaphysical home or Heimat of nature which romantic thinkers like Schelling projected into an imagined past was indeed little more than a myth. Heimat was for Bloch the glimpse into a childhood in which ‘we have not yet been’ because it was never there in the first place.70 When Habermas says that Bloch takes the idea that the ‘mechanical’ view of nature ‘misses the concept of nature as needing to return to itself’ from Schelling, he is mistaken, because for Bloch, nature – or rather, matter – was never ‘with’ itself to begin with.71 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Bloch 1985g, p. 221. Bloch 1985g, p. 223. Bloch 1985g, p. 225. Bloch 1985g, p. 227. Ibid. Bloch 1986, pp. 1376. Habermas 1969, p. 319.

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Second, although Bloch saw profound meaning in Schelling’s ‘emphasis on the wilful character of the That of existence as such, the non-rational fundamental intensity of the historical process’, he nevertheless took issue with what he saw as the excessively irrationalist and pessimistic consequences of the later Schelling’s claim that the origin of matter and freedom were beyond logical comprehension.72 According to the Schelling of the Freiheitsschrift, Bloch argues in The Principle of Hope, not only the irrational first impetus given to the world, but also every individual realization in the world generates … nothing but discord and irregularity, abortion, illness and death, since it runs on from that irrational impetus.73 For the late Schelling, as Bloch sees it, the drive that creates matter loses all relation to the realm of the living, even if it is somewhat maintained in the concept of created matter. However, Bloch sees the fact that both the conscious and unconscious pursuit of desire sometimes results in joy, happiness, and success, rather than always only death, destruction, and failure, as evidence that the drive within matter is not purely irrational and chaotic, but also contains the possibility of identity, fulfilment, and ultimately, utopia. As we have seen, Bloch was united with Schelling and other romantic thinkers in his view of nature as a historical process that realises itself in increasingly complex forms. In his view, there was quite a straightforward answer for why nature should work like this: there is something that is fundamentally not (yet) as it should be. If that were not so, he claims, then ‘there would strictly speaking be no process’.74 What is not as it should be in the present? In short: alienation, and an absence of harmony between the subjective and objective dimensions of the material process. Bloch may have considered Schelling’s idea of an original ground of being mythical, but the possibility of its ultimate realisation was nevertheless inherent for him in the structure and movement of matter, which he saw as striving towards ultimate identity with itself (though for Bloch this identity did not exist at some point in the primeval past). Habermas is thus on safer ground when he claims that although Bloch ‘criticizes myths, religions, and philosophies as shadows’, he nevertheless ‘takes them seriously as foreshadowing that which is to be created’.75 Bloch under72 73 74 75

Bloch 1986 p. 225. Bloch 1986, p. 192. Bloch 1985g, p. 473. Habermas 1969, p. 312.

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stood the content of religious ideas of an afterlife, myths of a lost golden age and so on as essentially projections of a utopia that could really be achieved in this world. Indeed, he argued that the possibility of an ultimate identity of subject and object, of a ‘world beyond alienation’ in which what he, following the young Marx, called the ‘naturalization of man and humanization of nature’ will be achieved, was inherent within matter.76 Moreover, he argued that human beings, as matter become conscious, have the power to help realise this utopia through their creative, practical, political, and artistic activity, the wellspring of which is none other than the creative activity of matter itself. Here again, however, this does not indicate, as Habermas claims, that Bloch’s speculative materialism is merely a politicised version of Schelling’s nature philosophy. Bloch may be correct that Schelling’s concept of nature contains ‘the suggestion that the possibilities of matter reach beyond those already realised, beyond organic blossoms and even beyond the human itself’.77 Nevertheless, in Schelling’s work this remains only a suggestion, and he certainly never draws the strong political consequences from it that Bloch does. Moreover, even at the ontological level, Bloch finds in what he saw as Schelling’s irrationalism the potential for a much more optimistic and rational view of matter. Bloch believed that such a view was necessary in order to be able to explain the fact of reason within the material world. Yet Schelling’s philosophy did not provide Bloch with the tools he needed to develop this potential. In order to do that, he would have to turn to Hegel.

3

The Logic of Matter

As with Schelling, however, it was not primarily Hegel’s concept of matter on which Bloch drew. Just as in Schelling’s nature philosophy, in which the concept of matter named a regional feature of the natural whole, so too in Hegel’s philosophy of nature, matter and motion were primarily questions of mechanics.78 For Hegel, it made no sense to speak of matter as such: in the Philosophy of Nature he describes the idea of a ‘formless matter’ as an ‘empty abstraction’. Hegel claimed that it was the ‘determinacy of matter [that] constitutes its being’, which is to say that he understood it as part of the essence of matter to assume qualitatively distinct forms. Thus in the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel 76 77 78

Bloch 1986, p. 1376. Bloch 1986, p. 223. Hegel 2004, p. 28. For more on Hegel’s philosophy of nature, see Houlgate (ed.) 1998, and Stone 2005.

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argues that matter ‘does not subsist in itself’, but rather its concept designates only a ‘superficial connectedness’ between its different forms, an ‘external combination’ of them.79 Nevertheless, Hegel understood the concept of matter as referring to an ‘original unity’ that he thought does persist between forms, even if it is never accessible – or indeed extant – as such. In other words, Hegel understood matter as a real universal: it denotes that which remains always the same in every instantiation of the forms it takes. For Hegel, realism about universals was a compelling metaphysical position when faced with scientific phenomena such as natural laws and natural kinds. As he argues in the Encyclopedia Logic, Nature offers us an infinite mass of singular shapes and appearances. We feel the need to bring unity to this manifold; therefore, we compare them and seek to [re]cognise what is universal in each of them. Individuals are born and pass away; in them their kind is what abides, what recurs in all of them; and it is only present for us when we think about them. This is where laws, e.g. the laws of motion of the heavenly bodies, belong too. We see the stars in one place today and another tomorrow; this disorder is for the spirit something incongruous, and not to be trusted, since the spirit believes in an order, a simple, constant, and universal determination [of things]. This is the faith in which the spirit has directed its thinking upon the phenomena, and has come to know their laws, establishing the motion of the heavenly bodies in a universal manner, so that every change of position can be [re]cognised on the basis of this law.80 Hegel’s point here is that in order to believe what science tells us about natural laws and kinds – that human intercourse will always result in the reproduction of the human species, or that something dropped from a height will always fall under the influence of gravity – then we must accept that there really is something connecting these seemingly discrete particulars or events, rather than it being only our impression.81 In Hegel’s philosophy, this universal ground that connects all phenomena is called substance. Just as the underlying productivity of Schelling’s nature philosophy was also a natural subject, Hegel’s substance, too, is subjective in the sense that it is, as Walter Kaufman has defined the Hegelian concept of subject,

79 80 81

Hegel 1991, p. 197. Hegel 1991, p. 53. Cf. Stern 2009, pp. 26–7.

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‘that which makes itself what it becomes’.82 Nevertheless, Bloch saw a major difference in the way Hegel and Schelling treated the relationship between substance and subject. For although in Schelling’s philosophy, the absolute – understood as that which exists independently of our knowledge of it – may be a subject, it is not ultimately substantial. Rather, Schelling conceived of substance, like matter, as the product of the subject of nature. In the First Outline, for instance, Schelling claims that substance is the ‘residuum of the universal process of formation’.83 In Schelling’s thinking, the subject-object relation is more fundamental than the subject-substance relation, since the first stage in his dialectic of nature is the self-objectification of the natural subject to become a material substance. Thus even though Schelling saw the original spontaneity of natural subjectivity preserved in thought, as substance becomes increasingly fixed in the process of the natural subject’s self-objectification, it appears to thought as something separate from it. Where we perceive differences between discrete forms, such differences are only apparent according to Schelling: the ‘greater the condition of fixity … the more apparently simple the substance’.84 In other words, the more complex and fixed nature’s products become, the more we perceive them as simple and distinct, despite the common ground that they – and we – share. At first sight things appear similar for Hegel, for whom the ‘highest definition’ of the absolute is that it is ‘mind’.85 However, Hegel also insists that this ‘Subject’ is simultaneously a kind of ‘Substance’.86 Thus according to Bloch, with Hegel ‘substance emerges from the undivided absolute of Schellingian equality and unity with itself’.87 Hegel’s substance-as-subject ‘gives itself its differences immanent-dialectically’, these are not only perceived ‘externally’ by the ‘thinking individual’.88 Contrary to Schelling, the subject-substance relation in Hegel exceeds the subject-object relation. Indeed, Bloch claims that ‘Hegel’s substance reaches over the subject-object relation’.89 Crucially, this observation allows Bloch to read Hegel retrospectively as effectively a materialist thinker ante rem. Referring to the lectures on the philosophy of history, Bloch claims that there Hegel’s concept of ‘substance in itself’ acquires characteristics that, as is ‘well82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Kaufmann 1966, p. 31. Schelling 2004, p. 31. Ibid. Hegel 2007. Hegel 1977, p. 10. Bloch 1985g, p. 232. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 233.

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known’, apply to Aristotle’s concept of matter.90 At a point in the introduction just after Hegel describes world history as the ‘development of the principle whose content is consciousness of freedom’, he claims that spirit begins from its endless possibility, but only possibility, which contains its absolute content as in itself …, has it as a germ, as a drive within itself. Equally, possibility points at least in a reflected way towards that which shall become actual, and further Aristotelian dynamis is also potency, force and power.91 Bloch acknowledges that what Hegel defines here is ‘certainly not substance as matter, but on the contrary as spirit’.92 However, he justifies his materialistic reading of Hegel on the grounds that ‘the relativity of these oppositions’ in Hegel (of spirit and matter) ‘is proven in the fact that precisely the concepts of possibility and longing – these basic concepts of Aristotelian matter – are attributed to the in-itself of substance’.93 Now, in the original passage, Hegel ascribes Aristotelian qualities of matter not to ‘substance in itself’, as Bloch claims, but to spirit.94 In other words, it seems Bloch is playing rather fast and loose with the systematic relationship between spirit and substance in Hegel’s thought, in this case conflating spirit with substance in itself. Yet that is not entirely the point. Rather, Bloch’s aim was to refunction Hegel’s concept of substance-as-subject into a concept of matter as the ultimate concrete universal that connects all phenomena, including human consciousness, to all others. Hegel’s idealism may have prevented him from identifying ‘the dialectic of spirit as one of the ever more illuminating and illuminated content of matter’.95 Nevertheless, as Bloch saw it, Hegel’s attempt to overcome fixed oppositions ‘including that between spirit and mat90 91 92 93 94

95

Bloch 1985g, p. 235. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Cf. Hegel 1975, p. 131, where Hegel writes that the ‘spirit begins in a state of infinite potentiality … which contains its absolute substance as something as yet implicit, as the object or goal which it only attains as the end result in which it at last achieves its realization. In actual existence, progress thus appears as an advance from the imperfect to the more perfect, although the former should not be understood in an abstract sense as merely imperfect, but as something which at the same time contains its own opposite, i.e. what is commonly called perfection, as a germ or impulse: just as potentiality … points forward to something which will eventually attain reality, or – to take a more specific example – just as the Aristotelian dynamis is also potentia, i.e. power and strength’. Bloch 1985g, pp. 245–6.

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ter – via the highest vitality of the totality, the consequence is undeniable: matter becomes a moment of spirit, but also spirit a moment of – dialectical – matter’.96 Ultimately Bloch argues that if the original impulse of the world process is grasped ‘not as spirit’, as it is in Hegel, but ‘force, intensity, movement of matter, matter of movement’, then matter appears ‘not at all as otherness, as dark difference’, but as an expression of the ‘substance’ that Hegel understood as a universal binding factor.97 Reinterpreting matter as an expression of Hegelian substance is a key move for Bloch, because it allowed him to avoid his ontology collapsing into the irrationalism of which he thought Schelling guilty. If for Hegel, the ‘substance of the universe’ is saturated with logical ‘reason’, and if Bloch’s concept of matter is Hegelian substance-as-subject recast, then, as Bloch argues in Das Materialismusproblem, ‘[t]he logical, as a real attribute of the material, can no longer be defrauded’.98 Indeed, Bloch argues that it is precisely speculative materialism which ‘discovers in the [dynamei on] of matter and its certainly most hazardous openness towards the true basic impulse of matter, the Logikon of which is called finality’.99 In other words, Bloch’s concept of matter is a reformulation of Hegel’s concrete universal: a self-actualising drive that connects all phenomena with one another, it is neither isolated from the particulars it instantiates in the process of its self-realisation, nor does it transcend them. Rather, it inheres in particulars as their essential determination, and its logic is to strive towards finality or completion. Bloch drew on Aristotle’s concepts of energy and entelechy to describe the logic he saw at work in the material process in more detail. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, energy and entelechy are two interrelated concepts that describe actuality understood as anything that is currently happening. They both draw on Aristotle’s conception of actuality as work. For Aristotle, every thing’s ‘thinghood’ is a kind of work, or in other words a specific way of being in motion. All things that exist now, and not just potentially, are beings-at-work, and all of them have a tendency towards being-at-work in a particular way that would be their proper and ‘complete’ way. Within this scheme, energeia can be seen as the fact of something’s being-at-work in a particular way, while entelecheia is something’s being-at-work in a continuous or complete way: the kind of beingat-work that makes a thing what it is.

96 97 98 99

Bloch 1985g, p. 233. Bloch 1985g, p. 245. Bloch 1985g, p. 472. Bloch 1985g, p. 473.

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According to Bloch, Aristotle himself already described motion as ‘incomplete entelechy’, an idea that clearly influenced his own view of change as occasioned by the presence of an outstanding goal.100 However, as we have seen, Bloch saw Aristotle’s concept of matter as still akin to the wax out of which entelechial forms could energetically be pressed. Instead, if we view matter not as wax, as something separate to the process that would form it, but as the process itself, as the agent of its own entelechial formation, then in Bloch’s view, ‘[n]ot only the motion of matter but matter itself, as active dynamei on, is as yet incomplete entelechy’.101 Since Bloch saw the process of material actualization as essentially incomplete, the Aristotelian categories of potentiality [dynamis] and actuality [energeia and entelecheia] converge in his ontology, such that matter becomes a name for the process in and through which what is potential is actualised. Thus the idea emerges that there may be a material end or telos to this process, an end that, following Bloch’s logic, must be present as potentiality within the material process itself, even if what that goal is has yet to become determined.

4

Real Possibility

Bloch uses the terms tendency and latency to express this relationship between process and goal. The material process comprises, on the one hand, tendency, an intensive quality or drive containing in its core a goal, which, however, is not yet fully determined. In conjunction with this, there is latency, which asserts itself as the outstanding essence, the placeholder of the not-yet-realised goalcontent of tendency.102 Bloch’s ontology is thus one in which None of the forms, figures realizing themselves purposefully in matter has already achieved its entelechy. And not the motion of all things and above all humans, but matter itself and in general presents itself as incomplete entelechy. This is characterized in forwards-matter and its uniquely adequate reproduction in a materialism which is no longer only empirical, but now also speculative. It concerns that true basic impulse of mat-

100

101 102

Bloch 1985g, p. 475. In fact, in the Metaphysics Book VII Aristotle describes motion as the entelecheia of potentiality as such [dynamei on], in other words motion is the complete or essential being-at-work of potentiality. Bloch 1985g, p. 476. Bloch 1985g, p. 469.

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ter, which drives on, full of finality, and holds its possible fruit only in a latent not-yet.103 Bloch’s use of the fruit metaphor here is instructive. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels used it to criticise what he called the ‘mystery’ of ‘speculative’ or ‘Hegelian construction’, by which they meant the mistaken assumption that the identity between particulars that exists at the level of the concept also exists in reality, at the ontological level.104 Here is the pair’s colourful description of how speculative construction works: If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea ‘Fruit’, if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea ‘Fruit’, derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then in the language of speculative philosophy – I am declaring that ‘Fruit’ is the ‘Substance’ of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea – ‘Fruit’. I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc., to be mere forms of existence, modi, of ‘Fruit’ My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same as in the pear, and in the pear the same as in the almond, namely ‘Fruit’. Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is ‘the substance’ – ‘Fruit’.105 As we will see in the following chapter, this observation will also have significant implications for Bloch’s epistemology. For now, however, the key point is that for Marx, the identity between different types of ‘fruit’ that the word implies is merely conceptual, rather than ontologically real. Engels would take up the metaphor in the Dialectics of Nature (1883), specifically in relation to the concept of matter. At a point in the discussion where he is criticising the mechanical materialism of Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott,

103 104 105

Bloch 1985g, p. 20. Marx and Engels 1975a, p. 57. Marx and Engels 1975a, pp. 57–8.

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Engels argues that when natural science ‘directs its efforts to seeking out uniform matter’, he argued, ‘it is doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples’.106 Here again, Engels is making the point that there is no such thing as ontological identity between particulars: what is empirically real is, as he and Marx put it already in The German Ideology, ‘real living individuals’.107 In some ways, Bloch was critical of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature as a work of ontology. For one thing, he claimed it had been based on scientific materials that were not only outdated when he himself was writing, but were ‘not quite the state of the art’ in Engels’ own time.108 He also claims that Engels collapsed back into a mechanical perspective by asserting an ‘eternal cycle’ in which ‘matter remains eternally the same through all its transformations’.109 Nevertheless, Bloch believed Engels’ work could still offer a ‘modern and fruitful’ perspective for rethinking materialism in a non-mechanistic way.110 He agreed that matter was ‘diversified, evolutionarily differentiated according to its form of existence’, and like Engels, Bloch saw ‘the human mind as the highest blossom of organic matter’.111 For Bloch, however, matter’s ‘self-reflection’ in human consciousness indicated a utopian impulse at work in the material process that Engels did not fully draw out.112 When Bloch writes in Das Materialimusproblem that the ‘true basic impulse of matter … holds its possible fruit only in a latent not-yet’ he is making a boldly divergent claim from that of Engels.113 For although Bloch concedes on the one hand that the kind of identity between particulars implied by the concept of ‘fruit’ may not yet be empirically real in the same way as ‘real living individuals’, he is nevertheless suggesting here that the emergence of human thought, which is capable of perceiving real identity and unity where it does exist amid complex and chaotic difference, but also, crucially, capable of going beyond what merely is, portends the possible achievement of a kind of identity that at present exists only at the level of concepts such as ‘fruit’.114 For Bloch, human beings, with our dreams, hopes, art, and transformative practice, are at the ‘Front’ of the world process as the most complex form of matter that, as far 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

Engels 1987, p. 533. Marx and Engels 1975b, p. 37. Bloch 1985g, p. 359. Bloch 1985g, p. 371. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 127. Bloch 1985g, p. 464. Bloch 1985g, p. 20. See Chapter 4 for an account of Bloch’s relation to Adorno on this point.

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as we know, have ever emerged. Now that we have, he argued, we are able to recognise ourselves and our dreams of a better life as continuous with a material tendency, which we can direct towards realising the possibility of utopia latent within matter itself.

5

Teleology without a Telos

Bloch’s assertion that the logic of matter is to ‘tend towards finality’ has led a number of observers to see his speculative materialism as an outdated teleology. Ruth Levitas attributes what one might call a ‘strong’ teleology to Bloch. His philosophy, she argues, ‘suggests that history has a goal rather than simply that human beings have purposes’, which Levitas rightly sees as a much more audacious claim.115 Tom Moylan has also claimed that Bloch ‘settles for a teleological end point’ instead of ‘opening up to whatever developments may occur in an as yet unknown future’.116 When Habermas accuses Bloch of outlining a vision of nature ‘led by the hand to its goal by man’, he is criticising him not only for being akin to Schelling – in other words, for saying that nature might have a goal at all – but for being a Marxist Schelling by marshalling the resources of dialectical materialism in order to make this point.117 However, it is important to note that although Bloch saw rational grounds for believing that utopia is possible, he never presented it as ontologically necessary or inevitable. For one thing, he opposed the idea that the world as a whole has some kind of inner essence that is already determined and merely has to be realised in the manner in which an acorn will always become an oak tree. One of the main problems Bloch perceived with Hegel’s philosophy in this respect was that it did not allow for what he called ‘real possibility’. Bloch points in Das Materialismusproblem to Hegel’s argument in the Encyclopaedia that philosophy ‘must not be concerned with showing that something is possible, or that something else is also possible, or that something, however one expresses it, is conceivable’.118 In his later work on Hegel, notably Subjekt-Objekt and The Principle of Hope, Bloch would push this point further still, claiming that Hegel was trapped within the boundaries of anamnesis, the idea that whatever we come to know must already have existed prior to our knowledge of it. In The Principle of Hope, for instance, Bloch argues that even when Hegel understands possib115 116 117 118

Levitas 2010, p. 122. Moylan 1997, p. 116. Habermas 1969, p. 319. Bloch 1985g, p. 234.

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ility as more than an ‘empty abstraction’, but also as an ‘in-itself moment of reality’, that which he calls real possibility is ‘wholly surrounded by the circle of reality that has already become’.119 ‘Hence that which is really possible can no longer be any different; under these conditions and circumstances nothing different can follow’.120 According to Bloch, Hegel is speaking here as an ‘enemy of empty speculation, of the idle rearrangement of history in accordance with what could have happened’, but also as a ‘non-philosopher of the future, as cycle-dialectician of the past’, of that which is ‘eternally returning in cycles’ rather than of a process open to change from within.121 In Das Materialismusproblem, however, Bloch is more generous. ‘As much as Hegel wants to reduce the difference between real possibility and real actuality to an apparent one,’ he argues there, ‘possibility remains for him the foundation in every actuality’.122 Bloch emphasises that Hegel had interpreted the objectified subject in the world process ‘also as germ and investment’, consequently as something that ‘is not yet there, but is approaching in what is previously existing as, so to say, possible’.123 As in the case of Bloch’s creative reinterpretation of Schelling, however, the point here is not so much whether or not this is true for Hegel, but rather that it is true for Bloch. Having looked to Hegel for a corrective to Schelling’s ontological irrationalism, Bloch now sought a corrective for the panlogism he saw at work in Hegel’s system. He found it, at least in part, in Schelling. As we have seen, the later Schelling asserted that reason in the world was underpinned by the unreason of the sheer facticity of existence. While we might be able to explain what exists, there can be no logical explanation, according to Schelling, of the fact that anything at all exists in the first place. Bloch refers to this as the ‘That of existence as such, of the non-rational intensity at the basis of the historical process’.124 Yet although Bloch disagreed with what he saw as Schelling’s theological conception of this non-rational original impulse, he nevertheless believed Schelling’s insight went ‘beyond this bottomless mythology’ insofar as it pointed to the ‘ “first contingency, that which is non-identical with itself” in the primum existens of matter, of material being-outside as such’.125 Bloch quotes at length from Schelling’s Munich lectures on the history of philosophy, where he claims that the ‘first

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

Bloch 1985g, p. 245. Cited in Bloch 1986, p. 245. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 234. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 225. Ibid.

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existent being [Seiende] … is the first contingency (Urzufall)’.126 For Schelling, the entire world process begins with this first contingency, which he explicitly associates with the emergence of matter. Herein lies the difference, according to Bloch, between Hegelian and Schellingian dialectics. Hegel’s logic begins from the moment of ‘being’, which is opposed to ‘nothing’ in a process of ‘becoming’ which generates ‘existence’ [Dasein] as that space in which ‘something’ can be discerned from some ‘other’.127 Meanwhile for Schelling, the measure of the dialectical process, the basic contradiction is given already with the first positing of being, consequently therefore already in the thesis, indeed before the latter is made; not only in the antithesis, in the sphere of differences that has erupted.128 However, as Bloch points out, according to Schelling, not only the ‘brute fact of existence’ is contingent, but ‘even the fact of subsequent objectification contains contingency – in an attenuated, above all qualitatively distinct sense’.129 Bloch claims that the first or ‘original contingency is in a state of thatness as such, of self-positing intensity; the following contingency is one of inadequately objectified thatness, of subject-being’.130 In Bloch’s speculative materialism, the trace of this original contingency is preserved at the heart of the desire that drives it. In the structure of the subjective factor within matter itself, therefore, there is desire for something, which explains the directionality of the process; however, the continuing trace of contingency prevents the ‘goal’ from being already determined, as in the classical Aristotelian-Hegelian system in which the teleology imputed to the world process as a whole was read off that visible in organic forms, the acorn and oak tree relation being perhaps the most common example. Bloch’s teleology was therefore one without a pre-given telos, in which the goal itself, the ‘essence’ of what the world might be, is still being worked out in a complex dialectical process of becoming from which contingency and chance are also far from absent. Moylan comes close to acknowledging this when he says that there is a ‘dialogic tension’ in Bloch’s work between a ‘historically entrenched orthodox 126 127 128 129 130

Bloch 1985g, p. 226. Cf. Hegel 2010, Book One. The Doctrine of Being. Bloch 1985g, p. 226. Ibid. Ibid.

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Marxism with its strong belief in the linear progression toward the communist telos of human history’, and an ‘unorthodox understanding of the fragmentary and disruptive play of utopia throughout human existence’.131 Certainly there is a tension of this sort, though the extent to which teleology lines up with orthodoxy and contingency with heterodoxy is not as straightforward as Moylan presents it. Bloch certainly disagreed with Engels’s idea that there is an ‘iron necessity’ inherent in the material process. The problem with necessity according to Bloch was that it ignored the contingency of the particular being or event, which can never be derived with certainty even on the basis of knowledge of natural laws. For instance, while it may be true that human intercourse will always produce a human child, the specific features of that child cannot simply be predicted in advance. However, it was for precisely this reason, Bloch argued, that ‘Marx and Engels greeted Darwinian natural selection with high praise’, as ‘the strongest thrust against the immutability of organic kinds’.132 After reading The Origin of Species when it appeared in 1859, Engels wrote to Marx in December that Darwin’s book was ‘splendid’, though precisely for the fact that it had ‘demolished’ any pretence to teleology in the life sciences.133 When Marx read the book a year later, he replied to his friend that the book provided ‘the basis for our views’ in ‘the field of natural history’.134 A month after, he wrote to Lassalle that the strength of the Origin was that in it, ‘teleology in natural science is … dealt a mortal blow’.135 Marx and Engels’ appreciation of Darwin demonstrates that they both valued contingency contra teleology, even if Engels uses the language of necessity when he talks about the emergence of the ‘thinking human’ in the Dialectic of Nature. Bloch, on the contrary, saw the emergence of consciousness from unconscious matter as a contingent event, or what he calls an ‘aporia’.136 Meanwhile, however, he viewed the ability of human beings to modify seemingly immutable natural kinds through science and technology in ways that are not simply predictable on the basis of universal laws as further evidence of the possible mediating role we might play in bringing about utopia. As Bloch saw it, Engels had failed to fully consider the influence of this ‘technical-cultural trans-

131 132 133 134 135 136

Moylan 1997, p. 116. Bloch 1985g, p. 367. Engels to Marx, 11 or 12 December 1859, in Marx and Engels 1983, p. 551. Marx to Engels, 19 December 1960, in Marx and Engels 1985, p. 232. Marx to Lassalle, 16 January 1861, in Marx and Engels 1985, p. 247. Bloch 1985g, p. 468.

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formation of “things in themselves” into “things for us” on the “eternal cycle”’ of matter, a major shortcoming of his Dialectics of Nature.137 At this point, the other aspect of Habermas’ critique of Bloch’s vision of nature ‘led to its goal by the hand of man’ comes into view. For if Habermas was here at one level criticising the teleology supposedly at work in Bloch’s philosophy of nature, he was also implicitly attacking his alleged anthropomorphism as illegitimate. Schmidt also criticised the fact that Bloch’s ‘ontology of not-yet-being’ corresponded to an ‘anthropology’ that sought to explain the whole of the natural world through an impermissible analogy with human purposes.138 However, against the suggestion that to reason about nature as a whole on the basis of human experience is illegitimate, following Jonas, one might argue that in a monistic ontology such as Bloch’s ‘the case against anthropomorphism in its extreme form becomes problematical and is on principle reopened’.139 The rise of Baconian science, Jonas argues, which presupposed an ontological dualism, posited a ‘basic difference of being’ between humans and non-human nature, and denied any continuity between them.140 According to Jonas, however, the emergence of the ‘doctrine of evolution’, spelled the triumph of a ‘modern monism’ that ‘obliterates any vestige of the dividing line on which the whole argument contrasting “nature” and “man” rests’.141 Jonas sees the enquiry issue in this choice of monistic alternatives: either to take the presence of purposive inwardness in one part of the physical order, viz., in man, as a valid testimony to the nature of the wider reality that lets it emerge, and to accept what it reveals in itself as part of the general evidence; or to extend the prerogatives of mechanical matter to the very heart of the seemingly heterogeneous class of phenomena and oust teleology even from the ‘nature of man’, whence it had tainted the ‘nature of the universe’ – that is, to alienate man from himself and deny genuineness to the self-experience of life.142 The second of these two choices could perhaps be described as the route taken by the mechanical materialists. The first is undoubtedly the one Bloch takes in Das Materialismusproblem. 137 138 139 140 141 142

Bloch 1985g, p. 371. Schmidt 1981, p. 118. Jonas 2001, p. x. Jonas 2001, p. 35. Jonas 2001, p. 37. Ibid.

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If one takes Bloch’s route, however, then according to Jonas the human being ‘is after all the measure of all things’, albeit not through the ‘legislation of his reason’, but rather through the ‘exemplar of his psychophysical totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us’.143 It is a completeness from which Jonas suggests the nature of reality ‘may have to be determined by way of progressive ontological subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter’ rather than, as in the case of mechanical materialism, constructing it ‘by cumulative addition’ on the basis of an elementary matter considered in purely mechanical terms.144 The point here is not to try to argue that Bloch’s speculative materialist ontology is either devoid of teleology, or that the anthropomorphising move involved in positing purposefulness in nature is beyond reproach. Clearly, there is a directionality at work in Bloch’s concept of matter, which he claims is bound up with a kind of desire for completion. And indeed, Bloch’s vision of the utopian end towards which matter might be directed was absolutely imagined in terms of its amenability to human concerns. It was, in the first instance, the vision of a Marxian classless society, or as Bloch puts it in The Principle of Hope, a ‘world beyond hardship’, a ‘real democracy’, ‘without alienation and expropriation’.145 Yet Bloch’s utopia is much more besides. It is a world in which material life would exist not only in, but also for itself; in which the sheer fact of existence would not be at odds with the form that existence takes. It is a world in which what a young Marx once called the ‘naturalization of man and the humanization of nature’ will come about, in which the lion will lie with the lamb, and all of nature will exist in harmony. If one prong of Schmidt’s and Habermas’ critiques of this vision was the alleged illegitimacy of extending anthropological reasoning beyond the description of the human ‘here and now’ across larger scales and ranges of phenomena, Jonas’ remarks at least serve to remind us that, certainly within the sphere of living, historical nature – and this is after all the focus of Bloch’s concern – there are undeniable continuities between human beings and other aspects of our world that weaken a strong argument against anthropomorphic modes of reasoning. Meanwhile if the other prong of the objection was Bloch’s alleged teleology, it is important to recognise that Bloch did not see the historical achievement of utopia as guaranteed. ‘Hope is not confidence’, he argues at the end of Das Materialismusproblem, ‘which means, precisely in the totality of

143 144 145

Jonas 2001, p. 23. Jonas 2001, p. 24. Bloch, 1986, p. 814; 1376.

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teleology: ens perfectissimum is not yet ens realissimum, and is often its opposite’.146 Nevertheless, since according to Bloch ‘the great workshop of human and world-matter is not yet closed’, he claimed that we can work towards utopia in the rational hope that our historical labour is capable of bearing fruit. 146

Bloch, 1985g, p. 478.

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Epistemology In 1903, the eighteen-year-old Bloch wrote a letter to the Austrian physicist and positivist philosopher of science Ernst Mach. No earlier correspondence is extant, but it clearly was not the first time the pair had communicated. The young Bloch apologises for ‘bothering’ Mach ‘again’, and refers to Mach’s previous, ‘gracious’ letter.1 The subject of the letter is the concept of matter, both the natural scientific and the philosophical understandings of it. In The Analysis of Sensations (first edition 1886), Mach had argued that ‘matter’ was nothing but a concept, one of the ‘useful names’ we give to ‘such relatively permanent compounds’ as ‘body’ and ‘thing’, which we experience as existing ‘in themselves’, but which according to Mach were in fact ‘nothing apart from the combinations of the elements – the colours, sounds, and so forth – nothing apart from their so-called attributes’.2 Mach argued against the ‘monistic point of view’, which he associated with mechanical materialism, claiming that the materialist ‘is at a loss when required to endow the world of matter with sensation’.3 Meanwhile the ‘philosophical spiritualist’ was ‘often sensible of the difficulty of imparting solidity to his mind-created world of bodies’.4 Mach’s solution was to understand the concept ‘matter’ as a kind of formula we apply to complexes of sensations that fall into a particular pattern in the way we experience them. With his critical empiricism, Mach wished to overcome the ‘great gulf between physical and psychological research’, demonstrating instead how the ‘whole inner and outer world’ are connected through the mechanism of sense perceptions to which we frequently – but erroneously – ascribe fixed names.5 Bloch’s own view of matter as it emerges from the 1903 letter bears some striking similarities with that of Mach. Clearly Mach must have got the impression in their previous correspondence that Bloch had denied the legitimacy of the empirical concept of matter in the realm of natural science: Bloch insists that this was not his intention, and acknowledges that matter, seen from the ‘provisional’ standpoint of empiricism, is ‘completely clear as a constant, cer-

1 2 3 4 5

Bloch 1985r, Vol. 1, p. 17. Mach 1914, pp. 6–7. Mach 1914, p. 14. Ibid. Mach 1914, pp. 17, 22.

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tain quantity’.6 Nevertheless, he insists that the empirical understanding of matter is insufficient, because it is ‘contradictory to the point of impossibility’.7 ‘Where natural science reckons with the concept of the body as the final, selfevident result of its reduction’, Bloch claims, ‘there philosophy sees its deepest problem’.8 Here Bloch already anticipates his later stance in Das Materialismusproblem, which saw the concept of matter formalised in modern physics not as illegitimate, but as insufficient in the face of nature’s dynamism.9 The concept of matter as ‘the substrate of all appearances’ could, Bloch claimed, ‘only be overcome psychologically’, or rather through an alliance of psychology with the tradition of idealist and romantic philosophy that historicised Kant’s apriorism and, in the form of phenomenology, increasingly sought to give it a body.10 In this spirit, Bloch posits the ‘principle of phenomenality’ as the ‘golden rule of philosophy’: in its shortest form, it is ‘Esse = percipi’.11 The reference to Berkeley here is unmistakable, but also to Schopenhauer. ‘The world is through and through representation, appearance, intellectual phenomenon’, Bloch claims.12 He sees an extra-psychic existence as ‘literally meaningless’, and insists we can ‘never escape the circle of optical, acoustic, thermal, tactile etc. sensations’.13 From this ‘psychological standpoint’, the concept of matter, ‘this empirically irresolvable residue’, becomes ‘nothing other than the relatively stable complex of these sensations’.14 Bloch’s agreement with Mach here is undeniable, so much so that in a footnote the editors describe him as ‘taking owls to Athens’ with his plea for the Professor’s approval.15 By the time he wrote Das Materialismusproblem, in a context in which, as we have seen, Mach’s philosophy had become highly contentious within Marxism, Bloch was critical of Mach’s ‘empiriocritical idealism’.16 Mach’s ‘phenomenalism’, Bloch claims, ‘abolishes matter and individual, object and subject equally

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Bloch 1985r, p. 20. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, pp. 356–8. Bloch 1985g, p. 357, quotes the mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl in this context, who in his book Raum, Zeit, Materie argued that the mathematised laws of physics ‘do not account for what is essential about this reality, the foundation of reality is not captured in them’ (cf. Weyl 1919, p. 263). Bloch 1985r, p. 20. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985r, p. 23. Bloch 1985g, p. 298.

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generously’.17 Bloch conceded that a ‘certain objective constant admittedly underlies the relation of ego and body’ in Mach’s thought – ‘a denser correlation of elements here, a relative condition of equilibrium there. But the one founds no I, the other above all no matter’.18 When Bloch approvingly mentions that Lenin had warned of the ‘Berkleyan danger’ inherent in ‘Machism’, he seems to have all but forgotten his earlier assertion of a ‘principle of phenomenality’ that connected him with both Berkeley and Mach.19 What Bloch’s correspondence with Mach indicates, however, is the significant influence of neo-Kantianism on his early philosophical development. Just as the editors of the letter insist that the trace of Schopenhauer’s influence never left Bloch, so too the influence of Kant and neo-Kantianism continues to be felt in Das Materialismusproblem, not least in the epistemology that underpins it. For if Bloch’s speculative materialism had, to all intents and purposes, solved one aspect of the materialism problem – namely, how to explain the existence of consciousness within the material world – as we have already seen, the materialism problem is like a hydra: whoever severs its ontological head is immediately confronted with the fresh visage of the epistemological question. In this respect, Bloch faced the very same challenge with which the mechanical materialists he opposed had been confronted. For when Habermas accuses Bloch of having ‘skipped’ Kant, he is echoing the same criticism levelled at Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott, not to mention German idealists, by neo-Kantians and Marxists alike: how does Bloch know that matter is a self-realising, unconscious agent? Isn’t he overstepping the critical limits of knowledge defined by Kant, just like the mechanical materialists did? Moreover, if Bloch’s matter is a speculative concept, as he admits it is, then how can his philosophy be materialist in any meaningful sense of the word? As we have already seen, the neo-Kantian Lange had argued that the ‘consistently materialist view’ of the mechanical materialists tipped over into a ‘consistently idealist view’ because it was founded on an unverifiable metaphysical claim about the nature of the world in itself. Dieter Wandschneider follows in Lange’s footsteps when he argues that Bloch’s ‘claim to materialism cannot be maintained’, and with regard to the ‘speculative content’ of his concept of matter, can ‘basically and against his intention only be interpreted and justified idealistically’.20 Wandschneider invokes a transcendental argumentation in his critique of Bloch, pitting the latter not only against Kant, but against Hegel 17 18 19 20

Bloch 1985g, p. 297. Ibid. Ibid. Wandschneider 1989, pp. 3–20, 18.

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read as a ‘logical idealist’.21 This chapter considers the extent to which Bloch’s epistemology is in fact a Kantian inheritance. On closer examination, Bloch’s speculative materialist epistemology owes more to Kant and neo-Kantianism than Habermas and others have supposed. Against the claim, implied in particular in Holz’s reception of Bloch’s speculative materialism, that it followed the reflection theory of knowledge adopted by some Soviet thinkers, I argue that Bloch’s epistemology was no naïve realism. To be sure, Bloch adhered to a certain Hegelian conceptual realism about universals, which allowed him to view the bold claims he made about the nature of matter and the possibility of utopia as speculative without being irrational. However, even if Bloch, following Hegel, saw the concept as the point of contact between mind and world, his epistemology was not simply a species of a crude reflection theory of knowledge. Rather, contrary to Habermas’ contention, Bloch’s speculative materialism also bears witness to the profound legacy of Kant and neo-Kantianism on his thought.

1

The Structure of the Concept

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined speculation as reason applied ‘beyond the boundaries of experience’.22 The ‘first usefulness’ of his critique, Kant argued, was that it teaches us ‘never to venture’ beyond these boundaries – or if we do, not to call what we find there knowledge.23 Kant’s conclusions had profound consequences for the theory of knowledge. For one thing, it implied that our concepts are radically distinct from ‘things in themselves’, and are more distinct the more ‘abstract’ – that is, removed from experience – they become. And for another, Kant’s critique made ‘speculative’ or purely conceptual thinking appear irrelevant with a single stroke. For Hegel, the Kantian settlement was deeply unsatisfactory, not least because, as we have seen, it seemed incapable of explaining how the world can be intelligible to us, indeed how our knowledge can actually have an impact on it, if thought and being are radically distinct. Hegel sought a response to the Kantian problem of intelligibility in the structure of the concept.24 He argued, contra Kant, that we cannot banish speculation by restricting knowledge only 21 22 23 24

Wandschneider 1989, p. 16. Kant, CPR B XXV. Ibid. For more on idealist attempts to guarantee a philosophical foundation for objective knowledge after Kant, cf. Beiser 2008a.

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to the realm of experience, because the very concepts through which we know the world are themselves speculative constructs. When in the Science of Logic Hegel refers to the concept ‘as thought in general, as universal, as against the particularity of the things vaguely parading in their multitudinousness before indeterminate intuition and representation’, he highlights the fact that concepts themselves are not reducible to any specific instance and are thus not empirically available, but are only derived or constructed on the basis of seeing in multiple particulars something that remains always the same.25 Yet as we have already seen, according to Hegel the speculative construction of concepts cannot be thought of as something belonging only to a kind of transcendental subjectivity, an operation of thought to which mere phenomena conform. Rather, as the example cited in the preceding chapter (p. 63) highlights, Hegel believed that the speculative structure of the concept does accurately reflect a real logic in the world, and as such it is reasonable for us to assume that we can know the absolute through concepts. Hegel thus restored to ‘speculative’ thinking the respectability Kant had undermined. If Kant recognised in his introduction to the second edition of the first Critique that metaphysical speculation would continue even if the other sciences ‘were swallowed up by an all-consuming barbarism’, Hegel now offered a rational explanation for why this is the case: speculative thinking is unavoidable, because concepts themselves are speculative constructs.26 It is in this sense that Hegel’s metaphysics can be seen to be continuous with, rather than simply overturning, the Kantian project, even as it sought to reassert the capacity of speculative thinking to produce objective knowledge.27 Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies would enjoy a differential reception within the Marxist tradition, however. Norman Levine has argued that the ‘divergent paths’ taken by Marx and Engels with respect to interpreting Hegel resulted in distinct traditions of thought that he calls Marxism and Engels-

25 26 27

Hegel 2010, p. 19. Kant, CPR, BXV. Both Pippin 1989 and Stern 2009 read Hegel as continuing the Kantian project, though they interpret the status of the objectivity he attributes to the concept differently. While Pippin (p. 158) has argued that Hegel’s concept achieves objectivity by being inter-subjectively constructed (‘knowledge as … a social institution’, p. 170), as we have seen, Stern argues that Hegel aspired to a thicker sense of conceptual objectivity by pointing to the fact that the structure of the concept, designating as it does what remains the same across different individuals belonging to a particular type or class, mirrors the structure of natural kinds and laws whose continuity is empirically verifiable using a variety of scientific methods. Whatever the case may be with respect to Hegel, it is argued here that Bloch read Hegel along Stern’s, rather than Pippin’s, lines.

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ism.28 The question turns on the extent to which each figure was prepared to accept the Hegelian idea that conceptual knowledge provides an accurate, unmediated account of reality. Marx’s greater emphasis – so the argument goes – on the role of practical experience, indeed of subjective labour, in producing rather than simple passively acquiring knowledge of the world, was a resolutely Kantian inheritance. Engels, meanwhile, is said to have much more readily applied the dialectical method to natural scientific questions after the manner of the mechanical materialists whom he nevertheless rhetorically opposed. Indeed, in both Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, Engels does speak of the human mind as ‘reflecting’ an ‘external world’ in the manner of a mirror, a metaphor that clearly ran against the Kantian claim that human thought cannot know the world as it in itself. Thus the metaphor of the concave mirror invoked to explain the modus operandi of ideology in Anti-Dühring implies that the mind is capable of reflecting reality as it really is through the operation of ideology critique.29 The metaphor is extended in Dialectics of Nature, where Engels argues that in ‘natural science … we often enough encounter theories in which the real relation is stood on its head, the reflection is taken for the original form, and which consequently needs to be turned right side up again’.30 It is this kind of reasoning that has contributed to the view of Engels as a naïve Hegelian attempting to solve the problem of knowledge contra Kant.31 There are certainly grounds on which to contest this view. For instance, in the Dialectics of Nature Engels only uses the metaphor of the mirror in relation to the human sphere, to which critics of his approach (such as Lukács, as we will see below) would also concede that dialectical reasoning can appropriately be applied. Referring to ideology, Engels writes of ‘the fantastic reflection of human things [law, politics] in the human mind’, and of human needs being reflected and coming to consciousness in the mind.32 When he uses the same

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Levine 2006; 2012; 2015. Levine distinguishes particularly sharply between Marx’s and Engels’ legacies in this respect, but versions of this argument have been made by various commentators. See for example McLellan 1977; Carver 1990; the argument has been made in political, rather than epistemological, terms by Kouvelakis 2003, in which Engels is presented as a seeker of harmony in the run up to the 1848 revolutions, while Marx is said to have pursued a politics of critical discord. Cf. Engels 2010, p. 89. Engels 1987, p. 343. Cf. on this question Tom Rockmore, ‘Engels, Lukács, and Kant’s Thing-in-Itself’, in Steger and Carver (eds.) 1999, pp. 145–62. Rockmore sets out the problem very helpfully there, arguing that neither Engels nor Lukács succeed in overcoming the Kantian challenge. Engels 1987, p. 459.

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analogy in relation to nature, he writes of the ‘reflecting mind’ isolating in conceptual images aspects of a reality that is in fact a dynamic, interconnected process, an analysis that is not at odds with Kant’s explanation of how the categories of the understanding help us to make sense of the manifold of sensory experience.33 Moreover, in terms of the validity of applying dialectical reasoning to natural phenomena, Engels’ claim that ‘matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations’ certainly appears to run the risk of ontologically levelling the discrepant logics at work in different regions of reality.34 However, as Foster and others have recently recognised, an Engelsian approach to the human-nature relation in the context of planet earth as a complex, selfenclosed metabolic system in fact has a good deal of explanatory power and political merit. Whatever the case may be with regard to Engels’ actual relation to Kant, historically the distinction between a Marx believed to have followed in Kant’s critical footsteps, and an Engels committed to a full-bodied materialist version of Hegelian metaphysics, has undoubtedly held traction in the Marxist intellectual tradition. It is important here insofar as Bloch remained committed to Kant’s insights into the limits of knowledge, while nevertheless asserting that the world is intelligible to us through concepts that are speculatively constructed. Insofar as Bloch drew on Engels as well as Marx in order to develop this position, he appears to have read Engels as a rather more sophisticated interpreter of Hegel than have others. One such other was Georg Lukács, Bloch’s erstwhile friend and contemporary to whom Das Materialismusproblem is dedicated. In many ways, the distinction between the legitimately critical Marx and illegitimately speculative Engels can be seen to have originated with Lukács, who argued in History and Class Consciousness (1924) that Engels’ application of the dialectical method to natural phenomena was misplaced.35 The ‘misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account’, he argued there, ‘can be put down to the fact that Engels – fol-

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Engels 1987, p. 533. Of course in Hegel’s system speculative reason is capable of rationally reconstituting the fluid character of a reality that the merely reflective understanding works to isolate. For more on the distinction between reflection and speculation in Hegel’s thought see Verene 2007, Chapter 1, ‘Hegel’s Preface: Reflection versus Speculation’, pp. 1– 12. Engels 1987, p. 335. The curious thing about Lukács’ role in this story is that on the one hand he is responsible for the ‘re-Hegelianisation’ of Marxism in the early twentieth century, while at the same time rejecting the conceptual realism that he believed had led Engels along an erroneous path. Here again, Rockmore’s account of this issue in Steger and Carver (eds.) 1999 provides a good overview of the vicissitudes of this problem.

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lowing Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the dialectical method to apply also to nature’.36 In an earlier essay, ‘Intellectual Workers and the Problem of Political Leadership’ (1919), Lukács had already exempted Marx from the same mistake, describing him as ‘altogether too sober and profound a thinker to apply [the dialectical] method to the investigation of nature’.37 According to Lukács, following Marx meant that dialectical reasoning should be limited only ‘to the realms of history and society’, since its ‘crucial determinants’, namely the ‘interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought’ are ‘absent from our knowledge of nature’.38 Lukács was thus firmly of the opinion that, from a Marxist perspective, the question of consciousness was primarily a social, rather than a natural scientific, one. On account of this view, however, Lukács was able to find a new use for the idea of reflection: namely in the sphere of art. If human consciousness and its products could never ‘reflect’ material reality as it is ‘in itself’, Lukács nevertheless believed that art could – indeed should – reflect social reality, since social reality is always already a product of human consciousness. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1956), for instance, Lukács would argue that literary realism should aim at the ‘truthful reflection of reality’.39 Art should reflect social reality, Lukács believed, in order to generate the class-consciousness required to achieve political change. He and Bloch – for whom the actual political commitments of an artist were important, but who nevertheless deeply valued aesthetic autonomy above overtly ‘political’ art – would clash on this issue in the famous debate over the meaning of German Expressionism.40 Art, however, also provides an important hinge in understanding Lukács’s differences with Bloch over the question of human knowledge of nature. In History and Class Consciousness, at a point when Lukács argues that the emergence of consciousness is a social rather than a natural scientific question, he refers to Bloch, for whom he says, approvingly, that the emergence of landscape painting was illustrative of a ‘pernicious chasm’ that has opened up between subject and object in the historical process. With the emergence of modern industrial class societies, Lukács argues, nature ‘becomes landscape’, with the observer standing outside.41 According to Lukács, landscape painting simul-

36 37 38 39 40 41

Lukács 1971, p. 24. Lukács 2014, p. 16. Lukács 1971, p. 24. Lukács 1969, p. 23. See selections in Bloch et al. 2002. Lukács 1971, p. 158.

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taneously represents and hides the ‘gaping abyss’ of the present as a problem of history, which must be mediated in order to overcome alienation.42 He draws on Hegel, who in the Phenomenology of Spirit argues that the concept of alienation describes the process by which consciousness ‘has become an enigma to itself’ and ‘does not regard the effects of its deeds as its own deeds’.43 In this situation, what Hegel calls ‘[a]bstract necessity’, that is, necessity considered purely in terms of the natural laws of universal mechanism and ultimately death, is ‘understood as the merely negative, uncomprehended power of the universal by which individuality is destroyed’.44 For Lukács, this was the stage in which modern bourgeois consciousness was trapped. It failed to see the connection between the ‘real individuals, their activity, and the material conditions under which they live’ which they ‘find already existing’ in the present, as Marx had put it in The German Ideology, and the fact that those very conditions had been produced by real living individuals before them. In other words, Lukács’ claim was that modern bourgeois subjects fail to see the connection between their own consciousness and activity, and that of those who had gone before. As Hegel understood it, this was a universal connection; in the passage of the Phenomenology following the one Lukács quotes from (p. 366), Hegel argues that self-consciousness is capable of transcending its perception of abstract necessity, and recognising the positive moment of the ‘power of the universal’. He says: The final moment of its existence [the existence of the form of selfconsciousness previously described] is the thought of the loss of itself in necessity, or the thought of itself as a being that is absolutely alien to it. However, self-consciousness has in itself survived this loss; for this necessity or pure universality is its own essence. This reflection of consciousness into itself, the knowledge that necessity is itself, is a new form of consciousness.45

42 43

44 45

Ibid. Lukács 1971, p. 159. Cf. Hegel 1977, pp. 220–1. The English translation of the passage quoted by Lukács reads: ‘Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself, the consequences of its deeds are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. The abstract necessity therefore has the character of the merely negative, uncomprehended power of universality, on which individuality is smashed to pieces’. Lukács 1971, p. 159. Hegel 1977, p. 221.

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Put another way, the fear of individual self-consciousness of disappearing into the abstract necessity of death, its incomprehension at becoming something alien to itself in its current form, becoming unconscious, even lifeless; all this is overcome when we recognise that consciousness as such does not die, but survives the loss of individual life. This – for Hegel, ‘positive’ – necessity, or universality, is the proper nature of consciousness, and reflection on it brings the historical (individual or social) consciousness to a higher stage. Now, from Lukács’ perspective, all Hegel need be talking about here is consciousness, without any relation to nature, and indeed as we have seen Lukács did believe that dialectical reasoning was only appropriately applied to consciousness, and to history understood as the product of the labour of conscious beings. However, as the example of the landscape painting illustrates, there is another dimension to this question. From Bloch’s perspective, the ‘pernicious chasm’ represented by the landscape painting reflects the subject’s alienation not only in the fact that the landscape as artwork is its own creation, but – more deeply still – the alienation that is captured in the landscape painting is one from nature, from the natural productivity that unites us with what is depicted in the tableau. What makes it possible for the subject to view landscape as landscape is the perception that ‘I am not that’. In this case, the ‘dead’ artwork stands as the empty signifier of the uniting force, itself not living, which nevertheless produces the landscape, our embodied consciousness, and – through the latter – also the artwork itself. Where Lukács refused to tread – asserting that a moment of positive universality connects human consciousness with nature – Bloch went, in the footsteps of both Schelling and Engels. No wonder Bloch reflected in a letter to Joachim and Sylvia Schumacher written in 1936 that he feared being seen to wage war on his old friend with this book.46 There were two main reasons why Bloch saw fit to take this additional step. First, he feared that restricting dialectical reasoning to the human world would only leave non-human nature at the mercy of mechanism. Second, since human beings are part of nature, Lukács’ approach either meant drawing an artificial dividing line between the natural and human worlds – reiterating, in the manner of Du Bois-Reymond, that we cannot know how these two spheres are related – or it ran the risk of subsuming conscious life into a mechanistic perspective. Bloch cites Du Bois Reymond’s view in this context, that ‘whatever cannot be explained mechanically cannot be understood scientifically’.47 He himself was supremely suspicious of a principled agnosticism vis-à-

46 47

Bloch 1985r, p. 497. Bloch 1985g, p. 425.

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vis whatever cannot be explained in mechanistic terms, seeing it as symptomatic of broader tendencies towards an instrumentalist view of nature, or else as a form of spiritualism. In this respect, Bloch, like the romantics and idealists before him, lamented the consequences of Kant’s failure to satisfactorily reconcile the relationship between appearances and things in themselves. Among neo-Kantians, he argued, this problem ‘came home to roost in all later thingin-itself immaterialisms … in such a way that whatever could not be accounted for in mechanical calculation was thereby already on the way to being a thing in itself for which only agnosticism if not irrationalism were responsible’.48 Bloch’s criticism here is directed at the tendency within neo-Kantian and positivist circles to assert that any claims about reality that were articulated in non-mechanical (and therefore non-mathematisable) terms were articles of faith rather than knowledge. Bloch wanted to avoid what he saw as this irrationalism, and in particular to claim for his concept of matter something more than the status of a purely speculative possibility. Hence his appeal alongside both Hegel and Engels to the logic of the concept as the guarantor of intelligibility. ‘[W]ith Engels there is neither an Ignorabimus nor any other-worldliness’, Bloch argues in Das Materialismusproblem.49 The point of unity between Bloch’s ontology and epistemology is thus his realism about universals. This is reflected in the structure of Das Materialismusproblem, whose first course is an extended engagement with the problem of universals, in which Bloch concludes that although universals have no reality apart from in and through particulars, at the same time they continually reveal the whole through the coming into being of individuals. Concepts, in other words, are like biological species: the connections they denote are real, even if those connections can only ever be instantiated, and transformed, in and through individual beings. Bloch takes over from Hegel the idea that speculative thinking is not only unavoidable, but because of the structure of the concept, thought’s tendency to posit an ultimate being or force in becoming that underlies and unites the whole of reality is in fact rational. ‘Totum relucet in omnibus’ as he puts it, the whole shines in everything.50 Nevertheless, Bloch saw the same problem with Hegel’s epistemology as he did with his ontology: panlogism. The ‘tension between the general concepts in thought and particularities in being and its beings’, he argued, was ‘not settled in Hegel’s genetic-historical process insofar as it remains a contemplative pro-

48 49 50

Bloch 1985g, p. 210. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 126.

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cess filled with the panlogical’.51 Though clearly connected, thought and being were not simply identical for Bloch – a critical distinction clearly drawn from Kant – and he was wary of what he saw as the desire within Hegel’s logic for thought to be ‘everything it is worth being’.52 In this vein Bloch criticised the ‘completely unreal limit concept of the Unum’, and argued that the ‘view of what is unincorporated’ was a good defence against what he called the ‘poverty of total comprehension’.53 At one level, of course, Bloch is making a purely epistemological point here, arguing that we do not have absolute knowledge, and in particular that the historical singularity of material being cannot be captured by thought. However, this argument also has political implications. For if what is most essential about particulars is what connects them to others of their kind rather than what is uniquely specific to them; if, as Hegel put it, the truth is the whole, then the individual becomes unimportant from the perspective of the greater context in which it exists. As the following chapter will demonstrate in more detail, Bloch saw this totalising tendency as a practical political problem within orthodox Marxism and the societies in which it was the official ideology. A related critique of Hegel’s panlogism was that Bloch believed it prevented Hegel from being able to think real possibility. He highlights a point in the Encyclopaedia where Hegel argues that philosophy ‘must not be concerned with showing that something is possible, or that something else is also possible, or that something, however one expresses it, is conceivable’.54 Even when Hegel understands possibility as more than an ‘empty abstraction of the reflectionin-itself’, Bloch claims, ‘but also as an in-itself moment of reality’, that which he calls real possibility is ‘wholly surrounded by the circle of reality that has already become’.55 The previous chapter already identified what Bloch saw as the ontological issue at stake here: namely that change and contingency are real, and in order to discriminate between what is possible and impossible at a given moment we require a philosophy that is willing to concede that possibility can be subjected to rational analysis, at least to an extent. Hegel was unwilling to concede this because he was a modal actualist: as he saw it, thought can only explain what is, it cannot say what will or should be. As he puts it at the end of his preface to the Philosophy of Right, when it comes to ‘issuing instructions on how the world ought to be’, philosophy ‘always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only 51 52 53 54 55

Bloch 1985g, p. 472. Bloch 1985h, p. 155. Bloch 1985g, p. 126. Bloch 1985g, p. 234; cf. Bloch 1986, p. 245. Bloch 1986, p. 245.

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at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its complete state’.56 In other words, philosophy is only capable of explanation after the fact, and should resist the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For Bloch, on the other hand, philosophy had a practical social role to play, which is why he lambasts what he saw as ‘that reactionary element in Hegel’ for which philosophy ‘always comes too late to change’.57 Here again, therefore, Bloch’s epistemological objections to Hegel also entailed an implicit political critique. Thus if Bloch, contrary to Lukács, did subscribe in large part to the Hegelian position that conceptual knowledge of nature, not only society, is possible, he also saw serious epistemological, and practical, problems with Hegel’s panlogism. Since it was to Kant and the Kantian tradition that Bloch turned for a solution to the illusion of absolute knowledge, his epistemology consists not in a repudiation of Kant, as Habermas and others have supposed, but is rather consistent with the intention, expressed already in Spirit of Utopia, to let Kant ‘burn through Hegel’.58

2

The Influence of Neo-Kantianism

As Frederick Beiser has pointed out, neo-Kantianism was the ‘dominant philosophical movement in Germany from 1860 to 1914’.59 Anyone who studied philosophy in Germany during this period could not have avoided its influence, and Bloch was no exception. Bloch’s dissertation, which he submitted under the supervision of Oswald Külpe in Würzburg in 1908, dealt with the thought of contemporary neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. As its title, Kritische Erörterungen über Rickert und das Problem der modernen Erkenntnistheorie [Critical Explanations of Rickert and the Problem of Modern Epistemology], already indicates, at that time, Bloch was engaging critically with neoKantianism, a fact not without significance for the evolution of his thought.60 In his dissertation, Bloch tried to show how a critique of the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge could lead to a new utopian philosophy.

56 57 58 59 60

Hegel 1991, p. 23. Bloch 1986, p. 245. Bloch 2000, p. 187. Beiser 2003, p. 8. For more on neo-Kantianism, see Beiser 2014; Kohnke 1991; Luft (ed.) 2015; de Warren and Staiti (eds.) 2015. Bloch 1909. Significant sections of the thesis have been republished in Bloch 1985q, pp. 55– 107. See also Bloch 2011.

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Prior to 1908 when Bloch’s dissertation was published, Rickert had become one of the leading members of the Baden School of neo-Kantianism. A key question in Rickert’s work was what constituted knowledge, in general and also in specific fields of academic enquiry. Rickert’s own epistemology was based on Kantian transcendental idealism. In his 1892 work Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis [The Object of Knowledge], Rickert argued that the consistency we observe in the world of objects is produced by the logical structure of mental judgements.61 It was, he argued, the ‘necessity of judgement that provides us with truth, and on which all existential propositions are based’. Rickert would summarise his epistemological position succinctly in the later 1915 edition of Gegenstand, in which he claimed that ‘the logical does not exist, rather it is valid’.62 Rickert’s epistemology was thus clearly built on Kant’s insight that our knowledge does not conform to reality as it is in itself, but rather reality conforms to the logical structures our knowledge imposes on it in the forms of intuition and categories of the understanding. Nevertheless, Rickert also went beyond Kant when he suggested that the latter had proceeded too rashly from the concept of what is given or perceived to a strong concept of nature as a realm existing independently of the mind.63 Despite Kant’s insistence that reality cannot be known in itself, Rickert believed Kant had still equated knowledge of experience with knowledge of nature, at least in certain of its aspects. Rickert wanted to insist that what is known is only our experience of nature, rather than nature itself, and so he now introduced the idea of ‘objective reality’ [objective Wirklichkeit] between the subject and the posited external world, to designate those facets of experience whose inter-subjective verifiability constituted the basis of knowledge.64 Seemingly driving an even larger wedge between human consciousness and material nature, Rickert’s philosophy was exactly the kind of ‘thing-in-itself immaterialism’ to which Bloch objected. The status of concepts was a key issue in both Rickert’s theory and Bloch’s engagement with it. In the late nineteenth century, as the various academic disciplines became increasingly independently defined, a dispute arose over the relative status of knowledge acquired via the distinctive methods operating in the natural sciences and the humanities, especially history. Rickert’s neo-Kantian contemporary Wilhelm Windelband put forward a distinction between the nomothetic method operative in natural science, which seeks to 61 62 63 64

Rickert 1915. Rickert 1915, p. 16. Rickert 1915, p. 410. Ibid.

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identify generally valid laws, and the idiographic method at work in the humanities, whose distinctive interest lies in knowledge of the concrete or individual. Emil Lask, Rickert’s student, nuanced the debate by pointing to what he called a hiatus irrationalis between concepts and the reality they describe, a phrase that clearly recalls Du Bois-Reymond’s claim that the relationship between consciousness and material nature is an unsolvable riddle.65 In his Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (1896) [The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science], Rickert intervened in this debate by arguing, in a more relativistic way than Windelband, that natural science is concerned with forming concepts of reality that increasingly tend toward the general and abstract, while history is concerned with forming concepts of individual entities.66 However, Rickert stopped short of suggesting that the knowledge acquired by history was any closer to perceptual reality than that of natural science. All concepts, for him, remained separated from perceptual reality by Lask’s hiatus irrationalis. Moreover, he continued to recognise all concepts as in some sense universalising. The difference between history and natural science for Rickert was merely that the concepts in search of which history goes are those that designate some phenomenon as an in-dividual, that is, as something that is ‘constituted by a coherence and an indivisibility’ which is of interest to us because we regard the phenomenon as irreplaceable.67 The distinction between natural-scientific and historical concept formation was thus for Rickert one of the cognitive interest each method ascribes to phenomena. In his dissertation, Bloch criticised two main aspects of the ‘problem of modern epistemology’ that are relevant for the development of his speculative materialism. First, he believed that Rickert’s theory of historical concept formation overlooked the depth and complexity of the processes it described. ‘It has not become clear to Rickert himself’, Bloch argued, ‘what a confused and dark searching reigns in the logic of history’.68 One sees already here the origins of Bloch’s susceptibility to a materialist account of history. For Bloch, history was a messy business that could not simply be reconstructed by designating certain phenomena as in-dividuals in order to form appropriate concepts of them. One reason for this was that Rickert’s emphasis on cognitive interest also neglected the material interests that have played a role in shaping the reality 65 66 67 68

For more on Lask’s place in the history of neo-Kantianism, and the hiatus irrationalis in particular, see Beiser 2008b, pp. 283–95. Rickert 1896; cf. Rickert 1986. Oakes, ‘Introduction’ in Rickert 1986, p. xxiv. Bloch 1909, p. 44.

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history tries to describe. ‘Even in the material of the discipline of history’, Bloch argued, ‘there resides a world primitively related to cultural meanings, which, like some semi-finished product, is inserted between events and the scientific goal [of the discipline]’.69 Bloch’s remarks here point in the direction of the Marxian critique of Feuerbach’s epistemology. According to Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, the ‘chief defect of all previous materialism’ had been that ‘things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’.70 For Marx, Feuerbach had been unable to see that the material world around him had been produced by human labour. Bloch seems to see Rickert make the same mistake here. Insofar as the ‘material’ that the discipline of history takes as its object has been produced by the ‘activity’ of ‘real individuals’, as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, it has become part of the ‘material conditions’ we find ‘already existing’.71 Crucially, however, as a product of human labour, this material is imbued with what Bloch here calls ‘cultural meanings’ that can neither be reduced to the manifold of events (which Rickert thinks is unknowable ‘in itself’ anyway), nor to the concepts that are meant to describe phenomena designated by historians in their respective present as in-dividual because irreplaceable. It is in part this ‘cultural meaning’, which is the product of labour – that is, of lived time – that constitutes the irretrievable past-ness of historical phenomena that makes them irreplaceable, and therefore into in-dividuals. Bloch seems to want to say here that this temporal past-ness is real, not just conceptual, and that Rickert’s account of historical knowledge fails because it is unable to take account of that fact. The second problem Bloch identifies with modern epistemology as represented by Rickert is that his arguments about the increasing abstraction of scientific concepts would require there to be an ultimate lawfulness of laws of the kind Rickert wanted to deny. The certainty within natural science ‘that there is a clear series of natural laws is only possible’, Bloch argues, if we may at the same time assume a lawfulness of laws in order to come ever closer to the single ultimate concept of law. Consequently, a concept of the material world must be constructed in which only such concepts of things occur that cannot be eliminated by the further progress of empirical science.72 69 70 71 72

Bloch 1909, p. 34. Marx 1975b, p. 3. Marx and Engels 1975b, p. 31. Bloch 1909, p. 28.

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In other words, the process of increasing conceptual abstraction that Rickert argues is characteristic for the development of natural scientific knowledge cannot continue ad infinitum unless there is some ultimate law at which science can arrive. However, that would resemble the kind of absolute knowledge that the neo-Kantian Rickert wanted to deny was possible, since it would point towards the real existence of some underlying, unifying aspect of reality. Rickert comes close to this position himself in the Grenzen in the context of a discussion of the conceptual abstraction involved in the transition from a mechanistic natural science based on a concept of matter to a more dynamic one based on that of energy. Rickert claimed that this shift must be viewed as ‘merely a change in the terminology, when one uses the word energy instead of that of matter. Objectively’, he continued, ‘everything remains as in the old system. Energy is then only a new name for the physical thing that underlies the whole physical world as the actual reality’.73 At this point the flaw in Rickert’s theory that Bloch pointed to is exposed: natural science must assume there is an underlying unity to reality of which, however, it cannot claim to have knowledge if it adheres to a purely phenomenal epistemology, as Rickert argued it must. Admittedly, Bloch affirms Rickert’s rejection of the epistemology of naïve realism. Rickert’s argument against the ‘reflection theory of knowledge’ as Bloch presents it is to say that realism is inconsistent, because it requires us to ‘have a knowledge of the object’ that according to Kantian principles ‘would not be permitted to be knowledge. Otherwise it would itself have an object and we would be obliged to compare this knowledge with its object, which would lead to an infinite regress’.74 Bloch agrees with Rickert’s rejection of realism in this form. Nevertheless, Bloch does also clearly want to argue that there is a kind of transitivity between subject and object that allows us to assume that the transcendental unity of the subject corresponds to an ontological unity that Bloch designates in Das Materialismusproblem with the term ‘matter’, and which can thus be seen to function as a descriptor for the ‘lawfulness of laws’ that he insisted followed from Rickert’s theory of an increasingly generalised and abstract scientific concept formation. Here again, Rickert comes close to saying something like this himself, this time in Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, where he defines the transcendental subject as ‘nothing other than a nameless, general, impersonal consciousness’ and

73 74

Rickert 1896, p. 115. Bloch 1909, p. 33.

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the ‘only thing that can never be an object or content of consciousness’.75 What Rickert here calls ‘epistemological consciousness’ is neither the consciousness of an individual embodied subject of a world of other bodies spatially external to it; nor is it the immanent consciousness of a subject whose own body is also conceived of as a transcendent object. Rickert’s epistemological consciousness is not even to be confused with the consciousness of the ego vis-à-vis the objects of that consciousness within the sphere of immanence, since as Rickert understands it, this would still be the consciousness of an empirical rather than a transcendental subject. Rather, epistemological consciousness for Rickert referred to ‘nothing other than that which is common to all immanent objects, which cannot be explained any further’.76 It is, Rickert argues, the ‘limit concept’ of our experience.77 Bloch’s early engagement on these points clearly influenced his philosophy in Das Materialismusproblem, where he argues that this minimal universality of transcendental consciousness is the point at which consciousness and nonconscious reality intersect, and that this intersection testifies to the existence of a real minimal universality in the structure of reality as a whole. In order to make this argument, Bloch draws on none other than Kant, who described the thing-in-itself, in terms echoed by Rickert, as the ‘limit concept of experience’.78 Bloch points to the roots of this idea in the work of the young Kant, who reflected that a substance might exist that nevertheless had no ‘external relations to others, nor stand in any real connection with them’.79 Since there can be ‘no place without external connections, positions and relations’, Kant surmised, ‘it is probably possible that a thing really exists but is nowhere present in the world’.80 This ‘no place’ that ‘really exists but is nowhere present in the world’ is none other than Bloch’s utopian matter, which, despite having ‘never been perceived by anyone’ – ‘in itself’, that is – must nevertheless be grasped as the ‘Totum, which also underlies the concerns of the critique of judgement, even that of practical reason, more than that, enables transcendental synthesis itself’.81 Bloch admits that Kant ‘never uses the expression matter for this not only transcendentally synthesised, but really comprehensive substrate of unity

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Rickert 1896, p. 325. Rickert 1896, p. 29. Rickert 1896, p. 56 and passim. Cf. Bloch 1985g, p. 209. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 210.

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and totality’.82 Nevertheless, this is the term Bloch uses for this ineluctable point of unity between subject and object, which, he argues, makes knowledge of an underlying unity possible. In a sense, of course, Bloch follows Schelling here again, who found a way out of Kantian dualism by taking the step Kant himself resisted, even in the critique of judgement, where he comes closest to suggesting that nature can be seen in more than merely formal terms. Schelling argued that things in themselves and ‘representations’ cannot be absolutely different, because we know a world that exists independently of our will yet which can be affected by it. For our knowledge of nature to be possible at all, Schelling claimed that there must be some connection between appearances and things in themselves. As he puts it in the System of Transcendental Idealism: one can push as many transitory materials as one wants, which become finer and finer, between mind and matter, but sometime the point must come where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap that we so long wished to avoid becomes inevitable.83 As we have seen, Schelling located this deep unity between human knowledge and a mind-independent reality in his conception of nature as an unconscious but productive subject, and in key respects, as we have already seen, Bloch followed suit. Now, however, if the Schellingian response to Kant has largely come to be associated with a return to a form of metaphysical speculation unencumbered by Kant’s insight into knowledge’s limits, it is worth noting that in no sense did Schelling’s nature philosophy depend on denying these limits; it rather attempted to understand and explain them in a different way. In Schelling’s view, the Kantian understanding of the absolute or in itself as something merely external to human consciousness made little sense even in Kant’s own terms; since we know no reality ‘without us’, the absolute must be grasped as a totality that does include human subjectivity. Crucially, human subjectivity has emerged within the world, and is thus immanent to it, just as the natural ‘productivity’ that preexisted and produced human consciousness (and is thus absolute in the sense that it does not depend on us for its existence) remains immanent to the conscious subjectivity that has emerged from it. Schelling’s immanentised absolute thus had the advantage of offering an explanation for intelligibility, while still

82 83

Ibid. Schelling 1988, p. 40.

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retaining the idea that human knowledge of the absolute is limited. The idea that the productivity of nature can never appear as such but only in the form of products, which are the result of the productivity inhibiting itself, was intended to shed light on the apparent discrepancy between things in themselves and appearances rather than make it uncritically disappear. Bloch’s dialectical conception of the human being and world as standing in relation to one another as simultaneously question and answer clearly takes its cue from Schelling here. Meanwhile, his claim that certain facets of material nature remain ‘latent’ must similarly be understood as a recognition, rather than a rejection, of the idea that human knowledge is limited.

3

The Role of Irony

A further indication of Bloch’s epistemological debt to Kant can be seen in the fact that he takes the side of the neo-Kantians in the debate about scientific materialism. As we have seen, the neo-Kantians accused the mechanical materialists of having overstepped an epistemological line by making claims about matter in-itself. According to the neo-Kantians, the mechanical materialists had forgotten the role that conscious, subjective activity plays in structuring our knowledge of the world. In Das Materialismusproblem, Bloch approvingly quotes neo-Kantian philosopher Carl Stumpf who ‘waxed ironic’ when he mocked the absurd implication of mechanical materialism in a speech delivered to the Munich Congress of Psychologists in 1896: Organisms live and act, people found states, write poetry, even hold psychology conferences, driven by physical forces, exactly as if thinking, feeling or willing did not exist at all. Indeed, one could even talk about language, as we are doing now, as if there were no such thing as consciousness!84 Stumpf’s point was to poke fun at the scientific materialist’s belief that they could make claims about the nature of reality as a whole without accounting critically for the epistemic position of the observer. That Bloch invoked this argument to counter the naïve metaphysics of mechanical materialism is instructive: it demonstrates that he himself was far from unaware of the constitutive role subjectivity plays in conditioning our knowledge of reality.

84

Bloch 1985g, p. 289.

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Bloch’s reference to irony here also marks him out as the heir to early romantic responses to Kant found in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin.85 These thinkers recognised that human thought and language are only a part of the totality we seek to articulate, and therefore philosophy, which is expressed linguistically, cannot profess to its complete representation. ‘Pure thinking and cognition of the highest can never be represented adequately,’ Schlegel claimed, and this insight into ‘the principle of the relative unrepresentability of the highest’ led him to adopt an alternative response to Kantian transcendentalism.86 For Schlegel, the difficulty of representing the highest or infinite is overcome when philosophy embraces the techniques of poetic language, in particular irony, which signals insight into the impossible necessity of the task of representation. Philosophy, Schlegel claimed, ‘is the real homeland [Heimat] of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty: for wherever philosophy appears in oral or written dialogues – and is not simply confined into rigid systems – there irony should be asked for and provided’.87 The meaning and function of irony in romantic philosophy and aesthetics has been much debated, but what is beyond doubt is that the romantic concept of irony was bound up with the idea that one never has access to absolute truth. The whole to which philosophy and art aspire can never be captured as such, but only outlined in a fragmentary way, from multiple, shifting perspectives. Bloch found Schlegel’s irony lacking to the extent that he believed it ‘dampened or diverted rebellious behaviour’ – by pushing the denial of objective truth too far, Bloch believed that irony might bring with it a kind of quietism.88 Nevertheless, he valued the fact that in Schlegel’s sense of irony ‘the subject wanted to behave … critically towards the object’, questioning the status of knowledge and testing out approaches to it.89 Above all, Bloch valued Schlegel’s concept of irony for recognising the dialectical method as a key technique in the pursuit of truth, though of course as a historical materialist, Bloch saw dialectics as operative within history itself and not only at the level of language. Nevertheless, his own literary style of philosophical prose, which incorporates aphorism, allegory, fragment and fairy-tale in an attempt to approach the absolute indirectly, by adumbrating the whole, owes a considerable debt to Schlegel and German romanticism more generally.90

85 86 87 88 89 90

For more on these thinkers, see Beiser 2003; Frank 2012; Nassar (ed.) 2014. Cited in Millán-Zaibert 2007, p. 168. Cf. Schlegel 1959, Vol. 11, p. 124; Frank 2012, p. 208. Millán-Zaibert 2007, p. 168. Bloch 1985g, p. 212. Ibid. For more on Bloch’s use of the fairy tale, see Weissberg 1992, pp. 21–44.

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Scholarship on Bloch never fails to mention his style, nor to acknowledge his debt to German expressionism, sometimes approvingly, sometimes more critically. Hudson has perhaps gone furthest in appreciating the role form plays for Bloch in constructing meaning. Hudson recognises Bloch’s style as a form of ‘recursive modernism’, and argues that, like his friend and contemporary Walter Benjamin, Bloch regarded literary techniques such as allegory, symbolism and montage as ‘a form of materialist cognition … designed to reveal traces of world contents not given in the abstract appearance of capitalist society’.91 As convincing as Hudson’s interpretation is, what his account misses is that Bloch’s use of these techniques also performs epistemological work: his use of irony signals his insight into the impossibility – in the present, at least – of fully articulating the absolute. While stylistic considerations alone are not sufficient to make definitive claims about Bloch’s epistemology, a formal analysis of his writing nevertheless complicates the idea that he saw thought as having immediate access to a mind-independent reality. For instance, although Bloch explicitly rejected Friedrich Hölderlin’s idea that the search for absolute knowledge was condemned to be a process of ‘infinite approximation’ [unendliche Annäherung], the meta-narrative structure he employs in The Principle of Hope in fact echoes this very same idea as expressed in terms more familiar to Novalis.92 Novalis’ fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen tells the story of a medieval Minnesänger seeking absolute knowledge in the form of a mystical union with divine nature. In the second half of the book, the pilgrim meets a mysterious girl who responds to his questions with cryptic answers, and leads him away from his path. When he asks ‘Where are we going?’ she simply replies ‘Always homeward [Immer nach Hause]’, the word ‘always’ expressing the ultimate impossibility of reaching the intended destination.93 There is a clear parallel here with the structure of The Principle of Hope. The text opens with a series of questions: ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? [Italics mine] What are we waiting for? What awaits us?’ and ends with the word ‘Heimat’ which – if read in a linear way – seems to stand as a definitive

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Hudson 1982, p. 2. Cf. Bloch 1986, p. 222, where he calls the ‘mere endless approach to the ideal’ a ‘phantom’, and laments the attitude of an ‘eternal striving towards the ideal’ that disavows the ultimate possibility of its achievement. Novalis 2008, p. 345. All references given here are to the German collected works. To date, the only English version of this text remains the 1842 edition, Henry of Ofterdingen: A Romance. From the German of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), (Cambridge, MA: John Owen, 1842).

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answer.94 However, given that the German concept of Heimat is associated with the search for origins, our arrival at the end returns us to the same questions with which we began.95 The recurring figure of the world as a ‘question’ or ‘riddle’ in Das Materialismusproblem also recalls Du Bois-Reymond’s response to scientific materialism, which he articulated in his 1880 speech to the Berlin Academy of Sciences entitled ‘On the limits of our knowledge of nature’ (Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens).96 There, Du Bois-Reymond argued that just because the scientific materialists had identified certain correlations between mental and physical processes, that did not mean they had explained how the former arose out of the latter. He identified seven questions, which he called ‘world riddles’, including the ultimate nature of matter and force, the origins of life, thought, and free will, and the apparently teleological organisation of nature, the answers to which he provocatively declared scientists ‘do not know and will not know’ (‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus’). Bloch agreed with Du Bois-Reymond that a central problem with mechanical materialism was that it had no answer for the question of how consciousness arises out of unconscious matter. When Bloch quotes Engels, who in his Dialectics of Nature argued that even if experimental science can ‘reduce’ thought to molecular and chemical processes, it still will not have exhausted the nature of thought, he adds approvingly that ‘even a Du Bois Reymond with his “Ignoramus et ignorabimus” could not have put quotation marks around the word “reduce” more ironically’.97 Here again, irony plays a positive role for Bloch in signalling the limits of our knowledge in the present. In view of these considerations, it is clear that Bloch’s epistemology is neither the naïve regression to a pre-critical metaphysics, nor the descent into an irrationalist romanticism that Habermas and others have at turns supposed it to be. Rather, there is a tension in his work between the recognition, registered in part at the level of form, of the present impossibility of absolute knowledge, and an affirmative attitude towards its ultimate possibility – that is, towards the ultimate possibility of a kind of identity between subject and object, which Bloch cast in ontological terms as a unity between human and non-human nature. Hope is the name Bloch gives to this affirmative attitude, and he understood it as simultaneously an epistemic and an affective category. 94 95 96 97

Bloch 1986, p. 3. For more on the concept of Heimat, see Applegate 1990; Bastian 1995; Blickle 2002. Du-Bois Reymond 1872, 1872. Bloch 1985g, p. 309; cf. Engels 1987, p. 527: ‘One day we shall certainly “reduce” thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motion in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?’

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Rationalism, Empiricism, and Practice

Seen in rationalist terms, Bloch’s concept of hope was predominantly a Kantian legacy. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant argued that it was rational to hope for a future utopia in the form of an afterlife.98 The ‘scale of reason’ was not, he claimed, ‘wholly impartial’, and indeed for Kant ‘one of its arms, which bears the inscription, “Hope for the Future”’, had a ‘constructive advantage’ allowing ‘even those light reasons which fall into its scale’ – that is, the ‘stories of apparitions of departed souls’ that would encourage us to believe in an afterlife – ‘to outweigh the speculations of greater weight on the other side’, namely on the side of our actual experience of another world, which of course we cannot have in this life.99 This ‘hope for the future’ was ‘the only inaccuracy’ Kant said ‘which I cannot easily remove, and which, in fact, I never want to remove’.100 Of course, after his critical turn, Kant would assert that speculations such as these belong squarely in the realm of metaphysics. To hope for it in the realm of the ideal may not be irrational, therefore – indeed, for Kant questions of modal possibility were questions of pure reason – but to hope for it in this world, which as we know is governed by physical laws that cannot be evaded, would be absurd. If for Kant, however, ‘utopia’ was only realisable in a spiritual realm, as an atheist and a Marxist, Bloch wanted to assert its historical-material possibility. ‘The ideal which in Kant is consistently dominant’, he claims in The Principle of Hope, is ‘abstractly given precedence even to politics’ and as such the ‘approach’ to it in history must remain ‘endless’ for him, just as it did for Hölderlin, Schlegel and Novalis.101 Bloch wanted to claim that his hope for utopia was more than merely rational, but also had some empirical basis. For that he needed a non-dualist epistemology that would enable him to claim that there is reason in history, without inflating this to the problematic proportions he believed Hegel had. This he found in the thought of Feuerbach and Marx, who had in their own ways both drawn on and extended some of Kant’s insights. The major discovery of Kant’s transcendental philosophy had been that knowledge was not a matter of the mind conforming to the way things are ‘in themselves’ in a mind-independent world, but rather the external world conforms to the structure of the mind, and that therefore human subjectivity plays an active role in shaping our knowledge of the world. Feuerbach largely 98 99 100 101

Kant 2003, p. 38. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 244.

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agreed with this insight, but he too grappled with an apparent mind-body dualism inherent in Kant’s theory. Although Kant recognised, for instance in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that the ‘world of sense … can be very dissimilar according to the dissimilar sensibility of many kinds of observers of the world’, he nevertheless believed that the ‘world of understanding’, which he saw as the ‘foundation’ of the world of sense, ‘always remains the same’.102 Feuerbach suspected, however, that also the world of understanding is indelibly shaped by the ‘dissimilar sensibility’ of the subject, since the thinking ego is, after all, always an embodied one. ‘How are we able to suppose the existence of an ego that thus enquires and can thus enquire?’ Feuerbach asked in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, in recognition of the fact that the ego is always a corporeal ego.103 ‘It is through the body’, he continued, ‘that the ego is not just an ego but also an object. To be embodied is to be in the world; it means to have so many senses, i.e., so many pores and naked surfaces. The body is nothing but the porous ego’.104 For Feuerbach, then, the human body was the hinge between the empirical and theoretical realms. However, he ultimately saw physical, or material, experience as primary. As he put it in a set of theses on the reformulation of philosophy from 1842, thought ‘comes from being, but being does not come from thought’.105 By emphasising the embodied nature of cognition, Feuerbach was criticising a tendency within epistemology towards ‘the abstraction from the sensuous [Sinnlichkeit], from matter’.106 Feuerbach’s ‘sensualism’ or sensuous materialism reformulated the traditional distinction between rationalism and empiricism more fundamentally than Kant had done. If the mind can only be thought of as an embodied mind, as Feuerbach insisted, then it is sense perception and the mental synthesis of sense data taken together that produce our knowledge of the world. Nevertheless, Feuerbach did not revert to a version of pre-critical realism when it came to the senses: he recognised that the knowledge we acquire through our embodied experience of the world is as much a product of the specific structure of our sensory apparatus as it is that of our mental apparatus (to the extent that these can be thought of as separate). For one thing, Feuerbach argued in his work on moral philosophy, human beings are corporeal beings endowed with needs: the need for food, for clothing, shelter, and indeed human interaction.

102 103 104 105 106

Kant 2012, p. 60. Feuerbach 2013, p. 140. All selections quoted here are available in English translation in this volume unless otherwise stated. Feuerbach 2013, p. 143. Feuerbach 2013, p. 168. Feuerbach 2013, p. 13.

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Feuerbach regards sensation as the ‘first condition of willing’, since without sensation there is no pain or need or sense of lack against which the will might strive to assert itself.107 He defines happiness as the ‘healthy, normal’ state of contentment or wellbeing experienced by an organism that is able to satisfy the needs and drives that are constitutive of its ‘individual, characteristic nature and life’.108 Feuerbach understood the drive-to-happiness as a drive towards overcoming a multitude of painful limitations by which the finite, corporeal subject is afflicted, which include among other things ‘political brutality and despotism’.109 For Feuerbach, every particular drive is a manifestation of the drive-to-happiness, and he named the different individual drives after the different objects in which people seek their happiness.110 For Feuerbach, then, the universal structure of embodied subjectivity was one of being ‘open to the world’ and materially dependent on others. If the German Idealists had already acknowledged the intersubjectivity of knowledge at the conceptual level, Feuerbach now pushed this in a more materialist direction. Because we are ‘porous’ beings, there are no definite boundaries that distinguish one embodied ego from another. Feuerbach recognised ‘that I am nothing without a not-I which is distinct from me yet intimately related to me, something other, which is at the same time my own being’.111 In other words, knowledge for Feuerbach was as much a product of material social interactions as it was of apperception or sensory experience. Bloch followed Feuerbach in understanding knowledge as produced by embodied, socially connected minds. Here again, the compositional form of Das Materialismusproblem and the metaphorical language Bloch uses offer some of the most convincing illustrations of Feuerbach’s influence on his epistemology. The structure of the text puts the sensuous experience of lack front and centre, beginning with a section on ‘feeling’, which emphasises the needs-laden 107 108 109 110

111

Feuerbach 2013, p. 366. Ibid. Feuerbach 2013, p. 50. Feuerbach 1866, pp. 11, 53–186, 70. Among the specific drives to which Feuerbach refers in his later writings are the drive-to-self-preservation, the sexual drive, the drive-toenjoyment, the drive-to-activity and the drive-to-knowledge. Although he does not explicitly associate drives with the unconscious, Feuerbach does anticipate Nietzsche and Freud in regarding the body as the ‘ground’ of both the will and of consciousness (p. 153), and he emphasises that action results from the force with which a dominant drive succeeds in subduing other conflicting drives that may reassert themselves under altered circumstances (p. 91). Feuerbach also occasionally distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy drives, though he has little to say about the standard or criterion for making such a distinction. Feuerbach 2013, p. 311.

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character of human being highlighted by Feuerbach. ‘We begin with almost nothing’, Bloch begins, ‘that drives us and wants to feel more. Then it looks around, touches and grasps. Yet sensation still hovers between in and out, what is sensed is not sealed. It remains vague and loose, pulls us on as if in a dream’.112 This observation that the outside world is ‘not sealed’ is mirrored exactly in The Principle of Hope where Bloch says that the ‘human being is not sealed’, clearly recalling Feuerbach’s sensualism by highlighting the reciprocally ‘porous’ nature of our consciousness and reality.113 This feeling around for something to grasp onto is followed in the architecture of Das Materialismusproblem by the ‘early protection’ of sorting what initially comes to us through the senses as a jumbled manifold.114 This is achieved, initially, through what Bloch calls the ‘spell of the name’.115 By identifying things as individuals, we can begin to make sense of our experience, and the process of ‘finding’ a world outside of us begins.116 Next, at the beginning of the first course in which Bloch treats the problem of universals, come ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’, and with them the shift from names to concepts.117 ‘Embodied thought’ comes with the shift from idealism to materialism in the book’s second course, which is followed initially by an ‘open crisis’ with the attempt to think consciousness from a materialist perspective.118 With the insight into the mediating role human beings can play in the process of trying to bring about a materially possible utopia, knowledge finds itself ‘in its own skin’.119 As the language Bloch uses to frame his epistemology demonstrates, his speculative enterprise here is far from the Kantian, purely theoretical definition of speculation. However, insofar as Feuerbach’s sensualism can be seen to have extended Kant’s epistemology in a phenomenological direction, and equally insofar as Das Materialismusproblem begins and ends with the Feuerbachian insight into the embodied nature of cognition, we can see just how complex and far-reaching an impact Kant’s thinking had on Bloch’s speculative materialism.

112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119

Bloch 1985g, p. 21. Bloch’s original phrase, ‘Der Mensch ist nicht dicht’ is translated in the English version of the text as ‘Man is not solid’, which does not convey the shared sense of both writers’ use of the word ‘dicht’ in the German (cf. Bloch 1986, p. 195). Bloch 1985g, p. 21. Bloch 1985g, p. 22. Bloch 1985g, p. 24. Bloch 1985g, p. 32. Bloch 1985g, p. 316. Bloch 1985g, p. 377.

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The entanglement of the senses in producing concepts that would avoid the violence of abstraction also saturates Bloch’s metaphorics. At a point in the text where he is criticising Hegel’s panlogism, Bloch emphasises that the ‘view of the individual makes one listen attentively’ by rendering one ‘sensitive to that which falls outside the frame, which is mostly all too pretty and all too large’.120 Sound and sight are invoked here simultaneously as means through which we acquire knowledge of an individual entity; meanwhile, the epistemological bias towards vision as the basis for conceptual knowledge is counterpoised with sound as a more ephemeral signature that resists the kind of totalisation possible in an image. For Bloch, as for Feuerbach, then, the structure of embodied subjectivity was both a universal and a social one. Once again in language that unmistakeably recalls Feuerbach, Bloch claims in Das Materialismusproblem that ‘the drive towards general happiness, the will to what is proper, the collective will to the happiness of the other … lives in the sensuous’.121 For Bloch this drive to, or desire [Sehnsucht] for, utopia was the ‘only honest characteristic of all human beings’. Bloch understood human beings as temporal beings, whose orientation towards the future can clearly be perceived in the material traces of the utopian imagination left over from the past. There can be little doubt that Bloch inherits his understanding of human historicity from Marx, and historical materialism entailed significant epistemological consequences for his theory. For if Feuerbach had shown that knowledge is not simply a reflection of an external world, but a product of embodied social relations, Marx was able to build on this further still by showing that the ‘sensuous’ world is not simply given: it is also the product of human labour, and as such of social struggle. As we have seen, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx claimed that the ‘chief defect of all previous materialism’ was that it conceived of ‘things, reality, sensuousness … only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively’.122 Hence why, when outlining the first premises of the materialist method, Marx and Engels depart not from the assumption of an eternal and immutable sensuous world, but emphasise that the ‘material conditions under which [real individuals] live’, include both ‘those they find already existing and those produced by their activity’.123 Importantly, however, the conditions we find existing in any particular historical present are themselves the product of the activity of past 120 121 122 123

Bloch 1985g, p. 128. Bloch 1985g, p. 276. Marx 1975b, p. 3. Marx and Engels 1975b, p. 31.

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individuals, and as such constitute the material trace of their subjective practice. Thus knowledge, from a historical materialist perspective, is itself acquired through practice, is the product of historical labour, and as such is itself a field of social struggle.124 Marx pushed the Kantian epistemological paradigm further still by emphasising the constitutive role of practical subjectivity in creating knowledge. Bloch clearly aligns himself with this view in Das Materialismusproblem when he says, paraphrasing Marx, that ‘knowing of the labour process and, more generally, of the “relations of man to man and to nature”, is […] at the same time knowledge of history itself […] including all forms of “humanity” ’.125 Bloch read artworks and other products of the labour of the imagination in this vein, as evidence of a will to utopia universally characteristic of human experience. Yet for Bloch, as we have seen, this creative striving towards utopia was not only limited to human subjectivity, but was also a feature of nature’s productivity and creative agency as well. The concept Bloch used to connect these two spheres was ‘matter’. Bloch’s matter is a speculative concept in the Hegelian sense that it describes an ontological universality connecting all things, which cannot be empirically observed as such. However, that does not mean that the concept ‘matter’ has no empirical basis for Bloch. Indeed, he sees the utopian traces of previous attempts to achieve freedom and harmony with nature as good empirical evidence of such a universal drive. Drawing on Kant, Bloch also saw good reason to believe that the object of this experimental will could be achieved through human historical labour. After all, even the post-critical Kant saw the historical future as open, and his vision of perpetual peace was, in Bloch’s view, merely another name for utopia. Since the future is a horizon of expectation rather than a space of experience, the achievement of utopia can only be subject to speculation and not knowledge. Nevertheless, on account of the mediating role played by human beings and their concepts between the actual and the possible, Bloch saw such speculation, such hope for a future utopia as rational and justified. 124 125

For more on the (post-)Kantian influence on Marx’s epistemology see Horowitz and Hayes 1999, pp. 295–310; McIvor 2004. Bloch 1985g, p. 385.

chapter 4

Politics In early 1938, the whole of Central Europe was under threat of invasion by Nazi Germany. The reintroduction of conscription in 1935, German occupation of the demilitarised Rheinland in March that year, its pacts with Japan and Italy in 1936 and 1937, and German intervention in Spain in 1936: all these were clear signs of Hitler’s expansionist intentions. Fearing for their lives, the Blochs were making plans to leave Prague and travel to the United States via Paris. It was a decision many with the means had already taken. Max Horkheimer had left for New York in 1934, where he had since re-established the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University. On 23 February 1938, Bloch wrote to Horkheimer in the hope that the latter would support his emigration by offering him a job.1 Horkheimer’s response was at best ambivalent. Although he agreed to provide Bloch with a letter confirming their professional cooperation, he regretted that, due to a ‘miserable’ financial situation, the Institute would not be able to offer him regular work.2 Bloch would later remark with bitterness that his erstwhile friends at the Frankfurt School would have ‘looked on with cold smiles if [he and his family] had really gone hungry’, a fate he insisted very nearly befell them.3 The issue was arguably not only one of resources. In the years following Bloch’s arrival in the United States, a key dividing line was drawn among German émigré thinkers between those who supported the Soviet Union and those who opposed it. While Bloch increasingly saw Russia as the only bulwark against fascism, in emigration Horkheimer came to see the Soviet and Nazi regimes equally as instances of totalitarianism. Karola Bloch would later recall that during the 1930s Horkheimer openly denounced her husband as ‘too Communist’.4 Bloch’s journalistic writings praising the Soviet Union as the Moscow Trials were in full swing undoubtedly played a part in Horkheimer’s lukewarm support. When later asked why he thought the Frankfurt School turned down his request for employment, Bloch claimed that they had ‘read my Stalin essays, and that was enough’.5 1 2 3 4 5

Bloch 1985r, pp. 680–1. Bloch 1985r, p. 683. Bloch 1985r, p. 682. Bloch 1981, p. 136. Zudeick 1987, p. 169.

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The question of totalitarianism is one that has haunted Bloch scholarship since the author’s own time, as Habermas’ review, which argued that Bloch’s thought ‘bordered on the totalitarian’, makes clear. This chapter challenges the idea that Bloch was a totalitarian thinker, arguing that despite his open support for Stalin during the 1930s, the conclusion that these commitments, which he later renounced, define his whole philosophy is mistaken. For one thing, as we have seen, the foundations of Bloch’s philosophy took shape before the Soviet Union even came into existence. Moreover, as this chapter will demonstrate, the idea that Bloch was an uncritical advocate of the Russian Revolution and of Lenin is inaccurate. Finally, Bloch’s dissidence during the GDR years provides further evidence of the fact that his philosophy, as well as his personal politics at that point, was actually at odds with orthodox Soviet agendas. The accusation that Bloch’s thought is totalitarian is at least partly bound up with the idea, articulated most explicitly by Bloch’s Frankfurt School contemporary Adorno, that utopianism, or speculative thinking, is in some sense essentially totalising. This argument, too, is challenged here on at least three counts. First, Das Materialismusproblem, written in large part during the same period as Bloch maintained his controversial stance on the Soviet Union, actually contains a critique of orthodox Marxism’s totalising tendencies. Second, the kind of speculative thinking in which Bloch did engage was viewed with suspicion in the Soviet Union, as is evidenced by Bloch’s later experience in the GDR. Finally, when Horkheimer himself described as the goal of all critical theory the ‘emancipation and alteration of society as a whole’,6 he highlighted his commitment to a kind of critique whose aim was the complete transformation of society. In its political dimension, it is argued here, Bloch’s speculative materialism participated in this self-same agenda of critique aimed at radical social change. As we will see, neither Marxist theory, nor socialist societies escaped its criticism.

1

The German Philosopher of the October Revolution?

Of all the images of Bloch that have contributed towards a view of him as a totalitarian thinker, it is perhaps Oskar Negt’s characterisation of Bloch as ‘the German philosopher of the October Revolution’ that has had the most influence.7 For Negt, ‘that epoch-making event, the occurrence of the October 6 Horkheimer 2002, p. 208. 7 Negt 1975, 3–16. Negt’s article was originally published in German as the afterword to the collection of Bloch’s journalistic writings from 1934–9, cf. Bloch 1972, pp. 429–44.

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Revolution’ was ‘the measure of all [Bloch’s] political assessments’.8 Negt claims that Bloch saw Lenin as the ‘Caesar of the Soviet Union’, and this view has been influential.9 Martin Jay has argued in the same spirit that ‘[p]olitically, Bloch was a fervent supporter of Lenin and the Russian Revolution and remained so well after most other Western Marxists had turned at least in part against them’.10 For Vincent Geoghegan, meanwhile, Bloch ‘welcomed the revolution as a kind of semi-mystical emanation from Holy Mother Russia’.11 Ivan Boldyrev echoes this view when he argues that the ‘spirit of the Russian Revolution was for … Bloch more immediate than the French Revolution, which [he] considered too reasonable, too close to Western rational culture’.12 Even among commentators sympathetic to Bloch, therefore, we often encounter this image of him as a politically rigid and doctrinaire thinker. In some respects, this was undoubtedly true. As Bloch’s son, Jan Robert, later emphasised, in the 1930s his father ‘transfigured the USSR into a revolutionary emblem, regardless of her bloody reality’.13 Nevertheless, Bloch’s politics were more nuanced than is allowed by the image of him as an early and unwavering advocate of the Revolution and of Lenin. To be sure, Bloch himself later avowed that October 1917 was the decisive event in his political development.14 However, his contemporary assessment of the revolution was more complicated than is often acknowledged. For one thing, Bloch was an early critic of Lenin, whom he called the ‘red tsar’, and a ‘new Genghis Khan’.15 And although his interpretation of the events of 1917 were undoubtedly coloured by his commitment to Marxism, as we will see, Bloch’s contemporary stance on the revolution was heavily influenced by the conviction that post-First World War Germany must look to the United States for the model of an open, democratic society. Finally, although Bloch did continue to engage with the legacy of 1917 throughout his life, his view of it changed considerably over time.

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

Negt 1975, pp. 3–16, 10. Negt 1975, p. 8. Jay 1984, p. 176. Geoghegan 1996, p. 124. Boldyrev 2014, p. 53. Bloch 1988, pp. 9–39, 9. Cf. Ernst Bloch in interview with Eckhart Frahm and Hubert Locher, broadcast on the Südwestrundfunk radio station in 1974. Zeitgenossen des Jahrhunderts: Ernst Bloch (Baden Baden: Audioverlag, 1999). Cf. ‘Lenin, der “rote Zar” ’, in Bloch 1985o, pp. 196–8 (article first published in the Freie Zeitung on 27.2.1918 under the name Ferdinand Aberle); Ernst Bloch, ‘Erkrankter Sozialismus’ in Kampf nicht Krieg, pp. 398–400, 399 (article first published in the Freie Zeitung on 16.11.1918 under the name Jakob Bengler).

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When the October Revolution broke out in November 1917, Bloch was living in exile in Zürich where he was working as a journalist for the Freie Zeitung, the foremost critical press in German emigration. Manfred Riedel has described Bloch’s stance during the pre-Weimar years as being ‘for Russia, against Lenin’, and this is certainly partly accurate, though insufficiently nuanced.16 In fact, in his contemporary journalistic writings, Bloch makes surprisingly few explicit references to the legitimacy or otherwise of events in Russia, and where he does, he demonstrates a strong orientation to the West, even if he supported the emancipatory goals of the February and then October Revolutions. Writing on Lenin’s victory at the beginning of December 1917, Bloch indicates his sympathy with the Russian peasantry only obliquely when he argues that one of Lenin’s goals in pursuing peace with the Central Powers was to prevent any future government from being able to ‘send the peasants once again before the canons’.17 However, his praise of Lenin here is not unalloyed: he simultaneously accuses the revolutionary leader of seeing no difference between the Central and Western Powers. A staunch critic of the Prussian regime, Bloch believed the Russian offer of peace would be a ‘misfortune for the question of democracy’ assuming that Imperial Germany’s autocratic structures were preserved after the war.18 He mocked the ‘maximalists’ whom he caricatures as supporting an armistice with an authoritarian regime while secretly hoping that German workers would be ‘infected’ with revolutionary fervour in order that socialist Russia should not have to live side by side with an ‘unbroken autocratic Empire’ immediately to its west.19 Bloch would reiterate these views several months later in an article commenting on the signature of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.20 There, Bloch again accuses Lenin of erroneously seeing both the Allied and Central Powers as equally the enemies of peace. His formulation here, that Lenin ‘acquiesces in the sovereign scepticism of the Marxist, who sees everywhere only capital interests and nothing else’, suggests that at this point Bloch did not yet explicitly identify with Marxism as he later would, albeit in a strongly heterodox form. Bloch makes clear his support for America when he expresses the view that the Entente powers had prevented the October revolution from being ‘annihilated’, and again accused the Bolsheviks of having broken the illusion of neutrality

16 17 18 19 20

Riedel 1994, p. 65. ‘Wochenschau’ in Bloch 1985s, p. 103. ‘Wochenschau’ in Bloch 1985s, p. 104. ‘Wochenschau’ in Bloch 1985s, p. 105. ‘Die letzten Tage der Bolschewiki’, in Bloch 1985s, pp. 318–19. First published in the Freie Zeitung on 17.8.1918 under the pseudonym Jakob Bengler.

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with Brest-Litovsk, coming out on the side of the Germans despite all that the latter had done to thwart the revolution’s liberatory aims. Bloch showed more vocal support for these aims in the 1918 edition of Spirit of Utopia, where he describes the Russian revolutionary subject as the first truly free human being, who once and for all broke with ‘every form of feudalist dependence, beyond even the extensions of liberal superficiality, beyond even Anglo-Saxon banality or the godless petit-bourgeois character of German social democracy’.21 Nevertheless, in an article published a few months earlier in July that year, it is to the French, not the Russian, Revolution that Bloch turns in support of German socialism and anti-imperialism. The Germans, he claims, needed their own 1789 in order to bring the war to an end and achieve freedom from tyranny with a storming of the Bastille. Thus, contrary to Boldyrev’s suggestion that the young Bloch espoused the spirit of 1917 over that of 1789, I argue, with Riedel, that during the war years he enlisted the ‘ideas of 1789’ as a counterweight to those of 1914.22 Bloch clearly saw the foundation of the Weimar Republic as insufficient to achieve thoroughgoing social transformation. Reflecting on the outcome of the failed November Revolution in Germany, he claimed that ‘the struggle against the corridors of Weimar’ was a struggle for freedom and democracy.23 Emboldened by the failure of Social Democracy, which he called a ‘dictatorship of the minority’, Bloch nevertheless observed that neither Germany nor Russia were yet the socialist republics they claimed to be.24 Already Bloch identified a distinction between the predominantly ‘cold’ way in which the German and Russian revolutions had been won and lost, and the ‘warm’ tendency that he believed was needed to achieve socialism. ‘Neither in Germany nor to an extent in Russia today,’ he wrote in April 1919, ‘does either a minority or a majority find ready in consciousness the excitement and foundations that build Christian utopian socialism’.25 It was this vision of Christian-inspired utopian socialism that Bloch now increasingly saw embodied in the spirit of the October Revolution. In Thomas Münzer, Theologe der Revolution (1921), Bloch now describes Russia as the ‘revolutionary-religious inherited memory’ of ‘Münzer’s Germany’, and argues that a new messianic moment was brewing, the ‘proletarian impact from the West’

21 22 23 24 25

Bloch 1918, p. 298. Riedel 1994, p. 11. ‘Entfesselung der Pressefreiheit’, in Bloch 1985s, p. 451. ‘Wie ist Sozialismus möglich?’, in Bloch 1985s, p. 563. Originally published in Die Weißen Blätter in May 1919. ‘Entfesselung der Pressefreiheit’ in Bloch 1985s, p. 451.

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would bring it, and it would ‘culminate’ in ‘Germany and Russia’.26 Germany and Russia, post-revolutionary in different senses, thus became paired for Bloch during the Weimar period. Already in 1918 he had expressed regret that ‘the same Germany that had brought forth Karl Marx, Engels, and Ferdinand Lassalle’ had failed to achieve revolution.27 The second edition of Spirit of Utopia in 1923 continued in this vein, only now Bloch presented the ‘Marxist Republic in Russia’ as standing ‘unbowed’, even if he saw the ‘eternal questions of our longing, of our religious conscience … undiminished, unbent, unredeemed in their absolute claims’ by it.28 There was thus a shift during the Weimar years away from a more cautious and critical appraisal of the October Revolution and its aftermath, towards a more exalting stance. To be sure, Bloch saw the ultimate goal of socialism as still outstanding, but he nevertheless began to hold up Russia as symbolising the mystical promise of that fulfilment. However, while Geoghegan claims that Bloch saw the revolution from the very beginning as an ‘emanation from Holy Mother Russia’, I understand this as a retrospective reappraisal.29 Negt’s image of Bloch as the ‘German philosopher of the October Revolution’ remains valid in the sense that Bloch demonstrated a certain fidelity to the event of October 1917 throughout his life. However, considerations such as these also allow us to further nuance Negt’s view.

2

For Stalin, against Hitler

In the years following the Nazi Machtergreifung, however, with Bloch in exile and against the background of the Comintern’s policy of building a popular front against Nazism, his evaluation of Lenin became more favourable. In Heritage of Our Times, for instance, Bloch now names Lenin alongside the ‘fathers’ of Marxism, holding him up as one of those exemplary individuals (though not idols, he is careful to add) without whom such ‘human things as revolution’ would never be achieved.30 This positive reassessment of Lenin is extended in The Principle of Hope, where Bloch now claimed that Marx, Engels, and Lenin had all brought socialism to a ‘new stage’ on its way to being a concrete ideal.31

26 27 28 29 30 31

Bloch 1921, pp. 294–5. ‘Revolutionshindernisse in Deutschland’, in Bloch 1985s, p. 168. Originally published in the Freie Zeitung on 30.1.1918 under the pseudonym Jakob Bengler. Bloch, 2000, p. 236. Geoghegan, 2008, p. 124. Bloch 1991, p. 147. Bloch 1986, p. 199.

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Where before Bloch had emphasised the religious-utopian dimension of socialist thought and practice as essential to its strength, he now insisted that socialism progressed through its ‘solidity, mediated according to a plan’.32 A shift can thus be observed away from valuing the more romantic elements of the socialist tradition most highly, towards an appreciation of its constructivist potential. During the 1930s, Bloch’s commitment to the Soviet Union only grew. As Karola Bloch puts it in her memoir, during this period, ‘if it was a question of the Soviet Union, he was in favour’.33 As a result, Bloch’s retrospective assessment of the October Revolution also shifted. Whereas he had once seen Lenin as mistaken in believing that workers alone could end the war and overthrow the state, he now insisted that the ‘October Revolution of 1917 had [legitimately] used the dictatorship of the proletariat for the goal of abolishing the state’.34 Whereas he once extolled the virtues of pacifism and Entente democracy against the militarism of the Central Powers, Bloch now praised the fact that the Soviet Union had ‘established the strongest state and military apparatus as a security measure’, and argued that the ‘end of violence [was] inevitably immanent in this type of violence’.35 Finally, whereas once Bloch had mocked Lenin for seeing no difference between the Western and Central powers, he now himself drew a bald equation between state capitalism and fascism.36 Bloch’s journalistic writing during this period displays the same shift. Lenin was now the one who had ‘fulfilled’ the image of the ‘father’ and ‘saviour’ for ‘hundreds of millions’; even if Bloch recognised that this image was in principle ‘reactionary’, he nevertheless saw a ‘certain surplus’ of ‘humanely grasping need and human dream’ at its core.37 If Lenin was the ‘Caesar’ of the Soviet Union, however, Stalin was now its ‘Augustus’.38 Bloch sided with Stalin against Trotskyism in the 1930s: in March 1937, after the first two Moscow trials had targeted Trotsky’s supporters, Bloch denounced the Trotskyists’ ‘hatred … against Stalin’ and claimed that the end result of Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin’s popular frontism would have been ‘German fascism in Moscow’.39 Against those who claimed to still have faith in socialism while being critical of Stalinism, Bloch argued that it was impossible at that point to separate the two.40 Crucially, he 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid. Bloch 1981, p. 115. Cf. Bloch 1985s, p. 104; 1986 p. 1061. Ibid. Ibid. Bloch 1985s, p. 201. ‘Kritik der Propaganda’, April 1937. Bloch 1985s, p. 293. Bloch 1985s, p. 179. Bloch 1985s, p. 274.

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saw the model of ‘monopoly capitalism’ represented by England and the United States as insufficient defence against fascism, whether in its German, Italian, or Spanish forms, largely because, as he saw it, the British and Americans would likely rather see a fascist Europe than a communist one.41 If in the aftermath of October 1917 Bloch had been ‘for Russia, against Lenin’, as Riedel put it, then he was now for Stalin against Hitler. Indeed, Bloch’s support for Stalin during this period has to be seen in the context of the popular front strategy. As Negt argues, his essays written in the mid-1930s were intended to convince an émigré audience that unity with Russia was essential in order to combat European fascism. This ‘ideal of the revolution’, he wrote in November 1937, was not best served by what he saw as ‘senselessly exaggerated criticism of the motherland’; ‘only the popular front’ could serve anti-fascist interests.42 However, Bloch insisted that supporting the popular front ‘in no way requires an intense, let alone absolute commitment to Russia’, but merely the acceptance that there could be no serious anti-fascist struggle without the Soviet Union43. Despite these caveats, Bloch’s commitment to the Soviet Union in the 1930s was intense and uncritical, and exposes all the difficulties that can accompany principled intransigence. It is quite startling how deaf Bloch was to the voices of those he trusted most when they criticised Stalin’s regime. Already in spring 1935, Bloch’s close friend and correspondent, the writer Joachim Schumacher, along with his wife Sylvia, visited Ernst and Karola in Vienna. The Schumachers, themselves committed socialists, were returning from Moscow where they had hoped to emigrate after being expelled from Switzerland on account of their political beliefs. However, as Karola Bloch reports, the Schumachers had been ‘unhappy’ in Moscow, disappointed by the dogmatism of the intellectuals there.44 Yet although the stories the Schumachers brought back with them were ‘not pleasant’, this did not dissuade the Blochs from considering moving there themselves.45 They remained enthusiastic about the country ‘in which the first proletarian revolution had achieved its goal’ despite the negative evidence presented to them by their trusted friends.46 The Schumachers’ experience in Russia convinced them to seek exile in the United States, and it was from there that Joachim wrote to Bloch in March 1937. Despite the negative aspects of the American worldview that he and 41 42 43 44 45 46

Bloch 1985s, p. 230; 287; 228. Bloch 1985s, p. 288. Ibid. Bloch 1981, p. 100. Ibid. Ibid.

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Bloch had criticised over the preceding years – its methodological agnosticism, empiricism, and pragmatism – Schumacher affirms in the letter that in the USA, freedom meant what it had to Rosa Luxemburg, namely ‘the freedom to think otherwise’.47 This must have been particularly important for Schumacher, whose opposition to Moscow had seen him branded with the ‘idiotic label “Trotskyist”’.48 Everyone knew, he said, that the Moscow Trials were as ‘corrupt as a trust fund’, ‘even the communist’ would admit it ‘in private’.49 In his letter, Schumacher openly criticises Bloch’s stance on the issue, finding the latter’s ‘defence of the official version of the Trotskyist trials [itself] almost too official’.50 Schumacher also found fault with Bloch’s appreciative review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s travel journal Moscow 1937, in which Feuchtwanger had heaped praise on the Soviet Union’s monumental achievements.51 Bloch eulogised Feuchtwanger’s account – which he was eager to point out had ‘not praised everything about the Soviet Union’ – as an even-handed corrective to the ‘discontent with which even friends of the new Russia … react to its dark sides and blow them out of proportion’.52 Schumacher countered Bloch’s credulity, saying that nobody considered Feuchtwanger a ‘democratic author’, but instead he was everywhere seen as a ‘voice of the party’.53 Although Schumacher himself thought that Stalin was ‘a hundred times more in the right than Trotsky’ on the question of popular frontism, that did not mean that he was ‘always and everywhere in the right’, as Schumacher argued Bloch believed.54 Once again, rather than allowing himself to be convinced by Schumacher, Bloch stuck to his position. In his reply to his friend written in October 1937, Bloch reiterated that he did not share Schumacher’s opinion when it came to Stalin, not even ‘in private’ as the former had said was true of so many communists.55 Although Bloch agreed that the ‘anti-trial voices’ in the USA should be heard, he rejected the idea that socialists should be swayed by them.56 Doggedly maintaining that the truth lay ‘in the direction of the Moscow version’ of events, Bloch thus remained deeply, if cordially, divided from Schumacher over the Moscow Trials. 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Bloch 1985r, p. 515. Cf. Luxemburg 2004, p. 305. Schumacher 1972, p. 24. Bloch 1985r, p. 516. Ibid. Feuchtwanger 1937. Bloch 1985k, p. 234. Bloch 1985k, p. 516. Ibid. Bloch 1985k, p. 524. Ibid.

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If on the surface Bloch largely seems to have ignored Schumacher’s warnings, however, perhaps they did reach deeper than it might at first have appeared. After all, when Ernst and Karola finally did leave Europe in 1938, it was in the United States, not the Soviet Union, that they decided to seek refuge. However, although Bloch was less vociferous in his defence of Russia during his American exile, Zudeick speculates that his decision to return to East Germany in 1949 was partly facilitated by the fact that he did not seriously interrogate his proStalin position during his years of relative isolation in the US. It was not until the details of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 were made public that the truth really hit home for Bloch. Ludwig Marcuse reports that when Bloch read the reports, he suffered a serious breakdown.57 With this revelation, Bloch saw himself forced to abandon the idea that the party was always right, and finally to recognise the ‘damaging, appalling’ things that he had ignored as a result of such dogmatism. He quickly became an outspoken critic of Stalinism, in particular of the way in which under Stalin’s rule Marxism seemed to have become ‘a closed doctrine’, little more than a ‘connection between two quotations’.58 However, Bloch misjudged the mood with his criticism: his opponents in the GDR now saw an opportunity to attack him openly, and in 1957 he was forced to step down from his position. After Bloch sought exile in the West in 1961, he continued to criticise Stalin and the Soviet Union. In an interview in 1965 with Fritz Vilmar, Bloch made it clear he did not believe that the freedom and equality for which the revolutionaries fought had been achieved. Blaming an excessive emphasis on ‘economism’ in the Soviet Union, Bloch claimed that a ‘lumpification’ [Verlumpung] had taken place such that many people blindly followed what the regime wanted.59 This view – that the ideals of the October Revolution had been betrayed in what came after, and that this was a colossal mistake – became Bloch’s go-to line in the Tübingen years. In a 1970 interview with Prvoslav Ralić and Djordje Zorkič, he claimed that ‘if such extensive state violence followed from the Russian Revolution, then something must have gone wrong in the process’.60 When Bloch published his political essays of the 1930s in the Politische Messungen volume of his collected works, he made sure the edition represented the most up-to-date version of his views: many of the more extreme essays and formulations were either redacted or excised entirely. Needless to say, Bloch was heavily

57 58 59 60

Zudeick 1987, p. 277. Bloch 1985q, p. 234. Bloch 1985q, p. 201. Bloch 1985q, p. 239.

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criticised for what many saw as this revisionism. Negt, however, defends Bloch’s decision to bring his writings into line with his view at the time of publication. He casts Bloch’s Soviet-leaning journalism of the period in a more sympathetic light than many have been prepared to, recognising the essays as documents of a specific historical moment, which were ‘frequently formulated in haste and under the pressure of events’.61 In Tübingen, however, another kind of pressure saw Bloch shield the regime from western criticism even as he acknowledged the failures of the GDR and the Soviet Union more broadly. In the Vilmar interview, Bloch admits that insofar as the regime’s enforced Verlumpung amounted to a ‘new form of slavery’, it had perpetrated the opposite of what Marx envisaged.62 Importantly, however, Bloch still insisted that this was also the opposite of what the Party envisaged, arguing that the ‘continuous abolition of freedom in the name of freedom’ was not the result of deliberate ‘deceit’, but a simple failure of human action in the face of complex historical forces.63 We get a glimpse of Bloch’s reasoning at the point in the discussion where he roundly dismisses the idea that something inherent in Marxism produced the aberrant situation in Russia. Although Bloch’s politics had shifted, he did not want to concede any ground to western critics who sought to tar socialism or Marxist theory as a whole with the Stalinist brush.

3

The Politics of Speculative Materialism

Peter Zudeick has pointed out that there was a certain discrepancy between the fundamentally anti-orthodox nature of Bloch’s theory, and the hard-line political positions he sometimes took in practice.64 Bloch was all too aware of the political stakes of ontology, and in Das Materialismusproblem he sets out to develop a metaphysics capable of underpinning certain kinds of social and political action or aspiration. Already for the young Bloch, Kant stood ‘above Hegel’ to the extent that he teaches us the ‘primacy and pragmatism of practical reason with regard to the actual’.65 Already in 1918, Bloch began his Spirit of Utopia with the words: ‘I am. We are. That is enough. Now we must begin’. Manfred

61 62 63 64 65

Negt 1975, p. 4. Bloch 1985q, p. 201. Ibid. Zudeick 1987, p. 191. Bloch 1985p, p. 187.

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Riedel has emphasised the significance of this ‘original intention’ for the early Bloch, whose philosophical project, he claims, was above all a practical one.66 Riedel sees this early orientation disappear as Bloch himself became more of a hard-line, if heterodox, Marxist. However, I argue that an analysis of his speculative materialism challenges this claim. I agree with Hudson that Bloch’s philosophy as a whole must be read as an ‘activist metaphysics’, an attempt to provide a ‘philosophical foundation of dialectical materialism’ that would not reduce human beings to the mere cogs of history.67 Already in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Marx argued that it makes a difference whether one takes the ideal or material dimension of reality to be more fundamental. When Marx argued against Hegel’s concept of the state as the actuality of concrete freedom, it was Hegel’s metaphysical idealism that Marx believed prevented him from grasping that the existence of the concept of freedom (indeed, even its apparent embodiment in social institutions such as the state) does not mean freedom has actually been achieved.68 It is thus more than a question of nomenclature when Bloch claims that dialectics is ‘no conversation of the world spirit with itself, but the motion of matter, above all that in the human labour process’.69 For his speculative commitment to the materiality of history entails the implicit claim that institutional guarantees of freedom and equality do not equate to their actual achievement, and thus that the historical struggle for emancipation and recognition is direct, visceral, and – crucially – not necessarily complete with the establishment of liberal democracy. The political implication of Bloch’s speculative materialism was the wager that radical social change is fundamentally possible, and that human beings have the power to achieve it. Some scholars have seen Bloch’s implicit humanism in this respect at odds with historical materialism, which emphasised class struggle and the economic sphere as the arenas in which political and social change is fought for and won. Yet as we have seen, although Bloch did not deny the significance of these dimensions of Marxism, he nevertheless believed that they were all too often prioritised at the expense of the ‘warm stream’, which he identified with the intensity of human experience. To flesh out what this ‘warm stream’ means from the perspective of Bloch’s speculative

66 67 68 69

Riedel 1994, p. 27. Hudson 1982, p. 86. Marx 1975a, p. 56. Bloch 1985g, p. 448.

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materialism, his political utopianism can be productively read through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s anthropological reformulation of Marxism, which highlighted the universality of a historical experience eternally characterised by class oppression. That Bloch drew primarily on an earlier, more humanist Marx than on the later Marx who was more focused on the dynamics of capital, is obvious. In Das Materialismusproblem Bloch declares it self-explanatory that the young Marx remarks that the young Marx used the term ‘real humanism’ interchangeably with the nevertheless ‘more tangible and completely worldly “materialism”’.70 And even after Marx had – ‘happily’, in Bloch’s view – abandoned the terminology of humanism, he nevertheless maintained the centrality of the ‘humanum’, or humane element within dialectical materialism.71 He approvingly quotes Marx’s statement from his critique of French materialism in The Holy Family: ‘If man is shaped by environment, then the environment must be made human’.72 This, in essence, could be taken as the programmatic political statement at the heart of Bloch’s speculative materialism. Of course, there was a reason why Marx at least partly turned away from humanism, which can be found in his critique of Feuerbach. According to Marx, Feuerbach was mistaken to refer to a universal and unchanging human nature. The ‘essence of man’, in so far as it was possible to speak of such a thing, was ‘no abstraction inherent in each single individual’, no ‘inner “mute” general character which unites many individuals only in a natural way’.73 Instead, it was the ‘ensemble of the social relations’, which could not be abstracted from the historical process as he believed Feuerbach had done.74 For Marx, there was no such thing as the human being as such, as Feuerbach’s emphasis on embodied being suggested, but only real, living individuals in historically specific contexts. This would become the foundation for the critical interventions of structuralist Marxists such as Louis Althusser, for whom humanism was, from the perspective of historical materialism, an ideological concept.75 Despite the emancipatory goals of a critical theory that sought the ‘emancipation and alteration of society as a whole’, the critique of humanism also entered into the perspective of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, Adorno would

70 71 72 73 74 75

Bloch 1985g, p. 312. Bloch 1985g, p. 448. Ibid. Cf. Marx 1975a, p. 131. Marx 1975b, pp. 7–8. Marx 1975b, p. 4. Althusser 2005.

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later level much the same criticism at his and Bloch’s mutual friend and contemporary Walter Benjamin as Marx had earlier directed at Feuerbach. In a letter he wrote to his Benjamin in 1936, Adorno states that all the points in which he differed from Benjamin, despite their fundamental and concrete agreement in other matters, could be summed up and characterised as an ‘anthropological materialism’ that he claimed he could not accept. He accused his friend of an ‘undialectical ontologization of the body’, in which it was as though ‘the body were the measure of all concretion’.76 This idea is visible in the 1933 essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, in which Benjamin reflects on his Berlin childhood around 1900 in the following terms: A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn carriages now stood under the open sky in a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds, and at its center, amid a field of destructive explosions and torrents, the tiny, fragile human body.77 In this passage, the ‘tiny fragile human body’ is at the centre, trapped between nature in the form of the clouds, and technological history in the ‘destructive explosions’. In other words, Benjamin saw the human body as the ‘measure’ of concrete historical change. Adorno was critical of the naturalism implied by Benjamin’s embodied universalism, emphasising the socially constructed and historically variable aspects of the human condition. However, Benjamin did not reassert the significance of universal, embodied human experience in order to deny the primacy of history: in his early notes for the Arcades project, he claims that ‘the “modernity” that concerns men with respect to the bodily is as varied in meaning as the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope’.78 Rather, his focus on the body was an attempt to lay bare the claims of historical experience. While Benjamin undoubtedly saw historical materialism as a powerful tool for critical social theory, he also identified a danger in erasing a certain anthropological perspective. For despite all the historical specificity of human experience which a materialist perspective helps us to see, that historical specificity, as Benjamin recognised, is purchased time and again at the same price: the ‘political violence and brutality’ to which Feuerbach had referred, though Benjamin clearly understood this, refracted through Marx, in classed terms as the

76 77 78

Adorno and Benjamin 2000, p. 146. Benjamin 2005, p. 732. Benjamin 2002, p. 846.

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violent oppression and exploitation of the many by the few. This is the universalist basis for a historical materialism that understands collective happiness as always pursued from the perspective of embodied, individual lived life. ‘All rulers’, as Benjamin writes in his 7th thesis on the concept of history, ‘are the heirs of those who conquered before them’.79 By acknowledging oppression and injustice as historical constants, the impact of which, crucially, is endured at the level of individual embodied experience, Benjamin sought to reinsert a critical anthropology into the historical materialist tradition. Since it is lived, bodily experience which binds us most immediately to our forebears and possible successors – the fact of having a life, and of being able to have that life diminished or cut short by those more powerful – the body became for Benjamin the site at which biological and historical forces meet. While the task of what Benjamin called the ‘historicist’ was thus to write history from the victor’s perspective, that of the materialist historian was, in his view, to identify with the ‘tradition of the oppressed’, by hearing the unfulfilled cries for emancipation of the past, and recognising our present as essentially beholden to the same brutal logic.80 For Benjamin, as for Bloch, the material traces of these past injustices were like images or fragments of memory that could remind us of the political task at hand: to introduce a ‘real state of emergency’, as Benjamin put it, out of which a more humane, just, equal society could emerge.81 Bloch certainly acknowledged the Marxian critique of Feuerbach’s tendency towards an ahistorical anthropological thinking. As he argues in Das Materialismusproblem, if the human being stands ‘as a normative absolute, as it does for Feuerbach’, then the ‘fixed dogmatism’ of religious morality, which Feuerbach himself set out to critique, simply returns.82 Nevertheless, he insists that even ‘the normative, the “godly in the human”, as Feuerbach loves to say, has its philosophy of history’.83 Feuerbach, Bloch points out, had already railed against the historicist vision in which the ‘wager of world history is a narrow wager’ as long as whoever has no place in it cannot find one without giving up ‘the conveniences of the old historical household’, and taking with them only ‘the most inalienable, most necessary and most essential’ – in other words, only that which anybody would need, and nothing which distinguishes them as an individual.84 Here Feuerbach equates the ‘historicist vision’ with the demand

79 80 81 82 83 84

Benjamin 1969, p. 256. Benjamin 1969, p. 257. Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 293. Ibid. Ibid.

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for all to conform to ‘dead tradition’, a ‘narrow wager’ in that it represses the freedom to be an individual, or to break with established expectations.85 If Feuerbach’s ‘normative humanism’ remained ‘bolstered within bourgeois society’ for Bloch, the philosophy of history he saw implied germ-like in it was nevertheless ‘all the more urgent’ for the fact.86 Indeed, the ‘philosophy of history’ to which Bloch refers here turns out to be none other than that developed by Benjamin, to whose Theses on the Concept of History Bloch turns at this point. Already Bloch saw Feuerbach’s ‘antihistorical’ (or in Benjamin’s terms, anti-historicist) claim as saturated with ‘unstructuralistic truth against all that which sees tradition only as tradition’.87 For Bloch, tradition was rather a weapon in the struggle for freedom and equality. He quotes Benjamin’s fourth thesis, which he sees as building on Feuerbach’s critique of dead tradition: The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things, without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of spoils which fall to the victor that these latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism, the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.88 The image Benjamin conjures here is one in which the finer things in life – courage, humor, cunning, fortitude in the struggle; one might also name love, trust, even hope – are passed on in the manner of what Bloch calls the ‘utopian surplus’ of the will to a better world. Left over after even every lost battle, these things are carried forward as a memory, inscribed on the bodies that live and die and fight for what is right as much as in books and images, and stories told from mouth to mouth. They are, one might say, inscribed in matter as knowledge of the possibility of utopia, and strive towards it as flowers turn towards the sun.

85 86 87 88

Ibid. Bloch 1985g, p. 294. Bloch 1985g, p. 411. Ibid. Cf. Benjamin 1969, pp. 254–5.

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Speculation, Totality, and Immanent Critique

Benjamin’s suicide in 1940, fleeing from the Nazis as they advanced across Europe, not only makes his remarks in the Theses, written shortly before his death, all the more poignant: for many Benjamin’s death, and that of millions of others at the hands of the fascists, called Bloch’s historical hope seriously into question. Adorno articulated this idea in his review of the revised edition of Bloch’s Traces in 1959. ‘Hope is not a principle’, argued Adorno, for whom, in the wake of the holocaust, speculative thinking had become irredeemably tainted.89 As we have seen, Bloch was all too aware of the potentially destructive political consequences of Hegel’s panlogism, which, in its most extreme form, threatened to deny individuality by placing greater importance in that which is shared between members of a species or kind. In the post-Second World War period, Adorno increasingly associated thought’s speculative or positive moment with the ‘identity thinking’ he saw as partly responsible for the Nazi atrocities.90 Rolf Tiedemann explains how Adorno saw the danger of the death camps already implicit in the logic of the Hegelian concept: The yellow patch that was imposed on Jews in Germany to make them stand out from other Germans served as well to make them indistinguishable from each other. Qualities specific to an individual were meant to vanish behind the ethnic identity he shared with the many. As a member of the Jewish people he was reduced to a mere instance, an abstraction, in whom concrete difference merged into indistinguishable sameness.91 According to Adorno, then, by subsuming material difference under the ideal guise of sameness, the concept served the purpose of violence against the individual, which it was able to see as nothing more than an example of a category. In the wake of National Socialism, the task of critical theory for Adorno thus meant above all overcoming thought’s will to identity, which is manifest in the structure of concepts and judgements. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues that thought, language and the process of reification were ‘interlocked’ to the extent that the ‘very form of the copula, the “is”, pursues the aim of pin-

89 90 91

Adorno 1980, pp. 49–62. Adorno 2003. Adorno 2003, p. xxi.

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pointing its object’.92 Like Bloch, Adorno criticised the ‘primacy of Logos’ in Hegel’s work, which he, too, associated with a totalising impulse.93 In Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno argued, ‘nothing is to be external to spirit’, and it was ‘the brutality of this coercion that creates the semblance of reconciliation in the doctrine of an identity that has been produced’.94 For it was only ‘the doctrine of the identity of subject and object inherent in idealism’, Adorno claimed, that gave Hegel’s dialectics ‘the strength of totality that performs the negative labour – the dissolution of individual concepts, the reflection of the immediate and then the sublation of reflection’.95 It was thought’s ‘negative labour’, however, that primarily interested Adorno, for he saw in it the only means by which philosophy could even attempt to do justice to the reality of the ‘nonidentity of subject and object, concept and thing, idea and society’.96 Just as a young Bloch had argued that Kant must be allowed to ‘burn through Hegel’ as the antidote to the latter’s panlogism, so too Adorno returned to Kant for the tools with which to think the nonidentical with and beyond Hegel.97 According to Adorno, Hegel ‘attempted to outdo Kant’ by ‘dissolving anything not proper to consciousness … into a positing by the infinite subject’.98 In Adorno’s view, however, Hegel had mistaken the thing in itself’s resistance to thought as an ‘inconsistency’ in Kant’s philosophy.99 Moreover, he had failed to recognise that ‘the Kantian discontinuities register the very moment of non-identity that is an indispensable part of his own philosophy of identity’.100 Rescuing Hegel according to Adorno thus meant ‘facing up to philosophy where it is most painful and wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvious’.101 Against Hegel’s assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that ‘the truth is the whole’, Adorno claimed that ‘the whole is the untrue’: the ‘truth in Hegel’s untruth’ was ‘the thesis of totality itself’, which for Adorno was allied with a ‘principle of domination’ in thought and society.102 In other words, Adorno saw the will to identity inherent in Bloch’s utopianism as tendentially totalitarian.

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Adorno 2003, p. 100. Adorno 2003, p. 21. Adorno 2003, p. 20. Adorno 2003, p. 10. Adorno 2003, p. 31. Bloch 1985c, p. 187. Adorno 2003, p. 11. Adorno 2003, p. 13. Ibid. Adorno 2003, p. 125. Adorno 2003, p. 87.

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What Bloch recognised, however, particularly as a result of his experience living on the other side of the Berlin Wall after 1945, was that the prohibition of speculation itself leads down a dangerous path. Marx and Engels’ own repudiation of ‘speculative philosophy’ and ‘idealist metaphysics’ became dogmatised in the context of Soviet ideology, and this position was frequently used to stifle critique. Nowhere would this become more obvious for Bloch than in the context of the so-called Hegel debate in the GDR. In the early days of Soviet occupation, Hegel was perceived as an ally in East Germany. The journalist and later member of the SED Central Committee Alexander Abusch expressed this sentiment in an article written in 1946, in which he said that contemporary socialists felt themselves to be the ‘appointed heirs of German humanism’, among whose representatives Abusch named Kant, Fichte and Hegel.103 Meanwhile, the future East German Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anton Ackermann, wrote in the Deutsche Volkszeitung on 5 February 1946 that the aim of a practical socialism was to make the intellectual demands of humanists like Hegel into ‘the demands of the people’.104 However, it was not long until the contrary stance became dogma. In 1946, in the journal Neue Welt, a member of the Soviet Military Administration, Wassili Stepanow, argued that although Hegel’s revitalisation of dialectical thinking had been revolutionary, he had used it for ‘conservative purposes’.105 For support, Stepanow looked to none other than Stalin, whose ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’ had been distributed en masse in the East since 1945. There, the Soviet leader argued that Hegel had contributed to the rise of fascism by offering a philosophical justification for German nationalism and chauvinism. A year later, at a philosophy conference in Moscow, Stalin’s propaganda chief Andrei Shdanow argued that in light of the leader’s position, ‘the problem of Hegel [had] long since been solved’.106 Once the text of Shdanow’s intervention was published in German in 1947, party functionaries such as Gerhard Harig, representative for philosophy on the SED Central Committee, called on it to argue that ‘Hegelei’ (a pejorative term meaning ‘Hegeling around’, which ironically enough was invented by Schopenhauer to criticise young Hegelians like Marx) represented a form of revisionism.107 A year later, at the SED’s 1st cultural congress, Otto Grotewohl presented Stalin’s two-faced Hegel as the official 103 104 105 106 107

Abusch 1962, p. 8. Warnke 2000, p. 197. Stepanow 1946, pp. 3–15. Shdanow, 1951, p. 104. Cf. Warnke 2000, p. 198.

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party interpretation: the originator of the progressive dialectical method, who nevertheless espoused a reactionary political philosophy.108 Writing on the political implications of reading Hegel in the GDR, Camilla Warnke has argued that the entrenchment of the anti-Hegel position between 1946 and 1948 reflected the abandonment of hope for an independent German path to socialism.109 The question of whether Hegel was a progressive or reactionary thinker was a proxy, Warnke argues, for that of whether the philosophy of this new society would be allowed to draw on its specific cultural tradition, or whether it would be wholly determined by Moscow. In these early years, taking a position on Hegel came to signal one’s allegiance or otherwise to Soviet orthodoxy and control. It was in this atmosphere that in 1949 Bloch returned from exile in the United States, to take up the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In an interview with the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August that year, he declared himself full of enthusiasm for the project of building a socialist utopia on German soil.110 The honeymoon period did not last long. Bloch’s choice to teach classical German philosophy in Leipzig was highly politicised in a context in which philosophy had become an ideological battleground. Within academic circles Bloch quickly became known as a Hegelian, practically a ‘swearword’ in that climate.111 The appearance of Subjekt-Objekt in 1951 did little to dispel this impression. Considering the official GDR line on Hegel, Bloch’s book could only be read as a provocation: he explicitly disputed that studying Hegel constituted ‘Hegelei’ as Harig had claimed.112 In light of the foregoing discussion, Bloch’s denial that Hegel’s work was ‘at an end’, which he called an ‘ideological pretence’, could only be interpreted as a round criticism of those who would see the ‘problem’ of Hegel and what it stood for ‘long since solved’ (ibid.). Bloch’s central argument in Subjekt-Objekt was that speculative reason, which looks beyond the merely empirical to what connects apparently discrete phenomena, was a critical weapon against totalitarianism. For Bloch, Hegelian speculation was an important critical tool for two main reasons. First, speculation as the ‘positive moment of reason’ demonstrated the ability of human thought to go beyond the merely empirical, in other words to transgress the

108 109 110 111 112

Grotewohl 1948. Cf. Warnke 2000, p. 198. Cf. Zudeick 1987, p. 180. Ibid. Bloch 1985h, p. 12.

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status quo.113 ‘Thought and its dialectic is the highest human power of production’, he claimed, and even though dialectical thinking must ‘be based on facts’, according to Bloch it does not ‘remain with them as mere sensory contents’.114 This capacity of thought to go beyond the merely given obviously spelled danger for a regime that, as the reaction to Bloch’s Hegel book would demonstrate, increasingly sought to curb all attempts at independent thinking. Second, Bloch saw the transitivity between concepts and reality asserted by Hegelian metaphysics as evidence of what he called the ‘objectively real possibility’ of utopia.115 He saw the emergence of human consciousness, with its dreams of a better life, as evidence that the world itself is striving towards a state in which reconciliation between subject and object would be achieved at the ontological level. Here again, however, the suggestion that utopia had not in fact been achieved in the present undermined the official Soviet narrative, according to which the establishment of communism represented the de facto realisation of this historic dream. When Bloch argued in the preface to the first edition that Hegel was the ‘teacher of living movement in contrast to dead being’, and of a truth that was ‘no static or completed fact’, but the ‘result of a process’ that still had to be ‘clarified and achieved’, he effectively denied that Soviet communism embodied a historically incontestable truth.116 Even Bloch’s central criticism of Hegel in Subjekt-Objekt mobilised him against a Marxism of dogma and stasis. Hegel’s dialectic, Bloch argued, was caught ‘in the circle of anamnesis as if under a spell’, which ‘prevents even the system of development from remaining a system open to development’.117 Only by accepting that both our knowledge of the world, and the world itself, are as yet incomplete can we escape the ‘spell of anamnesis’ and perceive the real possibility of utopia in a yet-to-be-determined future. Subjekt-Objekt did not immediately meet with harsh criticism. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 could an open debate about Hegel take place, and Bloch now found himself on the wrong side of the party line. In June that year, against the background of mass strikes and demonstrations in the GDR, the dissident philosopher and editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Wolfgang Harich published an article that would ignite a second phase of the Hegel 113 114 115 116 117

Bloch 1985h, p. 151. Bloch 1985h, pp. 110–11. Bloch 1985e, p. 235. Bloch 1985h, p. 12. Bloch 1985h, pp. 480–1.

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debate. Written by Bloch’s colleague Rugard Otto Gropp, Professor of MarxismLeninism at Leipzig, the article sharply criticised Hegel in by now ad nauseam familiar terms.118 Bloch responded in coded fashion, denouncing dogmatism and stasis. Initially, however, the exchange was cordial enough to offer some hope that the sectarianism of the past had been overcome. Gropp edited a Festschrift for Bloch’s 70th birthday in 1955, and Bloch was even awarded national prizes for his work. However, the seeds sown in this mealy-mouthed exchange would later bear bitter fruit for Bloch. Much happened in 1956 that led to Bloch eventually becoming persona non grata in the GDR. In February, commenting on the 20th party congress of the communist party, he criticised the suppression of free thought under the personality cult. It was as if Marxism ‘had become a closed doctrine under Stalin’, he argued, ‘nothing more than a connection between quotations’.119 One month later, in his new capacity as Director of the Philosophy Section of the East German Academy of Science, he convened a conference on ‘the problem of freedom in light of scientific socialism’, which explicitly addressed the issue of academic (un)freedom in East Germany.120 In November that year, at an event marking 125 years since Hegel’s death, Bloch expressed his opposition to the regime in the strongest terms yet. Just a month or so earlier Soviet troops had violently quashed demands for freedom in Poland and Hungary, and in his lecture, ‘Hegel and the Violence of the System’, Bloch made it clear that he saw this brutality as of a piece with the same repression of critical thought to which the anti-Hegel line belonged.121 A truly Marxist philosophy must ‘try to represent the world in its fullness and crucial depth, not to create a still life out of four or five textual fruits or a schoolmastery of sects and scientific catechisms. Red headmasters remote from life, paper aesthetics remote from art, philosophising remote from philosophy will not help us’, he insisted.122 Needless to say the red headmasters did not take this lying down. Gropp mounted a campaign against Bloch, exposing the supposedly parlous state of philosophy under his directorship at Leipzig. With Bloch accused of revisionism by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht, his students were openly harassed, and his publications blocked. In December 1957 Bloch was summoned before a tribunal in which his Hegel speech was the central focus. Bloch was excoriated for having developed an ‘absolutely revisionist conception’ of Hegel’s system 118 119 120 121 122

Cf. Gropp 1954, pp. 71–98. Bloch 1985q, p. 364. Cf. Zudeick 1987, p. 224. Bloch 1985j, pp. 481–500. Bloch 1985j, p. 495.

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according to which it ‘must be judged differently from the way Engels’ had done so.123 In particular his claim that dialectical materialism needed to be renewed met with sharp disapproval. Bloch’s philosophy was denounced as un-Marxist, and he himself was declared unfit to teach. There is thus a certain irony in the fact that both Habermas’ and Adorno’s critiques of Bloch relied in part on the very same rejection of speculative thinking that got Bloch into trouble among orthodox Marxists in the GDR. The connection Adorno makes between Hegel and fascism puts him in the unlikely company of – among others – Stalin, who, as we have seen, peddled this particular myth about Hegel in the interest of his own political control in the Soviet context. Meanwhile, by enlisting Marx’s rejection of speculation in his criticism of Bloch, Habermas presented Bloch’s materialism as naïve compared with the mature Marx’s clear-headed, sober brand of critique. In fact, however, Bloch turned speculative thinking into a tool for his own ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, from which neither Marx nor Marxism were exempt.124 Indeed, the critique of Lenin and Leninism that runs through Das Materialismusproblem poses a serious challenge to Habermas’s view of Bloch’s ‘intimate relationship to Lenin’s strategy of violence’.125 The concept of materialism, Bloch claimed, had been ‘all too often rubber-stamped’ by a Comintern concerned to insulate its ideology from change and critique.126 Given that the Comintern, and later the Cominform, were the self-styled gatekeepers of Marx and Engels’ ‘original’ intentions, Bloch’s insistence in the book that the Third International had attempted to foreclose questions Marx and Engels themselves took seriously can only be taken as an open criticism. Similarly, when Bloch argues that by understanding consciousness as part of the movement of matter, Engels ‘significantly expanded’ the concept without leaving the realm of materialism, he implicitly opposes Engels’ theory with Lenin’s less sophisticated view in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which understands matter simply as ‘things outside of our consciousness’.127 In this context, Bloch’s comment that ‘Engels’ testament in natural philosophy’ had often not been taken ‘to the letter’ appears as a criticism, if not of Lenin specifically, then of a certain tendency within orthodox Marxism to misrepresent Engels’ ideas for political purposes.128

123 124 125 126 127 128

Bloch 1991a. Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, in Marx and Engels 1975, p. 142. Habermas 1969, p. 322. Bloch 1985g, p. 15. Lenin 1977, p. 23. Bloch 1985g, p. 367.

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Even Bloch’s frequent recourse in Das Materialismusproblem to Lenin’s phrase, ‘Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism is’ stages a complex critique, superficially positioning his own views as consonant with Lenin’s, while simultaneously expressing his dissatisfaction with dialectical materialist orthodoxy.129 ‘Clever idealism’ names something else that Bloch saw but the Lenin of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism missed: namely that the human mind does not have unmediated access to an external reality that is simply given as perceived. Despite other disputes with neo-Kantians and positivists, Bloch broadly agreed with these figures that human knowledge is limited, even if he followed Hegel in believing that the world is not entirely opaque to us, and refused to insist that the quest for absolute knowledge was necessarily in vain. Nevertheless, Bloch simultaneously recognised that pushing this quest too far – or indeed, claiming that we have already achieved it – implies a totalising tendency that sacrifices the individual to the general. Against this background, Bloch’s speculative materialism must be read not only as an attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for dialectical materialism, but also as an immanent critique of dialectical materialism qua Marxist orthodoxy. Theoretically, it contributed to the longue durée of a materialism debate that had been raging since the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, and in light of the catastrophic political fallout from Lenin’s book, Das Materialismusproblem was also an attack on an orthodox Marxist worldview in which there was, as Bloch put it, ‘no longer any room for a human head’.130 Unlike the ideologues who tried to ‘solve’ the ‘creative problem at the heart of materialism’, Bloch argued that Marx and Engels themselves had ‘held open the freshness and breeze’ that a true philosophical problem creates.131 It was to this ‘creative problem’ – the conundrum of material creativity – that he insisted we must return time and again, allowing Marxist materialism to be nourished by the insights of a philosophy that lived on because, as Adorno would later put it, ‘the moment to realize it was missed’.132 129 130 131 132

Cf. Lenin 1976, p. 274. Bloch 1985g, p. 17. Bloch 1985g, p. 16. Adorno 2003, p. 3.

chapter 5

Relevance and Critique When Das Materialismusproblem was finally published in 1972, Bloch was living in Tübingen in West Germany. In a review of the book published in the Spiegel that year, his speculative materialism is portrayed as a kind of optimistic determinism, in which history will one day inevitably reach its in-built utopian goal. ‘The history of humanity is meaningful’, the author writes, ‘the kingdom of freedom will come,’ an insight which, we are told, ‘did not seem so certain to Marxists like the old Georg Lukács’.1 In opposition to ‘modern natural science’, the ‘critical theory of the Frankfurt School’, as well as ‘numerous orthodox Marxists’, Bloch is painted in the review as a ‘prophet of the absolute redemption of man and nature’, and as a true believer in the advent of socialism as a necessary step on the path to cosmic salvation.2 The real picture was of course much more complicated. As we have seen, Bloch’s speculative materialism was far from arguing for the inevitability of communism: if anything, its status as an activist metaphysics asserts the need for human action in pursuit of social change. And while it is true that Bloch never gave up hope that something like a communist society would be achieved, by the time Das Materialismusproblem was published he had arrived at the opinion that socialism had failed in the Soviet Union. Hope, it seemed, could be and had been disappointed, and Bloch, like many of his generation, wondered openly about why that was the case. In many respects, the failure of the communist project in the twentieth century must be read retrospectively as a failure to understand the nature and limitations of human agency. Bloch’s impetus in writing Das Materialismusproblem stemmed largely from the perceived need to offer a materialist justification for human agency in an authoritarian context in which he saw it stifled. This is an important insight, both systematically and strategically: not only does it reveal Bloch’s ongoing commitment to Kant’s critical perspective (‘the self must remain in everything’), but it also demonstrates his anti-authoritarian credentials après tout. But if communist regimes often denied agency to their citizenries – a fact most worthy of criticism – the socialist ideal that ‘humanity can build a better world’ also seems hopelessly naïve after the trials of the 1 ‘Erlösung für Menschen, Steine und Sterne’, review of Das Materialismusproblem in Der Spiegel 34/1972, 101. 2 Ibid.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004272873_007

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twentieth century. Even if a common ‘humanity’ could be identified, with a convergent idea of what a ‘better’ world would look like, if history demonstrates anything, then it is surely that the law of unintended consequences is at least as powerful a force as collective vision and will. Faced with twenty-first century challenges – the accelerating technologisation of the lifeworld, resurgent religious fundamentalisms, a global social system biased towards increasing precarity and inequality, impending ecological crisis – the question of agency, both human and non-human, once again vexes materialist thinkers in this millennium. Where agency is located, and whether and how human agency differs from other capacities for action are perhaps the most pressing questions of our time. What is to be done, can anything be done, about the challenges we face today? Contemporary materialist thinkers are responding to these questions in a variety of ways that often resonate with Bloch’s concerns. Despite the most confident expectations, the kinds of speculative questions Bloch posed in Das Materialismusproblem and elsewhere have refused to disappear. Indeed, in recent decades ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ has given way to renewed philosophical enquiry into the nature of reality and the place of human beings within it, and the problem of agency is at the centre.3 Yet despite clear intersections between Bloch’s speculative materialism and these new directions – the speculative turn, the new materialisms, and materialist ecologies – Bloch does not feature explicitly in their genealogies. This chapter aims to address this problem, situating Bloch in relation to each of these three tendencies within contemporary materialism through the lens of the problem of agency. By bringing Bloch into dialogue with some of the most prominent representatives of these intellectual currents – Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett, John Bellamy Foster and Jason W. Moore – the chapter exposes some of the systematic and historical limitations of Bloch’s thought. Yet it also highlights the valuable contribution his philosophy makes to thinking through the question of agency in our time. Challenges such as religious conflict, mistrust in science, environmental change all seem to demand massive coordinated responses. Which conceptions of agency best serve to explain and tackle these phenomena, and what might a Blochian perspective contribute? That is the question this final chapter sets out to answer.

3 Habermas 1994.

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The Speculative Turn: Bloch and Meillassoux

The Speculative Turn is the title of a 2011 volume edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, which brought together a range of continental materialist and realist thinkers who have once again become occupied with ‘properly ontological questions’.4 As the editors point out, though it is difficult to identify a single thread uniting the developments gathered under this banner, some central common themes are visible. There are signs, we are told, that the high moment of the ‘anti-realist trend in continental philosophy’ is on the wane.5 Phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism are all named as exemplars of a focus within modern continental thought on ‘discourse, text, culture, consciousness, power, or ideas as what constitutes reality’.6 Faced with twenty-first century challenges – the prospect of ecological catastrophe, accelerating technological complexity – there is a sense in which participants in the speculative turn believe that the anti-realist position ‘now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time’.7 The focus of the volume was thus a renewed commitment to speculating about the nature of reality as it exists independently of thought and of humanity in general. Those who would take flight at the suggestion of a return to a pre-critical metaphysics are assured that this is not on the agenda. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman affirm that the speculative turn does not represent an ‘outright rejection’ of the advances of post-Kantian philosophy.8 It aims rather to recuperate the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ in order to move ‘beyond the critical and linguistic turns’ and take seriously once again what Quentin Meillassoux has called the ‘great outdoors’ of being-in-itself, the originary object of philosophical wonder.9 Like Bloch, Meillassoux describes his philosophy as a form of speculative materialism, which he develops in After Finitude, in a body of writings on the concept of the ‘divine inexistence’ partially translated by Graham Harman, and in various articles.10 The starting point of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is the attempt to overcome the anti-realist tendency in continental philosophy since Kant, which he calls ‘correlationism’: the theory according to which ‘we

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011, p. 3. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011, p. 2. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011, p. 3. Ibid. Ibid., Meillassoux 2008, p. 7. See e.g. Meillassoux 2007, pp. 55–81; Meillassoux 2007, pp. 63–107.

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only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, never to either term considered apart from the other’.11 After Kant redefined knowledge so that rather than the knowledge conforming to the object, the object conforms to the structure of our cognitive apparatus, a long line of other factors were progressively found to shape knowledge – history, culture, and language among them – such that it became gradually impossible to claim knowledge of a mind-independent reality. For Meillassoux, the triumph of correlationism is problematic for two main reasons. First, it prevents us from truly grasping the meaning of the ‘ancestral’ reality that existed prior to human thought and language, and about which we have all sorts of scientific evidence, from geological traces of deep time on earth to microscopic background radiation in space.12 Meillassoux argues that if we want to take seriously science’s claims to knowledge concerning such ancestral events as the ‘origin of the universe’, the ‘accretion of the earth’, the ‘origin of life on earth’, and the ‘origin of humankind’, we have to give up on ‘correlationist’ theories of knowledge and accept once again that it is possible to know ‘the absolute’, which Meillassoux defines as reality ‘without us’, the ‘great outdoors’ with which speculative metaphysics was always concerned.13 The second reason why Meillassoux rejects correlationism is that he believes it has paradoxically abetted the resurgence in the modern world of religious fundamentalism and irrationalism. Meillassoux rejects the conventional positive association of scepticism with a trend towards more socially progressive societies, arguing instead that the basic claim of scepticism – that knowledge of the absolute or ‘in-itself’ is impossible – has facilitated the ‘return of the religious’ by leaving religion as the only permissible route to the absolute.14 If knowledge is limited, in other words, then belief is given free reign, and ‘faith is pitched against faith, since what determines our fundamental choices cannot be rationally proved’.15 Meillassoux thus sets out to restore the possibility of ‘knowing the absolute’ in an attempt to combat what he sees as its colonisation by ‘fideism’, and the attendant violence that ensues.16 On account of its attack on ‘fideism’, Slavoj Žižek has argued that After Finitude ‘can effectively be read as Materialism and Empirio-Criticism rewritten for the 21st century’, and indeed there are some striking parallels between

11 12 13 14 15 16

Meillassoux 2007, p. 5. Meillassoux 2007, p. 11. Meillassoux 2007, p. 9. Meillassoux 2007, p. 63. Meillassoux 2007, p. 46. Meillassoux 2007, pp. 28–49.

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the operation Meillassoux performs in After Finitude and the one Lenin makes in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.17 Lenin argued that where post-Kantian empirio-criticists like Mach and Bogdanov advocate ‘fideism’ vis-à-vis the existence of an external world – ‘a doctrine that substitutes faith for knowledge’ – materialism ‘makes the “naïve” belief of mankind [in the existence of an external world] into the foundation of its theory of knowledge’.18 Meillassoux’s concept of ancestrality – his insistence on the primacy of the world as it existed ‘anterior to every form of human relation’ to it – clearly resonates with Lenin’s basic insight that ‘nature is primary, and human will and mind secondary’.19 Like Lenin, Meillassoux also claims that thought is capable of knowing an absolute, external world in a way that truly reflects the nature of reality itself. However, if for Lenin the great outdoors was a space of freedom as the insight into necessity – the necessary causality of natural, including historical, laws, which human beings could direct for their own purposes – Meillassoux finds there only one necessity: that of absolute contingency and humanity’s fundamental inability to create a just world without divine intervention. Meillassoux arrives at his argument about the necessity of absolute contingency via his analysis of ancestral events. What does our knowledge of such events tell us, he asks? They tell us that there was once no universe until it spontaneously erupted in the big bang, followed several millions of years later by the formation of stars and planets, and then, on one such planet at least, life emerged, and later conscious, thinking life. Meillassoux refers to these events as the ‘advents’ of three ‘Worlds’: that of being, life, and thought.20 When we confront the question, ‘why did these things happen?’ we are asking a question about the nature of causality and necessity: what caused them, and were they necessary? Meillassoux’s answer to both questions is to say that nothing caused them, and they were not necessary but utterly contingent, spontaneous events ex nihilo that defy the principle of sufficient reason. Revisiting what he calls ‘Hume’s problem’, Meillassoux claims that in order to make sense of the existence of the universe, we must deny the principle of sufficient reason, because each new World effectively breaks with the laws of nature that had existed up to that point. Before the big bang, there was no space and time – no physics – then all of a sudden there it was. Before the origin of life there was no self-organising, developmental interiority, and then suddenly there it was. In each new World that arises, Meillassoux argues, there is ‘more 17 18 19 20

Žižek 2012, p. 625. Lenin 1977, p. 19; 70. Meillassoux 2007, p. 10; Lenin 1977, p. 188. Cf. Harman, 2011, p. 98.

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in the effect than in the cause’, or – since the conventional language of causality is out of place in relation to ex nihilo creation – more in what ensues than in the origin.21 Where Hume, therefore, remained sceptical about whether we can ever know a priori that natural laws will continue to function in the future as we observe them doing now, Meillassoux argues that the history of the universe forces us to accept that we can know the real and absolute contingency of physical laws.22 Instead of being based on a principle of sufficient reason, Meillassoux argues that the universe operates according to a principle of unreason. The logic of reality for Meillassoux is that it has no logic, except for absolute contingency, and non-contradiction. Literally anything might take place at any moment, and we can know that with certainty because reason has access to the eternal truth of absolute contingency. The model of agency that emerges from Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is thus rather paradoxical. On the one hand, the ontological underpinnings of his theory enable Meillassoux to make claims about the prospect of the advent of a fourth World, which he calls the World of justice.23 Meillassoux’s reasoning here is as follows: human beings, understood as ‘rational beings capable of grasping the ultimate truth of contingency’, and not simply as the ‘bipedal species in which such a reality now happens to be encountered’, have ‘access to the eternal truth of the world’ (namely that it is absolutely contingent).24 Thus there can be ‘no further being incommensurable with our humanity’.25 There can be no human being, Meillassoux argues, without the Worlds of matter, life, and thought. Yet humans, according to Meillassoux, are also defined by their desire which is ‘torn between their present contingency and the knowledge of the eternal by which they reach the idea of justice’.26 For this knowledge, he continues, gives us access to the strict equality between all humans qua human. The eternal truths to which our condition grants access are in fact indifferent to differences, to the innumerable and necessary differences between individual thinkers. The differences are necessary because humans, as simple existents, are contingent and particular beings indefinitely differentiable from other humans. Yet these differences are undifferentiated by

21 22 23 24 25 26

Harman, 2011, p. 93. Hume 2007, p. 32. Harman, 2011, p. 110 and passim. Harman, 2011, p. 190. Ibid. Harman, 2011, p. 191.

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the impersonal reason that marks all bearers of truth. This is why humans, as long as they think, are affected by injustice wherever it strikes them, since nothing permits us to found an inegalitarian difference of humans from themselves.27 Hence, Meillassoux argues, although its advent is entirely contingent (‘a world that is capable of everything ought also to be capable of not accomplishing those things of which it is capable’), the only possible fourth world would be a World in which the human desires for justice, equality, eternal life, even the resurrection of the dead would be fulfilled. Indeed, from a certain perspective it appears that human beings do have a vital role to play in bringing about the World of justice. Meillassoux’s ‘divine ethics’ – his claim that we should act as if we would eventually be judged for our actions – are intended to work against a ‘lazy fatalism under the pretext that the advent of a World of justice does not depend on the power of humans’.28 Moreover, although technically there ought to be no necessity in Meillassoux’s system for the fourth world to be more complex than the third world of thought in which it would erupt, his insistence that ‘the sole conceivable radical novelty following the human’ would be the advent of a ‘World of justice’, a ‘fourth order’ after the Worlds of matter, life, and thought, an ‘advent that crosses the boundary of the third World [of thought] as the third did the preceding one [of life]’ does suggest that something more than mere contingency is at work.29 Ultimately, though, it seems to be nothing more than the ‘factial’ observation that when it comes to the logics of worlds, there is more in the effect than in the cause, a kind of law of unintended consequences writ cosmically large. Although for Meillassoux, the fourth World of justice ‘already exists as an object of hope’, his thesis of the necessity of contingency means that there is no possibility of human beings practically doing anything to bring it about.30 Instead, our hope can only be directed towards the advent of an as yet inexistent God capable of inaugurating such a World. To be sure, Meillassoux insists that the World of justice must be ‘actively awaited by acts of justice that display the fervor linked to a belief in the radical requirement of universality, and in the discovery of the non-absurdity of such a requirement’.31 That is to say, ethics in the present means acting in accordance with the hope for universal justice for 27 28 29 30 31

Harman, 2011, p. 178. Harman, 2011, p. 214. Harman, 2011, p. 192. Harman, 2011, p. 189. Harman, 2011, p. 11.

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the living and the dead, such that if the divine inexistence does come into being at some point in the future, our action in this world will have been able to be seen as the prefiguration of the World of justice. Nevertheless, Meillassoux concedes that the object of such hope is ‘explicitly determined as a possibility that can be produced or not produced’ regardless of human action.32 There are evidently a number of important similarities between Bloch’s and Meillassoux’s speculative materialisms. Meillassoux’s notion that the human qua rational being represents the ultimate condition of possibility for a future World of justice is closely akin to Bloch’s conception of the human (which he like Meillassoux figures abstractly as the Humanum, rather than seeing it essentially tied to a particular physical form) as standing at the Front of a material world process in which only a possible utopia can fulfill the historical human desires for justice and equality.33 Moreover, the shared messianic horizon is evident in the metaphors of childhood and pregnancy that pervade both thinkers’ visions. Just as Bloch describes his utopian Heimat as an image that ‘shines into the childhood of all’, and speaks of a matter that is ‘pregnant’ with the possibility of a utopia to come, Meillassoux claims that as human beings, we ‘bear God in our wombs, and our essential disquietude [about injustice] is nothing other than the convulsions of a child yet to come’.34 Further, both Meillassoux and Bloch advocate hope as the proper attitude towards the advent of a future utopia, and it is, in both cases, a hope founded on the knowledge that its object is ultimately possible, even if there is no guarantee that it will come to pass. When Bloch claimed, in a 1971 radio interview, that for a certain ‘French materialist and encyclopaedist’, the ‘only complete justification of God is that he does not exist’, one even senses him anticipate aspects of Meillassoux’s argument about the divine inexistence.35 A major difference between Bloch’s philosophies and Meillassoux’s turns on the question of human agency. Meillassoux argues that it is time that brings forth and destroys worlds and things ‘without reason’, thus ascribing to it a curious agency not unlike that Bloch ascribes to material nature.36 Nevertheless, in Meillassoux’s vision, Worlds and things come into being and pass away according to a ‘principle of factiality’.37 Meanwhile, Bloch asserts a material transitiv32 33 34 35 36

37

Harman, 2011, p. 192. Cf. Bloch 1985g, p. 448. Bloch 1986, p. 1376; 1985g, pp. 239, 469; Harman, 2011, p. 231. Bloch 1985q, p. 268. Meillassoux 2008, p. 102. Adrian Johnston has described Meillassoux’s conception of time in this respect as the result of a ‘Heideggerian hangover’; cf. Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?’ in Bryant et al. 2001, p. 110. Meillassoux 2007, p. 129.

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ity between the human and natural realms that Meillassoux ultimately rejects. Thus although like Bloch Meillassoux acknowledges the increasing complexity of the Worlds of matter, life, and thought, he denies that there is any substantial reason for this increasing complexity. For Bloch, the emergence of conscious from non-conscious life, however aporetic, is explicable in terms of a preexisting possibility contained within matter as a dynamic, self-creating process. Meillassoux’s materialism on the other hand traces a Cartesian lineage, and in this spirit he defends what he calls a ‘materialism of matter’ that ‘takes seriously the possibility that there is nothing living or willing in the organic realm’.38 Thus in contrast to Bloch’s concept of a matter that contains the possibility of ‘everything later external within it’, the increasing complexity that erupts spontaneously with each new World is neither an emergentist phenomenon for Meillassoux, nor a dialectically mediated transition, but rather an entirely contingent factial event. Whereas in Bloch’s schema it is possible, however imperfectly and with however many unforeseen consequences, for human beings to direct the course of things, in Meillassoux’s system this becomes close to impossible. Like many other thinkers of the speculative turn, Meillassoux is not chiefly concerned with political questions. There are, as the discussion around Lenin’s Materialism book makes clear, very good reasons for wanting to avoid drawing political conclusions from ontological arguments. Writing on Meillassoux’s work, Ray Brassier has argued that the ‘ontologization of politics falters the moment it tries to infer political prescriptions from metaphysical description’, and Meillassoux certainly resists taking that step.39 Yet even today, materialist thinkers concede that things look a little different when we consider how epistemology affects our models of action. Discussing the implications of the speculative turn for political theory, Bryant, Srnicek and Harman have made the point that, while our ‘knowledge may be irreducibly tied to politics, … to suggest that reality is also thus tied is to project an epistemological problem into the ontological realm’.40 Their ostensible aim here is to distance contemporary speculative philosophy from the idea that ‘the basic determination of “what is”’ is itself a ‘contentious political matter’.41 One may well want to argue that the basic determination of ‘what is’ is indeed a contentious political matter, but the point to be made here is a different one. For even if we reject what Bryant, Srnicek and Harman call the ‘dogma’ that ‘politics is ontology and onto38 39 40 41

Meillassoux 2007, p. 64. Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’, in Bryant et al. 2011, p. 54. Bryant, Srnicek and Harman, ‘Introduction’ in Bryant et al. 2011, p. 16. Ibid.

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logy is politics’, by conceding that our knowledge is ‘irreducibly tied to politics’, they recognise the significance of epistemological models for theorising human agency.42 Indeed, the different conceptions of agency we find in Bloch’s and Meillassoux’s speculative materialisms can be seen to hinge largely on their divergent epistemological standpoints. To borrow Meillassoux’s terminology, in his commitment to dialectical logic Bloch remains a correlationist, and although it would be overly simplistic to cast Bloch in the role of the Bogdanov to Meillassoux’s Lenin, as the discussion in Chapter 2 clearly demonstrated, Bloch evidently believed that human knowledge is limited by our historical and phenomenological horizons in ways that Meillassoux’s ultra-rationalist perspective wants to reject. Whereas Bloch saw knowledge as historically limited, situated, and above all acquired and tested through practice, Meillassoux claims for human knowledge – at least in its factial symbolization – the status of eternal and unchanging rational truth. It turns out, therefore, that it does make a difference whether we say, as Meillassoux does, we know that utopia either will or will not come to be, or, as Bloch does, we do not know whether utopia will or will not come to be. In the first case, all we can do is act in hope, while in the second we do so in the knowledge that the material world is not hostile to the possibility of our success. Brassier has argued that one of the major contributions of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is the insight that the ‘failure to change the world may not be unrelated to the failure to understand it’.43 In a context in which what is arguably the greatest challenge facing us today – the prospect of socio-ecological collapse – is understood to have largely human causes, however complex and unpredictable an endeavor it may be to try and change things, the conception of agency offered by Bloch’s speculative materialism may well be better suited to the task.

2

New Materialism: Bloch and Bennett

There is some crossover between the speculative turn and the new materialisms, both in terms of thinkers – Meillassoux has been associated with both movements, for instance – and concerns.44 New materialist thinkers share the view of their speculative contemporaries that the challenges of the twentyfirst century force us to reconsider the fundamental nature of reality in ways 42 43 44

Ibid. Brassier, in Bryant et al. 2011, p. 54. Meillassoux’s work appears both in Bryant et al. 2011 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012.

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that were once dismissed as illegitimately metaphysical.45 Yet although in some ways these perspectives are also a response to a certain anti-realist tendency in continental thought, and its attendant privileging of ‘language, discourse, culture, and values’ over ‘material experience’, unlike the various permutations of the speculative turn, the new materialisms openly acknowledge their debt to the cultural turn and the political insights it has yielded. For many of them, ‘thinking anew about the fundamental structure of matter has far-reaching normative and existential implications’.46 Thus while new materialist perspectives do not seek to collapse ontology into politics any more than do those of the speculative turn, they nevertheless take seriously the entanglement of epistemological, ontological, and political questions that resonate strongly with Bloch’s speculative materialism. This shared horizon is perhaps most visible when we compare Bloch’s work with that of political theorist Jane Bennett, who, in her book Vibrant Matter, develops a materialist ontology that shares a number of apparent similarities with Bloch’s. As we have seen, one of the primary motivations behind Bloch’s speculative materialism was to reject mechanical materialism, which sees matter as merely passive ‘stuff’ devoid of all power of immanent self-formation. Instead, Bloch believed that a consistent materialist philosophy that sees both humans and other inhabitants of the natural world as material beings must accept the idea that matter is capable of taking on a multiplicity of forms, both living and non-living, without divine or other intervention from outside. In that sense Bloch conceptualised matter as an ‘agent’, a dialectical process of selfdirected becoming. Bennett, too, is concerned to work against the ‘figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter,’ which she believes ‘feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ by ‘preventing us from detecting … a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating within and around human bodies’.47 Her intention in paying heed to the agential capacities of nonhuman matter is to de-centre the idea of human supremacy in favour of the ecological claim that ‘deep down everything is connected’.48 Nevertheless, Bennett, too, thinks that we need to ‘cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature’ in order to grasp the myriad forces at work in the material world that are beyond our imme-

45 46 47 48

Cf. Coole and Frost 2011, pp. 1–46. Coole and Frost 2011, pp. 3, 5. Bennett 2010, p. ix. Bennett 2010, p. xi.

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diate control or even ken.49 Just as Bloch meditates on the way in which, for a child, ‘[e]ven the stones are alive’, and the floor of a playroom ‘becomes a forest full of wild animals or a lake in which every chair is a boat’, Bennett seeks to rekindle our sense of the world’s ‘vital materiality’, which ‘already found expression in childhood experiences of a world populated by animate things rather than passive objects’.50 For Bennett, all matter is ‘lively’, or ‘vibrant’. Using Bruno Latour’s term, she conceptualises matter as an ‘actant’, a ‘source of action that can be either human or nonhuman’, which has ‘efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events’.51 In developing this theory of vibrant matter, Bennett has recourse to a number of philosophical sources, but one of the most significant for her is the German biologist Hans Driesch, whose use of the concept of entelechy to explain matter’s dynamic forming force clearly recalls Bloch, who understood the process of material becoming as one of ‘incomplete entelechy’. Driesch belonged to the first generation of biologists struggling to make sense of the distinctive capacities of living matter, and Bloch was certainly aware of his work: in Das Materialismusproblem, Bloch mentions Driesch among the ‘neo-vitalists’.52 Driesch developed a theory of vitalism in response to a number of problems he encountered in empirical biology. His work in the field of embryology, in particular, led Driesch increasingly to search for a theory capable of explaining how organisms maintain their integrity as a whole even when individual parts are disturbed. Under the influence of his teacher Haeckel, Driesch tested the mechanistic embryological theories of another of Haeckel’s students, Wilhelm Roux. Roux advocated a theory of ‘developmental mechanics’ to explain how organisms grow.53 Through a series of experiments with chicken embryos, Roux developed a ‘mosaic’ theory of epigenesis, according to which after a few cell divisions, the embryos functioned like a mosaic with each cell playing a distinct part in the overall design of the organism.54 By 1885 Driesch’s experimental work began to challenge this theory. Dividing cells of sea urchin embryos after the first cell division, Driesch expected each cell to develop into the corresponding half of the animal to which it has been destined or preprogrammed, but instead found that each developed into

49 50 51 52 53 54

Bennett 2010, p. xvi. Bloch 1986, pp. 21–2; Bennett 2010, p. vii. Bennett 2010, p. viii, emphasis in original. Bloch 1985g, p. 286. Cf. Roux 1895. Cf. Magner 2002, p. 197.

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a complete sea urchin.55 This also happened at the four-cell stage: entire larvae ensued from each of the four cells, albeit smaller than usual. These experiments suggested that it was possible to remove large pieces from eggs, and interfere in many ways without affecting the resulting embryo. It thus appeared that any single monad in the original egg cell was capable of forming any part of the completed embryo. This was an important refutation of both preformation (the idea that organisms develop from seeds or cells that are simply like miniature versions of themselves) and Roux’s mosaic theory, which would later be evidenced even more precisely by Hans Spemann.56 Nevertheless, it already provoked Driesch to begin searching for a convincing explanation. From 1891, he began work at the Marine Biological Station in Naples, where until 1901 he continued to experiment and seek a theoretical formulation of his results. In 1905, he published Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und Lehre (The History and Theory of Vitalism), in which he developed his theory of entelechy for the first time.57 In 1907, on the strength of his ideas, Driesch was awarded the chair of natural theology at the University of Aberdeen, where he delivered the Gifford Lectures two years running, published in 1908 as The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.58 Thereafter, he moved away from experimental biology to pursue a career in academic philosophy, teaching natural philosophy at the University of Heidelberg from 1909. Driesch’s fascination with what later writers would describe as ‘teleonomy’ – the apparently purposeful behavior of living organisms under the influence of natural laws – and his later interest in parapsychology invited controversy, with critics seeing his work as a kind of unscientific spiritualism.59 Nevertheless, Driesch was not alone with his philosophical interest in the idea of entelechy: as Bennett acknowledges, both Driesch’s work and that of Bergson met with considerable success in the United States prior to the First World War, and as Bloch’s work demonstrates, the idea continued to enjoy a reception among European thinkers well into midcentury.60 In search of a materialism in which matter is an ‘active principle,’ Bennett also reaches for Driesch’s concept of entelechy.61

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Ibid. Cf. Magner 2002, pp. 198–202. Driesch 1914. Driesch 1929. Cf. Freyhofer 1982. Bennett 2010, p. 63. Bennett 2010, p. 93.

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In The History and Theory of Vitalism, Driesch acknowledges that he borrows the term entelechy from Aristotle.62 However, just as Bloch repurposed the term from one designating the movement of matter to a descriptor of processmatter as such, so too did Driesch insist that while the concept of entelechy was ‘well known in the metaphysical terminology of Aristotle’, in his philosophy it would not be ‘used in the proper Aristotelian sense’.63 Bennett acknowledges that Driesch ‘borrows his term of art’ from Aristotle, ‘retaining its sense of a self-moving and self-altering power, but rejecting its peculiarly Aristotelian teleology’.64 Indeed, Driesch introduces a differentiated concept of teleology by distinguishing between the ‘static’ teleology of a machine, in which the purposeful action of each part is determined by its place in the greater whole, and the ‘dynamic’ teleology present in organisms as the result of an ‘unanalysible autonomy’.65 While both kinds of teleology can be found at work in organisms – for instance the purposive action of a particular organ might be said to function according to the principle of a static teleology – Driesch argues that dynamic teleology is only operative in the realm of organic life. Driesch distinguishes further between a number of forces at work in living beings. There is on the one hand the process of ‘energetical becoming’, which equates to the impersonal will of all possibilities to be realised.66 This maps roughly onto Bloch’s concept of dynamei on as the fundamentally plenipotentiary aspect of matter. Within this process, Driesch also specifies what he calls an ‘individualising’ or ‘unifying causality’, which acts within what would otherwise be a purely chaotic process of eternal ‘energetical becoming’, directing and organising it from within.67 Entelechy, by contrast, makes a particular thing what it is by pushing back against this intensive drive towards the realisation of the possible. It is a ‘controlling action’, which ‘consists in the suspension of given possibilities’ rather like the conditioning force of Bloch’s kata to dynaton.68 It is by ‘relaxing’ its suspension of ‘preformed material becoming’ that Driesch’s entelechy ‘allows a “possible” happening to become “real” ’.69 Driesch clearly conceived of matter as something still separate to the force that forms it, as is evident from his insistence that entelechy is an ‘immaterial’

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Driesch 1914, p. 161. Driesch 1914, p. 203. Bennett 2010, p. 71. Driesch 1914, p. 5. Driesch 1914, p. 202. Ibid. Ibid. Driesch 1914, p. 203; p. 205.

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agent.70 What Bennett finds most attractive in Driesch’s account of entelechy is that it ‘is a figure of impersonal agency’, coordinating parts on behalf of a whole without following a rigid plan, answering events innovatively, and deciding on the spot and in real time which of the many possible courses of development will in fact happen.71 Entelechy is not a ‘disembodied soul’, Bennett argues, because it is ‘constrained by the materiality that it must inhabit and by the preformed possibilities contained therein’.72 Nevertheless, ‘despite this heteronomy, entelechy has real efficacy’, animating, arranging, and directing the bodies of the living, even under changing conditions.73 However, Bennett finds Driesch’s restriction of entelechy to the principle only of organic matter problematic, and wants to take the step he refused to by attributing this lively power to all matter. According to Bennett, Driesch ‘thought he had to figure entelechy as nonmaterial because his notion of materiality was yoked to the notion of a mechanistic, deterministic machine’.74 His refusal to extend the ‘agentic capacities’ of entelechy to non-living and inorganic forms of matter was ‘propelled by his assumption that materiality is stuff so passive and dull that it could not possibly have done the tricky work of organizing and maintaining morphing wholes’.75 Claiming that the work of entelechy is a property of material being as such brings Bennett into close conceptual proximity with Bloch; yet the agentic power she claims inheres in ‘vibrant matter’ is not the limiting force of Driesch’s entelechy, but something more like the ‘directing power’ of his individualising causality.76 Both Bennett and Bloch are closer to Aristotle in conceptualising entelechy as an internal, driving force, rather than as a regulating force as Driesch sees it. In the architecture of Bloch’s speculative materialism, matter itself is ‘incomplete entelechy’, one aspect of which is a kata to dynaton that fulfils the regulating role that entelechy plays for Driesch. Meanwhile, Bennett mistakes Driesch’s entelechy for the ‘immanent vitality flowing across all living bodies’.77 It is this vitality that she argues animates a vibrant matter endowed with the capacity to produce effects, and affects, in the world. Bennett’s ontology is one in which human beings are ‘bodies’ among others, and in which agency is

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Driesch 1914, p. 200. Bennett 2010, p. 75. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Bennett 2010, p. 80. Bennett 2010, p. 75.

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thought of as distributed across a network of relations or ‘assemblages’ rather than specifically having to do with the power to execute intentions. Driesch’s theory of entelechy clearly distinguishes much more sharply between the ‘agency’ of living versus non-living beings than Bennett’s does. According to Driesch, acting – ‘the work of the artist in the widest sense of that term’ – not only ‘is’, but ‘creates’.78 As such ‘entelechy creates through the artist’.79 However, recalling Hegel’s phrase that in the human creation of artefact, activity ‘goes over into its product’, Driesch distinguishes between a ‘product of entelechy that is itself the point of manifestation of entelechy’, i.e. ‘the organism’, and those products that ‘result from acting’, but are ‘unable to perform further entelechian acts’ themselves, and are therefore merely machines; in other words, the products of beings that are able to act in a fuller sense of the word.80 Bennett is concerned to liberate all matter from its ‘long history of attachment of automatism or mechanism’, but she does so only at the price of levelling out the discrepant agencies of living and non-living materialities theorised by Driesch.81 This also marks a significant point of difference between Bennett’s concept of matter and material agency and that of Bloch. For although Bloch, like Bennett, conceives of matter as an ‘agent’, as we have seen, he does so in order to explain in materialist terms how consciousness and freedom are possible; that is, in order to strengthen concepts of human agency and subjectivity, while Bennett intends to relativise them. There is a historical explanation for this divergence in focus, which also draws attention to a key weakness in Bloch’s thought. Bloch developed his speculative materialism in a context dominated by an orthodox Marxist worldview that as he saw it functioned to provide philosophical justifications for restricting human agency. Bennett meanwhile writes in an age in which a hubristic concept of human agency is seen not only to be misguided, but dangerous, not only because the category ‘human’ has historically so often been synonymous with white, heterosexual, rich-world masculinity, but also – and this is one of Bennett’s key foci – because anthropocentric conceptions of agency have been used to justify the exploitation of the natural world. With regard to the latter, Bennett explicitly seeks to ‘promote greener forms of human culture’ by focusing our attention on ‘encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities’.82 However, as necessary as this may be, it may paradoxic78 79 80 81 82

Driesch 1929, p. 138. Ibid. Hegel 2004, p. 175; Driesch 1929, p. 138. Bennett 2010, p. 3. Bennett 2010, p. x.

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ally turn out that too enthusiastically erasing the distinction between human and thingly modes of agency has consequences in the context of Bennett’s chief sphere of political concern in Vibrant Matter, namely environmental crisis. Bennett’s vital materialism involves both ‘a philosophical project and, related to it, a political one’, which she outlines in the following way: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? … How, for example, would patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or ‘the recycling’, but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter? What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand? What issues would surround stem cell research in the absence of the assumption that the only source of vitality in matter is soul or spirit? What difference would it make to the course of energy policy were electricity to be figured not simply as a resource, commodity, or instrumentality but also and more radically as an ‘actant’?83 Bennett argues that the ‘image of an inert matter helps animate our current practice of aggressively wasteful and planet-endangering consumption’, and hopes that, in contrast, that of a ‘materiality experienced as a lively force with agentic capacity could animate a more ecologically sustainable’ attitude towards the environment.84 Bennett’s central claim here – that an instrumental view of nature as ‘inert’ matter to be exploited is destructive – unites her with Bloch, who criticised the narrative of technological progress according to which the increasing ‘control of nature’ was frequently allied with the ‘retrogression of society’, arguing that the ‘control of nature’ is itself the ‘manifestation of a violent society’.85 In particular, Bloch believed that technology in its current form ‘stands in nature like an army of occupation’ that ‘knows nothing of the interior of the country’.86 He too urged us to pay attention to the ‘co-productivity’ of nature as both a subject and an agent. Quoting the same passage from Hegel to which Driesch refers, Bloch argues that while ‘in the usual view the original productivity of nature disappears in the face of the product, in the philosophically concrete view the 83 84 85 86

Bennett 2010, p. viii. Bennett 2010, p. 51. Bloch 1986, 696. Ibid.

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product must disappear in the face of productivity’. For Bloch, then, emphasising nature’s productivity also means emphasising the human productivity that issues from it. From Bennett’s perspective, an increased focus on human powers is misplaced. Her concept of ‘distributive agency’ is designed to combat what she sees as a dangerously hubristic belief in human sovereignty.87 In Bennett’s theory, agency is not the exclusive faculty of conscious subjects, but rather the capacity for action of any object, subject, or impersonal force. Bennett shares this view with other new materialists such as Coole and Frost, who conceive of matter as a dynamic, self-organising and self-directing force in order to disturb ‘the conventional sense that agents are exclusively humans who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature’.88 Instead, they argue that in this new materialist context, the human species ‘is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened’.89 Bloch, too, acknowledged contingency or chance as inherently part of the complex entanglement of natural and human agencies, although he still placed a greater emphasis on the power of human beings to mediate tendencies visible in the natural world.90 There are clearly benefits to be gained from the kind of radical de-centring of the human in which Bennett and other new materialists are engaged. The vision of human supremacy Bennett wants to resist is undoubtedly bound up with the compulsion to dominate non-human nature. Yet there are also problems inherent in effectively considering the agency of human beings to be of equal significance and type as that of ‘Baltimore litter’, ‘Prometheus’ chains’, ‘Darwin’s worms’, and the ‘not-quite-bodies of electricity … ingested food … and stem cells’, particularly when it comes to the question of the environment, not least because the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic cause of climate change is undeniable.91 The issue here is not one of ‘intentionality’, as Bennett suggests – the idea that agency has to do with the ability to act consciously – but rather the question of what constitutes a politics capable of responding to

87 88 89 90 91

Bennett 2010, p. ix and passim. Coole and Frost, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. Ibid. Cf. Bloch 1985g, p. 226. Bennett 2010, p. xiii.

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the problem at hand.92 Bennett is concerned with questions of ‘moral responsibility and political accountability’, and insists that the attempt to de-centre agency should not be confused with the abandonment of ‘the project of identifying … the sources of harmful effects’.93 Within an ecological perspective, however, Bennett sees the concepts of autonomy and strong responsibility as ‘empirically false’, and their invocations therefore ‘tinged with injustice’.94 ‘In emphasizing the ensemble nature of action’, she says, ‘and the interconnections between persons and things, a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects’.95 There is nevertheless a risk of overstretching the egalitarianism of agency. While Bennett’s claim that autonomous human agency is more illusory than we might like to think is undoubtedly true, pushed to the extent of likening it to the agency of ‘litter’ begs certain questions: how are we supposed to do anything about the litter we have created? One might argue that we must simply abandon the desire to ‘do something’ altogether, accept that what we are doing in and to the rest of our environment is, on the level playing field of vibrant matter, natural, and simply allow matter’s distributive agency to run its course. However, surely that would be to abdicate our responsibility to one another and to other living beings for the ways in which we have – not simply intentionally, it is true, and certainly with all manner of unintended consequences – altered the social metabolism of the planet in ways that will only be able to ‘self-correct’ over time scales that are predicted to see many life forms wiped out? Does a certain responsibility to other living beings not stem from the fact that they, too, are subjects capable of acting in ways in which litter is not? The lack of distinction between living and non-living beings in Bennett’s vitalism is arguably its most problematic aspect. If there is as good as no difference between the agency of human beings and plastic bags, how can one argue that it is unacceptable to treat human bodies in the same way one disposes of litter? Moreover, the overwhelming scientific consensus today is that the rapid transformations taking place within the biosphere – global warming, mass extinction, ocean acidification – have anthropogenic causes. Indeed, many have argued that the extent of this man-made change has pushed the ecosystem into a new geological epoch. While earth’s history has always been characterised by the constant flux of climate and evolution, today the evidence suggests that warming is taking place at a faster rate than ever before, 92 93 94 95

Bennett 2010, p. 21. Bennett 2010, pp. 21, 37. Bennett 2010, p. 37. Ibid.

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with human activity also contributing to a sixth mass extinction event. If this is correct, then it seems that there is indeed something particular about human agency that causes it to have a more intensive impact on the ecosystem than that of other species and forms. Vital materialism challenges a hubristic, anthropocentric account of agency on the undeniable ground that it is has played a central role in justifying environmental exploitation. Yet Bennett’s shift towards a more distributive understanding of agency may paradoxically leave us ill-equipped to account for precisely the phenomenon of anthropogenic environmental change that – among other things – she sets out to tackle.

3

Ecological Materialisms: Bloch, Foster, and Moore

The question of human agency in relation to the environment is also a central concern for contemporary ecological materialisms. John Bellamy Foster and Jason W. Moore are perhaps the best-known representatives of this trend, and although significant differences can be observed in their perspectives, they are united in rediscovering in the work of Marx and Engels a profound awareness of the intersection between environmental and social change. The early Marx was writing at a time when the fear of soil exhaustion gripped agriculturalists and industrialists around the world. In the early nineteenth century, urbanisation and the industrialisation of farming had begun to highlight the potential dangers of pushing the rigid distinction between natural and social processes too far. The reports of soil exhaustion that had abounded since the eighteenth century became more concerning as European states struggled with the problem of how to feed growing, increasingly urban populations. The occurrence of large-scale crop failures only made the issue seem more urgent.96 Against this background, German organic chemist Justus Liebig was keen to understand the relationship between town and city in the variation of soil quality. In his 1840 work Organic Chemistry and its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, Liebig argued that soil despoliation was largely caused by one-sided nutrient flows from the land to the city, such that there was an inherent instability built into the rural-urban partition of social space.97 In 1863, he would speculate that in order to maintain nutrient cycles in a sustainable balance, it would be necessary to collect all the excrement of the town and return it to each

96 97

Cf. Jones 2016, p. 8 and p. 92; Tauger 2010, p. x. Liebig, 1840.

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farmer proportionally to the volume of produce he had supplied.98 Liebig’s discovery of artificial fertilizers as a way of addressing this problem revolutionized agricultural practices worldwide. Nevertheless, he had made a crucial insight into the biochemical cycles connecting supposedly separate ‘natural’ and ‘social’ systems, which he termed ‘metabolism’. With the concept of metabolism, Liebig had identified that resource exploitation in urban, increasingly industrial societies has certain material limits. The social consequences of Liebig’s work were clearly apparent to his contemporary Marx, who sought to integrate the concept of metabolism into an analysis of the capitalist mode of production. In volume I of Capital, Marx would argue that capitalist production, predicated as it is on the extraction of ever increasing value from materially limited resources, is inherently environmentally unsustainable. As it had been for Liebig, the rural-urban split was the historically critical juncture also for Marx, who argued that urbanisation was undermining the very basis for capitalism’s continued productivity in the long term. He argued that ‘by collecting the population together in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of the town population’, capitalist production achieved two things.99 On the one hand it ‘concentrates the historical motive force of society’, providing the basis for increased association among members of the proletariat.100 On the other hand, he claimed that human agglomeration in urban centres ‘disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing’, thus depleting soil fertility.101 ‘All progress in capitalist agriculture’, Marx concluded, ‘is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil’.102 In Volume III of Capital, Marx explicitly refers to Liebig as the source of this insight, acknowledging him as the first to have identified how the process of urbanisation had led to the ‘squandering of the vitality of the soil’.103 Marx described this phenomenon in terms of ‘an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural

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99 100 101 102 103

Liebig 1862, p. 261. Liebig’s work, in particular its consequences for thinking about the policy of night soil collection, sparked a robust debate in Germany about soil exhaustion. Cf. Thon 1866. Marx 1996, p. 506. Ibid. Marx 1996, p. 507. Ibid. Marx 1998, p. 799.

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laws of life itself’.104 His concept of metabolic rift thus describes the process by which human labour extracts and relocates materials and energy in ways that disrupt certain natural cycles. The concept of metabolic rift is at the heart of John Bellamy Foster’s work, which theorises the roots of the contemporary ecological crisis via (among other things) a historical reconstruction of the ecological dimensions of Marx’s and Engels’ thought.105 In Marx’s Ecology, Foster demonstrates how the concept of metabolic rift was central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, allowing him to unite three of its main pillars: ‘the analysis of the extraction of surplus product from the direct producer; the related theory of capitalist ground rent; and the Malthusian theory of population’.106 By arguing that metabolic rift was a direct outcome of capitalist agriculture, Foster maintains that Marx was able to demonstrate the impossibility of governing ‘human metabolism with nature in a rational way’ in a bourgeois economy.107 Since the continued existence of human beings depends on that of a healthy natural world, Marx found in the concept of metabolic rift grist to the mill of his critique of the political economy of capitalism. According to Marx’s logic – so Foster – capitalism’s downfall was ultimately necessary, the only question was how it would take place: by accident in the form of ultimate ecological catastrophe, or design in that of proletarian revolution. Foster, too, finds here grist to his mill, as he has argued in later works such as Ecology against Capitalism and The Ecological Rift.108 In the latter, he and his co-authors Brett Clark and Richard York bring the concept of metabolic rift into conversation with that of the anthropocene, the idea of a ‘new geological epoch in which humanity has become the main driver of rapid changes in the earth system’.109 According to Foster, Clark, and York, the ‘ecological rift’ represented by the anthropocene has resulted in a situation in which the ‘planet is now dominated by a technologically potent but alienated humanity – alienated from both nature and itself; and hence ultimately destructive of everything around it. At issue is not just the sustainability of human soci-

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105 106 107 108 109

The terminology of ‘metabolic rift’ stems from the Penguin translation of Capital, cf. Marx 1981, p. 949. The German edition speaks of an ‘unheilbaren Riß’ (cf. Marx-Engels-Werke, Bd. 25, p. 821). The terminology in the Lawrence and Wishart edition is ‘an irreparable break in the […] social interchange’ (Marx 1996, p. 799). Foster 2000. Foster 2000, p. 141. Foster 2000, p. 170. Foster 2002; Foster, Clark, and York 2010. Foster et al 2012, p. 14.

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ety, but the diversity of life on earth’.110 They apply the concept of the ‘rift’ to a range of ‘planetary boundaries’ identified by climatologists as essential to averting ecological catastrophe, including ‘tipping points’ in relation to ocean acidification, global warming, and ozone depletion which, if overshot, would threaten the continued existence of all life on earth.111 Time is running out, and capital, on this view, is eating it. Foster, Clark, and York argue that capitalist production relations are fundamental to the current model of ‘unsustainable development’, but capitalism is, after all, a human construct.112 We create it, and we can choose to do things differently – that is the message of Foster, Clark, and York, who advocate for ‘ecological and social revolution’ as the only path to averting disaster.113 What is persuasive about this connection of the theory of metabolic rift to the concept of the anthropocene is not only that it broadly accords with the consensus among climatologists that human activity – particularly that ultimate economic activity of burning fuel – is the primary cause of the current climate crisis; it also offers hope that something can be done about it. Yet their analysis has been challenged on a number of fronts. It been argued, for instance by Jason W. Moore, that the concept of metabolic rift implicitly reproduces a dualist ontology that overemphasises human agency at the expense of natural agencies on which we depend and which, as climate change reveals, are often beyond our control.114 Drawing parallels between how conceptions of nature’s alterity have often been closely aligned with histories of the domination of women and colonised peoples, Moore’s theory of world-ecology seeks to highlight the agency of subaltern groups (human and non-human) in ways that Foster et al’s analysis of ecological imperialism can be seen to overlook. Moreover, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, Moore and his co-editors and contributors question whether the very idea of the anthropocene does not reproduce some of these dynamics, obscuring the differential role human groups have played in creating the global ecological crisis, and tacitly excluding the more radical ‘possibility of challenging human rule’ on earth.115 In his article ‘Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift?’, Moore argues that the concept of metabolic rift as it has been used in previous ecological materialist approaches – notably by Foster – has neglected the ‘double internality’ of

110 111 112 113 114 115

Ibid. Foster et al 2012, pp. 17–18. Foster et al 2012, pp. 51. Foster et al 2012, p. 48. Cf. Moore 2017, p. 285. Moore, Altvater and Crist (eds.) 2016.

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nature-in-us and us-in-nature. The ‘Cartesian narrative’ of Foster and other ecological materialists, as Moore sees it, unfolds like this: Capitalism – or if one prefers, modernity or industrial civilization – emerged out of Nature. It drew wealth from Nature. It disrupted, degraded, or defiled Nature. And now, or sometime very soon, Nature will exact its revenge. Catastrophe is coming. Collapse is on the horizon.116 The problem with this perspective as Moore sees it is twofold. Not only has it led to Marx’s ecological thinking, including his concept of metabolic rift, being ‘more or less cordoned off from the critique of political economy’.117 It also reproduces the very ‘dualism of Nature/Society – with a capital ‘N’ and a capital ‘S’’ that Moore argues is ‘complicit in the violence of modernity at its core’.118 By focusing narrowly on how capitalism impacts the environment, Moore argues that ‘“The” environment became just another object of analysis for Marxists’ rather than compelling a fundamental rethinking of ‘how capital accumulation works, how it booms, and how it develops through accumulation crises’, the ‘core concerns’ of political economy.119 His approach to understanding capitalism in terms of a ‘world-ecological’ history aims to address these issues. One of the problems with seeing nature as external to which Moore points is its association with the exploitation of certain groups – women, non-industrialised societies – as being somehow closer to a supposedly pristine nature to which we must return. Indeed, Moore argues that the nature/society dualism on the basis of which the exploitation of nature has historically been justified underpins ‘the dualisms of race, gender, sexuality, and Eurocentrism’ with which critical thinkers have been attempting to get to grips for the last four decades.120 Deconstructing the ‘Nature/Society binary’ is thus at the heart of Moore’s efforts to rewrite a world-ecological history that ‘drips with blood and dirt, from its sixteenth-century origins to capitalism in its twilight’.121 This operation begins with the insight that because capitalism’s relation to the soil is unsustainable, it is fated to the relentless quest for new frontiers. Its first and best option, Moore argues, has always been geographical expansion, taking new land into cultivation in the process Marx called primitive accumu-

116 117 118 119 120 121

Moore 2017. Ibid. Moore 2015, p. 4. Moore 2017. Moore 2015, p. 4. Ibid.

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lation.122 If capital expansion undermines the biodiversity essential to sustainability already at the local level, then it does so no less at the global, but rather extends the rural-urban distinction over ever-larger scales. Moore thus aims to move beyond Foster’s ‘Cartesian narrative’ by using Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to demonstrate how the world-system’s inherent environmental instability was at the root of the expansionist imperative in the first place. Capitalism is not simply destroying nature – natural forces have enabled it to emerge and grow. The deconstruction of the nature/society binary is also at the root of Moore’s – and others’ – efforts to interrogate the term ‘anthropocene’ favoured by Foster. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, Dan Hartley points to a number of problems in the discourse of the anthropocene, which the term capitalocene aims to overcome: an ahistorical, abstract concept of humanity, which glosses over differentials of power and agency, including in its non-human forms; a certain technological determinism, which prioritises the logic of tool-use over that of labour; and a retrospective teleology, which presents the current status quo as inevitable.123 Against these assumptions, the concept of the capitalocene is intended to argue that it is not human action per se, but human action in the service of capital accumulation that is correlated with ecological destruction. And since capital accumulation is always bound up with differentials of power and agency through divisions of labour, it is not simply ‘humanity’ that is responsible for the ecological crisis: those groups who have historically wielded power and exercised agency over others – Benjamin’s ‘triumphal procession’ – bear more responsibility than those who have been trampled underfoot. In other words, human beings and other creatures do have agency, but it is not distributed equally, and any solution to the socio-ecological crises we face must take that into account in order to be effective. It was a simplistic humanism at the heart of much Marxist theory that turned many ‘new’ materialists away from traditional Marxian approaches, and in its aim to disrupt the idea of ‘human’ agency as a singular – or singularly important – phenomenon, world-ecological perspective has much in common with Bennett’s new materialism. The ‘abstract’ humanism Hartley identifies at the heart of the discourse of the anthropocene is another version of Moore’s critique of Foster’s ‘binary’ conception of ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’: the charge against Foster is that there is no singular nature, or (human) society that could be separate from one another. The idea of the capitalocene is supposed to both capture this entanglement and the differentials that exist within it. 122 123

Cf. Marx 1996, p. 739. Cf. Hartley 2017, pp. 154–65.

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Yet there appear to be problems, too, with abstracting from the concept of ‘the human’ altogether when it comes to the question of environmental change. As the scientific data reveals, the durée of humanity’s ecological impact is far longer than that of the history of modern capitalism. The megafaunal extinctions that contribute to the ongoing Holocene/anthropocene extinction event are directly correlated on all continents with the arrival of homo sapiens.124 Meanwhile, analyses of the fossil record show that the basic global distribution of plants and animals changed dramatically during the Neolithic revolution when farming practices spread across the globe.125 These trends suggest that there is indeed something specific about human beings – more precisely, human agency – that must be part of an explanation for why and how we have a greater impact on the planet than any other species. On this point, neither Foster’s nor Moore’s explanations fully convince. Foster et al seem to assume that human beings do possess individual and collective agency, as evidenced by their call for revolutionary action. However, they do not substantially interrogate in what this agency may consist, whence it might be derived, and how it may be distributed, except insofar as they accept that unequal distribution results from class difference.126 Meanwhile, Moore defines human specificity in terms of our ‘sociality’, including our ‘capacities for collective memory and symbolic production’ rather than focusing on human action or its specific character per se.127 Although Burghard Schmidt pointed to the ‘actuality of a socialist politics of nature in a Blochian perspective’ already in the early 1980s, neither Foster nor Moore – nor Meillassoux nor Bennett – mentions Bloch specifically in their works.128 Involving him in the conversation between them may, however, contribute to a tighter account of the specificity of human agency in relation to environmental questions, while simultaneously connecting up some of the points of difference that emerge from these debates, particularly those around the terms anthropocene and capitalocene. As we have already amply seen, Bloch’s speculative materialism saw material nature and human being as fundamentally united by a creative, subjective force, the result of a constitutive lack that is the source of desire. Desire is thus what links natural agency with human agency, and in this sense it is a

124 125 126 127 128

See, for example, Kolbert, 2014. Cf. Lyons et al 2015. For a contrary view of the significance of the Neolithic revolution, see Williams et al 2016, pp. 34–53. Cf. Foster et al 2012, pp. 63, 200, 387. Moore 2015, p. 7. Schmidt 1983, pp. 228–60.

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fundamental motor of change. As Bloch puts it in Das Materialismusproblem, something is not (yet) as it should be, otherwise ‘there would … be no process’.129 Of course, human desires are not all the same: they vary from individual to individual, from culture to culture, from age to age. But Bloch nevertheless understood desire as such – the temporal projection of one’s self into the future – as common to all human beings.130 Because desire is linked to need – the need to survive above all – it is at bottom deeply connected to our physical being. We need to eat in order to metabolise energy to survive, for example, so we have hunger, desire food, go in search of it, eventually learn to grow food and keep it. All human societies have done this, and as soon as they did they began to transform their environment through labour, intercepting aspects of nature’s economy and redirecting it into the emergent social economy. Marx and Engels formulated this idea memorably in The German Ideology, when they wrote that human beings ‘begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life’.131 Thus where Moore defines human specificity in terms of our sociality – the way in which we organise and divide our labour, a focus that necessarily emphasises difference because those forms of organisation have always varied more or less across time and space – Marx defined it in terms of labour as such. Human beings are laboring beings, we work on our world. In Aristotelian terms we could say with Marx that labour is humanity’s entelecheia, it is the specific what of being-at-work that makes us what we are. With Bloch, however, we would have to say that labour itself is always in the service of desire. Human labour has a uniquely transformative impact on the natural economy as compared with the action of, say, an electricity grid or a falling rock. Through the acts of tool-making, resource use, the production, consumption, and exchange of goods and services, even in the pursuit of knowledge, we redirect and recombine elements of the natural world in ways that disrupt the temporal regimes that govern the ecosystem from the perspective of deep time. Taking together the insights of Marx, Bloch, Foster, and Moore, then, we might say that working on the environment in the service of our desire is just what we do, but in doing so we disrupt the circulation of natural economies, diverting elements of those economies into our social economy, recombining them 129 130 131

Bloch 1985g, p. 473. Bloch 1986, p. 45. Marx and Engels 1975b, p. 31.

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in new ways that can only be rectified at large spatio-temporal scales. This, perhaps, can be read as a potted materialist history of the anthropocene. The potted materialist history of the capitalocene would continue that the more advanced science and technology have become, and the more our labour is put into the service not only of desire, but also the endless accumulation of profit, the more effective we have become at doing this, to our own detriment as well as to that of the ecological fabric at large. Nevertheless, the basic insight remains the same, which is to say that the fact of ecological crisis strongly suggests that human agency is qualitatively different from the agency of other beings. Far from recreating the problematic narrative of a fall from pristine nature, this insight in fact allows us to recognise that no edenic wilderness existed in the past where humans lived in perfect harmony with the rest of our ecological network. Bloch certainly recognises this when he claims at the end of The Principle of Hope that the utopian Heimat for which we yearn was never yet there.132 Yet although he saw human beings as a product of the material process of realisation, Bloch also recognised that we are able to direct and shape the process itself in unique ways. Seen from this perspective, the eco-social problem becomes not to deny the specificity of our agency or try to circumvent it, but to figure out how to put that specificity – labour – to work in ways that are not self-centredly and short-sightedly consumerist and exploitative. As Bloch saw it, only we are capable of making this change, and in the end he speculated that the future history of the worldsystem would be much like its past in that the prospects of social prosperity and emancipation would be intimately connected with the wider fate of the natural world. In other words, he understood ‘real democracy, beyond alienation and expropriation’ as only possible in the context of a Heimat in which a rootedness of nature-in-us and us-in-nature that has never yet existed would be realised.133 132 133

Bloch 1986, p. 1376. Ibid.

Appendix: The Speculative Expanse Introduction The aim of this book has been to reconstruct Bloch’s speculative materialism as it is developed in his 1972 work Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz. Reconstruction – the methodological mainstay of intellectual history – is a curious activity, a narrative and performative act, which, if done well, balances the demand for a systematic interpretation with the need to situate ideas in the historical context in which they emerged. In its narrativity, the exegesis in which this book has engaged has cast Bloch in the role of a protagonist seeking to articulate his philosophical vision, intervening in some of the most significant debates of his time. Along the way we have occasionally heard Bloch speak in his own voice, as it were, by way of citation. On the whole, though, his ideas have been filtered through the reconstructive device. The reader has been given excerpts from the materialism book selectively, and, particularly for those who do not know German, there is perhaps a need to let Bloch have the final word. This epilogue does that via a translation of the final section of Das Materialismusproblem entitled ‘The speculative expanse; Logikon in matter; not only movement, but matter itself as incomplete entelechy’. To be sure, here too there is mediation at play: this is, after all, a translation and not the text in its original language. But since, on a Blochian view, meaning exists only in and through mediation, perhaps the opening up of meaning that takes place in translation can itself be seen as a truth-creating process. In this last section of the materialism book, we see many of the ideas discussed in the preceding pages come together. In a certain sense it presents us with as close to a programmatic statement of Bloch’s speculative materialism as he ever gives us. The Aristotelian categories of dynamei on and kata to dynaton that animate Bloch’s concept of matter are discussed here as constitutive descriptions of processual matter itself, rather than as modal states in which matter qua ‘wax’ may be found. Schelling’s conception of nature as communicating its needs, if we are apt to listen, is here too, as is the interplay between the Hegelian and Kantian models of knowledge on which Bloch draws. Finally, Marx makes his appearance as the figure who, for Bloch, provided us with the most immanent sense of why philosophy matters at all. For it alone allows us, so Bloch argued, to interpret the dream of a thing that the world has long possessed and thereby, in becoming conscious of it, to begin to try to realise it. À propos of the dream of a thing, it has not been the aim of this book to derive from Bloch’s thought prescriptions for social, political or environmental action in the present. Even in the chapter on Bloch’s relevance in the context of contemporary debates within materialism, the objective has at the most been to adumbrate how

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one might begin to go about operationalising his speculative materialism today. That said, having gone to the trouble of writing a book like this, my conviction that Bloch’s thought does have important resources to offer emancipatory thought and practice in our time ought to be clear. Whether we like it or not, it does seem that to a considerable extent, life, as Bloch wrote in Spirit of Utopia, ‘has been put into our hands’.1 What ‘we’ do with it, however, individually and collectively, is and remains an open question. It is, therefore, all the more challenging to end a book about Bloch on neither a vapidly triumphalist nor a cynically self-effacing note; to avoid simply saying, in the face of all the war and the violence and the exploitation and the hideous, profit-driven reduction of thriving nature to a lifeless husk: ‘we have the power to do something about all this!’ Whereupon one immediately has to ask oneself: ‘but do we, and even if we do, how do we know that the unintended consequences of our actions won’t entail something even worse? History is full of such examples …’ The point, of course, is that we don’t know, and this is simply the perennial problem of historical human being. For now, at least, there is no definitive way out of the conundrum, though Bloch pointed to one possible route with his concept of hope, an antidote to fear and its attendant politics as a response to the problem of the limited human horizon. As Marx put it in the Eighteenth Brumaire, human beings make history, but we do not make it as we please, we do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. And yet as Bloch reminds us, human beings, to a degree that far exceeds that of any other living being yet known to us, nevertheless reshape and overhaul what is so given, and indeed we often must if justice is to be done, even if our action is always to a greater or lesser extent a leap in the dark. Perhaps in the end what Bloch’s speculative materialism offers most importantly today is renewed attention to this delicate, and indeed dialectical, relationship between what is and what is not yet, what is known and what is not yet known within that space that we call history.

The Speculative Expanse; Logikon in Matter; Not Only Movement, But Matter Itself as Incomplete Entelechy2 What drives us can and wants to be expressed. We must not, as has been usual up to now, think lowly of matter, in which everything is formed. And not only outwardly, as

1 Bloch 2000, p. 1. 2 Bloch 1985g, pp. 470–8. My translation retains Bloch’s paragraph structure, and broadly also his punctuation, adapting it only where necessary to facilitate idiomatic flow in English. It also replicates his italicisation except for all Latinate neologisms and citations, which Bloch

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if there were not already in our own life an internal burrowing into oneself, which also belongs to the body. Many of the aforementioned difficulties, in the leap from brain to soul for example, are removed when we take not a petty approach, but an external and at the same time dead one to material being. As soon as matter is limited from the outset to the rough and block-like, or even intentionally abused as such, however, then no way leads from the body to consciousness, from the commercial turnover to an altogether elevated transformation into the ideal as such. It goes without saying that understanding many further qualitative transitions in material development requires an expanded conception of matter that not only discards the mechanistic shell but finds and grasps what must count as material once it has been discarded. With Feuerbach, the human essence, which until then had not at all been included in the material world, came into the materialist’s view, though still in too abstract a way and as a complete species being, rather than one in the midst of social labour processes. The concept of matter was expanded to include the subjective factor, which was incorporated by Marx in an increasingly materialist way: with his own subjectfully active method of a dialectical contradiction as contradicting, which related to the objective contradiction in external conditions that have become – not only subjectively speaking – intolerable. Indeed, through the dialectical as such, as the ‘pulse of liveliness’, an even more fundamental extension of the concept of matter becomes possible, a not only empirical, but precisely a speculative one; for the dialectical itself has always been inaccessible to the perspective limited to the mechanical, indeed it appears still today in the positivist perspective as pure, rather as unfortunate nonsense. Yet the word speculation (originally from speculari = to catch sight of, look around, keep a lookout), in order to make its own contribution to this extension of meaning, urgently requires both an examination and a recollection of its great, not yet declined meaning. It originally appeared not unsolid, right the way down to speculation on a market. It has also not necessarily always had the tinge of curious fantasy, located partly in the bottomless or in a blue haze. Although Kant admittedly still denigrated speculation as the ‘reckless use of reason’, and understood by it only a recognition of things on the basis of pure concepts without any empiricism, so Hegel distinguished the speculative process as a recognition precisely on the basis of concrete concepts as opposed to the merely abstract concepts of reflection. Hegel says on the matter:

does not italicise, but which are italicised here. Bloch makes liberal use in these passages of German’s greater flexibility than English in nominalising all manner of adverbs and particles, for instance: ‘das Wozu’, ‘das Überhaupt’. This is a characteristic device of German-language philosophy, perhaps the best-known example of which is the Kantian ‘in itself’. Constructions of this kind are capitalised here in order to distinguish them as Bloch’s terminological innovations.

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‘The speculative is the positive moment of reason, the intellectual, the first truly philosophical moment’. The speculative is supposed to stand here against the dogmatic as what is true, ‘which’, as Hegel says with special reference to dialectics, ‘has no such unilateral determination in itself and is not thereby exhausted, but, as the totality, contains, united within it, those determinations that appear to dogmatism as fixed and true in their separation.’ Thus precisely the unfixed dialectical determinations, which dogmatism makes rigid and holds apart, are united so that the totality emerges. And as totality, it colourfully divides into dialectical specifications and at the same time, with Omnia ubique, holds itself together in the process. If the speculative of this idealistic type is a matter of spirit, even of world spirit, it is not exhausted by this relation, and least of all began objectively with it. Because if the speculative is applied to the concept of matter of the early materialists instead of to world spirit, then this concept becomes as a matter of course sobering, demystifying, already with Thales, who posited that the essence of the world was water rather than something mythical (as Nietzsche, who otherwise does not belong here, said: people sought the essence of the world and when they found it, it was water). But likewise the concept of matter here was not only empirically sobering, but immanently speculative in that it appeared as a matter of course among the Ionians as hylozoic, animating the material. Later, Marx, ruminating on the speculative not only as dialectic and as Totum, but rather as quality, praised Bacon’s poetic-sensible gloss on matter, Jakob Böhme’s revival of it at the source, all categories that particularly presuppose the fantasy of the speculative, kept it going, did not allow it to be exhausted with outlandish projections; indeed Marx did not, as is always fantastic to hear, rule out a ‘resurrection of nature’. After which more would really be possible than ever the same substance and stereotypically eternally self-repeating law; from the perspective of historical materialism this false duration is already over, and not only in that case, above all if mediated as utopian-matter is thought forward. It is therefore the case for the fundamental, actual expansion of the pool of matter: the capacity for such forwards-matter is, as noted, active in the subjective factor, predominantly in the revolutionary class that transforms material conditions and its power, and to this corresponds in objective-concrete terms real possibility as the potential of these conditions and their matter to be transformed, including into what it has never been, into the Novum. In addition, the logical may no longer be underestimated as a real attribute of the material, that is, materialism must on this point – in spite of will, intention and consciousness – avoid assuming and becoming the wilful handmaiden of that dualism that has torn asunder matter and mind to the extreme and isolated them against one another exclusively in the interest of an intellectually fetishistic idealism. Through this rupture the being-consciousness aporia and the problem of the origin of quality in the transition from quantity to quality was artificially exaggerated. Instead of being made materialistically more precise and resolved through insight, in this case deep insight, into the dialectically mediated

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leap and into the impulse of matter to birth. Certainly, with a difficult birth, one per aspera not only ad astra, but above all: tanta molis erat, erit humanam condere gentem.3 That certainly does not mean that in matter everything gleams sensuously or is simply ‘there’. There is a drive towards form in matter, but its objects still collide in space as the only ones that are tangible. It was often better to be deceived than to be awake and we live in what that demonstrates and must better it. Even, or precisely, in its there-ness matter is incomplete and demonstrates the fact in its distance from the – not only sensuous – shimmer and fullness that issues from it. Even according to its unstructured, unconnected side matter belongs to what is incomplete and shows it, otherwise the drive to form would not lead anywhere. That which disrupts, limits, traverses, which in Aristotle still appears as an ancillary cause, extends to the kata to dynaton in that the latter also has a limiting effect on the full realisation of form, which can anyway only assert itself according to the measure of what is possible in each case. Limiting is also when in Aristotle and later in Thomas the simple divisibility of matter is defined as principium individuationis, which is admittedly not only the source of finitude and alterity, but also of diversity as plenitude and worldliness. Not only in space, however, as a rigid nextto-one-another, but precisely also in time as a moving sequentiality, whereby at least a mediating process can take place; even this is precisely in Aristotle thought not only as precondition of development as such, but has its ground in the fact that development is necessary at all. This other limiting factor then reaches even into the completely creative fertile character of the dynamei on of matter, in such a way that only a being-inpossibility and no achieved actuality is intended here; incompleteness, therefore, also precisely here, right into the entelechial forms bound to matter. From which it ought to be concluded: the developmental process is redemptive in such a way that it is healing; item, from a critical point of view, there would be no process at all if there were not also something, that should not be, or at least should not be as it is. And yet, with the big Despite here: precisely speculative materialism discovers in the dynamei on of matter and its certainly most danger-laden forwards-openness that true essential feature of matter, whose Logikon must be called finality. It is incomparably truer and more central than anything disturbing and deeper into everything antagonistic in and out of unsuccessfulness, which also belongs to openness in matter, though by no means in a mastering and agreed as such way. Dialectical materialism is a logical one per se, not only because it does not regard the world as alien to its ideas, let alone as too crude or too stupid to be recognised, to be conceptually depicted, but rather in that it emphasises its categories 3 ‘Such a task it was, will be to establish the human race’. This is a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem’, ‘such a task it was to establish the Roman race/people’.

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as forms of existence of the material of the world itself. This applies to self-developing categories of form, for instance the palm-like, fish-like, lion-like, master- and slave-like, the puzzle-like and so on. But even the more unintelligible transmission categories, which belong to the logical in the more usual sense, such as causality, finality, and substance, show the most objective logic within matter and its process; indeed, they prove it to be superior to the rampant randomness of the rigidifying, limiting, intersecting, and finally to the nihil in antagonism, in anti-purpose, anti-meaning. And all of these categories, the special form categories as the not only general, but also the connecting transmission categories are entelechies as a distinct form, developed in and from matter. The logical versus the recourse to what is alien, inimical to purpose therefore takes place in the nascent process of dialectical matter, above all teleologically, with the primacy of the causal, but with an immanent primacy of the teleological, that is driving tendency, entelechial latency. So, in the end, and consequently here: related tendency, entelechial latency do not, any more than the logical overall, allow the teleological in this logical aspect of the concept of matter to be defrauded. It is therefore no paradox that the objective-logical in matter appears dialectically graspable and finalising in its movements. Neither is it paradoxical that even dialectical and historical materialism allowed themselves to be convinced by idealism that matter has no truth in itself, and even used this Negativum of which they were convinced – against all arch-final theorypractice – as a special plus of their concept of matter. Marx’s approach of turning the Hegelian dialectic from its head onto its feet – feet that it can only have if something objectively logical is present in the modes of existence and forms of organisation of matter – would have been completely uninventive and precisely homeless if this were the case. As little as matter is dissolved energetically into matter and force, just as little does matter disappear when reason emerges from its idealist reserve and appears as what is leading and practicable in matter: that is, force and logic are attributes of matter. Historical-dialectical materialism thus acts as determined theoretically and practically by final determinations, by planned thinking towards the creation of a socialist society, with this goal in view, with this dominating purpose and sense of an already overdue socialist history, instead of a prehistory still undeveloped in way and goal. Here, thanks to the most external, completely unaided and unavoidable perspective of the What-for, an up to now still so spiritual sounding phrase such as the kingdom of freedom, with all the ‘at all’ of a future behind it, is even an entelechial force – not denying the origin of this category in absolutely eschatologically intended meaning creation in history and world. Increasingly amid all this the drive of the Where-from, the pull towards the Where-to emerges. If that is unusual from a mechanist point of view, so the course of dialectical movement only finally manages in any case in the process of the Where-to’s becoming through the What-for. As far as this For-sake-of-which, this finality is concerned, so since Hegel the ultimate concept of dialectics is the accomplishment and continu-

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ation of the purpose with which it is satisfied. Since Aristotle, who first used the term, entelechy means that which has the purpose within itself as one that can be realised. For Aristotle, it is that energy which, due to the determinations of purpose occurring within it, is called entelechy, always actively realising itself in matter and always forming itself further in the developmental history of the world. In Leibniz, entelechy is the striving of the monads to realise the completion contained within them as potential. Further: if Aristotle already called movement unfinished entelechy, thus when one sees matter not for instance as wax, but as itself the bearing womb of entelechial forms, ultimately the governing principle becomes: not only the movement of matter, but matter itself, as active dynamei on, is yet unfinished entelechy. And the content of final matterentelechy is always further a Logikon called the ideal of the good. Thus, while in the realm of the incomplete in which our life still takes place, there exist not so good paths, the ideal of the good end, although not available, stands by no means only so high that it abstracts itself with sudden distance; rather it proceeds itself in a highly entelechial way. Indispensable in two regions, the nearer of which is our own human history as a history that technologically reworks matter’s raw materials all around, and evidently holds our gait upright. What is crooked about this historical matter is equally something that allows its people to demand the straight and imperatively stand up to it, a being and pre-being that are themselves not at all illuminated yet still heliotropic; the Athenian that was factually conquered remained truer than the Peleponnesian War that wanted to destroy it. Precisely also the critic, not only the one mindful of right, can here, as Marx says in a letter to Ruge, ‘develop true reality out of the forms of existing actuality itself as its ought and its final purpose’. And further Marx to Ruge, always repeatable, capable of being retrieved again, and precisely concerning the anticipating fidelity to the goal in the dialectical matter of history: ‘It will become plain, that the world has long since possessed the dream of a thing of which it must only become conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will then become plain that it is not a question of drawing a sharp mental line between past and future, but to complete the thought of the past’. But how does the dream of a thing stand in the other, in the no way merely contrary but simply because of its magnitude so often disparate sphere of actually physical nature, which does not envelope us in nearness, but cosmically overwhelms us? Precisely cosmic nature, this immense arena that is still missing the play performed upon it, is full of unavoidable meanings of an indicative kind that are not only aesthetically perceptible in natural beauty, natural sublimity, but also seen from the perspective of the philosophy of nature the whole world is full of figures that point beyond themselves as real allegories, real symbols, with a significance that is only beginning to take shape. Accordingly, nature thus in no way speaks an ‘extinct speech’, as Schelling noted in his deeply significant but backwards looking remark, nature is no ‘age-old author’, and its figures, crystals are not philological hermeneutical problems made of being-ness, of a rigid past; on the contrary, a uto-

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pian outline is rather manifested here, the feature of a face with not only pink-fingered Eos in such undeniable natural emblems. As the real figures of a qualitatively utopian mathesis of such nature, indeed of nature-matter’s own incomplete entelechy, which has not only what is past as its likeness. One might say that an enormous expectation in an objectively real condition runs through the physical world, through all its experimental figures and experimental structures, testing for an outstanding example. This by no means romantically added expectation and above all the Ultimum of its contents is so far admittedly only thought mythologically, arch-fantastically as well, that is, in that most extreme horizon of finality that once made itself valid apocalyptically. The apocalypse however, even in its mythology, means according to the literal word of John not only destruction, above all not destruction as such, but revelation that so to say also in nature overturns that in which humanity does not exist, with the will to merge the cosmic into a new heaven and a new earth. Into a new heaven and new earth constructed to the dimensions of the son of man; not through the total disappearance of the cosmos into pure transcendence, but into the solely immanent that would then remain out of all the astral matter as a cosmos descended to the city of man, reduced to the place of man, a cosmos for us. Once all crazy fantasy is subtracted, once so to say set on its rational feet, in every apocalyptic book of reduction, of resurrection, in these wildest utopias of the highest good, a humane centring was always intended in the content of the world-become-true, expressly as unalienated becoming-for-itself that combines substance and subject with one another. In all that, the Ultimum should be thought as one in which the – until now – disparate Kosmikum of nature is mediated with the human. And the final problem in grasping it, that substance equally become subject, remains matter as incomplete entelechy in both sequences of the world: human history and that of cosmic nature. Therein a human kingdom of freedom already comes into contact with the kingdom of a face of the world actually turned towards homo absconditus; only in this final limit concept is materialism itself complete. Hope is not confidence, which precisely in the totality of teleology means: ens perfectissimum is in no way yet ens realissimum and is often its opposite; which, however, also means: the great workshop of human and world-matter is not yet closed. This shows the current world-fragment not only as an unfinished one, but also as one that, due to its actual demand for finis operis, the finality of the work, exists as incomplete. Here there is absolutely a transcending without transcendence, but indeed without transcendence, within process-matter, with sufficient invariance of direction, without simulation of something to be possessed above and beyond. Instead of transcendent finished-ness, the world itself, in its objective fantasy, harbors objective-real possibility, and in it an unthinkable capacity to be as utopia, an anti-nihil in the radical goal.

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Index Adorno, Gretel 26 Adorno, Theodor 4, 13, 26, 107, 119, 122–123, 128–129 Althusser, Louis 118 Aquinas, Thomas 52 Aristotle 7–8, 14–15, 51–52, 59–60, 65–67, 143–144, 163, 165 Avenarius, Richard 41 Averroes 6, 26, 52 Avicebron 26, 52 Avicenna 7, 46, 52 Bakunin, Mikhail 30 Ball, Hugo 20 Benjamin, Walter 5–6, 11, 98, 118–122, 154 Bennett, Jane 13–14, 131, 139–149, 140–141, 143–149, 154–155 Berkeley, Bishop 78–79 Bismarck, Otto von 38 Bloch, Karola 1, 21–22, 106, 112–113, 115 Bloch, Jan-Robert 108 Bloch von-Stritzky, Elsa 20 Bogdanov, Alexander 41–44, 134, 139 Böhme, Jakob 162 Boldyrev, Ivan 108, 110 Brecht, Bertolt 58n Bruno, Giordano 26, 52–53 Büchner, Georg 30n, 31 Büchner, Ludwig 31–32, 35–38, 42, 46n-47n, 48, 68, 79 Buhr, Manfred 1–4 Darwin, Charles 36, 38, 73 Deborin, Abram 43–45 Driesch, Hans 141–146 Du-Bois Reymond, Emil 37–38, 86, 91, 99 Dühring, Eugen 9 Anti-Dühring 39, 82 Dutschke, Rudi 25 Eckhart, Meister 52 Engels, Friedrich 7, 9, 14, 23, 29, 35–37, 39– 40, 42, 44–47, 45, 47, 57, 68–69, 73, 81–83, 86–87, 92, 99, 104, 111, 124, 128– 129, 149, 151, 156

Feuchtwanger, Lion 114 Feuerbach, Ludwig 10, 29, 30–31, 35, 37, 92, 100–104, 104, 118–121 Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy 36, 46 Theses on Feuerbach 10, 35, 92, 104 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 54, 56, 124 Foster, John Bellamy 14, 39–40, 83, 131, 149, 151–156, 155 Freud, Sigmund 19 Geoghegan, Vincent 4, 108, 111 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 5, 54 Gropp, Rugart Otto 127 Habermas, Jürgen 2–5, 7–9, 11, 13–17, 59–62, 70, 74–75, 79–80, 89, 99, 107, 128 Harich, Wolfgang 125–126 Harman, Graham 132, 134–138 Hartley, Dan 154 Haeckel, Ernst 38–40, 51, 141 Hegel, G.W.F. 4n, 5–10, 15–17, 20, 24, 28, 35, 40, 43, 44, 46, 62–66, 68, 70–72, 79– 89, 104–105, 116–117, 122–129, 145–146, 161–162, 164 Heidegger, Martin 12 Helmholtz, Hermann von 34, 40–41 Hitler, Adolf 6, 21, 106, 113 Hölderlin, Friedrich 97–98, 100 Holz, Hans Heinz 11, 14–17, 26–27, 58, 80 Horkheimer, Max 22, 26, 106–107 Hudson, Wayne 11, 98, 117 Hume, David 134–135 Husserl, Edmund 19 Jacobi, Friedrich 54 Jay, Martin 5, 18, 108 Jonas, Hans 8–9, 74–75 Kant, Immanuel 3, 9–11, 16, 22, 32–35, 40– 41, 46, 54–55, 78–80, 82–83, 87, 89–90, 94–96, 100–102, 105, 117n, 123–124, 130, 133, 161 neo-Kantianism 10, 13, 19, 32, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 79–80, 87, 89–91, 93, 96, 129 Khrushchev, Nikita 115

181

index Kolakowski, Leszek 5, 13, 45 Külpe, Oswald 19, 89

Roux, Wilhelm 141–142 Ruge, Arnold 165

Lafargue, Laura 36 Lafargue, Paul 36 Lange, Friedrich Albert 32, 34, 40, 79 Lask, Emil 91 Lassalle, Ferdinand 73, 111 Leibniz, G.W. 15, 165 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 2, 9, 17, 41–44, 79, 107–109, 111–113, 128–129, 134 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 54 Liebig, Justus 28, 31n, 149–150 Liebmann, Otto 32, 34 Lipps, Theodor 19 Lowe, Adolf 22, 26 Lowenthal, Leo 22 Lukács, Georg 19, 26, 43, 82–86, 89, 130 Luxemburg, Rosa 114

Scheler, Max 19 Schelling, F.W.J. 3–10, 15, 17, 19, 54–64, 66, 70–72, 86, 95–96, 159, 165 Schlegel, Friedrich 56, 97, 100 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob 28 Schmidt, Alfred 4, 8, 74–75 Schmidt, Burghardt 7, 24, 155 Schopenhauer, Arthur 78–79, 124 Schumacher, Joachim 12, 26, 86, 113–115 Schumacher, Sylvia 26, 86, 113 Schwann, Theodor 28 Scotus, Duns 52 Simmel, Georg 18–19 Socrates 6–7 Spemann, Hans 142 Spinoza, Baruch 53–55 Stalin, Josef 5, 23, 43, 45–46, 106–107, 112– 115, 124, 126 Stalinism 2, 12, 24, 44, 46–47, 112, 116, 128 Stumpf, Carl 96

Mach, Ernst 9, 41–42, 77–79, 134 Marcuse, Ludwig 1, 2, 115 Marx, Karl 3–5, 7–10, 14, 22, 28–29, 35–37, 40, 42, 44–45, 62, 68–69, 73, 75, 81–85, 92, 100, 104–105, 111, 116–119, 121, 124, 128–129, 149–151, 153–156, 159–162, 164– 165 Mehring, Franz 32 Meillassoux, Quentin 13, 132–139, 155 Moleschott, Jacob 30–32, 35, 37, 47n, 68, 79 Moore Jason W. 14, 131–132, 149, 152–156 Negt, Oskar 107–108, 111, 113, 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19, 102n, 162 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 97–98, 100 Plato 6–7, 46 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 30 Rickert, Heinrich 19, 89–94 Riedel, Manfred 19, 109–110, 113, 117

Thomasius, Christian 23 Trotsky, Leon 112, 114 Ulbricht, Walter 24, 44, 127 Verlet, Henri 36 Virchow, Rudolf 28 Vogt, Carl 28–30, 31, 35–37, 47n, 68, 79 Wagner, Rudolf 29–30, 37 Weber, Max 19–20 Weber, Marianne 19–20 Weyl, Hermann 78n Windelband, Wilhelm 50, 90–91 Žižek, Slavoj

13, 58n, 133