The Principle of Hope [1] 0262022508

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THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Thomas McCarthy, General Editor Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A TranscendentalPragmatic Perspective Richard J. Bernstein, editor, Habermas and Modernity Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory John Forester, editor, Critical Theory and Public Life Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science Jurgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles Jurgen Habermas, editor, Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age” Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics Helmut Peukert, Science, Action and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination

THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE Ernst Bloch

Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

Written in the USA 1938-1947 revised 1953 and 1959; first American edition published by The MIT Press, 1986 English translation © 1986 by Basil Blackwell, Ltd. Originally published as Das Prinzip Hoffnung, © 1959 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Federal Republic of Germany. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloch, Ernst, 1885-1977 The principle of hope. (Studies in contemporary German social thought) Translation of Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Includes index. 1. Hope. 2. Imagination. 3. Utopias. 4. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title. II. Series. B3209.B753P7513 1986 193 85-23081 ISBN 0-262-02250-8 0-262-02251-6 0-262-02252-4 0-262-02248-6

(volume 1) (volume 2) (volume 3) (3-volume set)

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

Translators’ Preface

xvii

Translators’ Introduction

xix

INTRODUCTION

3

PART ONE (Report)

LITTLE DAYDREAMS 1. WE START OUT EMPTY

21

2. MUCH TASTES OF MORE

21

3. DAILY INTO THE BLUE

21

4. HIDING-PLACE AND BEAUTIFUL FOREIGN LANDS

22

By ourselves 22

At home already on our way 23

5. ESCAPE AND THE RETURN OF THE VICTOR Putting to sea 24 The glittering bowl 26

24

6. MORE MATURE WISHES AND THEIR IMAGES The lame nags 29 Night of the Long Knives 30 Shortly before the closing of the gate 31 Invention of a new pleasure 33 Opportunity to be friendly 35

29

7. WHAT IS LEFT TO WISH FOR IN OLD AGE Wine and purse 36 Evocations of youth; counter-wish: harvest 36 Evening and house 39

35

8. THE SIGN THAT CHANGES

41

CONTENTS

VI

PART TWO (Foundation)

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS 9. WHAT GOES AHEAD AS URGING

45

10. NAKED STRIVING AND WISHING, UNSATISFIED

*

11. MAN AS A QUITE EXTENSIVE COMPLEX OF DRIVES The individual body 47

45 47

No drive without body behind it 48

The changing passion 49 12. VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE The sexual drive 51

51 Ego-drive and repression 52

complex, unconscious material and sublimation 54 frenzy-drive, collective unconscious 57

Repression, Power-drive,

‘Eros’ and the

archetypes 61

13. THE HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES; VARIOUS LOCATIONS OF SELF-INTEREST; FILLED AND EXPECTANT EMOTIONS The urgent need 65

65

Most reliable basic drive: self-preservation 65

Historical change of the drives, even of the self-preservation drive 67 Mental feelings and state of self, appetite of the expectant emotions, especially of hope 70

Self-extension drive

forwards, active expectation 75

14. FUNDAMENTAL DISTINCTION OF DAYDREAMS FROM NIGHT-DREAMS. CONCEALED AND OLD WISH-FULFILMENT IN NIGHT-DREAMS, FABULOUSLY INVENTIVE AND ANTICIPATORY WISH-FULFILMENT IN DAYLIGHT FANTASIES Inclination to dream 77

Dreams as wish-fulfilment 78

dreams and wish-fulfilment 82

Anxiety

A crucial point: the daydream is

not a stepping-stone to the nocturnal dream 86 First and second characteristics of the daydream: clear road, preserved ego 88 Third characteristic of the daydream: world-improving 91

Fourth

characteristic of the daydream: journey to the end 95 nocturnal and daytime dream-games, its dissolution 99

Merging of More on

inclination to dream: the ‘mood’ as medium of daydreams 103 More on the expectant emotions (anxiety, fear, terror, despair, hope, confidence) and the waking dream 108

77

CONTENTS

15. DISCOVERY OF THE NOT-YET-CONSCIOUS OR OF FORWARD DAWNING. NOT-YET-CONSCIOUS AS A NEW CLASS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND AS THE CLASS OF CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE NEW: YOUTH, TIME OF CHANGE, PRODUCTIVITY. CONCEPT OF THE UTOPIAN FUNCTION, ITS ENCOUNTER WITH INTEREST, IDEOLOGY, ARCHETYPES, IDEALS, ALLEGORY-SYMBOLS The two edges 114

Double meaning of the preconscious 115

Yet-Conscious in youth, time of change, productivity 117 thoughts on productivity: its three stages 122

Not-

Further

Different kinds of

resistance which the forgotten and the Not-Yet-Conscious offer to illumination 128 Epilogue on the block which has prevented the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious for so long 132

Conscious and

known activity in the Not-Yet-Conscious, utopian function 142 More on the utopian function: the subject in it and the counter¬ move to the badly existing 147 with interest 150 ogy 153

Contact of the utopian function

Encounter of the utopian function with ideol-

Encounter of the utopian function with archetypes 158

Encounter of the utopian function with ideals 165

Encounter of

the utopian function with allegory-symbols 174 16. UTOPIAN IMAGE-TRACE IN REALIZATION; EGYPTIAN AND TROJAN HELEN Dreams want to drift 178 within it 179

Non-satisfaction and what can lie

First reason for disappointment: happiness is there

where you are not; second reason: dream rendered independent and the legend of the double Helen 180

Objection to the first and

second reason: odyssey of aquiescence 186

Third reason for utopian

trace-images: the aporias of realization 189 17. THE WORLD IN WHICH UTOPIAN IMAGINATION HAS A CORRELATE; REAL POSSIBILITY, THE CATEGORIES FRONT, NOVUM, ULTIMUM AND THE HORIZON Man is not solid 195 unclosed 196 Ultimum 198

Much in the world is still

Militant optimism, the categories Front, Novum, ‘What-Is according to possibility’ and ‘What-Is in

possibility’, cold and warm stream in Marxism 205 appearance as visible pre-appearance 210 appearance as real fragment 217

Artistic

False autarky; pre¬

It is a question of realism,

everything real has a horizon 222 18. THE LAYERS OF THE CATEGORY POSSIBILITY The formally Possible 224

The factually-objectively Possible 225

CONTENTS

Vlll

The fact-based object-suited Possible 229

The objectively-real

Possible 235

Memory: logical-static struggle against the

Possible 241

Realizing possibility 246

19. CHANGING THE WORLD OR MARX’S ELEVEN THESES ON FEUERBACH

249

Time of drafting 250

Question of grouping 254

group: perception and activity (Theses 5, 1, 3) 255

Epistemological Anthropo¬

logical-historical group: self-alienation and true materialism (Theses 4, 6, 7, 9, 10) 262 (Theses 2, 8) 267

Theory-practice-group: proof and probation The password and its meaning (Thesis n) 274

The Archimedean point; knowledge related not only to what is past, but essentially to what is coming up 282 20. SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION AND ITS POLES: DARK MOMENT - OPEN ADEQUACY Pulse and lived darkness 287

287

Room for possible advance 287

Source and outflow: astonishment as absolute question 288 more: darkness of the lived moment; Carpe diem 290

Once

Darkness of

the lived moment, continuation: foreground, dead space, melancholy of fulfilment, self-mediation 295

More on

astonishment as absolute question, in the shape of anxiety and of happiness; the directly utopian archetype: highest good 300

The

Not in origin, the Not-Yet in history, the Nothing or conversely the All at the end 306

Utopia no lasting state; therefore after ail:

Carpe diem, but a genuine one in genuine present 313 21. DAYDREAM IN DELIGHTFUL FORM: P AMIN A OR THE PICTURE AS EROTIC PROMISE The tender morning 316

316

Effect through the portrait 317

around encounter, betrothal 320 nimbus around marriage 323

Nimbus

Too much image, rescue from it,

High Pair, Corpus Christi or previous

cosmic and Christ-like utopia of marriage 327

After-image of love 331

22. DAYDREAM IN SYMBOLIC FORM: PANDORA’S BOX; THE GOOD THING THAT REMAINS

333

PART THREE

(Transition)

WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR (DISPLAY, FAIRYTALE, TRAVEL, FILM, THEATRE) 23. MAKING OURSELVES MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN WE ARE

339

CONTENTS

IX

24. WHAT THE MIRROR TELLS US TODAY Being slim 340

340

Good at cringing 340

25. NEW CLOTHES, THE ILLUMINATED DISPLAY Well laid out 342

341

Light of advertising 343

26. BEAUTIFUL MASK, KU KLUX KLAN, THE GLOSSY MAGAZINES The crooked paths 345

Success through terror 347

345

Bestsellers,

syrupy stories 349

27. BETTER CASTLES IN THE AIR IN FAIR AND CIRCUS, IN FAIRYTALE AND COLPORTAGE

352

Courage of the clever 354 Magic Table, Genie of the Lamp 355 ‘On wings of song, my darling, I will carry you away’ 357

‘Let us go to the meadows of the Ganges, there I

know the loveliest place’ 360 circus 363

South Seas in fair and

The wild fairytale: as colportage 367

28. LURE OF TRAVEL, ANTIQUITY, HAPPINESS OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL Beautiful foreign lands 370

in the nineteenth century 375 ruins, museum 381 Arcadia 387

369

Distance-wish and historicizing room Aura of antique furniture, magic of

Castle garden and the buildings of

Wild weather, Apollo by night 391

29. WISHFUL IMAGE IN THE DANCE; PANTOMIME AND FILMLAND New dance and old 394 dance, exoticism 397

393

New dance as formerly Expressionist

Ritual dance, dervishes, blessed

circles 399 The deaf and dumb and the significant pantomime 402 New mime through the camera 406

Dream-

factory in the rotten and in the transparent sense 409

30. THE THEATRE, REGARDED AS PARADIGMATIC INSTITUTION, AND THE DECISION IN IT

412

The curtain rises 412 Rehearsal on the model 413 More on the rehearsal on the model to be sought 416 Reading, spoken mime and scene 418 institution 422

Illusion, sincere appearance, moral False and genuine topicalization 426

Further

genuine topicalization: not fear and pity, but defiance and hope 429

31. MOCKED AND HATED WISHFUL IMAGES, VOLUNTARILY HUMOROUS ONES The little word if 431

‘None of these new-fangled things are any

431

CONTENTS

X

good’ 432

Le Neant; Another World 433

Aristophanes and cloud-cuckoo-land 435 ‘Vera historia’ 436

The ‘Birds’ of

Merry outdoing: Lucian’s

Voluntary-humorous wishful images 438

32. HAPPY END, SEEN THROUGH AND YET STILL DEFENDED

441

PART FOUR (Construction)

OUTLINES OF A BETTER WORLD (MEDICINE, SOCIAL SYSTEMS, TECHNOLOGY, ARCHITECTURE, GEOGRAPHY, PERSPECTIVE IN ART AND WISDOM) 33. A DREAMER ALWAYS WANTS EVEN MORE

451

34. PHYSICAL EXERCISE, TOUT VA BIEN

451

35. STRUGGLE FOR HEALTH, MEDICAL UTOPIAS

454

A warm bed 454 ning 456

Lunatics and fairytales 455

Medicines and plan¬

Hesitation and goal in actual bodily rebuilding 462

Malthus, birth-rate, nourishment 467

The doctor’s care 469

36. FREEDOM AND ORDER, SURVEY OF SOCIAL UTOPIAS I. Introduction/A frugal meal 472 and colportage even here 473 horizon 475

The roast pigeons 472

471

Lunacy

New Moral Worlds on the

Utopias have their timetable 479

II. Social Wishful Images of the Past/Solon and the contented medium 481

Diogenes and the exemplary beggars 482

and the exemplary scroungers 483 state 484

Aristippus

Plato’s dream of the Doric

Hellenistic fairytales of an ideal state, Iamboulos’ island of

the sun 488

The Stoics and the international world-state 491

Bible and the kingdom of neighbourly love 496 God from rebirth 502 kingdom 509

The

Augustine’s City of

Joachim of Fiore, the third gospel and its

Thomas More or the utopia of social freedom 515

Counterpart to More: Campanella’s City of the Sun or the utopia of social order 523

Socratic inquiry into freedom and order, with regard

to ‘Utopia’ and ‘Civitas solis’ 528 classic Natural Right 534 social utopias 541

Continuation: social utopias and

Enlightened Natural Right in place of

Fichte’s closed commercial state or production and

exchange in accordance with rational law 548 the nineteenth century: Owen, Fourier 555

Federative utopias in Centralist utopias in the

nineteenth century: Cabet, Saint-Simon 561 Individual Utopians and anarchy, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin 568 Proletarian castle in the

CONTENTS

XI

the air from the Vormarz: Weitling 575 status of the rational utopias 578

A conclusion: weakness and

III. Projects and Progress Towards Science/Topical remnants: bourgeois group utopias 583 movement 585

Beginning, programme of the youth

Struggle for the new woman, programme of the

women’s movement 589

Old New Land, programme of

Zionism 598 Novels set in the future and full-scale utopias after Marx: Bellamy, William Morris, Carlyle, Henry George 611 Marxism and concrete anticipation 619 37. WILL AND NATURE, THE TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIAS I. Magic Past/Plunged into misery 626

625

Fire and new

armament 626 Lunacy and Aladdin’s fairytale 627 ‘Professor Mystos’ and invention 629 Andreae’s ‘Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz anno 1459’ 634

Alchemy again: mutatio

specierum (transmutation of inorganic species) and its incubator 639 Unregulated inventions and ‘Propositiones’ in the Baroque period 646 Bacon’s Ars inveniendi; survival of the Lullian art 649 Atlantis, the utopian laboratory 654

New

II. Non-Euclidean Present and Future, the Problem of Technological Contact/Plans must also be spurred on 658

Late bourgeois curbing

of technology, apart from the military kind 658

De-organization

of the machine; atomic energy, non-Euclidean technology 661 Subject, raw materials, laws and contact in de-organization 666 Electron of the human subject, of technology of the will 674 Co-productivity of a possible natural subject or concrete technology of alliance 686

Technology without violation; economic crisis and

technological accident 691

Chained giant, veiled sphinx,

technological freedom 696 38. BUILDINGS WHICH DEPICT A BETTER WORLD, ARCHITECTURAL UTOPIAS

699

I. Figures of Ancient Architecture/Glance through the window 699 Dreams on the Pompeian wall 700 Festive decorations and Baroque stage sets 701 Wishful architecture in the fairytale 706 Wishful architecture in painting 709

The church masons’ guilds

or architectural utopia in actual construction 714

Egypt or the

crystal of death utopia, Gothic or the tree of life utopia 721

Further

and individual examples of guiding space in ancient architecture 726 II. Building on Hollow Space/New houses and real clarity 733

Town

plans, ideal towns and real clarity again: permeation of crystal with profusion 738

CONTENTS

Xll

39. ELDORADO AND EDEN, THE GEOGRAPHICAL UTOPIAS The first lights 746

746

Inventing and discovering; characteristic of

geographical hope 747 Fairytales again, the Golden Fleece and the Grail 752 Island of the Phaeacians, the bad Atlantic, location of the earthly paradise 756

Voyage of St Brendan, the kingdom of Prester

John; American, Asiatic paradise 762 delta; dome of the earth 772

Columbus at the Orinoco

South land and the utopia of Thule 777

Better abodes on other stars; hie Rhodus 782 connection, Baader’s ‘central earth’ 785

The Copernican

Geographical line of

extension in sobriety; the fund of the earth, mediated with work 790 40. WISHFUL LANDSCAPE PORTRAYED IN PAINTING, OPERA, LITERATURE The moved hand 794 of human beings 796

794 Flower and carpet 795 Still life composed Embarkation for Cythera 797 Perspective

and large horizon in van Eyck, Leonardo, Rembrandt 799

Still

life, Cythera and broad perspective in literature: Heinse, Roman de la Rose, Jean Paul 802

The wishful landscape of perspective in

aesthetics; status of the matter of art according to its dimension of depth and hope 807 Painters of the residual Sunday, Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin; Giotto’s land of legend 813

Land of legend in

literature: as celestial rose in Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, as transcendental high mountains in the Faustian heaven 820

Splendour, Elysium in

opera and oratorio 827 Contact of the interior and the boundless in the spirit of music: Kleist’s ideal landscape; Sistine Madonna 834 41. WISHFUL LANDSCAPE AND WISDOM SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS AND OF PROCESS The search for proportion 838 and law 840

838

The ‘authentic’ in primary matter

Kant and the intelligible kingdom; Plato, Eros and

the pyramid of value 842

Bruno and the infinite work of art;

Spinoza and the world as crystal 847

Augustine and goal-history;

Leibniz and the world as process of illumination 853 concept or the ‘authentic’ as a task 862

The watchful

Two wishful proposi¬

tions: teachable virtue, the categorical imperative 866

The

proposition of Anaximander or world which turns into likeness 874 Lightness in the depths, joyfulness of the phenomenon of light 879 42. EIGHT-HOUR DAY, WORLD IN PEACE, FREE TIME AND LEISURE The whip of hunger 886 From the casemates of the bourgeoisie 886 All kinds of alleviation through benefaction 890 Bourgeois

885

CONTENTS

pacifism and peace 893

xiii

Technological maturity, state capitalism

and state socialism; October Revolution 897

Delusions of free

time: toughening up for business 904 Residual older forms of free time, spoiled, but not hopeless: hobby, public festival, amphi¬ theatre 907

The surroundings of free time: utopian Buen

Retiro and pastoral 914 goal 920

Leisure as imperative, only half explored

PART FIVE

(Identity)

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT (MORALITY, MUSIC, IMAGES OF DEATH, RELIGION, MORNING-LAND OF NATURE, HIGHEST GOOD)

43. NOT STRAIGHT WITH ONESELF

927

44. HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY

928

45. GUIDING IMAGES THEMSELVES, TO BECOME LIKE PROPER HUMAN BEINGS

930

46. GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE

934

Much still open 934 hunt 935

Too warmly dressed 934

French happiness and joy 937

Wild, bold

Adventures of

happiness 938 47. GUIDING PANELS OF WILL TEMPI AND OF CONTEMPLATION, OF SOLITUDE AND FRIENDSHIP, OF INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY A decent person 939

939

Fabius or the hesitant man of action 940

Sorel, Machiavelli or energy and the wheel of fortune 942 Problem of breaking, Hercules at the crossroads, DionysusApollo 948 Vita activa, vita contemplativa or the world of the chosen good part 953 friendship 958

Double light of solitude and

Double light of individual and collective 965

Salvation of the individual through community 969 48. YOUNG GOETHE, NON-RENUNCIATION, ARIEL The wish to smash things 973 suffering 974

Wertherian happiness and

The demand, Prometheus, Ur-Tasso 975

of sublimity, Faust Gothic and metamorphosis 980 poetic imagination 985

973 Intention

Ariel and

The demonic, and the allegorical-symbolic

CONTENTS

XIV

sealedness which expresses itself 989 longing: Mignon 993

Just those who know such

Wishes as presentiments of our

capacities 997 49. GUIDING FIGURES OF VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS; FAUST AND THE WAGER OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT No wet straw 1000

Play the lute and drain the glasses 1001

Giovanni, all women and the wedding 1004 Stay awhile you are so fair ion and the event 1016

IOOO Don

Faust, macrocosm,

Faust, Hegel’s Phenomenology

Odysseus did not die in Ithaca, he journeyed

to the unpeopled world 1023

Hamlet, sealed will; Prospero,

groundless joy 1027 50. GUIDING PANELS OF ABSTRACT AND MEDIATED VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS, ILLUSTRATED BY THE CASES OF DON QUIXOTE AND FAUST The fermenting will 1034 golden illusion 1035

1034

Don Quixote’s Rueful Countenance and

A related question: the wrongs and rights of

Tasso versus Antonio 1051

The Luciferian-Promethean and the

layer of sound 1053 51. VENTURING BEYOND AND MOST INTENSE WORLD OF MAN IN MUSIC

1057

Happiness of the blind 1058

The nymph Syrinx 1058

and nymph: Symphonie fantastique 1060 inseparable from music 1062

Bizarre hero

Human expression as

Music as canon and world of laws;

harmony of the spheres, more humane lode-stars 1070

Tone¬

painting, work of nature once again, the intensity and morality of music 1081

The hollow space; subject of the sonata and fugue 1089

Funeral march, requiem, cortege behind death 1097

Marseillaise

and the moment in Fidelio 1101 52. SELF AND GRAVE-LAMP OR IMAGES OF HOPE AGAINST THE POWER OF THE STRONGEST NON-UTOPIA: DEATH I. Introduction/No talk of dying 1104

1103

Utopias of the night with

no morning any more in this world 1105 II. Religious Counterpoints from Death and Victory!Only good of the dead 1109

Shades and Greek twilight nil

recurrence; Orphic wheel 1112 journey to heaven 1116

Affirmation of

Elixirs of the soul and the gnostic

Egyptian heaven in the tomb 1121

resurrection and apocalypse 1125 the flesh, magic garden 1133

Biblical

Mohammedan heaven, strength of

Sheer repose seeks deliverance even

from heaven, the wishful image of nirvana 1136

CONTENTS

XV

III. Enlightened and Romantic Euthanasias/The freethinker as strong thinker 1142

Youth with the reversed torch and with the newly

lighted torch 1143 nature 1148

Dissolution in the universe, lethal return to

Glacier, earth-mother and world-spirit 1152

IV. Further Secularized Counter-moves, Nihilism, House of Humanity/ Still the dyeing of nothingness 1156 faith 1157

Four signs of a borrowed

Metaphorical immortality: in the work 1161

the chisel in tragedy 1167

Death as

Disappearance of lethal nothingness in

socialist consciousness 1172 V. Joy of Life and Fragment in All Things/Journey of discovery into death 1176 death 1178

The moment as not-being-here; extra-territoriality to

53. GROWING HUMAN COMMITMENT TO RELIGIOUS MYSTERY, TO ASTRAL MYTH, EXODUS, KINGDOM; ATHEISM AND THE UTOPIA OF THE KINGDOM I. Introduction/In good hands 1183 path 1184

Lunatics again, occult

Chiefs and magicians; every religion has

founders 1189

A numinous element, even in the religious

Humanum 1193 II. Founders, Glad Tidings and Cur Deus Homo/The stranger as teacher: Cadmus 1203 Orpheus 1204

Singer of ecstatic salvation:

Poets of Apollonian gods and their attendance:

Homer and Hesiod; Roman state gods 1205

The unblossomed

belief in Prometheus and the tragic liturgy: Aeschylus 1212 Fish-man and moon-scribe of astral myth: Oannes, Hermes Trismegistus-Thoth 1216

Glad tidings of earthly-heavenly balance

and of the inconspicuous world-rhythm (Tao): Confucius, Lao Tzu 1220

A founder who is himself part of the glad tidings:

Moses, his god of exodus 1230

Moses or consciousness of utopia

in religion, of religion in utopia 1235

Warlike self-commitment,

mingled with astral light: Zoroaster, Mani 1241

Redemptive self¬

commitment, limited to acosmos, related to nirvana: Buddha 1249 Founder from the spirit of Moses and the exodus, completely identical with his glad tidings: Jesus, apocalypse, kingdom 1256

Jesus and the father; the serpent of paradise as

saviour; the three wishful mysteries: resurrection, ascension, return 1265

Fanaticism and submission to Allah’s will:

Mohammed 1274 III. The Core of the Earth as Real Extra-territoriality/The road of the non-existent What For 1278 Cassandra and Isaiah 1280

Inavertible and avertible fate, or

God as utopian hypostatized ideal of

1183

CONTENTS

XVI

the unknown man; Feuerbach, Cur Deus homo again 1283

Recourse to atheism; problem of the space into which

God was imagined and utopianized 1290

Stay awhile in the

religious layer: the unity of the instant in mysticism 1298

Miracles

and the miraculous; moment as the foot of Nike 1303 54. THE LAST WISHFUL CONTENT AND THE HIGHEST GOOD Drive and food 1312

Three wishes and the best 1313

1312

Value-images

as variations of the highest good; Cicero and the philosophers 1315 Stay awhile and highest good; problem of a guiding image in the world process 1321

Drive and food once again or subjectivity,

objectivity of goods, of values and of the highest good 1325 Hovering and severity with reference to the highest good (evening wind, statue of Buddha, figure of the kingdom) 1334 Number and cipher of qualities; meaning of the highest good in nature 1347 55. KARL MARX AND HUMANITY; STUFF OF HOPE The true architect 1354

1354

‘To overturn all circumstances in which

man is a degraded, a subjugated, a forsaken, a contemptible being’ 1355 Secularization and the power of setting things on their feet 1359 Forward dream, sobriety, enthusiasm and their unity 1365

Certainty, unfinished world, homeland. 1370

Glossary of Foreign Terms

1377

Name and Title Index

1390

TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE The English text of the Principle of Hope is based on Bloch’s revised version of the work, first published by Suhrkamp in 1959. As far as possible the format of this edition conforms to the German text which Bloch himself authorized. There are no footnotes in the original German but we have included explanations and references where we felt these would be helpful or especially interesting for the English reader. Wherever possible, we have also annotated the numerous implicit and explicit allusions to the Bible and to Goethe’s Faust, the central spiritual and poetic legacies inherited by The Principle of Hope. All translations are our own, with the exception of biblical quotations for which we have used the Authorized Version. Bloch’s own references are included in the body of the text. Where a specific page reference is given to a German work, we have left the original title and supplied a translation in the bilingual index. Otherwise book titles have been translated in the text and retained in the bilingual index, with the exception of Latin titles, which have been left in the original throughout. To preserve the structure and fabric of Bloch’s text, it has been necessary to override certain English publishing conventions. Except for epigraphs, quoted extracts have not been displayed, but are run on in text within quotation marks. To avoid confusion with Bloch’s own emphatic italics, classical and foreign expressions have not been italicized. These expressions have been left in the original, as they are also very much a feature of Bloch’s style. We have included a glossary of foreign terms not directly explained in the text. It precedes the index at the end of the third volume. The project of translating The Principle of Hope was first suggested to Paul Knight by Basil Blackwell Ltd to whom the book had been recommended by Bryan Magee. The translators would like to thank the following people for their assistance and encouragement. At Basil Blackwell: Rene Olivieri, Ray Addicott, Julia Mosse and Sue Banfield, all of whom demonstrated the principle of hope in setting up and realizing this project. Our thanks to George Steiner for his advice at important stages of its development. Margot Levy undertook the task of copy-editing the work. She also supplied us with some valuable references. Isabel Raphael interpreted Bloch’s Latin devices

XV111

TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE

and allusions cum ira et studio, and likewise helped us to reference them. Our special thanks to them both. Thanks also to Kevin Mulligan and to Martin Shovel. The translators would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of Inter Nationes and of South East Arts.

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Bloch’s early life Ernst Bloch was bom in Ludwigshafen on 8th July 1885, the son of a Jewish railway official. A stark contrast was presented to him as a child between the new industrial, proletarian city where he grew up and the fading nineteenth-century opulence of Mannheim, the other city just across the Rhine, with its Grunderzeit architecture and its old Residenz, one of the most elaborate palaces in Germany. Though Bloch by no means dismisses the achievements of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and describes them with a certain affection, this early landscape of class contradiction must have been decisive in his formation as a socialist. The local aniline and soda factory, Bloch points out in his early impressionistic and autobiographical work ‘Spuren’ (Traces), was moved to Ludwigshafen ‘so that the smoke and proletariat did not drift over Mannheim’. But though he lived on the wrong side of the bridge, his childhood was an imaginative and rewarding one which he looked back on fondly in his later books. The visions and longings of the child are for Bloch the emotional inklings of the spirit of ‘venturing beyond’ which he esteemed so highly in thinkers and innovators, and without which the New is inconceivable. The games he played with his childhood friends transformed the dismal, flat industrial hinterland of Ludwigshafen into an almost numinous, hallucinatory land¬ scape, populated with characters out of the adventure stories of Karl May. As a boy Bloch immersed himself in these stories, a love of which he retained for the whole of his life. Even in the core work of his mature system ‘The Principle of Hope’, a section is devoted to fairytale and to colportage, the term he employed to describe the genre of the adventure story. ‘There is only Karl May and Hegel’, he once said, ‘everything in between is an impure mixture’. Bloch was an indifferent pupil, but a precocious intellect. As a schoolboy he was composing speculative tracts with ambitious titles like ‘The Universe in the Light of Atheism’, ‘Renaissance of Sensuality’. By the age of seven¬ teen he was already corresponding with prominent German philosophers

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of the day. Even as an old man he was to reach back into these early writings for a motto to suit a volume of his complete works: ‘.. .but the essence of the world is cheerful spirit and the urge to creative shaping; the Thing In Itself is objective imagination’. This pre-appearance and its re-appearance across seven decades demonstrates the homogeneous development of Bloch’s work and thought. It is also entirely consistent with his idea that only at the end of a process does its beginning reveal itself and finally begin. Yet his school report for 1904/5, two years after the above was written, informs us that ‘his achievements are so minimal that, considering the profound gaps in his knowledge, he will only be able to pass his final exams by the most strenuous application’. After studying philosophy in Munich and in Wurzburg, in both cases pursuing the idea of bohemia and a particular girl-student rather than seeking out a particular professor, Bloch moved to Berlin, where he was befriended and encouraged by Georg Simmel, a fashionable professor whose interests ranged, as Bloch’s were later to do, over the whole spectrum of philosophy, sociology and metaphysics. Simmel was also one of the ‘Georgekreis’, the intimate circle around the lyric poet Stefan George. But Bloch was dismissive of the aesthetic posturing of the ‘Georgekreis’ and soon disillusioned by Simmel’s inability to commit himself to any of the positions he was so adept at expounding. During these years in Berlin Bloch also forged an important friendship with the philosopher and critic Georg Lukacs. Bloch travelled widely at this time, both with Lukacs and with Simmel, particularly in Italy. His work reflects an interest not only in travel and travellers, but in the psychological attraction of distance and foreignness in the daydreams and wishful images of the little man confined to the everyday. It is with these dreams that ‘The Principle of Hope’ opens. In 1911 Bloch went to Garmisch and began work on his own philosophy in earnest, developing the key-concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious which he had formulated as early as 1907. For the next few years, Bloch moved between Garmisch and Heidelberg where Lukacs was living. Later he wrote of this time and of his friendship with Lukacs: ‘We had become so close that we functioned like speaking-tubes. I was always away from Heidelberg, actually had my writing-desk in Garmisch, I alternated between Garmisch and Heidelberg; the beginnings of my philosophy were written in Garmisch - a Bavarian birth then, with the will to be worthy of the Alps which I had outside my window. If we were separated, I in Garmisch and Lukacs in Heidelberg or somewhere else, and then we saw each other again after a month or two - then it might happen that I or he began to speak

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XXI

or to think where the other had just left off.’ In Heidelberg Bloch became part of the circle around the sociologist Max Weber. Marianne Weber gives us a picture of him at that time: ‘A new Jewish philosopher has recently arrived - a boy with an enormous quiff and just as enormous self-importance, he obviously regards himself as the forerunner of a new Messiah and wants people to regard him as such.’ Weber shared his wife’s opinion and distanced himself from Bloch, suspicious of his mystical ideas. In 1913 Bloch married Elsa von Stritzky, a sculptress from Riga. Unfit for military service, he lived in Griinewald in the Isar valley for most of the First World War before moving to Berne in 1917. He was emphatic in his opposition to the war, which he saw as a fundamentally imperialist conflict. When Simmel lent his support to the wave of patriotism sweeping Germany, Bloch finally severed their friendship. In Zurich Bloch became acquainted with Walter Benjamin, seven years his junior, the essayist and critic. Benjamin described him in a letter as ‘the only person of significance I have met in Switzerland so far’, and later as the writer who alongside Kafka and Brecht had perfected the German essay, a compliment he might justifiably have paid himself.

The Spirit of Utopia During this central decade of Expressionism, Bloch continued to develop the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious, and in 1918 published ‘Geist der Utopie’ (The Spirit of Utopia), a mystical and prophetic work written in a highly Expressionist style. The book, his first major work, is dedicated to his wife. Bloch’s interest in religion which first becomes manifest in ‘The Spirit of Utopia’, unusual in a Marxist, may to some extent be attributed to the influence of Elsa’s almost gnostic Christian mysticism. This essayistic work is a blend of messianism, socialism and ideas of unrevealed spiritual truth, but the book also reflects Bloch’s early interest in what was to become the principal field of his future study - utopia. Bloch’s great friend Margarete Susman seems to have anticipated the importance of the ideas contained in the book, seeing in it elements of a new German metaphysics. Bloch’s first wife, to whom he was devoted, died in 1921 after several years of illness. Her death had a devastating effect on him, and continued to affect him throughout his life, as we may see from the end of the very moving section on marriage in ‘The Principle of Hope’, begun almost twenty years later: ‘Just as the pain of love is a thousand times better than

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unhappy marriage, in which there only remains pain, fruitless pain, so too the landlocked adventures of love are diffuse compared with the great sea voyage which marriage can be, which does not end with old age, not even with the death of one partner.’ Here still, as elsewhere in the section, there is a sense of his relationship with Elsa, and perhaps too of his second abortive marriage to a painter from Frankfurt which lasted less than a year, an attempt perhaps to replace the intimacy of the first. In 1928 a former girlfriend of Bloch’s from the days when he was living in Positano gave birth to a daughter, Mirjam, after their relationship had ended. Frida Abeles did not inform Bloch of the pregnancy or of the birth; the news reached him through the poet Else Lasker-Schuler. The relationship was obviously an embarrassment to Bloch who was by this time involved with Karola Piotrkowska, a young student of architecture from Lodz in Poland whom he subsequently married in 1934. A portrait of their felicitous life together may be read in Frau Karola Bloch’s book ‘Aus meinem Leben’ (From My Life). Bloch continued to travel throughout the twenties after the death of his first wife. His visit to Tunisia in 1926 brought him into contact with the world of Islam for the first time, a religion which significantly contributes to the ‘wishful images of the fulfilled moment’ in volume three of ‘The Principle of Hope’ alongside the Christian and Jewish traditions. When in Germany, he was mainly based in Berlin. Another major friend¬ ship began here in the twenties, with one of the philosophers who was later to be a major figure in the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno. Adorno later speaks of ‘the great Blochian music’, and retained a great admiration for Bloch, but as with Lukacs, the friendship was strained by the alleged unorthodoxy of Bloch’s subjectivist approach to socialism, even though by the twenties Bloch was politically a hard-line communist. There seems to be some evidence that he attempted to align himself in a more orthodox way with the mainstream of Marxist thinking. In 1923 he issued a second re-written edition of ‘The Spirit of Utopia’ giving a more systematic introduction to his utopian philosophy and attempting to fuse it with Marxism. Bloch seems to have had a closer affinity with Walter Benjamin, with whom he was in close contact in Berlin. Benjamin shared Bloch’s interest in mystical traditions, particularly the Cabbala, and they experimented with hashish together, another productive source of the creative day¬ dream for Bloch, as ‘The Principle of Hope’ elaborates. Elements of Benjamin’s theory of tragedy may be detected in Bloch’s analysis of the

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social function of theatre at the end of the first volume of this work. By this time Bloch’s literary reputation was established and he was writing regularly for the major newspapers in Berlin. He had met Bertolt Brecht as early as 1921 and their friendship endured until the latter’s death. He was drawn to Brecht by his undogmatic approach to Marxism, and Brecht’s work forms the backbone of Bloch’s view of the theatre as a socially instructive ‘paradigmatic institution’. Towards the end of the decade there were also friendships with Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Otto Klemperer. In 1930 Bloch’s major literary work was published, ‘Spuren’ (Traces), a collection of prose pieces which set the tone for the cryptic passages that introduce each section of ‘The Principle of Hope’. During these Berlin years Bloch began work on ‘Erbschaft dieser Zeit’ (Legacy of this Time), a critical analysis of the twenties and the rise of fascism, but this work was inter¬ rupted by Hitler’s accession to power. Bloch emigrated to Zurich at the beginning of March 1933. During this period his friendship with Lukacs gradually developed into public disagreement. This culminated in the notorious debate concerning Expressionism which by 1935 Lukacs, now a leading communist critic, saw as a direct cultural antecedent of National Socialist ideology. Bloch published his first reply in an essay written as a result of the Nazis’ exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in which many Expres¬ sionist works were included. But as ‘The Principle of Hope’ illustrates at several points, Bloch remained loyal throughout his life to his concept of Expressionism as a progressive artistic movement. Lukacs distanced himself more and more from Bloch’s mystical approach to the revelation of socialism. Lukacs pointed to the decisive difference in position between his own ‘Geschichte und Klassenbewufitsein’ (History and Class Consciousness) and the utopian philosophy of ‘The Spirit of Utopia’ or Bloch’s book on the millenarian Christian Thomas Miinzer, ‘Thomas Miinzer als Theologe der Revolution’ (Thomas Miinzer as Theologian of the Revolution). Even though as young men they had both developed a socialist perspective, Lukacs did not consider Bloch to be a ‘genuine Marxist’. Bloch also looked back on their early dialogue together with affection, and in 1972, still with obvious respect for Lukacs, he dedicated ‘Das Materialismusproblem’ (The Problem of Materialism) to the friend of his youth.

Exile in America After Zurich, Bloch moved on to Vienna, then Paris and Prague where

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his son Jan was born in 1937. Keeping one step ahead of the Nazis, he emigrated to the United States in 1938 and remained there for over a decade, living on the East Coast. It was during this period that ‘The Principle of Hope’ was largely written (it was revised in the 1950s). Originally Bloch hoped to publish it in America under the title ‘Dreams of a Better Life’. The book shows a clear antipathy to a culture which he saw as the inevitable heir of the fascism he had left Europe to escape. ‘The Principle of Hope’ bristles with anti-American sentiments, and a good deal of its ideological analysis of the psychology of the Babbitt (a term he borrowed from the American author Sinclair Lewis), the archetype of the little man, has an American frame of reference. Bloch never fully mastered English, as may be seen from some of his rather bizarre uses of American colloquialisms, and in fact he lived rather remote from the other exiled German intellectuals in the United States, grouped around Thomas Mann. The comprehensive ‘Triptych of the German Emigration’ painted by Arthur Kaufmann during those years shows Bloch withdrawn, in the very back row. Like Benjamin, who died during exile, Bloch was not given employment in Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research when it moved from France to the USA, though Adorno’s influence must have carried great weight there. This perhaps shows the extent to which their friendship had atrophied in the thirties. In 1942 Adorno did make a public appeal on behalf of Bloch in a New York journal, outlining the deprivation in which Bloch was living at the time and requesting donations. But this must have been very double-edged loyalty for Bloch, since Adorno incorrectly stated that Bloch had been earning his living by washing dishes and that he had been dismissed for his slowness. In fact, Karola Bloch supported Ernst and Jan by working first as a waitress and then in an architect’s office. Neither were the Blochs entirely free of the anti-Semitism which had forced them to leave Germany. Many places of recreation, Karola reports in her biography, were ‘restricted’ and inaccessible for Jews. In 1938, more than a decade before McCarthyism, a committee against ‘un-American activities’ had been founded to counteract communism. Bloch was repeatedly forced to appear in the Immigration Office in Boston to establish whether he was fit for American citizenship. Though he had never been a member of the KPD, the Communist Party in Germany, he was considered ‘a premature anti-fascist’, that is, someone who had been opposed to the fascists before Pearl Harbour. Finally he was forced to undergo an oral examination on the American Constitution. Karola Bloch relates that the astonished examiner called in his colleagues to listen to Bloch’s riveting analysis of the American War of Independence.

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XXV

In this way he finally secured citizenship, two years later than his wife.

East and West Bloch returned to Germany in 1949 to take up the chair of philosophy at the university of Leipzig at the age of sixty-four. As ‘The Principle of Hope’ tells us, he did not consider that the war was over, merely that the seat of fascist power had removed itself from Berlin to Washington. To begin with, he seems to have firmly believed in the possibility of creating a new anti-fascist society in the German Democratic Republic which would restore German culture to greatness. In 1954/5 the first two volumes of ‘The Principle of Hope’ appeared, and Bloch was awarded the National Prize of the GDR, and recognized as its leading philosopher. But gradually his philosophical and political position became irreconcilable with that of the leadership of the Stalinist SED (the ruling state party in the GDR). A number of his students were arrested in 1957, among them Wolfgang Harich, a supporter of Tito’s non-Stalinist regime in Yugoslavia. Though Bloch rejected Harich’s democratic humanist ideas of reform for the GDR, he was implicated in counter-revolutionary activity and was fortunate to escape arrest. Harich was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, accused of conspiracy with the West. Bloch was forced to retire, forbidden to teach, and was obliged to give up the editorship of the politically influential ‘Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophic’. His and Harich’s contributions were expunged from its index. Walter Ulbricht, leader of the SED, suggested that Bloch’s teaching adopted non-Marxist principles, laid too much emphasis on the subjective, and that his utopian philosophy was ignoring the concrete class-struggle and idealistically pursuing a ‘distant goal’. These sentiments seem to echo those of Bloch’s old friend Lukacs, who had become the Minister of Culture in Hungary in the Nagy regime, but it is worth considering that in 1956 Soviet troops were already suppressing ‘counter¬ revolutionary’ tendencies in Hungary, and Lukacs himself was forced into temporary exile in Rumania, because of his closeness to the ‘Yugoslavian’ line. In 1957, with official sanction, a pamphlet criticizing Bloch appeared in Berlin entitled ‘Ernst Bloch’s Revision of Marxism’. Branded as a revisionist, even as a mystic pantheist, Bloch was no longer able to participate in academic life in the East. He lived in isolation, having contact only with personal friends. His books continued to appear fitfully

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in the East, however. In 1959 the third volume of ‘The Principle of Hope’ was published. Bloch began to travel more frequently to the West to deliver lectures and attend congresses. In 1961 he was coincidentally in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was first erected and spontaneously took the decision to remain in the West, accepting a guest professorship at Tubingen university where he continued to be an active advocate of socialism and, most untypically for a German professor, devoted much of his time to his students. He spoke publicly against the voting of emergency powers in October 1966. Later in the sixties he befriended Rudi Dutschke and lent his support to the student movement, though with characteristic anticipatory consciousness, expressing surprise that the radical movement against capitalism in the West should emerge from the children of the middle class. Bloch never visited the Soviet Union. His attitude to it in ‘The Principle of Hope’ is still positive, but already we may detect a good deal of implicit criticism, of the ideology of the comrade for example, of the non¬ intervention pact, and of State Socialism in general. But he considered the artistic developments in dance and film in the Soviet Union to be extremely progressive tendencies, and praised the elements of folk-culture which the revolution had preserved, though he was well aware that the USSR had not reached political maturity, was still in a transitional stage, contained elements of State Socialism and fell far short of the ‘final state’ which corresponded to his own utopian vision of international socialism. His own reappraisal of Stalinism came late, after Khrushchev’s in 1956, after Hungary, and only after his own experiences in East Berlin. In later life he was opposed both to Soviet domination and to American imperialism, supporting the Prague Spring and vehemently denouncing America’s part in the Vietnam War, advocating a diversification of socialism away from the Soviet model. Bloch saw Marxism as a necessary synthesis of ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ streams, the one representing its undeceived critical rigour, the other its idealistic and imaginative receptivity. As early as the 1930s, Bloch warned against the separation of ‘bread’ and ‘violin’ in the communist world. Ultimately he was condemned for not subordinating the latter to the former in a decade of ideological entrenchment in the East. Bloch was not exposed to the international acclaim accorded to the Frankfurt School in the English-speaking world in the sixties and seventies, perhaps indeed because his works were not available to readers of English. He shared Marcuse’s suspicion of the ideologies into the service of which the new technologies were being pressed in East and West. His voice was

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XXV11

not heard outside Germany. But at Tubingen he became the pipe-smoking father figure of philosophy in his own country, ultimately preferring, like his great literary guiding-image Goethe, the climate of Southern Germany where his philosophy had begun. Bloch’s conception of old age, and the counselling role of the elder, was certainly one which he realized in his own life. Though he became blind in later years, he lived to supervise and to revise the seventeen volumes of his collected works, an astonishing achievement for a philosopher in his own life-time and consistent with his wishful image and archetype of harvest. He died in the summer of 1977 at the age of ninety-two.

Bloch and tradition Consistent with his view that the past contains a cultural inheritance and utopian content still to be extracted, Bloch’s philosophy, though firmly rooted in the German tradition, contains an eclectic mixture of progressive elements drawn from classical, oriental and Western philosophies. The inheritance that is to be claimed from the past, however, is not a legacy of fixed tradition, but of undischarged hope-content and utopian content in the works of the past. Thus Bloch takes the utopian aspirations and energy of the subjective factor in German Idealism first systematized by Kant and combines it with the objective factor in the materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels. He takes the concept of process from Hegel and develops it into his own concept of open process at work in dialectical materialism. He takes Aristotle’s concept of ‘entelechy’ and builds it into his own theory of possibility. He takes Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis’ and includes it in the historical programme for socialism. But claiming this inheritance in no way makes Bloch a secondary thinker. It is entirely consistent with his wholly original concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious, the preconscious dimension in both past and future. New meaning and fresh synthetic combinations can be extracted from the thinking of the past, precisely because this thinking is not yet finished, and is to be discovered and inherited by each succeeding age. The works of the past contain the premonitory and pre-figurative images of the next stage of society. In open process, succeeding ages ‘re-function’ the material of the past to suit their ideological requirements, whether reactionary or progressive. But from all progressive thinking a utopian surplus is carried over into the future. It may He dormant for centuries before new social conditions recall it and extract its new

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meaning. ‘The Principle of Hope’ is an encyclopaedia of hope that attempts to catalogue the surplus of utopian thought from the early Greek philosophers to the present day. Bloch understands utopia not as an impossible ideal, but as a real and concrete final state which can be achieved politically. He sees the development of socialism as the modern expression of the utopian function which effects this change, the goal towards which the process of history is impelled by utopian thinking. But history is by no means mechanical or fully determined for Bloch. It is not an inevitable march towards socialism. Its dynamic is not a Hegelian world-spirit. It advances at all stages through possibility. The possibility of Nothing, of the In-Vain remains. Possibility is itself an open process, and not merely in the subject. Bloch considers that the object itself contains layers of possibility, culminating in the objectively real Possible, the ultimate synthesis of subjective and objective realization of the world. Bloch has often been placed squarely in the Romantic tradition because of this attempted synthesis, as if he were continuing the utopian search for the ‘blue flower’ of German Romanticism where imagination and world finally meet. But the subjective idealism of Schelling and Fichte, the philosophical inspiration behind German Romanticism, sought this synthesis without considering possible development in the object, in objective process in the world. Whereas Bloch insists on the bilateral development of both the subjective and the objective factor and on their dialectical interaction. Bloch takes as his model for this final state of subjective and objective cognition the idea mentioned in a letter from Marx to Ruge in 1843 of the world possessing ‘a dream of the matter’, of a real state of the world that has not yet become manifest and will only become so through socialism. Yet Bloch understands that this ultimately real perception of the world implies the political task of humanizing the world. Hegel’s ‘Thing in Itself’ must also become Engels’ ‘Thing For Us’. By theoretically and practically realizing the real possibility of the world, it may be transformed into ‘Heimat’ - homeland, where, in the words of Bloch’s literary guidingimage, Faust, we may say ‘Here I am human, here I am entitled to be!’ At all points in Bloch there is the sense of this human freedom. The problematic dialectic of freedom and order is a central question in his work. His discussion of this relationship (which forms part of volume two of ‘The Principle of Hope’) was the first of his writings to appear after the war, but the political implications did not endear him to his post-war sponsors in the stabilizing regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Not-Yet-Conscious can be contained in past, present and future.

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XXIX

Unrealized meaning can be trapped in the works of the past. The ‘darkness of the just lived moment’ which prevents us from experiencing and enjoying the world in a Carpe diem sense indicates the presence of the Not-YetConscious in the present. The future aspect of the Not-Yet-Conscious is principally revealed in what Bloch calls ‘forward dawning’ and ‘pre¬ appearance’ (‘Vor-Schein’, which also has the connotation of ‘shining ahead’). Every age contains its horizon, its Front over which this NotYet-Conscious flows when the block of static and regressive thinking is lifted. It may actually be observed in social and political events, as in the storming of the Bastille, for example, but art is the major repository of the images, archetypes and symbols of the Not-Yet-Conscious, supplying us with the guiding-images that ‘venture beyond’ the statics of the known world. In his historical survey of the Not-Yet-Conscious, Bloch concen¬ trates on the thinkers and project-makers who have extended this Front by venturing beyond, by inventing, visualizing the possibilities of the world that is coming over the threshold. ‘The Principle of Hope’ is thus an encyclopaedia of these figures and their appearance in reality and in art. The Not-Yet-Conscious contains an individual psychological dimension as well as social and political expression. In characteristically polemical style, Bloch attacks Freud and particularly Jung (whom he regarded as a thinker complicit with fascism) for confining the unconscious to the past, in Jung’s case to an ahistorical dimension of primal experience. Bloch illustrates how this theory was appropriated to serve the bogus notions of Aryan purity and native soil by German Nazism. His criticism of Freud largely centred on the latter’s understanding of repression. Freud’s analysis solely attempted to lead his patients back into the past to confront the origins of their neurosis, the repressed material that was inhibiting them. There was no concern with future, not yet conscious development. Analogously, in Bloch’s view, Freud avoided analysis of the social causes of repression and entertained no idea of the future development of the society which might improve the psychological conditions of his patients. He only addressed himself to the symptoms and not the fundamental causes of their neuroses. Furthermore, he ignored the most basic human drive, the closest drive to the unrevealed ‘That’ which drives on within us, namely - hunger. It is significant that Freud never uses the German term ‘Instinkt’ for his theory of the drives, but rather the word ‘Trieb’. It may well be that Strachey’s English translation of Freud has committed a major error in referring to the drives as ‘instincts’. Bloch’s analysis of Freud makes this dis¬ tinction unequivocal. He extends the theory of the drives by demonstrating

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that they are socialized rather than innate, and thus wholly distinct from instincts. It is perhaps no coincidence that Bloch’s philosophy was ultimately considered heretical in the East. Bloch’s attention always seems to wander in the direction of heretical rather than orthodox figures. His earlier book on Thomas Miinzer is a pre-appearance of his preoccupation with thinkers who are challenging orthodox beliefs. Miinzer and millenarians like Joachim of Fiore feature largely in ‘The Principle of Hope’, whereas Luther, the father of the orthodox Reformation in Germany, only merits a handful of references. Bloch’s commitment to the Hermetic tradition and to heretical figures in general reflects his preference for those thinkers who regard the world as an unrevealed mystery rather than a body of received laws and commandments. In ‘The Principle of Hope’ he chooses to investigate the Cabbala rather than the Torah, prospective alchemy rather than determined astrology, systems of thought that are processive and open rather than already manifest and absolute. Bloch’s ‘Principle of Hope’ is of course such a system itself, and owes almost as much to the Hermetic tradition as it does to the tradition of dialectical materialism. Sections of the work have a mystical quality as they approach the That-riddle of consciousness that appears behind the drives, but Bloch would not see this as metaphysical speculation incompatible with a materialist approach to the world. He seeks to relocate man’s metaphysical aspirations and apotheoses in worldly experience itself, and to reveal the world precisely as the mystery towards which Hermetic thinking has been groping. This mystical aspect of Bloch’s work, often lifting his thought out of culturally specific historical and philosophical argument on to a different level of elliptical conceptual and linguistic connection, may well have contributed to the notion that Bloch is a difficult thinker. But these passages, cryptically opening each section of ‘The Principle of Hope’, transcendentally and climactically closing each section with a sweeping gesture of optimism or hope, perhaps hold the key to Bloch’s literary style. The notion of ‘intensification’ (Steigerung), already present in Goethe, permeates Bloch’s work. Bloch’s cadences do not fall, they are always going up. It is therefore no coincidence that many sections of the work end on the ‘heights’, on the metaphor of the high mountains, as indeed does ‘Faust’, a fact of which Bloch was well aware. The book is full of explicit and implicit references to ‘Faust’, and the structure of Goethe’s major work is unmistakably present behind Bloch’s own, as it moves towards ‘identity’. The symphonic structure of the work is also clearly evident. Bloch considered music to

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XXXI

be the most important of the arts, in which the Not-Yet and the utopian could be most perfectly realized. Reprises, refrains, codas, the musical gestures are unmistakable. Bloch was not only anxious to include the ontological and utopian gestures of music in his catalogue of hope (a section is devoted to it in volume three), but also to incorporate these gestures in the structure of his major work itself.

The style of 'The Principle of Hope’ ‘The Principle of Hope’ is thus certainly a literary work in its own right, and this may also account for the suspicion with which it has been received in Marxist circles. Alongside the metaphor of the high mountains is that of the ship venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, an image inherited from Francis Bacon, whom Bloch greatly admired. These images become sunken metaphors, often just below the text, apparently lost, then surfacing again with new significance, perfectly mirroring in metaphorical terms Bloch’s theory of the continuing legacy of utopian content. Forward dawning is also an aspect of Bloch’s style. An image will be filtered into the argument before it emerges in its full metaphorical plumage, as real cipher. But Bloch’s philosophy, of course, acknowledges the residual traces of past consciousness in advancing process, and this is also reflected in the fabric of the text, which reveals a great deal of after-ripening of ideas and images, reintroductions of motifs and metaphors, charged with renewed significance. A repeated idea, as Bloch states in his own introduction, may have learnt something in the meantime. Bloch’s eclectic choice of register is in itself a further reflection of his theory of the mutual presence of the past and future in each other. He blends archaisms, Latin and Greek terms, obsolescent usages, ‘ Volksweisheiten’ (popular sayings and proverbs) with the language of Marxism, science and dialectical materialism to produce a kind of cultural lexicon of the German language. As a poet, Bloch is perhaps a poet of light. The quality of light, morning red, distant blue, the blue hour of twilight, are metaphorical expressions of states of consciousness, both individual and social, and of states of hope and realization. New and unexpired ideas appear as premonitory glimmer¬ ings and extended after-glowings, shining ahead or continuing to bathe history in their unextinguished light. Bloch holds up a light-meter to history to test its utopian content. Light, and all its nuances, becomes the most fundamental ‘real cipher’ in the book. The theory of the ‘real cipher’ is

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TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

crucial to an understanding of Bloch’s literary style and of his use of metaphor. He develops Goethe’s conclusion in ‘Faust’ that ‘Everything transitory is only a metaphor’, and sees the very objects of the phenomenal world as ‘real ciphers’ of the world-riddle, that is, he believes the world contains in metaphorical form the secret signatures of the world mystery that is to be revealed. Bloch had conceived this idea of traces which the world-secret leaves behind it in the physical details of the world much earlier in ‘Traces’, begun in 1917 though completed in 1930, but it is in ‘The Principle of Hope’ that this aspect of his theory is developed into a fully fledged aesthetics, synthesized with the concept of the possible utopian All that, if progressive forces prevail, may finally be attained. Art is thus fundamentally concerned not with the imitation but with the revelation of the world, the process by which the images of the Not-Yet-Conscious are brought into consciousness. But for Bloch the successful achievement of this utopian final state is by no means an inevitability. He is equally aware of the opposite cipher circulating in the world, the Nothing which expressed itself and may express itself again in the darkness of fascism.

Venturing beyond This is the first full translation of any of Bloch’s works in English. It is ironic to think that ‘The Principle of Hope’ might first have been published in England before it had even appeared in Germany. Paul Tillich, among others, was instrumental in trying to get the book published in Oxford in the 1940s. But no contract was ultimately signed. The work seems to have been hovering on English consciousness for many years, its arrival inhibited by the resistance to heterodox socialist thought in British academic philosophy. This delay is itself a true example of the Blochian Not-Yet-Conscious. But there is no sense in which the book now appears, forty years later, as an anachronism. Always when reading Bloch there is the impression of a mind not confined to a specific decade but spanning the century, forwards and backwards. This year, 1985, is his centenary. There could be no more fitting time to present ‘The Principle of Hope’ in an English translation. In a time of cultural re-entrenchment and social pessimism, it presents a radical reappraisal of utopian socialist thinking. But it is not merely an academic catalogue of socialist and utopian thinkers. In fact, though Bloch was himself suspicious of the idea of ‘Lebensphilosophie’, programmatic philosophies of life, he provides in this book a moral and

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

xxxiii

intellectual agenda for socialism, a philosophical and historical counter¬ argument to the popular ideology that radical change in itself presents a danger and a threat to humanity and to ‘order’. By providing a panoramic view of history, Bloch demonstrates that it is precisely radical thinkers ‘venturing beyond’ available existence who have extended and humanized the world through intellectual, scientific and artistic innovation. He may now certainly take his place amongst the great innovators and Utopians who have espoused the principle of hope. Fittingly, his own epitaph, taken from this book, reads: ‘Thinking means venturing beyond’. Bloch was no utopist, he considered his philosophy to be concretely utopian, mediated with real possibility, and his philosophy advocates engage¬ ment with, rather than contemplation of, the world. There is certainly no sense of detachment, in his life or in his work, from political reality and practice. From the beginning, he was a tireless opponent of imperialism, fascism and war. From very early on, he was aware of the potential of nuclear weapons, of the negative Ultimum, of the destruction to which man’s scientific innovations could be turned. And he never wavered in the belief that socialism was ultimately the only alternative to the annihila¬ tion capitalism would inevitably bring if man did not venture beyond it politically and embrace radical change. ‘The Principle of Hope’, Bloch’s central work, is a historical and collective statement of hope against this annihilation, but also a practical guide to living in late capitalist society, in cultural decline, where the possibility of a truly human society seems remote and the dominant emotion is fear. As an alternative, it offers a socialist theory of the emotions based instead on the strongest of the expectant emotions - hope. It envisages a new society where men and women can at last become like proper human beings, living and working and above all enjoying themselves in a world which has become Thing For Us, or in Bloch’s own phrase, where man is walking upright. Neville Plaice Stephen Plaice Paul Knight Brighton, 1985

To my son Jan Robert Bloch

THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

'

INTRODUCTION

Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us? Many only feel confused. The ground shakes, they do not know why and with what. Theirs is a state of anxiety; if it becomes more definite, then it is fear. Once a man travelled far and wide to learn fear. In the time that has just passed, it came easier and closer, the art was mastered in a terrible fashion. But now that the creators of fear have been dealt with, a feeling that suits us better is overdue. It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce, it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. It will not tolerate a dog’s life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is, which is not seen through, even wretchedly recognized. The work against anxiety about life and the machinations of fear is that against its creators, who are for the most part easy to identify, and it looks in the world itself for what can help the world; this can be found. How richly people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible. Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable. It can be extricated from the unregulated daydream and from its sly misuse, can be activated undimmed. Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right. Let the daydreams grow even fuller, since this means they are enriching themselves around the sober glance; not in the 3

4

INTRODUCTION

sense of clogging, but of becoming clear. Not in the sense of merely contemplative reason which takes things as they are and as they stand, but of participating reason which takes them as they go, and therefore also as they could go better. Then let the daydreams grow really fuller, that is, clearer, less random, more familiar, more clearly understood and more mediated with the course of things. So that the wheat which is trying to ripen can be encouraged to grow and be harvested. Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over. Not in its deprivation, let alone in moving out of it. Not in the causes of deprivation, let alone in the first signs of the change which is ripening within it. That is why real venturing beyond never goes into the mere vacuum of an In-Front-of-Us, merely fanatically, merely visualizing abstractions. Instead, it grasps the New as something that is mediated in what exists and is in motion, although to be revealed the New demands the most extreme effort of will. Real venturing beyond knows and activates the tendency which is inherent in history and which proceeds dialectically. Primarily, everybody lives in the future, because they strive, past things only come later, and as yet genuine present is almost never there at all. The future dimension contains what is feared or what is hoped for; as regards human intention, that is, when it is not thwarted, it contains only what is hoped for. Function and content of hope are experienced continuously, and in times of rising societies they have been continuously activated and extended. Only in times of a declining old society, like modern Western society,-does a certain partial and transi¬ tory: intention run exclusively downwards. Then tKose~wKcTcannot find their way out of the decline are confronted with fear of hope and against it. Then fear presents itself as the subjectivist, nihilism as the objectivist mask of the crisis phenomenon: which is tolerated but not seen through, which is lamented but not changed. On bourgeois ground, especially in the abyss which has opened and into which the bourgeoisie has moved, change is impossible anyway even if it were desired, which is by no means the case. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se. Without success in the long run, of course: the bourgeois emptiness that has developed is as ephemeral as the class which alone still expresses itself within it, and as spineless as the illusory existence of its own bad immediacy with which it is in league. Hopelessness

INTRODUCTION

5

is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs. Which is why even deception, if it is to be effective, must work with flatteringly and corruptly aroused hope. Which is also why hope is preached from every pulpit, but is confined to mere inwardness or to empty promises of the other world. Which is why even the latest miseries of Western philosophy are no longer able to present their philosophy of misery without loaning the idea of transcendence, venturing beyond, from the bank. All this means is that man is essentially determined by the future, but with the cynically self-interested inference, hypostasized from its own class position, that the future is the sign outside the No Future night club, and the destiny of man nothingness. Well: let the dead bury their dead; even in the hesitation which the outstaying night draws over it, the beginning day is listening to something other than the putridly stifling, hollowly nihilistic death-knell. As long as man is in a bad way, both private and public existence are pervaded by daydreams; dreams of a better life than that which has so far been given him. In what is false, and all the more so in what is genuine, every human intention is applied on to this ground. And even where the ground, as so often before, may deceive us, full of sandbanks one moment, full of chimeras the next, it can only be condemned and possibly cleared up through combined research into objective tendency and subjective intention. Corruptio optimi pessima: fraudulent hope is one of the greatest malefactors, even enervators, of the human race, concretely genuine hope its most dedi¬ cated benefactor. Thus, knowing-concrete hope subjectively breaks most powerfully into fear, objectively leads most efficiently towards the radical termination of the contents of fear. Together with informed discontent which belongs to hope, because they both arise out of the No to deprivation. Thinking means venturing beyond. Admittedly, venturing beyond has not been all that adept at finding its thinking until now. Or even if it was found, there were too many bad eyes around which did not see the matter clearly. Lazy substitution, current copying representation, the pig’s bladder of a reactionary, but also schematizing Zeitgeist, these repressed what had been discovered. Marx’s work marks the turning-point in the process of concrete venturing beyond becoming conscious. But around this point deeply ingrained habits of thinking cling to a world without Front. Not only man is in a bad way here, but so is the insight into his hope. Intending is not heard in its characteristic anticipating tone, objective tendency is not recognized in its characteristic anticipatory powerfulness. The desiderium, the only honest attribute of all men, is unexplored. The

6

INTRODUCTION

Not-Yet-Conscious, Not-Yet-Become, although it fulfils the meaning of all men and the horizon of all being, has not even broken through as a word, let alone as a concept. This blossoming field of questions lies almost speechless in previous philosophy. Forward dreaming, as Lenin says, was not reflected on, was only touched on sporadically, did not attain the concept appropriate to it. Until Marx, expectation and what is expected, the former in the subject, the latter in the object, the oncoming as a whole did not take on a global dimension, in which it could find a place, let alone a central one. The huge occurrence of utopia in the world is almost unilluminated explicitly. Of all the strange features of ignorance, this is one of the most conspicuous. In his first attempt at a Latin grammar, M. Terentius Varro is said to have forgotten the future tense; philosophi¬ cally, it has still not been adequately considered to this day. This means: an overwhelmingly static thinking did not name or even understand this condition, and it repeatedly closes off as something finished what has become its lot. As contemplative knowledge it is by definition solely knowledge of what can be contemplated, namely of the past, and it bends an arch of closed form-contents out of Becomeness over the Unbecome. Consequently, even where it is grasped historically, this world is a world of repetition or of the great Time-and-Again; it is a palace of fateful events, as Leibniz called it without breaking out of it. Occurrence becomes history, knowledge re-remembering, celebration the observance of something that has been. This is how all previous philosophers went about it, with their form, idea or substance posited as being finished, even postulating Kant, even dialectical Hegel. In this way physical and metaphysical need spoiled its appetite, in particular its paths to outstanding satisfaction, certainly not just that achieved in books, were blocked. Hope, with its positive correlate: the still unclosed determinateness of existence, superior to any res finita, does not therefore occur in the history of the sciences, either as psychological or as cosmic entity and least of all as functionary of what has never been, of the possible New. Therefore: a particularly extensive attempt is made in this hook to bring philosophy to hope, as to a place in the world which is as inhabited as the best civilized land and as unexplored as the Antarctic. In critical and further elaborated connection with the contents of the author’s previous books, ‘Traces’, especially ‘The Spirit of Utopia’, ‘Thomas Miinzer’, ‘Legacy of this Time’, ‘Subject-Object’. Longing, expec¬ tation, hope therefore need their hermeneutics, the dawning of the In-Frontof-Us demands its specific concept, the Novum demands its concept of the Front. And all this so that ultimately the royal road through the mediated

INTRODUCTION

7

realm of possibility to the necessarily Intended can be critically laid, and can remain orientated, without being broken off. Docta spes, comprehended hope, thus illuminates the concept of a principle in the world, a concept which will no longer leave it. For the very reason that this principle has always been in the process of the world, but philosophically excluded for so long. Since there is absolutely no conscious production of history along whose path of informed tendency the goal would not likewise be all, the concept of the utopian (in the positive sense of the word) principle, that of hope and its contents worthy of human beings, is an absolutely central one here. Indeed, what is designated by this concept lies in the horizon of the consciousness that is becoming adequate of any given thing, in the risen horizon that is rising even higher. Expectation, hope, intention towards possibility that has still not become: this is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole. Since Marx, no research into truth and no realistic judge¬ ment is possible at all which will be able to avoid the subjective and objective hope-contentT^oFlihe world^vithontpaving ^^penakyof~^iviality or .reaching a dead-end. Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the futureffenowTedge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge. And the new philosophy, as it was initiated by Marx, is the same thing as the philosophy of the New, this entity which expects, destroys or fulfils us all. Its consciousness is the openness of danger and of the victory which is to be brought about in those conditions. Its space is the objectively real possibility within process, along the path of the Object* itself, in which what is radically intended by man is not delivered anywhere but not thwarted anywhere either. Its concern, to which all its energies must be devoted, remains what is truly hoping in the subject, truly hoped for in the object: our task is to research the function and content of this central Thing For Us. The good New is never that completely new. It acts far beyond the daydreams by which life is pervaded and of which the figurative arts are full. All freedom movements are guided by utopian aspirations, and all Christians know them after their own fashion too, with sleeping conscience or with consternation, from the exodus and messianic parts of the Bible. In addition, the merging of have and have-not constituted by longing and hope, and by the drive to reach home again, has in any case been burrowing in great philosophy. Not only in Plato’s Eros, but also in the far-reaching Aristotelian concept of matter as that of possibility towards essence, and * For a distinction between ‘Objekt’ (object) and 'Gegenstand’ (Object) see footnote on p. 166.

8

INTRODUCTION

in Leibniz’s concept of tendency. Hope acts unmediatedly in the Kantian postulates of moral consciousness, it acts in a world-based, mediated way in Hegel’s historical dialectic. However, despite all these Enlightenment patrols and even expeditions into terram utopicam, there is something broken off about them all, broken off by contemplation. Most obviously perhaps in Hegel, who ventured out furthest: What Has Been overwhelms what is approaching, the collection of things that have become totally obstructs the categories Future, Front, Novum. Thus the utopian principle could not achieve a breakthrough, either in the archaic-mythical world, despite exodus from this, or in the urbane-rationalistic one, despite explosive dialectics. The reason for this is invariably that both the archaic-mythical and the urbane-rationalistic cast of mind are contemplative-idealistic, conse¬ quently, being merely passive-contemplative, they presuppose a closed world that has already become, including the projected over-world in which What Has Become is reflected. The gods of perfection in the former, the ideas or ideals in the latter are in their illusory being just as much res finitae as the so-called facts of this world in their empirical being. Future of the genuine, processively open kind is therefore sealed off from and alien to any mere contemplation. Only thinking directed towards changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future (the unclosed space for new development in front of us) as embarrassment and the past as spell. Hence the crucial point isyonly knowledges conscious theory-practice confronts Becoming and what can be decided within it, conversely, contemplative knowledge can only refer by derimtloh ter What Has Become. In myth, the direct expression of this pull towards What Has Been, this relation to What Has Become is self-absorption, is the urge towards the immemorial, also the continual predominance of what is truly pagan, namely astral-mythic, the fixed dome arching over all occurrence. The methodical expression of the same connection to the past, estrange¬ ment from the future in rationalism is Plato’s anamnesis, or the doctrine that all knowledge is simply re-remembering. Re-remembering of the ideas perceived before birth, of totally primal past or what is ahistorically eternal. Whereby Beingness simply coincides with Been-ness, and the owl of Minerva always begins its flight only after dusk has fallen, when a form of life has already become old. Even Hegel’s dialectic, in its ultimate ‘circle of circles’, is similarly inhibited by the phantom of anamnesis and banished into the antiquarium. Marx was the first to posit the pathos of change instead of this, as the beginning of a theory which does not resign itself to contemplation and interpretation. The rigid divisions between future

INTRODUCTION

9

and past thus themselves collapse, unbecome future becomes visible in the past, avenged and inherited, mediated and fulfilled past in the future. Past that is grasped in isolation and clung to in this way is a mere commodity category, that is, a reified Factum without consciousness of its Fieri and of its continuing^pnocessdBut true action in the present itself occurs solely in the totality of this process which is unclosed both backwards and forwards, materialistic dialectics becomes the instrument to control this process, the instrument of the mediated, controlled Novum. The Ratio of the bourgeois epoch which remained progressive is the next inheritance for this (minus ideology which is tied to its location and the increasing emptying of contents). But this Ratio is not the sole inheritance, on the contrary, preceding societies and even many myths in them (again minus mere ideology and particularly minus pre-scientifically preserved superstition) may also provide a philosophy which has surmounted the bourgeois barrier of knowledge with possibly progressive inherited material, even though, as is obvious, this material particularly requires elucidation, critical acquisition, functional change. Consider for example the role of purpose (Where To, What For) in pre-capitalist world-pictures or even the meaning of quality in their non-mechanical concept of nature. Consider the myth of Prometheus, whom Marx calls the most distinguished saint in the philosophical calendar. Consider the myth of the Golden Age and its transposition into the future in the messianic consciousness of so many oppressed classes and peoples. Marxist philosophy, as that which at last adequately addresses what is becoming and what is approaching, also knows the whole of the past in creative breadth, because it knows no past other than the still living, not yet discharged past. Marxist philosophy is that of the future, therefore also of the future in the past; thus, in this collected consciousness of Front, it is living theory-practice of comprehended tendency, familiar with occurrence, in league with the Novum. And the crucial point remains: the light, in whose appearance the processive-unclosed Totum is depicted and promoted, is called docta spes, dialectical-materialistically comprehended hope. The basic theme of philosophy which remains and is, in that it becomes, is the still unbecome, still unachieved homeland, as it develops outwards and upwards in the dialectical-materialistic struggle of the New with the old. Furthermore a signal is set for this. A forward signal which enables us to overtake, not to trot behind. Its meaning is Not-Yet, and the task is to grasp it thoroughly. In line with what Lenin meant in a passage which has come to be very much praised over the years, but not so eagerly taken to heart:

10

INTRODUCTION

“‘What must we dream of?” I have written these words down and am shocked. I imagine I am sitting in a ‘coordination conference’ and opposite me are sitting the editors and staff of the ‘Rabocheye Dyelo’. And then Comrade Martinov stands up and turns to me menacingly: ‘‘May I be per¬ mitted to ask if an autonomous editorial staff still has the right to dream without previously consulting the Party committee? ’ ’ And after him Comrade Kritschevski stands up and (philosophically expanding the ideas of Comrade Martinov who has long been expanding those of Comrade Plekhanov) con¬ tinues even more menacingly: “I’ll go further than that. I’m asking whether a Marxist has the right to dream at all, unless he forgets that according to Marx humanity only sets itself tasks that it can solve, and that tactics are a process of growth of these tasks, which grow together with the Party?” I shudder at the mere thought of these menacing questions, and I wonder where I can hide. I will try and hide behind Pissarev. “One gulf is different to another”, wrote Pissarev concerning the gulf between dream and reality.“My dreams can overtake the natural course of events, or they can go off at complete tangents, down paths that the natural course of events can never tread. In the first case dreaming is totally harmless; it can even encourage and strengthen the working man’s power to act... There is nothing about such dreams which impairs or cripples creativity. In fact, quite the contrary. If a person were completely devoid of all capability of dreaming in this way, if he were not able to hasten ahead now and again to view in his imagination as a unified and completed picture the work which is only now beginning to take shape in his hands, then I find it absolutely impossible to imagine what would motivate the person to tackle and to complete extensive and strenuous pieces of work in the fields of art, science, and practical life.. .The gulf between dream and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his dream, if he observes life attentively, compares his observations with his castles in the air and generally works towards the realization of his dream-construct conscientiously. There only has to be some point of contact between dream and life for everything to be in the best order.” In our movement there are unfortunately precious few dreams of this kind. And those people are chiefly responsible for this who boast how sober they are and how “close” they stand to the “concrete”, and those are the representatives of legitimate criticism and the illegitimate politics of trotting behind’ (Lenin, What is to be Done?). So let a further signal be set for forward dreaming. This book deals with nothing other than hoping beyond the day which has become. The

INTRODUCTION

II

theme of the five parts of this work (written between 1938 and 1947, revised in 1953 and 1959) is the dreams of a better life. Their unmediated, but principally their mediatable features and contents are broadly taken up, explored and tested. And the path leads via the little waking dreams to the strong ones, via the wavering dreams that can be abused to the rigorous ones, via the shifting castles in the air to the One Thing that is outstanding and needful.* So the book begins with daydreams of an average kind, lightly and freely selected from youth to old age. They fill the first part: report, concerning the man in the street and unregulated wishes. This is immediately followed, founding and supporting everything else, by the second and funda¬ mental part: the examination of anticipatory consciousness. For reasons founded in the subject itself, the foundation makes many sections of this part no easy reading, but of gradually increasing difficulty. But, to the reader who is being informed by it and being led deeper into it, it equally becomes of decreasing difficulty. The interesting nature of the subject also relieves the effort of assimilating it, just as the light above is part of climbing a mountain, and climbing a mountain is part of the inspiring view at the top. Hunger, the main drive, must be worked out here, and the way it proceeds to the rejection of deprivation, that is, to the most important expectant emotion: hope. A central task in this part is the discovery and unmistakable notation of the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’. That is: a relatively still Unconscious disposed towards its other side, forwards rather than backwards. Towards the side of something new that is dawning up, that has never been conscious before, not, for example, something forgotten, something rememberable that has been, something that has sunk into the subconscious in repressed or archaic fashion. From Leibniz’s discovery of the subconscious via the Romantic psychology of night and primeval past to the psychoanalysis of Freud, essentially only ‘backward dawning’ has previously been described and investigated. People thought they had discovered that everything present is loaded with memory, with past in the cellar of the No-Longer-Conscious. What they had not discovered was that there is in present material, indeed in what is remembered itself, an impetus and a sense of being broken off, a brooding quality and an anticipation of Not-Yet-Become; and this broken-off and broached material does not take place in the cellar of consciousness, but on its Front. So it is a question here of the psychological processes of approaching, which are so characteristic above all for youth, for times of change, for the adventures * Cf. Luke 10, 42.

12

INTRODUCTION

of productivity, for all phenomena therefore in which Unbecome is located and seeks to articulate itself. The anticipatory thus operates in the field of hope; so this hope is not taken only as emotion, as the opposite of fear (because fear too can of course anticipate), but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind (and here the opposite is then not fear, but memory). The imagination and the thoughts of future intention described in this way are utopian, this again not in a narrow sense of the word which only defines what is bad (emotively reckless picturing, playful form of an abstract kind), but rather in fact in the newly tenable sense of the forward dream, of anticipation in general. And so the category of the Utopian, beside the usual, justifiably pejorative sense, possesses the other, in no way necessarily abstract or unworldly sense, much more centrally turned towards the world: of overtaking the natural course of events. Thus understood, the theme of the second part is the utopian function and its contents. The exposition examines the relationship of this function to ideology, to archetypes, to ideals, to symbols, to the categories Front and Novum, Nothing and Homeland, to the fundamental problem of the Here and Now. Here, against all stale and static nihilism, it must be borne in mind: even the Nothing is a utopian category, though an extremely antiutopian one. Far from forming a nullifying basis or being a background of this kind (so that the day of being lies between two absolute nights), the Nothing is - exactly like the positive Utopicum: Homeland or the All - simply ‘existing’ as objective possibility. It circulates in the process of the world, but does not ride on it; both: Nothing and All - are still in no way decided as utopian characters, as threatening or fulfilling resultdefinitions in the world. And likewise the Here and Now, what is repeatedly beginning in nearness, is a utopian category, in fact the most central one; even though, in contrast to the annihilating circulation of a Nothing, to the illuminating circulation of an All, it has not yet even entered time and space. Instead, the contents of this most immediate nearness still ferment entirely in the darkness of the lived moment as the real world-knot, worldriddle. Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself. In other words: we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness. Namely, the most immediate immediacy, in which the core of self-location and being-here still lies, in which at the same time the whole knot of the world-secret is to be found. This is no secret which exists only for

INTRODUCTION

13

insufficient intellect, for example, while the matter* itself is content which is totally clear or reposing in itself, but it is that real secret which the world-matter is to itself and towards the solution of which it is in fact in process and on the way. Thus the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs completely to the Not-Yet-Become, Not-Yet-Brought-Out, ManifestedOut in the world. Not-Yet-Conscious interacts and reciprocates with NotYet-Become, more specifically with what is approaching in history and in the world. And the examination of anticipatory consciousness must funda¬ mentally serve to make comprehensible the actual reflections which now follow, in fact depictions of the wished-for, the anticipated better life, in psychological and material terms. From the anticipatory, therefore, knowledge is to be gained on the basis of an ontology of the Not-Yet. So much for the second part here, and for the subject-based and objectbased function analysis of hope begun within it. Going back now to individual wishes, the first to surface again are the dubious ones. Instead of the unregulated little wishful images of the report, those harnessed and manipulated by the bourgeoisie now become visible. Thus manipulated, these images can be held down and misused, coloured pink and with blood. The third part: transition shows wishful images in the mirror, in a beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be. But the picture clears completely as soon as the mirror comes from the people, as occurs quite visibly and wonderfully in fairytales. The mirrored, so often standardized wishes comprise this part of the book; common to all of them is a drive towards the colourful, representing what is supposedly or genuinely better. The appeal of dressing-up, illuminated display belong here, but then the world of fairytale, brightened distance in travel, the dance, the dream-factory of film, the example of theatre. Such things either present a better life, as in the entertainment industry, or sketch out in real terms a life shown to be essential. However, if this sketching out turns into a free and considered blueprint, then we find ourselves for the first time among the actual, that is, planned or outlined utopias. They comprise the fourth part: construction, with historically rich content which does not merely remain historical. It develops in the medical and social, the technological, architec¬ tural and geographical utopias, in the wishful landscapes of painting and literature. Thus the wishful images of health emerge, the fundamental ones * Bloch uses the term ‘Sache’ here and elsewhere to mean the true state of affairs which has not yet been revealed. We have translated this as ‘the matter’.

14

INTRODUCTION

of society without deprivation, the marvels of technology and the castles in the air in so many of the existing wishful images of architecture. EldoradoEden appears in the geographical voyages of discovery, the landscapes of an environment formed more adequately for us in painting and poetry, the perspectives of an Absolute in wisdom. All this is full of overhauling, builds implicitly or explicitly on to the road and the goal-image of a more perfect world, on to more thoroughly formed and more essential appearances than have empirically already become. There is also a lot of random and abstract escapism here, but great works of art essentially show a realistically related pre-appearance of their completely developed subject-matter. The glance towards prefigured, aesthetically and religiously experimental being is variable within them, but every attempt of this kind is experimenting with something that overhauls, something perfect which the world has not yet seen. The glance towards this is concrete in various ways depending on the respective class barrier, but the basic utopian goals of the respective so-called artistic aspiration in so-called styles, these ‘excesses’ over and above ideology, do not always perish with their society. Egyptian architecture is the aspiration to become like stone, with the crystal of death as intended perfection; Gothic architecture is the aspiration to become like the vine of Christ, with the tree of life as intended perfection. And in this way the whole of art shows itself to be full of appearances which are driven to become symbols of perfection, to a utopianly essential end. Of course, until now it has only been self-evident in the case of the social utopias that they are - utopian: firstly, because that is what they are called, and secondly, because the word cloud-cuckoo-land has mostly been used in association with them, and not only with the abstract ones among them. Because of which, as noted, the concept utopia has been both unduly restricted, namely confined to novels of an ideal state, and also above all, through the predominant abstractness of these novels of an ideal state, it has preserved that abstract playful form which only the progress of socialism from these utopias towards science has moved out of the way and removed. Nevertheless, despite all these dubious aspects, the word utopia emerged here coined by Thomas More, though not the philosophically far more comprehensive concept of utopia. On the other hand, little utopian material worthy of consideration was noticed in other, for example, technological wishful images and plans. Despite Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis ’ no frontier-land with its own pioneer status and its own hopecontents introduced into nature was distinguished in technology. This was seen even less in architecture, in buildings which form, re-form or pre-form

INTRODUCTION

15

a more beautiful space. And similarly, utopian material astonishingly remained undiscovered in the situations and landscapes of painting and poetry, in their extravagances and especially in their deeply inward- and outward-looking realisms of possibility. And yet, in all these spheres, utopian function is at work, with modified content, fanatical in the lesser creations, precise and realistic sui generis in the great ones. The very pro¬ fusion of human imagination, together with its correlate in the world (once imagination becomes informed and concrete), cannot possibly be explored and inventoried other than through utopian function; any more than it can be tested without dialectical materialism. The specific pre-appearance which art shows is like a laboratory where events, figures and characters are driven to their typical, characteristic end, to an abysmal or a blissful end; this essential vision of characters and situations, inscribed in every work of art, which in its most striking form we may call Shakespearean, in its most terminalized form Dantean, presupposes possibility beyond already existing reality. At all points here prospective acts and imaginations aim, subjective, but possibly even objective dream-roads run out of the Become towards the Achieved, towards symbolically encircled achieve¬ ment. Thus the concept of the Not-Yet and of the intention towards it that is thoroughly forming itself out no longer has its only, indeed exhaustive example in the social utopias; important though the social utopias, leaving all others aside, have become for the critical awareness of elaborated anticipating. But to limit the utopian to the Thomas More variety, or simply to orientate it in that direction, would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary (a sometimes almost forgotten totality) to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia. Hence the breadth of the anticipations, wishful images, hope-contents collected in the part called: construction. Hence - in front of as well as behind the fairytales of an ideal state - the afore¬ mentioned notation and interpretation of medical, technological, architectural, geographical utopias, also of the actual wishful landscapes in painting, opera, literature. Hence, finally, this is the place for the portrayal of the multifarious hope-landscape and the specific perspectives on it in the collective thinking of philosophical wisdom. Despite the predominant pathos of What Has Been in previous philosophies;- the almost continually intended direction: appearance - essence nevertheless clearly shows a utopian pole. The sequence of all these formations, socially, aesthetically,

l6

INTRODUCTION

philosophically relevant to culture of ‘true being’, accordingly ends, coming down to always decisive earth, in questions of a life of fulfilling work free of exploitation, but also of a life beyond work, i.e. in the wishful problem of leisure. The final will is that to be truly present. So that the lived moment belongs to us and we to it and ‘Stay awhile’* could be said to it. Man wants at last to enter into the Here and Now as himself, wants to enter his full life without postponement and distance. The genuine utopian will is definitely not endless striving, rather: it wants to see the merely immediate and thus so unpossessed nature of self-location and being-here finally mediated, illuminated and fulfilled, fulfilled happily and adequately. This is the utopian frontier-content which is implied in the ‘Stay awhile, you are so fair’ of the Faust scheme. The objective hope-images of the construc¬ tion thus press inevitably towards those of fulfilled human beings themselves and their environment fully mediated with these images, that is, towards homeland. The fifth and final part: identity attempts to take up these intentions. As attempts to become like proper human beings, the various moral guiding images appear, and the so often antithetical guiding panels of the right life. The fictional figures of human venturing beyond the limits then appear: Don Giovanni, Odysseus, Faust, the last precisely on the way to the perfect moment, in utopia which thoroughly experiences the world; Don Quixote warns and demands, in dream-monomania, dream-depth. As call and pull of very immediate, very far-striking lines of expression, music emerges, the art of strongest intensity distilled into song and sound, of the utopian Humanum in the world. And then: the images of hope against death are gathered, against this hardest counterblow to utopia; death is therefore its unforgettable awakener. It is especially a circulation of that Nothing which is devoured into being by the utopian pull; there is no becoming and no victory into which the annihilation of what is bad is not actively devoured. All the glad tidings which constitute the imagination of religion culminate mythically, against death and fate, both the completely illusory tidings and those with a humane core, ultimately related to deliverance from evil, to freedom towards the ‘kingdom’. There follows, precisely concerning this-worldly intention

towards this becoming

homeland, the future problem in the bearing, encompassing space of homeland: of nature. The problem of what is worth wishing for in general, or of the highest good, always remains the central point here. Its utopia Cf. Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I, 1700. The moment for which Faust will gladly sell his soul.

INTRODUCTION

17

of the One Thing Necessary, although it in fact still stands completely in premonition, like the being-in-the-present of men themselves, governs all the rest. If only the less high goods were attained and accessible of course, on the road to the abolition of base deprivation. On the road which first leads to the treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt,* and only then to those which stay awhile. This road is and remains that of socialism, it is the practice of concrete utopia. Everything that is non-illusory, realpossible about the hope-images leads to Marx, works - as always, in different ways, rationed according to the situation - as part of socialist changing of the world. The architecture of hope thus really becomes one on to man, who had previously only seen it as dream and as high, all too high pre¬ appearance, and one on to the new earth. Becoming happy was always what was sought after in the dreams of a better life, and only Marxism can initiate it. This provides fresh access to creative Marxism, even pedagogically and in terms of content, and from new premises, of a subjective and objective kind. What is thus intended needs to be broadly delineated here. On a small and large scale, tested if possible, with the will to set free what is real within it. So that by the yardstick of real possibility, What Is in real possibility, what is really still outstanding (everything else is chaff of mere opinionizing and fools’ paradise) achieves positive being. This is ultimately a great simplicity or the One Thing Needful. An encyclopaedia of hopes often contains repetitions, but never overlappings, and so far as the former is concerned, Voltaire’s statement is valid here that he would repeat himself as often as was necessary until he was understood. The statement is even more valid since the repetitions of the book ideally always occur on a new level, have therefore both learnt something in the meantime and may allow the identical thing they are aiming at to be learned anew. The direction towards the One Thing Needful was also alive in previous philosophies; how else could they have been a love of wisdom? And how else could there have been great philosophy, that is, ceaselessly and totally related to the Authentic, the Essential? Let alone materialistically great philosophy with the capability for the real depiction of what is coherently essential? With the basic pull towards explaining the world in terms of itself (and with the certain confidence of being able to explain it in these terms), towards this-worldly happiness (and with the certain confidence of finding it)? But, until Marx, the previous lovers of wisdom, even the materialist Matthew 6, 19.

i8

INTRODUCTION

ones, posited the Authentic as already ontically* existing, in fact statically closed: from the water of the simple Thales t to the In-and-For-Itself of the absolute Hegel. Time and again, it was ultimately the ceiling of Plato’s anamnesis above dialectically open Eros which kept out and, in a contem¬ plative antiquarian fashion, closed off previous philosophy, including Hegel, from the seriousness of the Front and the Novum. Thus the perspective was broken off, thus remembering defused hope. Thus hope did not in fact arise in remembering either (in the future in the past). Thus remember¬ ing did not arise in hope either (in concrete utopia which is historically mediated, but which pours forth history). Thus we appeared to have already got behind the tendency of being, that is, to have arrived behind it. Thus the real process of the world appeared to have got behind itself, to have arrived and to have been brought to a standstill. But the forming-depicting aspect of the true, of the real, is never so easily broken off, as if the process pending in the world were already decided. Only with the farewell to the closed, static concept of being does the real dimension of hope open. Instead, the world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfilment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness. However, this tendency is in flux, as one that has precisely the Novum in front of it. The Where To of the real only shows in the Novum its most basic Objective determinateness, and it appeals to man who is the arms of the Novum. Marxist knowledge means: the difficult processes of what is approaching enter into concept and practice. In the problem area of the Novum inherently lies the profusion of even whiter fields of knowledge where worldly wisdom becomes young and original again. If being is understood out of its Where From, then it is so only as an equally tendential, still unclosed Where To. The being that conditions consciousness, and the consciousness that processes being, is understood ultimately only out of that and in that from which and towards which it tends. Essential being is not Been-ness; on the contrary: the essential being of the world lies itself on the Front.

* Bloch makes a distinction between ontological and ontical. The former broadly refers to ‘being’, the latter to ‘entities’ and facts concerning them. f Thales of Miletus (c. 624-565 B.c.), the earliest of the Greek scientists, saw water as the basic material of all being.

PART ONE (Report) LITTLE DAYDREAMS

■

WE START OUT EMPTY

i

I move. From early on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.

MUCH TASTES OF MORE

But we also learn to wait. Because what a child wishes seldom comes in time. We even wait for wishing itself, until it becomes clearer. A child grasps at everything to find out what it means. Tosses everything aside again, is restlessly curious and does not know what about. But already here the freshness, the otherness lives, of which we dream. Boys destroy what they are given, they search for more, unpack the box. Nobody could name it or has ever received it. So what is ours slips away, is not yet here.

DAILY INTO THE BLUE

Later we reach out more confidently. Wish ourselves where things are named more clearly. The child wants to be a bus-conductor or a confec¬ tioner. Seeks long journeys, far away, cake every day. That seems like real living. With animals too we dream we are big. With small ones especially, they are less frightening, they run into our hands. Or can be caught in nets; distant wishing becomes active in this way. The confectioner turns into a hunter, in a strangely filled outdoors. Green and blue runs the lizard, something elusively colourful flies as a butterfly. Even the stones are alive, but do not run away, we can play with them, they join in, ‘I want 21

22

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

everything to be like that’ said a child, meaning the marble which rolled away but then waited for the child. Play is transformation, though within what is safe and returns. As he wishes, play changes the child himself, his friends, all his things into strangely familiar stock, the floor of the playroom itself becomes a forest full of wild animals or a lake on which every chair is a boat. But fear breaks out if what we are used to runs too far away or if it does not smoothly slip back into its former aspect. ‘Look, the button is a witch’, screamed a child in play and then would not touch the button even later on. It had become no more than this child had wished it to be, but it had stayed that way too long. The homely den must never venture too far into the dream. It must remain a place the lizard has not yet violated, the butterfly not yet threatened. From here what we like doing best is playing and collecting window-views, deep and brief glimpses into otherness. The colourful animal is itself a colourful window, behind which the wished-for distance lies. Soon it is no different than a stamp, which tells of foreign countries. It is like the shell in which the sea roars when we hold it close enough to our ears. The boy sallies forth, collects from everywhere what is sent his way. This may also bear witness to the things the boy must go to bed too early to see. When he is gazing at a coloured stone many of those things germinate which he later wishes for himself.

HIDING-PLACE AND BEAUTIFUL FOREIGN LANDS

4

By ourselves Here too the fun of being invisible ourselves. We seek out a corner, it protects and conceals. It feels good in a narrow space, but we know we can do what we want there. A woman relates, ‘I wished I could be under the cupboard, I wanted to live there and play with the dog.’ A man relates, ‘As boys we built ourselves a platform between the branches which could not be seen from below. When we were sitting up there, when we pulled up the ladder and cut ourselves off completely from the ground, then we felt perfectly happy.’ Our own room is prefigured here, the free life that is coming.

HIDING-PLACE AND BEAUTIFUL FOREIGN LANDS

23

At home already on our way The hidden boy is also breaking out, in a shy way. He is searching for what is far away, even though he shuts himself in, it is just that in breaking free he has girded himself round and round with walls. All the better if the hiding-place is mobile, that is, if it consists of living material. In other words, of outlawed or strange people with whom we go along, amongst whom we are not suspected. Schoolboys do not always drop everything in an effort to please their parents and teachers, but parents and teachers can be relied upon to put a damper on things. Suffering at school can be nastier than any other later form of suffering, except that of the prisoner. Hence the wish to break out, shared by the prisoner; because outside is still indistinct, it becomes a place of wonder. A woman relates, ‘As a girl I always wished that burglars would come. I wanted to show them everything, silver, cash, linen, they could take anything they wanted, even me, for their trouble.’ A man relates, ‘When I heard the bagpipes for the first time, I ran after them as I did after everything peculiar. But I did not turn back after a little while, as I usually did when other curiosities came along the street, the knife-grinder, the Salvation Army and so on, instead I followed out of the city, along the country road into the villages that I knew, into the villages that I did not know. It wasn’t only the fantastic man who drew me away, the whistling spirit enticed me which I believed lived in the bagpipes, and in the end I became this myself.’ Thus at seven or eight the narrow space expands, the strangest things take place inside it (when the ladder is pulled up). But it is really only the hiding-place which seeks to be transposed here, the boy inside it only breaks free invisibly with his friends. Carries himself off on his snorting steed, with a fluttering feather into the security of the adventure. The night is full of taverns and castles, in each one there are furs, weapons, roaring fires, men like trees, no clocks. Drawings on blotting-paper in exercise books also seem characteristic of the sprinkled pleasure in hidingplaces at this time. A spiky security is committed to paper, a house, a town, a coastal fortress bristling with cannon. There are islands offshore, they deter the enemy from sea attack; inland there are three rings of forts. They guard the road, the only one which leads to the dream fortress, and it is mined. Thus the coastal town lies, out of sight of school and home, inaccessible, with eyes that seem to slumber. And yet: the fortress was not simply drawn as being impregnable, but also as being powerful, radiant;

24

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

its effect carries beyond the edge of the paper, into the unknown. Our own life was protected and rimmed by battlements high above, but these could be climbed at any time to look out. Even later on this combination of narrowness and beautiful foreign lands does not disappear. In other words: from this time the wishful land is an island.

ESCAPE AND THE RETURN OF THE VICTOR

5

When someone dreams, they never remain rooted to the spot. They move almost at will away from the place or the state in which they find them¬ selves. Around the thirteenth year, the fellow-travelling ego is discovered. That is the reason why dreams of a better life grow so luxuriantly around this time. They stir the fermenting day, fly beyond school and home, take with them what is good for and dear to us. Are outriders of our escape and establish the first quarters for our clarifying wishes. We practise the art of talking about what we have not yet experienced. Even an average mind tells itself stories at this time, simple fables in which things go better. It spins out the stories on the way home from school or when walking with friends, and the narrator is always in the middle as in a posed picture. Almost everyone is filled with a hatred for the average at this time, even if they have not strayed too far from the nest themselves. The silly young goose wants to improve herself, the young lout sneers at his stuffy home. Girls play around with their first name, just like they do with their hairstyles, they make it more piquant than it is, and in doing so they reach the beginning of a dreamed existence that is different. Young boys aspire to a nobler life than their father might lead, to tremendous deeds. They try their luck, it tastes forbidden and makes everything new.

Putting to sea Sexual attraction is not always part of this process, at least not in an obvious way. Girls retain an acquired shyness for a long time, boys pride themselves on a certain dry coolness. Often arrogance and self-love prevent them from giving love a special place in their dreams. The right boy or the right girl do not seem to be around or only among their own sex, often they

ESCAPE AND THE RETURN OF THE VICTOR

25

are not even present in wishing. Thus the castle in the air seldom becomes a castle of pleasure at this stage, the harem and the dream-woman only come later. Infantile structures are also preserved for quite a long time in this dry fantasy; the theme of escape fulfils their loneliness. A woman relates of this time, ‘I wanted to become a painter, I dreamed myself into an oriental castle on a mountain, living alone there with my illegitimate child which I had had by a very distinguished man.’ A man, asked about his fantasies at fifteen, related the following: ‘I wanted to go to sea and imagined a unique battleship. It was called the Argo, did so many knots per hour that it was present on all the coasts of the earth almost simul¬ taneously. I was master of the Argo, with the title and rank of Prince Admiral, ruled over all emperors and kings, re-drew the map of the world with the help of my electric cannons, re-established my beloved Turkey once more within her old borders. Once a year came the night of flight, the ship left the water, landed on the highest mountain on earth. There I entertained my friends, let them see into the future through a specially placed window, worked the mysterious green ray. This ray shines shortly after sunset on the Pacific Ocean; and I knew how to operate it so that we could see all the lost empires of the past.’* These are still excessive bourgeois notions of a juvenile kind; in proletarian adolescents of this age they are much more muted, more grown-up even, and more realistic. But even if here the contents have ceased to be so fantastic, their attraction still remains like that of a fairytale, sharply transcending the given world. Clearly, such fantasies do not only emanate from the depths of the mind, but just as often from newspapers, from adventure books with their wonder¬ fully glossy pictures. From booths at the fair where chains rattle and are broken, where the song to the evening star is sung and the half-moon shines. Argo, Turkey and the like come from there, even the raw or rough colour of adventure with which these figments glow. The elemental ship image characterizes the will to depart, the dream of itinerant revenge and exotic victory. Argo (and the equivalent images that almost every individual can replace this with from their own experience) is a kind of Ark for the principal wishes of this time: for the trumping wishes. The will destroys the house in which it is bored and in which the best things are forbidden. So in timeless history it builds its mountain stronghold in the clouds or the knight’s castle in the form of a ship. * This dream is not completely original. Jason had a ship made for him called the Argo in which Athene fitted an oracular beam.

26

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

The glittering howl Only then do pleasures which have grown sweet announce themselves, foam immediately. Love lets no one alone into the dreamed castle or out on the sea. Loneliness is no longer sought after and spun out in fantasies, but is intolerable, it is the most intolerable aspect of the life that begins at seventeen. So if the right girl eludes us for too long, the girl whom we think up, think out, appears anywhere. The torment of having missed out then becomes monstrous: every party which we did not go to leaves space for us to picture wishful images, and the young adolescent believes that one of these descended to earth on the very evening he missed. Now it is too late to meet her; because the girl, even if she were to be found, would be no match for the brilliance of the image he has painted. But erotic enchantment plays a part even in felicitous encounters. It clothes the girl in its dream. The street or the town in which the loved one lives turns to gold, turns into a party. The name of the loved one shines upon the stones, slates and railings, her house always lies beneath invisible palmtrees. We are unsure of our own powers because there are too many of them and they disturb each other. So the young man is mostly pulled to and fro between extreme dejection (to the point of asking himself if he even deserves to be in the world at all) and compensating arrogance. Embarrassment and impudence are bound up together here; the adolescent who is not part of the average world or who hates it, feels he is a little God, and since the others do not take the trouble to prove his existence, he does it himself. He wants to be the first to reach the goal, wants to outdo the others; the goal can be a completely external one, it stands for an unknown goal. What smooth skin, or the good fortune to have long legs or hard muscles meant to children becomes in young girls pride in so-called gentlemen friends, in young boys the vanity of being seen with the prettiest girl in town or in the area. Feelings of uncertainty, of being unsure of oneself go deeper, while being spurned is never felt so bitterly, being chosen (room at the top) never so rapturously as in puberty. Youth itself becomes a scourge or a laurel here, there is no middle ground; beyond loneliness, which is so strenuously avoided, there is only defeat which refutes claims to validity, claims to the future, or victory, which proves them. Immaturity per se is an invitation to go one better, this is not empty as in later years, but rather vexatious, taunting to itself. Thus everything wavers and wishes to be placed, to be fixed, especially the life-light, the

ESCAPE AND THE RETURN OF THE VICTOR

27

future image of the life which youth expects. All we know for certain is that it should not contain any trivialities and that no other season except spring should count in it. The young person torments himself with the enjoyable prospect of this future, he wants to induce it all at once, even with storms, suffering, thunder and lightning, as long as it is just life, real life that has so far not yet become. And the world begins with our own youth: nothing is stranger for an adolescent than to imagine the court¬ ship of his parents, and nothing more awkward than imagining himself in age, with children now themselves having his own courtship and his own - apparently unsurpassable - spring. During this period of youth it also becomes apparent that the only thing that actually binds us and establishes friendship is the common expectation of a common future; this unites us as matter-of-factly as working together does in later years. If the common future falls away, then the living spirit of the youthful friend¬ ship (if that is all it was) disappears; this explains why nothing is flatter and more forced than seeing old schoolfriends again after many years. They have become like the teachers, like the grown-ups of the past, like everything against which we had conspired. Such reunions make it seem as if the youthful faces and dreams have not only disappeared, as is obvious, but as if they have been betrayed. But this enormous shock does make us realize how much headiness and Riitli oath,* how much mountain air swirled and still swirls above real seventeen-year-olds. But this mountain air too is full of squalls, it is swept up in the changing winds racing here and there in the most uncertain of all ages of life. Uncertain even intellectually, since only very few young people enjoy one of those inescapable talents which make a job into a vocation and so spare us the choice. So many young girls, of course, wish to go into films, almost every young man has great ideas which cannot be sold in the normal job-market. However, these are more general wishes and directions, fortunately they are not pursued for long, they lack the detail of talent. In fact even where there is the urge - more common these days - towards productive expression, towards painting, music or writing, it comes as a surprise that everything shrinks in the execution. Adolescents of this kind know the feeling of a fire burning inside them, of art being so close, but when they try to grasp its being, it becomes dry, it shrinks so much that they cannot even fill a page. Talking at this time is common and easy, writing hard, and * The legendary oath of allegiance of the first three Swiss confederates on the Riitli at the Vierwaldstattesee in 1291.

28

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

if it is produced, the fruit appears precisely to the overflowing writer himself ‘like a shrivelled plum, black and wizened’. Bettina von Arnim, who says this, and who all her life could not get beyond this adolescent feeling, thus mostly chose letters to express herself. Another form is the diary which, not without reason, is called secret or is imparted secretly. Many an adult uses jottings like these, if he has made them, and if he has kept them with faithful vanity, as a gauge to measure how low his waterlevel has sunk. Love, melancholy, embryonic images and thought-masks, everything is fished for here and remains in its initial stages. But the life-light, containing nothing stale, shines vexatiously, tauntingly to itself. So this time seems to be unhappy and blissful at the same time: the feeling of spring later contains both. But the desire for courage, for colour, breadth, height is general; the real adolescent develops from a will which in these years is always still a chivalric will. Hence the dream of adventures which are to be undergone, of beauty begging to be discovered, of greatness begging to be won. Because our own life still lies a long way ahead, all distance is made more beautiful. The wish not only impels us towards this distance, but now it propels itself into it without a hiding-place, all the more strongly the narrower our situation. Even the distance which the evening express train brings into the smallest town can suffice as a symbol, the distance of the capital, seen from the provinces. In this way a dissolutely daring, carelessly beautiful wishful image develops, without relatives, miles away from them. Inside is the expanded soul in which longing is at work, outside the dreamed image of a city which could fulfil it. One of the strongest wishes in human nature, and one which is most frequently violated, is the wish to be important, and this is further combined especially strongly with the wish for a significant environment. Gifted girls wish to run away there; Munich had this attraction around 1900, Paris for much longer. Thrilled, the student enters the big city, besides the bright lights, it is populated with sheer impatient hopes. Here he believes he has at last found the ground and background for an existence which finally suits him; the houses, the squares, the stages seem bathed in a utopian light. In the cafe, at a proud little table, the chosen few are gathered who write verses, heavenly strings await the boy who plays the double bass, fame taps at the window. It is not surprising that with the wishful image of triumph, that of trumping also returns or is included in the erotic sheen. If the parents’ home was not only narrow but also bad, then the pictured homecoming of the victor is a particularly popular and widespread dream,

MORE MATURE WISHES AND THEIR IMAGES

29

a form of satisfaction so overwhelming that it welcomes the previous misery almost as a foil. The famous actress goes back, her parents and neighbours stand timidly aside, graciously she forgives what they did to her. The down¬ trodden boy of days gone by comes back in a coach-and-four, by his side the beautiful rich girl whom he has captured as his wife; he is now no longer mis¬ understood, returning as a general or as a great artist, returning at least with a magnificence that puts them to shame. His is the princess, graceful, proud and gentle, with the perfume of high above, and around her swirls the silver travel-veil, all this is the splendour their darling has won, all this is like Nice brought home. These are particularly immature wishful dreams, but they are still to be found today in the western glossy image of these years. Desirous, aware, mindful, possessed, in control, full, these words govern the genitive and the wishes of bourgeois youth. The often invoked streak of blue in the bourgeois sky became of course a streak of blood; the stupid or stupefied had their very own strong man called Hitler. But the greyness of a young mediocrity has never shone without capricious figures; the wish itself puts them on his arm. At this time, between the March and June of life, there is no break, either love fills it up, or the prospect of a kind of stormy dignity.

MORE MATURE WISHES AND THEIR IMAGES

6

These do not have to be any less turbulent. Since wishing does not decrease later on, only what is wished for diminishes. The drive that has grown older aims closer, it knows its way around, it sets itself up in this world. But not as if it were thereby accepting the life that had simply come to it; precisely what has already become petit bourgeois is half-baked and flat. Something important is missing now just as it was then, so the dream does not stop inserting itself into the gaps. An element of defeat probably also settles in, the flight often dips. An element of vulgarity emerges which no longer has healthy red cheeks, but is hard-boiled. But the dreamer believes he has at last found out what life ought to be offering him.

The lame nags First his wish goes backwards, it makes something good again. The dream

30

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

pictures what would have happened if a silly move had been avoided, if a clever move had not been missed. Lame nags and good ideas come last; this is wit on the stairs. It torments because it has missed the opportunity, and what has been missed is thus retrospectively activated and articulated in the imagination. This imagination contains both regret and longing together, the regret makes it into a wishful dream which improves on the past. In the wishful dream of wit on the stairs, blows are landed which the dreamer did not have the courage to land at the time they were due. The wishful dream of wit on the stairs makes losses good by going back to that point in time where it was still possible to avoid them. With bitter enjoyment it savours profits which would certainly have been made if we had gone into the business at the right time. We drank the wrong brand - how wisely we choose the right one in the dream or in the subsequent account, with which we not only fool other people. Or the source of the river down which all our hopes were dashed is imagined as a tap; we turn it off retrospectively, as if everything were as good as could be. Regret is a feeling that persists in the bourgeois world, but now almost exclusively in business life, so regretful dreams mostly revolve around money that has been lost. But amidst these dreams there is still room among the petit bourgeois for the heroic pose, the one they did not strike at the right time, and the thundering phrase that just did not flash out at the time. The dream plays out what is wished for as it could have been, what is right as it should have been. All boasting is part of this, all stupid pride follows this course, and the memory that the reality was different gives way to suit the vanity of our wishes.

Night of the Long Knives Not so far from here are the various dreams that are fond of getting their own back. They are particularly delicious, revenge is sweet when merely imagined, but also shabby. Most men are too cowardly to do evil, too weak to do good; the evil that they cannot, or cannot yet do, they enjoy in advance in the dream of revenge. The petit bourgeoisie in particular has traditionally been fond of the fist clenched in the pocket; this fist characteristically thumps the wrong man, since it prefers to lash out in the direction of least resistance. Hitler rose out of the Night of the Long Knives, he was called by the masters out of the dream of this night when he became useful to them. The Nazi dream of revenge is also subjectively

MORE MATURE WISHES AND THEIR IMAGES

31

bottled up, not rebellious; it is blind, not revolutionary rage. As for the so-called iron broom, the hatred of the immoral life of the hooknoses and those at the top, middle-class virtue, as always in such cases, was here merely betraying its dearest dream. Just as, with its revenge, it does not hate exploitation but only the fact that it is not itself an exploiter, so vir¬ tue does not hate the slothful bed of the rich, but only the fact that it has not become its own and its alone. This is what the headlines have always aimed at in those papers which love to see red, the gutter-press. ‘The truth, latest news: Broilers at Wertheim’s store - The harem in the Tiergarten villa,* sensational revelations.’ But they are only revelations concerning the outrage of the bourgeois conformist himself, both regarding Wertheim raking in the shekels and regarding Jewish lechery. Hence the immediate impulse to set oneself up in place of the eliminated Wertheim, after an act of retribution which, in the supposedly detested fraud, merely replaces the subject which is practising it. The malicious and brutal aspect of this, the repulsiveness of this kind of wish, as pervasive as the smell of urine, has always characterized the mob. This mob can be bought, is absurdly dangerous, and consequently it can be blinded and used by those who have the means and who have a real vested interest in the fascist pogroms. The instigator, the essence of the Nights of the Knives was, of course, big business, but the raving petit bourgeois was the astonishing, the horribly seducible manifestation of this essence. From it emerged the terror, which is the poison in the ‘average man on the street’, as the petit bourgeois is now called in American, a poison which has nowhere near been fully excreted. His wishes for revenge are rotten and blind; God help us, when they are stirred up. Fortunately though, the mob is equally faithless; it is also quite happy to put its clenched fist back into its pocket when crime is no longer allowed a free night on the town by those at the top.

Shortly before the closing of the gate But how is the most ordinary kind of life, the quiet everyday kind, transformed through dreams? Let us leave the vengeful wishes, there are besides them also warm, harmlessly foolish and colourful dreams. In general, the little man who is not class-conscious is content just to rearrange his * A residential district of Berlin.

32

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

lot slightly. He does not change anything, but he temporarily pours out the dishwater of his previous existence which has seemed so unsatisfactory. His waking dreams remain private; sexual dreams are particular favourites, followed by business dreams, both are effervescent. Solitary walks give these images room, novels of his own composition begin to be woven, involving his ego. They are no longer young, no longer full of superman, dream-ship, Prince Admiral. But they are sufficiently adventurous to garnish his usual fried egg and chips beyond all recognition. The reticent man or the man in a mediocre marriage enjoys the pleasures of an accomphshed lover, kindled imagination serves up double or treble portions, inexhaustible powers are at his command. There are so-called joke-cards on which a naked woman appears as a balloon: weightless, totally flexible, to be used for any purpose; thus the Calypso of the deprived Babbitt* is hallucinated as unresisting in a higher sense. Usually there are several images, a mixture of free love and harem, full of trained women. In interchangeable positions and groups, some of them being defiled, others looking on: a dream forest of randy eyes and spread legs. Normally the imagined harem is stocked with those women whom the well-behaved, often also impotent lecher has failed to secure in life. But of course excess alone does not satisfy him, even that of the so luxuriantly matured wishes. Because a man is not made for love alone, so the waking dream of the bourgeois conformist also becomes practical. Younger powers must be given their head, and so in his wishes he is himself these powers, and experienced as well. There is still room for improvement in blossoming communities, so the dreaming walker plucks up speculative courage. Long ago in his dream he bought the thriving shop on the corner, expanded it, brought it up to date; long ago he became a town councillor, a man to whom many who now scarcely give him the time of day doff their hats. Long ago the shop was sold again, the great world takes him on board, as it is shown in the films, the hunting lodge in the forest, the castle by the sea, his own yacht. Everything almost as it was in puberty, only now furnished with money instead of ideals; to his ever alert but now sedate longing a group of purchasable comforts present themselves, imagined in detail, but unpossessed. In this forest there is a different ending for him than in the forest of youth; beyond the tropical sea through which the yacht is ploughing stands the beach casino where people are gambling. But the private dreams of a more mature kind evidently The typical little man, the central character in the Sinclair Lewis novel ‘Babbitt’, 1922.

MORE MATURE WISHES AND THEIR IMAGES

33

do not cease to be foolish one moment, exotic the next. Although they develop more past material than future, more that is familiar and which simply has not been allotted to the dreamer than defiant premonition. The imminent closing of the gate, both sexually and in terms of business achievements, plays its part; especially as: ‘Make way for efficiency’* is at an end anyway, at least in the world which coined this slogan, the capitalist world. The little man, the petit bourgeois, proletarianized, but without proletarian consciousness, thus dreams considerably more castles in Spain than the bourgeois man of property who knows what he has. The latter in his thoughts tends to swim along with the current of what has already been achieved, the little man, on the other hand, finds only traces around him and kicks over them. Even if only in the silence of his imagination, as long as there is no Pied Piper on hand, or as long as he does not see through the conditions of his disgruntlement. He exercises this imagination through images which shimmer towards him out of the solarium of life which he has never entered.

Invention of a new pleasure Most people in the street look as if they are thinking about something else entirely. The something else is predominantly money, but also what it could be changed into. Otherwise it would not be so easy to lure with jewellery, to attract with a beautiful figure. The flaneur would not exist, nor everyone’s persistent inclination to turn themselves into one. In this way the shopping street is also steeped in dreams, not just the more rural walk or the hustle and bustle of the suburbs. A woman stands in front of the shop-window, looking at lizard-skin shoes trimmed with chamois leather, a man goes past, looks at the woman, and so both of them have a share of the wishful land. There is enough happiness in the world, only not for me: the wish tells itself this, wherever it goes. And it thus also demonstrates, of course, that it merely wishes to break out of the world somewhat, not that it wants to change it. The employee, the petit bourgeois, of whom we are talking here, this in no way regular, but increasingly regularized social stratum, contents itself with the needs which are awoken by the window-displays dressed for it. This unites all bourgeois * ‘Freie Bahn dem Tuchtigen’. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg used a similar slogan to the Reichstag, 28th September 1916.

34

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

dreams and yet it still rations them, even in more distant excursions to the over-blue coast of the travel agent’s and beyond: so that they do not explode the given world. People with wishes of this kind live beyond their own means, but never beyond the generally existing means. If this is true of the employee, in middle age and with the until now so cloudy consciousness of the middle class, then the upper middle-class citizen whose means are sufficient certainly does not have any reason even in his wildest dreams to explode the existing world. He finds it easiest to give up youthful ideals, to apply his will solely to what is attainable. To pull his weight efficiently, standing right in the middle of gainful employment, which really is that, full of plans promising profit, but on the whole without that element which, usually with contempt, he calls utopian. Since the rich man, in contrast to the salary earner, can indulge his every wish, he has, so to speak, no definite, that is, long-cherished and thus fully developed wishes at all. And yet, although it is only the left-hand side which is studied here on menus of every kind, and not, as in the case of the employee, the right-hand side where the price is given, precisely this affluence causes a quite specific producer of more mature, now sedate wishes to appear: instead of deprivation - boredom. No speed, no luxury, no coast however blue, helps to escape it; even the excitements of gambling go stale eventually. This fog of boredom swirls in the abyss of possession, and the peak, because it is not one, does not rise above it. The wishes, which nevertheless do rise above it, are solely those of the urgently longed-for thrill, of the snobbish butterfly, of fashion and its changes, provided they are not too gaudy. Of course, fresh styles are also continually produced for the masses, so that there is a turnover (which is not yet ensured by shoddy production alone); but the incentive came first from those at the top and is older than the pleasure in turnover. The rich man, who otherwise is nothing and can do nothing, the rich man, in the rarer and rarer guise of a gentleman of leisure, sees to it that boredom is at least made interesting. Xerxes was already offering a prize for the invention of a new pleasure; in its more modern form this escape attempt turns away from mere fat capital towards snobbery. Or even towards eccentricity: a rich Englishman travelled through all the countries where pointed arches occur to photograph them. This is how bourgeois wishes end, at least those of private life, for ordinary people so that they also want to cut their slice of the available cake, without changing baker’s, as Brecht puts it in his ‘Threepenny Opera’; in the case of the rich these wishes necessarily end bizarrely, that is, increasingly boosted into increasing triviality.

WHAT IS LEFT TO WISH FOR IN OLD AGE

35

Opportunity to be friendly Even the non-bourgeois dreamer likes many things that the others have. But essentially he imagines a life without exploitation, this must be attained. He is not the limpet stuck fast, having to wait for what chance brings to it, he overhauls the given world, both in actions and in dreams. The happy existence which he anticipates lies behind smoke, behind the smoke of a powerful change. The world which then appears is likewise changed, no Babbitt has any place in it or stretches himself out comfortably into the rotten laziness, the lazy rottenness that he is. It is not that comfort itself is dubious or limited to its bourgeois form. To each his chicken in the pot and two cars in the garage, that is also a revolutionary dream, not just a French or American or ‘general human’ dream. But the values of comfortable happiness shift in the prospects of the revolutionary wishful dream, if only because happiness no longer arises out of the unhappiness of others and measures itself against it. Because our fellow man is no longer the barrier to our own freedom, but rather the means by which this freedom is truly achieved. Instead of freedom of acquisition, there shines freedom from acquisition, instead of imagined pleasures of cheating in the economic struggle, there shines the imagined victory in the proletarian class struggle. And even higher above this shines the distant peace, the distant oppor¬ tunity of being in solidarity and being friendly with all men, an opportunity for the sake of which the struggle moves in the distant goal. The turmoil in which all this still lies admittedly makes the individual non-bourgeois dreams considerably less distinct than those which need only reach into the existing window-display. No department store sends a list out to them, there is no patron who realizes these dreams from above. Instead they are characterized not only by an incomparably higher status, but also by an expectation of the unknown, a blueprint of the unrealized which the bourgeois wishful image of more mature years no longer possesses at all.

WHAT IS LEFT TO WISH FOR IN OLD AGE

7

In old age we learn to forget. Exciting wishes recede, although their images remain. They picture escape, as they once did in March: the young girl

36

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

and dangerous old age, the flashy teenager and the old fop can share a turbulent desire for new life. Nevertheless, we no longer yield so willingly to temptation. Even if the wish does not wane, the strength which thinks itself capable of fulfilling the wish does. Even if the strength does not wane, then the disappointed gift of picturing ahead does. To this extent, and often only to this extent, unrest decreases.

Wine and purse Instead the realistic fears increase, they want to be avoided. The body does not recover so quickly as it did, everything is twice the effort. Work does not go so smoothly, economic uncertainty weighs heavier than before. Needs in the form of addictions, those whose satisfaction does not bring pleasure, but whose absence causes pain, do in fact decrease. Yet instead the demand for comfort increases and to a grumpy old man everything can become uncomfortable, even what he is used to, but even more so what is new. The adolescent is at odds with his ordinary environment and declares war on it, the grown man applies his strength to it, often resulting in the loss of his dreams, of his previously better consciousness, but the elderly man, the old man, when he gets annoyed with the world, does not fight against it like the adolescent, but stands in danger of becoming peevish towards it, moaning and cantankerous. At least in those areas where the old personality turns sour, where it simply shrinks back into miserliness and selfishness. In bourgeois old age money seems more desirable than ever, both on account of the neurotic drive to cling on to things with wizened hands, for which a means has entirely become an end, and of course also on account of the mortal fear of an infirm being. Wine and purse remain for petty old age what remains to be wished for, and not always only for petty old age. Wine, women and song, this association dissolves, the bottle lasts longer. Cheers, old boy; that is why an old drinker seems nicer than an old lover.

Evocations of youth; counter-wish: harvest Even young people, indeed especially young people, wish to live for a long time. But this seldom includes the wish to be an old man. This is rarely indulged. An adolescent can imagine himself as a man, but hardly as an

WHAT IS LEFT TO WISH FOR IN OLD AGE

37

old man; the morning points to midday, not to evening. It is remarkable in itself that getting old, in so far as it relates to the loss of an earlier state which, whether rightly or wrongly, is felt to be better, is not really felt until around fifty. Does the adolescent feel no loss at leaving his childhood behind? Does the man feel none when he quits the bloom of youth, when the green shoot turns to wood? Does the child not already die in the sexually mature girl and boy, in the ego and its responsibility which now emerges? The mother feels this when the shadow of her son’s first beard tickles and pricks, the adolescent himself feels it when life ceases to be a game, when small things and hiding-places become inaccessible to his growing body. And melancholy is in fact customary during the transition into the first stage of manhood, where the good old student days vanish, embourgeoisement begins. But the caesura of old age is clearer than any earlier caesura and more brutally negative; loss itself seems to become concentrated. Virility decreases, fertility ceases entirely, the lustre disappears, the summer ends. And if the ageing man does not notice himself that he is growing old, then the others notice it, he sees the cause by the effect, no matter how young he is urged to feel. It is very instructive for most old men when a girl stands up to make room for them for the first time; this politeness certainly does not act as a plus which age has brought, it has a fatal effect. And even the old fop who usually tries to deceive himself by being superficial, the easiest gift of youth, is surprised by the realization of how short life is. Something long since past can seem as close in old age as distant mountains shortly before the rain. The realiza¬ tion is received almost with disbelief even by the dignified old man; it seems only yesterday that he was the same age as the young people around him. Doubtless therefore, the specific feeling of age which sets in around fifty, sometimes even earlier, is little prepared for by the previously experienced and yet never so sharply experienced changing stages of life, is seen with some justification as something unfamiliar. The reason lies in the unclear nature or in the unclarified nature of the benefits which old age brings, for all the brutal negative aspects which can be associated with it and ultimately are associated with it. Thus the handshake of old age is predominantly only felt to be one of farewell, that is with death at the sharp end. The latter, possible at any stage of life, but inevitable in greater age, no longer gives the ebb any prospect of experiencing a flow; and that makes the change called old age so decisive. It makes it so unmistakable in contrast to the earlier stages concealed beneath new foliage; just as if the pain of farewell which the adolescent, the man may

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

38

have felt, or equally may not have felt, on leaving childhood and youth, were retrieved here and added to one’s own autumn. Thus an old age which is not petty also manifests wishes to return to a youth which there and then, years ago, may well have been felt as something that was still deficient, namely as intangible blossom and not yet as tangible, clearly defined fruit ripe for weighing. Precisely an old man who works, who is therefore not sucking at the paws of memory in his winter cave, will at least wish back all the time he had before him at the age of twenty. He will wish back the magic of the long backgrounds which life possessed for him then and which, as the future decreases (as the years are ‘numbered’), certainly decreases too. Thus resignation, which is only halfgenuine and temporary in youth, exists as genuine and collected in normal old age. No mere farewell to a phase of life is marked here, with dispersing dreams, thwarted fulfilments, but farewell to long life itself. It nevertheless remains strange that an oppressive sense of ageing can emerge so strongly. And characteristically, it does not emerge with equal force, nor so uninhibitedly in all men, nor in all periods of history. Instead, a psychological vacuum must also accompany the organic ebb, or at least, as noted above, the unclear or unclarified nature of the benefits which old age brings. Thus to sum up we may say: to make old age pure suffering, provided it is relatively healthy and based on an efficient life, all that is necessary is a simpleton to experience it and a late bourgeois society which desperately dolls itself up to look young. There is a proverb - When the candle’s out, you can tell whether it was wax or tallow: so old age is not itself at fault if the figure which it raises out of illusion and appearance is still just an ugly one. And societies which unlike today’s declining bourgeois society did not shy away from every glimpse of the end, possessed and saw in old age a blossoming fruit, a very desirable and welcome one. So it was in the Spartan Council of Elders, in the Senate in still Republican Rome, even in the new dimension of socialist experience. A different destiny to that of declining is still always to be heard here, has remained considerably more than ‘honour and the hoary head’*; for a thriving society does not fear like a declining one its reflected image in old age, but greets there its watchmen. On the whole, old age shows, like every earlier stage of life, completely poss¬ ible, specific benefits which also compensate for the farewell to the previous stage of life. Thus growing old not only describes a desirable stretch of time in which as much as possible has been experienced and in which as much as Cf. Leviticus 19, 32.

WHAT IS LEFT TO WISH FOR IN OLD AGE

39

possible can be learnt on the way out. Growing old can also describe a wishful image according to the situation: the wishful image of commanding view, or possibly of harvest. Voltaire says in the same vein, for the ignorant old age is like the winter, for the educated it is gathering and pressing the grapes. This does not exclude youth, but includes it in the after-ripening; the wish to return to youth loses precisely its element of suffering thanks to this matured empathy with what is coming, it compensates, fulfils itself with the footing it has gained, with simplicity and meaning. In general, a person’s later years will thus contain all the more youth, in the unimitated sense, the more collection there already was to start with in his youth; the phases of life, and therefore also old age, then lose their isolated sharpness. The healthy wishful image of old age and in old age is that of thoroughly formed maturity; it feels more at home giving than taking. Evening and house To be able to be so collected means there must be no noise. A final wish permeates all the wishes of old age, an often not unquestionable one, for rest. It can be just as tormenting, even as hungry as the earlier pursuit of diversion. The sexual flaring up, which especially in women is often reminiscent of early puberty, is also dampened by it. Even the possibly productive nature, related so closely to youth, so familiar with it, needs freedom from disturbance more than before (or even more freedom from disturbance). And every old man wishes to be allowed to be exhausted by life; even if he is caught up in the hurly-burly of the world, a part of him behaves as if he were not caught up in it. Vanity is the last garment that man removes, but only a very strange old man will give this garment a lot of hard wear at the expense of silence. The image of this silence is wonderfully embellished precisely in the non-embourgeoisement of old age, the image of the country instead of the city, the elapsion where the wet clothes are drying, where things are not very busy. In more important cases, the wish for rest subdues even the regret over previous omissions and mistakes; in his old age failures in his life seemed to Goethe almost unimportant in the long run, where they had not turned out well. Happiness refused, and particularly work unfinished, still rankle, but in memory the latter at least, rightly or wrongly, almost takes shape. Jacob Grimm’s speech about old age, which he himself gave in his seventy-fifth year, throws light on all these friendly late wishes and late feelings. This speech, definitely more ‘nolens’ than ‘volens’, is sustained by the grateful

40

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

awareness that growing old is a blessing. Physical debilities of the senses are mitigated here in the general wish for rest, they even supplement its content. Even possible deafness, according to Grimm, has the advantage that superfluous talk, useless chatter can no longer interrupt us. Failing eye-sight causes many disturbing details to disappear; Grimm recalls the blind seer. And he describes the enjoyment which the solitary walk affords the old man, how feeling for nature is heightened in general. Man is alone with himself in nature, the chattering conversation of nutrient plants dies down, the world grows dark in the evening, but the water grows bright, the last drop of life is dedicated to contemplation. Past deprivation is no longer felt, past happiness is becalmed, renewed through memory, the chisel-blows of life have worked an essential shape, and what is essential can be seen by it better than ever before. Nevertheless, of course, even this kind of separation from other stages of life, emphasized by the wish for rest and a kind of strolling standstill, is different in different periods. The Biedermeier period* is long past where the old soul, even in much less pure forms than that of Jacob Grimm, repaired to its own breast and was served at the long table d’hote of memories. The late capitalist world is certainly not a Bank of Good Hope for old people. Even the winter rest of the middle class is seriously disturbed by the dwindling or the precariousness of the savings account. Only socialist society can fulfil the wishes of old age for leisure, yet even here this leisure, in a positive sense of course, is different to before, since the difference between the generations is no longer so sharply divisive. Life at the moment is much more sharply delineated politically, and it can no longer be said that old age, despite its reflectiveness, is simply reactionary, youth, despite its freshness, simply progressive. Often it is the other way round, and the wish of old age for rest, in a time where, to isolate one symptom, there are still fascist youth leagues with their heads thrown back, does not always coincide with the wish of old age to remain forever in the inertia of yesterday. It has become easier than ever for old age to burn at both ends, namely with courage and experience together, with new consciousness and with that of the known inheritance. The man who has grown old and who, sitting in the cool of evening on the bench outside his front door, turns over the pages of his spent life and nothing more - this feature of Grimm’s wishful image has gone out of circulation economically and in terms of

Period of bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century Germany from 1815 to 1848. Also an elaborate style of domestic art in this period.

THE SIGN THAT CHANGES

41

content. Still in circulation, however, is the vigorous wish, so commensurate with the wish for silence, that the empty whirl of life round about should stop. Precisely love of silence can be more remote from the capitalist scramble than a youth which mistakes the scramble for life. Here old age (for which the bourgeois world no longer has any use) has the right - to be oldfashioned. To be genteel, giving a lead, using words and casting commanding glances which are not of that day nor for that day. Embodying times in which as yet not everything was the bustle of commerce, and above all in which this bustle will cease again. This makes a striking and yet understandable connection possible for many an old man today, provided he has grown wise, with a new age, the age without the cocky, sharp, heel-clicking wolves, i.e. the socialist age. Wish and ability to be without vulgar haste, to see what is important, to forget what is unimportant: all this is authentic life in old age.

THE SIGN THAT CHANGES

8

It is a flat feeling to be disturbed. But we let ourselves be interrupted by new things remarkably easily, by unexpected things. As if no part of life were so good that it could not be abandoned at any time. Pleasure in being different abducts us, it often deceives us. But it always drives us out of what we are used to. Something new must come to take us with it. Most are attracted merely by the empty difference from what has previously been, by freshness, regardless for the moment what its contents are. Here it already brings enjoyment that something is happening, only it must not contain any misfortune for ourselves. In the lowest instance, gossip seduces us, news of other people’s quarrels. But even the newspaper lives largely from the need for the unusual, the latest news is its appeal. Nothing is therefore more uninteresting, and so undeservedly so, than a paper that is one or even several days old. Today’s paper is overrated, yesterday’s underrated, the sting of surprise has been pulled out. All these vulgar or mediocre needs presuppose boredom which is to be driven out, but at the same time set something higher in motion; this something ultimately moves towards a wished-for, liberating piece of news. Its contents are definitely not uninteresting, but they make what is new into what is expected, finally

42

LITTLE DAYDREAMS

attained, achieved. The New is greeted as a brother who has travelled from the region where the sun rises. The sensational wish is in malleable, dull souls itself dull and gullible, in strong souls capable of vision it is thorough. It wants to make sure that man is not lying crooked, that he is in tune with his place and his work. That this work does not fob him off with alms, but rather that the same old story of doing without finally comes to an end. We listen in that direction, strain to see. The will which is at work here stems from deprivation and does not disappear until the deprivation is eradicated. Thus as children we jumped up, not always in fear, when the bell rang outside. Its ringing cuts through the silent, gloomy room, especially towards evening. Perhaps now something darkly intended is coming, that which we are looking for, that which is looking for us again. Its gift transforms and improves everything; it brings a new age. The ringing of this bell remains in every ear, it is associated with every good cry from outside. With the great awakening that is there and is coming; of course expectation alone does not bring it. But if it is well attuned to the sound and what it means, the expectation does not let us ignore the sound. It will not be deceived in the long run, because the lie does not last. Any more than the more refined, that is, the almost more cunning lie which whines and slanders pharisaically can deceive us in the long run, because the socialist New is brought about by power and not by gossip, by the hard work of proving ourselves and not through back-sliding excuses. The obsession with what is better remains, even when what is better has been prevented for so long. When what is wished for arrives, it surprises us anyway.

PART TWO (Foundation)

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

WHAT GOES AHEAD AS URGING

9

Who drives on within us? We move, are warm and keen. Everything living is aroused, and first of all by itself. It breathes, as long as it exists, and stimulates us. To keep on bringing us to the boil, from below. That we are alive cannot be felt. The That which posits us as living does not itself emerge. It lies deep down, where we begin to be corporeal. This push within us is what we mean when we say, man does not live in order to live, but ‘because’ he lives. Nobody has sought out this state of urging, it has been with us ever since we have existed and in that we exist. The nature of our immediate being is empty and hence greedy, striving and hence restless. But all of this does not feel itself, in order to do so it must first go out of itself. Then it senses itself as ‘urge’, as a quite vague and indefinite urge. No living thing can ever escape from the That of urging, no matter how tired it may have become of this. This thirst constantly announces itself but does not give its name.

NAKED STRIVING AND WISHING, UNSATISFIED

io

From the bare inside something reaches forth. The urging expresses itself first as ‘striving’, craving to go anywhere. When the striving is felt, it becomes ‘longing’, the only honest state in all men. The longing itself is no less vague and general than the urge, but at least it is clearly directed outwards. It does not burrow like urging does, but roves around, though quite as utterly restless, addicted. And if it becomes obsessed with itself, the longing remains mere general addiction. Roving around blind and empty, the latter can never go to the place where it would be stilled. To achieve this the longing must first clearly drive towards something. As something definite, it ceases to strike out in all directions at once. It becomes a ‘searching’, that has and does not have what it is searching for, it becomes goal-directed driving. Its driving-towards is divided up 45

46

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

according to the something at which it is directed, thus becomes the or that individually nameable ‘drive’. This concept, undoubtedly often dulled and reified in a reactionary way, should be understood as meaning the same as ‘need’. But since the word ‘need’ does not also have the resonance of goaldirected driving, the word ‘drive’ and the concept, understood in an undull way, may be allowed to stand. The drive is always searching to fill a hollow space, a missing space in the striving and longing, to fill something lacking with an external something. This various something, above all as bread or as woman or as power and so on, in fact divides up the driving towards a goal into its several respective drives. Thus also, when the striving we feel is only general longing, then the felt drive is the particular element of the respective individual ‘passions’, ‘emotions’. This something enables the drive to decrease when it is satisfied, even to stop temporarily, in contrast to the insatiably continuing addiction. So the goal towards which the drive moves is at the same time that by which (as long as and in so far as it is to hand) it is stilled. The relation of animals to this goal is that of their respective desires, man also pictures the goal to himself. Thus man is not only capable of craving, but also of wishing. The latter is more extensive, adds more colour than craving. For ‘wishing’ eagerly looks forward to an imagined idea in which the desire causes what is its own to be pictured. Craving is certainly much older than the imagining of the something which is craved. But precisely because this craving passes over into wishing, it acquires the more or less definite idea of its something, in fact as a better something. The demand of the wish rises precisely with the idea of the better, even perfect aspect of its fulfilling something. So that it may be said, not of course of craving, but of the demand of the wish: wishing arises, if not actually out of imagined ideas, then only together with them. At the same time it is further stimulated by them to the same degree that what is pictured, pictured ahead, promises fulfil¬ ment. Thus where there is the imagined idea of something better, ultimately perhaps perfect, wishing takes place, possibly impatient, demanding wishing. The mere imagined idea thus becomes a wishful image, stamped with the cachet: this is how it should be. But here wishing, no matter how strong it is, is distinguished from actual ‘wanting’ by its passive nature which is still related to longing. In wishing there is not yet any element of work or activity, whereas all wanting is wanting to do. We can wish for the weather to be fine tomorrow, although there is not the slightest thing we can do about it. Wishes can even be entirely irrational, we can wish that X or Y were still alive; it is possibly meaningful to wish this,

MAN AS A COMPLEX OF DRIVES

47

but meaningless to want it. Therefore the wish remains even where the will can no longer change anything. The remorseful man wishes that he had not carried out a certain action, but he cannot actually want this. Even despon¬ dent, dithering, often disappointed, weak-willed men have wishes, even especially strong wishes, without these wishes making them want to do something. Furthermore, different things can be wished, one is spoilt for choice here, but only one of them can be wanted; whereas the man who wants has already shown preference, he knows what he would rather do, the choice lies behind him. Wishing can be undecided, despite the definite imagined goal to which it eagerly looks forward; conversely, wanting is necessarily active progress towards this goal, it goes outwards, has to measure itself exclusively against things given as real. And the path the wishing takes, wishing augmented and hardened by wanting, can itself be unwished for, that is, rough or bitter. And yet ultimately nothing else can be wanted except what is wished: the interested wish is the ‘driving method’, ‘drive-method’, which releases wanting, demonstrates to it what is to be wanted. Hence though there may be wishing without wanting, namely feeble, inactive wishing which exhausts itself in the imagination or is impossible, there can be no wanting that is not preceded by wishing. And wanting will be all the stronger, the more vividly the imagined goal which it has in common with wishing has been shaped into a wishful image. Wishes do nothing, but they depict and retain with particular fidelity what must be done. The girl who would like to feel radiant and sought after, the man who dreams of future deeds, wear poverty or ordinariness as a temporary skin. This does not cause the skin to be shed, but it does make people grow into it less easily. Bare desire and its drive principally hold on to what they have, but the wishing in them that pictures intends more. It remains unsatisfiable, that is, nothing that exists gives it proper satisfaction. In all of this, drive as definite striving, as a desire for something, remains alive.

MAN AS A QUITE EXTENSIVE COMPLEX OF DRIVES

n

The individual body The drive must have someone behind it. But who is the the searcher open to stimuli? Who moves in the living movement, who drives in the animal,

48

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

who wishes in man? Everything certainly does not revolve around the ego here; because a drive ‘overcomes’ us. This does not mean, however, that no individual self-enclosed being is present at all, which carries and feels the drives and takes away unpleasant feelings by satisfying them. But this being is first and foremost the living individual body; moved by stimuli, overcrowded with stimuli, it contains the drives, they are not floating generally. And when the animal eats, its own body is satisfied, nothing else.

No drive without body behind it Certainly, that which feels itself to be body is itself very general. It merely ‘finds’ itself, in a good or bad state of health; but these are not very clear findings. Whereas every drive certainly seems to appear as a Who and as if it were pulling the body behind it. As if the body did not contain the drive, but the drive contained the body and determined it, dyed it respectively, black with rage, green with envy, red with anger, like a piece of cloth. In addition there is also the long duration and apparently subject¬ less appearance which the drives possess in so-called instinct. The chicks which have just crawled out of the egg peck immediately for grains of corn, on a pre-determined path, in which they attain what is their own in the most effective manner. The path is steered by the cerebellum, though subsequently of course, according to Pavlov’s discoveries, it can be steered in changing directions by the cerebral cortex and the environment which is experienced through the latter as changed; particularly among the higher animals. But so-called instinct works falsely as if it were a self-guiding drive, and people experience it too, particularly women, if not in love, then as caring mothers. Here it really does appear as if drives existed independently and controlled the body, not to mention the soul. But even less efficient drives occasionally pretend to be independent, make people into their prey. This is so in the case of neurotics, where an isolated drivedirection, which appears almost self-sufficient, overwhelms not only the body but also the conscious ego and confronts it as something alien. This is also true in healthy people at the moment when they are ‘overpowered’ by a drive-feeling, as if the emotion were a master in itself. Then we may say: it was not the love-sick girl who went into the water out of grief, but the grief which went into the water with the love-sick girl. But never¬ theless, despite this in many ways subjectless appearance: nothing in the body allows drives to become their own vehicles. When the bird builds

MAN AS A COMPLEX OF DRIVES

49

its nest, when the swallow finds the previous year’s nest, there is still of course no ego at work in such mysterious processes, but also no independent drive which could, as it were, get by without a body. Even the drive-instinct belongs to the economy of the individual body and is only employed in so far as it belongs to it, in so far as the body does its own business, fleeing from what damages it, searching for what preserves it. This is why there are also several motivating forces, according to the circumstances, not only a single one that drives everything along. Present throughout is only the body which wants to preserve itself and therefore eats, drinks, makes love, overwhelms and thus drives alone in its drives, however varied they may be and however transformed by the appearing ego and its relationships.

The changing passion Man, in particular, always carries several drives with him. For he retains not only most of the animal ones, he also produces new ones; that is, not only his body, but also his ego is emotional. Conscious man is the most difficult of all animals to satisfy; he is - in the gratification of his wishes - the animal which makes detours. If he lacks what is necessary for life, he feels the lack like no other creature: hunger-visions surface. If he has what is necessary, then with its enjoyment new desires surface which torment him differently, but no less intensely than the previous naked privation. The rich and the sated (but not only them) possibly suffer from the strange itch of the I-Don’t-Know-What-It-Is; luxury above all (which does appear to fulfil everything) is an insatiable driver. Xerxes of¬ fered a prize for the invention of a new pleasure; not only boredom was behind this, but an unknown drive, at least the clamour for it which also wanted to be stilled. In fact, in the course of history with its changing forms, the increasing extent to which needs are satisfied, hardly one kind of drive has remained the same, and not one presents itself as finished. With the new objects, differently orientated addictions and passions awake, of which nobody had the slightest inkling yesterday. The acquisitive drive, for example, which is itself only acquired anyway, has grown to an extent which was quite alien to pre-capitalist times; even the sexual libido is in many ways thwarted by it. Rather new also is the record-drive in late capitalist society, especially the empty technological addiction to ever greater speed; this latter addiction was first created by motorized

50

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

vehicles. Above all, however, monopoly capitalism needs to intensify an abstract record-drive for the purpose of whipping people on, for otherwise the maximum profit could not be so quickly squeezed from the workers. And furthermore, the fascist death-drive has a novelty which is almost furious, compared to, say, the sentimental death-drive of the Wertherzeit,* or even the Romantic nocturnal kind; it is fired and orientated by a very different social mandate. It receives a bonus partly for the slaughter in imperialist war, partly for the pointlessness of late bourgeois existence as a whole. On the other hand, the religious drive, if one can call this phenomenon such, heavily laden as it is with superstructure, the drive upward, the erotic urge towards the changeless, receded. And where it was stimulated in a depraved or deceived way, as in various fascist seduc¬ tions, the previous upward drive hardly remained one, it sank into the soil, into Blood and Soil, t In short, we realize that man is an equally changeable and extensive complex of drives, a heap of changing, and mostly badly ordered wishes. And a permanent motivating force, a single basic drive, in so far as it does not become independent and thus hang in the air, is hardly conceivable. The principal motivating force does not even become visible in men of the same time and class, by psychoanalytically dismantling their apparently purely inner clockwork, for example. There are certainly several basic drives; now one, now another emerges more strongly, now they work together, like opposing winds around a ship, and they do not even remain similar to themselves. Man wants to make his fortune, this saying certainly does sound really old and it is also undoubtedly reliable in quite a different way from the calumny about the eternal predatory drive, but when we ask: which fortune and for what, then immediately the questions and refinements always begin. It would also be too remarkable if in class history, where new imagined goals of striving repeatedly surfaced, the goal-directed striving of the drives in fact proceeded in one direction, firmly, already complete.

Goethe’s novel ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’, published in 1774, caused a spate of suicides in imitation of its hero. t ‘Blood and Soil’ - a Nazi propaganda slogan calling for racial purity and re-occupation of allegedly German territory.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

51

VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

The sexual drive But the body must first and foremost strive towards something. After all, what is the principal motivating force of our mind and energies, as they stand in the present? As we know, Freud posits the sexual drive as the first and most powerful. Accordingly, libido governs life, it is funda¬ mental both in terms of time and content. Already the sucking of the suckling is supposedly connected with sexual pleasure and takes place largely for the sake of this pleasure. Even hunger is supposedly subject to the sex-drive, its satisfaction becomes sexual relaxation. The relationship to our own body and thereafter to external objects, and all the more so to people around us, thus appears to be always primarily sexual. But libido did not remain the sole impulse in Freud, at least not libido in the sense of positive pleasure. The later Freud stressed alongside it a tendency towards negative pleasure, namely the death-drive. The animal will is then also assigned to the death in store for it, not only to mating. Just as multicellular creatures drive towards death from the outset, and mortal decomposition already sets in in youth, in vascular contraction for example, there is also a separate drive towards the process of dying, of growing cold. It is the destructive and aggressive drive; Freud sought to identify it as a separate, though always libidinally coloured drive in sadistic desires. The din of life which emanates from love is supposed to be silenced or destroyed by this same libido. The wish for destruction expresses itself with respect to our own body in the pleasure taken in bare discipline, in the various ascetic tendencies. With respect to other bodies and objects the death-drive ex¬ presses itself as cruelty, as the undeniable frenzy of destruction now rain¬ ing down on others. That the death-drive is also libidinal, however, is supposedly indicated by the universal connection between cruelty and sexual pleasure, above all also by the emotion of Liebestod.* In any case the core is and remains sexual here, this is what motivates Freud’s man.

* ‘Love-death’. The desire to preserve the perfection of Romantic love through death, as in Wagner’s interpretation of the story of Tristan and Isolde, for example.

52

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

Ego-drive and repression Only later is this joined by another, narrower power. Of course, this narrowness, even sharpness in man is important; since it is his ego. Freud indicates time and again, not without retreating occasionally, that, apart from the sex-drive and the death-drive related to it, he has distinguished a purely human drive. For if there were only libido and nothing else, then neither conflicts nor neuroses could arise in us. Next to the ‘dark id’ of the body and its drives, however, stands the ego, according to Freud. The ego-drives stand opposite the sexual powers; indeed, the whole of psycho¬ analysis, says Freud, ‘has been built up upon the sharp division of the sexual drives from the ego-drives’. The ego affirms, denies and censors the drives, consciousness depends on it, it is the power which makes our mental life coherent. It is the power ‘which goes to sleep at night and then still operates dream censorship’. The ego-drive represses what does not fall into line with it in the sexual drives and their contents (of which more later). Thus our mental life is dualistic, in spite of the libido, which began everything here; it moves ‘between the coherent ego and the repressed material that is split off from it’. Precisely this tension leads, if it leads to contradiction, to pathogenic conflict, one between the ego-drives and the sexual drives. From the ego emanate ‘the repressions through which certain mental tendencies are excluded not only from consciousness but also from the other kinds of validity and application. This material removed by repression confronts the ego in analysis, and the analysis is given the task of eliminating the resistances to dealing with the repressed material expressed by the ego.’ The ego sees to the removal of unpleasant feelings through the fulfilment of drives, but it sees to this fulfilment in its own way, in a censoring, moralizing way and above all with respect to what can be achieved, to ‘reality’. This moralizing element, i.e. what has adapted to the practices of Freud’s bourgeois environment, is according to Freud the acquired line of the ego-drive. Thus there even occurs a penetration of the libido, hence of the pleasure principle which otherwise determines all drive-processes; the adult, or better: the bourgeois individual seen by Freud in a bourgeois way, wears down his Dionysian horns on ‘reality’, as Freud calls his bourgeois environment (the commodity world and its ideology).‘The thus educated ego has become “reasonable”, it no longer allows itself to be controlled by the pleasure principle but. follows the reality principle, which basically also wants to achieve pleasure, but pleasure

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

53

ensured by consideration of reality, even if this is postponed and diminished pleasure.’ And yet the ego, the ‘reality’ itself or the bourgeois outside world would not yet be sufficient to censor and also to sublimate the libidinal drives, if there was not also, next to and above them, the ‘super-ego’ or the ‘ego-ideal’. The super-ego is the other content of the ego; according to Freud it represents our relations to our parents; it creates all the surrogate formations of piety. The ego represents the rights of the outside world, the super-ego is however ‘the advocate of the inner world’, the ‘origin of conscience and of guilt feelings’ (understood as the tensions between the claims of conscience and the achievements of the ego); it is the ‘seed from which all religions have developed’. By representing father and mother, the super-ego observes, threatens and controls the ego as the parents had previously observed, threatened and controlled the child; thus it gives the ego a guiding image and is the source of the formation of ideals. But precisely because of the continuing effect of parental authority, a threatening element can easily exist in the super-ego; the conscience is strict, the sense of duty sombre, and also the super-ego very often retains, from its parental side, the traditions and ideals of the past. Nevertheless it skirts round the wakeful ego to get to the libido, to the common dark, to the id of the inner world united in the dark. All this is added to the original libido, at least in the later Freud; thus an extraordinary superstructure of drives exists. Admittedly one which is supposed to be largely dismantled again through analysis and which, as far as the contents of the super-ego are concerned (to which not only religion but, for example, also the postulates of changing the world belong), supposedly consists exclusively of ‘illusions’ with regard to the outside world. The inner world itself, however, which finds its advocate in the super-ego, in the final analysis always remains that of the libido or the repressed drives, of the ‘unconscious id’ in man. The id of this libido is and remains according to Freud the unconscious realm of drives that fills the body and surrounds us, seen from its animal side as well as from that of the super-ego. With the result ‘that we are “lived” by unknown, uncontrollable forces’ (in other words: by the alien domina¬ tion of the capitalist mode of production which Freud has made into the libido-id). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is ‘a tool which should make the progressive conquest of the id by the ego possible’. This merely has the effect of freeing the basic libidinal drive again, that is, it is neither diminished in acts of repression nor eclipsed in ties of the ego-ideal. Freud does indeed want to bring the repressed and unconscious material in it rationally to light, that is, to reduce the hypocritical and neurosis-creating

54

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

mustiness. But what should follow is solely daylight within the private libido and within the ‘discontent’ of a civilization* where apparently nothing more than a breath of psychoanalytical air is lacking.

Repression, complex, unconscious material and sublimation Thus the sexual drive, if not the be all and end all, still remains fundamental here. The decent girl simply refuses to admit it, the demure ego represses sexuality. But consequently the latter now begins to ferment and to urge all the more, it cannot work itself off in the existing or permitted life. Sexuality and its wishes are wrapped up by bourgeois people, as Freud found them, in a thick web of secrecy, of hypocrisy and lies. For in fact: the libido in the individual himself, not just in the cant of society, is subject to a moralizing censorship which does not allow our true being to step over the threshold of consciousness. This censorship debars, it represses the sexual impulse, it slanders it, as soon as the repression is not totally successful, it blocks itself off against knowledge of it. The libido here remains for Freud both the single basic drive and the essential content of human existence; for the ego is, as noted, only a checking authority. It inspects the baggage brought in by the libido, it forces the libido to disguise itself, if necessary to ‘sublimate’ itself into intellectual material, but the ego itself is un¬ productive. Of course, when it represses, the moralizing censorship only removes the repressed material on the surface. The unfulfilled, even hushedup wishes simply sink down in the process of repression into the more or less unconscious. There they fester, form neurotic tensions and complexes without the sufferer becoming aware of the cause. The merely forgotten, not vanished sexual affective processing continues to work in all manner of disguises. Freud was already looking to demonstrate the prompting of the libido in the psychopathology of everyday life, in slips of the tongue, bungled actions, in slips'! of the seemingly most coincidental, most insignificant kind. Drives which have not been worked off, incomplete experiences, forgotten wounds and disappointments continue to smart; they have disappeared from the consciousness of the ego, but not from the psyche. From them derive seemingly unfounded oversensitivity, over-reaction,

Bloch is alluding to Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, 1930. t ‘Fehlleistungen’. Strachey’s English translation gives the elaborate ‘parapraxes’ for this simple German compound.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

55

compulsively neurotic activity, and finally the group of emotions which has become senselessly independent and devoid of content: the complex. All ghosts or perhaps merely Freudian ghosts appear here: penis envy, the castration and Oedipus complexes and more besides. According to Freud, a sexual irritation is at the bottom of all complexes, they are fixated on an infantile, forgotten trauma. From the experiences of childhood derives the castration complex, the so-called Oedipus complex of father hatred (although Oedipus himself, as Chesterton says, was the only man who certainly had no Oedipus complex, since he did not know until the end that Laertes, whom he killed, was his father, and Jocasta, whom he married, was his mother). Supposedly, all these strangely named phenomena, even more strange because they are thundered up from below, have entirely ‘resulted from interrupted, somehow disturbed processes which had to remain unconscious’. If it were then possible to go down with consciousness into the cellar of the repressed, to make the unconscious preconditions of the neurotic symptoms conscious, then the neurotic would be cured, that is, his ego would have his id under its thumb. The person who knows the cause of his complexes cures himself; though only psychoanalysis can help him to this knowledge. Laborious probing into the depths, paying attention to seemingly incidental authorities, particularly to authorities made to seem incidental, but also to mistrust of ideologies which sound much too nice (like ‘sanctity’ of motherhood and the like) - all this detective skill is necessary to recognize the content of the neurotic symptom and to call it into the patient’s consciousness. The main road there, via regia, is supposed to be the interpretation of dreams, as is well-known, in fact the interpretation of nocturnal dreams as such, being those where the censoring ego is asleep, and the harsh external world can no longer be perceived. For Freud, every dream is the fulfilment of an unconscious wishfantasy; the task is to decipher analytically the wishfully announced material from the symbolism in which it cloaks itself in the dream. At all stages the neurotic puts up a characteristic resistance to this deciphering: the forgotten wants to remain forgotten and its symptoms to remain disguised. But it is nevertheless important to note here: the resistance to them becoming conscious lies according to Freud solely in the will of the patient, not, for example, in the material of the unconscious itself, i.e. that unconscious which Freud himself establishes and which - apart from the grotesque quality of its essentially merely libidinal contents - is essentially a product or at least a refuge of repression. Repression itself is in this sense a process ‘through which an act capable of consciousness, i.e. one which belongs

56

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

to the system of pre-consciousness, is made unconscious, i.e. pushed back into the system of unconsciousness. And likewise we call it repression, when the unconscious mental act is not permitted to enter the next pre-conscious system at all, but is turned away on the threshold by censorship.’ The libido which has been made conscious thus reveals no other door than that through which we re-enter the reeled-up Long Ago. Psychoanalysis seeks to be ab ovo subcortical memory, solitary, encapsulated, and, as it itself states, subterranean, Acherontic.* The unconscious in Freud is therefore one into which something can only be pushed back. Or which at best, as id, surrounds consciousness as if this were a closed ring: a phylogenetic inheritance all around conscious man. ‘With the help of the super-ego, the ego draws, in a way that is still obscure to us, on the experiences of prehistory stored up in the id.’ The unconscious of psychoanalysis is therefore, as we can see, never a NotYet-Conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions. Accordingly, even the process of making this unconscious conscious only clarifies What Has Been; i.e. there is nothing new in the Freudian unconscious. This became even clearer when C. G. Jung, the psychoanalytic fascist, reduced the libido and its unconscious contents entirely to the primeval. According to him, exclusively phylogenetic primeval memories or primeval fantasies exist in the unconscious, falsely designated ‘archetypes’; and all wishful images also go back into this night, only suggest prehistory. Jung even considers the night to be so colourful that consciousness pales beside it; as a spurner of the light, he devalues consciousness. In contrast, Freud does of course uphold illuminating consciousness, but one which is itself surrounded by the ring of the id, by the fixed unconsciousness of a fixed libido. Even highly productive artistic creations do not lead out of this Fixum; they are simply sublimations of the self-enclosed libido: imagination is a substitute for the fulfilment of drives. ‘The problem to be solved then’, says Freud, ‘is to displace the drive-goals, in such a way that they cannot be affected by the failure of the external world.’ The sex-drive can be refined into caritas, into devotion to the well-being of one’s neighbour, ultimately of humanity. More highly sublimated libido constitutes the pleasure the artist derives from his creation, but also the enjoyment and the (vicarious) satisfaction the non-artist derives from a work of art. The latter does after all provide pure wish-fulfilment of a shaped yet uninhibited kind: women, wedding, heroes and even the beautiful tragic corpse. It provides the man Acheron, the river of woe in Hades.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

57

in the stalls with what he lacks in life, provides cloth of gold like a beautiful dream in the night does. The viewer or the spectator works off his wishes in this way so that they no longer cause him pain. But every ‘catharsis’ of this kind remains temporary, in fact illusory : art, according to Freud, works exclusively with the illusions with which the unsatisfied libido allows itself to be fooled. How mechanistically far away Freud is here from Pavlov’s realization that precisely the higher psychological processes work, with the constant influence of the changes in the environment which they have grasped, on the emotional and organic processes; that they are in no way merely dependent, nor inherently hollow modes of substitution. In Freud, however, there remain only sexual libido, its conflict with the ego-drives, and the cellar of consciousness as a whole, from which the illusions then rise.

Power-drive, frenzy-drive, collective unconscious No matter how dully grasped the body is, the sexual drive does not live in it all the time, nor alone. After he had taken this road, Freud, as we know, was therefore contradicted by several of his pupils. These pupils were quick either to distinguish a quite different driving force or to bronze the libido. Alfred Adler, the originator of so-called individual psychology, attempted to do the first, C. G. Jung the second (with a mythical patina). Thus ‘the problem of sexuality which weighs upon us all’ was ‘eliminated at a stroke’, for which Freud criticizes them both. At any rate, it seemed it could be eliminated. In systems based on different motivating forces, it is not the complete be all and end all. On a bi-sexual foundation, Adler posits, in supreme capitalist fashion, the will to power as the basic human drive: primarily man wants to rule and overpower. He wants to get from the bottom to the top, wants to lie on top, to pass from the female line in him to the male, feel himself individually confirmed as the victor. Vanity, ambition, ‘male protest’ are accordingly the emotions in which this basic drive appears most visibly. Wounded vanity, failed ambition are the source of most neuroses. Sexuality is itself only a means to the final goal, the attainment of power: ‘Libido, sex-drive and tendency to perversion, wherever they may have derived from, also line up behind this guiding principle’ (Adler, Der nervose Charakter, 1922, p. 5). The feeling of insecurity and inferiority stands threateningly at the beginning of the development of neurosis; unfulfilled power-drive produces the inferiority complex. But as skin hardens over a wound, as a protective measure, as it

58

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were, against future damage, and as the failure of one kidney strengthens the functioning of the other, mental inferiorities are likewise overcompen¬ sated by the ego. Partly through masks and fictions: will to power then becomes will to appearance; partly also, however, through higher achieve¬ ments: will to power then recoups its losses, possibly in a beautiful fantasy world. Though we do not see where it takes its material from here; for the will to power, in itself necessarily bare, cannot of course be sublimated as regards content. Nevertheless, goal-setting remains essential in this will, precisely in accordance with the desire to be out in front; it takes the place of mere innate drivenness from below, i.e. from the Freudian sexual libido. The individual person builds himself up by means of a guiding image or even just by means of play-acting and fiction: ‘The insecurity which is felt to be embarrassing is reduced to its smallest proportions and then reversed into its extreme opposite, into its contradiction which as a fictional goal is made into the guiding point of all wishes, fantasies and endeavours.’ In this way the person forms - nothing other than the individual person appears in this individual psychology - his character: ‘So as not to miss the path to the summit, to make it perfectly safe, he draws constantly effective guidelines in the form of character traits in the broad chaotic fields of his soul.’ Funda¬ mentally, everything personal is thus made and cultivated from the outset in Adler through a largely unconscious but no longer in any way naive purposive will. Thus, fundamentally, the causa finalis rules, the biological factor is subjugated to the capitalistically interested goal which is geared to the safeguarding of the personality, to raising the feeling of personality. Because Adler therefore drives sex out of the libido and inserts individual power, his definition of drives takes the ever steeper capitalist path from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and reflects this path ideologically and psychoanalytically. Freud’s concept of libido bordered on the ‘will to life’ in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Schopenhauer in fact described the sexual organs as ‘the focal points of the will’. Adler’s ‘will to power’ conversely coincides verbally, and partly also in terms of content with Nietzsche’s definition of the basic drive from his last period; in this respect Nietzsche has triumphed over Schopenhauer here, that is to say, the imperialist elbow has triumphed over the gentlemanly pleasure-displeasure body in psychoanalysis. The competitive struggle which hardly leaves any time for sexual worries stresses industriousness rather than randiness; the hectic day of the businessman thus eclipses the hectic night of the rake and his libido. But even that did not last, for fewer and fewer people were attracted by the day which had become inhospitable. The petit bourgeois’ wish grew

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BASIC HUMAN DRIVE

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ever stronger to allow himself to lapse back into irresponsible, but also more or less wild obscurity. Above all the path to the so-called heights lost some of its interest and prospects, in exact proportion to the decline of free enterprise, as a result of monopoly capitalism. The path became more attractive which led into the so-called depths, in which the eyes roll instead of aiming at a goal. C. G. Jung, the fascistically frothing psychoanalyst, consequently posited the frenzy-drive in place of the powerdrive. Just as sexuality is only part of this Dionysian general libido, so also is the will to power, in fact the latter is completely transformed into battle-frenzy, into a stupor which in no way strives towards individual goals. In Jung, libido thus becomes an archaically undivided primeval unity of all drives, or ‘Eros’ per se: consequently it extends from eating to the Last Supper, from coitus to unio mystica, from the frothing mouth of the shaman, even the berserker, to the rapture of Fra Angelico. Even here, therefore, Nietzsche triumphs over Schopenhauer, but he triumphs as the affirmation of a mescalin Dionysus over the negation of the will to life. As a result, the unconscious aspect of this mystified libido is also not contested and there is no attempt to resolve it into current consciousness, as in Freud. Rather the neurosis, particularly that of modem, all too civilized and conscious man, derives according to Jung precisely from the fact that men have emerged too far out of what is unconsciously growing, outside the world of ‘elemental feel-thinking’. Here Jung borders not only on the fascist version of Dionysus, but also partly on the vitalistic philosophy of Bergson. Bergson had already, though still in a secessionist-liberal* way, played off intuition against reason, creative unrest against closed order and rigid geometry. But far more so than with Bergson’s ‘elan vital’, the fascist Jung borders on the Romantic reactionary distortions which Bergson’s vitalism underwent; as in sentimental penis-poets like D. H. Lawrence, in complete Tarzan philosophers like Ludwig Klages. Bergson’s elan vital was still directed forwards; it corresponded to the ‘Art Nouveau’ or ‘Secessionism’ of the Nineties, it contained watchwords of freedom, none of regressive enslavement. D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, and Jung along with him, sings the wildernesses of the elemental age of love, which to his misfortune man has emerged from; he seeks the nocturnal moon in the flesh, the unconscious sun in the blood. And Klages blows in a more abstract way on the same bull-horn; he does not only hark back * Bloch has in mind here the artistic secessions in the last decade of the nineteenth century in Munich (1892), Vienna (1897) and Berlin (1899).

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ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

like the earlier Romantics to the Middle Ages, but to the diluvium, to precisely where Jung’s impersonal, pandemonic libido lives. There are of course egos and individuals, Jung teaches, but they do not go deep in the soul; the personality itself is only a mask or a socially played role. What works in the personality and as such is instead supposed to be vital pressure, from much deeper, much older layers, from the magical collective layers of the race, for example. The individual person is collective on this ground, and leads back to it again: ‘Since the individual is not only a single being, but also assumes collective relationships to his existence, the process of individuation therefore also leads not into isolation, but into a more intensive and more general collective context’ (Jung, Psychologische Typen, 1921, p. 637). Contest and free competition, which in Adler still spurred people on to outstrip each other and to keener and keener individual psychology, are submerged here into the ‘folk community’ and into ‘psychosynthesis’, this means in fact: into archaic collective regression. Impersonally, in fact inhumanly unconscious material opens up, a long way behind every individual experience, if not behind the archaic traces of the mere memory of humanity. Accordingly, primal memories are supposed to be active from the time of our animal forefathers, i.e. a long way behind the diluvium; Jung appropriates the concept of the ‘engram’ for this, which Semon introduced into biology, the concept of a memory of the whole of organic matter and its memory traces. They are incorporated in libido as a primal animal plan, but they also keep the unconscious per se in the archaic primal dimension of What Has Been. Thus psychosynthesis does not disperse into day and into external pieces, but ‘reflects’ and takes the neurotically or otherwise given symbol back into its ancestral night: ‘Just as analysis (the causal reductive process) divides the symbol into its components, the synthetic process condenses the symbol into a general and comprehensible expression.’ Freud’s unconscious, despite phylogenetic archaic elements which he no doubt believed he saw and which in his school have been ‘excavated’ down to the primal memories of the first land animals - Freud’s unconscious was therefore largely individual, that is, filled with individually acquired repressions and with repressions from the recent past of a modem individual. Jung’s unconscious on the other hand is entirely general, primeval and collective, it purports to be ‘the five-hundred-thousand-year-old shaft beneath the few thousand years of civilization’, particularly beneath the few years of individual life. In this basic ground there is not only nothing new, but what it contains is decidedly primeval; everything new is ipso facto without value, in fact hostile to value; according to Jung and Klages,

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the only thing that is new today is the destruction of instinct, the under¬ mining of the ancient basic ground of the imagination by the intellect. Even neurotic conflict is the suffering caused by intellect to this basic ground of the drives and of the imagination; or as Lawrence said: men have lost the moon in their flesh, the sun in their blood. Thus the neurotic must not be completely removed from the unconscious material which he still has, rather what is necessary is guidance back to the collective unconscious, to the ‘age-old forces of life’. Psychosynthesis - fleeing the present, hating the future, searching for primeval time - thus becomes the same as ‘religion’ in the etymological sense of the word: namely re-ligio, connecting back. And in fact there appears to be no difference between the frothing mouth of the shaman and Meister Eckhart, in true night-tolerance; indeed, the shaman is better. Then the most rampant superstition ranks more than ever above enlightenment; since, of course, Jung’s collective unconscious flows thicker in witch-crazes than in pure reason.

‘Eros’ and the archetypes It comes to this, among other things, when the conscious ego is taken away from the body. When the libido is driven completely into the dark, into the unconscious as a goal. In Freud the sick person was only reminded of the unconscious so that he could free himself from it. In C. G. Jung, however, he is reminded of it so that he plunges headlong into the un¬ conscious, into layers lying deeper and deeper, lying deeper and deeper in the past. Libido becomes archaic; blood and soil, Neanderthal man and Tertiary period leap out simultaneously to confront us. Gottfried Benn, the disciple of Jung and Klages, gave this an equally psychosynthetic and lyrical expression: ‘We carry the early peoples in our souls, and when the late Ratio loses its hold, in dream and intoxication, they rise up with their rites, their pre-logical way of thinking, and dispense an hour of mystical participation. When the logical superstructure dissolves and the cortex, tired of the onslaught of the pre-lunar stock, opens the eternally contested border of consciousness, it is then that the old, the unconscious appears in the magic ego-transformation and identification, in the earlier experience of being everywhere and eternal.’ Jung drove the libido harder and harder towards these archaic connections, at the same time he grasped these beginnings so nebulously and generally that the whole Irratio of those times, quite regardless of what it says, can be accommodated interchangeably.

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

62

This really is the night in which all cows are grey, the night of that immeasurably extended libido, collectivized in the idea of the bosom of nature, which is now also called world soul. Eros, Plato, Indian theosophy, alchemical and astrological imagery, Plotinus or what C. G. Jung imagines by this, swirl around each other, all united in the ‘pre-lunar’ libido: ‘As far as the psychological aspect of this concept is concerned, I remind the reader here of the cosmogonic significance of Eros in Plato and in Hesiod, as well as the orphic figure of Phanes, the “revealer”, the first to come into being, the father of Eros.. .The orphic significance of Phanes matches that of the Indian Karma, the love-god who is also a cosmogonic principle’ (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1925, p. 127). Jung adds, across huge gulfs, as if, because it sounds so cosmic, it were the same thing: ‘In the neo-platonist Plotinus the world soul is the energy of the intellect.’ In this way the libido in Jung opens up like a sack of undigested, atavistic secrets, or rather abracadabras, in fact this sack, in Jung’s own words, drags ‘an invisible dinosaur tail behind it; carefully separated, it becomes the saviour serpent of the mystery’ (Uber die Archetypen des kollektiven BewuBtseins, 1935, p. 227). For accordingly, diluvium remains the closest thing to Eros, who began everything, and Eros strives to get back to it, along pre-logical lines, away from consciousness. The anatomical location of this libido is the ancient sympathetic nerve, not the cerebro-spinal system; its organon, already itself semi-insufficient, all too enlightened, remains mythology. The mother bond, for example, is according to Jung not to the individual mother, but to an ancient general mother image. It is the bond with Gaia or Cybele, with that archaic beingness (Been-ness), which is also supposed to be behind Astarte, Isis, and Mary. The occupation* of libido thus subsequently becomes ‘prototypal’ per se here, the ‘archetypes of the Earth Mother’ shine and triumph through every individual mother. Archetype in general, Levy-Bruhl’s ‘representation collective’, is the cue with which Jung’s libido brings on its collective unconscious. Thereafter, the unconscious, and only this, is universally populated by archetypes: snake, kitchen, fire, pot on the fire, deep waters, Mother Earth, the old wise man, are a few examples of it. This prototypical material is supposed to be highly inflammable, especially for a man of today, that is, one who is

a

mixture

of

myths:

he

who

speaks

in

archetypes,

speaks

‘Besetzung’. In Strachey’s English translation of Freud this has been translated by the over¬ complicated ‘cathexis’. For a discussion of the misrepresentation of Freud in English translation, see Bruno Bettelheim’s ‘Freud and Man’s Soul’, 1983.

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63

with a thousand tongues, and this, according to Jung, simply because the creature of intellect is mediated with the drive-image life of the primeval man-animal, with the enormous resonance of blood and soil. Collective unconscious is, however, not only the location of this kind of health, according to Jung it also contains all the basic forms of human imagina¬ tion: all better or more beautiful worlds that have ever been dreamt of are racial soul, archetypal time. Thus the mandate to strive from the light into the darkness was followed here in such stupefying fashion. It is only possible to run capitalist business if the consciousness of its victims is stupefied in their free time. Conse¬ quently, Jung generalized and archaized Freud’s unconscious right down the line; it is not supposed to be resolved rationally. No sublimation takes place here either (which, according to Freud, does at least lead to culture); Freud’s pupil Jung dissociated himself also on this point from ‘Jewish psychology’ when the stars were propitious. The ‘sacred dark primeval night’, complete with bloody visions and a veritable orgy of images, replaces sublimation; this force is already in good order, it is in fact the only thing that lives in good order. Jung did stumble upon a not unimportant (as we shall see) imaginative stock here, upon that of archetypes. But just as he took his concept of them from Romanticism, he also failed to extricate it from unstructured Romantic dilettantism. Prototyping is only suitable for so-called psychosynthesis lock, stock and barrel, and magical wishywashyness (commanded by monopoly capitalism) is useful for its purposes. The rapport of this Panic libido with German fascism is obvious; the consciousness of the C. G. Jung somnambulist is in no way suspended here. To fascism also, hatred of intelligence is, as Jung actually says ‘the only means of compensating for the damages of today’s society’. Fascism too needs the death-cult of a dolled-up primeval age to obstruct the future, to establish barbarism and to block revolution. Given all this, the basic drive becomes a drive towards that basic ground where Dionysus only wants to be called Moloch. A basic ground of regressio is praised as medicine and morality, a ground from which everything human has again become estranged. Thus Freud, as we said, who did at least want to bring liberal enlightenment, and the fascistic mystifier Jung, present extensive contradic¬ tions in their common ‘depth psychology’ (as it modestly calls itself): the liberal wants to make repressed material conscious, the reactionary wants to connect conscious material back with the repressed, to push it back ever deeper into the unconscious. In Freud the unconscious is combated and, as far as it is individually acquired, kept in the orbit of the individual.

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In Jung the unconscious is welcomed and completely settled in the archaiccollective, and is also contemplated with limitless tolerance towards everything that swirls around in it as fog, numen or taboo. But neither must we forget: Freud the teacher is on the same plane as his perverted pupil on the crucial point: both understand the unconscious solely as something past in historical development, as something that has sunk down into the cellar and only exists there. They both recognize, even if the regression has an extremely different nature and extension, only an unconscious that moves backwards or underneath the already existing consciousness; they in fact recognize no pre-consciousness of a New. And, so far as the drive-theory under discussion here is concerned, the whole psychoanalytical school is connected in that it emphasizes solely spicy drives, and moreover lifts them in a conceptually mythical way out of the living body. In this way an idolized libido arises, or will to power or primeval Dionysus, and more significantly these idols are made absolute. Just as that which has been made absolute is lifted out of the living body, which after all only wants to preserve itself and that is all, so too in Freud and Adler, and especially in Jung, it is never discussed as a variable of socio¬ economic conditions. But if basic drives are to be distinguished at all, they will vary widely in material terms in men according to individual classes and epochs, and consequently in terms of intention or as drive-direction. And most importantly: the respective psychoanalytical basic drives that are emphasized are not basic drives at all in the strict sense, they are too partial. They do not break through so unequivocally as say - hunger, the drive that is always left out of psychoanalytical theory; they are not such final authorities as the simple drive to keep oneself alive. This drive is the selfpreservation drive, it alone might be so fundamental - no matter what changes occur - as to set all the other drives in motion in the first place.

HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES

65

THE HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES

13

VARIOUS LOCATIONS OF SELF-INTEREST FILLED AND EXPECTANT EMOTIONS

The urgent need Very little, all too little has been said so far about hunger. Although this goad also looks very primal or primeval. Because a man dies without nourishment, whereas we can live a little while longer without the pleasures of love-making. It is all the more possible to live without satisfying our power-drive, all the more possible without returning into the unconscious of our five-hundred-thousand-year-old forefathers. But the unemployed person on the verge of collapse, who has not eaten for days, has really been led to the oldest needy place of our existence and makes it visible. In any case, sympathy with the starving is the only widespread sympathy there is, in fact the only one that is widely possible. The girl, or especially the man, who is longing for love, these do not arouse sympathy, whereas the cry of hunger is probably the strongest single cry that can be directly presented. We believe the particular misfortune of the starving man; even the freezing, even the sick, not to mention the love-sick, seem to be in luxury by comparison. Even the most hard-hearted housewife will possibly forget her vexed stinginess when the beggar eats the soup she offers. Already in this ordinary sympathy, deprivation and its wishes are undoubtedly clear here. The stomach is the first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise, its drive is so unavoidable that it cannot even be repressed for long.

Most reliable basic drive: self-preservation But no matter how loud hunger bellows, it is seldom mentioned by the doctors here. This omission shows that it is always only the better class of sufferers who have been and are treated psychoanalytically. The problem of finding nourishment was the most groundless of worries for Freud and his visitors. The psychoanalytical doctor and above all his patient come from a middle class which until recently had to worry little about its

66

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

stomach. When Freud’s Vienna became less carefree though, there was a psychoanalytical advice bureau for attempted suicides, where there was also the opportunity to get to know the drives beneath the libido. Because over ninety per cent of all suicides occur out of economic deprivation and only the rest out of love-sickness (which is incidentally unrepressed). However, even in bourgeois declasse Vienna, the notice hung on the wall of the psychological advice bureau: ‘Economic and social questions cannot be treated here.’ Understandably, little could be thus discovered about the inner life of the attempted suicide, and just as little was done to remove the commonest complex of all, the one which Franziska Reventlov so unmedically called the money complex. The goad of hunger is just as excluded from psychoanalysis as the libido was from the cant of the salons. This is the class-based limitation of psychoanalytical research into basic drives; there is also a national limitation. Perhaps not as regards libido, but certainly concerning moral ego-censorship and consequently repression. A characteristic difference exists here between the middle classes of different countries, especially between France and Germany. If a bachelor in Paris does not take a girl to his hotel room at least once a week, or if he does not stop out one night, the manager begins to get worried about the bill: the tenant does not seem to be normal sexually, and so it may be assumed that he may not pay the rent either. The French bourgeois thus has a smaller reserve of cant than the average German, let alone the average Englishman; consequently he shows less sexual stuffiness, fewer libidinal repression complexes. And in the proletariat neither cant, nor above all the libido take up so much room as Viennese psychoanalysis assumed ab origine. Hunger and troubles constrict libido in the lower class; there are fewer noble sufferings here, and they have a more tangible cause with a less sophisticated name. The neurotic conflicts of the proletariat do not unfortunately consist of such well-heeled material as Freud’s ‘fixation of the libido on particular erogenous zones’ or Adler’s ‘badly fitting character mask’ or Jung’s ‘imperfect regression to primeval times’; and the fear of losing one’s job is hardly a castration complex. Of course, psychoanalysis cannot help but take notice of hunger and thirst occasionally, likewise of the interest in self-preservation; but, strangely, the self-preservation drive is not assigned by Freud to the stomach and the body-system in general, in which it is deeply anchored, but to the group of late ego-drives, the same group also responsible for moral censorship. Thus it looks like a late arrival, of which nothing is said in the advice bureau, like an acte accessoire compared to all-driving Eros. Obviously, however, there is

HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES

67

no erotic conception of history to replace the economic one, no explanation of the world in terms of libido and its distortions, rather than in terms of the economy and its superstructure. Here too then we should ultimately stick with the real expression of the matter: with economic interest, not the only, but the fundamental interest. The self-preservation which manifests itself within this interest is the soundest among the many basic drives and, despite all temporal, class-based modifications which it is also subject to, surely the most universal. Therefore it can be said, despite all reservations and the stated aversion to making things absolute: self-preservation - with hunger as its most obvious expression - is the only basic drive among the several which consistently deserves this name, it is the last instance of the drive and the one most concretely related to the bearer. Even the idealist Schiller had to teach that the world maintained its push and shove ‘through hunger and through love’; and furthermore he puts hunger in first place and love in second. Such a precedence was still possible at that time, though without any real consequences, in the rising bourgeoisie; in the late bourgeoisie, to which Freud’s psychoanalysis also belongs, hunger was deleted. Or it became a subspecies of the libido, its ‘oral phase’, as it were; subsequently, self-preservation does not occur as an original drive at all. ‘Suum esse conservare’, to preserve one’s being, that is and remains however, according to Spinoza’s unerring definition, the ‘appetitus’ of all beings. Even if capitalist competitive economy has made it individual beyond all measure, it still runs, however modified, remorselessly through all societies.

Historical change of the drives, even of the self-preservation drive Just as no drive remains rigid, neither does what bears it. Nothing at all is fixed once and for all here, at the beginning for instance, but rather precisely our self is not given to us in advance. Since the passions are subject to historical change, and new ones arise with newly set goals, the subjec¬ tive hearth on which they are all cooking also changes. Nor is there an ‘original’ drive, nor a ‘primal man’ or even an ‘old Adam’ either. The supposed ‘nature of man’, in the sense rigid research into basic drives understands it, has been cross-bred and broken up hundreds of times in

68

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

the course of history. Among cultivated plants and breeding animals an original variety may have been preserved because they are brought together in an external and artificial way in the breeding process, but this does not happen among men. Certainly, among cultivated plants and breeding animals there is still the simple dog-rose which was ennobled into the luxury roses, and the wood-pigeon from which all our tame pigeons stem, to which they could possibly revert. Whereas historical man, even if he becomes wild, never again becomes primal man from whom the various historical domesticated varieties emanated. He becomes a decadent bar¬ barian with a well-known, historically ordered psychopathology of drives; he becomes a bit of Bluebeard or Nero or Caligula or Hitler, but not a Neanderthal man from the ‘healthy diluvium’. Even a great number of so-called primitives today are, as we know, nothing of the sort, they are not the oldest human creatures. Rather, they represent the waste products of great cultures; they are not old physis, but have long since become new physis, by virtue of inheriting historically acquired qualities. The ‘heathen’ whom a missionary baptizes, the ‘old Adam’ whom the Christian casts off, is himself again the ‘Christ’ of an earlier practice and religion, that is, of an earlier radical change of the human creature. Therefore, the so-called man of primal drives is not to be discovered beneath historical and modern man, and, scientifically speaking, does not exist. What we call by this name is either (in Freud) the bourgeois man of drives, distorted and buried under the cant of the Victorian century, or he is even (in Jung) a fascist phantasmagoria, corked up in mythological bottles. Pvesearch into basic drives more than any other kind reflects the characteristic drive of its times, which is why its findings have always turned out to be so different. Rousseau’s ‘natural man’ was Arcadian and rational, Nietzsche’s ‘natural man’, on the other hand, was Dionysian and irrational; i.e. the one fulfilled the wishes of the Enlightenment, the other the wishes of Imperialism (and simultaneously of the ‘anti-capitalist longing’ smouldering amongst the bourgeois). Correspondingly, the historical location of ‘the human creature’, as characterized by Freud, can also be precisely determined: this libidoman lives - together with his dreamed wish-fulfilments - in the bourgeois world a few decades before and a few decades after 1900 (the key year of the secessionist ‘liberation of the flesh from the spirit’). The way of perceiving sex, and consequently the excitability of the libido is always variant in every society and in every layer of that society. Even for hunger there is no ‘natural’ drive structure, for the simple reason that the kind

HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES

69

of perception assigned to it, and consequently the stimulus-world, is also historically variable. Even this is no longer a biologically maintained basic direction in man, no longer one which remains rooted in the fixed instinct of searching for nourishment down firmly established paths. Rather, it interacts as socially developed and guided need with the other social, and therefore historically varying needs which it underlies and with which, for this very reason, it is transformed and causes transformation - the more, and the more sophisticatedly, further and further layers are added to the appetite. In short, all definitions of basic drives only flourish in the soil of their own time and are limited to that time. For this simple reason they cannot be made absolute, even less separated from the economic being of mankind in each age. Libido (which is confined in animals to the mating season), power-drive (which sets in at the earliest with the division into classes) appear secondary in contrast, but incidentally all have hunger, appetite within them. The latter’s need to be satisfied is the oil in the lamp of history, but even this primary need looks different according to the changing ways in which needs are satisfied. Economic interest forms the final instance in the historically existing framework of drives, but even this, precisely this once again, as we know, has its changing historical forms, the changes in the mode of production and exchange. Indeed, even man’s self, which wants to preserve itself, which reproduces itself through the intake of nourishment, which is co-produced by the respective form of economy and relation to nature, is itself the historically most variable entity. Namely one that - despite its most reliable basic drive: hunger, which relatively remains the most general - must continually run throughout history, so that through work it is and becomes. History is, as possible gaining of man, the metamorphosis of man precisely also in view of our core, of the self which is only developing. Not confined to the selfish system, not to this capitalist phase of egotism, but existing before it, and all the more so after it, self-preservation, human preservation in no way seeks the conservation of that which has already been drawn and allotted to the self. Thus self-preservation ultimately means the appetite to hold ready more appropriate and more authentic states for our unfolding self, unfolding only in and as solidarity. If these states approach, then selfencountering prepares itself in them; and self-encountering begins, highly disconcerted, in all phenomena and works broaching a final state. But our self always remains, with its hunger and the variable extensions of this hunger, still open, moved, extending itself.

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ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

Mental feelings and state of self, appetite of the expectant emotions, especially of hope Taking hunger as our starting point again, not merely the immediate drives come from here. Rather they also originate from it as ‘felt’ drives, as the drive-feelings in which craving or loathing become intensely aware of them¬ selves. These drives which drive not only directly but also as feeling are the mental feelings or emotions; if the whole man throws himself into a single emotion, then this becomes a passion. However, a quite special juice flows through all mental feelings, it comes from the heart, a blood which is also psychological.* And just as in every emotion, in contrast to sensation and imagination, there is an inner temperature, this temperature also senses itself. Thus emotions are distinguished from sensations and imaginations, not least because they proceed, in that they become closely aware of their process as a still semi-immediate feeling of self. They can in fact proceed in vaguely objective terms in this ‘state-based’ self-awareness, before a distinct external object even appears to which the feeling mind relates. This happens not only in the diffuse and undecided state called ‘state-of-being’, and more¬ over, less immediately, ‘mood’, (of which more later), but also in the more decided state, in those mental feelings at least which belong from early on to organic ‘dispositions’. Thus there is in young people and in erotic person¬ alities throughout their lives a kind of intransitive mental feeling of being-in-love, which its objects only enter retrospectively; they were not given narcissistically in advance to this being-in-love either, that is, in their own body. Thus there is - not as a mental feeling, but rather as a state of mind - a light-heartedness of character, even hope; it certainly does not only appear when it knows clearly what it is hoping for. Thus we speak or used to speak of a sanguine (or conversely, of a melancholic) ‘temperament’, raising the whole organic ‘disposition’ to a state of mind. This temperament can extend far beyond the mere state of mind into intransitive mental feelings, with absolutely no, or very weakly ‘founding’, imaginative contents. Of course, the more sensation contents and imagina¬ tive contents are added to this, the more clearly these intransitive processes will also become related to objects and transitive: just as vague craving passes over into wishes with wishful contents by imagining its something, so the emotional world is now all the more governed by love of something, Cf. Mephistopheles in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I, 1740: ‘Blood is a very special juice’.

HISTORICAL LIMITATION OF ALL BASIC DRIVES

71

hope for something, pleasure in something. In any case there would be no loathings or cravings at all without the external something that evokes them; only in fact: this external something must not be clear from the very beginning. But the emotions do not remain confined to the mere experiencing of their experience, even with the idealistic interpretation that their content concretely emerges only as ‘substance’ and not also as a clearly stimulative external object. But the difference to imaginative ideas and thoughts is nevertheless also indelible within the process of the emotions becoming transitive. The difference is characterized by the nature of the emotional intending, which is still occurring especially within itself and is still semi-immediately bent back upon itself. Even in imagining and thinking, there is an act of intending, it was separated by Franz Brentano, though here in an impossibly exaggerated idealistic way, then by Husserl from the ‘intended object’. But this act is not in fact imagined or thought to itself in imagining and thinking, rather it must first be laboriously made accessible to ‘inner perception’. Whereas with the emotions, a retrospec¬ tive analysis in Brentano’s sense, a liberation of the ‘act psychology’ from the ‘content psychology’, is not necessary first at all: the emotions are given to themselves as intentional acts in the form of states. And they are given to themselves in the form of states, intensively, because they are chiefly moved by the striving, the drive, the intending, which underlies all intentional acts, even the imagining and thinking-judging kind. ‘Interest’ ultimately underlies them and is the thing which really touches man most closely. Like the basic emotion of hunger, which primarily burrows into itself, all emotions are therefore primarily states of self; and precisely as these states of self, they are the most active intentions. But, because they are concerned with themselves, the life of the emotions is not only a most closely intensive, eminently intending into itself, it is also the mode of being of what Kierkegaard once called existential. In other words: only the ‘feeling mind’, as the essence of the mental feelings, has become an ‘existential’ concept, one of ‘affectedness’, not the theoretical-objective ‘intellect’. Thus, not without reason, so-called existential thinking, which has putrefied into nothingness today, began in Augustine with his highly emotional ‘Confessions’; even the becoming conscious of consciousness emerged here in the self-reflection of a man of intensive will-power. And, not without reason, Kierkegaard played off his ‘Understanding-OneselfIn-Existence’ as an experiential phenomenon of moral and religious emotions against Hegel’s objective ‘abstractions’. And finally, not without reason, a kind of existere, which has become blood-curdling and also hesitant,

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descends from here as far as Heidegger’s animal, petit-bourgeois experiential phenomenology, as far as his ‘basic state of mind’: anxiety, and the care that is attached to it; and these ‘existential modi’ are even supposed to provide especially ‘fundamental’ revelations, concerning existing itself in fact. All this is ultimately putrefied subjectivism, but even petit-bourgeois, reactionary existentialism at least casts an affinitive disreputable glance at the emotions of dying out. However, the only thing that is relevant here, instead of this conscious obscurantism, is the original, the nevertheless basically honest Kierkegaard with his playing off of emotionalized subject¬ thinking against the merely object-based kind. And the reverse check might be that the whole of object-based thinking necessarily turns away from the emotions as an organ of knowledge. ‘The whole nature of the intellect’, says Descartes in the ‘Meditations’, ‘consists in the fact that it thinks’; thus in Descartes, no theory emerges, even from his theory of the emotions, which does not have the merely thinking intellect as its author. And Spinoza, who was so inclined towards the extensively object-based, when he introduced a definition of the emotions into his marble hall (Ethics, Book 3), defined them not in the form of states, but essentially with regard to their imagined goals or ‘ideas’. Spinoza does of course emphasize that only emotions determine human wanting, but they themselves are only determined according to the form of their objects. Descartes and Spinoza therefore, as rational objective thinkers, also had to eliminate the emotions methodically; as Dilthey notes, this time not wholly inaccurately, they both necessarily include ‘observations from outside, with relationships which are not given in any inner perception’ in their theory of the emotions. So unswervingly is every ‘Understanding-Oneself-In-Existence’ connected with emotional closeness, and every pure observation of objects with turning away from the emotions. Therefore we may say: where philosophy merely clings to the emotions, everything that comes out of this is only to be regarded as ‘world of idle chatter’, in Kierkegaard’s sense; but where philosophizing clings purely to cogitatio, everything that aims in the emotional sphere cum ira et studio,* is to be regarded as ‘perturbatio animi’ even methodically, therefore as ‘asylum of ignorance’, in Spinoza’s sense. But intellectual contact (although nothing further) with the emotions is necessary for every piece of self-knowledge, and wherever self-knowledge was comprehensively attempted, this contact presented itself. Even in Hegel, ‘With passion and partiality’. Tacitus in Annals I, Chap. 1 declares he will write history impartially, ‘sine ira et studio’. Bloch is reversing the idea.

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despite Kierkegaard; there is no book which is more pervaded in its conceptual procedure by both emotional machinations and emotional insights than ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’. This precisely because it disposes of the worldless pectoral dimension, a disposal which wanted to grasp the ‘pulse of vitality’ first and foremost in the external, in the world. And just as, according to Hegel, nothing great has been achieved without passion, so too undoubtedly nothing great concerning the self can be comprehended without emotional insight. Seen from outside, the drive-feelings were always only insufficiently ordered and divided up. The abrupt ones were differentiated from the slowly maturing ones, the quickly disappearing ones from the self-entrenching ones: as for example anger from hatred. They were differentiated according to the strength which the individual drive-feelings could take on, then according to the expression of the mental feelings in men and animals. Externally the division is also according to asthenic and sthenic emotions, i.e. those which paralyse or strengthen heart innervation and also the tonus of the external muscles. According to this, emotions that suddenly break in, like fear, terror, but also excessive joy, are always asthenic, as are unpleasurable emotions of lesser degree, like sorrow and worry. Weak and moderately strong pleasurable emotions are however always sthenic, but anger, rising gradually, can also be sthenic, whereas in fact joy, when it breaks out suddenly, accompanied by surprise, appears asthenically, despite its pleasurable character. This division is thus still so external that emotions with different, even opposite feeling-content fall into the same sthenic or asthenic class. Nearer to the real state of things, already somewhat more from psychological experience, comes the division of the emotions into those of rejection or inclination, consequently into the two basic groups of hatred and love. Hunger, which must be able to accompany all emotions, breaks out most obviously in the grouping of libido and aggression. And nearly all the emotions can be assigned to the poles of will: negation or affirmation, the dissatisfaction or satisfaction with themselves and with their object. And the emotions of rejection : fear, envy, anger, contempt, hate on the one hand, the emotions of inclination : contentment, generosity, trust, admiration, love on the other hand, largely coincide with the old displeasure-pleasure duality. However, the rejecting-unpleasurable, incliningpleasurable equation does not work out perfectly either. There are also emotions here with contradictory feeling-content which are sometimes pleasurably united: revenge, in which hatred discharges itself, tastes sweet, almost like the moment of ecstasy in which, love discharges itself. Likewise

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there are emotions, like greed, which, even though they lie on the side of inclination, do not have the least in common with pleasure. Or there are mixed emotions, like resentment, in which the rejecting intention of envy and the inclining intention of admiration get along in a complex way, in so far as envy in fact transforms the admiration which is present into slander, so that it does not give rise to the unpleasant feeling of envy. It follows that even rejection and inclination, the poles of hate and love do not fully cover the curious area, so rich in elisions, of the emotional modes of self. In retaining love and hate as basic groups, the attempt has therefore been made to transform the mere pole relation of both into a value relation. The emotions of rejection are thus consigned to a lower region which is itself to be negated (and this, incidentally, since the class struggle also belongs here, appealed to reactionary pyschology, in Scheler); the emotions of inclination on the other hand (with truce, cosmopolitanism, pax capitalistica) stand in the light. But condemning one lot to hell or praising one lot to the skies does least justice to the amount of truth, or at least psychological experience, that may lie in the rejection-inclination series despite its confusion. Thus, to sum up: what has been imported from outside into the theory of the emotions must be completely removed; only then does the correct order of the drive-feelings emerge. This order must be discovered from the experienced appetite itself; and the result is then the only satisfying one, the division of the emotions into the following two series: into filled and expectant emotions. Whereby justice is also done to the relatively legitimate aspects of the rejection-inclination series: this series extends at least as far as the group of expectant emotions, namely as unwish or as wish. The series in the real table of the emotions are now definable as follows: filled emotions (like envy, greed, admiration) are those whose drive-intention is short-term, whose drive-object lies ready, if not in respective individual attainability, then in the already available world. Expectant emotions (like anxiety, fear, hope, belief), on the other hand, are those whose drive-intention is long-term, whose drive-object does not yet lie ready, not just in respective individual attainability, but also in the already available world, and therefore still occurs in the doubt about exit or entrance. Thus the expectant emotions are distinguished, both in their unwish and in their wish, from the filled emotions by the incomparably greater anticipatory character in their intention, their substance, and their object. All emotions refer to the horizon of time, because they are highly intentioned emotions, but the expectant emotions open out entirely into this horizon. All emotions refer to the actually temporal aspect in

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time, i.e. to the mode of the future, but whereas the filled emotions only have an unreal future, i.e. one in which objectively nothing new happens, the expectant emotions essentially imply a real future; in fact that of the NotYet, of what has objectively not yet been there. When they are banal, fear and hope also intend unreal future, but secretly or deep down even then a more total fulfilment has entered the banal fulfilment, one which, quite unlike the case of the filled emotions, lies beyond the available given world. Thus the urge, the appetite and its wish usually break out frontally in the expectant emotions. As urge, as wish, it even breaks out in the purely negative expectant emotions, those of anxiety and fear; for where there was no urge, there would be no unwish, which is only the reverse side of a wish. Moreover, there is always a countersense of the negative and positive emotions at work here, so that, as will be seen, even in anxiety dreams wish-fulfilment still takes place. In the images of fear and hope in the daydream, the faces may often change all the more between fear and hope, between the negative and positive expectant emotion, the still utopian undecided faces. But the most important expectant emotion, the most authentic emotion of longing and thus of self, always remains in all of this - hope. For the negative expectant emotions of anxiety and fear are still completely suffering, oppressed, unfree, no matter how strongly they reject. Indeed, something of the extinction of self announces itself in them, and something of the nothingness into which ultimately the merely passive passion streams. Hope, this expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear, is therefore the most human of all mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also refers to the furthest and brightest horizon. It suits that appetite in the mind which the subject not only has, but of which, as unfulfilled subject, it still essentially consists. Self extension drive forwards, active expectation Hunger cannot help continually renewing itself. But if it increases uninterrupted, satisfied by no certain bread, then it suddenly changes. The body-ego then becomes rebellious, does not go out in search of food merely within the old framework. It seeks to change the situation which has caused its empty stomach, its hanging head. The No to the bad situation which exists, the Yes to the better life that hovers ahead, is incorporated by the deprived into revolutionary interest. This interest always begins with hunger, hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an explosive force against the prison of deprivation. Thus the self seeks not only to preserve itself, it

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becomes explosive; self-preservation becomes self-extension. And this overthrows what stands in the way of the rising class, ultimately of the classless man. Out of economically enlightened hunger comes today the decision to abolish all conditions in which man is an oppressed and long-lost being. Long before this decision, and for a long time during it, the drive towards satisfaction becomes a drive which survives the available world in the imagination. And in human work, undertaken for the purpose of satis¬ fying needs, transforming raw materials into richer and richer utility values, consciousness runs as a consciousness which overhauls the available world in the imagination. Marx has the following to say about this, which has received nowhere near enough attention: ‘We are assuming work in a form in which it belongs exclusively to man. A spider carries out operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts many human builders to shame with the building of its wax cells. But what distinguishes the worst builder from the best bee from the outset, is that he has built the cell in his head before he builds it in wax, at the end of the work process there is a result which already existed in the imagination of the worker at the beginning of that process, i.e. already existed ideally. Not that he only effects a formal change in the real; he also realizes his purpose in the natural world, a purpose he knows, which determines as a law his way of doing things, to which he must subordinate his will’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 186). Therefore it follows: before a builder - in all areas of life - knows his plan, he must have planned the plan himself, and must have anticipated its realization as a brilliant, even decisively spurring forward dream. In ideal terms, all the more necessarily, the bolder, above all the more arduous the plan, towards which a man, in contrast to the spider or the bee, is looking, looking ahead, might be at that moment. And precisely at this point there is formed that which stimulates the wishful element in the expectant emotions always arising from hunger, that which possibly diverts and fatigues us, or which possibly also activates and galvanizes us towards the goal of a better life: daydreams are formed. They always come from a feeling of something lacking and they want to stop it, they are all dreams of a better life. No doubt there are among them base, dubious, dismal, merely ener¬ vating escapist dreams full of substitution, as is well-known. This kind of escape from reality has often been combined with approval and support of the status quo; as is revealed most strongly in the empty promises of a better hereafter. But how many other wishful daydreams have sustained men with courage and hope, not by looking away from the real, but, on the contrary, by looking into its progress, into its horizon. How many have reaffirmed

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their refusal to renounce, in the course of anticipation, of venturing beyond and its images. The amount of venturing beyond that takes place in daydreams thus indicates nothing repressed, even psychologically, nothing that has simply sunk down out of consciousness that already existed, nor any atavistic state which was simply left over from or breaks out of primeval man. The venturer beyond does not occupy a shaft in the ground beneath existing consciousness, with a single exit either into the familiar daylight world of today, as in Freud, or into a romanticized diluvium, as in C. G. Jung and Klages. What hovers ahead of the self-extension drive forwards is rather, as will have to be shown, a Not-Yet-Conscious, one that has never been conscious and has never existed in the past, therefore itself a forward dawning, into the New. It is the dawning that can surround even the simplest daydreams; from there it extends into further areas of negated deprivation, and hence of hope.

FUNDAMENTAL DISTINCTION OF DAYDREAMS FROM NIGHT-DREAMS

14

CONCEALED AND OLD WISH-FULFILMENT IN NIGHT-DREAMS, FABULOUSLY INVENTIVE AND ANTICIPATORY WISH-FULFILMENT IN DAYLIGHT FANTASIES

Inclination to dream We never tire of wanting things to improve. We are never free of wishes, or only in moments of delusion. It would be more comfortable to forget this longing rather than to fulfil it, but what would this lead to today? These wishes certainly would not stop, or they would disguise themselves as new ones, or worse still: without wishes we would be the dead bodies over which the wicked would stride on to victory. This is not a time to be without wishes, and the deprived certainly do not intend to be. They dream that their wishes will be fulfilled one day. They dream about it night and day, as the saying goes, not only at night then. That would indeed be strange, since deprivation and wishing are still very much with us during the day. There are daydreams enough, we just have not taken sufficient notice of them. Even with our eyes open, things can be colourful

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enough or dreamy inside our heads. If the inclination to improve our lot does not sleep even in our sleep - how should it do so when we are awake? Few wishes are not burdened with dreams of some sort, especially when their senses start to clear a bit. And then: the dreamy person during the day is clearly a different person from the one who dreams at night. The daydreamer often follows will-o’-the-wisps, gets led astray. But he is not asleep and does not sink back down with the mist. Dreams as wish-fulfilment As of course the nocturnal dreamer does and must do. The latter may as well be treated first, since after all the colourful performance does begin in sleep. The word dream has nocturnal origins, the dreamer presupposes the sleeper. The external senses are blinded, the muscles relax, the cerebrum is at rest. So important is this general black-out here, that in fact the sleeper often only dreams in order not to wake up. In order that he is not raised above the threshold of consciousness by external or internal stimuli. If the stimulus is an external one (say knocking or light or a shift of position in bed), then we wish it was not there. If it is an internal one (thirst, hunger, micturition, sexual excitement), then it is itself a wish, we want its stimulus to disappear. For all stimulation is unpleasant: pleasure, says Freud, is ‘linked with the diminution, reduction or extinction of the set of stimuli present in the psychic system, but displeasure with an increase of the same’. If the sleeper did not dream, then he would be woken by the clamour of these stimuli; so dreams protect sleep by assimilating knocks, intrusive light, and physical unrest. Not by this means alone, however; since Freud, it is generally agreed (and this will be his lasting contribution) that dreams are not merely a means of protecting sleep, or a world of poppies, but - as regards both their motor and their content - wish-fulfilment too. Dreams can only assimilate these disturbances at all by breaking off their insistent prodding. Or as Freud says: ‘Dreams are the elimination of (psychic) stimuli which disturb our sleep on the road to hallucinated gratification.’ As everyone knows, Freud’s real discovery is this: that dreams are not just foam,* and naturally not prophetic oracles either, but that they lie half-way between the two as it were: precisely as hallucinated wish-fulfilments, as fictitious fulfilments of an unconscious wishful fantasy. And the general theme of dreams of a better life also partly includes, * A German saying: ‘Traume sind Schaume’: ‘Dreams are just foam’.

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with all due caution and relevance, nocturnal dreams as wishful dreams; they too are a component (though a dislocated and not entirely homogeneous one) in the vast field of utopian consciousness. They are namely the component in which very early wishes circulate. In which the light of very old, long-vanished images beneath the ego and the cerebrum is still reflected. The night-dream has three characteristic qualities which enable it to hallucinate wishful ideas. Firstly, the adult ego is weakened in sleep, it cannot censor that which seems indecent any more. Secondly, from the waking state and its contents only the so-called dregs of the day remain, that is to say ideas with greatly loosened associa¬ tions, to which the dream fantasy adapts itself. Thirdly, in connection with the weakened ego, the outside world with its realities and practical functional content is blocked off. The ego reverts to the ego of childhood, thus there first appears the complete uncensored drive-world straight out of our childhood, or more accurately: as in our childhood. Freud thus stresses: ‘Every dream-wish is of infantile origin, all dreams work with infantile material, with childish psychic impulses and mechanisms.’ Moreover, in so far as the opposing tendency of material reality is cancelled by this blockade of the outside world, the wishful ideas receive sufficient psychic energy and psychic space to intensify into hallucinations. But the ego which censors morally, aesthetically and also in accordance with reality is only weakened in dreams, not completely switched off. It goes on censoring in a drunken way as it were, and forces the hallucinated wish-fulfilments to disguise themselves from its gaze. Thus almost no nightdream is wish-fulfilment pure and simple, but almost every one is distorted and masked, appears in ‘symbolic’ disguise. And the person who is dreaming does not understand the symbolic element at all, in which his wish-fulfilment disguises itself; it suffices here that the restlessness of the libido activates and satiates itself in a symbolically distorting dream-image. Only the dreams of children lack this dream-distortion, since the child knows no censoring ego whatsoever. Even very voluptuous night-dreams of a physiologically normal and as it were permissible kind, in the wake of involuntary seminal emissions for example, take a direct course, with no appreciable dreamdistortion; the manifest and actual dream-contents also more or less coincide here. But all the other ‘improper wishes’: the incest-wishes, the deathwishes directed towards people we love and other elements of infantile evil inside us resort to disguise in order to gratify themselves, in order to conceal themselves from the - even though weakened - censorship of the dream-ego. The conversion of latent (deeply subconscious) into manifest

8o

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

(symbolized) dream-content, Freud calls the dream-work; the analytical interpretation of dreams takes the opposite route, the route back to desymbolized wish-fulfilment. There is a resistance, in the person who has woken up, to the analytical interpretation of dreams, which is analogous in an intensified form to the neurotic’s resistance to the interpretation of the symptoms of his neurosis; it is the resistance of the reinforced daytime ego to the revelation of its other side. This other side usually tends to be very oppressive in the morally upright and correct man; he has sensed in it all along much which would embarrass him when awake. In this way the daytime ego can even feel responsible for the so very much weakened nocturnal one, the moment a single sensual echo remains behind from the jumble of symbols. Jean Paul remarks on this: ‘Dreams shine terribly deep into the Epicurean and Augean Stables we have constructed for ourselves; and we see in the night all the wild beasts of the grave and wolves of the evening roaming around alive, which reason held in chains during the day.’ In fact, the strange question was even asked, from the standpoint of intact bourgeois propriety and its daytime ego, whether a person should be held morally responsible for the good and evil which he thinks and does in his dreams. A moralist and psychologist from the final period of the Enlightenment answered in the affirmative and concluded, most comically, but instructively as far as this resistance is concerned: ‘We can therefore assert that it is a man’s moral duty to preserve the purity of his imagination even in his dreams, as far as this is possible by his own free will, and that the good and evil which he says or does in his dreams can also be attributed to him, namely in so far as his dream is created or modified by his desires and these desires are dependent on his own free will’ (MaaB, Versuch uber die Leidenschaften I, 1805, p. 175). So if the relatively harmless aberrations in the dreams of an ordinary human being are disagreeable to a morally correct ego - how much more so the wild infantile variety, in symbolic disguise. Hence the resistance to the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams, hence the reluctance to allow these dream-images to be turned into crime stories of one’s private self. (A reluctance which significantly did not apply to the old, so-called prophetic interpretation of dreams: Pharaoh was delighted by Joseph, because Joseph did not see through him, the prophetic interpretation of dreams left the internal affairs of the subject untouched.) From this moralizing reluctance chiefly springs the nocturnal ego-drive towards masquerade, towards concealment and disguise of the dream-content; the main part for the Freud of the libido is of course merely sexual symbolization. According to this,

DISTINCTION OF DAYDREAMS AND NIGHT-DREAMS

8l

there are hundreds of symbols for the male and female genitals (dagger and casket are the primary models), for sexual intercourse (the primary model is climbing stairs). The casket can turn into a compartment, the dagger into the moon standing unnaturally close to the window, into the ceiling-lamp in the compartment, into the light of this lamp, with a mild yellow like smashed egg-yolk. The whole variety of sexual allusions and metaphors, as displayed in Rabelais or Balzac’s ‘Amusing tales’, is attained if not surpassed by dreams; and this, as far as consciousness is concerned, in allegorical innocence. Balzac speaks of the joiner who thought of keeping the front door of his house permanently locked in future, of the page who had already planted his standard in the royal domain, and so on; all these metaphors are also dreamlike. They are joined by images which are not even to be found in the vast literature of pornography, namely those that have been lost; like the symbols of wood, table, and water for woman. They seem to reach back into the depths of racial history, depths which, as we have noted, are also familiar to Freud and his more immediate school, not to mention C. G. Jung. The table clearly stands for a room or house, the symbol of wood leads back to the family tree, a very old mother-image; it also suggests living wood, the tree of life. The water symbol is traced back to the mother’s amniotic fluid by Ferenczi, one of Freud’s oldest colleagues, and then, in a thoroughly phylogenetic ‘excavation’, to the primitive geological oceans in which life first arose. In the history of mythology a very differently preserved legend has grown up concerning this, that of the stork which brings babies from a pond; but the waters of the deep appear too, above which the spirit of God broods, just like a mother-hen. The well is an old mother-image, the reedy pond an even older, archaic hetairan one; it was unearthed by Bachofen. Be that as it may, hardly a dream is dreamed by adults that is not involved and enveloped. Freud comments on this with a striking paradox: the dreamer does not know what he knows. For Freud the manifest dream-content is simply just disguised or in fancy dress; the interpretation becomes Ash Wednesday, the day after the carnival. The censorship of the ego only let the truth, which is libido and its wish-fulfilment, pass through the night in the mask of a jester or a thin veil of sanctity; nevertheless, the Freudian interpretation of dreams is intent on revealing the naked text again. It proceeds via the symbols, without losing itself in them, to the more or less conscious wish-fulfilment, which expresses itself in such colourfully convoluted clauses. This embodies a true perception, even if it only emerges contorted by the narrow and false notion of bare libido.

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In any case, something recouped is at work in the nocturnal dream, a compensating element satiated with a wealth of images; whether this satiation occurs simply by means of these images or within them.

Anxiety dreams and wish-fulfilment But is someone who dreams at night really having wishes fulfilled all the time? These are mixed with enough insignificant dross after all, which evaporates and does not seem to fill any kind of gap. Even among our vivid dreams the happy ones, that is the wish-fulfilling ones, are by no means in the majority. Alongside them there are the anxiety dreams, from the usual examination dreams to downright horrible ones; the sleeper wakes from these with a yell. He was on the run from grimacing bogies which only emerge at night, but his car changes into a snail-shell, he jumps down and runs for his life, but his feet stick in the ground, soon they are firmly rooted to the spot. Freud naturally finds it hard to interpret even this nocturnal Fury as a fairy godmother, yet he still incorporates anxiety dreams into his theory of wish-fulfilment in three different ways. Firstly, a dream can suddenly break off, then the distressing stimulus which has caused it persists, the wish-fulfilment has failed. Secondly, a dream can turn into an anxiety dream precisely because the wish-fulfilment has occurred within it; this absurdity appears chiefly in undistorted, uncensored dreams. In this sort of anxiety dream, a particularly depraved wish unacceptable to the dream-ego is gratified in a particularly blatant way; the anxiety is then not that of the physical creature itself but that of the dream-ego, and the development of anxiety takes the place of censorship. Neuroses of this sort, for example the perpetual fear of losing one’s parents, can also be accom¬ panied by the wish for such a thing. The phobia is then merely the so-called moral thick end of the wedge or the attention-seeking hangover. Thirdly, however, Freud overcomes the problem almost involuntarily in dialectical terms, namely by not simply grasping anxieties and wishes as strict opposites. The ultimate source of anxiety is here seen as the act of birth; it brought ‘that constellation of feelings of aversion, angry rejection and physical excitement, which have become the standard reaction to any mortal danger and have been repeated by us ever since as an anxiety state’. The very term anxiety (angustia = narrowness) emphasizes the constriction in breathing which occurred at that time in consequence of the interrup¬ tion in our internal breathing. But the most important thing of all is that

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this first anxiety state stemmed from separation from our mother, and hence signals loneliness, defencelessness, abandonment. This first anxiety state is linked in Freud’s view with the so-called fear of castration, and this has moral consequences which pervade the whole of one’s life: ‘From the higher being, which became the ego-ideal, there was once the threat of castration, and the fear of castration is probably the nucleus for later anxiety of conscience, it is this which continues as anxiety of conscience.’ More plausible though is the explanation of anxiety from the very first act of desertion, which psychologically prefigures all the later ones, from the act of being torn from our mother by our birth; hence too the real anxiety of the child, the pavor nocturnus without a so-called castration complex, the fear of strange faces, darkness and the like. The longing and love of the child for its mother is frustrated by strange faces, it is unable to channel its ‘libido’, which cannot find its object. So it turns inward and is discharged as anxiety even in adulthood; the consequence is as follows: all repressed wishful emotions turn into phobias in this realm of the unconscious. A similar reversal of unoccupied libidinal urges which have lost their object occurs, as Freud conjectures, in the fear of death (countering the death-drive), especially in the neurotic, melancholic variety: ‘The melan¬ cholic fear of death admits of only one explanation, that the ego surrenders, because it feels hated and persecuted instead of loved by the super-ego... The super-ego performs the same protective and rescuing function as the father at an earlier stage, and later providence or fate.’ And even in a state of health, the fear of an immense concrete danger is increased by the fear of death which arises from desertion; the ego surrenders because it does not think it is able to overcome the danger by itself. ‘It is moreover’, adds Freud as a reminder, ‘still the same situation which lay at the heart of the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infant’s anxious longing, namely that of separation from the protective mother’ (Das Ich und das Es, 1923, p. 76). And it is the same reversal of the libido into its dialectical opposite which was already evident in the anxiety of the child when the libidinal emotion had to be repressed because its object, the mother it loved, was missing. Only, where the fear of death is concerned, the libidinal object has become one’s own ego, or more precisely: the ego loved by the super¬ ego; it is this very (narcissistic) occupation which has now ceased. ‘The mechanism of the fear of death could only be that the ego relinquishes its narcissistic occupation of the libido to a large extent, and thus surrenders itself, instead of another object as in other cases of anxiety’; but in the act of reversal it merely releases a feeling of immense horror. Libido again

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of course, nothing but libido the whole time (and this is the part of Freud that will not endure, in fact we can say even now: that did not endure); and together with the libido, a pure psychologism once again, without regard to the social environment. Is sexual libido sufficient to produce this anxiety, is it necessary to it at all? Does this negative wish-fulfilment or anxiety stem exclusively from the subject, exclusively from the ‘libidinal emotion which has lost its object’? And are there not also Objects, circumstances, which are menacing enough in an object-based way, unoccupied by libido, but sufficiently occupied by other things instead? The later Freud expressed this himself when he stated that it was not repression which caused anxiety, but anxiety which caused repression; it therefore precedes the blocked libido and forms the blockage. Towards the end of his life, moving far beyond the internal and initial biological experience of the act of birth, Freud even declares ‘that a feared drive-situation basically originates in a situation of external danger’ (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen, 1933, p. 123). The feeling of abandonment would not have any content at all if the strange faces, the darkness and so on were solely - non-mother and otherwise neutral. Instead of which, here too we find hunger, subsistence worries, economic despair, and existential anxiety, which are positive and objective enough. Bourgeois society was actually founded on free competition until recently, and is inclined towards it even today, hence it is founded on an antagonistic relationship, even within the same class and stratum of society. The hostile tension thus posited and even demanded between individuals produces incessant anxiety; and this does not need the pretexts of libido and the act of birth in order to deposit itself on it. It is sufficiently posited with the outside world as it is, especially one with two world wars to its credit. And with the anxiety caused by fascism as well, which hardly needed the pretext of infantile trauma in order to be delivered into the world. Thus many a tranquil night-dream may indeed be backward-looking, perhaps also many attacks of pavor nocturnus among sheltered children. They may consist of repressed libido, of amorous wishes unoccupied in object-based terms, and hence of anxiety. But even in dreams, the daytime and the objective apprehension of what is coming furnishes causes and sources enough as far as anxiety is concerned. Sources which relate to naked selfpreservation and its shattered, not merely unoccupied wishes. In particular, however, waking anxiety culminating in the fear of death does not go right back to the beginning to find its explanation in the vanishing libidinal object of its own ego, that is, of the transposed mother. It is precisely this anxiety which cannot be explained chiefly in narcissistic regressive

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terms, but rather in terms of the axe which will cut life short in the future, in terms of the pain and horror of an objectively expected night. If the ego merely relinquished itself in the fear of death and merely relinquished its narcissistic occupation of the libido, then neither animals without an ego nor very matter-of-fact people who are not infatuated with their ego would know the fear of death. If therefore the Freudian libido-subjecti¬ visms of anxiety are untenable, the correlation he established between phobias and repressed wishful emotions still remains important and true; nor is it orientated around narcissistic fantasies, but around the objective content of the wishful emotions. Anxiety and its dreams may have their initial origin in parturition, just as they have their final biological content at the moment of death. But where anxiety arises not merely in a biological sense, but in a way which is only to be found in human beings, especially in the form of an anxiety dream: then it is essentially founded on social blockages of the self-preservation drive. In fact, it is simply the annihilated content of the wish, a content actually transformed into its very opposite, which causes anxiety and ultimate despair. And how does the waking dreamer fare in all this, if his wishes are variously sprinkled? If he needs salt and pepper on his wishes, even a dash of shock, and not just honey all the time? Freud himself refers to a merging of opposite drive-feelings, not merely a transition from one to the other. Fie refers to a simultaneous ‘countersense of primal words’, so that ‘anxiety and wish coincide in the unconscious’. But they also undoubtedly coincide in consciousness to a large extent, as in the case of the hypochondriac and the general pessimist, who are both hoping to see their non-hope fulfilled. And did not the same eighteenth century in which the hypochondriac flourished apply a thick coat of sentimentality on to this mixed feeling, with its weeping willows and pitchers of tears, with its painful delight in mortality? The Gothic novel in particular, which emerged at the same time, discovered the strangely homely aspect of the uncanny; it thrived on a wishful home among shadows, on feeling at home at the crossroads, in the horrors of the night. Things of this sort already exhibit the wishfulfilment fantasies of anxiety, an exchange of faces between the wish and that quality of anxiety which has itself become spine-chilling by virtue of the hope that has been fixed on it, and as the perverse, even positive content of that hope. It is this devious, rather eerie wish-fulfilment which even in higher realms prevents, or at least impedes, a mere rosy red. An element of blackness is introduced, it heightens the colours, creates dissonance in far too predictable and hence insipid happiness, and reveals

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the peak of our wishes to be equally an abyss. Many emotional statements driven to the extreme have caught very well this merging full of conster¬ nation, even the so-called sweet horror in Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelungen’, in the exhibition of this neurasthenic-colossal work of art. And so the same is true even of the nightmare as of the meadow at the bottom of the well* and its symbols: every dream is wish-fulfilment.

A crucial point: the daydream is not a stepping-stone to the nocturnal dream But clearly, people do not dream only at night, not at all. The day too has twilight edges, where wishes are also gratified. In contrast to the nocturnal dream, that of the daytime sketches freely chosen and repeatable figures in the air, it can rant and rave, but also brood and plan. It gives free play to its thoughts in an indolent fashion (which can, however, be closely related to the Muse and to Minerva), political, artistic, scientific thoughts. The daydream can furnish inspirations which do not require interpreting, but working out, it builds castles in the air as blueprints too, and not always just fictitious ones. Even in caricature, the daydreamer is presented in a different light than the dreamer: he is then Johnnie Headin-the-air, and thus by no means the sleeper at night with his eyes closed. Lonely walks or enthusiastic youthful discussion with a friend or the socalled blue hour between daylight and darkness are particularly conducive to waking dreams. The account of little daydreams with which this book began gave a brief survey of slighter, barely inward images of this kind; it is now necessary to investigate the structure of the whole, as well as its consequences, specifically in order to gain an understanding of these, as we shall see, very powerful consequences: those of hope in general in the subjective factor. Yet astonishingly, the daylight fantasy has hardly been acknowledged as an original state by psychology up till now, not even as a special kind of wish-fulfilment, with a lot of sheer wishful thinking,! but which does not exclude acuteness and even responsibility precisely of ‘thinking’. Psychoanalysis, however, puts daydreams completely on a par with night-dreams, and merely sees them as incipient night-dreams. Freud remarks on this: ‘We know such daydreams are the essential models This meadow appears in Grimm’s fairytale ‘Frau Holle’.

T

Bloch is using the English term here in the original and continues to do so throughout the text.

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for nocturnal dreams. The night-dream is basically nothing other than a daydream which has become serviceable through the nocturnal freedom of the impulses, and distorted by the nocturnal form of mental activity’ (Vorlesungen, 1935, p. 417). And earlier on, in the same place: ‘The most well-known products of the imagination are the so-called daydreams, imagined gratifications of ambitious, megalomaniac, and erotic wishes, which thrive all the more profusely the more reality calls for resignation or for patience. The essence of imaginary happiness, the restoration of the independence of pleasure-gaining from the consent of reality, is unmistakably revealed in them.’ Psychoanalysis of course, which judges all dreams only as roads to what has been repressed, and only knows reality as that of bourgeois society and its existing world, consistently prefers to label daydreams as a mere stepping-stone to nocturnal ones. In any case, the poet equipped with daydreams is for the bourgeois only the hare who sleeps with his eyes open, and this in bourgeois everyday life which sees and employs itself as the touchstone of all reality. But if this touchstone is challenged even for the world of consciousness, if even the nocturnal wishful dream is only seen as a dislocated and not entirely homogeneous component in the vast field of a still open world and its consciousness, then the daydream is not a stepping-stone to the night-dream and is not disposed of by the latter. Not even with respect to its clinical content, let alone its artistic, pre-appearing, frontlike anticipatory content. For nightdreams mostly cannibalize the former life of the drives, they feed on past if not archaic image-material, and nothing new happens under their bare moon. So it would be absurd to take daydreams: as those presentiments of the imagination which from time immemorial have of course been call¬ ed dreams but also forerunners and anticipations, and to subsume them under or even subordinate them to the night-dreams. The castle in the air is not a stepping-stone to the nocturnal labyrinth, if anything, the nocturnal labyrinths lie like cellars beneath the daytime castle in the air. And what of the equality of imaginary happiness which both are said to share, as a ‘restoration of the independence of pleasure-gaining from the consent of reality’? More than one daydream before now has, with sufficient vigour and experience, remodelled reality to make it give this consent; whereas Morpheus only has the arms in which we rest. Thus the daydream requires specific evaluation of its own, since it enters and unlocks a very different region altogether. It ranges from the waking dream of a comfortable, silly, crude, escapist, devious and paralysing kind, to the responsible kind, the kind actively and acutely deployed in the matter-in-hand, and the shaped kind

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in art. Above all, it is clear that ‘reverie’, unlike the usual nocturnal ‘dream’, can possibly contain marrow and, instead of the idleness or even the self¬ enervation which certainly are to be found here, a tireless incentive towards the actual attainment of what it visualizes.

First and second characteristics of the daydream: clear road, preserved ego The first property of the waking dream is that it is not oppressive. It remains within our power, the ego starts out on a journey into the blue, but ends it whenever it wants. However relaxed the dreamer might be, he is not abducted or overpowered by his images, they are not independent enough for this. Real things do appear muted, they are often distorted, but they never completely vanish in the face of the wished-for images, however subjective. And daydream images are not normally hallucinated, so they return from the most remote flight of fancy at a moment’s notice. There is no spell in this condition, at least none which the daydreamer has not voluntarily imposed on himself, and which he could not revoke. The waking dream-house is also furnished exclusively with ideas chosen by the daydreamer himself, whereas the sleeper never knows what is awaiting him beyond the threshold of the subconscious. Secondly, the ego in the daydream is nowhere near so weakened as it is in the night-dream, despite the relaxation that also takes place in the former. Even in its most passive form, where the ego merely looks on or allows itself to be carried along by its reveries, it looks on completely intact, remains in the context of its life and its waking world. In contrast the night-dream ego is divisible, often like mush; it feels no pain, it does not die when it suffers death. Indeed the difference between the being of the ego in night- and daydreams is so great that the very relaxation in which the daydream ego also participates can subjectively burgeon into a feeling of elevation, however dubious. Because the ego itself then becomes a wishful idea for itself, one freed of censorship, it experiences the green light of release which appears to have come on for all other wishful ideas. The relaxation of the ego in night-dreams is merely a sinking, whereas in the daydream it is a rising with the general rising swarm. Thus there is even a difference between the drugs which artificially induce the two types of dream; even pharmacologically, within the artificially stimulating phantastica, the imagination of the sleeping cerebrum, with its benighted ego, is distinct

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from daytime imagination. Namely: opium appears to belong to the nightdream, hashish to the freewheeling, rapturous daydream. Even under the influence of hashish, the ego alters very little, neither the individual tempera¬ ment nor its reasoning are withdrawn. Admittedly, the external world is rather blocked off, not completely as it is in sleep, especially opium sleep, but only to the extent that it is not compatible with the images that appear, and its babbling interference merely appears stupid, pitifully stupid. Whereas in contrast, an external world which reaches into the realms of the imagination and appears to be on a plane with Parnassus or even with a fool’s paradise, such as gardens, castles, beautiful old streets, is particu¬ larly suited to the stimulation of the hashish dream. The Shiite sect of the hassasins or Assassins, the religious murder-sect of the Arabian Middle Ages, with the Sheik of the Mountain at their head, led the young boys who had been chosen to commit murder into the dazzling gardens of the Sheik, into a world of unlimited sensual pleasure with their eyes wide open even though they were under the influence of hashish. And the hashish images fitted in perfectly with this external world comparable to a waking dream, in fact they exaggerated it beyond all earthly measure, so that the boys with the utopian poison in their veins believed they were enjoying a foretaste of paradise; so that they were prepared to risk their lives for the Sheik in order to gain the real paradise. The hashish dreams of the subjects in more recent experiments are reported to be of an enchanting levity, they have a kind of elfin spirit about them, the asphalt of the street is transformed into yards of blue silk, random passers-by turn into Dante and Petrarch anachronistically deep in conversation, in short, to the talented hashish dreamer the world becomes a request concert of wishes. Another kind of levity is available under the influence of hashish: ‘The individual imagines he can see tangled plans, the clarification of which previously seemed impossible, disentangled before him and well on the way to being accomplished’ (Lewin, Phantastica, 1927, p. I59ff.). Even delusions of grandeur set in temporarily, anticipated achievements, almost as in paranoia. The opium-trance is quite different, the total sleep of ego and external world; here there is nothing but night-dream, right to the very bottom. Instead of imagined elevation of the ego, and utopistically conducted allevia¬ tion of the environment, everything in the opium-trance is sunken. And a sole dimension opens up of veiled, particularly undisentangled subconsciousness: woman, ecstasy, cave, torch, midnight, crowd in upon one another, usually in heavy, padded air. Oblivion, not light, is primarily at work in opium; it is Night who proffers the opium poppies to Morpheus

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in ancient cameos. The chthonic priestesses carried poppy seeds in their hands to deaden pain, Lethe was poured in the mysteries of Ceres as the opium water of oblivion, Isis-Ceres herself is portrayed in late antiquity with poppy-heads in her hand. Even though Baudelaire calls both the realms of intoxication of opium and hashish equally ‘paradis artificiels’, among these disreputable delights, those induced by hashish are and remain in fact the only ones which are pathologically assigned to the waking dream. So much for the illustration of a difference even between the enervations of Morpheus on the one hand, of Phantasus on the other. Consequently, the ego in the waking-dream is found to be very animated, even striving. It is particularly narrow and fundamentally wrong of Freud to observe on the subject of daydreams that they are all the dreams of children, that they are only equipped with an unadult ego. No doubt in some cases memories of a mistreated childhood ego are also at work within them, as are infantile inferiority complexes, but these do not constitute the core. The bearer of daydreams is filled with the conscious, enduringly conscious, even if variable will for the better life, and the hero of daydreams is always our own adult personality. When Caesar stood in Gades in front of the statue of Alexander deep in a daydream and shouted: ‘Forty years and nothing yet done for immortality!’, the ego which reacted in this way was not that of the childish, but rather of the future Caesar he was to become. Far from the ego regressing on this occasion, it is possible to say that it was not until this dream of immortality that the Caesar we know first came into being. The ego is always preserved here with its adult power, as unified adult experience of conscious mental processes; furthermore: the guiding image is present of what a man would like to be and become in utopian terms. It differs precisely on this point from the night-dream ego, all the more so from the completely altered, deposed ego of the opium dream. As we remember, in Freud the night-dream ego only remains sufficiently present to compel the hallucinated wish-fulfilments to disguise themselves from its gaze; thus it practises moral censorship, even if it is patchy. Whereas the ego of the waking dream is neither deposed, nor does it practise censorship against the often unconventional content of its wishes. On the contrary: the censorship here is not merely weakened and patchy as in the night-dream, rather it completely ceases despite the entirely undiminished strength of the daydream ego, indeed because of it. It ceases precisely because of the wishful idea which seizes the daydream ego and in fact strengthens or at least dresses it up. In contrast to nightdreams therefore, in daydreams there is no censorship whatsoever by a

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moral ego; rather, their utopistically intensified ego builds itself and what belongs to it into a castle in the air in an often amazingly carefree blue. This is especially evident in crude private reveries. In any case it is much more obvious here than in those of a considered plan or a definite futurepath. The little man who satisfies his wishes for revenge or who wishes his otherwise more or less beloved wife dead to the extent that in his wishful dream he is openly honeymooning with a younger woman, feels no pangs of conscience. He does not atone for any pleasure, and, in the imaginary fulfilment of such depraved wishes, he experiences no anxiety as a substitute for the censorship. And an ambitious dreamer really does allow his wishes free rein, he flies with outspread wings up to the Temple of Posterity, whether he is a Caesar or, as in most cases, a Spiegelberg.* He too feels no censorship, apart from the hindrance of external circumstances, not even the censorship of the comic, let alone that of the anxiety of an Icarus or a Prometheus. In waking dreams, however average, Circe who turns men into swine, King Midas who turns the world into gold, live un¬ restrained - always with remarkable exemption from the rules of behaviour, all the more remarkable since the relationship to the outside world is in no way screened as it is in the night-dream. All this overhauling, however, is only possible because of the unaltered ego of the waking dream and more precisely because of the already mentioned utopianizing strengthening with which the daydream ego supplements itself and what is commen¬ surate with it. In fact it must supplement this whenever the daydream is not expended on chimeras like Circe and Midas, or even on private excesses, but attains the commonly binding progression: to painting a better world. Particularly when a daydream of this kind takes on its proper seriousness and becomes a cleverly informed plan. What is needed for this is least of all the altered ego as in the night-trance, but rather an ego with taut muscles and a concrete head. A head with the will to extend itself, held up high, which knows how to be circumspect.

Third characteristic of the daydream: world-improving The ego of the waking dream may become so extensive that it represents others along with it. Thus we reach the third point where daydreams and night-dreams differ: human breadth makes them different. The sleeper is alone * The villainous blackguard in Schiller’s play ‘The Robbers’, 1781.

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with his treasures, the ego of the enthuser can refer to others. If the ego is no longer introverted in such a way or does not only refer to its immediate environment, then its daydream wants to improve publicly. Even still privately rooted dreams of this kind apply themselves to what is inside only because they want to improve it in collaboration with other egos; because they take the material for this above all from an outside which has been dreamed to perfection. Thus it is instructive to read in Rousseau, in the fourth book of his confessions: ‘I filled nature with being after my own heart; I created a golden age for myself to my own taste, by recalling the experiences of earlier days with which sweet memories were associated, and by picturing in vivid colours the images of happiness for which I could then long. I imagined love and friendship, the two ideals of my heart, in the most delightful forms and decorated them with all the charms of woman.’ Thus, even out of the swirling fog of the phantasm, shapes emerge which draw the ego into their orbit, into a better, external orbit in which millions are embraced.* World-improving dreams in general seek the outwardness of their inwardness, they emerge like the extrovert rainbow, like a vault across the sky. At this point the separate classification of night- and daydream which appeared above with opium and hashish recurs; and this time it recurs in psychoses. The poppy-like aspect of the nightdream manifests itself correspondingly in schizophrenia, as a regression, the hashish-like aspect in paranoia, as projective delusion. Of course the two illnesses to which these names are given are not to be strictly separated, their characteristics sometimes flow into each other. Both are examples of extreme turning away from the current or available reality, schizophrenia is of course literal splitting off from it, with a submerged road back. The schizophrenic lets the world go, goes back to the autistic-archaic state of childhood; but the paranoiac takes from this state many of his delusions, which certainly are not turned away from the world, but in fact world¬ improving. Often, of course, paranoia ends in schizophrenia; even so, there is an unmistakable difference in direction between the two illnesses, which the utopian aspect now enables us to denote. If psychosis in general is an involuntary giving way of consciousness to an invasion by the unconscious, then the paranoiac unconscious, unlike the schizophrenic unconscious, at least manifests utopistic edges. The schizophrenic succumbs defencelessly to traditional powers, is thoroughly spellbound, stands with the regres¬ sions of his madness in archaic primeval time and paints, rhymes, stutters * Cf. Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’: ‘Be embraced, you millions.’

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out of its long-lost dream; the paranoiac, on the other hand, reacts to the traditional powers with querulousness and persecution mania, but breaks them at the same time with adventurous inventions, social recipes, heavenly roads and more besides. Related differences of upwards or downwards, of darkening or over-brightness also seem to be at work where the downwards or upwards of neurotic consciousness pass over into raving. Where, that is, regression boils up to the being-beside-oneself of ecstasy, projection to the being-above-oneself of rapture. Iamblichus, the Syrian neo-Platonist, who knew his way around in the false consciousness of the possessed, reports the following about this kind of upwards and downwards in his account of the mysteries: ‘It has quite wrongly been assumed that even rapture can be attained by the influence of the demons. The latter only bring about ecstasies, but rapture (enthusiasm) is the work of the gods. So rapture is definitely not ecstasy, rather rapture is a turning to the good, whereas ecstasy is a falling towards evil’ (De mysteriis II, 3). These are chaotic and mythological interpretations, but what underlies them repeats precisely in the religious-parapsychological field the different directions of significance of schizophrenia and paranoia. In short, if schizophrenia denotes the illness (screened exaggeration) of archaically regressing acts, paranoia does the same thing for the utopian progressive acts, especially, however, for the tendency of the waking dream towards world-improvement. Which explains why there have been so many of these madmen among project-makers, and at least some among the great Utopians. Almost every utopia in fact, whether medical, social or technological, has paranoiac caricatures; for every real innovator there are hundreds of fantastic, unreal, mad ones. If one could fish out the mad ideas which are swimming around in the aura of lunatic asylums, alongside the archaic theory of schizophrenia made all too famous by C. G. Jung, we would find the most astonishing prefigurations created by paranoia. And no brooding night-symbols will be found among them, of the heart in the pond variety, a crucifixion fountain or any other painted or fictional antiquities derived from schizophrenia, but instead new combinations, changes to the world, project-making forwards, in short, fiery owls of a crazy Minerva who nevertheless wants to glimmer with red dawn. Even in such great illness the waking dream shows what it is capable of in terms of specific world-improvement. As madness it makes fiery owls, as fairytale it paints Arabian fairy palaces into the world, of gold and jasper. It is further important for the waking dream, as an extensive dream, to communicate itself outwards. It is capable of doing this, whereas the

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night-dream, like every all too private experience, can only be related with difficulty, related in such a way that the particular feeling of the subjectmatter is communicated to the listener too. Conversely, daydreams are comprehensible on account of their openness, communicable on account of their generally interesting wishful images. The wishful images imme¬ diately posit external form here, in a better planned world or even in an aesthetically heightened world, one without disappointment. On this point Freud himself gives daydreams their own slant, they now become after all, against the grain, alongside the stepping-stone of the night-dream, a stepping-stone to art: ‘They are the raw material of poetic production; since the writer makes out of his daydreams, by certain reshapings, disguises and omissions, the situations which he inserts into his short stories, novels, plays’ (Vorlesungen, 1922, p. 102). Freud has touched on the truth of utopian creativity at this point, of consciousness directed into the good New; but the merely diluting concept of ‘sublimation’ which follows immediately in Freud made the psychology of the New once more unrecognizable. Yet the daydream, because it is common property, extends both into the broad and into the deep expanse, into the non-sublimated, but in fact concentrated expanse, into that of the utopian dimensions. And this automatically posits the better world also as the more beautiful, in the sense of completed images, the like of which have not yet been seen on earth. Through planning or forming, windows are hewn in deprivation, hardness, rawness, banality, with distant prospects, full of light. The daydream as a stepping-stone to art so very obviously intends world-improvement, has this as its robustly real character: ‘Ahead, with lowered gaze, the earthly pain/Entwined with joy, a figure in a dream’: thus, in ‘Death of the Poet’ Gottfried Keller characterizes the companions of the poet, together with imagination and its wit. Art contains this utopianizing character by virtue of the daydream, not as a frivolously gilding character, but as one which also contains renun¬ ciation and which, though the latter is certainly not conquered by art alone, is not forgotten within it either, but embraced by joy as the figure that is approaching. The daydream goes into music and echoes in its house which is invisible but nevertheless as much a part of world-extension, now it is dynamic and expressive in music. It posits all the figures of venturing beyond, from the noble robber to Faust, all the wishful situations and wishful landscapes, from the aurora in oil to the symbolic circles of the Paradiso. People and situations are themselves driven to their end by virtue of the daydream riding to its end in great art: the consistent, the objectively possible becomes visible. In realistic writers such objective

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possibilities in the world they portray become quite distinct. This however, not by making nature fantastic for example, but rather by making known through fantasy, a fantasy which is concretely related and hurries on ahead, that dream of a matter in nature and history which the matter has of itself and which belongs both to its tendency and to the settlement of its Totum and essence. Where extrovert imagination is completely lacking, as in Naturalists and in those people Engels called ‘induction asses’, then of course only matters of fact and superficial connections are apparent. Con¬ sequently, waking dream with world-extension is always presupposed for the accomplished work of art, as the most exact imaginative experiment of perfection possible; in fact not only for the work of art. Ultimately, even science only gets beyond the superficial connection through an act of an¬ ticipation, through one, it goes without saying, of a specific kind. This may simply consist in the so-called heuristic ‘assumptions’, which present a picture of the whole matter, still not in detail, but purely in outline. However, a perfect waking dream of harmonious connection with nature may also come first: Kepler intended such world-perfection, and he discovered the laws of planetary motion. The reality of these laws certainly did not correspond to the dream of perfection of the harmony of the spheres; nevertheless: the dream went on ahead, was the estimate of a totally harmoniously ordered world. This sort of thing is as remote as can be from the regression of the night-dream: for the latter shows, in its sinking back and archaism, only prelogical images, as categories of a society which has long since passed, not those of a rational cosmos. Anticipations and intensifications which refer to men, social utopian ones and those of beauty, even of transfiguration, are really only at home in the daydream. Above all revolutionary interest, with knowledge of how bad the world is, with acknowledgement of how good it could be if it were otherwise, needs the waking dream of world-improvement, keeps hold of it in a wholly unheuristic, wholly realistic way in both its theory and practice.

Fourth characteristic of the daydream: journey to the end Fourthly, the waking, that is, open dream knows how not to forgo. It refuses to be fictitiously full or even simply to spiritualize wishes. The day-fantasy begins like the night-dream with wishes, but carries them radically to their conclusion, wants to get to the place of their fulfilment.

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Two typical daydreams of writers are relevant here; for, despite all weakness and escapism, they posit this place in a really prototypical way. The two daydreams, both incidentally of quiet writers, are all the more relevant here because they intend an arrival, not merely a world-improving roaming. One comes from the childhood of Clemens Brentano, the other comes from the youth of Morike and already contains all the seeds of a poetic ideal landscape. After Brentano, with his sister Bettina and other children, had established a kingdom called Vaduz in a Frankfurt attic, it was, as Brentano says, like being driven out of paradise when he later learnt that there was a real Vaduz and that it was the capital of the principality of Liechtenstein. But Goethe’s old mother consoled him: ‘Don’t let it upset you, believe me, your Vaduz is yours and is not marked on any map, and all the soldiers of Frankfurt, even the household cavalry with the Antichrist at their head, can’t take it away from you. . .Your kingdom is in the clouds and not of this earth, and every time it touches the earth it will rain tears, I wish you a blessed rainbow.’ Morike’s account con¬ cerning the direct transition from day-fantasy into poetry is to be found in his novel ‘Maler Nolten’, and it records the following, as transposed autobiography: ‘When I was still at school I had a friend whose way of thinking and aesthetic endeavour went hand in hand with mine; we spent our free time together and soon created our own sphere of poetry... All the shapes of our imagination still stand before me, vivid, earnest, true, and anyone into whose soul I could play just one ray of the poetic sun which warmed us then, truly golden as it was, would not at least begrudge me a serene pleasure, he would even forgive the mature man for taking another idle walk in the redolent landscape of this poetry and even for bringing back a piece of old stone from the beloved ruin. We invented for our poetry a territory which lay outside the known world, a secluded island on which a powerful heroic people was supposed to live. This island was called Orplid, and we imagined it was situated in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America.’ So much for Brentano’s Vaduz founded in the children’s attic, and Morike’s Orplid transported so far away. The mere assignment of the daydream to the chimeras of the night or even to art seen as a kind of game does least justice to such or similar imagi¬ native landings. For this sees only sublimations in them or even archaic return, instead of attempted articulation of a utopian hope-content. In a thinker like Freud, nothing at all corresponds to these contents in the outside world either (which must in fact appear to the late bourgeoisie as leaden sobriety and nothingness); art as a whole is false appearance, religion as

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a whole, illusion. What is essential for the daydream, particularly in the journey to the end, is: the seriousness of a pre-appearance of the possibly Real, this is almost more definitely blocked off for it here than for the nightdream which is in any case symptom-like. The usual simple bourgeois illusion-theory of the daydream leaves within it and around it only the playing space for the pretty games of infantilisms and archaisms: ‘In the exercise of his imagination, man thus continues to enjoy the freedom from external compulsion which he has long since renounced in reality.... The creation of the spiritual realm of the imagination finds its complete counter¬ part in the laying-out of conservation areas, nature reserves in those places where the demands of agriculture, of traffic and of industry threaten to change quickly the original face of the earth beyond recognition. The nature reserve preserves this old state which we have elsewhere regretfully sacrificed to necessity. Everything may thrive and grow as it wants, even what is useless or harmful. The spiritual realm of imagination is also such a con¬ servation area, withdrawn from the reality principle’ (Freud, Vorlesungen, 1922, p. 416). If art was everywhere and always the same as mere formal or non-committal armchair observation, i.e. like enjoyment of art that merely conserves, then the nature reserve theory would perhaps be all right; and a kind of jester’s licence for the purpose of producing pleasure would follow, for anywhere from the night-club to the National Gallery. But even the bourgeoisie was not always committed solely to the stalls of contemplation, it did once dream of the aesthetic education of man,* and consequently of art which grasps, in fact attacks, and of a morning gate of the beautiful. How little Socialist Realism has in common with philistine enjoyment of art, let alone with ‘a conservation area withdrawn from the reality principle’. In Freud, reality always appears as immutable, and it appears as mechanical reality consistent with the world-picture of the last century. Precisely by this process, utopian daydream, particularly as journey to the end, is made reflexive, or, psychologically speaking, purely introverted, as is the night-dream. In C. G. Jung this introverted material only had to be excavated vertically in order to transfer Orplid into the archaic realm; from the nature reserve into the Tertiary period. By this process, imaginative landing was only possible as an archetype, that is, in Jung, only in the long since sunken land of myth. This is decisively contradicted by the fact that Vaduz and Orplid, and what is intended by these radical conceptions, have never sought their place of fulfilment * A reference to Schiller’s essay ‘On the Aesthetic Education of Man’, 1795.

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anywhere but in the future. Even the transferral of such fairytale images into Once-upon-a-time always allows the One Day as something coming to shimmer through the One Day as something past. Even the transferral to secluded valleys or South Sea islands, as was the case in older novels of an ideal state,* involves future in its remoteness, utopian destination in its distance. Even the really archaic basic ground of memory to which so many images of hope refer back: the archetype Golden Age, Paradise - stands likewise, as something expected - in the Some Day of time. The Orplidic thus hangs with hundreds of small and great pearls on the littleexplored red threadf of dream-utopia and is continually held together by it. It is held together by the intention towards something perfect, no matter how variably the contents of this perfect something have been pictured in accordance with previous classes and societies. The will to journey to the end where everything turns out well thus always pervades utopian consciousness, plays throughout this consciousness with a never to be forgotten spirit of fairytale, works in the dreams of a better life, but also, and this must finally be understood, suo modo in works of art. The world¬ improving imagination lands in them not just so that all men and things are driven to the limits of their possibility and all their situations are used up and their forms fully fashioned. Rather, every great work of art, besides its manifest essence, is also carried towards a latency of its coming side, that is: towards the contents of a future which had not yet appeared in its time, in fact ultimately towards the contents of an as yet unknown final state. For this reason alone, great works of every age have something to say, and indeed something new that the previous age had not yet noticed in them; for this reason alone, the fairytale Magic Flute, but also the historically rigidly fixed Divine Comedy have their ‘eternal youth’. What is important is, as Goethe says, the ‘far radiating’ quality of these great imaginative creations, through which they at least hold open the exit in given reality, possibly a window on to something Absolute. And the great, i.e. realistic works of art do not become less realistic through the notation of latency, through the space - however blank - of the Absolute, but more realistic; since everything real mingles with the Not-Yet within that space. Significant daydream imaginative creations do not blow soap-bubbles, they open windows, and outside them is the daydream world of a possibility which can at any rate be given form. There are enough differences Novels in which life in an imaginary state is described, as in Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, t ‘The red thread’ also means ‘the central theme’ in German.

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between the two kinds of dream even at this end; the mode as well as the content of wish-fulfilment diverge in them insuppressibly. This always means: the night-dream lives in regression, it is indiscriminately drawn into its images, the daydream projects its images into the future, by no means indiscriminately, but controllable even given the most impetuous imagination and mediatable with the objectively Possible. The content of the night-dream is concealed and disguised, the content of the day-fantasy is open, fabulously inventive, anticipating, and its latency lies ahead. It comes itself out of self- and world-extension forwards, it is wanting to have better, often simply wanting to know better. Longing is common to both kinds of dream, for it is, as noted, the only honest quality of all men; but the desiderium of the day, in contrast to that of the night, can also be the subject not only the object of its science. The daytime wishful dream requires no excavation and interpretation, but rectification and, in so far as it is capable of it, concretion. In short, it does not have a measure from the outset any more than the night-dream but, unlike the spooks of the night, it has a goal and makes progress towards it.

Merging of nocturnal and daytime dream-games, its dissolution Being different from one another does not of course mean being unrelated. Between the level of the dreamer and that of the daydreamer there is some¬ times an exchange. There is a play of colours in the night which can also exist during the day, which looks like something exceptional and doubtless can be portrayed as such. Remarkable collections of this kind exist. Friedrich Huch published a hundred accounts of ‘Dreams’, thus a particularly tangled strangeness, the novel ‘The Other Side’ (by the illustrator Alfred Kubin) stems mainly from moon and sleep. Day writings, however, also certainly incorporate dreams, most strikingly and most beautifully even in the realist Keller. They are reported like other events, but they also blend effortlessly with the solid yet fairytale-like lavishness in which all Keller’s observations are steeped. Der grime Heinrich,* shortly before his sad return home, succumbs to a real orgy of dreams. They are all reproachful wish-fulfilments. Among them belongs the vision of his home town, transfigured, changed, a crazy aerial picture on the ground, into which there is no entry. Valleys * The hero of Keller’s most famous novel of the same name, 1854-5.

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and streams appear with unheard-of, yet well-known names, rose-gardens float away into the distance, spreading out a reddish hue on the horizon: - ‘the alpine glow streams out and surrounds the fatherland’. It is a different red to that of reddening dawn, the waking dawn of former times when der grime Heinrich left his home town and turned back to the mountains: ‘now the morning star glimmered only over the last ice-altar’; the light now comes from Hades, pretends to be the last remaining hope. His mother’s house appears, actually the parlour at dusk turned inside out, unforgettable, only the night-dream provides the raw material and image for this: ‘On the ledges and in the recesses stood rows of antique silver pots and beakers, porcelain jars and little marble images. Window-panes of glass-crystal sparkled with mysterious brilliance in front of a dark background between the grainy doors of rooms and cupboards with shining steel keys in them. Above this strange fa£ade the sky arched dark-blue, and a half-nocturnal sun was reflected in the dark splendour of the walnut, in the silver of the jugs and in the window-panes.’ This sort of thing does of course show the traffic between the antipodes of night and daylight, they seem completely immersed in each other, uncannily and peculiarly full of foreboding. With what elective affinity Romanticism in particular was able to use this mixed light, as a dream-game and not only as a game. Every dream was for Novalis ‘a significant tear in the mysterious curtain which falls in a thousand folds in our inner being’. It was predominantly also the metamorphosis of dream-images which recommended itself to Romantic antistatics and to its waking dream, in an almost scholarly fashion. Night-dream as novel grown wild was discovered by Romantic nature philosophy: ‘These creations then are not without voice and speech; sounds and words, coming as if from all different directions, comprehensible and incomprehensible, meet and mutually suppress each other, and thus nothing seems to be lost from that inner nature, in contrast to the outer, except the steadiness and quiet which the latter has. For such inner figments, as if made of fleeting clouds, come and disappear; here neither the high mountains are protected by their greatness, nor the tree by the power of its roots from passing quickly away, and where one moment there was cliff and forest, there suddenly now appears a plain or a room enclosed by walls’ (G. H. Schubert, Die Geschichte der Seele, 1830, p. 549). Thus the appearance arose as if night-dreams and daydreams underwent, beside their exchange, even a merging of their images, on the same ground, romantically-objectively united. The pure Romantic simply no longer wants to know whether subconscious chaos or consciously shaping, re-shaping

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imagination predominates in his poetry. For him the night-dream is in any case removed from all concepts of time and space of current sobriety, from all causal and identity-forms of the grey cortex of civilization; the night-dream is constructed pre-logically and is thus an archaic element against the expanse, the morning, the future of the day. This is a legacy which Romanticism brought from the night into the day layer, though there was continually an element of new connection at work between the two layers. Accordingly the overlap of the black and the blue hours happened again every time both were proud not to be day in the sense of superficial clarity, mere superficial connection. The crack in the previous surface then tore open cave and distant blue together; ultimately in Expressionism, particularly in Surrealism. Though now with the important difference from Romanticism that the utopian did not so much want to turn towards the past, as the past towards something utopian. No matter how lunar the atmosphere in the Expressionist poem: ‘pale evening trees, willows which steal the light from the moonfond pond, moonflakes silvering through the window’, and many more Daubler phrases besides:* night-lines were incorporated into utopian ones in this strained way. Even stammering non¬ sense of the night in the attempt to travel, on the basis of such dissolutions of the former day connections, to a new land, to better shores, even to rationally ordered shores. An object-lesson in these transitions was given by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’; highly post-Romantic, highly un-Romantic. The cellar of the unconscious discharges itself in Joyce into a transitory Now, provides a mixture of prehistoric stammering, smut and church music; the author does not interrupt with a single comma the decoction that surges over the levelled threshold of consciousness for eighty pages. But in the midst of the monkey-chatter (from one day and a thousand subconscious human reactions strictly mixed up) there appears something clearly viewed, applied montage shows quite rational cross-connections or analogiae entis; Lot’s wife and The Old Ireland Tavern near the salt water down by the docks, cutting straight through time and space, celebrate their meeting, their everyday beyond space and time. ‘So that’, says Stephen Dedalus, ‘so that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’ (Ulysses, Part II (Circe)). Primeval caves, with babbling and speaking in tongues inside them, are thus conjured up in day-fantasies and these are then lowered down again; a continual merging * Theodor Daubler, Expressionist poet, 1876-1934.

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of grotesque night-faces and outlines develops. And in Surrealism, i.e. corresponding to the very time of collapse to which Surrealism belongs, as always in the sudden combination of incompatibles, there is no lack of humour; a contemptible humour sometimes, one which then unmasks the design merely to epater le bourgeois, or even a humour of pettily contrived jokes, and after that things become quite cosy in the dream-house at the sign of the Double Strangeness. But more essential in Surrealism remains the fundamental coupling of Hecate and Minerva, remains the visionary face, a montage of mere shreds and collapses. This is in fact a difference from Romanticism understood as the age of Restoration;* at that time the daydream was fundamentally incorporated into night-lines without becoming phosphorescent. At any rate, it is a protracted mixed world of subconsciousness and red dawn, a contact-world in which the regressio makes use of the journey to the end, or the journey to the end makes use of the regressio. The labyrinth of the night-dream even aesthetically is not a stepping-stone to the castle in the air, and yet: in so far as it forms its dungeons, archaic material can communicate with waking imagination. And above all: from the example of Gottfried Keller’s dream-house, which flashes like the Styx, a night-piece of the house of the mother and of youth, it also becomes apparent why conversely the waking dream is no less able to communicate with archaic material. It can do so because, not only psychologically, but also objectively, future still exists in the past, because many night-pieces are also undischarged or unfinished and therefore demand daydream, forward-intention. This night still has something to say, not as something brooding that has primally been, but as something that has not become, that has never really become known anywhere, which is encapsulated in parts within it. But it can only say something in so far as it is exposed by waking imagination, by an imagination that is directed towards what is becoming; in itself the archaic is dumb. Only as something brooding in an undischarged, undeveloped, in short, utopian way does it have the power to open up in the daydream, does it attain the power not to hold itself sealed against the latter; but as such, even though only as such, it can circulate in the notions of clear road, preserved-retained ego, world-improvement, journey to the end. The insight therefore that archaic brooding can be utopian in reality finally explains the possibility of a merging of night-dreams and daydreams, gives the explanation and dissolution of a partially possible merging of the dream-games. And even Bloch is referring to the reactionary period of the restoration of the French monarchy after 1814.

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with the continuing primacy of the waking imagination: it is not the utopian that capitulates here to archaism, but archaism which capitulates, on account of its undischarged components, possibly to the utopian; every other merging and every other explanation of it is illusion. The elabora¬ tion of it is in any case the business of the day; the suspect god who gives to his beloved in sleep* needs Apollo to speak for him, that Apollo who may well be familiar with vapours and oracles, but has conquered them and has them serving in his temple. Otherwise, imagination in Jung and Klages’ sense would revert completely to prehistory, moreover a romanticized, counterfeit prehistory. Therefore, only the daylight opens up the wonder¬ fully relevant material of night-dreams, of the archaic in general, and it is this material only because and in so far as it is still itself utopian, transposed in a utopian way. Regression therefore occurs artistically only with profit when something that has not become, a future possible, is also still encap¬ sulated in the archetype. Otherwise the treasures which can be seen on the floor of night become chaff and withered pine-cones, like Rubezahl’st gifts when day comes. But the daydream, and what it grasps, contains human concerns instead of Medusas in the labyrinth. Daydreams have chosen the better part; so they all advance together, though with so much varia¬ tion of capability and quality, into the field of anticipatory consciousness.

More on inclination to dream: the ‘mood’ as medium of daydreams Asleep, the body is in the dark, only awake do we sense it. It senses itself first in the feeling of its state-of-being; therein only physical states become aware of themselves. And even they then only become aware in a blurred and diffuse way, not yet referring to a particular part of the body or to a particular kind of physical pain or enjoyment. There are middling, sick and healthy states-of-being, feeling well and feeling ill, but they are all merely quite general; a clear stomach-ache, a specific sensation of pleasure, on the tongue or localized in erogenous zones, is immediately excluded from the above. And: the state-of-being is not, for example, being in good or bad ‘spirits’, like the mood; since it is not a mixture, like the latter, of actual drive-feelings or emotions. In fact, it only contains the cooking

* Psalm 127, 2. | Riibezahl - a legendary Silesian mountain spirit.

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of the bodily processes, particularly the gut-sensations and more or less subconscious sensations of the circulation of the blood, but as yet no emotional feelings, with an ego behind them. This distinguishes the more organic feeling of condition in the ‘state-of-being’ from the far more egobased feeling of ‘mood’; thus there is the diffuse sense which announces the feelings of organs on the one hand, and the diffuse sense that conveys emotional feelings on the other, which a person always first gets into, when in unsettled spirits. The state-of-being is like a roaring which, like every other noise, arises out of a confusion of many naturally given sounds in an irregular sequence. The mood is like the confusion of sounds from an orchestra which plays bits of individual passages simultaneously before the beginning of a piece of music, not natural sounds, but sounds which have a musical, composing ego behind them. The mood does not have such a muffled, subterranean ‘ground tone’ either, as the state-of-being does, but its own ‘ground tone’ is undulating, like weather, atmospheric, it can move between extremes (like ‘exulting to the heavens, gloomy as death’),* which the state-of-being does not know so close together. And furthermore, every mood shows a peculiar expanse, which is reminiscent of the spreading of perfumes. Th. Lipps emphasized precisely this expanse which is foreign to the state-of-being of the body; he notes in the case of ‘cheerfulness’, for example, ‘the perceptible spreading of the pleasure of an experience into a more or less expansive mood embracing the whole of psychological experience’ (Leitfaden der Psychologie, 1903, p. 271). Or in a more recent description (which at any rate is not crawling with the fashionable existentialist mood-obsession a la Bollnov):t ‘The spiritual mood is the relatively persistent atmospheric basis of our feeling of life, from which the changing perceptions are raised with particular colouring, by which, however, our ideas and our behaviour are also permeated’ (Lersch, Der Aufbau des Charakters, 1948, p. 41). On account of this atmospherically wide, and at the same time diffuse collective phenomenon, the feeling of mood spreads out even beyond the ego, to which it is primarily attached. A room, a landscape appear to have a ‘mood’, and even here the more distinctly, the more indistinct, i.e. more diffuse the transmitted emotional state looks. So bright midday is little suited for this, the early morning is better, it is most at home in the evening; the stormy mood is wellknown (which the first bolt of lightning disperses). Simple, great objects like the sea are worse suited for it, those which cannot be surveyed are * Klarchen in Goethe’s play ‘Egmont’ 3, 2 (1788). t Otto Friedrich Bollnov, b. 1903, German philosopher and education theorist.

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better, like the forest. Here, however, we must never forget that the breadth of mood, which itself moves outwards so strongly, even as an extroverted feeling for nature never appears divided up, but remains in an undulating generality. It is an essential feature of the mood that it appears total only when it is diffuse; it never consists of a dominant, overwhelming emotion, but of an itself wide mixture of many emotional feelings which have not yet been settled. This in fact makes it into a phenomenon which so easily becomes iridescent, this at the same time causes it - still on the other side of the confusion of sounds before the beginning of a piece of music, and also completely without intensive density - to spin out and deform so easily as merely impressionistic experience-reality (Debussy, Jacobsen). Heidegger also hails from this impressionistic thereabouts, in so far as he describes it and at the same time succumbs to it. But here, within this dull dimension, Heidegger has the so to speak tautological advantage of having noticed ‘that existence always already has a mood’, in the sense of an original explanation of how one is and one feels. The original aspect is according to this idea not a perceiving Finding-Oneself-in-a-State but rather a mood-laden Being-in-a-State: ‘What we indicate ontologically by the term state-of-mind is ontically the most familiar and everyday thing: mood, mood-ladenness’ (Sein und Zeit, 1927, p. 134). But Heidegger has not got beyond the dull, depressingly stagnant, even shallow dimension that he has uncovered. State-of-being and mood remain unseparated here; thus, in this undifferentiated animal surge, shallowness prevents any intima¬ tion of the darkness of the real immediate existere which in no way brings its being before it as There (darkness of the lived moment, of which more later) even in the mood. Thus the interested depressing element obstructs all brightening tendencies of the mood, to reproduce instead only the dejection: ‘The often enduring, evenly proportioned and pale moodlessness, which should not be confused with a bad mood, is so far from being nothing that precisely within it existence becomes wearisome to itself. Being has become manifest as a burden.... And there again an elevated mood can relieve the manifest burden of existence; the possibility of mood also reveals, even though relieving it, the burdensome character of existence’ (l.c., p. 134). Not the misery of all mankind, but solely that of the unilluminated hopeless petit bourgeoisie strikes us when we come to this sentence in Heidegger, concerning the ‘abysses’ of this kind of state-of-mind: ‘The deep boredom, swirling to and fro in the abysses of existence like a silent fog, draws all things, people and oneself together in a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals That-Which-Is in the whole’ (Was

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ist Metaphysik? 1929, p. 16). Here then from the mood, because it announces itself solely as a mood of expiring life, i.e. here: of a declining class, the wishful character is completely missing, without which even this diffuseness of emotions, as one of emotions, cannot exist; unless, as Heidegger must himself say, it is ‘moodlessness’. What is missing is precisely the colour for waking dreams, with which the mood can picture its blue hour, without it of course becoming uninteresting in existential-ontical terms and sinking down in existentialist-ontological terms into nihilism. Not every possible everyday, not even every one which has already appeared historically, is endowed with ‘pale moodlessness’, let alone with the boredom which the ‘That-Which-Is in the whole’ supposedly reveals; rather, this everyday mood essentially, if not solely, belongs to the mechan¬ ized capitalist enterprise. And even within this enterprise there exists, apart from the moodlessness, even alongside the undoubted burden of such an existence, that confusion of sounds of living drive-feelings which actually first pictures ‘mood’ and in which the inclination to dream, one to waking dreams, only now finds its medium. Because the sleeper’s body is in the dark, its state-of-being is also missing. And this is even more true of the mood, which presupposes the ego, it belongs to the blue hour, not to the black one. It also demands relaxation, certainly, though of a kind which is not seeking slumber, but rather an excursion. This state of mood, particularly inclined to the blue, has previously been disregarded in relation to the daydream; we must now make up for this. The pale moodlessness itself may not yet be dreamy, even the dejected mood, the confusion of unpleasurable emotions, is not light enough as a medium to allow daydreams to develop straight away. However, the continual propensity towards the better in the ground tone of all expectant emotions is all the more inclined to relieve this dejected mood and to escape into an elevated one. And precisely at this point of transition, between gloom and cheerfulness, the medium exists in which waking dream images develop most comfortably. Escape and inclination, emotions of rejection and devotion are simultaneously mixed in this brightdark mood, and in this way form the aura in which each embarkation for Cythera takes place. Whether it is minor or grand, a nervous or a considered departure, whether Cythera consists in a mere improvement of situation or in something unheard-of till now, whether it is for next to nothing or not for all the world: this of course depends not on the mood, but on the strength and the content of the emotions of inclination which arise out of it, on the status and concreteness of the imagination

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which visualizes the fulfilment of their intention for these emotions. But bright-dark mood remains in every blue light, distant light of this kind clings for a long time to the waking dream, and thus also extends a long way into the actually shaped waking dreams, negatively as well as positively. Otherwise there would not be in them that weather-like quality which is not just confined to Impressionism, to this phenomenon of mood which is relatively of the most comfortable kind, that is, of a weakly shaped and weakly committing kind. Otherwise there would not be the lyricism which also accompanies rigidly shaped daydream images, wherever they are still situational. In daydream-works, bright-dark mood is therefore not only confined to softness a la Debussy or Jacobsen. It also fills such sustained and martellato emotional picture music as that of Brahms (fourth symphony, particularly the last movement), rather than softness it causes the rough and sharp quality here. Mood only recedes in a decisive situation and in a representation which can accordingly make itself appear free of atmosphere. Not merely the impressionistic and the older sentimental mood then recedes, the kind whose iridescence never goes beyond a mixture of broken-off emotions and blurred outlines, but also the atmosphere of sharpness, together with the whole romanticism of this medium clears, opens a view on to what is decisive and no longer so situational. This always happens where a situation driven to its conclusion in the artistic waking dream, or at least a situation which has been brought to a standstill by taking a stance, refuses the situational itself. This is also the case, in a strikingly weatherless way, in all art that has been striven for and which is without unrest, without the pathos of movement and time, that is, in that art which seeks to be hard and crystalline. Around a Cythera like Egyptian relief, Byzantine mosaic or even merely Alfieri’s classicism, there is no longer so much mood as around Gothic, Baroque or even merely around Byron’s stormy world. Nevertheless, mood as pathos still underlies these too; even Egyptian art contains unrest, in that it pacifies it, in fact, qua its wishful dream, by seeking to be a single stone requiem. So mood still lies at the feet even of the intended anti-mood of a work of art, because of the atmospheric quality of the imagination. This daydream water belongs to every daydream, imaginative dream, even if, in its ultimately achieved dryness, it leaves this water. Thus it is confirmed: the bright-dark mood provides the medium in which all daydreams begin, even those with hardness, and especially those with arousing blue (azure).

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More on the expectant emotions (anxiety, fear, terror, despair, hope, confidence) and the waking dream The drive-feelings themselves are of course no longer so mood-based, do not remain so. They soon clearly raise themselves from this general way of feeling in the shape of ‘sheer’ envy, ‘open’ hatred, ‘complete’ trust. Cheerfulness, for example, this general carefree feeling of life, is a mood; but keenly flashing pleasure is an emotion. And the emotions do not only emerge out of the diffuse, but also out of the relatively unrelated. Therefore, even when the mood-based medium disperses, the waking dream continues to resound; but now as one which has predominantly been driving in the medium of expectant emotions. These, a quite special type of emotions, have been promoting the waking dream in the mood-medium anyway; so they appear here again, as those which are differentiated from the filled emotions by their strongly anticipating intentional direction (cf. Vol. I, p. 74). The intention in all expectant emotions is one that points ahead, the temporal environment of its content is future. The more imminent this future is, the stronger, ‘more burning’ the expectant intention as such; the more extensively the content of an expectant intention affects the intending self, the more totally the person throws himself into it, and the ‘deeper’ it becomes a passion. Even expectant intentions with a negative content as regards self-preservation, like anxiety and fear, can likewise become passions, no less so than hope. They then seem ‘exaggerated’ to the unengaged observer, and are so in pathological cases; occasionally, of course, simply lack of awareness of the real situation causes them to appear ‘exaggerated’, ‘enlarging’ their object. But even then the expectant emotion extends beyond its ‘founding’ idea-content; the expectant content shows a greater ‘depth’ than the given idea-content in each case. Every fear implies, as a fulfilment correlate, total destruction such as there has not yet been before, hell let loose; every hope implies the highest good, bliss let loose such as there has not yet been before. This ultimately distinguishes expectant emotions from the filled ones (like envy, greed, admiration), which are always only ‘founded’ by known material and at most intend an ‘unreal’ future of their Object, that is, one that can be imagined exactly, objectively containing nothing new. The intentional contents of the filled emotions lie, as Husserl wrongly says of all emotions, in a ‘set horizon’, the horizon of memory idea, as opposed to that of hope idea, the forward-reaching, i.e. real imagination, and the possible ‘real’ future of its Object. At the

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same time there is always of course, even in the remembering idea, qua intention, an expectation at work, and Husserl himself states, quite unexpectedly: ‘Every originally constituting process is animated by protentions which emptily constitute and collect what is coming as such’ (Zur Phanomenologie des inneren ZeitbewuBtseins, 1928, p. 410). However, these ‘protentions’ have in memory and in the emotions ‘founded’ by it already received what is theirs, they only have a ‘horizon directed towards the future of what is re-remembered’, which, with its unreal future, is in fact ‘set horizon’. Whereas the expectant emotions, and the real imaginative idea which shows them their Object in space, at the same time possess this space as decided temporal space, that is, with the unweakened temporal material in time that is called real future. Accordingly, every expectant emotion, even if it should only intend unreal future in the foreground, becomes capable of a rapport with the objectively New. This is the life which the expectant emotion implicitly communicates to the thus anticipatory waking dreams. Every drive-feeling that is not merely mood-based refers to a something that is external to it. But the inner surge is of course abandoned in this process with varying speed or force. The first and fundamental negative expectant emotion, anxiety, begins as the most mood-based and undefined. An anxious person never sees defined in front of him or around him the something from which the feeling drifts towards him; this feeling is tremulous, not only in its physical expression, but also in its Object. Freud primarily traced anxiety, as we have seen, back to the act of birth, to the first constriction (angustia) in breathing, and to the first separation from the mother. Every later feeling of anxiety accordingly brings this primal experience of trepidation and abandonment alive; reacting to all situations of danger, even fear of death, is thus supposed to be merely subjective and therein regressive. But with the existing social conditions which may by themselves copiously stimulate fear of life and death, or even produce them, the negative content in this relation is completely omitted here, i.e. that which objectively arouses anxiety, without which anxiety could not constitute itself at all. Heidegger, on the other hand, does not make his anxiety regressive, but neither does he process beyond it to equally original positive expectant emotions without which anxiety as such could not exist, just as a valley could not exist without a mountain. Instead, Heidegger makes anxiety into the simple, undifferentiated ‘Thusness’ in everything, the existential ‘basic state-of-mind’, and in a way which really does subjectively individuate each man, leading him back to himself as

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solus ipse. Anxiety thus accordingly reveals to man ‘his most characteristic Being-in-the-world’; but the About Which, ‘about which anxiety is anxious, is Being-in-the-world itself’ (Sein und Zeit, 1927, p. 187). And this About Which is basically the same thing into which anxiety dissolves itself, namely nothingness, the ‘It was nothing’; being itself ‘hangs over into nothingness’. Thus anxiety here confronts us most immediately and par excellence with nothingness as the basic fund of the Being-Uncanny, of the Being-Subject-to-Death of all Being-in-the-World. The ‘basic stateof-mind’ of anxiety reveals precisely this abyss, according to Heidegger; hence also ‘ the constant, although mostly concealed trembling of everything existing’ per se. Heidegger, with much intentional immediacy of experience (mere experiencing), but also with, it can be said: much cheap emotion¬ seeking, together with an inordinate amount of mere interpretation of the meaning of words, with which philosophy feels ashamed in front of philology and gains nothing in the process beyond metaphysical dilet¬ tantism - Heidegger thus reflects and, with his ontology of anxiety, clearly only makes absolute the ‘basic state-of-mind’ of a declining society. From the standpoint of the petit bourgeoisie, he reflects the society of monopoly capitalism, with permanent crisis as its normal condition; the only alternatives to permanent crisis are war and war production. What was for primitive man still the ‘Not-at-home’ in impenetrable nature, has become for the unsuspecting victims of monopoly capitalism their society, the gigantic alienated enterprise into which they are placed. Heidegger however - with a sociological ignorance which matches his metaphysical dilettantism - makes this anxiety into the basic state-of-mind of man in general, including the nothingness into which he is supposedly always, everywhere and irrevocably thrown. All that remains of Heidegger’s anxiety-‘hermeneutics’ is at best a kind of familiarity, acute in the petit bourgeoisie, with anxiety as unsuspectingness. ‘The fact that the threatening is nowhere, characterizes the About Which of anxiety’ (l.c., p. 186); in fact it is from the outset expectation of something negatively undefined. Because what causes and establishes anxiety can come from all sides, its most revealing manifestations were fear of ghosts and nocturnal horror. And both have been replaced by those monsters and nightmares walking in the flesh today, but working in the darkness. So naturally anxiety does not yet clearly refer to its external something, in contrast to the second negative expectant emotion, fear: with its sudden concentrated mode, fright, and its intensified concentrated mode, terror. The threat here at least comes out of a weather-corner which is known from previous experience; or even:

DISTINCTION OF DAYDREAMS AND NIGHT-DREAMS

III

that which stimulates fear is spatially so visible that we can be prepared for the way it strikes, if not actually for its arrival. If the About Which of fear emerges completely and moreover suddenly, and terror arises, with the weaker degrees of fright, then the suddenness of these emotions must not blind us to the fact that they too are also those of expectation, although possibly (by no means always) of an expectation that is itself first born in statu nascendi of its Object. Without expectation, nothing could instil terror, nothing make us numb with fright; like a sniper’s bullet, an event which is completely disparate to the expectant intentions arouses no emotion at all. It does cause numbness, blindness (as long as the event is survived), that is, bodily sensations which are also appropriate to fright, as to a shock, but it does not cause the actual mental feeling of terror or fright which always presupposes expectant intention of what has happened. After all, this expectation itself so little excludes the surprising feature of its Object that the emotional character of the surprising feature, both of the negatively and positively surprising (‘miraculous’) feature, does not appear at all without being prepared for by an expectation. The activated expectation of the terrible is of course brief; if it is prolonged, like fear, but with the complete certainty (temporal inevitability, familiarity of content) of its Object, then the most extreme, hardest borderline mode of fear appears, the absolutely negative expectant emotion: despair. And only this, not anxiety, really refers to nothingness; anxiety is still questioning, hovering, still deter¬ mined by mood and by the undetermined, unresolved element of its Object, whereas despair itself has a definitive quality in its frame of mind, and besides this definitive element, has something absolutely defined about it in its Object. It is expectation as eliminated expectation, that is, expecta¬ tion of something negative about which there is no longer any doubt; with despair, the series of negative expectant emotions ends. All their waking dreams (only terror has no time to form one) ultimately revolve around something negatively unconditional: the infernal. In complete contrast there now appear in and behind all this the positive expectant emotions. Of course their number is much smaller, up till now there has not been so much cause for them. There are only two of them: hope, which wrecks fear, and confidence, which corresponds to despair. Hope, as a gathering emotion, still has a mood-based element in common with anxiety: not as the homeless element of the nocturnal, but rather as the dawning-decanted element of the auroral. This is described with particular accuracy in the echo or reflection of the landscape in Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, as the ineffably sweet blooming of the reddening dawn with

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all its arpeggio ante lucem shining from afar. But hope stands also as one of the most exact emotions above every mood; because it is not very changeable, but very characteristic in its intention, and above all - something which befits neither the mood nor even the negative expectant emotions - capable of logical and concrete correction and sharpening. Consequently, hope is not only the opposite concept to anxiety, but also, regardless of its emotional character, to memory; that is, a relation to a purely cognitive process and system of ideas which befits no other emotion. And its relation to anxiety, even to the nothingness of despair, is of such determined power that it can be said: hope drowns anxiety. No ‘existential analysis’ of hope will ever be able to reveal the latter as a ‘forerunning determination to die’, provided that the analysis really is one of existere and not corrumpere. Instead, hope has projected itself precisely at the place of death, as one towards light and life, as one which does not allow failure the last word; thus it definitely has the intentional content: there is still rescue - in the horizon. ‘Where there is danger, rescue also grows’, this line of Holderlin’s* indicates simply the positive dialectical turning point for which fear of the place of death disappears. In such a way that the uncertainty of the outcome remains, just as with fear, but an uncertainty that, unlike fear, does not border on passive care, on bearing a burden of care, on the night where nothingness is, but on the day which is the friend of man. Danger and faith are the truth of hope, in such a way that both are gathered in it, and danger contains no fear, faith no lazy quietism. Hope is thus ultimately a practical, a militant emotion, it unfurls banners. If confidence emerges from hope as well, then the expectant emotion which has become absolutely positive is present or as good as present, the opposite pole to despair. Like the latter, confidence is still expectation, that is, eliminated expecta¬ tion of an outcome about which there is no longer any doubt. But whereas the expectant intention in the emotion of despair only appears as a corpse, in confidence it gives and yields itself up like a wise virgin, who, in going into the chamber of the bridegroom, offers up as well as gives up her intention. Despair touches almost completely that Nothing which all the negative expectant emotions are approaching; confidence, on the other hand, has in its horizon almost that All to which the weakest hope, even that transposed by unreal future, essentially refers. Despair transcends, in that its Nothing defeats the intention in the certainty of extinction, confidence, in that its All allows the intention to enter into the certainty From Holderlin’s ‘Patmos’, 1802.

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of salvation. Whereas therefore the negative expectant emotions and their utopian images ultimately intend the infernal as their unconditional element, the positive expectant emotions likewise inevitably have the paradisial in the unconditional element of their ultimate intentional object. Thus: if the mood is the general medium of daydreaming, then the expectant emotions (including the extension which they can build on the filled emotions, on envy or respect for example) give the direction of daydreaming. They give the line along which the imagination of anticipatory ideas moves, and along which this imagination then builds its wishful road, or even (in the case of negative expectant emotions) its unwishful road. The wishful road with the landscape it aims for is no richer as a road of hope, but noticeably more lovely and more lively than the unwishful road, or road of fear; at least among peoples who are striving from the darkness into the light. Both future-orientated intentions, that of expectant emotions and that of expectant ideas, accordingly extend into a Not-Yet-Conscious, that is, into a class of consciousness which is itself to be designated not as filled, but as anticipatory. The waking dreams advance, provided they contain real future, collectively into this Not-Yet-Conscious, into the unbecome-unfilled or utopian field. Its composition, which is in the first instance psychological, must now be investigated; certainly cum ira et studio, with partiality for the already understood forward imagination, for the object-based Possible in psychological approaches to it. For only in the discovery of the NotYet-Conscious does expectation, above all positive expectation, attain its proper status: the status of a utopian function, in emotions as well as in ideas and in thoughts.

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DISCOVERY OF THE NOT-YET-CONSCIOUS OR OF FORWARD DAWNING

15

NOT-YET-CONSCIOUS AS A NEW CLASS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND AS THE CLASS OF CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE NEW: YOUTH, TIME OF CHANGE, PRODUCTIVITY CONCEPT OF THE UTOPIAN FUNCTION, ITS ENCOUNTER WITH INTEREST, IDEOLOGY, ARCHETYPES, IDEALS, ALLEGORY-SYMBOLS

The cistern contains, the fountain overflows. William Blake 'ivx'rjs eon \070s eavrbv aV&v Peculiar to the soul is the common spirit that grows. Heraclitus

The two edges The inward glance never sheds equal light. It is sparing, only ever illuminating a few parts of us. We are not conscious of what is not struck at all by the ray of attention. We are partly conscious of what is only struck obliquely, to a decreasing or increasing extent, according to the degree of attention. The conscious field is so narrow, and on all sides it shades off into darker edges and dissolves. Even before a mental event is forgotten, in fact even without it being forgotten, much in it is not conscious. A pain may remain unfelt, an external impression unexperienced, although they are definitely present psychologically. They lie below the threshold, either because the stimulus is too weak to be perceived, or because our attention is occupied with other things, and hence distracted, or because repetition deadens even powerful stimuli. So even in the conscious field, quite apart from forgetting, there are already various darker patches which are not conscious or only weakly so. The actual edges of consciousness do not of course lie in present experiencing, which is merely weakened. They are rather to be found where the conscious fades, in forgetting and

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in the forgotten, where what has been experienced sinks below the edge, below the threshold. And what is more, they are also to be found in a different form on the opposite side to forgetting, where something not previously conscious dawns. Here too there is an edge, a threshold in consciousness, in this case an upper one, pushed forward a greater or lesser distance, beyond which what is happening psychologically is not very lucid. Beneath the threshold of fading, yet also above the threshold of dawning, there is relatively unconscious material, the attentive glance must first make an effort, often a painful effort to focus on it. It is certainly capable of being preconscious, both in the depths of the no longer perceptible and especially where new material rises which has never occurred to anyone. Both can be fetched from beyond their edges, and to a greater or lesser extent elucidated.

Double meaning of the preconscious Mental life is always framed both by evening and morning. The nightdream moves in the forgotten and repressed, the daydream in what has never been experienced at all as present. For roughly two hundred years, what lies outside the conscious field has generally been called the uncon¬ scious. It was a great discovery that mental life does not coincide with consciousness. Unconscious, of course, wherever thought of as capable of consciousness, does not mean completely unconscious of itself, like a stone for example, but rather preconscious. But this is how the psycho¬ logically unconscious has been understood and is still understood today, merely as something that lies beneath consciousness and has dropped out of it. The unconscious lies - according to this interpretation - in the sediment; it begins backwards from an increasingly diminished conscious¬ ness. The unconscious here is therefore exclusively No-Longer-Conscious; as such it populates solely the moonshine landscape of cerebral loss. Accordingly, even when psychoanalysis calls it preconscious, it is not a newly dawning consciousness with new content but an old one with old content that has merely sunk below the threshold and may cross it again by a more or less straightforward process of being remembered. Thus the unconscious for Freud is solely the forgotten (for him the preconscious proper, which is normally capable of easily returning to consciousness) or the repressed (for him the unconscious proper, the ‘not merely descrip¬ tively but also dynamically unconscious’, which is not capable of easily

Il6

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

returning to consciousness). Admittedly the later Freud does stress that apart from the forgotten and repressed unconscious there is a third kind, namely an unconscious ‘in the ego itself’. ‘Even a part of the ego, God knows how important a part of the ego, can be unconscious, certainly is unconscious’; however, Freud immediately continues: ‘If we find ourselves thus compelled to posit a third non-repressed unconscious, then we must concede that the character of unconsciousness loses some of its meaning for us’ (Das Ich und das Es, 1923, p. 17). It loses some of its meaning because this third unconscious (Freud surprisingly cites even significant intellectual production as a manifestation of this) does not fit into his scheme of repression. But this touches on that preconscious which does not suit Freud’s system at all, the preconscious in its other meaning, over on the other side, in which no repressed material, but rather something coming up, is to be clarified. The night-dream may refer to the No-LongerConscious, it regresses towards it. But the daydream is carried on to something which is new at least for the dreamer, and probably even on to something in itself new, in its objective content. Thus in the daydream the crucial definition of a Not-Yet-Conscious reveals itself, as the class to which this daydream belongs. A final psychological definite feature of the daydream arises here, and it is a question of clarifying it. Up till now it has remained completely beyond conceptual reach, there is as yet no psychology of the unconscious of the other side, of forward dawning. This unconscious has remained unnoticed, although it represents the actual space of receptivity of the New and production of the New. The Not-Yet-Conscious is admittedly just as much a preconscious as is the unconscious of repressedness and forgottenness. In its way it is even an unconscious which is just as difficult and resistant as that of repressedness. Yet it is by no means subordinated to the manifest consciousness of today, but rather to a future consciousness which is only just beginning to come up. The Not-Yet-Conscious is thus solely the preconscious of what is to come, the psychological birthplace of the New. And it keeps itself preconscious above all because in fact there is within it a content of consciousness which has not yet become wholly manifest, and is still dawning from the future. Possibly even content that is only just objectively emerging in the world; as in all productive states which are giving birth to what has never been there. The forward dream is disposed towards this, and Not-Yet-Conscious, as the mode of consciousness of something coming closer, is charged with it; here the subject scents no musty cellar, but morning air.

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Not-Yet-Conscious in youth, time of change, productivity All fresh strength necessarily contains this New, and moves towards it. Its best places are: youth, times which are on the point of changing, creative expression. Any young person who feels some hidden power within him knows what this means, the dawning, the expected, the voice of tomorrow. He feels called to something that is going on inside him, that is moving in his own freshness and overhauling what has previously become, the adult world. Bold youth imagines it has wings and that all that is right awaits its swooping arrival, in fact can only be established, or at least set free by youth. With puberty begins the mystery of women, the mystery of life, the mystery of knowledge; how many unexplored shelves the young reader sees shining in front of him. The green years are filled with forward dawning, they consist chiefly of not yet conscious states. These are certainly threatened in young people, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. But what has survived of youth till then will always survive in people who are not infected by and in league with the putrefaction of yesterday - as something warm, bright and at least comforting kept in view. The voice which calls for things to be different, to be better, to be more beautiful, is as loud in these years as it is unspoilt, life means ‘tomorrow’, the world ‘room for us’. Bold youth always pursues the melodies from its dreams and books, hopes to find them, knows the hot dark roaming through field and town, waits for the freedom which lies before it. It is a longing out of and a looking out of the prison of external compulsion which has become stifling or appears stifling, but also out of the prison of its own immaturity. Longing for life as an adult drives us on, but this life is to be completely transformed. If youth occurs in revolutionary times, that is, during a time of change, and if it is not duped into screwing its head back, as so often happens today in the West, then it really does know what the forward dream is all about. The dream then passes from vague, mainly private premonition to a more or less socially sharpened, socially mandated premonition. The broadest example of this was once provided by the Russian Narodniki, who went among the Russian people to fight with them for the overthrow of Tsarism, with sentimental or angry red dawn. Here the conversations of young unmatriculated women and of male students utopianized on the dusty boulevards of Russian provincial towns. And later in the big cities, with increasing socialist clarity, united with the workers, the red dawn which lay in consciousness and above

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the time made solid headway. For more than half a century before the October Revolution, even the Russian popular novel was continually portraying youth which had time of change in mind. Germany had its revolutionary students in the Sturm und Drang,* in the Vormarz,f and it has them today, with the goal in their sights, in the new Republic;! in all these, youth and movement forwards are synonymous. During these times and whenever they are topical, there is not merely a physiological feeling of spring in the air, but more than this: changing times are sultry, a thundercloud seems to be pent up within them. Hence categories of weather or birth have always been applied to them: calm before the storm or March in history or, in its strongest and most concrete form: a society pregnant with a new one. Times like ours understand the state of change well; even its enemies, the fascists in Italy and Germany, were only able to continue to deceive by masquerading as revolutionaries, marasmus in the guise of spring sunshine. The times of change are themselves the youthful times in history, i.e. objectively they stand at the gates of a new society which is coming up, just as youth feels subjectively that it stands on the threshold of a hitherto unopened day in life. So far the Renaissance has been the most easily surveyable example of such a change, especially on the ideological and cultural side. Here more clearly than almost anywhere else there is, in the first shift of feudal society towards the modern bourgeois one, departure and expectation, Not-Yet-Consciousness as conscious premonition. Incipit vita nova, at the time this also designated psycho¬ logically the aurora quality of the age: the still progressive entrepreneur emerged, and with him the feeling of individuality; the consciousness of the nation appeared over the horizon; individuation and perspective entered into the feeling for nature and the picture of the landscape; the distant earth itself opened up and revealed new continents; the ceding of the heavens cracked, leaving a clear view of infinity. All the testimonies from the period of change in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proclaim a very powerful preconscious here, one which created space and went beyond the previously posited Pillars of Hercules. A total renewal of art, life and science began, or seemed to begin; this three-quarters-of-an-hour-before-day still appears, rather late, but eloquently enough, in Bacon’s ‘Novum Organum’:

A period of revolutionary literary activity, principally in drama, during the second half of the eighteenth century. t A period of political ferment in Germany leading up to the revolutions of March 1848. I Bloch means the German Democratic Republic here of course, not the Federal Republic.

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‘Then let others consider what may be hoped for from men who enjoy abundant leisure, from united labours, and the succession of ages, after these suggestions on our part. .. Lastly, though a much more faint and uncertain breeze of Hope were to spring up from our new Continent, yet we consider it necessary to make the experiment, if we should not show a dastard spirit.’* The air of such historical springs is buzzing with plans which are seeking to be realized, and with thoughts in the stage of incubation. Prospective acts are never more frequent or more common than they are here, the anticipatory element in them is never more content¬ laden, the feeling for what is coming closer never more irresistible. All times of change are thus filled with Not-Yet-Conscious, even overfilled; a Not-Yet-Conscious which is carried by a rising class. The expression of this state which recaptures the experience of the Renaissance is the monologue in Goethe’s Faust, here too satiety, waking dream, dawn-red are the ingredients of the onward. And likewise such periods are working on problems which have barely emerged in embryonic form in existing reality. Thus the Renaissance, just as later the genius periodf in Germany, excavates the developing tendencies of the epoch, places them in early morning light, new daylight. In such periods man distinctly feels that he is not an established being, but one which, together with his environ¬ ment, constitutes a task and an enormous receptacle full of future. How much more so creative work itself is preceded by dawning, and how peculiarly it stands within it. Intellectual productivity, creation proves to be particularly full of Not-Yet-Conscious material, that is, of youth that potentiates itself in creative work; here too, youth is presupposed and constantly active. Gifted youth has a beginning which easily gets lost, as in the whispering reeds in Lenau:

At the water’s edge I think I can hear your soft voice call me From across the pool, and sink With your lovely melody.

* Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorisms 113 and 114. t The cult of genius in the Sturm und Drang period.

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As it progresses, youth acquires the gratitude of becoming, and the birth¬ giving wondrous image of this which is to be formed, as in Goethe’s ‘Prologue in the Theatre’:* Then give me once again the time, When I was still becoming strong, When welling springs of bubbling rhyme Supplied a constant stream of song, When mist concealed my world from view, The bud still promised wondrous hours And I could pluck the thousand flowers That richly in each valley grew. Youth remains in the same place during production, even after this production has finished, and even after the work is complete it feels unguaranteed boldness or bold anticipation; as in Klopstock’s ode ‘To Friend and Foe’, thirty three years after he had begun the ‘Messias’:t The hot soul of the youth was thirsting After immortality! I woke, and I dreamed Of the bold voyage on the ocean of the future! Thank you once again, my early mentor, for showing me How terrible it is there, my guiding spirit. Your golden rod pointed the way! Tall-masted, full-rigged works of poetry And yet sunken wrecks frightened me!

I became serious, fell into melancholy, absorbed myself In the purpose, in the hero’s dignity, in the basic tone, The restraint, the stride, strove, led by my knowledge of the soul, To fathom: what might the poem’s beauty be? I flew and hovered among the monuments of the fatherland, Searched for the hero, did not find him; until at last In Goethe’s ‘Faust’, 184-91. t The ‘Messias’ was probably begun sometime between 1745-8, though Klopstock in his dotage, in a letter to Herder in 1799, claimed it went back sixty years.

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I sank weary, then as if awoken from slumber, suddenly Saw it blaze around me as if with lightning-flame! And the light of youth, productive light, which can even find affinities in ancient events, as if they were not ancient at all, but new proclamations, keeps the morning in the world awake even in times of darkness in Holderlin’s great hymn to Ex oriente lux,* to the new and vocal day: Then, as if from the superbly tuned organ In the sacred hall, Pouring in from the inexhaustible pipes, The prelude, waking, of the morning begins, And all around, from chamber to chamber, The refreshing, melodic stream runs, Filling the house with excitement Right into the cold shadows. But now awakened, now ascending, The choir of the parish answers The sabbath sun, so the word Came to us out of the East. And on the cliffs of Parnassus and on Cythera I hear, O Asia, the echo from you, and it breaks On the Capitol, and hurtling down from the Alps She comes to us, A stranger, awakening, The voice that shapes humanity. Productivity thus does not cease to awake as it is awoken by the spur of the compulsion to speak. This compulsion really takes hold when the vision hovering ahead, that would have to be formed, conceals itself, when it even seems to be flirting with the idea of retreat. When work perhaps flees from its doer before the breakthrough of a new assault, because it so urgently craves for him; when the theme of work is reified into a wavering, whispering, itself hesitant entity and seems to reproach the compulsion to speak for its dilatoriness. But anyone whose destiny is bound to a star, says Leonardo, does not turn back, and the moral of productivity proves itself by completing everything that has been kindled, by bringing to light in pure and concise form the contours of the content hovering ahead. All the more so when youth, time of change, productivity simultaneously *

Holderlin’s ‘Am Quell der Donau’, 1801.

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coincide in talents which get off to a felicitous start. As was the case in the young Goethe, in his Prometheus fragment, in the vast intentiondimension in ‘Faust’ and even in the ‘Urfaust’,* but also - still from the same source - in the most confident of all statements (from ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’): ‘Wishes are presentiments of the abilities which lie within us, precursors of what we will be capable of achieving.’ Then the prospective acts work and succeed through the powerful expectation which has gained power over itself; through the affinity to the star which still lies below the horizon; through the strength to explore the untrodden, which prompts Dante to say: ‘L’acqua che io prendo giammai non si corse’t (the water that I hold has never been crossed before). This last motto is ultimately the one which best unites youth, time of change and productivity at a single stroke, not with arrogance, but with a description of what occurs in the process of creation, what has to occur.

Further thoughts on productivity: its three stages So much for the great unrest when it covers itself with forward dreaming. An active unrest, with its new origin opposed to rigidity, developing full of premonition. Even in the unusual form in which it appears, this premoni¬ tion is the feeling for what is on its way. When it becomes creative, it combines with imagination, particularly with that of the objectively Possible. This premonition with its potential for work is intellectual productivity, understood here as work-forming. More specifically, productivity extends threefold into the unarrived, growing in three direc¬ tions: as incubation, as so-called inspiration, as explication. All three belong to the ability to travel forward beyond the previous edges of consciousness. In incubation there is a powerful intending, it aims at what is sought, what is dawning, on the advance. Mists are the best times for sowing, even psychologically, only things must not just rest there; there is even a stage of darkness, but with an intensive propensity to clear. This state of propensity is in itself already a contradiction which seeks to resolve itself; it is the untenable state, as fearful as it is happy, of not being what our nature most genuinely strives to be, and of being precisely what it not yet is. Also caught in this contradiction is the more developed propensity The early draft of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, 1772-5. t Paradiso ii, 7.

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or fermentation in which the already more contoured expression and form is prepared and concocted. At any rate, expectation is always present here, no matter with how large or small a charge the three-quarters-of-an-hour before-day appears. This incubation is usually further followed by abrupt clarification in a flash; it comes as if from outside or, falsely interpreted, as if from above. That is why the expression inspiration came to be used to describe this; it indicates the abruptness, the illuminating and inspiring stroke, the sudden insight. The incubation which had a speechless quality about it, and which can sometimes produce from sheer profusion a kind of emptiness of consciousness, this sealed character now dissolves. In simpler cases the solution can come about through an invasion of ideas which merely surround or proclaim the central thought; sometimes they also follow after the central thought has appeared. Its very appearance comes in an over¬ powering way and seems to be so clearly the solution of the problem, as if no problem had existed at all during the incubation and the process of brooding. Even the most intense concentration dissolves which had marked the sealed character of the last stage, and which in the print of Diirer’s ‘Melencolia’ is a stone sphere lying in the room, i.e. the condensed intellectual symbol of the brooding mind. The solution springs up in a process seemingly so unmediated, that is, without consciousness of the long-fermenting incubation period, that the inspiration, along with the elation of release, easily brings with it, or rather has brought with it, the marvellous feeling of a magical gift. But the vision which comes with it is in every case combined with euphoria, with the greatest buoyancy, although both the magic-archaic and the transcendental interpretations have to be discarded, as just so much musty consecration. The productive creator is no shaman, nor is he a psychological relic from primeval times; he is neither a sooty flame from this abyss, but nor is he, no matter what Nietzsche may coquettishly have wished to remind us, a mouthpiece of higher powers. This transcendental mythicization of inspiration, as if it descended from above, really is without substance; it is superior to the magic-archaic version only in so far as it does at least attempt to do justice to the transcendere, that is: the surpassing expanding element in intellectual creation, and does not distort this creation into a sinking down, into a language of the night. The fact that no archaic regression takes place here in the act of productivity precisely demonstrates the constant experience of light that is associated with inspiration. This experience is wholly lucid in most cases and discernible at the peak of consciousness, most notably in the case of Descartes when he discovered the principle of cogito ergo

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sum: ‘On the ioth of November 1619 when the light of a wonderful discovery broke in on me.’ But where does the kindling of this light take place, when neither shamanistic notions from below, nor enthusiastic notions from above, have provided anything more than superstitious explanations? The kindling place of inspiration lies in the meeting of a specific genius, i.e. creative propensity with the propensity of a time to provide the specific content which has become ripe for expression, forming and execution. Not only the subjective, but also the objective conditions for the expression of a Novum must therefore be ready, must be ripe, so that this Novum can break through out of mere incubation and suddenly gain insight into itself. And these conditions are always socio-economic and of a progressive kind: without the capitalist mandate, the subjective mandate towards cogito ergo sum would never have found its inspiration; without an incipient proletarian mandate, the discovery of the materialist dialectic would have been impossible or would have remained merely a brewing aper9u, and neither would it have struck like lightning into the no longer naive popular soil. Likewise, the breakthrough, the sudden powerful burst of light that often occurs in the individual of genius, obtains both the material which sparks it off and the material which it throws light on solely from the Novum of the time content itself which is forcing its way into thought. This is the case, of course, even when, as so often, the recep¬ tivity of a time does not itself stand at the peak of that time, let alone of its further ramifications, its continuing tendencies and latencies. Even then the inspiration comes from the mandate of the time which perceives itself in the individual of genius and reveals itself in harmony with his propensity, potentiates itself with his potential. The mystery of the world which advances as our task in time and is advanced in front of great talent is powerful enough to keep those called upon to articulate it charged with incubation, but not yet powerful enough to trigger off the shot of each possible, socially imminent mode of illumination. When this world mystery is merely seen in isolation, without a concrete relationship to time, even in the greatest talents only that narrow pass of incubation is formed which Hegel, looking back at a slack period in his early days, describes at one point as follows: ‘I know from my own experience this mood of the mind or rather of reason, once it has plunged with interest and with its premoni¬ tions into a chaos of appearances and. .. inwardly certain of its goal has not yet reached the clarity and detail of the whole... Every man probably has one such turning-point in his life, the nocturnal point of the concen¬ tration of his being’ (Briefe von und an Hegel I, 1887, p. 264). And as

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for the necessary concurrence with the historical kairos* as a constitutive property of genius as a whole, the Hegelian Rosenkranz remarked most pertinently with his master in mind: ‘Unlike talent, genius is not great through formal versatility, although it can possess this, but through the fact that it accomplishes what is objectively necessary in a particular sphere as its individual destiny. That is precisely why it has its true measure only in historical development, because it must be directly above and beyond everything given and must elaborate for its own private satisfaction those elements for which, according to the objective course of things, the time has come. Within the confines of this task it rules with demonic power, beyond them it is powerless, and while it can develop in various ways, it cannot create the new’ (Psychologie, 1843, p. 54f.). And how splendidly this definition would have applied to Marx, at that time in 1843, a young genius who, as few others could, began to accomplish the objectively necessary in a particular sphere as his individual destiny, and who experienced the inspirational breakthrough of his work as no other could in fully grasped concurrence with the socio-historical tendency of his time. Thus inspira¬ tion as a whole, whenever it is work-forming, emerges from the meeting of subject and object, from the meeting of its tendency with the objective tendency of the time, and is the flash with which this concordance begins. Then the kindling which is thoroughly immanent occurs; inspiration is thus the explosion of light in each tendency-latency being itself, in each case produced by its strongest consciousness. The clear idea of the work now surfaces in the author, and as before in incubation, in the present state of inspiration it is by no means complacent, but instead drives on ahead, and, from the flash which revealed the new landscape, has to enter into the topography of that landscape. That which was revealed by the initial unrest and its premonition is finally carried out here. This happens in the final act of productivity, in the agonizing, blissful work of explication. Genius is hard work, but of a kind which never wants to allow the elaboration to grow stale or to be anything less than a constant obsession. There must be no break here, either between vision and work or between work and vision: ‘The first light’, says Van Gogh, ‘in which the kindling impression lay, must itself have begun to share in the act of painting.’ Genius is thus the specific hard work of leading the visionary moment of light towards its expression, so that the mastered material adds not only strength but also depth to * Kairos - transliterated from the Greek: occasion, opportunity, the right time.

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what was planned. In accordance with the true observation in Schopenhauer’s statement: ‘Talent resembles a marksman who hits a target which the others cannot reach; genius resembles one who hits a target so far away they are not even able to see it.’ It is this very truth that also cancels out the fundamentally false definition that Schopenhauer expressed elsewhere, according to which genius is a purely static world-eye, and hence can by no means be hastening ahead. But precisely because genius looks beyond each existing horizon, hits a distant target, it is not a contemplative-static world-eye, but a pioneer on the borders of an advancing world, and even a most important part of the world which is only now being formed. Psychologically, genius is the appearance of a particularly high degree of Not-Yet-Conscious and of consciousness capability, ultimately then the power of explication of this Not-Yet-Conscious in the subject, in the world. The degree of gifted genius is determined by the wealth of its Not-YetConscious material, i.e. of its mediated being-beyond what has previously been consciously given, what has previously been explicated and finally formed in the world. It is not yet necessary at this point to distinguish between artistic and scientific genius; since the motto in Dante ‘L’acqua che io prendo giammai non si corse’ is psychologically true both of artistic and scientific works of note. Forming of the previously not yet formed, this criterion for works of genius, is the same in art (the figurative depiction of a real preappearance) and in science (the conceptual depiction of the tendency-latency-structure of the real). The explications in art and science, of course, even at these contrasting levels of objectivity, still have the fact in common that they each find themselves in the process of objectivity itself and, in so far as they contain sufficient genius, they stand at its Front. Genius, as the most advanced consciousness and tutor of this consciousness, for this very reason is also the highest sensitivity to the crucial moments of change in time and its material process. It is the power and ability to stand at the peak of this time and to inform it knowingly about the landscape and the horizon of this process-epoch. Therefore it is not completely unjust of Carlyle to celebrate the word of the genius as nothing less than the password to the premonition of the age: ‘It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so!’* Even if this yes often only comes in the next generation or even later, the powder Carlyle, ‘Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’.

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for the shot still lay ready prepared, and the publicity of the time simply did not hear the shot, precisely because it went off on the horizon of that time. And what is most clearly demonstrated in the explication of a previously Not-Yet-Conscious is: the Not-Yet-Conscious as a whole is the psychological representation of the Not-Yet-Become in an age and its world, on the Front of the world. The making conscious of the Not-Yet-Conscious, the forming of the Not-Yet-Become, exists only in this space, a space of concrete anticipation, only here is the volcano of productivity to be found pouring out its fire. Mastery in the work of genius, a mastery which is foreign to what has normally become, is also comprehensible only as a phenomenon of the Novum. Every great work of art thus still remains, except for its manifest character, impelled towards the latency of the other side, i.e. towards the contents of a future which had not yet appeared in its own time, if not towards the contents of an as yet unknown final state. For this reason alone great works have something to say to all ages, a Novum pointing onward in fact, which the previous age had not yet noticed; only for this reason does a fairytale opera like ‘The Magic Flute’, but also a historically localized epic like the ‘Iliad’, possess so-called eternal youth. Therefore: explications which have become works of genius have not only completely expressed their own day, but the permanent implication of the plus ultra also circulates in them. Its place, the place of the Not-Yet-Conscious, is here least of all to be found in the territory of the subconscious, the region into which what has already been conscious, already experienced and appeared material has simply sub¬ merged. Its place is on the Front, where genesis continues, and where, being the proper genesis, it is still only now in the process of beginning with the beginning. The waters of oblivion flow in the underworld, but the Castalian spring* of productivity rises on Parnassus, a mountain. Thus productivity, although it comes from the depths, is working for the very first time in the light and is continually positing a new source, namely one at the peak of consciousness. It is fitting that there is blue above this peak, the opposite colour to Orcus, the dark and yet transparent nimbus around all real explication. This blue, as a colour of distance, likewise designates in a graphically symbolic way the future-laden aspect, the Not-Yet-Become in reality, to which significant expressions, precisely because they are advancing, ultimately refer. The darkness forwards, because it is clearing, is in its expression also assigned to that brightest consciousness in which the day has not given up the reddening dawn but is precisely growing dawn. * In Greek mythology, a spring sacred to the Muses.

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Different kinds of resistance which the forgotten and the Not-Yet-Conscious offer to illumination The problems of penetrating the backward or forward disposed darkness are always of a different order. Certainly, in remembering, as in premoni¬ tion which has a potential for work, the threshold of consciousness is moved. But in the one case it is a matter of lowering it so that forgotten or repressed material can cross it, in the other case a border is shifted upwards. Certainly too, in both cases, something blocks itself off against becoming conscious, a resistance asserts itself against the displacement of the threshold. But this resistance is still different in character, according to whether repressed material is to be remembered or intuitive material to be formed. Psychoanalysis has long been trying to identify such resistance in its sub¬ conscious region: as one of reluctance to unpack repressed material again. The repressed material itself is here supposed to have resulted from the fact that a struggle had arisen against the underlying mental process or event becoming conscious. Thus the process remained or became uncon¬ scious, merely sending a neurotic symptom of itself into consciousness; but this symptom is always regarded as a sign that a process has not been lived through to the end, that it has been broken off, that the patient has not come to terms with something in himself. And the same struggle which has made a person ill again opposes the effort to raise repressedsubconscious material into consciousness during analytical treatment; this is precisely the resistance of the No-Longer-Conscious to its becoming conscious. In short, a clearly manifest will founds the resistance here; if this will is broken, then the forgotten material supposedly emerges without further ado. And this will is regarded as a purely negating will, which is why Freud also says: ‘Repression is the early infantile stage of con¬ demnation.’ The same motives which allowed the old trauma to become embedded place themselves in the way of the attempt to make it conscious. And above all: if the repressed material comes to light all the same, then it is redundant debris which is only now properly forgotten, that is to say, overcome. The unwillingness is of a completely different kind, however, where the journey is forwards into the darkness. The resistance to material becoming conscious in the area of the Not-Yet-Conscious rarely or never displays neurotic features. It displays them only when a discrepancy between power and will arises in the willingness to produce; though, as is

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well-known, this discrepancy does create one of the acutest forms of suffering. Even then, however, a self-blocking is definitely lacking in the will towards illumination itself, of the kind, that is, which appears in the subject during the mere recovery of something repressed, that is, on the march into the No-Longer-Conscious. A resistance in the subject of the production-will to this will and its contents, or even to the success of the journey into the Not-Yet-Conscious and to its treasures: unwillingness of this kind does not occur at all in the producer. He leaves that instead to the receivers of his work, to the so often blocking receptivity, i.e. to that which used to be called the resistance of the uncomprehending world. But the psychology of producing itself reveals no sign of inner resistance to the acts of illumination under discussion here; instead, the resistance which belongs to production and is endemic to it is not present in the human subject at all. It is to be found instead in the matter treated by the subject and is only mirrored by the specific difficulties of explication. It is to be found in the hazardous straits of the Novum, in the still inchoate, utterly habit-free character of the new material. In fact, even the mere receptivity-resistance, when it forms a block against works of genius, completely fails to understand them or is simply irritated by them, ultimately derives, in spite of the added resentment which belongs to the realm of psychoanalysis, from a disinclination towards the difficulty of the factually New; yet even here the resistance inherent in the illumination of the NotYet-Conscious is finally identified as that of the still unchannelled material. All beginnings are difficult* in an area like this, all the more difficult in fact because the newness into which the productive pioneering effort goes is essentially also a newness of the matter in and for itself which is coming up. It is therefore for this reason alone that the new truths, those of the objectively New, emerge so hesitantly in their articulation and always only as astra per aspera. Thoughts only happily coexist as long as they are plans or sketches, but one step further and the concrete difficulty of the work begins. Even where sufficient ability is present and precisely when it is, the difficulty is after all responsible for the many repulsed expeditions in the studio, in the laboratory, in the study, the countless battlefields without victory or where victory is postponed. Thus, not repressed material at all, but rather the difficulty of the path is the thing in the Not-YetConscious, Not-Yet-Become which causes productivity trouble. The reasons for this lie exclusively in the terrain of the matter, itself a terrain which * A German proverb.

13°

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

is not yet enclosed, let alone rounded off; in short, the upper threshold has its own guardians, and they lie in the material. The block that operates in this way first and always appears as a historical one. More precisely as a social one; even when that which is to be expressed or to be known is actually by no means new itself. When therefore only a new piece of knowledge is to be acquired and not also knowledge of the factually New, i.e. of what is only now factually coming up. There is thus in history a socio-economic barrier to vision, it cannot be scaled by even the most daring mind. Many anticipations, previsions entered existing consciousness and were emphasized, illuminated by that consciousness itself in the Not-Yet-Conscious; however, the social barrier prevented their being carried out. Thus, first-rate researchers, because of their social and historical standpoint, often did not appropriate even half the wisdom of Minerva (as the ancients themselves called this resistant material). No Greek mathematician would have understood differential calculus, not even Zeno, close though he came to it. The infinitesimal, the variable quantity, lay totally beneath the horizon of Greek society; only capitalism caused what was previously fixed and finite to enter such a state of flux that rest could be conceived as infinitesimal movement, and non-static notions of quantity conceived at all. It is also relevant here that the notion of work was alien to Greek slave-owning society, even in epistemological terms and especially in those terms. It constantly stressed knowing merely as a receptive looking, never as an activity; easily though it could have suggested itself to the Stoics, for example, with their ‘subjective factor’. Not all insights and works are possible at all times, history has its timetable, the works that transcend their time often cannot even be intended, let alone carried out. Marx stressed this with the statement that humanity always only sets itself tasks which it can solve. The tasks which transcend their time are concretely insoluble even where, by way of exception, they may be set in abstract terms. But even this barrier is ultimately founded solely in the historical state of the material, above all in its own processive, unfinished state, itself existing in difficulty, Front and fragments. This is true even where only new knowledge but not yet knowledge of anything factually new is fragmenting; and all the more true where, as in the case of the concept of work, the whole matter - bourgeois society - still lies under the horizon. Here too, the thing which ultimately determines the productivity-resistance remains the hazardous straits of the matter itself, remains the sealedness, clearing only sparingly, of the Novum in the overall process, which proceeds as world. The by no means fundamental, but rather historically temporary

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resistance in this is still noted even where it is claimed that it has been overcome, namely through courage. As in the marvellously anti-agnostic vision of Hegel’s: ‘The sealed nature of the universe contains no power which could offer resistance to the courage of knowing, it must open up before the latter and reveal to it its riches and its depths and allow them to be enjoyed’ (Werke VI, 1840, p. xl). It is noticeable that the word resistance is also present here, although it is very far from dealing with Objects of a subconscious. Instead the sealedness of an entire universe is cited, and this precisely in proportion to the unrestrained courage of knowing. The resistance of object-basedness to the subject-object relation¬ ship of knowledge is all the greater where there is no universe which is panlogical and thereby at the same time closed, as there is in Hegel. Where an unfinished process is pending, which is furthermore not signed with such a familiar name as Spirit, associated with every idealistic professor. In complete contrast, the vehicle of the process is matter, and is an entity that in no way actually compounds the subject with the object, like the so-called World Idea, except in the wake of hard work sharpened by the very difficulty of the resistance. The still sealed nature of the universe which, precisely as matter, still lies in an unfinished process of its objectifications, can least of all be mirrored or declared as something already complete, let alone extravagantly clear as daylight. That which has still not become, still not been achieved, is a wilderness of its own, comparable in danger to the untrodden wilderness, but superior to it in its unarrived possibilities. This Not-Yet-Become, Not-Yet-Achieved in the object thus founds the last resistance, it is clearly of a completely different type to that of repressedness or of concealed availability. The world-mystery itself does not lie in a kind of cosmo-analytic rubbish pit, but in the horizon of the future to be attained, and the resistance which it offers to its being opened is not that of a sealed chest, as in demonic treasure-myths, guarded by dogs with malicious eyes, but the resistance here is that of fullness which is still itself actually in process, and not yet manifest. Significantly, this means that objective idealism, even spiritualism, generally undertook to define its essence behind appearance by virtue of the false equation: Thinking = Being, as if it were only geographically in a different place, whereas Marx, who certainly could not be suspected of ‘agnosticism’, already speaks of the ‘realm of freedom’ almost only privatively in a negative sense, namely as the mere non-existence of the characteristics of the class society, or at most in the deeply remote, still completely hovering meaning of a ‘natural¬ ization of man, humanization of nature’. The so-called character of the

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universe is therefore still inherently sealed in the sense of: Not-YetAppearance of itself; the fact that this is its own task-nature makes it difficult. In order to remove what is difficult, not only knowledge is necessary in the sense of an excavation of what was, but knowledge in the sense of a planning of what is becoming; knowledge is therefore necessary which itself decisively contributes to this becoming, becoming which changes for the good. Revolution and genius inspire confidence in the fact that this difficult heliotropic business was not in vain or will not have been in vain; despite the resistance in itself or in the sour dough which the world is.

Epilogue on the block which has prevented the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious for so long With particular difficulty the inward glance sheds light on itself. There is a separate resistance in the general factual resistance here; mental life seems fleeting, shadowy. How long it took for people even to begin to notice that this life takes notice of itself, i.e. is a conscious life. And sub¬ conscious mental processes have only been named as such for little more than two hundred years. There may possibly be some excuse for this in the fact that the subconscious processes are not automatically submitted to our notice, that they are only deduced from symbols, that they contain forgotten content. But it seems more difficult to understand, after the conscious and the subconscious have finally been noted, that the Not-YetConscious has been disregarded for so long. Because it is not first excavated by the act of memory, but is a separate act which is immediately given to itself, i.e. intuitively, apart from the content that occurs within it. Never¬ theless, the floating, open, visualizing aspect of these events was portrayed, as we have seen, as if it too was merely subconscious; and in fact: it has remained hidden in this darkness until the present day. As is well-known, unconscious processes in general were first identified in psychological terms by Leibniz, by a very roundabout route. Not just observation, but also theory effected the discovery; observed material to some extent served as an example later to illustrate the theory. One of Leibniz’s basic principles was that of the unbroken coherence of the world; this lex continui tolerates no interruption, no empty space, anywhere. If there does seem to be one, however, then in reality it is occupied by the imperceptibly smallest something, something beginning and growing; differential calculus

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expresses this infinitesimal something mathematically as a moment of motion. But just as there are the smallest impulses of motion, so too there are those of the intensity of conception in consciousness graded according to its clarity and lucidity: these are the ‘petites perceptions insensibles’. And as examples of these, Leibniz cites the smallest perceptions, which because of their weakness remain imperceptible or unconscious, but in adequate numbers, such as in the sound of waves or the buzz of voices, definitely become conscious. So they must also have been present beforehand in the mind, hence they must be forgotten ideas which enter into con¬ sciousness when sufficiently amplified.

The petites perceptions are

immediately singled out by Leibniz as a great discovery in the preface to the ‘New Essays’: ‘In a word, these imperceptible perceptions are of just as great importance in the theory of the intellect as the imperceptible bodies are in physics; and it is equally unreasonable to reject either one of them on the pretext that they fall outside the realm of our senses.’ Thus the notion of the unconscious is born out of the lex continui, indeed it can be said cum grano salis: out of differential calculus, as its counterpart in the mind. At the same time, however, the notion of the unconscious which has thus been acquired is totally subordinated to that of existing conscious¬ ness. As soon as it is noted, unconscious material is branded subconscious. The petites perceptions are always outbidden, even dispersed, by the consciousness that has already been achieved in man; consequently, after attaining clarification, they occur as elements of creation, not giving birth again, as it were, to anything beyond themselves. Nevertheless, something other than existing consciousness had been demonstrated in the mind by the hero of the Enlightenment himself, even if only as moonlight in the ancestral hall of consciousness.* Sheer consciousness was now no longer regarded as the essential feature of the human intellect; the previously so paradoxical notion of unconscious mental activity began. And, more importantly, the peculiar hiding-place of the Not-Yet-Conscious in this darkness began, the subordination of the Not-Yet-Conscious to a past, brooding moonshine-world: this mask of the Not-Yet-Conscious now emerged. Undergoing curious pseudo-morphoses, only now discernible as such, first in the Sturm und Drang, then in Romanticism. Fifty years after the death of Leibniz, with the posthumous appearance of his ‘New Essays’, this key notion of the petites perceptions echoed in the early throes * Bloch is punning here on the double meaning of ‘Ahnen’, which means both ‘premonition and ‘ancestors’.

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of that bourgeois revolution which then never came in Germany. While for the Sturm und Drang the unconscious remained something completely submerged, lay at the mere beginning of the history of the mind, it still appeared welling and bubbling up within it. Thus the unconscious no longer remained infinitesimal like the smallest impulses, nor meagre like the petites perceptions, but all the mists of the north and of prehistory swirled around in it, both Fingal’s cave and Macbeth’s heath, both The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry and Strasbourg cathedral seemed to find a place in it. For all its dull fugginess, the unconscious had the primal voice, fervour, youth, the wild, impetuous spirit of creative genius. Dawning therefore also appeared in the Sturm und Drang, which of course largely belongs to the Enlightenment, to be endowed with future for the first time, and also to be aware of the fact in the night-wind of prehistory: ‘Who can expect’, exclaims Hamann, magus of this whispering Enlightenment, ‘who can expect to take proper ideas from the present, without knowing the future? The future determines the present and the latter the past, just as the intention determines the nature and use of the means.’ And Hamann goes on to say, with reference to Ezekiel 37, 1-6: ‘The field of history has thus always appeared to me like that wide field full of bones, and lo! they were very dry. Nobody except a prophet can prophesy upon these bones that sinews and flesh will grow on them and skin will cover them.’ And also, when it came to the rule, this pride of rationalistic consciousness, it was above all the extinguished element, that which has become and is dead, that was rejected, as opposed to bursting forth or nature always forcing its way to the surface like a spring. Nevertheless, even this still remained mixed to numbing effect with regressio, with the moonshine of Ossian,* with moss-covered monuments and heroes’ graves. Germany’s unreadiness for a bourgeois revolution and the resulting opaque thwartings of progressive revolutionary reason thus ultimately made original genius more into a messenger from primeval times than from the future. This sort of thing intensified in the really strange complexities of Romanticism. The welling of the spring was certainly lively here, and extraordinary things seemed to be under way, but the feeling of a lost yesterday opposed it with a force which the Sturm und Drang would not and could not recognize. This force was supplied by the reactionary mandate, directed against the bourgeois revolution, which increasingly determined German

The verses of Ossian, a legendary warrior, were composed by James Macpherson (1736-96). Herder and Goethe believed the verses to be authentic and translated from them.

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Romanticism and thwarted the undeniably progressive tendencies which were nevertheless present. In a way which can hardly be recaptured any more, the Romantic was enslaved by the past, and was so with a lex continui which - true to the reactionary mandate - preferred to raise nothing but knights’ castles in the magic moonlit night. The historical was increasingly associated with the archaic, and this in turn with the chthonic, so that the core of history soon came to look like the core of the earth itself. This enshrined feeling, this incestuous phenomenon of the desire to return to the womb of night and the past, culminates late, in Bachofen, the teacher of matriliny, but with grave-love for chthonic Demeter herself. Even psycho¬ logically, in keeping with this nocturnal vision, everything good and premonitory is drawn to the nocturnal pole of consciousness: creation has a native affinity with drive and instinct, with atavistic clairvoyance and the whispering of the abyss; for the Romantic, nothing half as familiar dwelt on the day side, or even on the form and fulfilment side. All productivity, especially the expectation which paradoxically characterizes so much of Romanticism, lost itself here in antiquarian images, in the past, in the immemorial, in myth, as a stance against the future, which increasingly comes to be regarded merely as chaff, emptiness, wind. It is therefore not surprising if youth and productivity here reversed all consciousness of their Not-Yet-Conscious even to the point of ancestor worship: the other explosive force, apart from productivity: the grasped time of change, was missing. Nor is it surprising if the nevertheless powerfully vague mood of expectation in the Restoration world of Romanticism was never elevated beyond the level of an Advent in which Vineta bells* ring out, the bells of a sunken city. Gorres, the renegade with the Phrygian cap, expressed this pathos of the past most passionately: ‘That past world was so rich, it is sunk, the waters have passed over it, here and there the ruins still tower, and whenever the murky depths of time clear, we see its treasures on the sea-bed. We look down from a great distance into the wondrous abyss, where all the secrets of the world and life lie hidden, but have we succeeded in fathoming the root of things which lies hidden in God? Our gaze penetrates the depths, mysteries beckon us from afar, but the current surges upwards and throws the diver out into the present’ (Mythengeschichte, 1810, p. 599f.). Significantly, this upward surge leads only with regret into the present, and the future is nowhere to be seen at all. There are of course mysteries of * Vineta: a tenth-century Viking city, possibly located on the Baltic Sea island of Wollin, supposedly engulfed by a flood or an earthquake, often referred to in sagas and legend.

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distance, they are the most compelling for the Romantic, but they He almost exclusively in the abyss, the distance is and remains primal Beenness. Undoubtedly, German Romanticism - this cannot be stressed often enough in view of the antiquated, abstract way it has been underestimated - also had a progressive character; precisely its instinct for what is bubbling up, becoming, growing, is relevant here, the famous ‘historical sense’ which first created whole disciplines like legal history and German studies; especially the patriotic element must not be forgotten, and corresponding to it the feeling for all great national achievement in world literature. As the Wartburgfest of 1817 alone shows,* there is definitely also a revolutionary Romantic component in German Romanticism: while even the most passionately utopianized red dawn is shot through here time and again with the abovementioned night-thoughts of an antiquarium, with the projection of an overprized past even into the newness of the future. And it is almost solely outside Germany, in English and Russian Romanticism, neither of which stood beneath such a reactionary star, but beneath the wildly remembered star of the French Revolution, in Byron, in Shelley, in Pushkin, that the true feeling of homeland commensurate with man becomes explosive and future-laden, and is not sought by sinking back into the past. But this was anomalous in Germany; a revolutionary Romanticism was not yet distinctive enough to be a match for Romantic reaction. Even Jean Paul, who cannot really be classed as a Romantic anyway, the most exuberant and uninhibited creator of waking dreams, whose liberalism was beyond question, and whose dawn-red language, if it is steeped in night, then in Midsummer night, even he subordinated hope, which is constantly present in his work, to memory, or ultimately settled it there. So even Jean Paul, the creator of the most beautiful wishful landscapes shimmering ahead, finally sought the light, as soon as he was not creating it but rather reflecting on it, only in the past, not in the future. ‘For this very reason every remembered life gleams in the distance like an earth in the heavens, that is, the imagination condenses the parts into a closed serene whole. Of course, it could equally well form a gloomy whole; but it places Spanish castles in the air full of torture chambers only in the future, and only Belvederes in the past. Unlike Orpheus, we gain our Eurydice by looking back, and lose her by looking forwards’ (Vorschule der Asthetik, §7). Thus Romanticism, with its promise of a land beneath the wellj in the petites perceptions, seduced the Not-YetWartburgfest: a student festival on the Wartburg on the 18th October 1817 in memory of the Reformation and of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig, 1814. t Cf. Grimm’s fairytale ‘Frau Holle’.

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Conscious time and again. The vision of the utopian condition, the yield of its content, thus encountered the most powerful block, for all the expectation which pervaded Romantic feeling, in anamnesis, a re¬ remembering which is virtually an invocation. And this did not remain the only block, as Freud later demonstrated with his exclusively subconscious dream. Probably few ages have felt so inescapably the transition to a becoming different, to something coming up, as the present one has. But the bourgeoisie reacts all the more sheepishly and blindly to this, shows no interest at all or only a hostile interest in the reflection of tomorrow. For this bourgeoisie, coming events merely cast their shadow, nothing but shadow; capitalist society senses itself negated by the future. More than ever the bourgeoisie lacks the material incentive to separate the Not-Yet-Conscious from the No-Longer-Conscious. All psycho¬ analysis, with repression as its central notion, sublimation as a mere sub¬ sidiary notion (for substitution, for hopeful illusions), is therefore necessarily retrospective. Admittedly, it developed in an earlier age than the present one, around the turn of the century it took part in a so-called struggle against the conventional lies of a civilized mankind. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis developed in a class which was superannuated even then, in a society without future. So Freud exaggerated the dimensions of the libido of these parasites and recognized no other onward, let alone upward drive. Nor any other dreams than those which the Lord, now called Eros, gives his beloved in sleep. And the longer time went on, the more readily the thoroughly selfinterested mistrust of the future was intensified by the bourgeoisie’s new supply of anxiety and old supply of resignation. And it is precisely this which characterizes the barrier which, as we have seen, even in Freud’s case, obstructs the notion of a Not-Yet-Conscious, and obstructs forward dawning. Hence the totally inevitable, totally regressive proposition: ‘The repressed is for us the model of the unconscious’ (Das Ich und das Es, 1923, p. 12). The barrier finally became absolute in so-called depth psychology; where in other words psychoanalytical regression became ideologically useful for the Blood and Soil humbug. C. G. Jung’s notion of the unconscious consigned itself all the more completely to the cellar of consciousness, since it is only there that the opium with which Fascism stupefies utopia can be smoked. Jung also interprets what is beginning to dawn in an utterly archaic and occult fashion, analogous to the prophetic - sleep in the temple. Even the ‘inconscient superieur’, even the so turgidly expressed ‘prospective tendency of subliminal combinations’ is thus, in the manner understood above, wholly subordinated to regression. The passage in Jung in which ‘an idea prefiguring

I3«

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

the future is and remains archaized thus, is revealing enough for the history of obstructed Novum-psychology to warrant quoting at length: ‘Psycho¬ analysis works backwards like the study of history. Just as a large part of the past is so remote that our knowledge of history no longer reaches it, so a large part of unconscious determination is also inaccessible. But there are two kinds of things history does not know, namely what is hidden in the past and what is hidden in the future. Both could perhaps be reached with a certain probability, the former as a postulate, the latter as a historical prognosis. In so far as tomorrow is already contained in today, and all the threads of the future are already in place, a more profound knowledge of the present could make possible a more or less far-reaching and certain prognosis of the future. If we apply this line of reasoning... to the psychological sphere, the same thing must necessarily follow; just as memory traces which have long since sunk below the threshold are still demonstrably accessible to the unconscious, so are also very fine subliminal forward combinations, which are of the very greatest significance for future events in so far as these are determined by our psychology. But just as the study of history scarcely concerns itself with future combinations, which are rather the object of politics, so psychological future combinations are also scarcely material for analysis. They would have to be objects of an infinitely sophisticated psychological synthesis, capable of following the natural currents of the libido. We cannot do this, but the unconscious can because that is where it occurs, and it seems as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of this work are revealed, at least in dreams, which would explain the prophetic significance of dreams long claimed by superstition. The aversion of exact scientists today to these trains of thought, which can hardly be termed fantastic, is merely an over¬ compensation for man’s millennial, all too great inclination to believe in soothsaying.’ (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, 1925, p. 54L). This is all that Jung can find to say on the subject of the mental representation of what is coming up. Utopian consciousness is presented as an Egyptian book of dreams. Only the archaic unconscious, in deepest darkness, carries out here the so-called future combinations; but if the slightest area of this darkness comes to light, then it is to the light which ultimately displays regressio. Precisely in the historical context of the petites perceptions, the archaizing of the unconscious recalled again here sounds another warning. The barrier in front of the Novum in the great progressive work of Leibniz becomes a guillotine for the Novum in the final bourgeois psychology of the unconscious. As now becomes completely clear, even in the times

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when bourgeois psychology flourished, they did not note, or at least not unmistakably, the New as a class of consciousness. Leibniz placed the accent on the advance of consciousness, but the petites perceptions in which the seeds lay were exclusively underneath already acquired consciousness, show therefore the precise historical topology to which the preconscious was confined until Freud. Even the construction of wishful dreams which the modern age has developed: the social utopias and those of a technologically controlled world, even these anticipations were unable to develop, in the philosophical consideration they were given from More, Campanella, Bacon to Fichte and beyond, either a psychology of their expanding daydreams, or an epistemology of their possible-real place in the world. The reason in this case certainly does not lie in a self-interested mistrust of the future, but, as it were, in a uninterested mistrust, under the continuing spell of static living and thinking. In addition, the consciousness of the rising bour¬ geoisie had not yet sufficiently escaped from the concept of a pre-ordained, ultimately finished world (ordo sempitemus rerum); continuing feudal statics inhibited the concept of newness. It inhibited it in the work of Leibniz, it inhibited and perverted it even in the most decisive of all previous expositions of becoming and philosophies of process such as Hegel’s. Even the famous passage on process from the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ must be seen as similarly constricted: ‘But just as a baby’s first breath, after a long period of silent nutrition, breaks the gradualness of merely continuing growth - a qualitative leap - and the baby is now born, so the developing mind matures slowly and silently towards a new form, dissolves one particle after another of the construction of its previous world, its shakiness is only suggested by isolated symptoms; the frivolity and the boredom which make inroads into the existing mentality, together with the vague premoni¬ tion of something unknown, herald the fact that something else is in the offing. This gradual crumbling, which did not change the physiognomy of the whole, is interrupted by the opening up, a flash which all at once erects the structure of the new world’ (Werke II, 1832, p. 10). The reflex of the French Revolution is unmistakable here, as in the leaping character of the Hegelian dialectic in general; yet the whole thing is equally conceived as finished simultaneity, as - memory. The flash of the new beginning is here also merely opening up, where the closedness of what is opening up has long since been decided. It is therefore trapped in a circle without an opening out on to the as yet unarrived. The enormous enterprise has already entered perpetual retirement, the rest of finished achievement: ‘The phenomenon is the arising and passing away which does not itself arise

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and pass away but is in itself and constitutes the reality and movement of the life of truth.. .Stored up in this movement as a whole, conceived as rest, is that which distinguishes itself within it and gives particular existence, one which remembers, and this existence is the knowledge of itself’ (Werke II, p. 36f.). The utopian hiddenness which certainly exists in embryo or In-itself, and which bursts through again at every stage of the Hegelian process, is accordingly revealed by the totality of comprehended manifestations to date. Plato’s theory, according to which all knowing is merely anamnesis, a re-remembering of something seen before, this knowledge, solely geared to Been-ness, was thus reproduced over and over again; this ideologized once and for all the block against the being sui generis of a Not-Yet-Being. Precisely the continuing statics of what is reactionary and in need of rest, this finally settled, enclosed anamnesis-world here accomplished what in periods of decline is accomplished by the horror of the unknown that is in the offing. No new tone-composer of the old kind, however new he appears, is free of this block. Not even where, as in Bergson, there is an attempt to single out exclusively, all too exclusively, this very newness. Bergson says at one point, in his ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, that the great insights had previously been regarded as if they illuminated point for point a logic which had long been preformed in things, ‘just as at an evening celebration one gradually lights the circle of gas-lamps which abeady outline the contours of a ornament’. But what then claims to be Novum in Bergson: anti-repetition, anti-geometry, elan vital and intuition flowing with the stream of life - all this vitality is impressionistic, and liberalanarchistic, not anticipatory. Bergson’s elan vital is a ‘continually modifying change of direction, as in a curve for example’; the so-called intuition enters into this continuously surprising mode, but without ever meeting the actual Novum for sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; - where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was. Therefore everything is in fact pre-arranged even in Bergson’s stream of surprise, and is frozen into a formula, into that equally dead antithesis to repetition which reduces the New to a merely endless, contentless zigzag, to that coincidence made absolute, in which neither birth nor explosion, nor a venturing beyond, fruitful in terms of content, the previously Become occur. Bergson opposes the process-idea directed towards a goal, but he does not oppose it because the goal has already been agreed, so that the said process - at the highest level - almost looks as if it has been rigged, instead he eliminates any and every trace of the onward, the

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Where To and any openly pursuable goal whatsoever. So that the alleged Novum does not look any different than it does in anamnesis, that is, having always been, always phoenix, always spellbound return to the unchangeable which is here called changeability. Overall, therefore, the astonishing fact remains almost everywhere that the dawning sticks fast in the Fixum, ultimately unnoted or clogged with What Has Been. A vast mental realm of the Not-Yet-Conscious, one that is constantly travelled, has so far remained undiscovered, or its discoveries have remained unnoticed. Similarly, a vast physical realm of the Not-Yet-Become, which forms the correlate of the Not-Yet-Conscious, remained stationary, and the closely related real categories: Front, Novum, Objective Possibility, which are inaccessible to anamnesis, remained without a theory of categories in the world before Marx. The epigone is always only found on the passable roads which productivity has built and embellished before him, but in the notation of the New, previous productivity also behaved as if it only recognized epigonism. The decline of the bourgeois class sealed this aversion to the concept of aurora far beyond Romanticism, which had itself been so reactionary. And - as we are now in a position to say - only experience of the modern age, as a positive age, that is to say: as the affirmation of its oncoming content, allows us to describe a state of consciousness which, just as it was always hidden, fulfils the potential of youth, of times of change, of cultural production. Only our present age possesses the socio¬ economic prerequisites for a theory of the Not-Yet-Conscious and whatever is related to it in the Not-Yet-Become of the world. Marxism, above all, was first to bring a concept of knowledge into the world which no longer essentially refers to Becomeness, but to the tendency of what is coming up; thus for the first time it brings future within our theoretical and practical grasp. Such recognition of tendency is necessary to remember, to interpret and to open up even the No-Longer-Conscious and the Become according to its possible continuing significance, i.e. its undischargedness. Marxism thus rescued the rational core of utopia and made it concrete as well as the core of the still idealistic tendency-dialectics. Romanticism does not understand utopia, not even its own, but utopia that has become concrete understands Romanticism and makes inroads into it, in so far as archaic and historical material, in its archetypes and works, contains a not yet voiced, undischarged element. The most advanced consciousness thus operates even in memory and oblivion not as in a sunken and hence closed space, but in an open space, that of process and its Front. But this space is exclusively filled up with forward dawning, even in its examples from

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continuingly significant past; it is filled with the vitality, capable of being both conscious and known, of a Not-Yet-Being. Where Romanticism, in its archaic, historical aspect, was drawn down into solely antiquarian welling, into false depths, utopian consciousness lays bare even what is coming up in the old, and all the more so in the imminent itself. It discovers the real depths - on the heights, that is on those of its brightest consciousness, where something still brighter is dawning.

Conscious and known activity in the Not-Yet-Conscious, utopian function The forward glance in question here is discriminating, not gloomy. It requires from the outset that premonition is sound, and not dim like something kept in the cellar. Something which is not at all disposed to make itself conscious in its half-light, even though it may be directed towards morning. As there was no science, hysterical and superstitious elements also accumulated here. Nervous states like clairvoyance, second sight and so forth, were described as premonition, in fact, as dim premoni¬ tion. But these are aberrations, into which genuine premonition, as goes without saying, neither can nor will descend. Even assuming that so-called second sight does occur, a poky atmosphere clings to it, even a proximity to convulsions and other not exactly hopeful gifts. Such things belong to that morbid sensitivity (the sensitivity of a wound) which in legitimate cases only senses in advance a sudden change in the weather, but here supposedly senses major fires or deaths. And it is in keeping with the very subconscious, sunken, atavistic, exhausted nature of this kind of premonition that it always only refers to something that has already happened a thousand times before, and that will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, again and again. Somnambulary presentiment in general may at best be a decayed remnant of animal instinct, but the instinct is utterly stereotyped; its actions, though appropriate down to the finest detail, immediately become absurd as soon as the animal, confronted with a new situation, has to sniff out in advance what has never been there before. Egg-laying, nest-building, migration are performed by instinct, as if precise ‘knowledge’ of the future existed, but this very future is one in which only the millionyear-old destinies of the species occur. It is an automatic future with old contents, and consequently, since nothing new occurs in it, the false one mentioned above. Many aspects of bodily instinct still seem obscure, research

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into signal systems is not yet complete, the life of the driving images in instinct, if there is one, is undeciphered, together with the sense of bearings which it provides for the drives. But however far the threshold of human premonition is lowered, it will scarcely be able to recapture the activity which in the animal instinct of pre-caution seems to possess past, present and future still completely ravelled up together, and which relatively controls them according to the business of the species. Nevertheless, it is absolutely certain here, as also in the prophesying found in folklore, that the future is a totally false one, a repetition, a pre-ordered piece in a circle that is always the same. Instinct-future and the related future of atavistic premonition always starts and picks up the same thing on the same level, over and over again, whenever it begins. Productive premonition, even in the form of so-called intuition, is thus something completely different from instinct that has become conscious of itself. It does not remain dim and poky, not in the least fuggy, it exists from the beginning in strength and health. It is openly conscious of itself, precisely as a Not-YetConscious, demonstrates in its alertness the desire to learn, shows the capacity to be circumspect in its foreseeing, to have circumspection, even foresight in its fore-sight. Since genuine premonition begins with youth, time of change and production, it is automatically at home in human dealings of the most upright kind, not in animal, let alone parapsychological ones. The German peasants of 1525, the masses of the French and Russian Revolutions, certainly also had, alongside their slogans, driving images, as it were, of revolution; there was a sense of bearings in ‘£a ira’.* But these driving images were attracted and illuminated by a real future place: by the realm of freedom. The so-called power to foresee deaths or even winning lotterynumbers is obviously of a less productive order. One of the greatest somnam¬ bulists, the seer of Prevost, says in the account Justinus Kerner published of her at the time (Reclam, p. 274): ‘For me the world is a circle, I was able to move back and forth around this circle and see what had been and what was coming.’ The Romantics, and even Hegel, knew and valued premoni¬ tion solely in this atavistic, superstitious sense, which has become totally trivial today. The only sense they have is for an old world in which the only novelty is the cock-crow which summons back to the graveyard and itself belongs to the realm of ghosts. There is understandably not a single

* ‘£a ira!’: a song of the French Revolution. ‘Ah! 9a ira, 9a ira, 9a ira, Les aristocrates a la lanterne!’

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word in any of these wheezing diaphragm-prophets from the sibyl to Nostradamus, when they proclaim ‘the future’, which transcends available knowledge and which does not merely rearrange it. Whereas Bacon, for example, no prophet, but a discerning utopian, saw in his ‘New Atlantis’ amazingly genuine future. And this solely by virtue of his sense, which makes itself thoroughly conscious, for the objective tendency, objectively real possibility of his age. After all, the forward glance becomes all the stronger, the more lucidly it makes itself conscious. The dream in this glance seeks to be absolutely clear, and the premonition, the correct one, seeks to be quite plain. Only when reason starts to speak, does hope, in which there is no guile, begin to blossom again. The Not-Yet-Conscious itself must become conscious in its act, known in its content, as the process of dawning on the one hand, as what is dawning on the other. And so the point is reached where hope itself, this authentic expectant emotion in the forward dream, no longer just appears as a merely self-based mental feeling, as described in chapter 13, but in a conscious-known way as utopian function. Its contents are first represented in ideas, and essentially in those of the imagination. In imaginative ideas, as opposed to those remembered ones which merely reproduce past perceptions and thereby shade off more and more into the past. And even these imaginative ideas are not ones which are merely composed of existing material, in arbitrary fashion (stony sea, golden mountain and so on), but extend, in an anticipating way, existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better. So that the thus determined imagination of the utopian function is distinguished from mere fantasizing precisely by the fact that only the former has in its favour a Not-Yet-Being of an expectable kind, i.e. does not play around and get lost in an Empty-Possible, but psychologically anticipates a Real-Possible. At the same time, this lends a new clarity to the so often stressed distinc¬ tion of the waking dream as really possible anticipation: utopian function is not present at all in mere wishful thinking or only flickers up. In the figure of Ulrich Brendel in ‘Rosmersholm’, Ibsen has movingly portrayed a mere and hence fruitless planner. On a very much lower level, not at all movingly, Spiegelberg in ‘The Robbers’* belongs to the utopianswaggering brigade to which Marquis Posa also belongs on an incomparably higher level, by virtue of an all too great, solely abstract-postulative purity, t Schiller’s play ‘Die Rauber’, 1781. t In Schiller’s play ‘Don Carlos’, 1787.

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Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely present in abstract utopianizing, i.e. still predominantly without solid subject behind it and without relation to the Real-Possible. Consequently, it is easily led astray, without contact with the real forward tendency into what is better. But at least as suspicious as the immaturity (fanaticism) of the undeveloped utopian function is the widespread and ripe old platitude of the way-of-the-world philistine, of the blinkered empiricist whose world is far from being a stage, in short, the confederacy in which the fat bourgeois and the shallow practicist have always not only rejected outright the anticipatory, but despised it. Indeed this confederacy - from an aversion to all modes of what is desirable, primarily to those which drive forward - finally, as was only logical, even added - nihilism to its repertoire. So that this very nihilism was able to come up with anti-utopian statements like the following: ‘In wishes existence projects its being into possibilities which not only remain unseized when provided, but whose fulfilment is not even considered or expected(I). On the contrary: the predominance of being-in-advance-of-oneself in the mode of mere wishing entails a failure to understand factual possibilities .. .Wishing is an existential modification of comprehending self-projection which, addicted to thrownness, merely continues to indulge in possibilities’ (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1927, p. 195). This sort of thing, purely applied to immature anticipating, unquestionably sounds like a eunuch accusing the infant Hercules of impotence. We do not need to emphasize that the genuine struggle against immaturity and abstraction, in so far as they adhered to the utopian function or potentially still adhere to it, has nothing in common with bourgeois ‘realism’, and is also on its guard against practicism. But what is important is the fact that the hope-charged imaginative glance of the utopian function is not corrected from a worm’s-eye view, but solely by the real elements in the anticipation itself. That is, from the perspective of that solely real realism which only is so because it is fully attuned to the tendency of what is actually real, to the objectively real possibility to which this tendency is assigned, and consequently to the properties of reality which are themselves utopian, i.e. contain future. And the thus denoted maturity of the utopian function - never led astray - denotes not least the sense for tendency in philosophical socialism, in contrast to the bad ‘sense for fact’ in empirically side-tracked socialism. The point of contact between dreams and life, without which dreams only

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yield abstract utopia, life only triviality, is given in the utopian capacity which is set on its feet and connected to the Real-Possible. And which in fact tendentially transcends what exists in each respective case, not only in our nature, but in that of the entire external world of process. Thus the only seemingly paradoxical concept of a concrete utopia would be appropriate here, that is, of an anticipatory kind which by no means coincides with abstract utopian dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism. The very power and truth of Marxism consists in the fact that it has driven the cloud in our dreams further forward, but has not extinguished the pillar of fire in those dreams, rather strengthened it with concreteness. In similar fashion, therefore, the consciousness-knownness of the expectant intention must prove itself as the intelligence of hope - in the midst of the immanently ascending, materially-dialectically transcending light. Thus the utopian function is also the only transcendent one which has remained, and the only one which deserves to remain: one which is transcendent without transcendence. Its support and correlate is process, which has not yet surrendered its most immanent What-content, but which is still under way. Which consequently is itself in a state of hope and of object-based premonition of the Not-YetBecome, in the shape of a Not-Yet-Become-Good. Consciousness of the Front provides the best light for this, utopian function as the comprehended activity of the expectant emotion, of the hope-premonition, maintains the alliance with all that is still morning-like in the world. Utopian function thus understands what is exploding, because it is this itself in a very condensed way: its Ratio is the unweakened Ratio of a militant optimism. Therefore: the act-content of hope is, as a consciously illuminated, knowingly elucidated content, the positive utopian function; the historical content of hope, first represented in ideas, encyclopaedically explored in real judgements, is human culture referred to its concrete-utopian horizon. The docta spes combine* operates on this knowledge as expectant emotion in the Ratio, as Ratio in the expectant emotion. And predominant in this combine is no longer contemplation, which for centuries has only been related to What Has Become, but the participating, co-operative process-attitude, to which con¬ sequently, since Marx, the open becoming is no longer sealed methodically and the Novum no longer alien in material terms. Subsequently, the theme of philosophy has stood solely in the topos of an unfinished law-governed field of becoming in depicting-intervening consciousness and in the world Bloch is using the word ‘combine’ in the economic sense here.

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of knownness. This topos has only been discovered by Marxism through science - precisely with the development of socialism from utopia to science.

More on the utopian function: the subject in it and the counter-move to the badly existing But without the strength of an I and we behind it, even hoping becomes insipid. There is never anything soft about conscious-known hope, but a will within it insists: it should be so, it must become so. The wishful and volitional streak vigorously bursts out within it, the intensive element in venturing beyond, in acts of overhauling. Walking upright is pre¬ supposed, a will which refuses to be outvoted by anything that has already become; it has its preserve in this upright posture. This characteristic point on which the subject can stand and from where it reacts is abstractly described by stoic self-confidence as follows: if the world caves in, I will stand firm amidst the falling rubble. The point is abstractly described in a different way in the transcendental ego of German Idealism, from the perspective of assumptions no longer proud of virtue, but proud of intellect. Here self-confidence has changed into an act of cognitive production; and even as early as Descartes, cognition appears in places as manufacture, namely of its Object. The assumptions proud of intellect were of course incurably inflated, with the illusion of their absolute power of making; intellect definitely does not dictate the laws of nature. Nor is the world of this epistemological idealism by any means a utopian one; on the contrary: the ambition of the transcendental ego was predominantly to produce the existing world of laws itself, the world of mathematical-scientific experience. Nevertheless, the transcendental ego of Kant and Fichte knew how to postulate morally beyond a bad existent, even if only, corresponding to the German misery,* in an abstract way, lacking content. Kant, who on almost every point is not to be confused with neo-Kantianism, constructed, as a postulate at least, a more beautiful world, in Goethe’s phrase, one of spontaneity of the will, which was neither satisfied by mechanistic experience based on the existent, nor destroyed by it. Thus - though thoroughly impaired by abstractness - there is in stoic self-confidence, and much more immediately in German Idealism itself, the indication of the * Bloch uses Heine’s expression to describe the political and historical experience of Germany, often contrasted with the progressive, revolutionary history of France. There are also echoes of ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ (1847), Marx’s reply to Proudhon’s ‘The Philosophy of Poverty’.

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characteristic point from which the subject reserves for itself the freedom of a counter-move contradicting the badly existing. In spite of the still abstractly formal indication of such a subjective factor, the latter was nevertheless clearly identified; at that time it stood philosophically for the citoyen. Thus every bourgeois-revolutionary call in Germany, from the Sturm und Drang to the so-called People’s Spring of 1848, is still connected with the ego of idealism. Whereas in real terms, not merely in the mind, and also totally free of incurably idealistic inflatedness, a subjective factor was only grasped through socialism, namely as proletarian class-consciousness. The proletariat grasped itself as the actively contradictory contradiction in capitalism, and therefore as the one which causes the most trouble for what has become bad. In equally real terms, the subjective factor - against all abstractness and the corresponding boundless spontaneity of consciousness - has mediated itself with the objective factor of the social tendency, of the Real-Possible. Thus the activity of knowing-best turned into that something more which con¬ sciously continues, guides and humanizes the path on which the world has set out, its ‘dream of the matter’, as Marx puts it. The objective factor alone is not sufficient for this; instead, the objective contradictions are constantly provoking interaction with subjective contradiction. Otherwise the ultimately defeatist heresy of an objectivist automatism develops, according to which the objective contradictions are alone sufficient to revolutionize the world permeated by them. Both factors, the subjective and the objective, must rather be understood in their constant dialectical interaction, one which cannot be divided or isolated. While the element of human action must certainly also be preserved from isolation, from the evil of putschistic activism as such, which just charges out, and whose excessively subjective factor thinks it can skip over the objective economic laws. But no less harmful is social-democratic automatism as such, superstitious belief in a world which becomes good of its own accord. It is therefore impossible to get by without the subjective factor, and it is just as impossible to suppress the deep dimension of this factor, precisely that of the counter-move to the badly existing, the mobilization of contradictions which occur in the badly existing, for the purpose of undermining it completely, bringing about its collapse. But that is precisely why the deep dimension of the subjective factor is in its counter-move, because the latter is not only negative but equally contains within it the forward surge of an achievement which can he anticipated and represents this forward surge in the utopian function. The question is now, whether and to what extent the anticipating counter-move coincides with a merely embellishing one. Especially when

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the merely embellishing element, although it definitely does highlight things, has for the most part no counter-move in it at all, but merely dubious polishing of what exists. And with a by no means revolutionary mandate behind it, but with an apologetic one, one which is supposed to reconcile the subject with what exists. This purpose is fulfilled above all by ideology in periods of a class society which are no longer revolutionary, although still rising, because they still further the development of the forces of production. The highlighting of what exists then occurs as an illusory, at best premature harmonization, and it is surrounded by nothing but smoke or incense of false consciousness. (The rotten ideology in the declining periods of a class society, especially that of the late bourgeoisie of today, does not of course belong here at all; since it is already known false con¬ sciousness, and therefore deception.) Furthermore, however, there are in ideology certain figures which condense, perfect and give significance to what exists which are known as archetypes when mainly referring to condensing, as ideals when mainly referring to perfection, as allegories and symbols when mainly referring to significance. The embellishment of what exists, which is intended in so many different ways in all this, is never¬ theless not an embellishment of the badly existing, and it is not consciously, i.e. deceitfully, trying to divert attention from the latter. Rather, what exists is completed here, though in a largely idealistic-abstract way and never in a dialectically explosive and real way, yet so that a characteristic, an inauthentic anticipation of a better world is not lacking: an anticipation in space so to speak, not or only inauthentically in future and time. And now the question has become more concrete: whether and to what extent the anticipatory counter-move coincides with a merely embellishing one. Since in ideology, in a different way in archetypes, different again in ideals, and again in allegories and symbols, there is of course no counter-move, but rather a transcending of what exists through its embellishing, condensing, perfecting or signifying exaggeration. And this again is not possible without a distorted or displaced utopian function, just as it is not possible without an irregularly perceived ‘dream of a matter’ on the leading edge of what exists. But then the original and sustained concrete utopian function must also be discoverable in these inauthentic improve¬ ments, at least in places, and it must be possible to confront the not wholly irredeemable distortions and abstractnesses. The respective conditions of production explain how the respective ideologies and other inauthentic improvements came about, but the respective confusions in the Humanum of the respective conditions of production made a borrowing from the

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utopian function necessary in order to be able at all to make the completions mentioned above together with their cultural surplus. Ideologies as the ruling ideas of an age are, in Marx’s striking phrase, the ideas of the ruling class; but since even the latter is self-alienated, ideologies also incorporated, apart from the interest in presenting the well-being of one’s own class as that of humanity as a whole, that yearning and overhauling image of a world without alienation, that above all passes for culture in the bourgeoisie, and that showed the utopian function at work partly also in that class which otherwise felt happy in its alienation. It is obvious that this function truly, indeed almost entirely, animated the still revolu¬ tionary ideologies of such classes. Without the utopian function, no spiritual surplus at all is explicable over and above what has been attained and thus exists, however full this surplus may be of appearance instead of pre¬ appearance. Therefore, every act of anticipating identifies itself to the utopian function, and the latter seizes on all possible substance in the surplus of the former. Even, as will be shown, on that contained in previously progressive interest, in ideologies which have not completely passed away with their society, in archetypes which are still encapsulated, in ideals which are still abstract, in allegories and symbols which are still static. Contact of the utopian function with interest A cool glance does not prove its worth by understating. Rather it wants to correct things and can do so, does not want to lose its own sense of proportion. It dispels the deceptive feelings and words, wants to see ego, striving, impulse naked, but not of course cut up and divided. Certainly, the economic impulse in the totally crooked business-life of today has descended to a purely despicable level, and all that remains intact is ruthless nastiness. The greed for profit here overshadows all other human inclina¬ tions, and unlike the desire to kill, does not even pause occasionally. And likewise it is true that even in earlier, comparatively more honest ages of capital, profit interest was not exactly composed of the noblest human impulses. On pain of being ruined, a powerful selfishness was always at work in the economic struggle. If this stimulus had let up, if altruistic motives had taken its place, then, as Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees so cynically and truthfully demonstrated, the whole capitalist machinery would have ground to a halt. And yet, would it not often at least have been slowed down, among a considerable majority of employers at that time, if the egotistical impulse had presented itself so nakedly? If it had not

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pretended even to itself, on a purely inward level, that is, distinct from conscious brutality, something more noble, more communal, and dreamed it up in a subjective way that was not entirely false? These fictional bees must therefore not blind us to the nature of the real egoists, a nature which even had to make altruistic excuses and protestations to itself in order to make so-called honest profit in an honourable, ostensibly philanthropic way. Thus Adam Smith’s selfish system distinctly incorporated features of an even inwardly false consciousness; and these were not, as they so often are in Calvinism, crafty and twisted, but subjectively honest and polished. They were features of conviction, of clear conscience, of the respec¬ table businessman and employer, showing how he actually believed in honest profit, how he above all felt himself to be a kind of benefactor to consumers, in the game of supply and demand. That is, of course, to those wealthy consumers through whom the surplus value extorted from the workers can be made into money by selling the product of their labour. But their clear conscience bolstered itself up with the fact that capitalist interest was continually supposed to address itself to the interest of the customer, to its satisfaction. The clear conscience of mutual advantage was further enhanced by the fact that all human beings were regarded as free traders with increasing powers of exchange, whose evident self-interest balanced itself out in the overall benefit thus produced. With all this, the capitalist economy appeared the only natural one, discovered at last, of which Smith expressed his total approval, in a manner as ponderous as it was - utopian. The interest itself was therefore influenced in a utopian way, or rather the false consciousness of it, which was in fact extremely active. Without this embellishment the exploitation among the great sharks, totally un¬ encumbered by bourgeois morals, would undoubtedly have continued as before, the gentlemen of the East India Company had no place for a utopian function in their business, it would only have damaged it. But the average businessman in manufacturing industry, even in the incipient industrial revolution, still needed and cultivated a belief in the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number, he needed it as a link between his egotistical impulses and those pretended, dreamed-up impulses specifically noted by Smith as being benevolent. All the more so as cynical selfishness was ascribed to nobility, chiefly to the lechers in its ranks (cf. the con¬ temporary novels of Richardson). Whereas the rising bourgeois citizen needed ‘virtue’ in order to earn money all the more zealously from others, as if he were earning it for those others. And when it came to the last fight of all against feudal restraints, the bourgeoisie, not a very heroic class,

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had to boost itself in a particularly strong utopian fashion. Otherwise they would not have done any fighting themselves, which was actually partly the case, but would have let the men from the suburbs do all their fighting for them. Otherwise they would not have felt a credulous affinity with the Gracchi* and with Brutus, which was actually again partly the case, during the courtship leading up to the bourgeois freedom of 1789. Therefore the rising class, which was economically due, needed even inwardly a far-reaching passion in the confused feelings of that time, in order, as Marx says, ‘to hide from themselves the content of their struggles with its bourgeois limitations’. This was blatant self-deception, the private businessman who supported human rights, the abstract idea of the citoyen as a moral person, were not seen through, could not yet be seen through at that time. Yet this kind of self-deception also contained an anticipatory element, it even showed particu¬ larly humanitarian features, although they were abstractly expressed, employed in an abstract and utopian way. And in fact not everything about its interest was deception; otherwise one could not refer in socialist terms to the businessman who supported human rights and was not only orien¬ tated towards the private sector, let alone to the citoyen. What the citoyen promised is a promise which can certainly only be kept in socialism. All the same, it can be kept, so there was at that time a surplus, contributed in a utopian fashion, in bourgeois striving itself. The social mentality which is morally abstracted in the citoyen, i.e. which had become divorced from real individual people, must first be united with their own energies, which are no longer bourgeois individualistic ones. All the same, this mentality, called ‘virtue’ in those days, did still exist, it existed in this case as one which not only acted as a boost, but also as a surplus; how else could someone like Jefferson be revered, let alone the genuine Jacobins? So another, sustainable trend, one going beyond the progress which was to be directly encouraged, could operate even in the impulse, if it was a progressive one for its time. It can be morally inherited, in the same way as the shaped surplus in actual ideological consciousness, a surplus which has been turned into works, can be culturally inherited. Good things, indeed the best, have been desired repeatedly in the past, and mostly it remained at that. But precisely because this desire was one which never reached its goal, on those points where it does not coincide with the attainable that is now due, in this case therefore with capitalist society, it carries on along the path of liberation. Utopian function Tiberius Gracchus (d. 133 b.c.) and his younger brother Gaius (d. 121 b.c.) made use of the concilium plebis to oppose the power of the Senate in Republican Rome.

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tears this part away from deception; it thus enables everything philanthropic to feel a growing mutual affinity.

Encounter of the utopian function with ideology A keen glance does not simply prove its worth by seeing through things. But also in the way it does not see everything as if it were as clear as crystal. Since not everything is as perfectly clear as that, in fact there is sometimes a process of fermenting, of self-forming at work, to which precisely the keen glance does justice. This unclosed aspect appears in its broadest and most hybrid form in ideology, in so far as this ideology is not exhausted merely by the connection to its time. Nor by the mere false consciousness about its time which has accompanied all previous cultures. Certainly, ideology itself stems from the division of labour, from the separation of physical and mental work which occurred after primitive communes. Only after that could a group which had the leisure to develop ideas deceive themselves and especially others by means of these ideas. So, since ideologies are always originally those of the ruling class, they justify existing social conditions by denying their economic roots and disguising exploitation. This is the picture in all class societies, most clearly in that of the bourgeoisie. Here there are admittedly three phases in the ideological formation of these societies with very different status, with a different mandate to the mental, all too mental superstructure: the preparatory, the victorious, the declining. The preparatory phase of an ideology helps its own, not yet secured substructure by opposing its fresh progressive superstructure to the rotten superstructure of the previous ruling class. The class which then itself comes to power instigates the second ideo¬ logical phase, by securing - (through the omission, partly also through the more or less classical ‘equilibration’, of previous revolutionary impulses) - its own substructure which has meanwhile come into existence, fixing it politi¬ cally and legally, and dressing it up politically, legally and culturally. Securing and embellishment are supported by an achieved, although only temporary harmony between forces and conditions of production. The declining class then instigates the third ideological phase by sweetening the rotten stench of the substructure - while the credulity of the false consciousness almost totally disappears, and the deception is almost completely conscious - and even by phosphorescently renaming night as day, day as night. Thus the economic substructure in class society is certainly shrouded in the mist of an interested false consciousness, no matter whether its illusion subdivides in terms of content into fiery, classical or decadent, into ascent, blossoming,

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or cosmetic application. In short, since no exploitation can afford to be seen naked, ideology seen from this side is thus the sum of the ideas in which a society has justified and transfigured itself with the help of false conscious¬ ness. But then again: whenever we think of culture, does not another side of ideology appear which is already recognizable in the composition, so different morally and as regards content, of the three phases? This is precisely the side which does not fully coincide with merely false consciousness and with the apologetics of a mere, historically discarded class society. Seen from the critical side, Marx says strikingly in ‘The Holy Family’: ‘The “idea” always blundered whenever it differed from “interest” ’, and with this remark he takes up the self-examination of bourgeois society that had begun in French materialism, which first demonstrated, in the work of La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, and particularly of Helvetius, that evident personal interest was the basis of all this morality. But Marx goes on to say in the same passage: ‘On the other hand, it is easy to understand that every massive, historically successful “interest”, when it first enters on the world stage, goes far beyond its real thoughts in its “idea” or “conception” and becomes confused with human interest per se.’ This results in illusion or ‘what Fourier calls the tone of every historical epoch’. Yet, because this illusion possibly also contains, apart from the enthusiastic flowers with which a society garlanded its cradle, those artistic creations which, as Marx reminds us, citing the Greeks, in the ‘Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy’, ‘are regarded in certain respects as norms and unattainable models’, the problem of ideology is broached from the side of the problem of cultural inheritance, of the problem as to how works of the superstructure progressively reproduce themselves in cultural conscious¬ ness even after the disappearance of their social bases. The very difference in content of the three phases cannot be suppressed here, not even when the continuing tua res agitur* is by no means confined to the rising revolu¬ tionary epoch of one of the previous class societies. In fact, it is precisely then that the actual phenomenon: cultural surplus under discussion here, dwelling on the other side, becomes all the more apparent. For this phenomenon, that of developed and also future-orientated art, science and philosophy, confronts us much more abundantly in the classical epoch of a society than in its revolutionary epoch, where of course the directly utopian impetus against what exists, beyond what exists, is stronger. And the

‘Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet’. Horace, Epistles, I. 18, 84. "It is your concern when your neighbour’s house is on fire.’

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blossoms of art, science, philosophy, always denote something more than the false consciousness which each society, bound to its position, had of itself and used for its own embellishment. Rather, these blossoms definitely can be removed from their first socio-historical soil, since they themselves, in essence, are not bound to it. The Acropolis of course belongs to slave¬ owning society, Strasbourg cathedral to feudal society, yet, as we know, they did not disappear with their social base, and they carry with them nothing deplorable, in contrast to the base, in contrast to the conditions of production at the time, however progressive they may have been. The great works of philosophy do of course contain more time-bound, and thus transitory material, due to the respective social barriers to cognition. However, because of the height of consciousness which distinguishes them and which permits a glance far into future, essential material, these works too, especially these, demonstrate that genuine classicism which does not consist in rounding off, but in eternal youth, with constantly new perspec¬ tives in it. In the case of the ‘Symposium’, the ‘Ethics’ and even ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’, only the illusory problems and the ideology of particular place and time have sunk away and been discarded, whereas the Eros, the substance, the substance as subject stand in the midst of all changes as variations of the one goal. In short, these great works are not deficient as on their first day, nor glorious as on the first day: but instead they shed their deficiency and their first glory while being capable of a later glory, in fact a final one to which they can intend. The classical element in every classicism equally stands before each age as revolutionary Romanticism, i.e. as a task that points the way forward and as a solution that approaches from the future, not from the past, and, itself still full of future, speaks, addresses, calls us on. But this, together with more modest things, is only the case because ideologies seen from this side are not exhausted with the false consciousness of their base, nor with the active work for their respective bases. No search for the surplus is possible in false consciousness itself, as carried by the ideology of class societies, none is necessary in the ideology of socialist revolution, in which no false consciousness at all participates. Socialism, as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat, is only true consciousness at all with reference to the comprehended movement and the apprehended tendency of reality. But rather, the following statement by Marx (to Ruge, 1843) holds good for the relation of this true ideology to the anticipatory element in the false, though here not merely false consciousness of the earlier ideology: ‘Our motto must therefore be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through analysis of mystical

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consciousness which is still unclear to itself. It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought-dash between past and future, but of the carrying through of the thoughts of the past.’ Even the class ideologies, within which the great works of the past lie, lead precisely to that surplus over and above the false consciousness bound to its position, the surplus which is called continuing culture, and is therefore a substratum of the claimable cultural inheritance. And now it becomes clear that this very surplus is produced by nothing other than the effect of the utopian function in the ideological creations of the cultural side. Indeed, false consciousness alone would not even be sufficient to gild the ideological wrapping, which is what in fact happened. Alone it would be incapable of creating one of the most important characteristics of ideology, namely premature harmonization of social contradictions. And ideology is even less conceivable as the medium of continuing cultural substratum without its encounter with the utopian function. All this obviously ventures beyond both false consciousness and the strengthening, even mere apologetics of the respective social substructures. Therefore, without the utopian function, class ideologies would only have managed to create transitory deception, not the models in art, science and philosophy. And it is this very surplus which forms and preserves the substratum of the cultural inheritance, as that morning which is not only contained in the early day, but on a higher level also in the midday of a society and partly even in the twilight of its decline. All previous great culture is pre-appearance of something achieved, in so far as it could still be built up in images and thoughts on the panoramic heights of time, and thus not only in and for its time. Without doubt, the dream of a better life is very broadly perceived through all of this. Or, which comes to the same thing, utopian, apart from the usual purely pejorative sense, is used not only in the above an¬ ticipatory sense, but - as function - also in a comprehensive sense. It thus emerges that the breadth and depth to which the utopian extends is at first, even in a historical respect, not confined to its most popular manifesta¬ tion - the utopia of an ideal state. Correspondingly, the dream of a better life stretched far beyond its social-utopian parent company, namely into every kind of cultural anticipation. Every plan and every creation that was pushed to the limits of its perfection had touched on utopia and gave, as mentioned above, precisely the great cultural works, which had a more and more progressive influence, a surplus over and above their mere ideology

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there and then, and consequently nothing less than the substratum of cultural inheritance. The broadening of a previously so narrowly conceived power of anticipation was begun in Ernst Bloch’s ‘The Spirit of Utopia’, in 1918, and, moreover, with witnesses, ornaments and figures which had previously been dealt with totally outside a Not-Yet-Arrived in reality, although they belong to this and are occupied with its articulation. The parasitic enjoyment of culture reaches an end through insight into the more and more adequate trend towards our becoming identical and through commitment to this; cultural works open up strategically. The question now remains, of course, whether and how far the expression utopia and its attack can or should also be applied, without superfluous misunderstanding, to intentions and interest which are by no means those of the past. But which lie completely current and new within the development which has occurred, of socialism from utopia to science. Of course, the history of terminology contained several such examples of the broadening of a previous meaning of a word, with the partial removal of the negative meanings which adhered to it; the word romantic is a relevant example here. A still greater differentia¬ tion was undertaken between the meanings of the concept of ideology itself; on the basis of this differentiation, Lenin was able to call socialism the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat. And yet in general, the power of anticipation, which we called concrete utopia above (as distinct from the utopistic and from merely abstract utopianizing), with its open space and its object which is to be realized and which realizes itself forwards, has still remained completely untouched by the terminological correction and broadening which the romantic, for example, underwent in ‘revolu¬ tionary Romanticism’, and the ideological underwent in ‘socialist ideology’. Although, of course, above all in the areas of technological, architectural or geographical utopias, but also of all those which ultimately revolved and are revolving around the ‘Absolute’, the ‘authentic’ core of our wanting, the category: utopian function is dominant factually and therefore in a conceptually apposite way. Naturally, with knowledge and removal of the finished utopistic element, with knowledge and removal of abstract utopia. But what then remains: the unfinished forward dream, the docta spes which can only be discredited by the bourgeoisie, - this seriously deserves the name utopia in carefully considered and carefully applied contrast to utopianism; in its brevity and new clarity, this expression then means the same as: a methodical organ for the New, an objective aggregate state of what is coming up. Thus all great cultural works also have implicitly, though not always (as in Goethe’s ‘Faust’) explicitly, a utopian

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background understood in this way. They are now, from the point of view of the philosophical concept of utopia, not an ideological prank of a higher kind, but the attempted path and content of known hope. Only thus does utopia fetch what is its own from the ideologies and explain the progressive element which continues to be historically effective in the great works of ideology itself. There is a spirit of utopia in the final predicate of every great statement, in Strasbourg cathedral and in the Divine Comedy, in the expectant music of Beethoven and in the latencies of the Mass in B minor. It is in the despair which still contains an unum necessarium even as something lost, and in the Hymn to Joy. Kyrie and Credo rise in the concept of utopia as that of comprehended hope in a completely different way, even when the reflection of mere time-bound ideology has been shed, precisely then. The exact imagination of the Not-Yet-Conscious thus completes the critical enlightenment itself, by revealing the gold that was not affected by aqua fortis,* and the good content which remains most valid, indeed rises when class illusion, class ideology have been destroyed. Thus beyond the end of class ideologies, for which it could only be mere decoration up till then, culture has no other loss than the business of decoration itself, of falsely concluding harmonization. Utopian function tears the concerns of human culture away from such an idle bed of mere contemplation: it thus opens up, on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of the content of human hope.

Encounter of the utopian function with archetypes A deep glance proves its worth by becoming doubly profound. Not only downwards, which is the easier, more literal way of getting to the bottom of things. But rather there is also a depth upwards and forwards which takes up into itself profound material from below. Backwards and forwards are then as in the movement of a wheel, which simultaneously dips and scoops. Real depth always occurs in double-edged movement: ‘Sink then! I could also say rise! It’s all the same’, Mephisto shouts to Faust.t He even shouts it where a delight in something that has long since ceased to exist, in Helen of Troy, is to begin. And not only Mephisto shouts

Nitric acid. Used to separate gold and silver in gold-silver alloy, since silver dissolves in it, but gold does not. Hence - pure gold, t ‘Faust’, Part II, 6275.

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this, the intriguer, the dangerous master of double-edged meanings, a double meaning itself shouts through Mephisto: that of the equally archaic and utopian relations between images. Thus utopian function very often has a double profundity, that of submersion in the midst of that of hope. Which can only mean that the groundwork for hope is partly done in the archaic frame here. More precisely, in those archetypes which still arouse conster¬ nation and which have possibly been left over from the age of a mythical consciousness as categories of the imagination, consequently with a nonmythical surplus that has not been worked up. Hope consequently has to make utopian provision not only for ideologies which continue to have significance, but also for those archetypes which contain material which has still not been worked out. It therefore has to forge them into utopia, just as, mutatis mutandis, significantly progressive ideology is forged into it. It is clear here that this can be achieved not only from below, by sinking, but essentially from above, from the overall perspective of climbing. Because we find repeatedly: that which is exclusively repressed downwards and to be found in the subconscious is in reality only the soil from which nightdreams emerge and occasionally the poison which causes neurotic symptoms: this below can largely be resolved into the known, is not ascending forward dawning, therefore has at bottom only a tedious latency. Whereas that which is hoped for and imagined contains the possible treasure from which the great daylight fantasies are derived, those which do not become obsolete for a long time; this forwards and above can never be resolved into the already Known and Become, and therefore has at bottom an inexhaustible latency. When Faust, with the magic potion of youth, sees Helen in every woman,* Helen the archetype of beauty is moving wholly out of the archaic here; this archetype is moving upwards even in the archaic. But: it can only be invoked from the utopian standpoint; and only from the overall perspective of climbing, not in pure submersion, can affinitive utopian material possibly become visible in archetypes. That which is still Eurydice, not yet lived out herself, in the Orcus of What Has Been, is found by Orpheus alone, and it is Eurydice for him alone. Only this utopian aspect of some archetypes makes their fruitful quotation possible, glancing forwards not backwards; as has already been seen in the apparent merging of dreamgames and in the dissolution of this appearance. All such rationalisms

* Mephisto in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, in the witches’ kitchen, Part I, 2603-4: ‘When you have drunk this magic potion Soon you’ll see Helen in every woman.’

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based on the Mothers,* seen as still giving birth, show a light falling in from utopia, even in Romanticism with its nostalgic grave- and underworldlamp. The peculiarly brooding element in archetypes, particularly this element, shows their unfinished nature; but the warmth produced by the maturing process is not located in regressio. The archetypes themselves have already been mentioned above, in connection with C. G. Jung, but this arch-reactionary, in whose work, moreover, the archaic appeared like Timbuktu in Zurich, merely invoked the whole phenomenon falsely, purely as gloom. The expression archetypos itself is first found in the work of Augustine, still as an explanatory paraphrase of Plato’s Eidos, that is, of every generic form, but in fact it was only Romanticism that applied the classical expression to a categorial stock of a pictorially objective kind, breaking through and illuminating by means of certain, as it were, compressed events. Thus in the work of Novalis, Romeo and Juliet become the archetype of young love, Anthony and Cleopatra that of more mature, more interesting love; Philemon and Baucis, together with their hut, are visualized as the tableau of age-old, elapsed marriage. What is decisive, according to Novalis, is the extraordinary harmonization of all elements in these archetypes, in the case of Philemon and Baucis it extends ‘to the ham which hangs well-smoked in the chimney’. But far more decisive was the peculiar nimbus that was added to the agreement of these elements, a nimbus like that around landscapes with successful architecture of the situation and its significance. The attention that was beginning to be paid to similarities in the material of fairytales, in conflict-types, in rescue-types, in recurring ‘motifs’, did much to point to the existence of archetypes; comparative literary history revealed a wealth of such elements. Thus it is the extremely impressive motif of recognition (anagnorisis), for example, which archetypally unites such diverse material as Joseph and his Brothers in the Bible and the meeting of Electra and Orestes in Sophoclean tragedy. Above all, mythology seemed to contain all basic situations and their possible combinations; this is, of course, a wild exaggeration wholly in accordance with a reactionary element in Romantic archaism, but the studies of the history of myths by Karl Philipp Moritz, and especially Friedrich Creuzer, do indeed contain a wealth of archetypes through their attempt to categorize ‘motifs’. These archetypes appear here as symbols; Creuzer in particular already unmistakably separates their archetypicality into four aspects: into ‘the momentary, the total, the unfathomable aspect of their origin, and The archetypes of creation in Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part II.

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the necessary’. And he explains the momentary and also pictorially laconic aspect beforehand, by means of an archetype: ‘That arousing and at the same time startling element is connected with another quality, with brevity. It is like a suddenly appearing ghost or like a flash of lightning which abruptly illuminates the dark night, a moment which claims our whole being’ (Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker I, 1819, p. 118, 59). Creuzer called such laconicisms symbols in the Romantic sense, since they were manifestations of an idea; it would have taken only a little less hypostasis of an already eternally translucent idea to see the archetypes also in the form of an allegory, not just in that of a symbol. After all, allegories, in their true form, that is, before the classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are by no means concepts dressed up in sensory form, and therefore what we so readily call frosty and abstract. Rather, they also contain - in the Baroque period, and in a different way in the Middle Ages - archetypes, in fact the majority of archetypes, namely those of transitoriness and its multiple guises. It is precisely in the allegory that the wealth of poetically working archetypes first opens up, of those which still lie in the Alteritas of worldly life, whereas the symbol is consistently assigned to the Unitas of a meaning, and therefore also essentially forms the religious archetypes, or rather, religiously forms the archetypes. Thus Bachofen, a greater Creuzer and accomplished mythologist, both discovered and first attempted to arrange the system of archetypes among ancient peoples completely inside the sphere of religion. It appeared in hetairan, matrilinear, patrilinear series: in the hetairan ornaments of reeds and swamp, in the matrilinear ones of ear of corn and earth cave, in the patrilinear ones of laurel and the circle of the sun; an equally socio-historical and natural mythical order was thus supposed to emerge in the archetypes as a whole. Though this does not mean that - apart from the hypothetical division of the three series - they were catalogued in a more comprehensive way, either in their allegorical form and relation, or in their religious-symbolic one. Nevertheless, precisely from the work of Romanticism, the following became clear, crucial in terms of utopia: despite their original Augustinian consonance with prototypes in the sense of Platonic Ideas, archetypes have little or nothing in common with these and their pure, ultimately even transcendental idealism. They are, as already emerges from the above examples, essentially situational condensing categories, especially in the realm of poetically depictive imagination, and not, like Platonic Ideas, generically hypostasized. The archetypes of Romanticism or rather: as interpreted by Romanticism, were connected with the Platonic Ideas only

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through so-called re-remembering, even though in a way which also indicates their differences from unchangeable ideas. Re-remembering, anamnesis, was in Plato that of the pre-worldly state where the soul found itself in a prototypal heaven; re-remembering in Romanticism, however, moves historically, goes back into primal periods within time itself, becomes archaic regression. Though the fact that this was possible, even if it shows no proximity whatsoever to the Platonism of heavenly ideas, does show a misunderstandability - particularly exploited by Romanticism - of arche¬ types in their relation to the utopian function. Those archetypes merely held back in regression transform utopia into a backward-looking, reactionary, ultimately even diluvial one. They are then more dangerous than the usual smoke-screen of ideology; for while the latter merely diverts attention from recognition of the present and its real driving force, the archetype, spell¬ binding backwards and held in a backward spell, additionally prevents openness to the future. By no means all archetypes are capable of utopian treatment anyway, even if this is genuine, and not reactionary utopianism as it often is in Romanticism. Through the pathos of the merely archaic the whole sphere is missed which is often so actively, and, on a grand scale, luminously powerful, in poetry and also philosophy. As noted above, only those archetypes in which something not worked out, relatively unexpired and undischarged still circulates are capable of utopian treat¬ ment. Significantly, it was precisely expired feudal archetypes that were most popular in the regression which corresponded to political reaction, just as if the archetype, the token, by which, as Romanticism said, all things poetical always recognize themselves in life that has grown older, was solely surrender to the past and not also (like the storming of the Bastille) an emblem of the future, in genuine utopian function. Therefore another separation begins here so that true friends recognize each other and stay together. Only the utopian glance can find this material which has an elective affinity with it, it has an important office to perform here, instead of the bare capitalist murder of ornaments even in thought. The rotten archetypes must first be separated from those which are really undischarged in utopian terms, namely by assigning the former to totally obsolete What Has Been. But clearly, existing archetypes of the situation of freedom or of luminous happiness are not bound to this sort of past material, they have escaped it and are at least extra-territorial to it. This is not the place to survey the archetypes, they belong, as we will later have to demonstrate, to a new part of logic, to the categorial table of the imagina¬ tion. They are to be found, as we have seen, in all great literary works,

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myths, religions, and in fact: they belong by virtue of their undischarged part alone to a truth, to a cloaking depiction of utopian tendency-contents in the real. An archetype with undischarged tendency-latency beneath the cloak of fantasy is the Land of Cockaigne, is the fight with the dragon (St George, Apollo, Siegfried, St Michael), is the winter demon who tries to kill the young sun (Fenriswolf, Pharaoh, Herod, Gessler). A related archetype is the liberation of the virgin (innocence in general) whom the dragon holds captive (Perseus and Andromeda), is the time of dragons, the dragon-land itself, when it appears as the necessary space which precedes the final triumph (Egypt, Canaan, the kingdom of Antichrist before the beginning of the New Jerusalem). An archetype of the highest utopian order is the trumpet signal in the last act of ‘Fidelio’, concentrated in the Leonora overture, which heralds the rescue: the arrival of the Minister (he stands for the Messiah) embodies the archetype of the vengeful, redeem¬ ing apocalypse, the old thunderstorm and rainbow archetype. Indeed, there is an archetype of an age-old, but here quite concretely related kind even in Marx’s statement: ‘When all internal conditions have been fulfilled, the day of German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cockerel.’ We notice, purely immanent in these examples, that the utopian dimension of archetypes ultimately cannot be fixed at all in terms of the archaic, but rather it wanders highly suitable through history. And, above all, these are not all archetypes of archaic origin, many of them appeared ab origine only in the course of history, such as the dance on the ruins of the Bastille - a new arresting prototype, separated from the archaic circles of the Blessed by entirely new contents. Its music is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and therefore not one which would have been in tune with fields of asphodel, nor with orgiastic festivals of spring and Dionysus. Even archetypes of clearly archaic origin have repeatedly derived refreshment and variation from historical transformations: even the trumpet signal in ‘Fidelio’ would hardly have its piercingly genuine effect without the storming of the Bastille, which forms the model and the continual background for the music of ‘Fidelio’. Through it the thunderstorm and rainbow archetype, to which the signal and the rescue refer, first acquired a completely new origin: it stepped out of astral myth into revolutionary history; although an archetype, it now seems to lack any trace of the archaic. Thus, in the end, not all archetypes are merely condensed images of archaic experience; time and again a shoot has sprouted from them that augments the existing contents of the archetypes. All the more so when the utopian incursion occurs into both the age-old and the

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historically fresh archetypes, the refunctioning which is expert at liberating archetypally encapsulated hope. If archetypal material was totally regressive, if there were no archetypes which themselves reach for utopia, while utopia reaches back to them, then there would be no pioneering literature, committed to light, with ancient symbols; imagination would be exclusively regressio. Progressively determined it would have to guard against all images, even allegories and symbols, which stem from the old mythical ground of imagination, in each case it would only have technical school intellect in its favour, and therefore, as the latter is dreamless, against it. But the Magic Flute - to take a fantasy-piece that is unquestionably humanizing - uses almost nothing but archaic allegories and symbols: the guide and priest-king, the kingdom of night, the kingdom of light, the ordeal by water and fire, the magic of the flute, the transformation into a sun. Nevertheless, all these allegories and symbols, among them some in whose sacred halls no philanthropy had ever previously been sung, have shown they can be used in the service of enlightenment, in fact, they found their true home in Mozart’s fairytale music, in an undemonic temple. Thus productive utopian function also draws images from the What Has Been which is not obsolete, in so far as they are capable of future, in a doubleedged sense, despite all the spell in them, and it makes them suitable for the expression of What Has Still Not Yet Been, of sunrise. Thus the utopian function discovers not only the cultural surplus belonging to it, it also fetches back from the double-edged archetypal depths an element of itself, an archaically stored anticipation of still Not-Yet-Conscious, Not-YetAchieved material. To use a dialectical archetype itself: the anchor which sinks down to the bottom here is simultaneously the anchor of hope; what is sinking down contains what is rising up, can contain it. And the same double nature designated by all this, that which is capable of utopia, ultimately shows itself and proves its worth whenever archetypes clearly turn into object-based ciphers, which they have in any case copied from nature. This is so in numerous condensed sayings (still waters run deep, it’s lonely at the top), in the thunderstorm-rainbow archetype, and also in the light and sun imagery of the Magic Flute. Archetypes of this type are not at all formed merely out of human material, neither out of the archaic, nor out of later history; but rather they demonstrate a bit of the double inscription of nature itself, a kind of real cipher or real symbol. A real symbol is one where the thing signified is still disguised from itself, in the real object, and not just for the human apprehension of that thing, for example. It is therefore an expression for that which has not yet become

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manifest in the object itself, but rather is signified in the object and through the object; the human picture of the symbol is only a representative depiction of this. Lines of movement (fire, lightning, sound-figure and so on), forms of well-defined objects (palm shape, cat shape, human face, Egyptian crystal style, Gothic forest style and so on), indicate these real ciphers. A sharply delineated part of the world thus appears as a symbol group of an objectbased kind whose mathematics and philosophy are still both equally undeveloped. So-called morphology is only an abstract caricature of this; because real ciphers are not static, they are figures of tension, they are tendentious process forms and, above all in fact, on this path, symbolic ones. Things like this border on the problem of an object-based utopian theory of figures, and therefore ultimately on the forgotten (Pythagorean) problem of a qualitative mathematics, of a renewed qualitative philosophy of nature. Here, however, it is already clear that even object-based archetypes, turned into real ciphers which are to be found in the enormous antiquarium of nature, and nearer at hand in the formed works of man, are only elucidated by utopian function. Archetypes, of course, always have their nearest existence in human history; namely in so far as archetypes are what they can be: concise ornaments of a utopian substance. Utopian function tears away this part from the past, from reaction, and also from myth; every refunctioning occurring in this way demonstrates the un¬ discharged aspect of archetypes changed to the point of recognition.

Encounter of the utopian function with ideals An open glance proves its worth by turning towards itself. A goal hovers before it which has rarely been lost sight of since youth. Since it is not to hand, but demands or shines, it acts as a task or as a target. If the goal seems to contain not just something desirable or worth striving for, but something absolutely perfect, then it is called an ideal. Every goal, whether attainable or unattainable, whether crackpot or objectively meaningful, must first be imagined in the mind. But the ideal as imagined goal is distinguished from an ordinary imagined goal precisely by its emphasis on perfection; it cannot be made to settle for anything less. Active striving and desiring are otherwise abandoned, or they are empirically and shrewdly diverted, if the imagining of empirically compelling counter-reasons penetrates the imagined goal. On the other hand, the ideal as imagined goal acts as such unremittingly, a decision of the will directed towards

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it is irrevocable. It is so even when it is not implemented; because the non-implementation, precisely because of its factual irrevocability, is accompanied by guilty conscience, at least by the feeling of renunciation. The Object* of the imagined ideal, the ideal Object, thus acts as a demand¬ ing one, seemingly as if it had its own desire, which is decreed to man as obligation. The ordinary imagined goal and that of the ideal display the character of a value, and mere illusion of value is to be found in both cases. But whereas this illusion can be empirically corrected in ordinary imagined goals, this is considerably more difficult in the case of ideals, precisely because of their reified demands. If an Object appears as one which is ideal, then the only way of breaking its demanding, sometimes enchantingly demanding spell is through catastrophe; and even then this is not always a cure. There is the misfortune of an idolatry of love which continues to cast its spell even on the object which has been seen through; illusionary political ideals occasionally continue to have an effect even after an empirical catastrophe, as if they were - genuine. A peculiar power thus emanates from the formation of ideals, one which intersperses the, as it were, bright and fully-fledged conviction of the ideal as perfection with very much darker impulses. So that formation of ideals, seen from its unfree and illusionary side, is able to contain a tremendous amount of false consciousness, archaic subconsciousness. This sort of thing has already appeared in connection with repression in the Freudian sense, and differently in connection with Adler’s psychology of power, - concerning the over-compensatory formation of the guiding ideal. In Freud, the super-ego is the source of the formation of ideals, and the super-ego itself, with all the threat, the obliga¬ tion that radiates from it, is supposed to be the father continuing to exert an influence. The ego stands in the same relation to the super-ego as that of a child to its parents; their commands have remained effective in the ideal ego, in every ideal command in general, and now, as conscience, exercise moral censorship. This theory of ideals therefore led exclusively backwards to the father, and, with sufficient excavation, back into the patriarchaldespotic age as a whole. Accordingly, all non-threatening, all shining features of the ideal are left out in Freud, and this ideal is wholly confined to the moral sphere. Adler’s theory of over-compensation seeks to explain these truly shining features, at the same time it is directed towards the past,

Bloch begins to use the more concrete ‘Gegenstand’ here, alongside the more philosophical ‘Objekt’. Both can only be translated by the English ‘object’, but we have indicated the difference by capitalizing the former.

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towards the previous ‘Tom Thumb situation’, only with regard to what the guiding-ideal may overcome. The guiding or personal character-ideal is not supposed to be a remembered, enforced goal here, but one which is chosen relatively freely: people finalize themselves by changing from the charactermask to the ideal-mask, in order to achieve the feeling of superiority. Once again, of course, according to this theory, all ideal images are confined to moral and ultimately to personally vain ones; more objective ideals, artistic ones for example, are totally missing. Even alternative ideals of the correct life-style which extend from pre-capitalist times, such as loneliness or friend¬ ship, such as vita activa or vita contemplativa, have no place in this pure psychology of competition. Likewise, ideal situations and ideal landscapes, when limited to purely personal guiding images, remain uncomprehended and homeless. Thus Freud and Adler identified only the oppressive spell which can underlie the formation of ideals: the father-spell in Freud, and at least the spell of inferiority in Adler. Neither is the march-route open which leads from here both to the surplus qualities and to the surplus images. Everything remains in the sphere of obligation, the goal-image imagined by wanting-to-become is mostly endured rather than hoped for. But the will which gazes up at towers, and also climbs them, is never exhausted by this. The formation of ideals is by no means restricted to obligation and spells, it has its freer, brighter side as well. Even if this brighter side also displays strong negative aspects: those of substitution, overblownness, abstractness, which were joined in the nineteenth century by the mendacity of the ideal, these are certainly not connected with the dark or sinister elements of the formation of ideals. Not with obligation from above, with spells, pressure of the super-ego, turning against the human creature as such; what is seductive here is rather perfection itself, floating high above our heads. The free characters of the daydream reveal themselves on this brighter side, particularly the journey to the end, where things really do go on forever. Even if a real journey to the ideal is not undertaken at all or only remains in its picture, as embarkation for Cythera, a moreover purely erotic ideal, an end is always intended, and always as Perfectum. Perfection then is not merely easier to feel, it is also more inviting to think about than middling cultural categories. Thus the ideal was much more clearly conceptualized than ideologies (which goes without saying because of the interested cloaking character of ideology), but also more clearly than archetypes. Up to now there has been no classification and table of archetypes, but there have been several of the ideal; and they go right down to terms like: ideal housewife, ideal Bach baritone and the

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like, they go right up to the ideal of the highest good. There are guiding ideals of the right life, sharply contrasting ones, there is a value estimation theory, richly nuanced from the Sophists and Socrates right down to Epicurus and the Stoics, a theory of criteria for the ideal. In Kant, who calls the philosopher himself a teacher of the ideal, and philosophy a course of instruction in the ideal, the ideal appears from all sides in fact, those of pressure and of final directing unity and of hope. This ideal appears again as pressure, even attack, in the categorical imperative of moral law: the dignity of man, which demands respect in this law, conflicts with all natural impulses. But then the ideal appears in Kant as the final directing force in such a way that the latter does not itself demand, but on the contrary is itself demanded, and in the postulating trinity of the Unconditional: freedom, immortality, God. The ideal equally appears as hope, namely as the truly highest good of practical reason; this is then supposed to be the combining of virtue and bliss, the (admittedly always only approxi¬ mative) realization of a kingdom of God on earth. Then the ideal appears again in Kantian aesthetics: as that of a natural perfection, therefore without the highest good, but with the most instructive contrast to the moral pressure-ideal. Kant turns away from this in art, just as in art moral Being Obliged in general always becomes silly: there is a thundering ethics, but - corresponding to it - only a schoolmasterish aesthetics. Kant does not want this, the artistic genius for him is not at odds with his natural motivating force, as the moral man is. On the contrary, genius ‘gives the rule’ precisely ‘as nature’, genius is an ‘intelligence which acts just like nature’. And all embellishments in accordance with the aesthetic ideal are defined as ‘the perfect embodiment of an idea in an individual phenomenon’. Thus precisely in Kant, the formal, but thereby particularly abstract-radical teacher of the ideal, perfection bursts out in so many different forms, corresponding to its various faces, those of spell and those of starlight above all, as a hope for the future. His aesthetic version, the ‘perfect embodi¬ ment of an idea in an individual phenomenon’, passes, moreover, from a formal idealism straight into an objective one. Thus this concept of the ideal ultimately comes close to the Idea, which was taken by Aristotle from Plato’s generic form above the phenomenon into goal-form or entelechy within the phenomenon. This entelechy, which does not perfectly reveal itself because of impeding secondary causes in individual things, is made visible for Aristotle by sculpture, and also by literature. Aesthetic ideal representation thus becomes one which both captures imitatively and embellishes in accordance with entelechy, i.e. which shows what ought

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to happen according to the nature of the matter; hence the famous Aristotelian statement that drama is more philosophical than the recording of history. It is ultimately this character of perfection, driving to an end, of the aesthetically ideal which in Schopenhauer and Hegel can be linked with Kant’s ‘perfect embodiment of an idea in an individual phenomenon’. With a large Aristotelian component in Schopenhauer: ‘Now according to whether the organism more or less succeeds in overcoming those deeper levels of natural forces expressing objectivity of the will, it becomes the more perfect or more imperfect expression of its idea, that is, stands closer to or further from the ideal to which in its particular genre beauty is appropriate.’ And further, clearly touching on the idea of a utopian function (in the static limited character of the genre): ‘Only thus could the Greek genius find the prototype of the human form and set it up as a canon of the school, as sculpture; and also, only by means of an anticipation of this sort is it possible for us all to portray the beautiful where nature has really succeeded in individual instances. This anticipation is the ideal; it is the idea in so far as at least half of it is known a priori and becomes of practical use to art, in that this idea approaches in a complementary way what is given a posteriori by nature’ (Werke, Grisebach, I, p. 207, 297). For Hegel, ideals in general can only occur in art and not in the rest of reality, least of all in political and social reality; here they are for Hegel, in so far as he is a Restoration philosopher,* solely chimeras of an imaginary perfection. Whereas art as a contemplative structure has absolutely nothing but ideals as its substratum, oriental-symbolic, classical Greek, western-romantic ( honour, love, loyalty, adventure, faith). And their aesthetic manifestation is most definitely reminiscent of Aristotle, of entelechy: ‘The truth of art must therefore be no mere correctness to which the mere imitation of nature confines itself, but the exterior must harmonize with an interior that harmonizes with itself and, precisely by means of this, can reveal itself as itself in the exterior. By now leading back what has been stained by contingency and externality in the rest of existence to this harmony with its true concept, art casts everything aside which does not correspond to that concept in the phenomenon, and brings forth the ideal only through this purification’ (Werke XI, p. I99f.). Clearly, the ideal is definitely not regarded here as indifferent towards reality in general, nor as cheap gloss (which asserted the fraudulent contrast between poetry and prose, ultimately between culture and civilization). But a stronger * Restoration: again Bloch means the period of the restoration of the French monarchy after 1814.

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degree of reality itself is meant, of the respective perfection which is in real terms intended in phenomenal process, even if this layering in Hegel is never permitted to be that of a Not-Yet-Become in real terms. Nevertheless, wherever no super-ego, wherever no backward father-spell or even fixed images of a merely imitative over-compensation are about their business, the ideal manifests much more genuine anticipation than most archetypes. And the utopian function in the ideal thus becomes not so much the blasting open as the correction of this ideal: by means of a mediation with concrete movements towards perfection in the world, with material ideal tendency. Beyond this, of course, only grand words remain, inwardly and all the more so outwardly, known by heart. Obligation, demand, pressure are part of the ideal as spell, but as noted above: overblownness, non-binding abstractness, unhistorical statics threaten it in its freedom and intended perfection. And on top of this came the sheer lie added by the nineteenth century - the true, the good, the beautiful as bourgeois cliches. In the commercial councillor’s wife Jenny Treibel, nee Biirstenbinder,* Fontane portrayed a bourgeois woman with ideals who is a cut above all her own kind. Even above her whole environment: ‘They liberalize and sentimentalize constantly, but that is all farce; when they have to lay their cards on the table, then the call is: gold is trumps - and that’s that.’ In most of his dramas, Ibsen is passionately keen to show how professed bourgeois ideals and bourgeois practice no longer have anything in common with one another at all. ‘The Doll’s House’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘The Wild Duck’, are nothing but variations on the theme of cliche ideals; and it would not have taken much to work up these deeply serious, almost tragic plays into comedies. Gregers Werle in ‘The Wild Duck’ is precisely the Don Quixote of bourgeois ideals, in the midst of a degenerate bourgeois world, and the cynicism of Relling when he calls these ideals not merely lies, but life-lies necessary to the average person, is by no means merely cynical, he is simply calling the Sunday swindle of the late-bourgeois ideal by its proper name. With the limitation that Ibsen himself still believes and wants to believe in bourgeois ideals, and tries to portray them in his dramas after ‘The Wild Duck’ in such a way that they are immune to Relling’s criticism. There was no new world either in Fontane or in Ibsen, instead the old one was immanently Commercial councillor was an honorary title formerly conferred on German financiers and industrialists. In his novel ‘Frau Jenny Treibel’, Theodor Fontane (1819-98) implies the class aspirations of his central character in her names. Her maiden name means ‘brushmaker’, her married name ‘Treibel’ suggests ‘treiben’, as in ‘Handel treiben’, ‘to do business’. ‘Frau Jenny Treibel’ appeared in 1892.

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denounced, with its discrepancy between theory and practice, with its deeply ingrained hypocrisy. A critical realism is sufficient to see through this, no research into ideology, let alone utopian function is necessary. But the latter is necessary, with apprehended material tendency, so that the ideal is not seen to be at one with its overblown bourgeois existence; so that it really may be rescued from its whole previous mode of existence, from abstractness, from statics. First from abstractness, the detached, poorly general, feebly hovering kind. It is essentially formal, the content has stolen out of real life, or stands directly opposed to it in the empty, grand words. Since the ideals were thus not mediated with any tendency, abstractness was joined by undialectical statics. Both increase the illusion of value; it is now supported by an attitude which places the ideals in the silver cupboard for our eternally unchanging edification. Abstractness and statics together then constitute the so-called ideal principles, as targets for words, not for actions. This kind of formality flourishes chiefly in England and, deteriorating into a religion of dead slogans, in North America. The American Declaration of Independence and then the American Constitution contained their rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their principles of liberty, justice, morality and law, still seen from the standpoint of the citoyen (not of course forgetting the less Bengal-lit principle of property, as the basic principle). But now all this is trapped in inert air, and the only real basic principle, the economic one, because of the formal abstract-statics of the other principles, permits any opportunism of content, above all in the case of liberty. Such an ideal neither can nor wants to stand out theoretically against this opportunism of its content, which can go as far as total inversion; it cannot do so because of its misleading formal generality, it does not want to do so because of its languid inertia. And how great this powerlessness was in Germany especially, in Luther’s Germany of double-entry book-keeping or the dualism of works and faith. In Calvinistic countries the ideal at least remained a verbal and formaldemocratic target for modes of action which were soon abandoned; hypocrisy develops as a tribute of vice to virtue. In Germany, however, what is ideal stood so high above the world that it did not come into any contact with it at all, apart from that of eternal distance. This target became stars which were too far away to be reached, that is, stars of velleity, not of action. Out of this arose the phantom of mere endless approach to the ideal or, which comes to the same thing, of its transposition into eternal striving towards the ideal. The world thus remained in a bad way, moral ideals hung in the heavenly distance, aesthetic ideals were not even sought

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after, but were merely enjoyed for their splendour. So easy is the leap from endless desire to mere contemplation: for even the eternally approxima¬ tive is contemplation, only disturbed by the constant illusion of action, by acting for the sake of acting, ut aliquid fieri videatur. Even if a concrete sense of the ideal did emerge in Germany, as far as its realization was concerned it was certainly only the reverse side of endless non-realization, namely total peace in the world; as in Hegel. Here the endless aspect of the approach to the ideal does admittedly disappear, but so does every approach through the works of man to the ideal in general. The worldprocess as such becomes the self-realization of the ideal aims posited within it, and man is a mere accessory, ultimately even, as a philosopher, a mere spectator of ideals which are supposedly realized in any case. All this there¬ fore keeps the ideal impotent, no matter whether in endless approach or in far too much overlapping with the world as a supposed ideal world. In both, statics of the ideal predominates with an in itself already finished perfection; and it is precisely against this finished aspect that utopian function has to prove its worth here. But this probation is different from that through archetypes, it is much more related to the material, though it also contains much more fraternal strife. It is precisely this intended perfection, its wholly admitted anticipation, which makes the ideal accessible to utopian treatment. Archetypes have encapsulated the anticipating element, and it has to be blasted out; whereas ideals reveal it abstractly or statically, and it only has to be corrected. Archetypes very often reveal hope in the profound depths and these depths in the archaic, they are then like the sunken treasures in myth itself which rise up and sun themselves on a midsummer’s day; whereas ideals reveal their hope from the beginning in the daylight, on its upwardly curving dome. The renewal of most archetypes is supported by Morike’s quiet line about Orplid: ‘Ancient waters rise rejuvenated around your waist, child!’; whereas the appearance of an ideal is supported by the distinct daylight cry from Browning’s ‘Pippa Passes’: ‘Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing,/Whence earth, we feel, gets steady help and good -/... All shall be mine!’ There are certainly also archetypes which do not dwell in the profound depths, dancing on the ruins of the Bastille provided the strongest example of this, and conversely an archetype like the mother-image in Isis-Mary is at the same time a deeply rooted ideal. But on the whole, the ideal lives purely on the Front, so much so that its image of fulfilment appeared too distant, rather than too sunken. It is no accident that the abstract utopias, as abstract, but equally as utopias, are essentially filled with ideals and considerably less with archetypes, even

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with those which have straightforward revolutionary meaning. The lonely island where Utopia supposedly lies may be an archetype, but more strongly at work within it are the ideal forms of perfection which is striven for, as either free or ordered development of the content of life. Utopian function therefore has to prove itself through the ideal basically along the same lines as through utopias themselves: along the lines of concrete mediation with material ideal-tendency in the world, as noted above. That which is ideal can by no means be instructed and corrected by mere facts; on the contrary, it is part of its nature to exist in a state of tension with mere factual Becomeness. And yet that which is ideal, if it is worth anything, has contact with the process of the world, of which so-called facts are reified-fixed abstractions. It has in its anticipations, if they are concrete, a correlate in the objective hope-contents of the tendency-latency; this correlate makes possible ethical ideals as models, aesthetic ones as pre¬ appearances which point to something that is possibly becoming real. Such ideals, corrected and aligned by utopian function, are then collectively those of a self- and world-content developed in terms adequate to man; thus they are - which may finally summarize and simplify the whole nature of ideals here - all variations of the basic content: highest good. Ideals relate to this supreme hope-content, possible world-content, as means to an end; there is therefore a hierarchy of ideals, and a lower one can be sacrificed to a higher one, because it is resurrected anyway in the realization of the higher one. For example, the supreme variation of the highest good in the socio¬ political sphere is the classless society; consequently, ideals like freedom and also equality act as means to this end, and derive their value-content (one which in the case of freedom has been particularly ambiguous) from the highest good in socio-political terms. In such a way that it does not merely determine the content of the ideals as means, but also varies them according to the requirements of the supreme end-content, and where necessary temporarily justifies the deviations. Equally, the supreme variation of the highest good in the aesthetic sphere is immanent pre-appearance of a humanely perfect world: consequently, all aesthetic categories bear relation to this goal and are its variations - as l’art pour l’espoir. And more audibly than in the case of archetypes, there resounds in the ideal the answer of the subject to bad Becomeness, the tendential answer against what is insufficient, for what is humanely appropriate. Thus when Marx says the working-class has no ideals to realize, this anathema certainly does not apply to the realization of tendentially concrete goals, but only to that of abstractly introduced goals, of ideals which have no contact with history

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and process. Through Marx and Lenin, socialism has itself become a concrete ideal in each further stage to be pursued, an ideal which, through its systematically mediated solidity, spurs us on not less but more than the ideal which was abstract. And precisely the highest political ideal: the realm of freedom, as political summum bonum, is so little alien to consciously manufactured history that, as a concrete realm, it constitutes the finality of that history, or the last chapter of the history of the world. Because an anti-summum-bonum or In-Vain, the equally possible alterna¬ tive, would not be the last chapter of this history, but rather its deletion, and not finality, but exit to chaos. In process, there is either death without hinterland despite human work, or there is, by virtue of human work, realism of the ideal in its operation - tertium non datur. But the activity and the separate ideal of the freedom of the utopian function consists in objectively signifying and setting free the not yet become ‘Being as Ideal’ (highest good) which develops with real possibility in dawnings, on the Front of the process-world.

Encounter of the utopian function with allegory-symbols There still remains the engaged glance which clearly proves its worth even through what is not yet clear. The latter is here that not yet clear element which not only signifies its own matter, but also at the same time another matter within it. When this element appears in literary language, the words can certainly be sensuous and immediate, but they echo as in a great hall. Even the proverb offers itself as multi-layered and significant, in so far as it is capable of becoming metaphorical, in fact prefers to be so. ‘Still waters run deep’, this is thus already an allegorical statement, and it is heightened in great literary metaphors. ‘Poems are painted windowpanes’, this great metaphorical phrase of Goethe’s splendidly conveys the dark-brightness of signifying its own matter and at the same time another within it. Such a phrase is a perfect allegory, though as such itself again tainted with the not yet clear element of itself, which again is why no allegory can be perfect. For it is equivocal by definition, i.e. the Object from which it takes its illuminating metaphor (here: the painted windowpanes) is itself by no means unequivocal. It contains several meanings within it, even those which do not relate to poems as comparisons, and above all it points further beyond itself, even in the poem-relation, in the transparency-relation, between darkness and light. So no allegory is perfect;

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if it was, if its extended relation was not one which repeatedly sends us shooting off in all directions, but also along the same lines, to other things, then this kind of statement would not be allegorical but symbolic. It would be so even though the then attained perfection still remains one of what is factually not yet clear, namely one of the cloaked in the apparent, of the apparent as something still cloaked. In this sense, compared with the symbolic, allegory possesses a kind of wealth of vagueness; thus, in fact, its type of metaphor is inferior to the unwavering, yet at the same time still hovering type of the symbol and of its unified point of reference. Of course, this must not be confused with the other value-distinction between the allegorical and the symbolic, which has been drawn in a fundamentally false way for little more than a hundred years. According to this, the allegorical merely consisted of concepts which are dressed up or decorated in sensory form, whereas the symbolic - in fact, was simply always based on so-called immediacy. Or as Gundolf subsequently put it so foolishly, on the subject of Goethe whom he had Georgianized:* the young Goethe had expressed his ‘original experiences’ symbolically, whereas the older Goethe had only been able to convey his so-called mere ‘formative ex¬ periences’ allegorically. This value distinction is not only pointless in Goethe’s case, it also follows the whole conventional fallacy concerning allegories which has been committed since Romanticism. By virtue of the semi-allegories defused by reason, indeed mere abstract illustrations, which in the Rococo and Louis Seize period (as figures of virtue, of truth, of friendship and so on) were the only aspect of the phenomenon of allegory that remained in consciousness. The Romantic devaluation of allegories which related to this lacked the experienced knowledge of real allegory: that of the Baroque, with its orgy of emblems, that of the Middle Ages, that of early Christian patristics. Allegory in its heyday was by no means a dressing up of concepts in sensory form, a decoration of abstractions, but in fact the attempt to convey a thing-meaning through other thingmeanings, and furthermore on the basis of the opposite of abstractions: namely on the basis of archetypes, which unite the respective metaphorical components in their meaning-content. And likewise it is archetypes which found the resonance of meaning, though the binding and central one, in the symbol-metaphor: not as archetypes of On The Way and transitoriness, but of a strict Absolute or final sense. Clearly therefore, this last-mentioned value-distinction between allegory and symbol, the only legitimate one, * After the manner of the poet Stefan George.

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cannot be confused with that between decorated abstractions, even of the most fixed kind, and incarnate theophanies; their difference of status is rather one within the same field of archetypes itself. The distinction has already been made above (cf. p. 161) that allegory contains the archetypes of transitoriness, which is why its meaning is always directed towards Alteritas, whereas the symbol remains consistently assigned to the Unitas of one sense. And in the problem that now arises of an encounter of utopian function with allegory and symbol, the category of the cipher must be stressed in both, as the formed meaning, occurring even in real terms in objects, of the allegorical or symbolic dimensions combined in the archetype. Accordingly, allegory through respective detail provides a cipher on to a sense which is likewise still spread out in detail (multiplicity, Alteritas) and is to be found in transitoriness and fragmentation. Whereas the symbol through respective detail provides a cipher on to a unity of sense trans¬ parently appearing in detail (multiplicity, Alteritas); it is thus focused on the unum necessarium of an arrival (landing, gathering), no longer on temporariness, equivocalness sent hither and thither. This intention towards an arrival thus makes the symbol binding, in contrast to allegories, which shift as they flourish and are at the mercy of the continuing uncertainty of the path. Which ultimately means that allegory is essentially at home in art which is rich in figures and in polytheistic religions, whereas the symbol essentially belongs to great simplicity in art and to heno- and monotheistic religions. Anticipation has something to announce in both, because in both it announces itself. This is simultaneously something sealed that reveals itself and something revealing, opening, that still seals itself up, because - especial¬ ly in the symbol - the time is not yet ripe, the process has not yet been won, the matter pending within it (the sense) has not yet been produced and decided. Thus there is an encounter, founded in the substance itself, of utopian functions with allegory and symbol; it is the objective significa¬ tion itself in which the utopian function here encounters itself. To repeat: every metaphor that remains in multiplicity, Alteritas, represents an allegory, as it does in the following: ‘The oak stood in its misty shroud/a giant towering to the skies/where darkness from the bushes glowered/with hun¬ dred black and gloomy eyes.’* If however the metaphor expresses unity, central things in general, if it converges towards these with an unques¬ tionable certainty which is beginning to appear, even though it is still From Goethe’s poem ‘Willkommen und Abschied’ a later version of ‘Es schlug mein Herz... 1771.

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cloaked, then symbolism is achieved unequivocally, as it is in the following: ‘Above all summits there is peace.’* And the form of both is that dialec¬ tical form which Goethe called, in a phrase which itself has a dialectical tension, ‘a public mystery’, precisely as a still continuing merging of what is opened and what is cloaked, what has not yet been removed from the cloak. But in such a way that - in all genuine, i.e. also objectively accurate allegories, especially symbols - the ‘public mystery’ is not only one for human interpretation, owing to inadequate powers of comprehension for example, but equally constitutes real qualities of meaning in the outside world independent of human beings; hence the tendency-forms of the characteristically typical which signifies itself in its respective appearances, hence the whole dialectical experiment of the world with forms of existence (with figures) on its still latent central figure. It is also instructive to compare this really public element of a mystery with Goethe’s so realistic world¬ opening: the entelechies developing in the shape of life in the world are all so many living, object-based existing allegories and symbols. Thus this cipher also exists in reality; not merely in allegorical and symbolic designa¬ tions of this reality: and such real-ciphers exist precisely because the world-process itself is a utopian function, with the matter of the objectively Possible as its substance. The utopian function of humanly conscious planning and change here represents only the most advanced, most active outpost of the aurora-function circulating in the world: of the nocturnal day in which all real-ciphers, i.e. process-forms still occur and are located. The allegorical formation of figures, the symbolic formation of goals, thus in fact show everything transitory as a metaphor,! hut as one which is a separate real path of meaning. Every apt metaphor is therefore at the same time one depicting reality, to the same extent as it is full of objective utopian func¬ tion in the direction of its meaning, and is full of real-cipher in the form of its meaning. And the symbol, in final contrast to the allegory, proves its worth from this standpoint as an attempted transition from metaphor to equation, i.e. to the attempted identity of inwardness and outward¬ ness. And it is in fact part of the honesty of the statement itself that the unum necessarium (highest good) of such an identity-content has always first appeared in the voice of a Chorus Mysticus, and not yet with that adequate predication, object-based successfulness, which is the frontiergoal and the final task of world enlightenment. Longing, anticipation,

* From Goethe’s poem, ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’, 1780. f Cf. Lines from the Chorus Mysticus at the end of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part II, 12104-5.

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distance, still continuing cloakedness, these are determinations in the subject and the object of the allegorical-symbolic. They are determinations of a by no means permanent kind, but tasks directed towards the growing illumination of what is still indeterminate within it, in short, towards the growing resolution of the symbolic. But it is precisely realistic tendencyknowledge, with the conscience of latency within it, which has to do justice to what is termed a public mystery.

UTOPIAN IMAGE-TRACE IN

16

REALIZATION EGYPTIAN AND TROJAN HELEN But does the deed come, as the sun comes from the clouds, From the thought perhaps, spiritual and ripe? Does the fruit follow, as from the grove’s Dark leaf, the silent script? Holderlin

Dreams want to drift How long does it keep on pointing only forwards in us? Wishing does want something, is not just anyhow, only rarely torments empty. If it hurries to land however, does the drive which is working within it arrive? The drive perhaps can surprisingly be gratified for a time, as any craving can to begin with. Nothing is of more indifference to the sated man than a piece of bread, nothing is more out-of-date to the curious man than the newspaper he has just read. Behind this, however, everything rises again, there are, beginning with hunger, wishes that are never cooled. And the images which even a self-gratifying wish has visualized occasionally hang in the air, as if they could not condense and fall. The wish and will towards them lives on, they themselves live on. Not even everything in fulfiliable dreams always arrives when they land on level ground; often a trace remains. It is airy, windy even, but is stronger than flesh, is nevertheless noticeable. A man awaits a girl, the room is full of tender unrest; the last light of evening is in it, heightens the tension. If, however, the girl he is hoping for crosses the threshold and everything is all right, everything is there, then hoping itself is no longer there, it has vanished. It no longer has

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anything to say and yet it still carried something with it which does not make itself known in the existing pleasure. Complete congruence has rarely, probably never, entered. In the dream of something, before the heart refreshes itself, things were better or appeared to be so.

Non-satisfaction and what can lie within it It is not always possible even to pluck a Now that has come. The flesh can be weak, but there is often a more sophisticated reason. All the more dubiously in fact, even in a good situation, if too many dreams are added beforehand, too many overhauling dreams. Then the imagination has used up the material of the imminent experience for itself, in love as in every kind of debut. Stendhal’s essay ‘On Love’ achieves its famous diagnosis of the fiasco from this premise. According to Stendhal, immediate happi¬ ness occurs only where a man possesses a woman without delay, that is: in the moment of desiring her. Certain happiness in love is then only guaranteed ‘if a lover has not yet had time to long for the woman and to work on her in his imagination’. In fact, Stendhal does not even need the full play of the imagination to explain a remaining behind reality; he ventures the proposition: ‘As soon as a single grain of passion comes into the heart, there is also a grain, a possibility of fiasco.’ And further, with dangerous, unnerving creation of stage-fright: ‘The higher a man’s love is, the more he must force himself before he dares to touch his loved one intimately. He imagines he will anger a being which appears to him as something divine, which inspires in him both boundless love and boundless respect... Thus the soul is filled with shame and preoccupied with over¬ coming this shame; the road to bliss is blocked.’ We may compare with this the reluctance of Romantic poets to allow their heavenly images of femininity to fall into experience, to see them fall, especially in E. T. A. Hoffmann. The Romantic hatred of marriage derives not least from a stock of dreams which becomes inexhaustible and reified: ‘The magic is destroyed’, exclaims an artist in Hoffmann’s ‘Fermate’ with over-sexual fiasco in mind, ‘and the inner melody, which otherwise announces marvellous things, becomes a row over a smashed soup-dish’. The same tragi-comedy is suggested in a conversation of the conductor Kreisler with the princess in Hoffmann’s ‘Kater Murr’; Kreisler praises the ‘real musicians’ who do not want to make love like the good people who desecrate dreams in their marriage-bed. However, in order that the artists do not appear

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either as eccentric or even as incapable of love, Kreisler compares them to minnesingers, courtliness, the cult of the Virgin and continues on the subject of the ‘real musicians’: ‘They bear their chosen lady in their hearts and want nothing more than to sing, to write, to paint in her honour, in short, in their most exquisite Courtoisie, they are comparable to the gallant knights. In fact, several husbands have experienced the end that comes with realization, even if they were no Kreislers; this happened to a real composer, and moreover one of the most Romantic, Hector Berlioz, in exactly the way Kreisler envisaged. There was even a stage available here on which the idol shone with double radiance: Berlioz fell in love with a young English actress who portrayed Shakespeare’s maidens and noble women. This Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona enhanced her brilliance by rebuffing all approaches and consequently became all the more destruc¬ tively radiant for Berlioz. Fearing that the desperate lover might take his life, his friends Chopin and Liszt spent a whole night searching the plain of St Quentin in the direction of which Berlioz, quite out of his mind, had been seen rushing off. However, some years later, when the now famous composer succeeded in winning his beloved, when his idol became his wife, the previously so violent love collapsed with its realization (which may have brought more than just ‘smashed soup-dishes’ with it). Madame was no match for the dream-image which she had infused into a young man from the stage. Experience was not forbearing with hope, but this hope was not forbearing with experience either; and the latter became exaggeratedly disappointing.

First reason for disappointmenthappiness is there where you are not;* second reason: dream rendered independent and the legend of the double Helen The first underlying factor here is that the Here and Now stands too close to us. Raw experience transposes us from the drifting dream into another state: into that of immediate nearness. The moment just lived dims as such, it has too dark a warmth, and its nearness makes things formless. The Here and Now lacks the distance which does indeed alienate us, but makes things distinct and surveyable. Thus, from the outset, the immediate G. P. Schmidt von Lumbeck, ‘Des Fremdlings Abendlied’, and in Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’.

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dimension within which realization occurs seems darker than the dreamimage, and occasionally barren and empty. Even if boundless imagination has not washed away the soil on which the realization stands, if the meeting with reality also takes place, even then the paradox can occur that the dream appeared firmer or at any rate brighter than its realization. The shining cloud settles around us as a grey mist when it comes nearer; the distant blue of the mountains vanishes completely when we reach them. Tamino in the ‘Magic Flute’, a fairytale opera, supposedly sees Pamina in the courtyard of Sarastro’s castle exactly as she looks in her picture. Yet, despite his happy cry: ‘It’s her!’, the question arises whether it really is her, whether the feeling expressed in Tamino’s nostalgic song ‘This likeness is enchanting’, whether this utopian imagination, with its imago, has found and could find its fulfilment in such a perfect original. We may compare with this image-blue two tests which, as in the case of Berlioz, have taken place, have happened in life, and in fact to such diverse person¬ alities as the distraught lyric poet Lenau on the one hand, the vain and strict Christologian Kierkegaard on the other; but it was the same catastrophe with the mirage. Lenau travelled to America, desiring not least to have the image of his bride more intensely present through separation than if he had her beside him; he returned home dissatisfied with the mere image, his desire for the original reinforced, but then he wrote the following poem entitled ‘Change of Longing’: Yet how long that journey seemed to me, how I longed to return so fearfully from the wide and foreign wastes of foam to the dear and distant coast of home. Welcomed by the land I longed to reach, jubilant I sprang at last upon the beach, like the evergreen dreams of younger days home’s familiar trees greeted my gaze. Purer than ever rang the bird-song here, sweet and intimate upon my ear; gladly, after the pains of being apart, I’d have taken every stone there to my heart. You instead I found, and - on a dying beat all my joy sank down there at your feet,

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in my heart all there was to be found was the hopelessness of love unbound. O and how I long again in fear to ride out upon your murky swirling tide! How I wish I were forever on the wild sea with your image alone for company! So much for Lenau and his incapacity for real reunion: Pamina crumbled immediately here at close quarters. This kind of love has the solemn vanity of being in love with itself; it is a feast that can never experience a Monday. For exactly the same reason, Kierkegaard, the all too absolute lover, also remained on the high seas with the image alone for company. Kierkegaard broke off his engagement with his fiancee Regine Olsen, Regine took one of her previous admirers as a husband, and Kierkegaard wrote in his diary: ‘Today I saw a pretty girl and was not interested. No husband can be more faithful to his wife than I am to her.’ And he continued, in the adopted mask of the lecher and equally that of the ascetic: ‘She has grasped the point well that she has to marry.’ There is the craziest criss-crossing of Platonisms here: there is the love-ideal of the troubadour and the ascetic love of the Virgin, but there is also the removal of Pamina to an imagehorizon as her idea-based home. The Platonist, even the homo religiosus Kierkegaard does not always deny himself the present, but he confines himself to the absolute, just as the absolute reserves the present for itself: ‘For with regard to the absolute, there is only one time: the present; the absolute does not even exist at all for anyone who is not contemporary with it.’ Consequently, according to Kierkegaard, not only is the uncon¬ ditional present of love very difficult to attain, but also, wholly in keeping, that of Christian imitation, Christian love: ‘There have been no Christians since the days of the Apostles.’ The fact that here, both in the relation¬ ship to the so-called absolute and especially to our neighbour, nothing more than horizonless inwardness appeared: this deep loss does not dispel the power of Kierkegaard’s aporia concerning realization. Present means probation here, and, in Kierkegaard, it suits the reactionary mandate in Romanticism to represent the probation precisely before high ideals, i.e. those that are sometimes uncomfortable for existing society, as being as difficult as possible. In relation to the society of his time, Kierkegaard’s ideals were certainly only paradoxical and anything but revolutionary: never¬ theless, this probation scruple made absolute does suit very well - not

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even in a paradoxical way - the reactionary defeatism concerning the (abandoned) ideals of the formerly revolutionary bourgeoisie itself. Thus the bourgeois ‘resigned’ himself to paying lip-service to liberty, equality, fraternity; but in this way social democracy, by ‘idealizing’ its supposed socialism to the extreme, also avoided the realization of a society in which people - again with absolute idealization - would supposedly have to become angels and, more significantly, would already have had to act like angels previously. And yet there is also real seriousness concealed in the continuing brilliance of the great image confronted with the Here and Now of its content; otherwise this seriousness could not be misused. That which is realized immediately, perfectly, with skin and hair, with flesh and bones, that which leaves no trace in the midst of our prehistory, of our sphere of being which has still developed so little towards complete Being-Here, is also hardly likely to appear as the right thing immediately to the scheming realist, whom no absolute demand makes bankrupt. This is in fact the unromantic trace and core in Kierkegaard, even in Lenau’s so eccentric, in fact defeatist and impotent scrupulousness, - a trace which elsewhere precisely caution notices in hope. Hence hope makes us mistrustful - justly and with precision, in fact with the highest kind of conscience: that of the goal - of every realization that offers itself all too plumply; apotheoses are also always flat and decorative to a consciousness that does not esteem Kierkegaard’s abstract radicalisms. Even such a perfect music of fulfilment as that which resounds in Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ when Leonora takes the chains off Florestan, even this unearthly happy music does not mediatize the previous music of hope. ‘A brilliant rainbow shines before me which brightly rests upon dark clouds above’ - this earlier song of Leonora’s has a special kind of happiness about it, even though it comes out of the middle of the night. ‘Come, o hope, do not let the last star of the weary pale, illuminate my goal, no matter how far, love will not fail’ - the music of this pure prayer to hope does not completely pale before the fulfilled jubilation with which the opera ‘Fidelio’ closes and releases us. Of course, Leonora’s aria of hope has none of the depth which subsequently appears at the moment of realized hope, at the moment when the chains are taken off, in the almost stationary mysticism of this moment, but it does never¬ theless retain an unsunken rainbow, with a space which seems open. Thus nearness makes things difficult; hope, at least the presentiment of the imminent entrance of what has been hoped for, often still appears easier, even more filling than this nearness. Secondly, the all too distantly drifting and resonating flight makes things

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difficult here. It is the life in the dream that has become independent, a life that longingly augments itself. This life will not die of fulfilment, does not want to quit its long-familiar stage without leaving a trace. Not even when dream-content and fulfilment appear to be as congruent as is humanly possible; even then something which has become an idol does not withdraw as a matter of course. In fact, the anomaly is possible that the idol posits itself as solely real, and then the fulfilment itself acts as a phantom. The motif of this rendered independence, which is not normal and yet threatens every wishful-image, is conceived in the legend of the Egyptian Helen. A drama by Euripides deals with this peculiar, in fact essentially fragmentary material; the material subsequently deserved a Shakespeare, but did not even find a Hebbel.* Eventually, Hofmannsthal did base an opera libretto on it, which is of little significance without Strauss’s music,t and an essay as well. The myth itself is one of the most true-to-life, even most important, which is to be found on the utopiareality road. Hofmannsthal tells us the following about it: ‘We are in Egypt or on the island of Pharos which belongs to Egypt, before a king’s castle. Menelaus appears, alone on the return journey from Troy. His ship has been drifting for months, blown from shore to shore, continually driven away from home. He has left behind Helen, the wife he has won back, in a concealed bay with his warriors; he is looking for advice, for help, an oracle which will instruct him how to find the way home. Then from the colonnade of the castle - Helen approaches him, not the beautiful, all too notorious one whom he has left behind on the ship, but a different one, and yet the same. And she claims to be his wife - the other one left behind on the ship is nobody, means nothing, a phantom, a delusion, put into Paris’ arms at the time by Hera (the protectress of marriage) to fool the Greeks. Ten years of war have been waged for the sake of this phantom, tens of thousands of the best men have fallen, the most flourishing city in Asia has been reduced to ashes. But meanwhile she, Helen, the only real one, carried across the sea by Hermes, has been living here in this royal castle.’ So she has lived purely, secluded, faithfully, the most beautiful woman, but one who knows nothing of Paris, the Helen without Trojan war, not the monstrous cocotte, not the idol who was present during all the fighting, not the prize of victory. The change is too abrupt, the withdrawal of the idol too extensive for Menelaus to be able to believe Freidrich Hebbel, 1813-63, German dramatist, t Richard Strauss’ opera ‘Die agyptische Helena’.

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it immediately, in fact to want to believe it. Ten years’ fixation on the Trojan Helen stand in the way of the Egyptian one; even Euripides has Menelaus say in similar vein: ‘I trust the weight of sufferings endured more than I trust you!’ Menelaus turns to go, but then a messenger comes from the ship and reports that the being that had been taken for Helen had dissolved into fiery air on the ship. After which as little doubt about the mere phantom-existence of the Trojan cocotte remains as about the reality of the Egyptian woman of virtue: the former a streak of fiery air (but still glowing as it vanishes, perishes), the latter a corporeal entity, solely real. In fact, in Euripides, Menelaus has to accept this explanation and takes the Egyptian and not the Trojan Helen home with him, to the royal court at Sparta where she is also depicted by Homer in the fourth canto of the Odyssey. Not greatly admired or admonished, but as an aristocratic lady of the manor reigning in peace, whose mind is hardly troubled by any memory of Troy. Except by a brief and smiling memory, by a memory which is not so much expressed with flippancy as with detachment (Od. IV. 1. 145): Menelaus’ wife mentions that the Acheans had to besiege Troy because of her enticing dog-gaze (e/iefo xvvfonrtdos el'vexa) (the bitch is an old allegory for the hetairan). Elsewhere she pretends to have wept over the misery that she has caused and lays all the blame on Aphrodite who abducted her (11. 251-64) - quite distantly, just as if she had been the Egyptian Helen all along. Thus far everything appears to be all right, not only on the ship but also in Sparta; Menelaus is envied his great goddess of love, he is congratulated on having a wife who has remained virtuous. While at the real heart of the matter the following has taken place: the Trojan or dream-Helen has the advantage over the Egyptian one that she has been inhabiting a dream for ten years, in fact has fulfilled the dream as a - dream figure. In fact, the later real fulfilment can match this only with difficulty, or at least not completely: the luminous trace of the dream remains, a streak of fiery air remains, the mirage becomes independent. Because the object of the real fulfilment was itself not present during the adventures, in contrast to the dream-object; the realized represents a very late acquaintance. Only the Trojan, not the Egyptian Helen followed the colours, has absorbed the longing of ten utopian years, the bitterness and the love-hatred of the cuckold, the many nights far from home, the rough field-camp and the sweet foretaste of victory. Precisely because of this the balance easily shifts: the airy siren in Troy, with whom a world of guilt, suffering, but above all hope is associated, remains almost the real object in this curious aporia, reality almost becomes a phantom.

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Quite apart from the cocottish glamour of the Trojan Helen, the Egyptian one does not have the utopian glamour of the Trojan one in her favour, she did not go along with the longing of the voyage, the adventures of the campaign, the wishful image of conquest; consequently the Egyptian reality as such appears to be of lesser dimensions. At least the destruction of the imagination by realization (even if by its own realization which fulfils it) creates deficiency symptoms in the latter case which reduce consciousness of the realization itself, where they do not in fact make this relative itself. The Egyptian Helen can have many names - her Euripides problem, which does not only appear in literary and antiquarian contexts, is consequently representative. It is to a great extent threatening, as reification of the goal-dream, or at least as the continuation of this goaldream which has become like reality. In each fulfilment, in so far and in as much as this is even possible totaliter, there remains a peculiar element of hope whose mode of being is not that of the existing or currently existing reality, and which is consequently left over together with its content. However, of course: it is, if it is not abstract but runs along the concrete line of extension of what it has overhauled, never quite outside the objectively possible in reality; instead this Trojan Helen-like element is also provisionally dotted in outline in Helen. Otherwise it would not have found any space in her at all, and no credibility for the universally desired object, the goal of the struggle. And furthermore: the imago which can be kindled on an object, as one which continues to hover towards attainment, is also not in the air, but possibly in the real-utopian possibility of the object itself which points even further. Only there can the full congruence of intentioncontent and content of attainedness be latent, that is, the identity of the identical and of the non-identical (the latter understood here as intentiondistance, as hope-distance). Rest, however, is the day when the Egyptian Helen also contains the glamour around the Trojan one.

Objection to the first and second reason: odyssey of quiescence But dreaming in no way wants to point forwards continually. The drive behind it is definitely not sated by purely pictured material. Even dreaming itself does not aim at dream in such a way that it only takes pleasure in images. In waking dreams people enjoy instead the imagination of how it would be if there were something like what is dreamed, that is, if it

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were to become real. Thus even subjectively there is a counterweight to the reification of the dream and to the hoping which does not arrive itself in arrival, but rather, in the double sense of the word, remains behind. The counterweight is posited in the That of the intending, in the wish and will to become real itself. The dream as such does not realize itself, that is a minus, but flesh and bones are added to it, that is a compensating plus. There are also well-known cases where what is wished for, when it appears, may not only surprise us by the force of its landing, its quiescence, its realization, but even by a certain surplus of content which was not dreamed. The blossom as such may no longer be in the fruit, but then the fruitful as such was not in the blossom either; and the previous dream-road can appear shorter than the real road which is now being trodden. Thus the darkness of the Here and Now, even the loss of the dream-colour itself, are sometimes overemphasized, as if neither were present. As if there were already fulfilment toto coelo, experienced as present, in the existing aggregate state of being real. Hope then apparently no longer needs to be disappointed by privation, any more than experience needs to lack forbearance with hope. The feeling of first love is relevant here, when all buds burst, the feeling of thrilling encounter, enthusiastically experienced time of change, time of greatness. In this context the testimony of Gottfried von Strassburg concerning Isolde is still noteworthy, i.e. present, in fact reminding us of Helen, the most beautiful of women: This madness I have now forsaken, by Isolde it was taken, so henceforth I might not fancy that I saw the sun rise from Mycenae. Such splendour never dawned in Greece so clear, it first dawns here! We may take the liberty of applying this consciousness of Gottfried’s also to his other Greece, to a work-based super-Greece of his time, for example to Strasbourg cathedral: its inscription in the mind of the contemporary onlooker. Pride in works in general is capable of great presence, in the spirit of the producer, on the day of completion, when the sun for which a vigil is so often kept rises like a crown. This moment appears most clearly, endlessly anticipated and yet succeeding in the end, in Klopstock, after the completion of the Messias: I have reached the goal, the goal! and feel where I am My whole soul is alive! It will be thus (I speak humanly Of divine things) for us one day, you brothers of the Man Who died and rose again, on our arrival in Heaven!

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All this seems like historical presence of mind per se, like quiescence, which nevertheless seems to contain the whole of the previous odyssey. Klopstock’s comparison itself points to that strongest example of landing which was mythically described in the unio mystica: no expectation remains behind in the face of it, no intention persists, not even that of the sursum corda, and definitely no distance. And yet even here a trace emerges again in the long run, one that has never disappeared. Since all these contacts are not yet such, even the glance at them is still merely preview, even the feeling that they arouse, merely presentiment. Little more repose is achieved through this than the darkness of the Here and Now together with the loss of the dream-colour being briefly over-emphasized in what is reached. Even in such culminations, however Klopstockian, all that remains objectively justified is after all only Faust’s presentiment of a supreme moment. It remains the journeying odyssey, and thus an odyssey of quiescence cannot yet succeed, with identity of its arrival and its journey-content. The presentiment itself, which is thoroughly related to attainability and arrival, is of course extremely important; since corresponding to it is the That-tendency, aimed at realization and positing realization, of the waking dream and its anticipatory perfec¬ tion. In no way does the so-called endless approach to the ideal smuggle itself in again here, that kind of scruple which is not really serious about realization. However, the opposite to the endless approach is not in fact sheer presence, not the claimed total successfulness of the arrival in the goal, but rather the opposite is the finiteness of the process and of the consequently at least surveyable anticipation distance to the goal. This genuine presentiment, that is, one which implies an attainable final state, undoubtedly fills most broadly, most democratically, and most humanely the immense moments of the happily begun, then victoriously celebrating revolution. But again only, and here precisely only in such a way that it does not rest on the laurels of the present, but that instead, in the still so pressing achievement of victory, this victory is properly grasped as task and thus the happy present is simultaneously grasped as pledge for the future. Revolutions realize the oldest hopes of mankind: for this very reason they imply, demand the ever more precise concretion of what is intended as the realm of freedom and of the unfinished journey towards it. Only if a being like utopia itself (consequently the still completely outstanding kind of reality: successfulness) were to seize the driving-content of the Here and Now, would be the basic state of mind of this driving: hope, also be totally included in the successfulness of reality. Until this possible fulfilment

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the intention waking-dream-world is in progress; no part payment allows it to be forgotten. No making absolute of a mere presentiment may allow us to forget the mindfulness in this intention. For it is the mindfulness of the basic content in our driving, a content which has not yet entered into our consciousness at all, let alone into successfulness, which, for precisely this reason, still lies in utopia. The highest conscientiousness of this mind¬ fulness is set down in the words of the psalm: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.’* Even without religious accents, even without contrasting accents towards a so-called exile of existence, a realization has never yet been made absolute without a final part of its waking dream being left over, and therefore moved on further beyond the attained to its possible Being-even-better. A new peak appears behind the previously attained one: this plus ultra consequently does not let the realization weaken, but makes it sharper towards its purpose. Anyway the duration, the non-renunciation of the image of hope, have their origin in the enduring problem: realization and in the reasons for this problem itself. Third reason for utopian trace-images: the aporias of realization Even in the entrance of something there is still a something which remains behind itself. The doer and the doing of the work of realization are not completely carried out, they live on to themselves. They remain absent from the deed which frees itself from them, as the tool remains absent from the finished machine or the poet from his poem. And in every fulfilment, even in the one which seems, so to speak, similar to the point of confusion to the goalimage, there lies an unfinished piece of work of the active element which becomes a burden on the weakness of the realization, the quantitative as well as the qualitative weakness. From the quantitative weakness derives the com¬ pulsive will to continue work endlessly; against this will the Roman counsel is issued: manum de tabula. J From the qualitative weakness derives the decision to begin even a finished work from the very beginning again, in accor¬ dance with an image of perfection which has grown up alongside the growing work itself and thus seems to be doubly unrealized. Therein lies the cause of a fiasco and of an Egyptian Flelen problem in this sphere too. Hoffmann’s fantasy-piece ‘Ritter Gluck’ allows the composer of the ‘Armida’ (or the madman who wants to embody him) to go around even after his death Psalms 137, 5. | ‘Hands from the writing tablet’.

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‘somewhat diminished* so that he can play ‘Armida’ again, ‘to a higher degree, as it were’, can play it as if it came ‘out of the kingdom of dreams’. The quantitative and most definitely the qualitative deficit in the act of realization itself has hardly been thought through philosophically until now: and this in spite of the overwhelming internal, external experience of it. One reason for this lies in the fact that human activity as such only became conscious of itself at a late stage. Work was the business of slaves and manual workers, thought took only brief notice of its completion, realization. Creating and knowing were considered in antiquity as pure depicting of something given, passive looking is dominant, the work merely traces over it. Even in the ethical sphere: according to Socrates no-one can do wrong voluntarily, knowledge of the good inevitably posits the doing of it. Thus there is here neither a defiance of what has been morally demonstrated nor a will towards it; the realizing is so passive and therein so apparently self-evident that it is not even named, let alone thought. This minimal regard for the separate, active act of realiza¬ tion did not change fundamentally either when in more recent times the homo faber, the maker, the entrepreneur, producer were thoroughly reconsidered philosophically. In fact, since the act of generation was exclusively rational¬ ized, i.e. was understood as a purely logical action, the rationalistic, if not panlogical ideology supplied a further motive as regards the non-reflection of the realization. At that time, in rationalism, after many re-qualifications of this ‘construction’, world-formation itself ultimately developed out of the idea of generation, understood initially purely in mathematical terms, which only posits and defines formal objects. It is still a predominantly formal world-formation, i.e. orientated towards mathematics, as in Kant, where reason makes the world of experience. Then generation became experimental in terms of content, orientated towards artistic production; as in Schelling, in that spontaneity here not only dictates nature’s laws, but - as nature productive with consciousness - creates nature, i.e. animates it to become free and sends it into its separate development. And generation finally became completely experimental in terms of content in Hegel, orientated towards history and its genesis, in that here all the form-contents of the world were supposed to arise dialectically out of ‘sound, continually governing reason’. This is therefore in nuce the classical-idealistic notion of generation, of origin, of reality-formation, and evidently it does not do much more justice to the problem of realization, although this was seen, than antiquity did. Because even here realization does not appear as a separate act, it simply appears as an automatically unfolding logos. The cognition-ground remains the same as the real-ground; because the real-ground is itself only a logical-

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panlogical one, one inside the world-thought of which the whole world ultimately consists in Hegel. And above all: the ancient passivity of realizing is not abandoned despite the homo faber and his philosophy: the pan-logos repeatedly ties generating into a mere process of revelation. This means: to contemplative thinking as a whole (and all idealistic thinking is contemplative) realization remains mere ‘embodiment’ of a goal-idea, an automatically existing and a finished one, so to speak, which is simply clothed with flesh by the doer or creator. The realization comes out of the logical consistency of the matter itself here; it comes out of this even in the only thinker who, although he lived in antiquity, did at least make realization into a category, even if not into a problem: in Aristotle. He saw the various disruptions of Realization,* and yet despite this he entrusted it, in fact in a particularly whole-hearted way, to the idea which had become ‘entelechy’, as its most characteristic concern. According to Aristotle, realization is solely selfrealization of the form-idea or entelechy which is inherent in things; the entelechy is thus itself the energy (or the actus) towards its Realization. However, a not so logical element manifests itself in the first thinker of realization as well: in fact a not so logical element which attempts to do justice from afar to the disruptions, perhaps even aporias of realization. Aristotle lays the existing unfinished piece of work of realization which remains behind the entelechy to the charge of - mechanical matter, in so far as this despatches ‘disrupting subsidiary causes’ into the entelechetic purposecauses. In this way what is not defined, what is contingent in nature arises, together with capricious fate in the sphere of intentional occurrence, of history. An idea which does at least confront the problem, even though it is an idealistic idea, and how close Goethe’s notion in Faust is to it: ‘The finest things the spirit could receive,/ By strange and stranger matter are besieged;’t How close to it even Hegel’s notion is, despite all its confinement of non¬ panlogicality to nature: ‘This contingency is greatest in the realm of concrete structures

which,

however,

are only directly concrete

as

natural

things... Nature is powerless to keep conceptual definitions merely abstract and to expose the elaboration of the particular to external definability’ (Enzyklopadie, §230). And yet even here the problem of realization proves not to be posed in terms of and within itself, rather it is shifted on to a scapegoat: on to mechanical matter or, in Hegel, on to the Being-besideitself of the whole of nature itself, as the ‘unresolved contradiction’. * Bloch uses two terms for ‘to realize’ here, ‘verwirklichen’ and ‘realisieren’. We have in¬ dicated the latter and its compounds by capitalizing it. f ‘Faust’, Part I, 634-5.

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But do not the doer and the doing besiege each other in a strange and stranger way? This is a thought which would like to get to the still dark heart of the process of realization as such. That is why, finally, we cannot leave memories from the history of philosophy concerning Realization and its weakness without a gesture in the direction of the later Schelling, who was the only philosopher who did in fact wish to tear the problem of Realization away from total rationalism, though instead he consigned it to incurable mythology: the mythology of the Fall of Man and of the fall of Lucifer. According to the later Schelling, its quod or its That-existence and entry-origin do not at all follow from the quid or the rationally graspable essence of a matter. Instead: the becoming real of the idea is, in its immemorial origin, particular will, a ‘falling away from the idea’, and indeed a will which already occurs in God himself, in the fathomless ground or non-ground of the divine ground. Schelling’s work ‘Philosophy and Religion’ thus combines the logos as creator and places a kind of original crime, the dark-evil particular will, at the source of being: ‘In a word, there is no constant transition from the absolute to the real, the origin of the world of the senses is only conceivable as complete breaking-away from absoluteness, by means of a leap’ (Werke VI, p. 38). Thus Schelling in fact transferred realization on to a separate sheet from that written on by the idea; it ceases to be a mere manifestationfunction of the objectively logical. The price that was paid for this reference of the logical to something volitional and That-intensive was of course that the realization was both housed in mythology and literally sent to the devil inside this mythology. To which must be added: not only the irrational first impetus given to the world, but also every individual realiza¬ tion in the world generates, according to Schelling, nothing but discord and irregularity, abortion, illness and death, since it runs on from that irrational impetus. So this is how far Schelling tore the realizing element and the idea apart, and how senselessly and totally he made the aporias of realization itself absolute to the point of insolubility. And neither did Schelling dissolve the traditional connection of Realizing with a finished, merely to be manifested idea. The connection was only expressed as a negative one: the evil particular will realizes what is opposed to the good universal will. Open horizon is not granted here either to the Realization factor or to its goal-image, any more than it is in the optimists of the incarnation. These then are the reasons why the quantitative and qualitative weakness of realization is still really uninvestigated. Obviously, its aporias - from the unfinished piece of work to the still present non-congruence

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of even the best realization with the goal-image - cannot be investigated at all outside the context of the utopia problem. All the less so since such varied utopian elements are left over in realized material and re-emerge afterwards, pursuing new goals. We said that even in the entrance of something there was still something that remains behind itself. Something about it darkens and cannot completely free itself from this Not, this Not-there in the midst of the immediate nearness of occurrence. We have already identified above the dimming of the just lived moment, and precisely this dimness makes it difficult, in the most immediate way, to experience something that has entered wholly as such. At the same time, however, this most immediate thing in itself is nothing other than the driving force, the That-factor, consequently the intensive aspect of the realizing element itself. And this realizing element still stands squarely in the Not-Having of its act and content; the darkness of the just lived moment illustrates precisely this Not-Having-Itself of the realizing element. And it is in fact this still unattained aspect in the realizing element which primarily also overshadows the Here and Now of something realized. Therein therefore lies the ultimate, the principal solution of the Not-, Not-Yet-Carpe diem, definitely without romanticisms: what is realized is brilliant and slightly in shadow at the same time, because in the realizing element itself there is something that has not yet realized itself. The unrealized Realizing element brings its own most peculiar minus into the plus of the Realization as soon as the latter occurs. This is the primary reason why, as Goethe says, nearness makes things difficult; also why a fulfilment which appears to be sufficiently perfect rebus sic stantibus still equally brings a melancholy of fulfilment along with it. And why the preceding goal-image, with its utopianly anticipated substance, may not enter completely into the fulfilment, and thus, driving on further, often even driving on into senselessness, is left over. After all, the wish- or goal-content itself did not He in the nearness which belongs to the attainment of the goal; precisely the far goal-content was still outside the darkness of the just Hved moment on account of its distance, on account of its being kept away from the Here and Now. When, however, what has been utopianly anticipated moves into what is realized, it also simultaneously moves up into the shadow of that most central immediacy which, being that of the realizing element, is itself not yet cleared. From this primary reason, at the same time in a wider context, the whole twilight follows in which the process of realization also still lies and must lie, which is the process of history. Since it is still an undecided process, on account

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of its not yet realized driving- and origin-content, its outflow can just as easily be Nothing as All, just as easily total In-Vain as total success. And just as, cheeringly, there is a sudden flash of the possible All in this so dark-bright dappled world, so too, threateningly, darkenings of the possible Nothing loom. Though far from being the case that Being is centred in death, there is still a hint of negation circulating in the air, without any joking, even without automatic negation of negation. Every mortal danger belongs to it and every individual death, the millions of young people who fell in the World Wars belong to it and the pervasive imbecility which has learnt nothing from them. These are the delays or frustrations which interrupt the conditions of positive realization; also, since the Not in the Not-Having-Itself of the realizing element can equally lead to the non-realization of the essential tendency-content, and ultimately Realizationcontent, this threatening circulation of In-Vain and Nothing already generates the disruption, otherwise expressed as the resistance in the material, otherwise expressed as the gigantic sleep of stupidity or disparate¬ ness in the so hazardous straits of our process-world. This circulation of Nothing is what Aristotle wrongly laid to the charge of mechanical matter. What Schelling even wished to displace as old Satan from reason and to place in the primal ground of the world. Both were looking for a scapegoat for imperfection in their completed world, that is, a world already statically defined to an end. Conversely, insight into process as something undecided - with Nothing or All in its real end-possibility - needs no scapegoat, either with regard to the existing unfinished piece of work or to the not wholly redeemed goal-image in its best conceivable fulfilment. Instead: not yet emerged realizedness of the realizing element and - closely associated with it - not yet discovered, positively manifested, realized Absolute and Essence, these are the elements in the aporias of realization. Only if a Being were like utopia, if consequently the still completely outstanding kind of reality of successfulness had made the driving-content of the Here and Now itself radically present, would the basic stock of this driving: hope be wholly included as such in the realized reality. The content of what has been realized would then be the content of the realizing element itself, the What-Essence (quidditas) of the solution would be precisely the opened That-ground (quodditas) of the world. The Essence - most highly qualified matter - has not yet appeared, therefore missing represents its not yet manifested Absolute in every previously successful appearance. But the world makes space even for this missing, on the Front of its process the goal-content itself is in fermen¬ tation and real possibility. Concretely anticipatory consciousness is directed

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towards this state of the goal-content, it has its openness and positiveness within it.

THE WORLD IN WHICH UTOPIAN IMAGINATION

17

HAS A CORRELATE REAL POSSIBILITY, THE CATEGORIES FRONT, NOVUM, ULTIMUM AND THE HORIZON The critic can therefore latch on to any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop true reality out of the separate forms of existing reality as their obligation and their final purpose... It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. Marx, letter to Ruge, 1843 I am convinced that the world-spirit gave the age the command to advance; such a command is obeyed; this entity moves irresistibly forward like an armoured, tightly-closed phalanx with the same undiscernible movement with which the sun moves, through thick and thin; countless light troops are flanked around it, for and against, most of them have no idea what it is about and are run through the head, as if by an unseen hand. The best bet, however, is to keep a close eye on the advancing giant. Hegel, letter to Niethammer, 1816

Man is not solid To think oneself into what is better, this proceeds at first only inwardly. It indicates how much youth there is in man, how much lies in him that is waiting. This waiting will not go to sleep, however many times it has been buried, even in a desperate man it does not stare into complete nothingness. Even the suicide still flees into negation as into a womb; he expects rest. Even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing, a ghost that has lost its way back to the cemetery and clings to refuted images. It does not perish through itself, but only through a new form of itself. The fact that we can thus sail into dreams, that daydreams, often of a completely uncovered kind, are possible, indicates the great space of the still open, still uncertain life in man. Man spins out wishes, is in a position to do so, finds a wealth of material for them, even if it is not always of

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the best, most durable quality, in himself. This fermenting and effervescing above the consciousness that has become is the first correlate of the imagination, a correlate which to begin with is merely inward, in fact only located within itself. Even the silliest dreams nevertheless exist as foam;* daydreams even contain a foam from which a Venus has sometimes risen. The animal knows nothing of this kind; only man, although he is much more awake, wells up utopianly. His existence is less solid as it were, although, compared with plants and animals, he is much more intensely present. Human existence has nevertheless more fermenting Being, more dawning material on its upper edge and hem. Something has as it were remained hollow here, in fact a new hollow space has only just developed. Dreams drift in it, and possible things circulate inwardly which can perhaps never become outward.

Much in the world is still unclosed Of course, nothing would circulate inwardly either if the outward were completely solid. Outside, however, life is just as little finished as in the ego which is working on this outside. No thing could be altered in accordance with wishes if the world were closed, full of fixed, even perfected facts. Instead of these there are simply processes, i.e. dynamic relation¬ ships in which the Become has not completely triumphed. The Real is process; the latter is the widely ramified mediation between present, unfinished past, and above all: possible future. Indeed, everything real passes over into the Possible at its processual Front, and possible is everything that is only partially conditioned, that has not yet been fully or conclusively determined. Here we must of course distinguish between the merely cognitively or objectively Possible and the Real-Possible, the only one that matters in the given context. Objectively possible is everything whose entry, on the basis of a mere partial-co^m'hon of its existing conditions, is scien¬ tifically to be expected, or at least cannot be discounted. Whereas really possible is everything whose conditions in the sphere of the object itself are not yet fully assembled; whether because they are still maturing, or above all because new conditions - though mediated with the existing ones - arise for the entry of a new Real. Mobile, changing, changeable Being, presenting itself as dialectical-material, has this unclosed capability of becoming, this Not-Yet-Closedness both in its ground and in its horizon Bloch is alluding to the German saying ‘Traume sind Schaume’ (Dreams are just foam).

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So that we may deduce from this: the really Possible of sufficiently mediated, i.e. dialectically-materialistically mediated newness gives utopian imagination its second, its concrete correlate: one outside a mere fermenting, effervescing in the inner circle of consciousness. And as long as the reality has not become a completely determined one, as long as it possesses still unclosed possibilities, in the shape of new shoots and new spaces for development, then no absolute objection to utopia can be raised by merely factual reality. Objections to bad utopias can be raised, i.e. to abstractly extravagant, badly mediated ones, but precisely concrete utopia has in process-reality a cor¬ responding element: that of the mediated Novum. Only this process-reality, and not a fact-basedness torn out of it which is reified and made absolute, can therefore pass judgement on utopian dreams or relegate them to mere illusions. If we give every mere factuality in the external world this critical right, then we make what is fixedly existing and what has fixedly become into absolute reality per se. It becomes clear, however, even merely within the vastly altered reality of today, that the restriction to the Factum was hardly a realistic one; that reality itself is not worked up, that it has something advancing and breaking out at its edge. Man today is thoroughly acquainted with the frontier-existence outside the previous expectationcontext of Becomeness. He no longer sees himself surrounded by ostensibly completed facts, and no longer considers these as the only Real; devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing has opened up in this Real, and above all, finally feasible and overdue, socialism. A different concept of reality to the narrow and ossified one of the second half of the nineteenth century is thus overdue, a different one to that of the positivism to which the idea of process is alien, and of its counterpart: the non-committal ideal world of pure appearance. Sometimes the ossified concept of reality even penetrated Marxism and consequently made it schematic. It is not sufficient to speak of dialectical process and then to treat history as a series of sequential Fixa or even closed ‘totalities’. A narrowing and diminishing of reality threatens here, a turning away from ‘efficacity and seed’* in reality; and that is not Marxism. Rather: the concrete imagination and the imagery of its mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream; anticipating elements are a component of reality itself. Thus the will towards utopia is entirely

* From Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I, 384: ‘All efficacity and seed explore and rummage round in words no more.’

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

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compatible with object-based tendency, in fact is confirmed and at home within it.

Militant optimism, the categories Front, Novum, Ultimum Precisely the defeated man must try the outside world again. That which is coming up is not yet decided, that which is swamp can be dried out through work. Through a combination of courage and knowledge, the future does not come over man as fate, but man overcomes the future and enters it with what is his. However, the knowledge needed by courage and above all decision cannot have the most common mode of previous knowledge: namely a contemplative mode. Because merely contemplative knowledge necessarily refers to what is closed and thus to what is past, it is helpless against what is present and blind to the future. In fact, it appears to itself all the more as knowledge, the further back its objects lie in what is past and closed, the less therefore it contributes to the process of something being learnt for the present and future from history, a history that occurs in tendency. The knowledge necessary for decision accordingly has a different mode: one which is not merely contemplative, but rather one which goes with process, which is actively and partisanly in league with the good which is working its way through, i.e. what is humanly worthy in process. It goes without saying that this mode of knowledge is also the only objective one, the only one which reflects the Real in history: namely the events produced by working people together with the abundant interweaving process-connections between past, present and future. And knowledge of this kind, precisely because it is not merely contemplative, thoroughly mobilizes the subjects of conscious production itself. Since it is not quietism, even in relation to discovered tendency, it does not revere that banal, automatic progress-optimism per se which is only a reprise of contemplative quietism. The optimism is this reprise because it also disguises the future as past, because it regards the future as something which has long since been decided and thus concluded. Confronted with the future-state which stands like an agreed consequence in the so-called iron logic of history, the subject can just as easily lay his hands in his lap as he once folded them when confronted with God’s will. In similar fashion, for example, by leaving capitalism to function to its conclusion, it was appointed as its own grave-digger, and even its dialectic appeared to be self-sufficient, to be autarkical. All this is fundamentally false, however,

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in fact so patently just new opium for the people that, cum grano salis, even a dash of pessimism would be preferable to the banal, automatic belief in progress as such. Because at least pessimism with a realistic perspective is not so helplessly surprised by mistakes and catastrophes, by the horrifying possibilities which have been concealed and will continue to be concealed precisely in capitalist progress. Thinking ad pessimum, for every analysis which does not make it absolute again, is a better travelling companion than cheap credulity; it thus constitutes the critical coldness precisely in Marxism. For every changing decision, automatic optimism is not much less of a poison than pessimism made absolute; since, if the latter quite openly serves shameless reaction, which calls itself by its own name, with the aim of discouraging, then the former helps shamefaced reaction with the aim of fostering winking connivance and passivity. Thus, rather than false optimism, the only thing that is assigned - in order to foster true optimism - to the knowledge of decision, to the decision of attained knowledge, is once again the concretely and utopianly comprehended correlate in real possibility: comprehended as one in which of course it is by no means already the night to end all days, but just as little - in the sense of nonutopian optimism - already the day to end all nights.* The attitude towards this undecided material, which can however be decided through work and concretely mediated action, is called militant optimism. Through this, as Marx says, no abstract ideals are realized, but rather the repressed elements of the new, humanized society, that is, of the concrete ideal, are set free. It is the revolutionary decision of the proletariat which today commits itself to the final struggle of liberation, a decision of the subjective factor in alliance with the objective factors of economic-material tendency. And it is not as if this subjective factor, that of realization and of changing the world, were any other than a material activity; it is such, even if, as Marx stresses in the first thesis on Feuerbach, as the active side (generation, productivity, spontaneity of consciousness), it has certainly been developed primarily from idealism and not from (mechanical) materialism. And once again it is not as if even for one moment the activity which is part of changing the world, i.e. of militant optimism, could really intervene or bring about lasting change without being allied with real, present tendencies; because if the subjective factor remains isolated, then it simply becomes a factor

* Bloch is playing on a German saying ‘It is not yet the night to end all days’, an English equivalent of which would be ‘We are not yet out of the wood’.

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of putschism, not of revolution, of Spiegelbergian forays,* not of the work. If, however, there is insight into the consequences of the decision - and it is precisely the knowledge in the decision which guarantees this insight - then the power of the subjective factor cannot be estimated highly or even deeply enough, precisely as the militant function in militant optimism. Concrete decision in favour of the victory of light in real possibility is the same as countermove against failure in process. Is the same as the counter¬ move of freedom against so-called destiny which has been removed from process and which counteracts it through stagnation and reification. Is the same as the countermove against all these deadly manifestations from the family of Nothing and against the circulation of Nothing, the other alterna¬ tive to real possibility itself. Is thus ultimately the countermove against the pervasive ruin of pure negation (war, advent of barbarism), so that, by redirecting this destruction on to itself, the negation of the negation may also find space here and the dialectic actively triumph. Concrete decision is always in conflict with statics here, yet precisely because it is not putschism, but rather, being militant, is equally founded optimism, it lives in peace with process which brushes death-statics itself the wrong way. Man and process, or rather: subject and object in dialectically materialist process, consequently both stand equally on the Front. And there is no other place for militant optimism than the place which the category of Front opens up. The philosophy of this optimism, that is, of materially comprehended hope, is itself, as the trenchant knowledge of non-contemplation, concerned with the foremost segment of history, and is so even when it concerns itself with the past, namely with the still undischarged future in the past. Philosophy of comprehended hope thus stands per definitionem on the Front of the world process, i.e. on the so little thought-out, foremost segment of Being of animated, utopianly open matter. Not everything that is well-known is also known, least of all when freshness is present. Thus along with the concept of the Front the so closely related concept of newness is also in a parlous state. The New: it circulates in the mind in first love, also in the feeling of spring; the latter has never¬ theless hardly found a single philosopher. It permeates, though it is forgotten time and again, the eve of great events, together with a highly characteristic mixed reaction of fear, being armed, confidence; it founds, in the promised Novum of happiness, advent consciousness. It runs through the expectations of almost all religions, in so far as primitive, even ancient oriental future Spiegelberg: the unscrupulous marauder in Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’.

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consciousness can be properly understood at all; it pervades the whole of the Bible, from Jacob’s blessing to the Son of Man who makes everything new, and to the new heaven, the new earth. Nevertheless, the category Novum has not been described anything like adequately enough, and found no place in any pre-Marxist world-picture. Or if it did seem to find it, as in Boutroux* or above all in the Art Nouveau or secession philosophy of Bergson, then the New was simply considered from the point of view of senselessly changing fashions and celebrated as such; all that resulted from this was the different rigidity of a surprise that is always the same. This kind of thing has already been made clear in the case of the block which has obstructed the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious for so long; in such a way that the dawning, the Incipit vita nova, also repeatedly remains a Fixum in the so-called Philosophy of Life. Thus the concept of the New in Bergson simply appears as abstract contrast to repetition, in fact often as merely the reverse side of mechanical uniformity; at the same time it was attributed to every moment of life without exception, and was consequently devalued. Even the duration of a thing, the duree which is imagined as being fluid, is based by Bergson on continual difference; supposedly because in truly unchanged persistence the beginning and end of this state would be indistinguishable, would objectively coincide, and consequently the thing would not have duration at all. And the Novum as a whole in Bergson is not elucidated by its path, its explosions, its dialectic, its images of hope and genuine products, but in fact repeatedly by the contrast to mechanism, by the contentless declaration of an elan vital in and for itself. Great love for the Novum is active, great inclination towards openness leaps to the eye, but the process remains empty and repeatedly produces nothing but process. In fact, the eternal metaphysical vitality theory ultimately achieves a mere frenzy instead of the Novum, precisely because of the constantly required change of direction, required for its own sake; so it is not the curve praised by Bergson that develops with this change, but rather a zig-zag in which - from sheer opposition to uniformity - there is only the figure of chaos. Consequently, the abstractly understood Futurum also ends in a Part pour Part of vitality which Bergson himself compares to the rocket or ‘to an immense firework which con¬ tinually shoots out new bursts of fire’ (L’Evolution creatrice, 1907, p. 270). Here too we must emphasize: there is absolutely no genuine Novum in Bergson; he has in fact only developed his concept from sheer excess into capitalistic fashion-novelty and thus stabilized it; elan vital and * Emile Boutroux, 1845-1921, French philosopher of science.

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nothing more is and remains itself a Fixum of contemplation. The social reason for Bergson’s pseudo-Novum lies in the late bourgeoisie, which has within it absolutely nothing new in terms of content. The corresponding ideological reason ultimately lies in the old, laboriously reproduced elimina¬ tion of two of the most essential qualities of the Novum in general: possibility and finality. In both, Bergson sees the same schematics of deadening reason hostile to change which he sees at work elsewhere as spatialization, causality, mechanism. The mighty realm of possibility thus becomes for him an illusion of - retrospection: there is no Possible in Bergson whatsoever, for him it is a projection which is sketched back into the past by what is newly developing. In the Possible, according to Bergson, the just arising Novum is only to be conceived as ‘having been possible’: ‘The possible is nothing other than the real plus a mental act which reflects the image of this real into the past, as soon as the real has developed... The real welling-up of unforeseeable newness, not predesignated in any possible, is however a real which makes itself possible, not a possible that becomes real (La Pensee et le Mouvant, p. 133). Bergson thus characteristically almost reproduces the anti-possibility proof of the Megarian philosopher Diodoros Kronos, who was in fact himself close to the Eleatic philosophers, the teachers of an absolute rest. And similarly, Bergson closes his mind to the concept of the Novum by regarding finality simply as the establishing of a rigid final goal, rather than as the goal-determination of the human will, which first seeks precisely its Where To and What For, in the open possibilities of the future. Or rather: as the goaldetermination of a work, above all of a planning, which has stressed its Where To and What For and goes about achieving it. Bergson, however, in equating all foreseeability with static prediction, has not only ignored creative anticipation, this reddening dawn in the human will, but the genuine Novum as a whole, the horizon of utopia. And the continually stressed changeableness, boundlessness, hardly made Bergson’s newnessuniverse into what, with nevertheless unmistakable finality, he fantasized it to be: into ‘the machine to produce gods’. To sum up: appropriate to the Novum, so that it really is one, is not only abstract opposition to mechanical repetition, but actually also a kind of specific repetition: namely of the still unbecome total goal-content itself, which is suggested and tended, tested and processed out in the progressive newnesses of history. Thus moreover: the dialectical emergence of this total content is no longer described by the category Novum, but rather by the category Ultimum, and with this of course the repetition ends. But it only ends by virtue

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of the fact that, to the same extent that the Ultimum represents the last, i.e. the highest newness, the repetition (the unremitting representedness of the tendency-goal in all progressively New) intensifies to the last, highest, most fundamental repetition: of identity. And the newness in the Ultimum really triumphs by means of its total leap out of everything that previously existed, but it is a leap towards the newness that is ending or identity. The category Ultimum has not been left as unconsidered as that of the Novum; the idea of the Last Thing has always been a subject of those religions which also set a time-limit to time, and thus above all of JudaeoChristian philosophy of religion. However, this categorial treatment precisely indicated that the one which properly ought to precede it, that of the Novum, was as good as absent. Because in the whole of JudaeoChristian philosophy, from Philo and Augustine to Hegel, the Ultimum relates exclusively to a Primum and not to a Novum; consequently the Last Thing appears simply as the attained return of an already completed First Thing which has been lost or relinquished. The form of this return incorporates the pre-Christian form of the self-combusting and self-renewing Phoenix, it incorporates the Heraclitean and Stoic doctrine of worldconflagration, according to which the Zeus-fire takes the world back into itself and similarly, in periodic cycles, releases it again. And in fact we may say: the cycle is the figure which the Ultimum attaches so firmly to the Primum that it misfires logically and metaphysically within it. Of course, Hegel saw in the Being-for-itself of the idea, which is its Ultimum and in which process dies away as in an amen, the Primum of the Being-in itself of the idea not only reproduced but fulfilled: the ‘mediated immediacy’ is attained in the Being-for-itself, rather than the unmediated immediacy in the beginning of the mere Being-in-itself. But, as in every individual form-epoch of the world process, and consequently also in its totality, this result nevertheless remained a cychcal one here; it is the cycle, completely free of the Novum, of the restitutio in integrum: ‘Every part of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle which closes in upon itself,... the whole thus presents itself as a circle of circles’ (Enzyklopadie, §15). Likewise, despite having been thought out more thoroughly, the Ultimum was also invariably defused here, in that its Omega coils back into the Alpha again without the power of the Novum. In the final analysis, this is also true where mechanically and materialistically the Alpha-Omega has been secularized into a ball of vapour out of which the world emerges and into which it disperses again. The original and the archetype of all this remains the Alpha-Omega in the embracing ring of a primal being to which process

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returns almost as a prodigal son and undoes the substance of its Novum. These are all in fact prison-formations against real possibility or a disavowal of it which seeks to visualize even the most progressive historical product solely as the re-remembering or restoration of something once possessed, primally lost. Consequently, as is evident precisely in the Ultimum, in the case of this Novum, but also in that of all previous Novum, only antire-remembering, anti-Augustine, anti-Hegel is philosophically appropriate, anti-circle and denial of the ring-principle, that intended from Hegel and Eduard von Hartmann, in fact as far as Nietzsche. Yet hope, which does not want to be just as far at any end as it was at the beginning, does away with the sharp cycle. The dialectic which has its motor in unrest and its goal-content, which in no way exists ante rem, in unappeared essence does away with the dogged cycle. The tension-figures and tendency-forms, the real-ciphers in the world, even these rehearsals on an as yet unsuc¬ cessful model, do away with the fundamentally sterile cycle through their especially high percentage of utopia. The humanization of nature has no parental home at the beginning from which it runs away, to which, with a kind of ancestor cult in philosophy, it returns. In fact in process itself, still without the problem of the Ultimum, a horde of real possibilities emerge which were not predicted of the beginning at birth. And the end is not the bringing back, rather it is - precisely as the impact of the Whatessence on the That-ground - the blasting open of the primum agens materiale. In other words: the Omega of the Where To explains itself not with reference to a primally been Alpha, supposedly most real of all, of the Where From, of the origin, but on the contrary: this origin explains itself first with reference to the Novum of the end, indeed, as an origin still essentially unrealized in itself, it first enters reality with this Ultimum. The origin is certainly the realizing element itself; and yet: just as there is still something immature and not yet realized in the realizing, so the realization of the realizing, of the realizing element itself is always only just starting to begin. In history it is the self-apprehension of the historical doer, working man: in nature it is the realization of that which has been hypothetically called natura naturans or subject of material motion, a problem which has hardly been touched on, even though it is clearly connected with the self-apprehension of working man and lies along the line of extension of Marx’s ‘humanization of nature’. The site for both kinds of self-apprehension and their Novum, their Ultimum, is however located solely on the Front of the process of history and is predominantly confronted with only mediated-real possibility. This remains that which

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corresponds to exact anticipation, concrete utopia as objective-real correlate. In the same sense that the concretely utopian is an objective-real degree of reality on the Front of the occurring world, - as Not-Yet-Being of the ‘naturalization of man, humanization of nature’. Correspondingly, the thus designated realm of freedom develops not as return, but as exodus - though into the always intended promised land, promised by process.

‘What-Is according to possibility’ and ‘What-Is in possibility’, cold and warm stream in Marxism On the path to the New we must usually, though not always, proceed step by step. Not everything is possible or can be implemented at any time, absent conditions not only hinder, they also block. More rapid progress is of course allowed, even demanded, where the stretch ahead shows no other dangers than over-anxiously or pedantically imagined ones. Thus Russia did not first need to become fully capitalist before it could pursue the socialist goal successfully. Even the complete technological condi¬ tions for the construction of socialism could be made good in the Soviet Union, in so far as they had already been developed in other countries and could be taken over from there. On the other hand, obviously, a path which has never been travelled before can only be skipped or jumped over with some failures. Because of course everything is possible for which the conditions exist in a sufficiently partial form, but this is precisely why everything is still factually impossible for which the conditions do not yet exist at all. The goal-image then proves to be subjectively and objectively an illusion; the movement towards it then collapses; at best, if it makes headway, as a consequence of the prevailing and determining socio-economic conditions, a totally different goal is achieved from the one intended in this skipping over, abstract sense. Of course, in the bourgeois ideal dream of human rights, from the outset the tendencies were already active which subsequently ushered in the purest capitalism. But even here a city of brotherly love hovered ahead anyway, a Philadelphia, particularly far removed from the real Philadelphia which was on the agenda of economic history and consequently saw the light of day. And nothing much more than a Philadelphia of that kind would have been the fruit of the pure, the simply chiliastic utopias, if they had not collapsed but had reached the goal according to the measure of the Possible at that time. The economic conditions which the radical will towards the millennium from Joachim

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of Fiore to the English millenarians skipped over, and in fact had to skip over, would have announced themselves anyway, even in what was attained itself: and, again by virtue of the still imminent capitalist agenda, they would certainly not have been those which predestine for the kingdom of love. All this has become completely comprehensible through the Marxist discovery which shows that concrete theory-practice is most closely connected to the explored mode of objective-real possibility. Both the critical caution which determines the speed of the path, and the founded expectation which guarantees a militant optimism as regards the goal, are determined through insight into the correlate of possibility. And in such a way that this correlate, as it is now becoming possible to say, itself again has two sides, a reverse side as it were, on which the measures of the respectively Possible are written, and a front side on which the Totum of thejinally Possible indicates that it is still open. In fact, the first side, that of the existing decisively conditions, teaches conduct on the path to the goal, whereas the second side, that of the utopian Totum, fundamentally prevents partial attainments on this path from being taken for the whole goal and from obscuring it. Despite all this it must be stressed: even this douhle-sided correlate: real possibility is nothing other than dialectical matter. Real possibility is only the logical expression for material conditionality of a sufficient kind on the one hand, for material openness (unexhaustedness of the womb of matter) on the other. Already above, in the previous chapter (cf. p. 191), on the subject of the ‘disrupting subsidiary causes’ during realization, a part of the Aristotelian definitions of matter was enlisted. We mentioned that according to Aristotle mechanical matter (70 e£ avayxrjs) represents a resistance, and consequently the entelechetic tendency-form cannot reveal itself purely. This is how Aristotle seeks to explain the many inhibitions, chance thwartings, even the innumerable progress-torsos of which the world is full. In the quoted passage, this definition of matter was designated as that of a scapegoat, and so it is, in so far as it is made absolute and in so far as it supposedly serves to send matter to the devil for the purpose of unburdening entelechy in general. But of course there is no mention in Aristotle of any such In General, any such Making Absolute, rather for him matter is in no way limited to the mechanical, and even this, from which to avayxrjs stems, is in fact assigned for the first time to the extremely extensive concept of dvvoifiis or objective-real possibility in Aristotle. This assignment now also opens up a new, not thwarting, but rather determining meaning for the concept of inhibiting matter: to e£ avayxrjs is supplemented and extended through xara to bvvonov,

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i.e.: through What-Is according to possibility, according to the measures of possibility. Seen from this side, matter is the site of the conditions according to whose stipulations entelechies reveal themselves; to dtvcc'YXrjs thus does not only mean mechanics, but much more extensively: con¬ tinuous conditional connection. And only from this What-Is-according-topossibility does the inhibition ultimately originate which the entelechetic tendency-form experiences on its path. The consequence also originates from here that the sculptor, working under ‘more favourable conditions’, can create more beautiful bodies than the physical ones that are born, and that a poet removes contingency and narrowness from the path of his creations, transposes them, as Aristotle says in his ‘Poetics’, from the xad’ txaorov or each individual thing into the xad’ b\ov or the richer possibilities of a whole. But all this would not have been possible if Aristotle - and this is of central importance - had not already also distinguished the other side, the front side of possibility-matter, in fact recognized it as the side completely free of inhibitions; matter is not only xara to bvvaTOv, according to possibility, and therefore the respectively condition¬ ing element according to the given measure of the Possible, but it is to bwapet bv, What-Is-in-possibility, therefore the - in Aristotle admittedly still passive - womb offertility from which all world-forms inexhaustibly emerge. With this last definition precisely the friendly, if not the hope-side of objective-real possibility opened up, however long it took for it to be comprehended; the utopian Totum is implied in the bvva/iet bv. To repeat and sum up, What-Is-according-to-possibility in matter precedes the critical consideration of what is respectively to be attained, What-Is-in-possibility in matter precedes the founded expectation of attainability itself And since the passive was deleted from the latter definition in the pantheistic school of the Aristotelians, since the bova/iec bv no longer appeared as undefined wax on which the form-entelechies imprint themselves, the potential of matter ultimately became birth and grave and new place of hope for the worldforms in general. This development of the Aristotelian concept of matter runs through the peripatetic physicist Strato, the first great Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, the oriental Aristotelians Avicenna, Averroes and his natura naturans, the neo-Platonizing Aristotelian Avicebron, through the Christian heretical philosophers of the thirteenth century Amalrich of Bena and David of Dinant, right down to the worldcreating matter of Giordano Bruno (cf. here Ernst Bloch, Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke, 1952, p. 3off.). In fact even the substratum, giving birth to itself, of the Hegelian world-idea, this idea which moves away

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so soon from matter, nevertheless contains a large part of matter-potentiality, which has become potent. On this point Lenin, in his ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, particularly notes the statement from Hegel’s Logic: ‘That which appears as the activity of form is furthermore also the separate motion of matter itself.’ There are several such statements in Hegel, also in his History of Philosophy (Werke XIII, p. 33), concerning the Aristotelian concept of development, where he at least equates his idea of Being-initself with the Aristotelian dbvctpLS. And the supposition is justified that without this legacy of Aristotle and Bruno, Marx would not have been able to set much of the Hegelian world-idea on its feet in such a natural way. Nor would the dialectic of process have been rescuable from the socalled world-spirit in materialistic terms and become ascertainable in matter as a law of motion. Thus, however, a very different matter from the mechanical clod appeared, the matter of dialectical materialism, one in which dialectic, process, expropriation of expropriation, humanization of nature are in no way just external epithets, let alone tacked on. So much here for the correlates to critical consideration of the attainable, to founded expecta¬ tion of attainability itself within the overall correlate: real possibility or matter. Coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation are pre-figured in this, are related to these two sides of the real Possible. Its unexhausted fullness of expectation shines upon revolutionary theory-practice as enthusiasm, its strict determinations which cannot be skipped over demand cool analysis, cautiously precise strategy; the latter indicates cold, the former warm red. These two ways of being red always go together of course, yet they are distinct from each other. They are related to one another like that which cannot be deceived and that which cannot be disappointed, like acerbity and belief, each in its place and each employed towards the same goal. In Marxism, the act of analysing the situation is entwined with the enthusiastically prospective act. Both acts are united in the dialectical method, in the pathos of the goal, in the totality of the subject-matter treated, yet the difference of view and situation is plain to see. It has been recognized as one between the respective condition-exploration according to the stipulations of the Possible, and the prospect-exploration of WhatIs-in-possibility. Research which analyses conditions does equally show prospect, but with its horizon as a limiting one, that of the limited Possible. Without such a cooling down Jacobinism or even totally extravagant, most abstractly utopian fanaticism would emerge. Thus lead is here poured into the shoes of overhauling, skipping over, flying over, because experience shows that the real itself has a heavy gait and seldom consists of wings.

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But the prospect-exploration of What-Is-in-possibility goes towards the horizon, in the sense of unobstructed, unmeasured expanse, in the sense of the Possible which is still unexhausted and unrealized. Only then of course does prospect in the authentic sense result, that is, prospect of the authentic, of the Totum of what is occurring and what is to be pursued, of a not only respectively prevailing, but overall historical, utopian Totum. Without such a wanning up of the historical and especially of the currently practical condi¬ tional analysis, the latter is subject to the danger of economism and of goal-forgetting opportunism; the latter avoids the mists of fanaticism only in as far as it gets bogged down in the swamp of philistinism, of compromise, and finally of betrayal. Only coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation together therefore ensure that neither the path in itself nor the goal in itself are held apart from one another undialectically and so become reified and isolated. And the conditional analysis on the whole historical-situational stretch emerges both as an unmasking of ideologies and as a disenchantment of metaphysical illusion; precisely this belongs to the most useful cold stream of Marxism. Through it Marxist materialism becomes not only the science of conditions, but at the same time the science of struggle and opposition against all ideological inhibitions and conceal¬ ments of the ultimately decisive conditions, which are always economic. To the warm stream of Marxism, however, belong liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken. From here the strong appeal to the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled human being, from here the appeal to the proletariat as the turntable towards emancipation. The goal remains the naturalization of man, humanization of nature which is inherent in developing matter. This final matter or the content of the realm of freedom first approaches in the construction of communism, its only space, has never before been present; that is beyond doubt. But it is also beyond doubt that this content lies within the historical process, and that Marxism represents its strongest consciousness, its highest practical mindfulness. Marxism as a doctrine of warmth is thus solely related to that positive Being-in-possibility, not subject to any disenchantment, which embraces the growing realization of the realizing element, primarily in the human sphere. And which, inside this sphere, signifies the utopian Totum, in fact that freedom, that homeland of identity, in which neither man behaves towards the world, nor the world behaves towards man, as if towards a stranger. This is the doctrine of warmth in the sense of the front side, the Front of matter, hence of forward matter. The path then opens up

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within it as function of the goal, and the goal opens up as substance in the path, in the path explored towards its conditions, visualized towards its opennesses. Matter is latent in these opennesses according to the direction of their objective-real hope-contents: as the end of self-alienation and objectivity encumbered with alien material, as matter of Things For Us. On the path towards this, the objective surpassing of what currently exists in history and world occurs: this transcending without transcendence, which is called process and is accelerated on earth so forcefully by human work. Forward materialism or the warmth-doctrine of Marxism is thus theorypractice of reaching home or of departure from inappropriate objectification; through it the world is developed towards the No-Longer-Alienation of its subjects-objects, hence towards freedom. Undoubtedly only from the vantage point of a classless society does the goal of freedom itself come clearly into our sights as definite Being-in-possibility. Nevertheless it is no great distance from that self-encounter which has been sought in images under the name of culture; with so many ideologies, but also with so many kinds of pre-appearance, anticipations in the horizon. The means by which man first became human was work, the basis of the second stage is the classless society, its framework is a culture whose horizon is surrounded purely by the contents of founded hope, the most important, the positive Being-in-possibility.

Artistic appearance as visible pre-appearance We say of the beautiful that it gives pleasure, that it is even enjoyed. But its reward does not end there, art is not food. For it remains even after it has been enjoyed, even in the sweetest cases it hangs over into a land which is ‘pictured ahead’. The wishful dream goes out here into what is indisputably better, in doing so, in contrast to most political wishful dreams, it has already become work-like, a shaped beauty. Only: is there anything more in what has been shaped in this way than a game of appearance? Which may be extremely ingenious but, in contrast to the childlike, does not prepare for anything serious, nor signifies it. In aesthetic ringing or even jingling* is there any hard cash, any statement which can be signed? Paintings prompt us less often to this question, since paint only stands in sensory certainty and is otherwise more weakly burdened with the claim to truth than the word. Since the word not only serves literature, Here Bloch is playing on the old German expression ‘in klingender Miinze’: ‘in coin of the realm’.

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but also truthful communication; language makes us more sensitive to the latter than paint, even than drawing. All good art, of course, finishes its materials in shaped beauty, renders things, people, conflicts in beautiful appearance. But what is the honest status of this finish, of a ripeness in which only invented material ripens? How do things stand with a richness which communicates itself in a merely illusionary fashion, as mere appearance to the eye or to the ear? Conversely, how do things stand with Schiller’s nevertheless prophetic statement that what we experience here as beauty will one day approach us as truth? How do things stand with Plotinus’ statement, and then Hegel’s, that beauty is the sensory manifestation of the idea? Nietzsche, in his positivist period, sets against this assertion the much more massive one that all poets lie. Or: art makes the aspect of life tolerable by throwing the veil of impure thought over it. Francis Bacon sees the golden apples in silver bowls as really not that far from being an illusion, they belong to the idola theatri that have been handed down to us. He compares the truth to the naked bright daylight in which the masks, mummeries and resplendent features of the world do not appear half so beautiful and magnificent as in the candlelight of art. According to this, all artists are from beginning to end in league with appearance, they have no inclination towards truth, but just the opposite inclination. In the whole of the Enlightenment there are premises for this antithesis between art and truth, and they have made artistic imagination an object of suspicion from the factual standpoint. These are the empirical objections to the insidious gloom, to the golden mist of art, and they are not the only ones which derive from the Enlightenment. For alongside them stand the rational objections which of course originally belong to the Platonic conceptual logos and to its especially celebrated, especially radical hostility to art, but which made themselves fashionable again as objections to art in the trend towards calculating reason in the new bourgeois age. Even where the specific hostility to art, described by Marx, of capitalism in the nineteenth century (with l’art pour Part as the counterblow and with the Goncourts’ declaration of war on ‘the public’) could not yet make its presence felt. Even the droll inquiry of that French mathematician is relevant here who asked after listening to Racine’s ‘Iphigenie’: ‘Qu’est-ce que cela prouve?’* Droll and fetishistically pedantic though this question looks, it still stands as a purely rational question in a separate and great school of alienation from art, equal to that of the empirical school. The aesthetic dimension is conspicuously absent in all the great systems of reason of * ‘What does that prove?’

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the new rationalist age; the ideas which inhabit it are not considered worthy of the least scientific discussion. Predominantly only technical aesthetic theories, albeit of a significant kind, chiefly concerning poetics, blossomed in French classical rationalism, and only the mathematical side of music was of interest to Descartes. Otherwise we do not know either in Descartes or even in Spinoza that there is an art in the ordered connection of ideas and things. Even the universal philosopher Leibniz at best only cited a few examples from art, such as those concerning the harmony-enhancing effect of shadows and dissonances, because such examples were serviceable for something much more important: for the proof of the best of all possible worlds. In Leibniz the harmoniously beautiful is in fact a kind of hint of a scientifically recognizable world-harmony, but it is only a confused hint, and the truth can thus dispense with it. Consequently the aesthetics of rationalism began in a very strange way when it was finally made into a philosophical discipline very late by Baumgarten,* the follower of Wolff; t in fact it began with a decidedly low opinion of its Object, indeed with apologies for its existence. The aesthetic Object was solely the so-called lower cognitive faculty at work in sensory perception and its ideas. And though beauty also represented perfection in this area, it was not comparable in terms of value with the complete clarity of conceptual cognition. The rationalist debasement of art thus lines up with the empirical positivist kind after all; - but the list of enemies is still not complete. Indeed, hatred of art only becomes totally glaring when it derives not from reason but, often conversely, from belief, at least from the positing of something spiritually true. Then a storm of iconoclasm breaks out - in this case not against the golden mist of art, as was usual in the empirical and ultimately also in the rationalist approach, but against the mainland of art, i.e. against the over-accentuated appearance within it. Beauty, the verdict reads here, seduces us to the superficial, falls for the hollow exterior and thus diverts from the essential nature of things. ‘What good is there in imitating the shadows of shadows?’ asks Plato, already making his conceptual logos almost clerically curt. On the other hand: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’, J commands the fourth commandment in the Bible and gives the cue for the iconoclasm of the invisibility of Yahweh, of the banning of all idolatry. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, 1714-62. t Christian Wolff, 1679-1754, philosopher of the German Enlightenment. I Exodus 20, 4.

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Art in general thus becomes gleaming, ultimately luciferian fulfilment which stands in the way of the true undissembling kind, indeed which denies it. This is hostility to art in its religious and spiritual form; what corresponds to it in morality is, not without reason, the turning away from the all too great visibility of ‘works’, the turning towards the invisible, genuine dimension of ‘convictions’. Puritanism in this extensive sense (reaching back as far as Bernard of Clairvaux) finally culminated in Tolstoy’s monstrous hatred of Shakespeare, of the lascivious work of beauty in general. Even in Catholicism a horror pulchri led, under Pope Marcellus, to the planning of a ban on elaborate church music, and this horror, applied to what is visible, gave to Protestantism the bare God who wishes to be worshipped in moral belief, in the word that is the truth. Thus the claim to truth comes out against beauty in so many different forms, empirical and rationalist, spiritual and religious. And however much these different claims to truth (for subjectively the spiritual was one as well) were at variance with themselves and in extreme conflict with one another, they are nevertheless united in the will towards a seriousness opposed to the game of appearance. This has always affected artists too, precisely because they themselves were serious. They themselves felt committed to the question of truth, because they did not want to be game-players, either immured or decadent ones. How amply the beautiful seeks also to be pictorially true in the descrip¬ tions and stories of great realistic writers. Not only in terms of sensory certainty, but also in terms of broadly revealed social contexts and natural processes. How legitimate Homer’s realism is, a realism of such exact fullness that almost the whole of Mycenean culture can be visualized from it. And admittedly not a French mathematician, but Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, tells us of the Book of Job, Chapter 37: ‘The meteorological processes which take place in the cloud cover, the formation and dispersal of the vapours during various wind changes, their kaleidoscope of colours, the generation of hail and of rolling thunder are described with individual graphicness; many questions are also raised which our modern physics is able to formulate in more scientific terms, but not to solve satisfac¬ torily’ (Kosmos II, Cotta, p. 35). Such precision and reality is undoubtedly peculiar and essential to all great literature, often also in decidedly spiritualreligious literature, as in the imagery of the Psalms. And the demand of significant realism to which all surface, but also all extravagance is alien, this glory in Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Keller, Tolstoy, is so greatly recognized in art (at least in the novel in recent times), if not actually

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fulfilled at high points, as if there had never been a mistrust born of the love of truth towards the Magister Ludi and his box of tricks. And yet artists, however concrete they are, have not settled the aesthetic question of truth; at best they have extended it in a desirable and significant way and made it more precise. For precisely in the realistic work of art we see that as a work of art it is still nevertheless something other than a source of historical and natural historical knowledge, or even insights. It is characterized by exquisite words which do after all also exaggerate what is so tellingly described by them beyond its given station, it is characterized above all by fantasizing, which bustles around between characters and events with a degree of licence highly alien to science. Fantasizing and in addition, in both senses of the word, art-fullness, by means of which invented material fills up the gaps in what has been concretely observed and rounds the plot into well-curved arches. An appearance of rounding, over-rounding, is in any case unmistakable even in the most realistic artistic creations, particularly in artistic novels. And great appearance has a quite ‘surpassing’ effect in those works of art which do not offer themselves primarily as realistic, either because they consciously romanticize alongside or beyond available existence, or because, far beyond a mere ‘subject’, they fructify - myth, which is the oldest sustenance of art anyway. Giotto’s ‘Raising of Lazarus’, Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, Heaven in the final part of Faust: how do these stand - beyond all detailed realism - in relation to the philosophers’ inquiry after truth? They are undoubtedly not true in the sense that the knowledge we have acquired of the world is true, but then what does the enormous wonderment at the after all inseparable form-content of these works mean, in a legitimate, world-related manner? Thus, astonishingly, although on a completely different level, the ‘Qu’est-ce que cela prouve?’ of that French mathematician becomes irrefutable, even without mathe¬ matics and completely without drollery. In other words: the question as to the truth of art becomes philosophically the question as to the possibly available depictability of beautiful appearance, as to its degree of reality in the by no means single-layered reality of the world, as to the location of its object-correlate. Utopia as object-determination, with the degree of existence of the Real Possible, thus encounters in the shimmering phenomenon of art a particularly fruitful problem of probation. And the answer to the aesthetic question of truth is: artistic appearance is not only mere appearance, but a meaning, cloaked in images and which can only be described in images, of material that has been driven further, wherever the exaggeration and fantasizing represent a significant pre-appearance, circulating

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in turbulent existence itself, of what is real, a pre-appearance which can specifical¬ ly be represented in aesthetically immanent terms. What habitual or unblunted sense can hardly still see is illuminated here, in individual processes as well as social and natural ones. This pre-appearance becomes attainable precisely because art drives its material to an end, in characters, situations, plots, landscapes, and brings them to a stated resolution in suffering, happiness and meaning. Pre-appearance is this attainable thing itself because the metier of driving-to-the-end occurs in dialectically open space, in which any Object can be aesthetically represented. Aesthetically represented, this means: immanently more achieved, more thoroughly formed, more essential than in the immediate-sensory or immediate-historical occurrence of this Object. This thorough formation remains appearance even as pre-appearance, but it does not remain illusion; instead, everything that appears in the artistic image is sharpened or condensed to a decisiveness which the reality of experience in fact only seldom shows, but which is most definitely inherent in the subjects. Art clearly indicates this with founded appearance, in the theatre regarded as paradigmatic institution. It remains virtual, but in the same sense as a reflection is virtual, i.e. reproduces an Object outside itself with all its dimensions of depth on the reflecting surface. And the pre¬ appearance, in contrast to religious pre-appearance, remains immanent despite all transcendence: it expands, as Schiller in fact defined aesthetic realism using Goethe as an example, it expands ‘nature, without going beyond it’. Beauty, even sublimity are thus representative of an existence for Objects which has not yet become, of thoroughly formed world without external chance, without unessentiality, unrenderedness. The motto of aesthetically attempted pre-appearance runs along these lines: how could the world be perfected without this world being exploded and apocalyptically vanishing, as in Christian-religious pre-appearance (cf. also: Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 1923, p. 141). Art, with its formations which are always individual and concrete, seeks this perfection only in these formations, with the Total as penetratingly viewed Particular; whereas religion, of course, seeks utopian perfection in totality and places the salvation of the individual matter completely in the Totum, in the: ‘I make all things new’.* Man is supposed to be born again here, society transformed into Civitas Dei, nature transfigured into the celestial. Whereas art remains rounded, when ‘classical’ it loves the coastal trip around the given, even when it is Gothic, despite all venturing beyond, it has something balanced, homogenized in * Rev. 21. 5: ‘Behold, I make all things new’.

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it. Only music works explosively, occurring in open space, for which reason this art always carries something eccentric in it compared with the other arts, just as if it were only transposed on to the level of the beautiful or the sublime. All other arts pursue the representation of the pure carat in individual figures, situations, plots from the world, without exploding this world; hence the perfect visibility of this pre-appearance. Thus art is non-illusion, since it works along a line of extension from the Become, in its formed, more commensurate expression. This goes so far that a writer from antiquity, Juvenal, in order to express all the possible horrors of a storm, calls the storm ‘poetica tempestas’. This goes so deep that Goethe, in his commentary on Diderot’s ‘Essay on Painting’, posits concentration as realism, against merely reproductive naturalism: ‘And thus the artist, grateful to nature, which also produced him, gives her a second nature in return, but one that is felt and thought and humanly perfected.’ This humanized nature is however at the same time one that is more perfected in itself; not of course in the manner of sensory appearance of an idea which is finished anyway, as Hegel teaches, but rather in the direction of increasingly entelechetic expression, as Aristotle states. In fact, precisely this entelechetically or, as Aristotle also says, typically resolving force is powerfully remembered afresh in Engels’ statement that realistic art is representation of typical characters in typical situations. Whereby the typical in Engels’ definition obviously does not mean the average, but the significantly characteristic, in short, the essential image of the matter, decisively developed through exemplary instances. Along this line, therefore, lies the solution of the aesthetic question of truth: Art is a laboratory and also a feast of implemented possibilities, together with the thoroughly experienced alternatives therein, whereby the implementation and the result occur in the manner of founded appearance, namely of worldly perfected pre-appearance. In great art, exaggeration and fantasizing are most visibly applied to tendential consistency and concrete utopia. Though whether the call for perfection - we can call it the godless prayer of poetry - becomes practical even only to a small extent and does not merely remain in aesthetic pre-appearance is something which is not decided in poetry, but in society. Only controlled history, with an incisive counter-move against inhibitions, with active promotion of tendency, can help essential material in the distance of art to become increasingly also appearance in the dealings of life. This is then of course the same as - iconoclasm that has become correct, not as destruction of artistic images, but as a breaking into them - for the purpose of fructifying what is possibly contained in them, not only typically,

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but paradigmatically, i.e. in exemplary fashion. And wherever art does not play itself out into illusion, beauty and even sublimity is that which mediates a premonition of future freedom. Often rounded, never closed: this life-maxim of Goethe’s is also that of art - with the accent of conscience and substance ultimately on the unclosed.

False autarky; pre-appearance as real fragment Often rounded: it does not suit a beautiful image to present itself as incomplete. What is unfinished is external to it, does not belong to it, and the artist who has not finished what he had to do is unhappy about it. This is quite correct and obvious, in so far as and as long as it is merely a matter of sufficient strength of form. The source of artfulness is the ability which understands and thus totally wants to acquire its subjectmatter. But of course, precisely for the sake of non-isolated acquisition, the threat of that artfulness must also repeatedly be noted which arises not out of ability but out of the share of mere appearance which even pre¬ appearance has. The appeal of pleasing perception and its representation, however imaginary what is represented may possibly be, is enough to satisfy mere appearance. Indeed, the imaginary or what has become imaginary can lend mere appearance a particularly decorative roundedness, one in which the seriousness of the subject-matter hardly disturbs, let alone interrupts, the beautifully coherent game. Precisely because mere appearance lets images live alongside each other so easily, so unreally, it guarantees that pleasing superficial coherence which shows no interest and presence whatever of a subject-matter beyond sheer illusion. The lack of belief in the represented subject-matter can even be a help to the smooth illusion, even more so than scepticism. This showed itself in Renaissance painting with regard to the gods of antiquity, in depicting whom the painter did not need to fear he had not behaved sufficiently discreetly towards the sacred; the same thing showed itself a little later in mythologically rounded poetry. Camoes in the ‘Lusiads’ has his goddess Themis say quite ironically and yet in the most luxuriant verse that she herself and Saturn, Jupiter and all the other gods that appear are ‘vain creatures of fantasy born to mortals out of blind madness, only serving to lend charm to the song’. Through the use of beautiful appearance mythological substance was indeed held in memory here, in fact introduced into the possible allegories of a pre-appearance, but by means of that finished fullness especially invited

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by appearance which is never interrupted. And finally, a further invitation to this comes from the side of immanence without an exploding crack, which surrounds all art, not just the art of classical antiquity or that imitating classical antiquity. Precisely the art of the Middle Ages provides many examples of a rounded-off satisfaction of an aesthetic kind, despite its religious-transcendental conscience. Gothic art contains this conscience, but there was equally a curious harmony in it which derived from classical Greek balance. The early Lukacs observed quite acutely, if somewhat exaggeratedly: ‘So a new polis arose from the church..., the ladder of the earthly and heavenly hierarchies from the crack. And in Giotto and Dante, in Wolfram* and Pisano, in Thomas Aquinas and St Francis the world became round again, surveyable, the abyss lost the danger of its actual depth: but without losing any of its blackly shining strength, all its darkness became pure surface and thus fitted smoothly into a closed unity of colours; the cry for redemption became dissonance in the perfect rhythmical system of the world and made a new balance possible, but no less colourful and perfect than that of the Greeks: that of inadequate, heterogeneous intensities’ (Die Theorie des Romans, 1920, p. 2of.). German secessions of Gothic art like that of Grunewald are of course unaffected by this kind of perfection. However, this hypostasis of the aesthetic confronts us in an even more closed fashion, though by no means in classical strength, from the Middle Ages, which remained determined by the Mediterranean. And there is within it an equilibrium and a finished coherence which is not only idealistic, but ultimately derives from - great Pan, this primal image of all rounding. Pan is the one and all of the world which had also been revered as that whole which lacks nothing. Hence the ultimate seduction to nothing but rounding, but hence also Greek balance as secularized form of the totally pagan, i.e. crackless world-picture: the astral myth. In this myth the cosmos really was ‘decoration’, i.e. evenly beautiful; it was something ceaselessly circling within itself and hen kai pan a circle itself and not an open parabola, a sphere and not a process-fragment. Thus it is not without reason that art is very often pantheistically disposed in this all too rounding form, and not without reason that, conversely, a system formulated in a finished way appears pleasantly beautiful even in extra-artistic occurrence. The pleasure in sensory appearance, in the living mantle of divinity, certainly contributes to this pantheistic trait, but the seductive pull towards it is

* Wolfram von Eschenbach, fl.c. 1200-20, wrote ‘Parzival’, the greatest German romance of the Middle Ages.

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even stronger from the harmoniously undisturbed coherence, the ‘cosmos’ even without ‘universe’. All these are therefore the various reasons why a veritable art-fullness, an autarky of apparent enclosedness can also exist in a work of art, which, because it is excessive and immanent, at first masks the pre-appearance. But equally, and this is precisely the crucial difference and the crucial truth, all great art shows the pleasant and homogeneous aspects of its work-based coherence broken, broken up, leafed open by its own iconoclasm, wherever immanence is not driven to closedness of form and content, wherever it still poses as fragment-like. Here - completely incom¬ parable with the mere contingency of the fragmentary in the avoidable sense - another hollow space of a factual, highly factual kind opens up, with unrounded immanence. And it is precisely in this space that the aesthetic-utopian meanings of the beautiful, even the sublime make their presence felt. Only what is broken into pieces in the all too stilled work of art, mixed with the atmosphere of the gallery, one which has become a mere objet d’art or, to put it a much better way: the itself already shaped openness in great artistic creations gives the material and the form for a cipher of the authentic. Never closed: thus precisely the all too beautiful breaks into life when the varnish cracks. When the surface pales or darkens, as in the evening when the light falls obliquely and the mountains emerge. The shattering of the surface and furthermore of the merely cultural-ideological context in which the works have stood exposes depth wherever it exists. What is meant here is not the sentimental ruin nor that kind of torso which, as so often with Greek statues, holds the figure together more tightly and produces greater block unity and plastic rigour. This sort of thing can of course be improve¬ ment of form, but not necessarily the intensification of the cipher which is what matters here. This only occurs through the fissures of disintegration, in the quite specific sense which disintegration possesses concerning the objet d’art and as transformation of the objet d’art. In this way, instead of ruin or torso, a belated fragment arises, one which can do better justice to the depth contents of art than the completedness which the work sought to manifest there and then. Every great art, even one as inherently so com¬ pletely closed as that of Egypt, thus becomes a belated fragment, by disintegrating into essentiation; because the utopian ground opens up in which the work of art had been registered. Although the acquisition of the cultural heritage always has to be critical, this acquisition contains, as a particularly important factor, the self-dispersal of what has been made into the museum-bound objet d’art, but also of the false enclosedness which the work of art sought to have there and then and which further intensifies

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in museum-bound contemplation. The insular quality cracks, a series of figures full of open, experimental symbolic formations opens up. All the more so when the phenomenon of the belated fragment combines with that created in the work of art itself: not in fact in the usual, flat sense of the fragmentary as that which could not be done or that which remained by chance unfinished, but in the concrete sense of that which, at the highest level of mastery, is unclosed, of that which is transformed through utopian pressure. This is the case in great Gothic art, sometimes also in the Baroque, which despite all the power of the work, indeed because of it, had a hollow space and behind it a fertile darkness. Thus precisely fully-executed Gothic, despite Pan’s presence here too, executes a fragment composed of central un-finish-ability. Peculiar, if then fragments arise even in the usual sense of brokenness, and yet in the unusual, though solely legitimate sense of an appearing Ultimum only hinted at. This is so in the work of Michelangelo, who left more fragments behind than any other great master, and in fact remarkably in his most characteristic concern, in his sculpture and not in his painting. Since in the latter he finished everything he began, whereas with statues and also in architecture he set a disproportionately large amount of half-completed work on one side, never turned to it again and left it behind. Vasari gave art history the signal to wonder at the meagre amount of totally finished material in Michelangelo’s work and to wonder all the more since the enormity in the intended goal nevertheless corresponded so completely to the power and nature of this genius. But what offered resistance to artistic rounding, artistic completion here was precisely the corresponding element to enormity in Michelangelo himself, was the agree¬ ment between an overpowerful nature and the overpowering character of a task in such a way that no work executed could satisfy this adequation, so that in fact completion itself, driven so deeply into the Absolute, becomes a fragment. This kind of fragment is then nothing less than an ingredient of the un-temple-like, of the unharmonized cathedralic, is the conscience: Gothic even post festum. The depth of aesthetic completion brings the very dimension of the uncompleted into play: to this extent even the non¬ fragmentary, in the usual sense, in Michelangelo, the figures on the Medici tomb as much as the dome of St Peter’s Basilica, stretches into that excessive measure which is the measure of the Ultimum in art. Hence finally the legitimately, namely materially fragmentary quality, in all works of this ultimative kind, in the West-ostlicher Divan,* in Beethoven’s last quartets, A cycle of later Goethe poems inspired by intensive reading of Persian poetry in 1814 when the poet was already sixty-five.

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in Faust, in short, wherever unfinishability lends greatness in finishing. And if we look for the reason, which in ideological terms most definitely continues to operate, for such internal iconoclasm in greatly completed art and precisely in this, then it lies in the pathos of path and process, in the eschatological conscience that came into the world through the Bible. Totality in the religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom is solely of a totally transforming and exploding kind, is utopian; and, confronted with this totality, not only our knowledge, but also the whole of what has previously become, to which our conscience refers, then appears as unfinished work. As unfinished work or objective fragment precisely also in the most productive sense, not only in that of creatural limitation, let alone resignation. The ‘Behold, I make all things new’, in the sense of apocalyptic explosion, is written above this and influences all great art with the spirit after which Diirer named his Gothic creation Apocalypsis Cum Figuris. Man is still not solid, the course of the world is still undecided, unclosed, and so also is the depth in all aesthetic information: this utopian factor is the paradox in aesthetic immanence, the most fundamentally immanent paradox in this immanence itself. Without such potency for the fragment, aesthetic imagination would of course have sufficient perception in the world, more than any other human apperception, but it would ultimately have no correlate. For the world itself, just as it is in a mess, is also in a state of unfinishedness and in experimental process out of that mess. The shapes which this process throws up, the ciphers, allegories and symbols in which it is so rich, are all themselves still fragments, real fragments, through which process streams unclosed and advances dialectically to further fragmentary forms. The fragmentary holds good for the symbol too, although the symbol does not refer to process, but to the unum necessarium within it; but precisely because of this reference and because of the fact that it is only a reference and not an arrival, the symbol also contains fragment. The real symbol itself is in fact only one because, instead of being disguised merely to the observer and inherently clear, it is precisely not yet inherently manifest. This therefore constitutes the meaning of the fragment, seen from the perspective of art, and not only from that of art; the fragment lies in the subject-matter itself, it still belongs, rebus sic imperfectis et fluentibus, to the subject-matter of the world. Concrete utopia as objectdetermination presupposes concrete fragment as object-determination and involves it, even though certainly as an ultimately revocable fragment. And therefore every artistic, and especially every religious pre-appearance is only concrete on the basis and to the extent that the fragmentary in

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the world ultimately presents the layer and the material for it to constitute itself as pre-appearance.

It is a question of realism, everything real has a horizon To stick to things, to sail over them, both are wrong. Both remain external, superficial, abstract, and being immediate, cannot get away from the surface. Sticking keeps to it anyway, sailing over has it in its own unruly inner dimension as well as in the other, merely evaporated dimension of immediacy to which it escapes. Nevertheless, of course, sailing over belongs to a higher human type than taking things as they are. And above all: sticking to these things remains flat even when it is considered, that is, empiricist, whereas enthusiasm, when it is considered, can most definitely stop being bottomless. The flat empiricist and the effusive enthusiast are constantly surprised by the flow of the real, which neither of them grasp, but the former, as a fetishist of so-called facts, remains obstinate, whereas the fantast is possibly teachable. In the world only reification, which keeps a firm hold on individual moments of process and anchors them as facts, suits the empiricist, and he stands and falls by it. Whereas sailing over is itself at least in motion, i.e. in an attitude which need not fundamentally remain unmediable with real motion. In creation, sailing over has art on its side, albeit with much appearance, much dubious escape to a downright inten¬ tionally untrue dream-appearance. But the concrete correction of sailing over opens up in art, and not only in art, images, insights, tendencies which occur simultaneously in man and in the object assigned to him. Precisely this concrete dimension does not rise from the perspective of grovelling empiricism and the naturalism that corresponds to it in aesthetic terms, which never advances from the establishment of what is factual to the exploration of what is essentially happening. Whereas imagination, as soon as it appears concretely, knows how to visualize not only sensory abundance, but also the mediation-relations in and behind the immediacy of real experience. Instead of the isolated fact and the superficial context of abstract immediacy which is likewise isolated from the whole, the relation of appearances to the whole of their epoch and to the utopian Totum located in process now emerges. Art becomes knowledge with the help of imagina¬ tion of this kind, namely through telling individual images and overall pictures of a characteristically typical kind; it pursues the ‘significant aspect’ of appearances and executes it. Science, with the help of imagination of

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this kind, grasps the ‘significant aspect’ of appearances through concepts, which never remain abstract, never allow the phenomenon to fade, let alone be lost. And the ‘significant aspect’ is in art and science the particular aspect of the general, the respective instance for the dialectically open context, the respective characteristically typical figure of the Totum. And the actual Totum, this dimension in which even the epochally grasped whole of all epochal moments is itself again a moment, shows itself precisely in broadly mediated great works only on the horizon, not in an already thoroughly formed reality. Everything living, says Goethe, has an atmosphere around it; everything real in general, because it is life, process, and can be a correlate of objective imagination, has a horizon. An inner horizon, extending vertically as it were, in the self-dark, an external one of great breadth, in the world-light; and the regions behind both horizons are filled with the same utopia, are consequently identical in the Ultimum. Where the pro¬ spective horizon is omitted, reality only appears as become, as dead, and it is the dead, namely naturalists and empiricists, who are burying their dead here. Where the prospective horizon is continuously included in the reckoning, the real appears as what it is in concreto: as the path-network of dialectical processes which occur in an unfinished world, in a world which would not be in the least changeable without the enormous future: real possibility in that world. Together with that Totum which does not represent the isolated whole of a respective section of process, but the whole of the subject-matter pending in process overall, hence still tendential and latent. This alone is realism, it is of course inaccessible to that schematism which knows everything in advance, which considers its uniform, in fact even formalistic, stencil to be reality. Reality without real possibility is not com¬ plete, the world without future-laden properties does not deserve a glance, an art, a science any more than that of the bourgeois conformist. Concrete utopia stands on the horizon of every reality; real possibility surrounds the open dialectical tendencies and latencies to the very last. By these the unconcluded motion of unconcluded matter - and motion is, in that profound phrase of Aristotle, ‘uncompleted entelechy’ - is arch-realistically pervaded.

THE LAYERS OF THE CATEGORY POSSIBILITY

18

How often something presents itself in such a way that it can be. Or even in such a way that it can be different than it was before, which is

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why something can be done about it. But this itself would not be possible without Possible within and in front of it. There is a wide field here and it must be investigated more than ever before. Already the fact that a Can-Be can be said and thought is by no means self-evident. There is still something open here, it can be meant differently than it was before, can be rearranged, connected differently, changed in moderation. Where nothing more can be done or is possible, life stands still. ‘Now everything, everything must change’,* how else would this decidedly youthful exclamation itself be possible? Certainly, there is much that is vague in the merely Possible, much that is slippery too, not only what is fluid or that which keeps things fluid. But just as man is mainly a creature who enters into the Possible and has it in front of him, he also knows that this does not coincide with vagueness, that precisely his open character is definitely nothing arbitrary. Can-Be also has laws, even in the mere play of words and especially in the seriousness that soon enters. And the available substance which has so much airiness in it is at the same time one of the heaviest and demands to be treated strictly. Otherwise above all the different layers of the Can-Be do not become visible.

The formally Possible First, of course, much too much can just be said without thinking. Everything can be spoken in theory, words can be senselessly strung together. Constructions are possible such as: ‘something round or’; ‘a person and is’. Apart from the fact that they are sayable, there is nothing possible in them at all; they are meaningless nonsense. The case is different however with statements which are not nonsensical, but run counter to sense, where the listener at least shakes his head in disbelief. Namely when the statement directly contradicts itself, as in the concept ‘round square’ or in the judgement: ‘He is boarding a ship that had sailed.’ A meaning like this which directly contradicts itself in its characteristics or its predicate is absurd, but definitely not nonsense, rather in fact countersense. The latter is, in contrast to merely sayable nonsense, definitely something concep¬ tually possible, a formal Can-Be; because everything is conceptually possible which can in any way be conceived as standing in relation. In fact even

Cf. Uhland’s ‘Friihlingsglauben’, 1812: ‘The gentle breezes have woken, Now everything, everything must change.’

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relations whose parts are related not only absurdly, but totally disparately to one another still represent, even though they are disparate, a formally describable relation, namely in fact a disparate one, and belong to what is conceptually possible. Such as the statements ‘irascible triangle’ or ‘wellread chain-bridge’ or ‘the horse that is thunder’ and other incompatible things besides. Such exaggeration shows at the same time how boundless the merely conceptually possible can be. For even the relation in the statement that there is no relation whatsoever between things had an unfruitful place in what is conceptually possible. Just as there can be fullness in thinking due to imprecision, bad fullness in other words, there is also bad openness in what is conceptually possible. And this alongside the good kind, which reveals itself above all in the formal Can-Be of the Self-Contradicting.

The factually-objectively Possible* Much too much can therefore still not only be said, but also thought. That is why the Can-Be, which can be encountered not only in thinking but also in cognition, looks much more definite. This Possible is not boundless, but a respectively nameable one and one that can be indicated by degrees in proportion to the known conditions. But since such namings and degrees initially only express degrees of knowing and cognition, not degrees of the inner conditional maturity of the fact-based Object J itself, the Possible is still not a strictly fact-based one here, but a factual one, i.e. a cognitive, fact-suited one. Thus it presents itself as statement of caution, then as one of grounded opinion, of grounded assumption of its capability-of-being, in short as factually-objectively grounded possibility. It is the grounding which stands here for the condition or the real ground, in such a way however that the grounding, that is, the condition existing according to cognition for an affirmative, factually valid statement itself does not exist in a complete form. Everything is conceptually possible where * In this section Bloch uses the concepts - ‘sachlich’, ‘sachhaft’ and ‘sachgemaB’ for possible attitudes to ‘die Sache’, i.e. the real matter, the real state of affairs. We have translated these as ‘factual’, ‘fact-based’, ‘fact-suited’. Uniform with these are the concepts for possible attitudes to ‘das Objekt’, the object - ‘objektiv’, ‘objekthaft’, ‘objektgemafi’, which we have translated consistently as ‘objective’, ‘object-based’ and ‘object-suited’. t Bloch once again distinguishes between the more philosophical ‘Objekt’ and the more concrete ‘Gegenstand’ here. We have indicated ‘Gegenstand’' and its compounds with a capital.

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anything at all can be conceived as standing in relation, but over and above this it is true of all further kinds of the Can-Be: the Possible is partially conditioned material, and it is possible only as such. We must keep to the thus given definition from here on, as it contains the criterion for the Possible in all its variations. In other words: every Possible beyond the merely concep¬ tually possible signifies an openness in consequence of a not yet completely sufficient, and hence more or less insufficiently existing conditional ground. Because only a few but not all conditional grounds exist, the Real cannot yet be indicated from the thus Possible, so the old scholastic principle holds: a posse ad esse non valet consequentia.* But now back to the factually Possible itself which is in question here. It is likewise partial conditionality, but, in more precise terms, solely factually-partial knowledge-cognition of conditionality. This conditionality is partial and must be so because a total mustering of the conditions would make the occurrence of an event no longer merely supposable, more or less probable, i.e. factually possible, but unconditionally certain. Thus it is unfair, in full knowledge of the fully available conditions, still to bet on the occurrence of an event; thus with such knowledge in one’s pocket it is cowardly or stupid still to play Fabius Cunctator.t The factually-objective Possible (and incidentally also the fact-based object-based Possible and the really Possible, of which more later) is stated in a hypothetical judgement or, in cases of even less certainty, in a problematic judgement. The hypothetical judgement is distinguished in this relation from the problematic one in that it presupposes not yet confirmed initial propositions, whereas the problematic judgement, which in its form conceals the initial propositions: ‘it could rain today’, ‘Leukippos did perhaps exist’, ‘cosmic rays possibly emanate from a star-cluster in the Milky Way’ - presupposes other unknown initial propositions apart from the not yet confirmed ones. The problematic judgement is therefore the authentically developed judgement of possibility as a factually modal determination: P is assigned to S in the mode of the Can-Be. A special case that is relevant here is further represented by the inauthentic, in fact false judgements of possibility; they are those of knowledge which is insufficient not in terms of research but only of reception. Previously, this false factual Can-Be has hardly been separated from the genuine kind, and

There is no necessary development from potential to being, t Fabius Maximus (Cunctator) (d. 203 B.c.), the Roman Consul and Dictator who saved Rome from being conquered by Hannibal by evasive tactics, avoiding direct confrontation in battle. Hence the term ‘Fabian Policy’ which Bloch is referring to here.

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yet the difference, which is so important for the status of the possible, leaps to the eye. A false modal judgement is this for example: ‘Water can be broken down by electric current.’ In reality, however, water is always broken down by electric current (as long as no new, possibly disturbing conditions exist). Likewise the knowledge of this process is completely grounded, all conditions for it exist; consequently the abovementioned content of the judgement is unquestionable. The only thing that is not so unquestionable is the state of knowledge of the consciousness which receives the proposition, and only in this psychological-pedagogical respect, external to logic, is the cited judgement modally formed, modally disguised. Factually, it is a categorical or assertive judgement through and through, not a hypothetical or problematic one. Which is why therefore only non-pedagogical statements, only research-statements in which a non liquet of the knowledge-conditions for the categorical or assertive form exists are genuine factually-modal statements. Factually-objective possibility thus always designates the degree of scientific-objective groundedness according to the incomplete scientific knownness of the factually existing conditions. Thus the judgement is left in the balance here, is only more or less distanced from the question. Or rather the affirmation and denial of the judgement remains in the balance, i.e. the bare judging or the qualitative judgement of a judgement. And only in this judgement of a judgement does the factually Possible exist, and most decidedly in this of course; it begins to exist in it before it goes on to become depictive. Factual possibility is thus already in the assumption or the suppositions which lead to the formulation of questions concerning scientific or socio-historical given facts. The supposition anticipates in a problematic judgement the principal condition or a group context of conditions on the basis of which the Object of examination can be clarified in its real ground and accordingly understood in the course it takes. This methodological supposition guides the formu¬ lation of questions and the variations of the conditions of scientific experiments, but it also provides the peculiar estimate, i.e. what has been called the temporary, the working hypothetical image of a particular matter. The expression working hypothesis of course contains a dubious element within it, in that it was flogged to death by the late-bourgeois relativists; so let us use the older and more solid expression: heuristic principle. Such a principle is at work for example in hypothetical simplification or in a hypothetical analogy to what is already better known, with which the exploration of confused or complicated phenomena of a socio-historical

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kind may first be approached. The formulation of the question of this factually Possible in methodological use is confirmed or not confirmed by inductions which are made in the direction of the supposed conditional context. Though, of course, however comprehensive it is, an induction can never express its result other than in a judgement of factually-objective possibility once again. For even the most complete induction cannot be a total one, i.e. a knowledge of all conditional elements as the same in all regions of space, or even remaining the same in time. Thus in inductive confirmation of a methodological supposition there is also still that trace of a factually Possible, of a not totally Certain, which - in graduated stages up to ‘astronomic certainty’ - is called comparative probability. And what of deduction, the supposedly always settled large form of an exhaustively sufficient, essential-general conditional ground? It is true that it not only reveals the particulars of inductive empirical knowledge as moments of a total context, from this generality of the particular, it also seeks, in a traditionally extreme claim, to derive the cognition of these particulars with necessity, consequently not with partial but total conditionality. This quite clearly in the first mode of the first conclusion figure: Caius is neces¬ sarily mortal by virtue of his being a man. The middle term of being a man produces here the completely sufficient ‘essential ground’ of being mortal; thus there arises what Aristotle calls a perfect conclusion, that is in fact: a conclusion of necessity. ‘Perfect I call a conclusion which, in order for its necessity to be clear, needs no further definition beyond the premises’ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, Chapter i): - factual capability of-being thus gives way to factual inevitability-of-being. However, the thus asserted impossibility of the capability-of-being-other, let alone of the capability-of-being-opposite, is only to be found in areas of the highest abstraction which have been made artificially pure, and even there only when limited to what can be derived from axioms or to that which is dominantly contained in theorems. The axioms (mathematical, logical, in copied form even the earlier ones of Natural Right) are of course not posited arbitrarily, and hence mere game-rules, as - with incurable randomness - much airily idealistic, supposedly fact-free ‘pure research’ into mathematics asserts. Instead, the axioms definitely contain a depiction of factual relations external to thought, although in the most abstractly abbreviated and general form. However, they are limited to particular areas of their purely constructive dominance, and these limits are above all fluid (we only need to think of the mere ‘limited case’ of our Euclidean space and its axioms or of the changes in the proposition of contradiction in

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elementary, as it were Euclidean logic, and then in dialectically developed logic). But then, all these axioms still far from coincide with the ‘essential ground’ designated by Aristotle (the active Totum of the matter, the ‘entelechy’); they are kept much too abstract for that. And the ‘essential ground’ itself, for example the cited fact of Caius being a man as the middle term in the first mode of the first conclusion figure: even the middle term of this being a man, in which Aristotle wanted to perceive both the perfect logical cognitive ground and also the inevitable real ground of being mortal, produces no necessity settled once and for all, in the sense of strict deductive proof. Since even being human (like every other ‘essential ground’) stands in process, and cannot therefore, in the strict sense, lend logical necessity even to such an exceptionless phenomenon as mortality. Consequently, even in deduction, factually Necessary only proves to be factually Possible, even though this is possibly of the smallest degree. In general: the condi¬ tional initial propositions of concluding cognition, without falling into a closed schematism estranged from the world, cannot be more complete than the unenclosed Fact-based itself, which the Factual has to depict after its fashion, in concept, judgement, conclusion. Even in the Factuallyobjective the area of the possible is, sui generis, very large; it can belong here, opposed to bed of ease and fixed derivation, to the life of research.

The fact-based object-suited Possible So much for what remains open, that is so because it is not or not rigidly settled. This kind of Can-Be thus reflects factual caution in judgements, mostly in the manner of a question still resonating along with it, of a factual reservation. Differently constituted, however, to this factually Possible is the fact-based Possible which now emerges; namely in so far as it does not concern our knowledge of something, but this something itself, as something that could become this or that. The fact-based Possible does not live on the insufficiently known, but on the insufficiently emerged conditional grounds. It therefore does not designate a more or less sufficient knowledge of conditions, but it designates what is more or less sufficiently conditioning in Objects themselves and in their factual relations. Factual relation, that is the ‘relating of matters-of-fact’ as Objects of cognition; to the factual relation belong first the kinds of having of Objective qualities and relation¬ ships, then of standing in Objective relationships. Modal factual relations, as the Objects of cognition, therefore never coincide with modal statements,

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as the mere procedures of cognition, of the kind represented by assumptions, suppositions, the anticipating estimate, and inductively probable or even deductive conclusions. But in fact: a still openly Possible arises even when there is otherwise sufficiently enclosed knowledge of the existing conditions; consequently, the Possible appears here as Objective-structural thus-relating itself. Here we enter upon the depictive layer of fact-basedness, of objectsuitedness, as distinct from mere factuality, objectivity. This also makes a distinction necessary in the discipline in which the fact-based Possible is to be treated. Whereas factuality only concerns cognition and therefore the concern of its objectivity is an epistemological one, fact-basedness concerns the Object of cognition, which is not, according to the neoKantians, cognition itself; the real concern of this object-suitedness is consequently a categorically Object-theoretical one. The concept of Object theory first appeared clearly in Meinong, but it was here purely related a priori to the supposedly existence-free quality of an essence which was supposed to ghost around independently of the existence or non-existence of Objects. Mathematics was regarded as a model of this ‘existence-free knowledge’ here, and especially in the later phenomenology of Husserl, even if it was of course: a mathematics artificially removed from all its depictive real reference, and incurably reified in its abstractness. And logic was well and truly reified here, in the sense of a purely a priori ‘description’ of its acts, a purely a priori ‘semantic analysis’ of its categories - with ‘bracketed existence’. Whereas Object theory that applies to reality is one in which the a priori represents even less of a temptation than in epistemology. For although the Objects and their factual relations must still be distinguished not only from the factual aspect of the process of cognition, but also from the actual objects and their real relations, they function precisely as the most faithful possible forms of realistic depiction. And the precedence noted here of an Object theory over object theory thus contains no idealism, because the researching-materialistic depiction itself belongs to the Object theory, is at work only in the face of the objectbased Real and not in it, and does not coincide with it. Further: the depiction of the structural factual relations no longer belongs to the methodological cognition-process, because it is a result of cognition, and it is such a result in that and in so far as it is related, being object-suited, precisely to the real object. The form of the result of cognition is the real definition, as the statement not merely of linguistic features, conceptual characteristics, but of Objective-constitutive properties; and precisely this real definition, being characteristically ‘concise’ and not spread out,

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represents the object considered from its structural Object-side. To give an example: the socialist real definition of the nation depicts, without all the far-fetched foreign nationalistic moustaches or even cosmopolitan great Chicagos, hotel sauces, levellings of today, precisely the concise Object-side of the real, this means in fact: it makes the constitutive-real structure in the object clear. The theory of Objects is thus the site of categories as the most general and then characteristically typical modes and forms of existence. (If it were not this specific site and on it, the theory of categories would coincide with the whole philosophy of the real and the latter likewise with the theory of categories.) So now, within the thus constituted layer of factbasedness, of structural object-suitedness, the possibility in this layer must also be distinguished separately and as separately determined. Important for this is the above-mentioned distinction between Object and real object: the purely structural possibility of the propensity to something is not yet the same as this real propensity itself, as the disposition in all the richly inter¬ woven, even richly disturbed, inhibited, and again victorious metamorphoses of reality. The fact-based object-suited Possible, grasped and defined in terms of Object theory, therefore definitely constitutes a separate differentiation in the category of possibility and is not, for instance, a superfluous doubling of the object-based real Possible. The fact-based Possible is the fact-based partially Conditional according to the structural genus, type, social context and legislative context of the matter. Partially Conditional appears here therefore as an openness strictly founded in the Object and thus only com¬ municated to hypothetical or problematic cognition, an openness of a more or less structurally determined kind. Two kinds of conditions appear here in all cases, internal and external ones. They interweave in interaction, in such a way however that the individual character of both is thoroughly preserved. But the fact-based merely Possible remains even if one of the two conditions, the internal or the external, should almost be fulfilled. Thus a blossom can of course let the fruit ripen within it with complete internal conditionality, but if the complete external condition of good weather is missing, then the fruit is still merely possible. Conversely, an even more reductive effect than the missing external condition is produced by the weakness of internal conditions when there is a simultaneous abundance of external ones. Of course, humanity always sets itself tasks it can solve, but if the great moment for solution is met by a faint-hearted generation,* * ‘The great moment is met by a faint-hearted generation’, from Goethe and Schiller’s ‘Xenien’, epigrams written mainly in 1796.

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then more than ever this solution is merely possible, i.e. only remains weakly possible. The lack of revolutionary consequences that followed from the 9th November 1918 in Germany provides an example of this, or, in another sphere, the unripened fruit of great German painting after Diirer, even though the external conditions still existed for it, however much the circle of ideology and patronage was that of a small state.* The partial condi¬ tionality must not therefore sink below a certain fraction in either of the two kinds of condition, otherwise over-compensation by the other kind of condition is itself impossible. But the interweaving remains of course, as becomes especially clear when the structure of the internal as well as the external condition is more firmly grasped, i.e. with the removal of that equivocation which has persisted for ages precisely in the Object-category of possibility. Possibility here in fact means both internal, active capability and external, passive capability-of-being-done; therefore, capability-of-beingother falls into capability-of-doing-other and capability-of-becoming-other. As soon as these two meanings have been concretely distinguished, the internal partial condition emerges as active possibility, i.e. as capacity, potency, and the external partial condition as possibility in the passive sense, as poten¬ tiality. Both are in fact interwoven: there is no working capability of capacity and its active ‘propensity’ without potentiality in a time, environment, society, without the usable ripeness of these external conditions. The political form of active possibility is the ability of the subjective factor; and the latter least of all can act without interweaving, without interaction with the objective factors of possibility, i.e. with the potentialities of that which can really happen or can at least be arranged, according to the ripeness of the external conditions. But not as if the external conditions themselves here fell out of possibility in its most significant sense, namely out of openness here in a fatalizing way. On the contrary: if possibility as capacity is the capability-of-doing-other, that which does not cancel but rather re¬ determines in all determinations, then possibility as objective potentiality is the capability-of-becoming-other, that which cannot be cancelled, but rather can be directed and re-determined in all determinations. And the latter always with such interweaving that, without potentiality of the capabilityof-becoming-other, neither the capability-of-doing-other of potency would Bloch is referring to ‘Kleinstaaterei’, the political division of Germany into small states which pertained until the nineteenth century. This was the outcome of the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. After 1848, with great foresight, Marx wrote: ‘Unless radical elements unite Germany by revolutionary means, Bismarck will unite it by reactionary Junker ones’. By 1871 Bismarck had done so.

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have space, nor, without the capability-of-doing-other of potency, would the capability-of-becoming-other of the world have a sense which could be mediated with human beings. Consequently even the Object category of possibility predominantly reveals itself as that which it is not by virtue of itself, but rather by virtue of the supporting intervention of human beings in what is still changeable: as a possible concept of salvation. It also revealed itself partly, of course, as a possible concept of disaster,* precisely on account of the capability-of-doing-other, but also on account of the capability-of-becoming-other within it, that no less provides room for a change for the worse, commensurate with the precarious material which can lie precisely in the changeability, and here therefore uncertainty of a situation. This precarious material, as negative stock of fact-based possibility, extends from the accident that can happen to us to the eruption of fascist hell, a possibility that was and still is concealed in the final stage of capitalism. The disaster character of the Possible thus militates against the above-mentioned salvation character, hope character of the Possible, which lies no less powerfully in the changeability of a situation, here however not in its uncertainty, but in its redeemahility, positive revocability. This nonprecarious, but beneficial element, as the so highly positive other stock of fact-based possibility, extends from the stroke of luck which can hap¬ pen to people to the realm of freedom which develops as socialist possibility in history and finally begins to become real. Everything which is thus capable of change (fortuna vertit) admittedly always contains an element of chance, but again in a different way. There is the merely singular and immediate aspect of an accident or a stroke of luck. But there is also a capability-of-being-other which does not occur on the surface in this way. Along these lines, Hegel distinguished with great vividness external con¬ tingency from dialectically mediated change of process; he did this by limiting external contingency to merely external necessity, in fact by declaring that they are identical. Consequently contingency is seen by Hegel solely in the immediately concrete and not in the mediatedly concrete, or in fact only on the edge of process: ‘The immediately concrete is namely a host of properties which are outside each other and more or less indifferent towards each other, and towards which for this very reason simple subjectivity that exists for itself’ (the incipient centring aspect of process) ‘is equally indifferent and leaves them to external and therefore contingent determination’ (Enzyklopadie, §250). This is contingency in the not at all * Bloch is punning on the German ‘Heil’ - salvation, and ‘UnheiT - disaster.

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trustworthy sense, that which externally disperses and disturbs normal and typical development more in previous history than in nature. But dialectically-mediated unenclosedness, as the possibility structure of lasting process, has nothing at all in common with poorly-mediated randomness. Though once again not as if that which is circulating in the capability-ofbeing-other of the process is now the strict opposite of every kind of chance and contingency. The enormous experiment of mediated capability-of-beingother in process does not yet possess this opposite and still has neither the calm nor even a legal title to possess it. Instead, there is at work in this capability-of-being-other of possibility once again precisely that which we may call contingency at its highest level, with the character of permanent, but in fact partial mediation. This kind of contingency, in the finally trustworthy sense of the matter, means creative wealth of variability which is open to formations and creations. This is a variability which is not external but mediated in a law-governed and fact-based way, yet precisely one of unthwarted change of direction, above all of unexhausted new formation. Here even a so-called contingency no longer coincides with merely external necessity, but it forms, as a contingency which is dialectically mediated with the material of law-based necessity, precisely the blooming, characteristic aspect, the ordered fullness of development of the open world. Contingency of this kind is of course equally still situation-based, but not in the sense of the precarious, it fulfils rather the mundus situalis of the process which is giving birth to the New. The strict opposite of every contingency would only be enclosed necessity no longer capable of varia¬ bility, but not in need of it either. Only this structurally enclosed necessity would be the fully Conditional per se, in which the internal and above all the external conditions are not merely completely ripe, but coincide. Though as yet no Objectivity has got to the bottom of the matter in this necessity to such an extent that the Objectivity itself coincides with its total foundation; so that it would in fact be structurally necessary. This coincidence was considered by Spinoza in his definition of God-nature as the causa sui and - with much greater hypostasis of logical identity - by Anselm of Canterbury in the self-foundation, the ‘aseitas’ (a se esse) of God. According to which the most perfect being necessarily exists because it exists out of its own intrinsicality, and consequently its essence also necessarily includes its existence, as its existence does its essence. It is not necessary to affirm that such object-based notions do not exist beyond their definition, unless in mere, more or less concretely anticipatable valueideals of the perfect coincidence of reason and manifestation. The framework

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of such a value-ideal is - even outside and opposed to all theology - the ‘one thing which is necessary’, and therefore that which has traditionally been designated as the ‘highest good’. However, since rebus sic imperfectis even what is designated thus is still by no means real, but at best in process, even this type of structural necessity exists once again only in - structural possibility. Though the latter now proves, with the horizon of the causa sui or achieved identity of existence and essence, to be the most decisive category of salvation. Since the ideal point where essential being and appearance coincide is always simultaneously the absolute target point for the structural line of the humanely positively Possible.

The ohjectively-real Possible The Can-Be would mean almost nothing if it remained without consequences. The Possible only has consequences, however, in that it does not occur merely as formally permissible or even as objectively supposable or even as open in an object-suited way, but in that it is a future-laden definiteness in the real itself. There is thus real-partial conditionality of the object which represents in the latter itself its real possibility. Thus man is the real possibility of everything which has become of him in his history and, above all, which can still become of him if his progress is not blocked. He is a possibility therefore which is not merely exhausted like an acorn in the enclosed realization of the oak-tree, but which has not yet ripened the whole of its internal and external conditions, condition-determinants. And in the unexhausted whole of the world itself: matter is the real possi¬ bility for all the forms which are latent in its womb and are delivered of it through process. In this most comprehensive concept of real possi¬ bility, the dynamei on (Being-In-Possibility) is located, which Aristotle himself defined as matter. For just as Heraclitus was the first to see the contradiction in things themselves, Aristotle was the first to recognize possibility in real terms, in the world-stock itself. From this point Real Possible becomes conceivable as substratum: ‘Everything that becomes in nature and art has matter, since everything that is becoming is capable (dynaton) of being and not being, but this (what can and cannot be) is in every case matter’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, 7). And it is instructive that that which reveals itself actively in this potentiality: the self-realizing form (entelechy) which is still dualistically separated from matter in Aristotle, recedes and itself becomes matter to the same extent that the

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concept of active potency accedes to that of passive potentiality. The ex contrario proof of this is the struggle of strict Arab theists, the socalled Motakhalim (that is, teachers of the word, of revealed faith) against the equation: real possibility = matter. To keep the omnipotence of the highest form (of the divine actus purus) absolute, instead of the dynamei on, they had to spread the wholly null void into a Primum before the world: God created the world out of the void, did not evoke it from matter, from real possibility. Conversely, in pantheistic-materialistic philosophers of the Middle Ages, for example in Avicenna, Averroes, Amalrich of Bena and David of Dinant, real possibility becomes matter for the whole ground of the world, and the divine creative will is always a moment of matter; in fact, God and matter become identical. Development in Averroes is ‘eductio formarum ex materia’, with the ‘dator formarum’ in the universe itself. Thus creation appears - with the omission of all dualism - solely as self-movement, self-fertilization of the matter of God; this matter contains the potentiality and simultaneously that potency immanent in it which makes an extra-worldly mover superfluous. And this semi-materialism of real possibility increases in line with the Renaissance in Giordano Bruno. In his work the world becomes totally the realization of the possibilities which are contained in uniform matter and as this. Natura naturans and natura naturata now coincide above and below ‘in permanent, eternal, generating, maternal matter’. The substratum real possibility thus becomes, in bold extrapolation from Aristotle, at the same time the source, not only the vessel of forms: ‘Hence matter, which.. .always remains fertile, must have the significant prerogative of being recognized as the sole substan¬ tial principle and as that which is and remains... That is also why some of them, because they had perhaps considered the relationship of forms in nature, as far as it could be discerned from Aristotle and others of a similar school of thought, finally concluded that the forms were only accidents and determinations in matter and that therefore the prerogative of being considered as actus and entelechy must also belong to matter’ (Bruno, ‘Cause, Principle and Unity’). These are therefore the first consequences when real possibility is taken as being so real that it simultaneously embraces the womb and generation, life and spirit, united in matter. And the womb also continues to remain fertile, the tendencylatency of that which can become in real terms is not enclosed in the material substratum. This definition of the dynamei on is of course one which perished in merely mechanical, mechanistic materialism. Matter as fullness first rightly had to shrink here, because quantitative science showed no

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trace of it and because total mechanics was the best crowbar against other¬ worldliness. But this shrinking was no less possible because Christian scholasticism had itself removed the Aristotelian concept of matter and even the variously pre-Socratic one (to which Bruno likewise refers) from the fecund region of the natura naturans. Which is also why the words of the English naturalist John Tyndall may also apply to the mechanical = all too mechanical concept of matter, above all to its deadening after¬ effect in the previous century: ‘If matter comes into the world as a beggar, it is because the Jacobs of theology have robbed it of its birthright.’* In any case, matter which is only understood mechanically subsequently became a clod estranged from history, for which all of its real possibility has already become static reality, in the sense of a beginning frozen to death from birth as it were. However, Aristotle’s definition which continues to have an effect, that of the dynamei on, a definition which has become capable of mutation, enters - itself mutatis mutandis - into historicaldialectical materialism. Subjective factor, ripeness of conditions, shift of quantity into quality, even changeability: all these dialectically-materialist moments of development are without substratum in a clod-matter. The dialectical element falls away from it, as a quantum which is of course moved mechanically but also immediately mechanized, or remains an epitheton ornans attached to it; transition from the realm of necessity into that of freedom only finds land in unenclosed process-matter. Precisely the extremes which have previously been held as far apart as possible: future and nature, anticipation and matter - chime together in the overdue groundedness of historical-dialectical materialism. Without matter no basis of (real) anticipation, without (real) anticipation no horizon of matter is ascertainable. Real possibility thus does not reside in any ready-made ontology of the being of That-Which-Is up to now, but in the ontology, which must constantly be grounded anew, of the being of That-Which-Is-Not-Yet, which discovers future even in the past and in the whole of nature. Its new space thus emphasizes itself in the old space in the most momentous manner: real possibility is the categorical In-Front-of-Itself of material movement considered as a process; it is the specific regional character of reality itself on the Front of its occurrence. How else could we explain the future-laden properties of matter? - there is no true realism without the true dimension of this openness. The Real Possible begins with the seed in which what is coming * The physicist John Tyndall (1820-93) was actually Irish.

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is inherent. What is prefigured in it drives on to unfold itself, but not of course as if it already existed beforehand, boxed into the narrowest space. The ‘seed’ itself still awaits many leaps, the ‘inherent propensity’ unfolds itself in the unfolding itself to ever new and more precise beginnings of its potentia-possibilitas. The real Possible in seed and inherent propensity is consequently never an encapsulated finished entity which, first existing in miniature, simply has to grow out. Instead it proves its openness as really developing unfolding, not as mere spilling out or folding out. Potentia-possibilitas repeatedly makes the initial root and Origo of processively continuing appearance original on a new level, with newly latent content. Thus the worker, this root of becoming human, is transformed throughout the whole of his further history and develops more and more precisely within it. In fact we can say that even man walking upright, this alpha of ours in which lies the propensity towards being completely unbowed and hence towards the realm of freedom, itself moves repeatedly transformed and more precisely qualified throughout the history of ever more concrete revolutions. Right up to classless man, who in general represents the ultimately intended propensity-possibility of history up to now. Hence the real Possible not only keeps the latter driving onwards, as propensity towards its Real, but also, as the ever further developing ultimate Totum of this propensity, has an essential relation to the reality which has already become. Thus the previously Real is both pervaded by the constant plus-ultra of essential possibility and illuminated by it at its leading edge. This illumination, a pre-appearing light on the horizon, which has also been reflected in almost all social utopias in a more or less abstract way, presents itself psychologically as wishful image forwards, morally as human ideal, and aesthetically as natural object-based symbol. The wishful images forwards have as their content the more or less grasped Possible of a better life in general; they are therefore cheerful and prelusive. In the main, the ideals have as their content the more or less realized Possible of an attempted perfect humanity, of perfect social conditions; they are therefore, in their guiding images and guiding panels, galvanizing and exemplary. The undistorted and unreified, beautiful human type and the classless relation¬ ship in which there is room for him belong here. Finally, the symbols have as their content, most definitely in the main matter, the Possible, which is always only realized in passing, of an unalienated identicality of existence with essence in nature as a whole; hence symbols are engaged and profound. They are, in contrast to ideals, cloaked, i.e. they mean their Own with particularly strong pathos of ‘meaning’, and do so because they do not

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have as their content a more or less realized Possible like ideals, but in fact have as their content a Possible which is only realized in themselves in passing. And furthermore, above all: this content therefore stands so much in the ‘meaning’ or as we may say more specifically of symbols: in the ‘cipher’, because it is more central and consequently for the time being less manifestable than the content of ideals. The respective carriers, existences of a symbolic meaning are of course far more numerous, indeed almost more random than those of the ideal, yet they are in return always related far more extensively in the whole of nature to what is essential. And they are centrally related to it; which on the other hand constitutes the difference of the symbol from the allegory, the simile of a thing with any number of other things without the region of sheer diversity ever being left. The reference of the symbol, however, is directed, as we have seen, precisely towards a uniformity of meaning; which is also why, in contrast to the diverse reference of allegories, which is always ambiguous, genuine symbols ultimately converge in their meaning, namely in the central aspect of their meaning. The socially conditioned respective direction-line towards the central aspect has varied in the history of the symbol - which led for long stretches through religion - but what has not varied is the respectively and repeatedly intended basic relation of the symbol-simile to an ‘Unum Verum Bonum’ of essence. However, because this very essence only lies in the Possible which is realized in passing and cannot he anywhere else, the symbolic - and this is now of crucial importance - is still cloaked not only in its expression but, in all genuine symbols, also in its content itself. Since the genuine symbolic content itself is still at a distance from its full appearance, and it is therefore also in objectively-real terms a cipher. It is precisely in the light of the real Possible that there thus occurs the overdue notation of a real core in the concept of the symbolic, and therefore of a concept which had previously been understood almost exclusively in subjective-idealistic terms, apart from one or two objective-idealistic versions in Hegel’s Aesthetics. In subjective-idealistic terms, because in fact all symbol-content was portrayed only as content that was cloaked for limited human reason, while the content was considered to be completely settled - without any distance from itself, radiant in transcendentally existing statics. On the contrary, however, the truth is this: the symbolic communicates itself to its expression solely from the perspective of its objectcontent, differentiates the individual symbols from the perspective of the objectively real material, whose variously situated content of cloakedness, content of factual identity they respectively depict as this cloaked and

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factually identical aspect. And it is solely this depictiveness of a real cipher, of a real symbol, which finally lends symbols their genuineness. The genuineness of a convergence of meaning which combines with the reality of this meaning in particular objects in the outside world containing an especially high degree of latency. To this category belong symbols like the tower, the spring, the evening breezes in Mozart’s ‘Figaro’, as well as the snowstorm in Tolstoy’s ‘Death of Ivan Illyich’, the starry sky above the fatally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, the high mountains at the end of ‘Faust’, and all symbols of sublimity in general. Literature has understood the symbolic region of the real Possible more clearly than previous philosophy owing to its figurative nature, but philosophy incorporates this region with strictness of concept and seriousness of connections. But both realistic literature and philosophy reveal that the world itself is full of real ciphers and real symbols, full of ‘signatura rerum’ in the sense of things which contain a central meaning. In this meaning¬ fulness they point in quite real terms towards their tendency and latency of ‘sense’, of a sense which might one day possibly completely receive man and his concerns. The partial conditionality, and hence possibility of the ripening of this propensity goes through all examples which test humane sense in which the world is so rich. But in fact with greater or lesser distance from the example, with greater or lesser Not-Yet of the full appearance, i.e. with that distance which so variously presents only wishful images, ideals and symbols rather than successful achievement. And which shows the essential Totum of the world in the heavy process of its being raised, never as a result. If the distance is played down, then abstract-infamous optimism arises; but if the distance is understood as the mediated perfectibility which it is, with all the components of danger, then the opposite of infamy arises: militant optimism. So much here for the real Possible and the essence within it in the propensity-state of that perfectible element which receives man - with a premonition of his future freedom. According to the most concrete of all Marx’s anticipations, the essence of the perfectible is ‘the naturalization of man, the humanization of nature’. That is the abolition of alienation in man and nature, between man and nature or the harmony of the unreified object with the manifested subject, of the unreified subject with the manifested object. Such a perspec¬ tive of absolute truth, that means here, of complete real being in the Real itself - and its breadth and depth is unavoidable, on penalty of relativism without outflow - opens up once again only real-essential possibility, not yet the real-essential necessity which is only inherent in that possibility itself.

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For this would be a necessity with totally sufficient, i.e. inescapable conditions for the existence of essence, for the essence of existence. On this side of this extreme non-contingency or situationlessness, real-essential necessity is also only - possibility, in fact a possibility with conditions which in reality hardly even partially exist. Lasting process, active hopeimage of a better world, mediated with tendency, galvanizing ideal, profound symbol, these remain the real perspectives, themselves anticipatory, of real possibility - the epitome of the Front-dimensions.

Memory: logical-static struggle against the Possible Easy to see how still many a new leaf can be turned over. A Not-Yet exists everywhere, so much is not yet conscious in man, so much in the world has not yet become. But both kinds of Not-Yet would not exist if it could not move in the Possible and turn towards its openness. Even so, the Can-Be has still been astonishingly little thought through and come to grips with. The category of the Possible, although so well-known and used every hour, has been a logical problem. This category has so far remained perhaps the most uncertain of the concepts which have been worked out philosophically in the course of the centuries and honed to sharpness. Certainly, it is the one which has been least followed through in ontological terms; hence it conventionally occurs almost exclusively in formal logic. Even when the theory of categories deals with the Possible, it is predominantly designated only as cognitive definition, not as objectdefinition. Of course, logicians like Joh. v. Kries, lesser and greater epigones of the usual like Verweyen, and ultimately N. Hartmann, who even calls himself an ontologist, have written diverse separate books on possibility. But since in these latter epigones the Possible is only recognized as conceptual relationship, they have written as good as nothing, that is, nothing real about it. In every case here, but no less in original philosophers too, whom we will consider shortly, the conspicuous emptying of the Possible occurs primarily through the failure to distinguish between still partial knowledge of the conditions and partially existing conditions themselves. Thus the problematically wavering judgement of an objectively decisive factual relation is repeatedly equated with the assertively decisive judgement of an objec¬ tively wavering factual relation, i.e. of the objectively existing possibility. The problematic judgement: ‘It is possible that Louise is at home’ thus covers the assertive judgement: ‘It is clear that in the foreseeable future

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it will be possible for a rocket to travel to the moon.’ The difference between the first and the second judgement clearly indicates, however, the not only logically, even psychologically immanent character, but in fact the external worldly character of a large part of modality. If the category of possibility is exclusively reduced to the mere knowledge-level of a supposition, then objective possibility must of course evaporate subjectively and idealistically in the external world. The Possible is then demonstrated away, as if no man had ever exposed himself to the modal element of danger, as if he had never really escaped, avoided or fallen prey to it. The Possible is then made into mere ‘anthropomorphous introjection’, as if not all organisms, with their reflex and reaction apparatus, were geared to an objectively real world of possibility; from the sea-anemone to the scenting deer, to the circumspection of homo sapiens. The Possible is de-realized to the status of ‘fiction’, as if the concept objective possibility did not fulfil the civil as much as the criminal law (liability, impossibilium nulla obligatio, conditional clause, negligence and so on). Nevertheless, even Sigwart, although he correctly defines mere possibility as something befitting the individual, ‘in so far as it contains the partial ground of that which will be’ (Logik I, 1904, p. 274), sees in the Possible only an expression of subjective indecision or even the resignation of our limited knowledge. Excess of problematic judgement-modality, underestimation of Object- and object-modality consequently provide the first motive for the idealistic denial of real possibility. But this is joined by a second motive for the denial of real possibility, and it is also to be found in great thinkers, moreover in those who are at no point subjective and idealistic. The block here is the same as the one which has also left the sister category of the Possible: the New as yet not thought through. The block is the coastal trip, condi¬ tioned according to class, around the given, indeed the past, is the aversion of static thinking to the world-concept of active openness and blue. This aversion is even to be found in such processive philosophers as Aristotle and Hegel, in spite of the enormous conception of a real dynamei on in the former and of the real dialectic in the latter. The positing of a finished One and All, of a universe in which all Possible is real (Nicholas of Cusa calls God ‘possest’, perfected ‘Could-Be’ , and even Giordano Bruno leaves no unrealized Possible in the totality of the world): this static positing has above all obstructed the space of the Open Possible. Thus the categorial concept of possibility as a whole lies in almost pure virgin land; it is the Benjamin among the great concepts. It always appears to be what is fresh, what is coming, that is not supposed

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to be considered here. Even the Sophists, in whom everything firm began intellectually to totter, drew nothing but derision from the Possible. So that everything and nothing is equally possible, since, as Gorgias says, there is nothing at all, neither That-Which-Is-Nothing nor That-Which-Is nor even anything in between, that can pass away or become, i.e. that could relate as possible to one or the other. No more radical, but more central was the denial of the Possible in the Megarian school, where it clearly also combined with the Eleatic theory of immobile being. The Megarian philosopher Diodoros Kronos, characteristically extending Zeno’s demon¬ stration of the non-existence of motion, invented his supposed proof of the non-existence of the Possible. This supposed proof remained famous (under the name of Kyrieuon) for centuries afterwards, both as supposed dialec¬ tical masterpiece, and above all in fact on account of the interest which static thinking took in it (cf. Zeller, Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie, 1882, p. I5iff.). Diodoros formed a syllogism: nothing Impossible can proceed from the Possible; but since a Possible that did not become real would allow Impossible to proceed from it, namely another Is than the Is that is, this Possible is itself impossible and the Real proven as the only Possible. Weak though this syllogism is, even the Roman Stoics took it over; in Epictetus and in Marcus Aurelius it plays a significant role in the satisfaction with the world-order free from possibility and full of necessity, and was transmitted to the later amor fati by Cicero (De fato 6, 7). Denial of the Possible, neo-Stoicism, and amor fati join hands in great affinity in Spinoza: to see sub specie aeternitatis (Ethik II, Proposition 44, Addition 2) means by definition to see everything possible already as necessarily real. Since from the point of view of Spinozistic eternity, because it coincides with the unconditional reason-consequence relationship (as the mathematical Fatum of the world), there is nothing partially conditional, that is, nothing possible any more. Which excludes for Spinoza’s God the choice between the infinitely numerous logical possibilities, which a Leibniz of course still left spread out before his God (as realizer). Even inside the existing world, as one which is realized by its creator out of infinitely many possible ones, Leibniz still recognizes possibility as propensity, even though as one which cannot develop anything that is in reality new either, i.e. anything not contained in the whole of the previous world. And even if Leibniz, the only great philosopher of the Possible since Aristotle, also gives space to an infinite number of other possible world-contexts, these ‘primae possibilitates’ once again only live in the reason of the creator and not as possibilities still capable of realization projecting into this world

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now realized for once. Spinoza, however, even decides, with all the fundamental force of amor fati, against the possibilities in God: ‘Things could not be created in any other way or in any other order by God than they are created’ (Ethik I, Proposition 33). This is therefore, with regard to the Possible, Diodoros Kronos on a grand scale in metaphysics. And once again it was not as if the distaste for the Possible ended here, this distaste also inhabited philosophies which could quite openly pay homage to the Possible; as in Kant, or more concretely in Hegel. Kant flaunted the ideal, Hegel progress in the consciousness of freedom; nevertheless, the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ stresses the Possible just as little as, mutatis mutandis, Hegel’s ‘Logic’ and ‘Encyclopaedia’. Thus Kant brings possibility (both that ‘a priori to things through concepts’ and that ‘which can only be taken from reality in experience’) over on to the side of pure forms of thought. Of course, all pure forms of thought or categories, hence even the modal ones, constitute experience here, as the ‘system of appearances’ which has been established through the categories, but as for the categories of modality (possibility, reality, necessity) Kant urges decided caution precisely with regard to experience. Hence the statement: ‘The categories of modality have the special property that they do not in the least enlarge, as determination of the object, the concept to which they are ascribed as predicate, but only express the relationship to the cognitive capacity’ (Werke, Hartenstein, III, p. 193). Consequently, Kant does not recognize objectively-real Possible at all, objectively-real Real is also only added to the modally Real through intuition and not in the least through connection with an assertive judgement, and hence with a reality-judgement of modality. Nevertheless, even if at the cost of dualism, Kant must make room for possibility, namely in the peculiar area of thinking above recognizable experience, which belongs to moral ‘reason’ and not to cognitive ‘understanding’; which is therefore inhabited by the ‘postulate’ and by the ‘ideal’. The postulate that was later so powerfully mobilized by Fichte: ‘You can since you ought to’ means possibility as capacity, as potency. The ideal which in Kant is consistently dominant, and abstractly even given precedence to politics: ‘Extension of the domination of moral freedom’ - means, on the other hand, possibility as potentiality of an, unfortunately endless, approach to this ideal in history. But possibility understood in this way is not object-based real possibility; there are no paths to it in the world of experience of transcendental idealism. And in fact it is by no means separately distinguished even as possibility of obliga¬ tion, of postulate, of ideal; in the ahistorical field of vision of a ‘consciousness

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in general’ there was of course inclination, but no constitutive place for the future, for the ‘hope of the future’, as Kant said in the ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’ (Werke II, p. 357). Thus not only ‘understanding’ of the categories of experience, but also ‘reason’ as the ‘mother of ideas’ restricted space for the Possible. And what is the ultimate status of possibility in Hegel, the pronounced philosopher of (concrete) reason rather than (abstract) understanding? Hegel, who is otherwise so objectively idealistic, surpris¬ ingly quotes with approval the passage from Kant given above which keeps modality apart from the real object, an approval of Kant which is in fact rare in Hegel. Concerning the Kant quotation he adds: ‘In fact possibility is the empty abstraction of the reflection-in-itself, that which was previously called the Inner, except that now it is defined as the resolved, merely posited external Inner, and thus in fact also posited as a mere modality, as insufficient abstraction, in more concrete terms belonging only to subjective think¬ ing ... In particular, 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’ (Enzyklopadie, §143). And even when Hegel understands possibility not only as empty abstraction of the reflection-in-itself, but also as an In-itself-moment of reality, that which he calls real possibility here is wholly surrounded by the circle of reality that has already become: ‘Hence that which is really possible can no longer be any different; under these conditions and circumstances nothing different can follow’ (Logik, Werke IV, p. 211). Hegel is evidently also speaking here as an enemy of empty speculation, of the idle rearrange¬ ment of history in accordance with what could have happened, of the abstract ideal of ‘the way a girl should be’, of ‘the way the State should be’ and so on. But he is also speaking as non-philosopher of the future, as cycle-dialectician of the past or, which amounts to the same thing, of that which is eternally occurring, eternally returning in cycles, in short, that reactionary element in Hegel is speaking here for which in any case philosophy always comes too late to change. For which the thought, according to the preface to the ‘Philosophy of Right’, in any case only appears in the time ‘after reality has completed its formation process and has finished itself’. There is also an element of Diodoros Kronos in this state¬ ment, on a scale that has become grand, this time as celebration of the past, the past which supposedly encompasses the whole world. Precisely this pathos of statics, so astonishing in the powerful dialectician, thus caused Hegel to neglect possibility or to transpose it into that which is subordinately over and done with. The following proposition of Hegel’s, closing up

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process, is also relevant here: ‘That which is internal is also externally available and vice-versa; appearance shows nothing that is not in essential being, and there is nothing in essential being which is not manifested’ (Enzyklopadie, §139). Against this we could admittedly set the earlier statement from the preface to the ‘Phenomenology’: ‘It is. . .not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The mind has broken with the previous world of its existence and imagination and is on the point of sinking it into the past, and is about the work of reshaping it’ (Werke II, p. 10). Thus the conclusion from this statement, which Hegel simply did not draw, would then of course be this: where there is a time of ‘birth’, there is also the womb of a real Possible from which it springs, and where there is ‘work of reshaping’, the potency of the reshaping and the potentiality of what can be re-shaped must be more than merely empty abstraction of the reflection-in-itself. Likewise, the logic and ontology of the wide realm of the Possible has been stifled by the static delusion that everything possible in the Real has already been thoroughly formed. That consequently it is as unimportant as the ear from which the corn has emerged, or as chess-pieces after the game is finished. The truth is however the Marxist one, contrasting with all previous philosophy, that the point is to change the world as a correctly interpreted world, that is, precisely as a dialectically-materialistically processive world, as an unenclosed world. Changing the changeable world is the theory-practice of the realizably real Possible on the Front of the world, of the world process. And at this end the real Possible, which is homeless in every contemplative-static philosophy, is the real problem of the world itself: as the still unidentical character of appearance and real essential be¬ ing, ultimately of existence and essence within it.

Realizing possibility Man is that which still has much before it. He is repeatedly transformed in his work and by it. He repeatedly stands ahead on frontiers which are no longer such because he perceives them, he ventures beyond them. The Authentic in man and in the world is outstanding, waiting, lives in fear of being frustrated, lives in hope of succeeding. Because what is possible can equally well turn into Nothing as into Being: the Possible, as that which is not fully conditional, is that which is not settled. Hence, from the outset, if man does not intervene, both fear and hope are equally

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appropriate when confronted with this real suspension, fear in hope, hope in fear. This is why the Stoics - wise or all too passively wise men - advised that man should not settle in the vicinity of circumstances over which he has no power. But since in man active capacity particularly belongs to possibility, the display of this activity and bravery, as soon as and in so far as it takes place, tips the balance in favour of hope. Bravery in this sense is the counter-move to the negative possibility of the wrong path into nothingness. But it is only a counter-move in that, unlike the rash, abstract heroic deed, it secures for itself the most precise mediation with the given conditions. That is: mediates itself with the ripeness of these conditions and with their content which is on the social agenda. Only this is practice according to the respectively Possible in the field of the general possibility-being of unenclosed history and world. Only practice of this kind can lead the matter pending in the historical process: the naturalization of man, the humanization of nature, out of real possibility into reality. A future land, like every Totum of the Possible, but it is full of historically tendential mediation which can be pursued precisely. Just as time, according to Marx, is the space of history, so too the future mode of time is the space of the real possibilities of history, and it invariably lies on the horizon of the respective tendency of world occurrence. That is, theoretically and practically: on the Front of the world process, where the decisions are made, new horizons open up. And the process into this future is solely that of matter which is concentrated and formed through to the end in man, its most highly developed blossom. What is ours and also what is not yet ours has this path ahead of it, it is rough and open. Men and things are united in this track, in this way man and world are connected best. And, not more than a few thousand years ago, the decisive blow was delivered by men, by means of which what we call, in presumptuous, but only temporarily exaggerated fashion, world history was opened up. Man and his work has thus become a decisive factor in the historical world process; with work as a means of becoming human itself; with revolutions as the midwives of the future society with which the current one is pregnant; with the Thing For Us, the world as mediated homeland, towards which nature is in possibility which has hardly even been entered upon, let alone exploded open. The subjective factor is the unenclosed potency to turn things here, the objective factor is the unenclosed potentiality of the turnability, changeability of the world within the framework of its laws, its laws which are however also legally variable under new conditions. Both factors are always interwoven with

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one another in dialectical interaction and only the isolating overemphasis of the one (causing the subject to become the ultimate fetish) or of the other (causing the object, in apparent self-motivation, to become the ultimate Fatum) tears subject and object apart. Subjective potency coincides not only with what is turning, but also with what is realizing in history, and it coincides with this all the more, the more men become conscious producers of their history. Objective potentiality coincides not only with what is changeable, but also with what is realizable in history, and it coincides with this all the more, the more the external world independent of man is also one which is increasingly mediated with him. There is cer¬ tainly also a realizing element, with wild efficacity and seed,* even great breadth, in the pre-human and extra-human world. It is here, although with no or with weak consciousness, from the same intensive root from which the humanly subjective potency then also sprang. But man as a realizing element - above all in so far as and after it is no longer endowed with false consciousness - concentrates even more certainly the central potency in the potency-potentiality of processive matter. This central potency thus stands increasingly in the possibility of itself increasingly meeting, meeting up with the driving core-interest of all occurrence, this origin and content of final real possibility, of identifying it, and indeed of making itself manifestly identical with it. However transfinite all alignments of this kind may be, they nevertheless lie along the rigorous and consistent line of extension of what has been designated as the conscious production of history - contrary to unfathomed fate. So that in fact the realization itself of what is realizing, i.e. the adequate manifestation of what is forming history, stimulating process, as the core of real possibility, constitutes the both remotest and yet positively deepest real possibility; with hardly even partially existing conditions. Nevertheless, the whole of the conscious production of history is visible here: grasped, achieved, extended causa sui in society and nature. Whereby the realization of what is realizing, this final real possibility, is the same as the final real problem: to lift society and nature on to their hinges. And precisely the world of this final real possibility, the world of causa sui, which can at least be anticipated in terms of definition, presents itself in exemplary form as: harmony of the unreified object with the manifested subject, of the unreified subject with the manifested object. These are - turned towards a near and distant fixture - the basic proportions of human development. However, Cf. Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I, 384.

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the hinge in human history is its producer - working man, who is finally no longer dispossessed, alienated, reified, subjugated for the profit of his exploiters. Marx is the realized teacher of this resolution of the proletariat, of this possible mediation, which is becoming real, of men with themselves and their normal happiness. However, the hinge in the history of nature, which, in contrast to his own history, man of course influences but does not make, is that agent of extra-human occurrence, still hardly mediated with us, indeed still hypothetical, which is abstractly called natural force and was once called in untenably pantheistic terms natura naturans, which can however be made concretely accessible the moment the working man, this most powerful, highly conscious part of the universal material agent, by no means separated from the rest of nature, begins to emerge from the semi-incognito of his previous alienation. Marx is the essential teacher of this approaching mediation with the production-centre of world occurrence in general, of the, as Engels puts it, transformation of the supposed Thing In Itself into the Thing For Us to the extent of a possible humanization of nature. Free people on free ground, grasped thus in a total way, this is the final symbol of the realization of what is realizing and hence of the most radical frontier-content in the objectively real Possible as a whole.

CHANGING THE WORLD OR MARX’S ELEVEN THESES ON FEUERBACH

19

Thinking ahead has long since been announced and there to be heard. Only cowards talk their way out of everything, and liars remain general. Only they conceal themselves in baggy or crazy garments, always try to be somewhere other than where we can catch them out. But what is true can never be defined enough, even when and especially when the matter is still dawning on our vision. Through this early feel for what is essential, even the nineteen-year-old Marx was perfectly successful in formulating sharp central propositions in the surviving letter to his father. This type wants to get to the heart of the matter from the outset, never plays itself out into what is futile, discards it as soon as it recognizes it as such. Thus, with all broadly perceived, carefully considered material that ensues, it is capable of being on the ball again at any time, hitting home and scoring

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points. The grasped element that knows how to grasp itself in this fashion thus shows the points along the way. With and through these the pull forwards now sharpens itself so that even possible sidetracks may still serve it. Of course this directing quality is subsequently not always as easy to survey as it is to quote, in its brevity. For significant brevity is coherent, that is why it is the least quick to put itself into words.

Time of drafting Thus the understanding must repeatedly prove itself anew in such propositions. This nowhere more freshly than in the terse collection of the most terse directions which are known as the Eleven Theses on Feuerbach. Marx wrote them down in April 1845 in Brussels, most probably in the burst of preparatory work for ‘The German Ideology’. The theses were not published until 1888 by Engels, as an appendix to his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy’. Here Engels slightly edited Marx’s occasionally sketchy text for style, naturally without the slightest change of content. Concerning the theses, Engels writes in the foreword to his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’: ‘They are notes for later elaboration, jotted down quickly, definitely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which the seed of genius of the new view of the world is set down.’ Feuerbach had recalled us from pure thought to sensory perception, from mind to man, together with nature as his basis. As we know, this both ‘humanistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ rejection of Hegel ( with man as the main idea, nature rather than mind as primary) had a strong influence on the young Marx. Feuerbach’s ‘The Essence of Christianity’, 1841, his ‘Provisional Theses for a Reform of Philosophy’, 1842, and even his ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, 1843, seemed all the more liberating since even the left-wing school of Hegelians could not detach itself from Hegel, in fact did not go beyond a merely internal Hegelian critique of the master of idealism. ‘The enthusiasm’, says Engels in ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, looking back at it around fifty years later, ‘was general: we were all momentarily Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new interpretation, and how greatly - despite all critical reser¬ vations - he was influenced by it, we can read in ‘The Holy Family’ (Lud¬ wig Feuerbach, Dietz, 1946, p. 14). The German youth of that time believed it could at last see land instead of heaven, human, of this world . Meanwhile Marx very soon detached himself from this all too vague

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humanness of this world. His activity on the ‘Rheinische Zeitung’ had brought him into far closer contact with political and economic questions than the left-wing Hegelians, or even the Feuerbachians enjoyed. This very contact increasingly led Marx from the critique of religion, to which Feuerbach restricted himself, to the critique of the state, indeed already of the social organization which - as the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of State’, 1841-3, recognizes - determines the form of the state. In Hegel’s distinction between bourgeois society and state, emphasized by Marx, more economic consciousness was in fact already concealed than in his epigones, even in the Feuerbachians. The separation from Feuerbach occurred with respect and in the first place as a correction or even as a mere amendment, but the totally different, social viewpoint is clear from the beginning. On 13th March 1843 Marx thus writes to Ruge: ‘For me Feuerbach’s aphorisms are only incorrect on one point, he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. This is however the only alliance through which current philosophy can become truth’ (MEGA I, 1/2, p. 308). The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, 1844, contain another significant celebration of Feuerbach, admittedly as a contrast to the woolgathering of Bruno Bauer; they praise above all among Feuerbach’s achievements the ‘foundation of true materialism and of real science, in that Feuerbach likewise makes the relationship between “man and man’’ into the fundamental principle of his theory’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 152). But the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ are already a lot further beyond Feuerbach than they declare. The relationship between ‘man and man’ in them does not remain an abstract anthropological one at all, as it does in Feuerbach, instead the critique of human self-alienation (transferred from religion to the state) already penetrates to the economic heart of the alienation process. This not least in the splendid passages on Hegelian phenomenology, in which the historically formative role of work is identified, and Hegel’s work interpreted in the light of it. At the same time, however, the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ criticize this work because it interprets human work-activity only as mental, not as material. The breakthrough to political economy, i.e. away from Feuerbach’s general idea of man, is accomplished in the first work undertaken in collaboration with Engels, in ‘The Holy Family’, likewise in 1844. The ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ already contained the sentence: ‘Workers themselves are capital, a commodity (l.c., p. 103), whereby nothing more of Feuerbachian human¬ ness remains here than its negation in capitalism; ‘The Holy Family’ noted capitalism itself as the source of this strongest and final alienation.

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Instead of Feuerbachian generic man, with his abstract naturalness which always remains the same, a historically changing ensemble of social relation¬ ships now clearly appeared and above all: one that is antagonistic in class terms. Alienation, of course, embraced both: the exploiting class as well as that of the exploited, above all in capitalism, the strongest form of this relinquishing of self, false objectification of self. ‘But’, states ‘The Holy Family’, ‘the first class feels happy and confirmed in this self-alienation, knows that the alienation is its own power and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence; the second class feels itself destroyed in alienation, perceives in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 206). Which in fact showed the respective class-based methods of production and exchange based on the division of labour, particularly the capitalist ones, to be the finally discovered source of aliena¬ tion. Marx was a materialist at the latest from 1843 onwards; ‘The Holy Family’ gave birth to the materialist interpretation of history in 1844, and with it scientific socialism. And the ‘Eleven Theses’, produced between ‘The Holy Family’ of 1844/45 and ‘The German Ideology’ of 1845/46, thus represent the formulated departure from Feuerbach, together with a highly original entry into a new original inheritance. Politically empirical experience from the Rhineland period plus Feuerbach made Marx immune to the ‘mind’ and nothing but ‘mind’ of the left-wing school of Hegelians. The adopted standpoint of the proletariat allowed Marx to become causally and concretely, that is, truly (fundamentally) humanistic. As is self-evident, the departure here is not a complete break. References to Feuerbach run through large parts of Marx’s work, even after the departure of the ‘Eleven Theses’. Closest to the abandoned land, if only for chronological reasons, stands ‘The German Ideology’ which directly followed the theses. Many critical approaches of the theses return in it, although of course the critique of Feuerbach and the murderous demolition of second-rate Hegelian epigones are vastly different here. Feuerbach still belonged to bourgeois ideology, so the analysis of its pseudo-radical manifestations of decay, such as Bruno Bauer and Stirner,* also had to implicate him in ‘The German Ideology’. But in such a way that in places the philosopher himself supplied the handle of the logical weapon with which Marx also intervened against him, but above all against the leftwing Hegelians. Consequently, ‘The German Ideology’ fundamentally

Max Stirner, 1806-56, nom de plume of the German individualist philosopher Johann Kaspar Schmidt.

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begins with the name of Feuerbach and criticizes, starting out from his critique of religion, the simply inner idealistic ‘conquering’ of idealism. ‘It has not occurred to any of these philosophers to inquire about the connec¬ tions of German philosophy with German reality, about the connections of their critique with their own material surroundings’ (MEGA I, 5, p. 10). However, Marx stresses on the other hand that Feuerbach ‘is to be greatly preferred to the “pure” materialists in that he realizes that man is also a “sensory object” In fact, the recognition cited above indicates the impor¬ tance of Feuerbach for the early development of Marxism just as much as the critique of his abstract, ahistorical notion of the human being indicates the un- and indeed anti-Feuerbachian character of fully developed Marxism itself. The recognition states: without man equally being a ‘sensory object’, it would have been much more difficult to have worked out human activity materialistically as the root of all social things. Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism thus marks the facilitated possible transition from mere mechanical to historical materialism. The critique states: without the concretization of what is human into really existing, and above all socially active men, with real relationships to one another and to nature, materialism and history would have in fact continually fallen apart, despite all ‘anthropology’. In this connection, however, Feuerbach always remains important for Marx, both as a transit point and as the only contemporary philosopher of whom an analysis is at all possible, clarifying and fruitful. The basic thoughts to which Marx critically reacts in this way, and via which he makes productive progress, are essentially contained in Feuerbach’s central work ‘The Essence of Chris¬ tianity’ of 1841. Feuerbach’s ‘Provisional Theses for a Reform of Philosophy’ of 1842 and the ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’ of 1843 also come into consideration. The earlier writings of the philosopher can hardly have been of any importance for Marx, since Feuerbach, at least until 1839, was too unoriginal, and lay too much under the influence of Hegel. Only from that time on did Feuerbach apply the Hegelian concept of self-alienation to religion. Only from that time on did the earlier Hegelian say his first thought had been God, his second reason, and his third and last was man. This means: just as the Hegelian philosophy of reason had overcome churchbelief, so philosophy now put man (with the inclusion of nature as his basis) in place of Hegel. Despite all this, however, Feuerbach could not find the path to reality; precisely the most important aspect of Hegel: the historicaldialectical method, he rejected. It was only the ‘Eleven Theses’ that became signposts out of mere anti-Hegelianism into reality which can be changed, out of the materialism of the base behind the lines into that of the Front.

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Question of grouping How the theses should be ordered is both an old and a new question. For the way they stand, for private reference, not intended for publica¬ tion, they repeatedly overlap. They also present the same content in another place, do not always make the reason for their division and sequence evident. The requirements of teaching have thus occasioned various attempts to rearrange the theses as they belong together and hence to divide them into groups. In doing this, the attempt is sometimes made to let the sequence of numbers stand, just as if the ‘Eleven Theses’ could be subsumed one after the other, in a direct row. For example, such a grouping which sticks to the numbers looks as follows: Theses I, 2, 3 are under the heading: Unity of Theory and Practice in Thought, Theses 4 and 5 under: Under¬ standing of Reality in Contradictions, Theses 6, 7, 8, 9 under: Reality itself in Contradictions, Theses 10,11 under: Location and Task of Dialectical Materialism in Society. This is the arrangement according to figures; since there are several other such arrangements quite different in terms of content, it shows how little instructive the mere place value of the numbers is here. Each of these arrangements treats the order in too exalted a fashion on the one hand, in that they allow it to remain eternally entrenched, as in the Twelve Table Law* or in the Ten Commandments, while on the other hand they treat it in too lowly and formalistic a fashion, as if it was a series of stamps. But numbering is not systematics, and Marx needs this substitute least of all. Hence the theses must be grouped philosophically, not arithmetically, that is, the order of the theses is solely that of their themes and contents. There is, as far as can be seen, still no commentary on the Eleven Theses; only when there is one, arising out of the common cause itself, does the continuously productive coherence of their brevity and depth also open up. Then there appears: firstly, the epistemological group dealing with perception and activity (Theses 5, 1, 3); secondly, the anthropological-historical group dealing with self alienation, its real cause and true materialism (Theses 4, 6, 7, 9, 10); thirdly, the uniting or theorypractice group, dealing with proof and probation (Theses 2, 8). Finally there follows the most important thesis, the password that not only marks a Final parting of the minds, but with whose use they cease to be nothing but

Twelve Table Law - the earliest Roman legal code, covering civil, criminal and religious law, introduced in 451-450 B.c.

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minds (Thesis 11). Strictly speaking, the epistemological group is opened by Thesis 5, the anthropological-historical group by Thesis 4; since these theses describe the two basic theories of Feuerbach which Marx relatively accepts, and which he goes on beyond in the remaining theses of the respective groups. The basic theory adopted is the rejection of abstract thinking in Thesis 5, the rejection of human self-alienation in Thesis 4. And corresponding to the first basic feature of materialist dialectics, the depiction of which announces itself here, between the individual theses within each respective group there is free, complementary movement of voices; just as, between the groups themselves, continual correlation is taking place, forming a coherent unified whole.

Epistemological group: perception and activity Theses 5, 1, 3

It is recognized here 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. Feuerbach reminded us of this at a time when every academic street-corner still resounded with mind, concept and nothing but concept. Thesis 5 stresses this contribution: Feuerbach is ‘not content’ with cerebrality, he wants his feet on the perceived ground. But Thesis 5, and then above all Thesis 1, both make clear that with contemplative sensoriness, the only kind Feuerbach understands, his feet cannot yet move and the ground itself remains unnegotiable. The person who perceives in this way does not even try to move, he remains standing in a state of comfortable enjoyment. Hence Thesis 5 teaches: mere perceiving ‘does not understand sensoriness as practical, as human-sensory activity’. And Thesis I reproaches the whole of previous materialism for only understanding perception ‘under the form of the object’, ‘not however as human, sensory activity, practice, not subjectively’. Hence it happened that the active side, in contrast to materialism, ‘was developed from idealism - but only abstractly, since idealism obviously does not know real sensory activity as such’. The inactive perception in which all previous materialism persists, including that of Feuerbach, is thus replaced by the human activity factor. And this happens even within the context of the sensory, i.e. immediate, fundamentally beginning knowledge: sensoriness as knowledge, as real basis of cognition,

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is thus by no means the same as (contemplative) perception. The concept of activity which is thus stressed by Marx in Thesis I in fact derives from idealistic epistemology, and not from idealistic epistemology as such, but only from that developed in the new bourgeois age. For this concept pre¬ supposes as a base a society where the ruling class sees or wishes to see itself in activity, i.e. work. However, this is only the case in capitalist society in so far as work, or rather: the appearance of work around the ruling class, in contrast to all pre-bourgeois societies is here no longer a dishonour, but is respected. This results out of the necessity of making profit, out of the forces of production being unleashed in this profit-society. Work, which had been held in contempt in the ancient slave-owning societies, even in feudal society with its system of serfdom (in Athens even sculptors were counted as philistines), is obviously not reflected in the thoughts of the ruling class either, in total contrast to the ideology of the entrepreneur, the bourgeois, the so-called homo faber. Whose profitdynamic, becoming free in the new age, forming the new bourgeois age, still by a long chalk progressive, also certainly makes itself evident in the superstructure and activates the base itself. Both morally, in the shape of a so-called work ethic, and epistemologically, in the shape of a concept of activity, a work logos in cognition. The work ethic, preached particularly by the Calvinists for the purpose of creating capital, this capitalist vita activa contrasted with aristocratic idleness, and also with the vita contemplativa of a quiet, monkish, scholarly existence. In parallel fashion, the work logos in cognition, this concept of ‘producing’ particularly exaggerated in bourgeois rationalism, differed from the ancient and also scholastic cognitive concept of mere receiving: vision, visio, passive depiction. As it survives contained in the concept of ‘Theoria’ itself, con¬ sistent with the original vision-sense of the word. Even Plato is, cum grano salis, ultimately a receiving sensualist in this manner; for however ideally and purely related to ideas his vision pretends to be, it is in fact still essentially receptive vision, and the thought-process is consistently understood in keeping with sensory perception. But then even Democritus, the first great materialist, who in fact sets the tone until Marx, is likewise trapped in this work-shy ideology which does not reflect the work-process. Even Democritus only understands cognition in passive terms; thinking, through which for him the truly real is known, the real dimension of the atoms together with their mechanism, is explained here solely by the impression of corres¬ ponding little pictures (eidola), which detach themselves from the surface of things and flow into the person who is perceiving and knowing. On

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the question of epistemological non-activity there is therefore no difference at all between Plato and Democritus; both epistemologies are united by the slave-owning society, which means here: the absence of despised workactivity in the philosophical superstructure. And now: the paradox appears that rationalism, the idealism of the new age, which often distanced itself far from Plato, reflected the work-process much more powerfully in epistemological terms than the materialism of the new age, which never distanced itself very far from its ancient progenitor Democritus. The calmly depicting mirror, this omission of the concept of work, is thus, up to and including Feuerbach, materialistically more common than the pathos of ‘production’, and especially of the dialectical reciprocal depiction of subject-object, object-subject on to each other. Among the more recent materialists only Hobbes teaches rational ‘production’, with the principle which is valid until Kant: only such objects are knowable which can be constructed mathematically. But greatly though Hobbes, with the help of this principle, was able to define philosophy as theory of the mathematicalmechanical motion of bodies, and therefore as materialism, for his part he just as little succeeded in getting beyond the ‘form of the object’ criticized by Marx, namely beyond merely contemplative materialism. Something different occurred within idealism when ‘production’ passed from geometric construction into the real work-form of historical genesis. This was first decisively achieved in Hegel; the ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ was the first work to discuss seriously the dynamics of the epistemological concept of work, at least in historical-idealistic terms. This was also far superior to the merely mathematical-idealistic ‘production’ pathos, which, in the case of the great rationalists of the manufacturing period, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, had influenced their semi- or total idealism. There is no better witness to this significance of Hegel’s Phenomenology, which was not in the least understood by Feuerbach, than Marx in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’: Marx sees the greatness of the Phenomenology precisely in the fact that it ‘understands the essence of work and compre¬ hends Objective man, true because real man, as a result of his own work’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 156). This statement thus best explains the deficiency mentioned above of merely perceiving materialism, up to and including Feuerbach: previous materialism lacks the constantly oscillating subject-object relation called work. Hence in fact it understands the Object, reality, sensoriness only ‘under the form of the object’, omitting ‘human-sensory activity’. Whereas Hegel’s Phenomenology occupied, as Marx says, ‘the standpoint of modern political economy’ (l.c., p. 157). Feuerbach,

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however, still occupied in epistemological terms the standpoint of slave¬ owning society or even of serfdom, on account of the non-active, still contemplatory element in his materialism. At the same time Marx of course makes it clear that bourgeois activity is still not the complete, right kind. It cannot be so precisely because it is only appearance of work, because the production of value never emanates from the entrepreneur, but from peasants, manual workers, ultimately wage-earners. And because the abstract, reified, confused circulation of goods on the free market allowed nothing more than an ultimately passive, external, abstract relationship to it. For this reason Thesis I stresses: even the epistemological reflection of activity could only be an abstract one, ‘since idealism of course does not know real, sensory activity as such’. However, even the bourgeois materialist Feuerbach, who wishes to get away from abstract thinking, who seeks real Objects rather than reified thoughts, omits human activity from this real being; he understands it ‘not even as Objective activity’. This is strikingly elaborated in the intro¬ duction to the ‘German Ideology’: ‘Feuerbach is speaking specifically of the perception of natural science, he mentions secrets which only became apparent to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and trade? Even this ‘pure’ natural science of course receives its purpose and material only through trade and industry, through sensory activity of men. The activity, this continuing sensory working and creating, this production is so much the basis of the whole of the sensory world that, even if it were interrupted for only a year, Feuer¬ bach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but very soon also miss the whole human world and his own ability to perceive, indeed his own existence. Of course the priority of external nature remains at the same time, and of course all this is not applicable to original men, produced through generatio aequivoca; but this distinction only makes sense in so far as man is regarded as being different from nature. This nature which precedes human society is not incidentally the nature in which Feuerbach lives, not the nature which no longer exists anywhere today except perhaps on one or two Australian coral islands of more recent origin, i.e. does not exist for Feuerbach either’ (MEGA I, 5, p. 33f.). How crucially human work, which precisely as an Object is completely homeless in Feuerbach, is emphasized in these lines as an important, if not the most important Object in the world which surrounds men. Accordingly, therefore, the Being that conditions everything now itself contains active men. This has quite astonishing consequences, they make

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Thesis 3 above all especially important - challenging not only Feuerbach, but also vulgar Marxists. Two further concepts of the ‘sensory world’, a bad one and one that is often misunderstood, are therefore worth noting in this truly Objective connection, they are most intimately related to it. They concern, after all, the empiricist favourite children or even trump-cards of that supposedly activity-shy perception which sees the ‘circumstances’ merely as that which is standing around men. One is socalled givenness, a particularly object-based, i.e. apparently materialistically related concept. However, apart from the fact that it is, semantically, a changeable concept that would not be valid if there were no subject to which alone something is given or can be given, there is in the world which constitutes the human environment hardly anything given which is not equally something worked on. Hence Marx speaks of the ‘material’ which natural science only receives through trade and industry. In reality, only surface contemplation shows the given; after a little probing, however, every Object of our normal environment reveals itself to be by no means sheer datum. It proves itself instead to be the end result of previous workprocesses, and even the raw material, apart from the fact that it is totally changed, was fetched from the forest by work or hewn out of the rocks or extracted from the depths of the earth. So much for the first passive trump-card which is obviously not one at all, but only counts and wins the trick from the surface standpoint. The second trump-card of supposedly activity-shy perception, however, does employ a perfectly legitimate, in fact decidedly materialistic concept to begin with, namely the primacy of being over consciousness. In epistemological terms this primacy expresses itself as the external world which exists independently of human consciousness, in historical terms as priority of the material base over the mind. But once again Feuerbach hardened this truth one-sidedly, he exaggerated it mecha¬ nistically, in that he omitted activity here too. Within the province of normal human environment, independence of being from consciousness is by no means the same as independence of being from human work. The independence of this external world from consciousness, its Objec¬ tivity, is instead so far from being cancelled by the mediation of work with the external world that it is in fact ultimately formulated by it. For just as human activity is itself Objective activity, i.e. does not fall out of the external world, so the subject-object-mediation, in that it occurs, is likewise a piece of external world. This external world also exists indepen¬ dently of consciousness in that it does not itself appear under the form of the subject, but admittedly not only ‘under the form of the object’ either.

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But in fact it represents the interacting mediation of subject and object, in such a way that being does indeed determine consciousness everywhere, but once again historically decisive, namely economic being contains an in¬ ordinate amount of objective consciousness. All being is for Feuerbach, however, autarkical primacy, as purely pre-human base, natural base, with man as blossom, but in fact simply as blossom, not as separate natural force. But the human method of production, the metabolism with nature which occurs and is regulated in the work process, even the relations of production as base, all this, illuminatingly, itself has consciousness in it; likewise the material base in every society is again activated by the superstructure of consciousness. Thesis 3 is especially informative concerning the interaction in this being-consciousness relationship, despite the priority of economic being. But it is information which gives no pleasure to vulgar materialism; it does however give human consciousness the most real place in the ‘circumstances’, that is, precisely inside the external world which it helps to form. Mechanistic environmentalism asserts ‘that men are products of circumstances and of education, changed men therefore products of other circumstances and a different education’. Above this one-sided, often even very naturalistic theory of depiction (milieu like soil, climate) Thesis 3 now posits the truth which is so superior to the previous standard materialism, ‘that circumstances are in fact changed by men, and that the educator must himself be educated’. This does not of course mean that this change of circumstances could now happen without reference to that objective lawfulness which also binds the subject- and activity-factor. Rather, Marx is waging a war on two fronts at this point, he is struggling both against mechanistic environmentalism, which ends in fatalism of being, and against the idealistic subject-theory, which ends in putschism, or at least in exaggerated activity-optimism. One passage in the ‘German Ideology’ thus thoroughly complements Thesis 3, namely because it deals with the most salutary reciprocal movement of men and circumstances, of subject-object mediation of a constantly interacting, constantly dialec¬ tical kind. So that in history ‘on every level a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relationship to nature and of individuals to one another is to be found, which is passed on to each generation by its predecessor, a class of productive forces, capital and circum¬ stances which is indeed on the one hand modified by the new generation, but which on the other hand also prescribes to it its own conditions of life and gives it a particular development, a special character - so that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’

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(MEGA I, 5, p. 27E). As stated above, the interaction between subject and object is particularly emphasized in this passage, even with the audible precedence of the circumstance-man-relationship over the reverse, in such a way, however, that man and his activity always remain the specific part of the material historical base, indeed represent its root, as it were, and also its capability for radical change. Even the idea (in theory) becomes a material power, according to Marx, if it seizes the masses; how unequivocally the technological-political changing of circumstances is such a power, and how clearly even the subject-factor understood in these terms remains inside the material world. ‘Das Kapital’ provides a final elaboration of Thesis 3, now committing man quite decisively to the external world, in fact to nature: ‘He sets in motion the natural forces pertaining to his physical nature, arms and legs, head and hands, in order to acquire natural material in a form useful for his own life. Because he acts on and changes nature outside himself through this movement, he simultaneously changes his own nature... The earth is itself a working material, but presupposes a whole series of other working materials before it can serve as working material in agriculture, and an already relatively high development of working capacity’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 185, 187). Thus human activity with its consciousness is itself explained as a piece of nature, moreover as the most important piece, in fact as radical practice precisely at the base of material being, which again primarily conditions the conscious¬ ness that follows. Feuerbach, who felt no revolutionary mission whatsoever and who also never got beyond man as a nature-based generic being, had no appreciation whatsoever of this increased primacy of nature, increased by human activity. This is ultimately the reason why history does not appear in his purely perceiving materialism and why he does not manage to get beyond the contemplative attitude. Thus his relationship to the object remains ancient-aristocratic, in illogical contrast to the pathos of man which he put - again only in purely theoretical terms and as mere blossom of existing nature - at the centre of his critique of religion (and no other). He thus looks down on practice from on high, which he only knows as a demeaning business: ‘Practical perception is a dirty perception stained with egotism’ (Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841, p. 264). It is this passage to which Marx is ultimately referring in Thesis 1 when he says that in Feuerbach ‘practice is only understood and fixed in its dirtyJewish manifestation’. And how much arrogance of this kind there was later when the ‘perception’ increasingly ‘stained with egotism’ was added ideologically to so-called pure perception, then with a so-called truth

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for its own sake. How much ‘equestrian science’ then arose, high on its horse, au dessus de la melee (apart from the dirt in itself); how much aristocracy of knowledge (without aristoi), knowingly in league with dirty practice, restraining from the correct kind. With great presentiment Marx already posited the pathos of ‘revolutionary, practical-critical activity’ against such pure lack of understanding as Feuerbach’s. Thus Marx emphasizes, precisely as a materialist, precisely inside being itself, the subjective factor of production activity which is, exactly like the objective factor, an Objective one. And this has powerful, and in fact also anti-vulgar-materialistic consequences; they make this part of the Feuerbach Theses particularly valuable. Without the comprehended work-factor itself the primacy of being, which is in no way a factum brutum or given fact, cannot be compre¬ hended in human history. It most certainly cannot be mediated with the best aspect of active perception with which Thesis I closes; with ‘the revolutionary, practical-critical activity’. Working man, this subject-object relation living in all ‘circumstances’, belongs in Marx decisively with the material base; even the subject in the world is world.

A nthropological-historical group: self-alienation and true materialism Theses 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 It is recognized here that as human beings we always proceed from alienation. Thesis 4 states the theme: Feuerbach revealed self-alienation in its religious form. His work therefore consisted in ‘dissolving the religious world into its worldly basis. But’, Marx continues, ‘he overlooks the fact that, after the completion of this work, the main task still remains to be done.’ Feuerbach, as Thesis 6 determines more precisely, had put religious existence on to a worldly basis in so far as he dissolved it into human existence. This was an important undertaking in itself, especially since it cast a sharp glance at the contribution of human wishes. Feuerbach’s ‘anthropological critique of religion’ derived the whole of the transcendental sphere from wishful imagination: the gods are the heartfelt wishes transformed into real beings. At the same time there arises through this wish-hypostasis a doubling of the world into an imaginary and a real one; when man shifts his best being from this world into a celestial other world. It is therefore necessary to remove this self-alienation, that is, to fetch

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back heaven to men again through critical anthropology and by identifying its origins. Here, however, the logical Marxist argument comes into force, which did not stop at the abstract genus of man, which is quite unstructured in class and historical terms. Feuerbach, who had reproached Hegel so strongly on account of his concept-reifications, does indeed localize his abstract genus of man empirically, but only in such a way as to allow it to be inherent in the single individual, free of society, without social history. Thesis 6 therefore stresses: ‘But human existence is not an abstract inherent in the single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social conditions.’ Indeed, with his hollow arc between single individual and abstract Humanum (while omitting society) Feuerbach is little other than an epigone of the Stoics and of their after-effects in Natural Right, in the ideas of tolerance of the new bourgeois age. Even Stoic morality had fallen back upon the private individual after the decline of the Greek public polis: this was, Marx says in his doctoral dissertation, ‘the good fortune of its time; thus the moth, when the common sun has gone down, seeks the private lamplight’ (MEGA 1,1/1, p. 133). On the other hand, however, the abstract genus of man, skipping all national social conditions, was supposed to assert itself in the Stoics as a sole Universal over single individuals, as the place of the communis opinio, of the recta ratio for all times, among all peoples: i.e. as the general human house, incorporated into the equally general-good world house. Only this human house was not the vanished polis, but it was half - with assiduous ideology - the Pax Romana, the cosmopolitan empire of Rome, and half - with abstract utopia - a fraternal human league of enlightened individuals. Not without reason, therefore, did the concept of humanitas arise as both a generic and value concept at the court of Scipio the Younger, and the Stoic Panaitios was its author. With his abstract genus of man Feuerbach then above all absorbed the neo-Stoicism which - again with hollow arc between individual and generality - had emerged in the new bourgeois age. This ultimately in the abstract-sublime concept of the citoyen and in the Kantian pathos of humanity in general, which reflected the citoyen in a German and moral way. The individuals of the new age are of course capitalists, not Stoic private pillars, and their Universal was not the ancient oecumene which was supposed to eliminate nations, but - with idealization precisely of the ancient polis - the generality of bourgeois human rights with the abstract citizen above it, this moral-humanitarian generic ideal. Nevertheless, there are important economically conditioned correspondences here (otherwise there would have been no neo-Stoicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries): here as there society is atomized into individuals, here as there an abstract genus rises above it, an abstract ideal of humanity, humanness. Marx, however, criticizes precisely this abstract above mere individuals, in fact defines human existence as ‘ensemble of social conditions’. That is why Thesis 6 is directed both against Feuerbach’s ahistorical view of humanness per se and - connected with this - against the purely anthro¬ pological generic concept of this humanity, as a generality which unites the many individuals in a merely natural way. Marx still definitely retains the value-concept of humanity of course; he does so clearly in Thesis 10. The expression ‘real humanism’ with which the preface to the ‘Holy Family’ begins is of course abandoned by the ‘German Ideology’, in connection with the rejection of any trace of bourgeois democracy, with the gaining of the proletarian-revolutionary standpoint, with the creation of dialectical-historical materialism. But Thesis 10 nevertheless states with all the value-accent of a humanistic opposition, of a ‘real humanism’ therefore, which however is only valid and accepted to be valid as a socialist humanism: ‘The standpoint of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the standpoint of the new materialism, human society or socialized humanity. ’ The Humanum therefore does not always lie in every society ‘as inner, silent generality which unites the many individuals in a merely natural way’, it does not lie in any kind of existing generality at all, it is to be found instead in difficult process and gains itself only together with communism, as communism. For this very reason, the new, pro¬ letarian standpoint, far from removing the vaiue-concept of humanism, in practice allows it to come home for the very first time; and the more scientific the socialism, the more concretely it has precisely the care for man at its centre, the real removal of his self alienation as its goal Certainly not, however, after Feuerbach’s fashion, as an abstract genus equipped with all too sublime humane sacraments per se. Marx therefore incorporates the very motif of the epistemological Thesis-group into Thesis 9, this time against Feuerbach’s anthropology: ‘The highest to which perceiving materialism can attain, i.e. the materialism which does not comprehend sensoriness as practical activity, is the perception of single individuals in “bourgeois society’’.’ A class barrier is thus finally noted, the same barrier which blocked revolutionary activity in Feuerbach’s epistemology, and now blocks history and society in his anthropology. Marx’s continuation of Feuerbachian anthropology, as a critique of religious self-alienation, is therefore not only logically consistent, but also a renewed demystification, namely of Feuerbach himself or of final, anthropological fetishization. Thus

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Marx leads us from general-ideal man, via mere individuals, to the ground of real humanity and possible humanness. In order to do this, the glance at the processes which really underlie alienation was necessary. Men double their world not only because they have an inwardly torn, wishing consciousness. Rather, this consciousness arises together with its religious reflection from a much closer split, namely a social one. The social conditions themselves are inwardly tom and divided, show an Above and a Below, struggles between these two classes and hazy ideologies of the Above, of which the religious is only one among many. To find this closer aspect of the worldly basis was for Marx precisely the work whose main task still remained to be done, - itself a This World compared with the abstract-anthropological This World of Feuerbach. Feuerbach, an undialectical stranger to history, had no eye for this, but Thesis 4 acquires it: ‘The very fact that the worldly basis sets itself off from itself and fixes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the self-conflict and the self-contradiction of this worldly basis. The latter itself must therefore first be understood in its contradic¬ tion and then be revolutionized by eliminating the contradiction in practice. Hence for example, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must now itself be criticized and radically changed in practice.’ In order to be truly radical, i.e. according to Marx’s definition: in order to grasp things by the radix, by the ‘root’, the critique of religion thus requires the critique of the conditions which underlie heaven, of their wretchedness, of their contradictions and their false, imaginary resolution of these contradictions. Marx had already formulated this so forcibly and unmistakably in the ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ of 1844: ‘The critique of religion ends.. .with the categorical imperative of overthrowing all conditions in which man is a debased, an enslaved, a forlorn, a contemptible being’ (MEGA I, 1/1, p. 6i4f.). Only after this progressive critique, which is also progressive in practical revolutionary terms, do we arrive at a situation which no longer requires any illusions, either as deception or even as compensation: ‘The critique has picked to pieces the imaginary flowers on the chain, not so that man has to wear the dreary chain devoid of imagination, but so that he can throw off the chain and pick the living flower’ (l.c., p. 608). In order to do this, the earthly family must first be discovered as the secret of the heavenly one, right down to that matured economic-materialistic ‘secret science’ which then causes Marx to say in ‘Das Kapital’: ‘Besides, little familiarity is required with the history of the Roman Republic, for

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example, to know that the history of property forms its secret history’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 88). Consequently, the analysis of religious self-alienation, in order for it to be a truly radical one, fundamentally goes beyond ideologies to the closer role of the state, to the very closest political economy and achieves here for the first time real ‘anthropology’. Achieves it as social-scientific basic insight into the ‘relation of men to men and to nature’. Since, as Thesis 7 stresses, ‘the religious disposition is itself a social product’, the act of producing can and must not be forgotten over the product, as it is by the unhistorical, undialectical Feuerbach. The following passage in ‘Das Kapital’ once more refers to this ultimate half¬ measure, that is, untenability of Feuerbach’s dissolution: ‘It is in fact much easier to find the earthly core of the nebulous shapes of religion through analysis than conversely to develop deified forms from the respective conditions of real life. The latter is the only materialistic and therefore scientific method. The defects of abstractly natural scientific materialism which excludes the historical process can already be seen from the abstract and ideological ideas of its spokesmen, as soon as they venture out beyond their specialized field’ (Das Kapital I, Dietz, 1947, p. 389). Furthermore the ‘German Ideology’ states: ‘In Feuerbach materialism and history completely fall apart’, thus establishing the basic difference between dialectical-historical materialism and the old mechanical kind: ‘Whenever Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not appear in his work, and whenever he takes history into account, he is no materialist’ (MEGA I, 5, p. 34). Feuerbach himself had claimed that he was a materialist looking back¬ wards (i.e. regarding the basis of nature), but an idealist looking forwards (i.e. regarding ethics and even the philosophy of religion). Precisely the omission of society, history and its dialectic in Feuerbach’s materialism, precisely the feeling occasioned by this that life is missing in the old mechanical materialism, which was the only kind Feuerbach knew, inevitably causes an idealism of an embarrassed kind in this philosopher at the end of his philosophy. It revealed itself clearly in his ethics of life, it shows itself in the hints of a certain Sunday-brotherhood sentimentality. Once again the governing influence here is merely, as Thesis 9 says, ‘the perception of single individuals in “bourgeois society” ’, but once again even religion, which had ostensibly been disposed of, makes itself apparent in Feuerbach, a religion which was merely derived anthropologically by him, not socially criticized. This is evident in the way that Feuerbach does not actually criticize the contents of religion, but essentially only their displacement into an other world and thus the weakening of man and

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his This World. In so far as he consequently sought to remind ‘human nature’ of its squandered wealth again, there are of course undoubtedly problems involved in this reduction. Who would wish to underestimate precisely the depth of humanity, the humanity of the depth in religioncharged art, in Giotto, in Griinewald, in Bach and ultimately even perhaps in Bruckner? But Feuerbach, with unparalleled heart, soul brotherhood and melting soul, makes out of all this almost a kind of non-denominational pectoral theology. Moreover, he allows almost all the attributes of the fathergod to remain, in the unavoidable emptiness of his ‘idealism forwards’, as virtues in themselves so to speak, and only the heavenly god is struck from the list. Instead of: God is merciful, is love, is omnipotent, works miracles, hears our prayers - all that can be said now is: mercifulness, love, omnipotence, working miracles, hearing prayers are divine. Accord¬ ingly, therefore, the whole apparatus of theology remains intact, it has just moved from its heavenly location to a certain abstract region, with reified virtues of the ‘natural basis’. In this way, however, the problem: humane legacy of religion, which Feuerbach probably had in mind, did not arise, but religion came at a reduced price, to suit a poorly demystified habitual embourgeoisement, which Engels correctly identifies in Feuerbach’s stale dregs of religion. Marxism, conversely, is no ‘idealism forwards’ even with regard to religion, but materialism forwards, wealth of materialism without a poorly demystified heaven which must be brought down to earth. The truly total explanation of the world from within itself, which is called dialectical-historical materialism, also posits the transformation of the world from within itself. Into an other world beyond hardship, which has not the least in common either with the other world of mythology, or with its master- or father-contents.

Theory-practice-group: proof and probation Theses 2, 8 It is not recognized here that thought is pale and feeble. Thesis 2 sets it above sensory perception, with and in which it merely commences. Feuerbach had denigrated thought, because it leads away from the individual into the general; this was evaluated nominalistically. In Marx, however, thought definitely does not aim into the poorly general, abstract, but just the opposite: it opens up precisely the mediated essential context of the

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appearance, one which is still sealed to the mere sensoriness in the appearance. Thus thought, which Feuerbach only allows to be abstract, is concrete precisely when it is mediated, whereas conversely, thoughtless sensory material is abstract. Thought must of course lead once again to perception, in order to prove itself, as pervasive, in the latter, but even at this end this perception is by no means the passive, immediate Feuerbachian kind. The proof can instead only lie in the mediatedness of the perception, that is, solely in that sensoriness which has been theoretically processed and has thus become Thing For Us. This is however ultimately the sensoriness of theoretically mediated, theoretically acquired practice. So the function of thought is, even more than sensory perception, an activity, a critical, insistent, revealing activity; and the best proof is thus the practical testing of this deciphering. Just as every truth is a truth for a certain purpose, and there is no truth for its own sake, except as self-deception or whimsy, so too there is no complete proof of a truth from within itself as a truth which merely remains theoretical; in other words: there is no theoreticallyimmanently possible complete proof. Only a partial proof can be achieved purely theoretically, mostly still in mathematics; but even here it proves to be only a partial proof of a specific kind, since in fact it never gets beyond mere inner ‘agreement’, logically consistent ‘correctness’. Correctness is not yet truth, however, that is, depiction of reality and also the power of intervening in reality according to the measure of its known agencies and laws. In other words: truth is not a theory relationship alone, but a definite theory-practice relationship. Thus Thesis 2 states: ‘The question of whether Objective truth is appropriate to human thinking is not a question of theory, but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the This-worldliness of his thinking. The argument about the reality or non-reality of a thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question.’ That is, a school-bound question in the sense of a closed thought-immanence (including mechanicalmaterialistic thoughts); this contemplative boarding-school was the space of all previous concepts of truth. With its theory-practice relationship, Thesis 2 is therefore wholly creative and new; in comparison, previous philosophy really does appear ‘scholastic’. Since, as observed above, either ancient and medieval epistemology did not reflect activity, or on the other hand activity as bourgeois-abstract activity was not truly mediated with its object. In both cases, in the ages of the ancient and feudal contempt for work and in the age of the bourgeois work-ethic (without concreteness of work), practice, both technological and political, was regarded at best

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as the ‘application’ of theory. Not as attestation that the theory is a concrete one, as in Marx, not as the functional change of the key into the lever, of true depiction into intervention with power over being. Thus the right thought and doing what is right finally become one and the same. Activity and partisan attitude are contained within it from the beginning, and therefore emerge again as true conclusion at the end. The colour of the resolution is its own in this conclusion, not an additional colour brought in from elsewhere. Every confrontation in the history of philosophy confirms in this case the Novum of the theory-practice relation¬ ship as opposed to mere ‘application’ of theory. Even when a part of the theory was already aimed at practice: as in Socrates, as in Plato when he tried to realize his utopian state in Sicily, as in the Stoics with logic as mere wall, physics as mere tree, but with ethics as the fruit. As in Augustine, the founder of the site of the medieval papal church, as at the end of the Middle Ages in William of Occam, the nominalist destroyer of the papal church in favour of rising national states. There was undoubtedly a social and practical mission behind all these, but the theory nevertheless led its own abstract, practically unmediated separate existence. It only condescended to ‘application’ to practice, like a prince to his people, at best like an idea to its utilization. And even Bacon, in the sharp bourgeois-practical utilitarianism of the new age: he did indeed teach that knowledge is power, he wanted to re-establish the whole of science and to give it a new aim, as ars inveniendi, but, despite all opposition to purely theoretical knowledge and contemplative cognition, science remains autarkical, and only its method is to be changed. Changed in the sense of the inductive method, the methodically directed experiment; the proof, however, does not lie in practice, this is rather regarded even here only as the fruit and reward of truth, not as its final criterion and as demonstration. The various ‘philosophies of action’, which derived from Fichte and from Hegel, and then again, going back to Fichte, arose in the left-wing school of Hegelians, have even less similarity with Marx’s practice-criterion. Fichte’s ‘active deeds’ may itself have shown power and line on important national political points, but ultimately it always proved ethereal. In the end, it simply served not so much to better the world of the Not-I by processing it as to remove it completely. All that was proved, so to speak, by this basically worldhostile ‘practice’ was the in any case settled subjective starting-point of Fichtean ego-idealism, not however an objective truth which first develops with and through the world. Hegel comes closest to a premonition of a practice-criterion, and in fact characteristically on account of the

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relationship to work in his phenomenology. In addition, a transition occurs in Hegel’s psychology from ‘theoretical mind’ (perception, imagination, thinking) to the antithesis ‘practical mind’ (feeling, driving will, bliss), out of which then, synthetically, ‘free mind’ was to result. Thus this synthesis proclaimed itself as the self-knowing will, as will which thinks and knows itself, which ultimately, in ‘the rational State’, wants what it knows and knows what it wants. Likewise the ‘practical idea’ is already classed above the ‘idea of contemplated cognition’ in Hegelian logic, in so far as ‘not only the dignity of what is general, but also of what is simply real’ is appropriate to the practical good (Werke V, p. 32of.). ‘All this’, notes Lenin, ‘in the chapter “The idea of cognition”..., undoubtedly means that in Hegel practice is a link in the chain in the analysis of the process of cognition... Consequently Marx is establishing a direct link with Hegel when he introduces the criterion of practice into epistemology; see the Theses on Feuerbach’ (Aus dem philosophischen NachlaB, Dietz 1949, p. 133). However, at the end of his Logic, just as at the end of his Phenomenology and of his fully-developed system, Hegel leads the world (the Object, the object, the substance) almost as far back into the subject as Fichte does; so that in the end, it is not practice which crowns truth, but ‘re-minding’, ‘science of appearing knowledge’ and nothing more. And also, according to Hegel’s famous statement at the end of the preface to his ‘Philosophy of Right’, ‘philosophy always comes too late anyway. It only appears as the thought of the world in the time after which reality has completed its formation-process and finished itself. ’ The closed-circuit thinker Hegel, the antiquarium of what is unalterably already existing, thus ultimately prevailed over the dialectical process-thinker Hegel with his crypto-practice. There is still - in order to measure the distance of Marx’s doctrine of practice even in the immediate environment of his youth - the practice, soon also sharp practice of the left-wing Hegelians and all that goes along with it. This was the ‘weapon of criticism’, the so-called ‘philosophy of action’, when Marx was young. But what was at work here in fact was essentially only a return from the objective idealism of Hegel to the subjective idealism of Fichte; Feuerbach himself identified this in Bruno Bauer. This series of so-called philosophies of action began with the otherwise not uninteresting work by Cieszkovski: ‘Prolegomena to Historiosophy’, 1838, a work which expressly presents it as necessary to use philosophy to change the world. Thus in these ‘Prolegomena’ there are even appeals for rational research into the tendencies of history: so that the correct course of action can be taken; so that not instinctive, but

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conscious actions form world history; so that the will is brought to the same peak to which reason had been brought by Hegel; so that in this way a not only pre- but also post-theoretical practice can gain space. This all sounds significant, and yet it remained only declaratory, resulted in absolutely nothing even in Cieszkovski’s other writings, in fact the ‘interests of the future’ became more and more irrational and obscure in his work. Cieszkovski’s rejection of speculation became a rejection of reason, activity became an activity of ‘active intuition’, and the whole will towards the future ultimately ended in a theosophy of - Amen in the orthodox church, published at the time of the ‘Communist Manifesto’. In Marx’s own circle there was still Bruno Bauer’s work of course, likewise a ‘philosophy of action’, even one of the Last Judgement, but in fact the most subjective of all. When reactionary thinking under Friedrich Wilhelm IV put this ‘weapon of criticism’ to the test, in Bruno Bauer it immediately retreated into individualism, in fact into an egocentricity contemptuous of the masses. Bauer’s ‘critical critique’ was simply a battle in and between thoughts, a kind of l’art pour l’art-practice of the arrogant mind with itself, and eventually Stirner’s ‘The Lone Individual and his Property’ developed from it. Marx himself has said the decisive thing about this in the ‘Holy Family’, on his own account, as is evident, in the cause of genuine practice and its unmistakableness. In the cause of revolutionary practice: beginning with the proletariat, equipped with the fruitful aspect of the Hegelian dialectic and not with abstractions from the ‘wilted and widowed philosophy of Hegel’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 189), let alone of Fichtean subjectivism. Fichte, the virtuous man of wrath, did at least still have energetic directives in view, from the ‘Closed Commercial State’ to the ‘Speeches to the German Nation’, he philosophized the French out of Germany; the ‘critical critique’, however, merely paraded in the Tattersalls of self-importance. And, closer to Marx, even in the work of the thoroughly honest Socialist Moses Hess action had a tendency to detach itself from social activity, to reduce itself to reform of moral consciousness - a ‘philosophy of action’ without developed economic theory behind it, without a timetable of dialectically comprehended tendency within it. The concepts of practice until Marx are therefore completely different from his theory-practice conception, from the doctrine of unity between theory and practice. And rather than merely being glued on to theory, in such a way that thought remains purely scientific and does not in the least require ‘application’, in such a way that theory continues to pursue its own life and its immanent self-sufficiency even in its proofs, according to Marx and Lenin, theory and practice continually

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oscillate. Since both alternately and reciprocally swing into one another, practice presupposes theory, just as it itself further releases and needs new theory in order to continue a new practice. Concrete thought had never been valued more highly than it was here, where it became the light for action, and never had action been valued more highly than here, where it became the crowning of truth. And warmth also definitely seeks to be inherent in thinking here, since it is helpful thinking. The warmth of wanting-to-help itself, of love for the victims, of hatred of the exploiters. Indeed these feelings bring partiality into play, without which no true knowledge combined with good action is at all possible in socialist terms. But a feeling of love which is not itself illuminated by cognition blocks the very helping action on which it would like to embark. It is sated all too easily by its own excellence, becomes the haze of a new pseudo-active self-confidence. In this case not a Part pour 1’art-critical self-confidence, as in Bruno Bauer, but a sentimentally uncritical one which is stifling and vague. As in Feuerbach himself: he always set his equivocation ‘sensation’ in place of practice. He defuses love into the general emotional relation between I and You, he reveals the lack of any social cognition even here by retreating to mere individuals and their eternally languishing relationships. He effeminates humanity thus: ‘The new philosophy is in relation to its base (!) itself nothing more than the nature of sensation raised into consciousness - it affirms only in and with reason what every person - the real person - admits in his heart’ (Werke II, 1846, p. 324). This statement is from the ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, in fact it is the action-substitute from the past, from a bourgeois-conformist, sanctimonious, indeed, very often, Tartuffishly sabotaging past. From a past which, precisely because of its abstractly declamatory love of mankind, does not in the least seek to change the world today for the good, but to perpetuate it in the bad. Feuerbach’s caricature of the Sermon on the Mount excludes all harshness in prosecuting injustice, while including total laxness in the class struggle; for this very reason general ‘socialism’ of love recommends itself to all the crocodile tears of a capitalistically interested philanthropy. Hence Marx and Engels: ‘The kingdom of love was preached precisely as opposed to bad reality, to hatred... But when experience teaches that this love has not become effective in 1800 years, that it has not been able to transform social conditions, nor to establish its kingdom, then it quite obviously follows from this that this love which has not been able to conquer hatred does not supply the active energy necessary for social reforms. This love gets lost

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in sentimental phrases through which no real, factual conditions can be removed; it makes man lethargic with the enormous emotional pap on which it feeds him. Therefore deprivation gives man strength; those who must help themselves, do help themselves. And that is why the real condi¬ tions of this world, the sharp contrast in society today between capital and work, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, as they appear in their most developed form in industrial trade, are the other, more powerfully bubbling source of the socialist world-view, of the desire for social reforms ... This iron necessity creates a wide audience and active adherents for socialist endeavour, and it will pave the way for the socialist reforms through transformation of present conditions of trade sooner than all the love which glows in all the hearts brimming with feeling in the world’ (Circular against H. Kriege, a supporter of Feuerbach, nth May 1846). Since then, what Thomas Miinzer would not only have called ‘contrived belief’ but also ‘contrived love’, has spread in quite a different way than in Feuerbach’s relatively harmless time, among renegades and pseudo-socialists. Their hypocritical love of mankind is however only the weapon of war of a much more total hatred: namely of communism; and the newly contrived love is only there for the sake of the war. Together with the mysticism which is not lacking even in Feuerbach, which here still at least wished to be ‘forward idealism’, i.e. progressive, and which, in the formless roaring of the fulfilment of its heart, of its God-the-Fatherliness made anthro¬ pological, had no worse shortcoming than the poorly demystified, non-denominational philistinism mentioned above. But the mysteries of today’s profound babbling which is no longer even idealistic - almost as different from Feuerbach’s mysticism as this was from the mysticism of Meister Eckhart - hide their heart up their sleeves, and instead of the empty rosy mist there is today a nothingness exploited by the bourgeoisie. Thesis 8 says: ‘All mysteries which lead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the rational solution of this practice.’ Here of course a distinction is being made between two types of mysteries: namely those which present what is unclarified, aporias, forest of uncomprehended contradictions as still uncomprehended in reality, and those, called actual mysticisms, which are idolatry of darkness for its own sake. But even things that are simply unfathomed, and especially the mistyline in them, can lead into mysticism; for this very reason only rational practice is the human solution here, and the rational solution only human practice, which keeps to humanity (rather than the forest). And even the word mysticism is not used without reason by Marx on the subject of

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Feuerbach, in fact it is used against the non-sword of abstract love which leaves the Gordian knot alone. To repeat: Feuerbach’s mysteries, the lovemysteries without clarity, certainly have nothing in common with that which later emerged as rottenness and night-irratio; Feuerbach lies instead on that German salvation-line which leads from Hegel to Marx, just as the German disaster-line leads from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and the consequences. And love of mankind, in so far as it clearly understands itself as being directed towards the exploited, in so far as it proceeds towards real knowledge, is undoubtedly an imperative agent in socialism. But if the salt can lose his savour, how much more so the sugar its sweetness,* and if Christians of feeling remain locked in defeatism, how much more so socialists of feeling in pharisaical betrayal. Hence Marx also attacks in Feuerbach a dangerous inflatedness, one which enjoys itself as it is, on the bottom line a pectoral practice which achieves the opposite of what the altruism it preaches to and its ineffably universal love intend. Without factions in love, with an equally concrete pole of hatred, there is no genuine love; without partiality of the revolutionary class standpoint there only remains backward idealism instead of forward practice. Without the primacy of the head to the very end there are only mysteries of resolution rather than the resolution of mysteries. At the ethical conclusion of Feuerbach’s philosophy of the future both philosophy and future are missing; Marx’s theory for the sake of practice started both functioning, and ethics at last becomes flesh.

The password and its meaning Thesis u It is recognized here that the future aspect is the nearest and most important. But not in fact after Feuerbach’s fashion, which never sets sail. Which contents itself from beginning to end with contemplation, which leaves things as they are. Or even worse, which believes it cannot help but re¬ arrange things, but only in the book, while the world itself notices nothing of it. One reason why it notices nothing of it is because the world can so easily be rearranged in false representations that nothing real appears in the book at all. Every step outwards would be damaging here to the ‘Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?’ Luke 14, 34.

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neatly figured-out book living in its own nature reserve and would disturb the private life of invented thoughts. But even the most authentic books and doctrines often show the typically contemplative desire to be satisfied with themselves in their framed context, one successfully achieved at last ‘in terms of a work’. Consequently they even fear a change in the portrayed world which might possibly arise out of themselves, because the work - even if, like Feuerbach’s, it sets up principles of the future - could then no longer hover through the ages in such an autarkical manner. Especially if, as was again the case in Feuerbach, this was supplemented by an intended or naive political indifference, the public was wholly confined to the equally contemplative reader; his arms, his actions were not addressed. The stand¬ point may have been a new one, but it remained a mere vantage point; conceptual invention thus gave no instructions for real intervention. Hence, briefly and antithetically, Marx states the celebrated Thesis 11: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; but the point is to change it.’ A significant difference to every previous impetus to thought is thus strikingly designated. Short propositions, as we noted at the beginning, sometimes seem as if they can be assessed more quickly than they in fact can. And with celebrated propositions there is sometimes the problem that, very much against their will, they no longer stimulate reflection, or that we swallow them too raw. Then from time to time they cause us difficulty, in this case difficulty which is hostile to intelligence, at least alien to intelligence, and which could not be further from the sense of the proposition. What exactly is intended by Thesis 11 then, how must it be understood in Marx’s invariably precise philosophical sense? It must not be understood or rather: misused by mixing it in any way with pragmatism. The latter stems from a region which is utterly alien to Marxism, from a region which is hostile to it, intellectually inferior, ultimately downright disreputable. Nevertheless, ‘busy bodies’,* as they say in America, i.e. bustlers, repeatedly subscribe to Marx’s proposition, just as if it was - American cultural barbarity. Underlying American pragmatism is the view that truth is nothing more than the commercial usefulness of ideas. Consequently, there is a so-called aha-experience of truth, as soon and in so far as this is aimed at practical success and actually shows itself to be suitable for bringing it about. In William James (‘Pragmatism’, 1907), the businessman, as ‘American way

* Bloch is using the English expression here, but seems to have misunderstood its colloquial application.

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of life’, to a certain extent still appears to be generally human, is so to speak garnished in a humanitarian way, even in an almost life-promoting and optimistic way. Both on account of the pink packaging of American capitalism still possible at that time, and above all on account of the tendency of every class society to present its special interest as that of the whole of humanity. This is why pragmatism initially also professed to be the patron of those various, interchangeable, logical ‘instruments’ with which the higher order of businessman achieves almost ‘humanitarian success’. But there is no more such a thing, even less such a thing as a humanitarian businessman than there is such a thing as a Marxist playboy; thus after James, pragmatism in America and in the whole of the world-bourgeoisie quickly showed itself for what it is: the final agnosticism of a society stripped of any will towards the truth. Two imperialist wars, the first generally imperialist war from 1914 to 1918, the second partially imperialist war of the Nazi aggressors, made pragmatism ripe even for horse-trader ideology. Now it is no longer a question of truth at all, not even as if it were at least an ‘instrument’ to be maintained; and the pink package of ‘humanitarian success’ completely went to the devil who was in it from the beginning. Now ideas wavered and changed like share prices, according to the war situation, the business situation; until finally the utterly disgraceful pragmatism of the Nazis appeared. What served the German nation, i.e. what served German capital finance, was right; what furthered the interests of life, i.e. maximum profit, and what appeared to be useful for its purposes, was truth. These were therefore, in the fullness of time, the consequences of pragmatism; and yet how harmlessly, indeed how deceptively it may have also looked like ‘theory-practice’. How speciously a truth for its own sake was spurned here too, without saying that this was done on account of a lie for the sake of business. How speciously concrete too was the demand here for the probation of truth in practice, even in ‘changing’ the world. How great the falsifiability of Thesis II is then in the heads of scorners of intelligence and practicists. Certainly, as far as practicists in the socialist movement are concerned, in moral terms, as is self-evident, they do not have the least in common with the pragmatists; their will is pure, their intention revolutionary, their goal humanitarian. But by omitting the head here, and consequently nothing less than the whole wealth of Marxist theory together with the critical appropriation of the cultural legacy within it, there arises on the site of the ‘trial and error method’, of tinkering, of practicism, that cruel falsification of Thesis 11 which is reminiscent of pragmatism in

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methodological terms. Practicism which borders on pragmatism is a consequence of this falsification, one which is as always uncomprehended; but ignorance of a consequence is no protection against stultification. The practicists, with at best short-term credit for theory, especially complicated theory, create in the middle of the Marxist system of light the darkness of their own private ignorance and of the resentment which so easily goes with ignorance. Sometimes in fact not even practicism, i.e. still at least an activity, is necessary to explain such alienation from theory; since the schematism of unthinkingness also lives from its own, from inactive anti-philosophy. But it can thus refer even less to the most valuable thesis on Feuerbach; misunderstanding then becomes blasphemy. It must therefore be repeatedly emphasized: in Marx a thought is not true because it is useful, but it is useful because it is true. Lenin formulates the same idea in the pithy dictum: ‘Marx’s doctrine is all-powerful because it is true.’ And he continues: ‘It is the rightful heiress of the best that humanity produced in the nineteenth century in the shape of German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.’ And he states a few lines previously: ‘The whole genius of Marx consists in the fact that he gave answers to the questions which the progressive thinking of humanity had already posed’ (Lenin, Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism). In other words: real practice cannot take a single stride without having consulted theory economically and philosophically, a theory advancing with great strides. Thus just as there has been a lack of socialist theoreticians, the danger has always existed that contact with reality would suffer, a reality which is never to be interpreted schematically and simplistically, where practice was otherwise supposed to succeed in socialist terms. Even if these are open doors which the anti-pragmatism of the greatest practice-thinkers, greatest in that they were the most reliable truth-witnesses, holds open, they can still be closed again and again by an interested misinterpretation of Thesis 11. By one which ironically enough believes it can detect in the highest triumph of philosophy - which takes place in Thesis 11 - an abdication of philosophy, in fact a kind of non-bourgeois pragmatism. Precisely that future aspect is poorly served here which no longer comes towards us uncomprehended, but to which conversely our active knowledge comes; - Ratio keeps watch on this stretch of practice. Just as it keeps watch on every stretch of humanitarian road home: against the irrational which ultimately also shows itself in any practice devoid of concept. For if the destruction of reason sinks back into the barbaric irrational, then the

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ignorance of reason sinks back into the stupid irrational; though the latter does not of course shed blood, but ruins Marxism. Even banality is thus counter-revolution against Marxism itself; since Marxism is the consummation (not the Americanization) of the most progressive thoughts of humanity. So much for false understanding, right at the end, where it surfaces. The false equally requires elucidation precisely because Thesis 11 is the most important - corruptio optimi pessima. At the same time this thesis is the most succintly expressed one; so a commentary here must go into the literal meaning much more than with the others. So what is the significance of the wording in Thesis 11, what is its apparent contrast between knowing and changing? There is no contrast; even the not contrary, but rather broadening particle ‘but’ is missing in Marx’s original (cf. MEGA I, 5, p. 535); there is just as little sign of an either-or. And previous philosophers are reproached for the fact - or rather: it is identified as a class barrier in them - that they have only interpreted the world in various ways, not however that they - have philosophized. But interpretation is related to contemplation and follows from it; Hon-contemplative knowledge is thus now distinguished as a new flag which truly carries us to victory. But as a flag of knowledge, as the same flag which Marx - though with action, not with contemplative quiet - raised above his major work of learned research. This major work is a clear directive for action, but it is called ‘Das Kapital’, not ‘Guide to Success’ or even ‘Active Propaganda’; it is not a sort of recipe for a quick heroic deed ante rem, but stands in the middle of the res, in painstaking examination, philosophizing contextual exploration of the most difficult reality. With the course set towards comprehended necessity, towards knowledge of the dialectical laws of development in nature and society as a whole. The identification of the first part of the proposition thus pushes off from the philosophers who ‘have only interpreted the world in various ways’, and from nothing else; it does set sail, but only on an extremely well thought-out voyage, as the second part of the proposition reveals: on that of a new, of an active philosophy, one which, in order to achieve change, is as inevitable as it is suitable. Undoubtedly Marx did direct harsh words against philosophy, but not against contemplative philosophy per se, whenever it was important philosophy from a great age. But precisely against a particular kind of contem¬ plative philosophy, namely that of the Hegel epigones of his time, which was in fact a non-philosophy. Hence, characteristically, the ‘German Ideology’, which was aimed at these epigones, contains the strongest polemical attack: ‘We must set aside philosophy, we must jump out of

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it and, as ordinary people, apply ourselves to the study of reality, for which there is enormous material even in literature, of which philosophers are of course unaware; and if we then come across people like Kuhlmann or Stirner again, we find that we have had them “behind” us and below us for a long time. Philosophy is about as similar to study of the real world as masturbation is to love-making’ (MEGA I, 5, p. 216). The names Kuhlmann (a pietistic theologian of the time) and especially Stirner show only too clearly to which address or kind of philosophy this mighty invective was directed; it was directed at philosophical windbaggery. It was not directed at Hegelian philosophy and other great philosophies of the past, no matter how contemplative these were considered to be; Marx would have been the last person to have missed a ‘study of the real world’ in the concrete philosopher Hegel, the most knowledgeable encyclopedist since Aristotle. This kind of objection was raised to Hegel by minds funda¬ mentally different to Marx and Engels, the minds of the Prussian reaction, subsequently of revisionism and similar ‘political realists’, as we know full well. Of real previous philosophy, on the other hand, Marx speaks quite differently even in the ‘German Ideology’, namely in the sense of a creative real entry into an inheritance. Previously the ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ of 1844 had already clearly established that philosophy could not be abolished without realizing it, could not be realized without abolishing it. The former, with the accent on realization, is said for the ‘men of practice’: ‘Hence, quite rightly, the practical political faction in Germany demands the negation of philosophy. Where it is quite wrong is not in the demand but in stopping at the demand which in all seriousness it neither implements nor can achieve. It believes it can achieve that negation by turning its back on philosophy and murmur¬ ing a few irritated and banal phrases about it with its head turned away. The limitation of its field of vision does not rank philosophy as well in the precincts of German reality or imagine it even under the rubric of German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that we should start from real living seeds, but you forget that the real living seed of the German nation has until now only proliferated beneath its skull. In a word: You cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it.’ The second, with the accent on abolition, is said for the ‘theoreticians’: ‘The same wrong, only with reverse factors, was committed by the theoretical political faction which dates from philosophy. It saw in the present struggle only the critical struggle of philosophy with the German world, it did not consider that subsequent philosophy itself belongs to this world and is its, albeit ideal, completion.

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Critical of its adversary, it behaved uncritically towards itself, in that it began with the assumptions of philosophy and either stuck at its given results or issued demands and results of philosophy imported from elsewhere, although these - assuming they are justified - are conversely only to be obtained through the negation of subsequent (!) philosophy, of philosophy as philosophy. We will reserve a closer portrayal of this faction for the moment’ (it occurred in the ‘Holy Family’ and in the ‘German Ideology’, with the severest critique of degenerate contemplation, of the critical ‘repose of knowing’). ‘Its basic defect can be reduced to this: It believed it could realize philosophy without abolishing it’ (MEGA I, i/i, p. 613). Marx thus gives both factions of the time an antidote for their behaviour, in each case a reverse medicina mentis: he imposes greater realization of philosophy on the practical men of that time, and greater abolition of philosophy on the theoreticians. However, even the ‘negation’ of philosophy (itself a very highly philosophically charged concept deriving from Hegel) refers in a most explicit way here to ‘subsequent philosophy’, not to every possi¬ ble and future philosophy in general. The ‘negation’ refers to philosophy with truth for its own sake, i.e. to autarkical-contemplative philosophy, to one which simply interprets the world in an antiquarian way, it does not refer to one which changes the world in a revolutionary way. Indeed, even inside the ‘subsequent philosophy’, which is of course so funda¬ mentally different from the Hegel epigones, there is, despite all the contemplation, so much ‘study of the real world’ that even German classical philosophy does not figure in a totally impractical way among the ‘three sources and three components of Marxism’. The absolutely new aspect in Marxist philosophy consists in the radical changing of its basis, in its proletarian revolutionary mission; but the absolutely new aspect does not consist in the idea that the only philosophy which is capable of changing and destined to change the world concretely is not - philosophy at all any more. Because it is so like never before, hence precisely the triumph of knowledge in the second part of the proposition of Thesis 11, concerning the changing of the world; Marxism would not be a change at all in the true sense if it were no theoretical-practical primacy of true philosophy before and in it. Not least philosophy which, with staying power, with full cultural inheritance, is well-versed in ultra-violet, that is: in the future-laden properties of reality. Changing in the untrue sense is easy of course in many ways, even without a concept; the Huns also changed things, change can also be brought about through megalomania, through anarchism, even through the ravings of mental illness which Hegel calls a ‘perfect

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depiction of chaos’. But sound change, especially that into the realm of freedom, comes about solely through sound knowledge, with ever more precisely mastered necessity. Out and out philosophers have subsequently changed the world in this way: Marx, Engels, Lenin. Practicists from the hollow of the hand, schematists with a horde of quotations, have not changed it, and neither have those empiricists whom Engels called ‘induction asses’. Philosophical change is change with unstinting knowledge of its context; for if philosophy does not represent a separate science above all other sciences, it certainly is the separate knowledge and conscience of this Totum in all sciences. It is the progressive consciousness of the pro¬ gressive Totum, since the Totum does not itself stand as a Factum, but solely circulates with the still Unbecome in the gigantic context of Becoming. Philosophical change is thus a change according to the stipulations of the analyzed situation, of dialectical tendency, of objective laws, of real possibility. That is why therefore in the end philosophical change takes place essentially in the horizon of the future, which is generally incapable of contemplation, incapable of interpretation, but is discernible in a Marxist sense. And seen from this point of view, Marx also rose above the changing accents, cited above, which are only placed antithetically: concerning realization or abolition of philosophy (realization accentuated against the ‘men of practice’, abolition accentuated against the ‘theoreticians’). The dialectical unity of correctly understood accents reads, at the end of the already quoted ‘Introduction’ (MEGA 1,1/1, p. 621), as is well-known: ‘Philosophy cannot realize itself without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot abolish itself without the realization of philosophy.’ And the abolition of the proletariat, as soon as it is not only grasped as a class, but equally, as Marx teaches, as the sharpest symptom of human self-alienation, is undoubtedly a long act: a total abolition of this kind coincides with the final act of communism. In the sense in which Marx expresses it in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, with a perspective which is at home precisely in the philosophically most extreme ‘Eschaton’: ‘Only here for him (for man) has his natural existence become his human existence and nature for him become man. Thus society is the perfect essential unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accom¬ plished humanism of nature’ (MEGA I, 3, p. 116). The final perspective of changing the world which Marx attempted to formulate shines here. Its thought (the knowledge-conscience of all practice, in which the still distant Totum is mirrored) undoubtedly demands just as much newness of philosophy, as it creates resurrection of nature.

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The Archimedean point; knowledge related not only to what is past, hut essentially to what is coming up To begin with the mind became so powerful, ultimately it becomes expert at being so. And precisely because it has relinquished its earlier, often falsely sublime character. Because it has become a truly political song, finally managed to get beyond contemplated and past material to the present. To a present, furthermore, in those days, which did not countenance the mind as ether, but rather used it as material power. To understand this, the point in time is once again important when, with the other early writings, the ‘Eleven Theses’ emerged into this powerful light. Marx wrote about it in the ‘Communist Manifesto’, 1848, that is, a short time later: ‘The communists are directing their main attention on Germany, because Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution and because it is achieving this radical change under more progressive conditions of European civiliza¬ tion in general and with a much further developed proletariat than England in the seventeenth and France in the eighteenth century, and the German revolution can therefore only be the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution.’ Hence the particular impetus, one not experienced by Feuer¬ bach, which immediately brought the new philosophy, in statu nascendi, on to the barricades. Already in Thesis 4 the Archimedean point had been discovered from which the old world could thus be lifted off its hinges and the new one on to its hinges, the Archimedean point in the ‘worldly basis’ of today: ‘The latter itself must therefore first be understood in its contradiction and then be revolutionized by eliminating the contradiction in practice.’ And so, what is it finally that discovered the starting-point of the ‘Eleven Theses’, i.e. the beginning philosophy of revolution? It is surely not the new, proletarian mandate alone, however decisively it tore itself free from contemplation, did not take, let alone perpetuate things as they are. Neither is it only the critically and creatively claimed inheritance of German philosophy, of English political economy, of French socialism, necessary though these three enzymes, primarily Hegel’s dialectic and Feuerbach’s renewed materialism, were for the formation of Marxism. But rather what finally led to the Archimedean point, and with this to theory-practice, did not appear in any previous philosophy whatsoever, in fact has hardly been fully considered by and in Marx himself. ‘In bourgeois society’, says the Communist Manifesto, ‘the past rules over the present,

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in communist society the present rules over the past.’ And the present rules together with the horizon within it, which is the horizon of the future, and which gives to the flow of the present specific space, the space of new, feasibly better present.Thus the beginning philosophy of revolution, i.e. of changeability for the better, was ultimately revealed on and in the horizon of the future; with the science of the New and power to guide it. All knowledge was however previously related essentially to what is past, since only this can be contemplated. The New thus remained beyond its grasp, the present, in which the Becoming of the New has its Front, remained an embarrassment. Thinking in commodity-form has particularly intensified this old traditional impotence; since the way capitalism turns all men and things into a commodity not only lends them alienation, but it also makes evident: the thought-form commodity is itself the intensified thought-form Becomeness, Factum. On account of this Factum the Fieri is particularly easily forgotten, and consequently the producing element on account of the reified product, and on account of the apparent Fixum at the back of men, the openness in front of them. But the false reciprocal relationship between knowledge and past is very much older, in fact it has its origin precisely where the work process was not at all considered in cognition, so that knowledge not only had to be, as shown above, simply vision, but the Object of knowledge had to be simply material that has been thoroughly formed, and beingness simply Been-ness. This is the proper place for Plato’s anamnesis: ‘For truly’, says Socrates in the ‘Meno’ dialogue (81B-82A) and points to vision precisely in the primal past of the soul, ‘searching and learning are purely and simply - memory.’ It is the spell of this contemplative antiquarium which - despite all social changes in the concept of knowledge - has kept philosophy until Marx not only in contemplation, but also in fact in the mere relation to Becomeness inscribed in every contemplation. Even for the thinker of development, Aristotle, essence is the to tI r\v elvca, the ‘What-Was-Being’, in the sense of enclosed definability, statuary distinctness. Even for Hegel, the great dialec¬ tical process thinker, occurrence is totally bent under its finished history, and essence is the reality that has become, in which it ‘is one with its appearance’. Not least in Feuerbach, Marx himself notes the same block: ‘Feuerbach’s whole deduction regarding the relationship of people to one another only goes to prove that people need and have always needed each other. He seeks to establish consciousness via this fact, he therefore seeks, like the other theoreticians, merely to produce a correct consciousness via an existing Factum, whereas for real communists it is a question of

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overthrowing what exists’ (Deutsche Ideologic, MEGA I, 5, p. 31). The effect of all this was simply for the spirit of anamnesis to seek its power of cognition precisely where present, and especially future is least to be decided. Whereas, therefore, the mere relation: knowledge-past stands in an almost exclusively tub-thumping relationship to questions of the present, and especially to crucial problems of the future, or in a relationship of the most short-sighted bourgeois class standpoint, it only feels at home as it were (though without the perpetuated class standpoint coming to an end) in the seclusion of the preterite. And indeed all the more at home, the more distant the objects lay back in the past, the more adequate therefore their isolation appears to the repose of contemplation. Hence, in the relation: knowledge-past, the Crusades permit more ‘scientificality’ so to speak than both the last two World Wars, and Egypt, which is even more distant, more than the Middle Ages. In fact the apparent total Over of physical nature stands or stood there as a kind of super-Egypt or potential of Egypt, a very long way back in the past, with the granite Becomeness of a matter which was pronounced dead, not without methodological jubilation. But how different all this is in Marxism, how greatly its power has passed to the present. How convincingly its new, its general science of occurrence and change proves itself precisely on the Front of occurrence, in the actuality of each decision, in tendency-control towards the future. In Marxism, the past is not graded in an increasingly antiquarian manner either, since history, as both a primitive communist history and as a history of class struggles, does not even make the epoch which lies furthest back in the past into a museum; even less does it make the one which lies closer to it into a science-free moratorium, as happens in bourgeois contemplation. Whereby such large sections of bourgeois erudition, without any concrete knowledgerelationship to the present, either confronted this latter epoch helplessly when it demanded decision, or, in recent times, sold themselves to antiBolshevism, over and above all class interests, with scandalous ignorance and lack of wisdom. Even the incomparably superior scientific pioneers of bourgeois society, the great and pure ideologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who certainly were kept in relation to the present and the future, always confronted what was coming up in their own revolu¬ tionary class with illusions or unconcretely overshooting ideals; not only on account of their respective class barriers, but also on account of the barrier against the future, which until Marx was consistently erected with the class barrier. This all unites, the longer it persists, the more so, precisely with the anamnesis or the contemplative-static knowledge-block against

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what is really advancing and coming up. And likewise, now quite decisively: where the knowledge-past-relationship sees only embarrassment in the present and chaff, wind, formlessness in the future, the knowledge-tendency-relationship grasps the What For of its knowledge as a whole: as the mediated new construction of the world. The dialectical-historical tendency science of Marxism is thus the mediated future science of reality plus the objectively real possibility within it; all this for the purpose of action. The difference from the anamnesis of the Become, together with all its variations, could not be more illuminating; this is true both of the enlightening Marxist method and of the enlightened, unenclosed matter within it. Only the horizon of the future, which Marxism occupies, with that of the past as the ante-room, gives reality its real dimension. Neither must we forget here the new location of the Archimedean point itself, from which the world is lifted on to its hinges. It likewise does not lie a long way back, in what is past, what is finished and done with, to which earlier, merely contemplative materialism had reduced the world by analysis. This subsequently produced an unchecked retrograde effect, precisely when the demystifying role of this materialism was long since over; it dissolved historical appearances into biological ones, and the latter into chemical and physical ones, right down to the atomic ‘basis’ of each and every thing. So that, even of historically highly-charged appearances, say of the Battle of Marathon for example, only the muscle movements remained, i.e. the Greeks and the Persians together with the social content of this battle disappeared into entirely sub-historical muscle movements. These then dissolved again out of physiology into organic chemical processes, and organic chemistry in turn, which is common to all living things in any case, finally landed up in the dance of the atoms, precisely as the most general ‘basis’ of each and every thing. Thus, of course, not only had the Battle of Marathon completely disappeared, for which after all an explanation was supposed to be given, but the whole constructed world was apparently submerged in the generality of a total mechanism - with the loss of all its appearances and differences. In this reduction to atomics and nothing but atomics, mechanical materialism saw the heart of the matter; in fact all there was in reality here was that night of which Hegel once spoke, the night in which all cows are grey. What was missing was what Democritus, the first great materialist, termed biotow^eiv toc dooLivbfievcx, the rescuing of appearances, and which he called for in methodology. Here, of course, Feuerbach did the young Marx a great service with his not physical but ‘anthropological’ materialism, a service

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which is recognized in the whole tenor of the ‘Eleven Theses’. Atoms and then the whole of biology do indeed underlie every further construction in evolutionary terms, but the ‘starting-point’, as Engels later called it in the ‘Dialectic of Nature’, then the Archimedean point (for history) is for Marxism working man. His social modes of satisfying needs, the ‘ensem¬ ble of social conditions’, which came to replace the Feuerbachian human Abstractum, the social exchange process with nature itself: all this was now recognized as the only relevant and real basis as far as the realm of history and culture is concerned. This was also a material basis, in fact a much more distinctively material basis than that of the invisible atomic processes, but precisely because it was a more distinctive basis, a historically characteristic basis, it did not make historical appearances and characters into night. Instead it brought light for the first time, a genuine light, in which simultaneously the Archimedean point lay, which means: relation of people to people and to nature. And precisely because historical materialism, in contrast to one-sided natural scientific materialism, was not a contemplative materialism, it discovered at the specific location of its Archimedean point not only the key of theory, but also the lever of practice. Marxism thus least destroys this lever or, correspondingly, the higher, the new organization of living matter to which the lever raises us. Thus once again Thesis io states: ‘The standpoint of the old materialism is “bourgeois” society, the standpoint of the new materialism is human society or socialized humanity.’ And correspondingly, world-changing of this kind occurs solely in a world of qualitative reversibility, changeability itself, not in that of the mechanical Time and Time Again, of pure quantity, of the historical In-Vain. There is likewise no changeable world without the grasped horizon of the objectively real possibility within it; otherwise even its dialectic would be one of marking-time. In fact, a great deal more power of creation has become visible in the world-embracing dialectic of Marxism and comes to science. The hope which Herder sought to invoke hymnically in the ‘Genius of the Future’: ‘.. .for what is knowledge of life! and you,/Gift of the Gods, face of the prophets! enchanting voice/That sings in premonition!’, - precisely the hope of the knowledge of life became a real event in Marx, so that it might really be such knowledge. The event is not closed, since it is itself a single Forwards in the changeable world, a world which implies happiness. Thus the totality of the ‘Eleven Theses’ testifies: socialized humanity, allied with a nature that is mediated with it, is the reconstruction of the world into homeland.

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SUMMARY

20

ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION AND ITS POLES: DARK MOMENT - OPEN ADEQUACY But who drives on within us? Someone who does not occupy himself, does not yet emerge. There is no more to be said now, this inner dimension sleeps. The blood runs, the heart beats without us being able to sense what has set the pulse in motion. In fact, if there is no disturbance, then nothing under our skin can be felt at all. That within us which makes us capable of being stimulated does not stimulate itself. Healthy life sleeps, weaving within itself. It is completely immersed in the juice in which it is stewing.

Pulse and lived darkness

For this very reason we cannot feel that we are alive. Precisely this immediate pulse beats alone. Acts like the fulfilment of desire, imagination and so on do not step outside the immediate darkness of their occurrence. But the Now itself ultimately remains the most dark in which we each find ourselves as experiencing beings. The Now is the place where the immediate hearth of experience in general stands, stands in question; thus what has just been lived itself is the most immediately, that is, the least previously experienceable. Only when a Now has just passed or when and for as long as it is expected, is it not only lived, but also experienced. As immediately being there, it lies in the darkness of the moment. Only what is just coming up or what has just passed has the distance which the beam of growing consciousness needs to illuminate it. The That and Now, the moment we are in, burrows in itself and cannot feel itself. Correspondingly, therefore, the respective content of what has just been lived is not perceived.

Room for possible advance

But what is driving in the Now at the same time continually surges forwards. It therefore never remains weaving within itself, since the That of life is greedy. However unexpressed its inner dimension may be, it expresses itself in the fact that it does not have what belongs to it, but

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rather searches for it and intends it outside, i.e. that it is hungry. And the Outside into which the subjective reaches must lie at least within its reach. If there were nothing but narrow, suffocating, firmly established walls around the urging after what the subjective lacks, then there would not even be any urging there. But as it is, something is still open to it, its urging, wishing, doing has room. What is not can still become, what is realized pre¬ supposes Possible in its material. There is this open dimension in people, and dreams, plans live within it. The open dimension is also in things, on their leading edge, where becoming is still possible. And urging not only has its outlet or its free space there, where it can still go, still choose, still depart, still take a new path, lay a new path, but apart from the path there is in the objectively Possible something which possibly corresponds to us, whereby the urging does not continue endlessly unsatisfied. This corres¬ ponding something is not itself settled and guaranteed as such, it is not receptive, let alone a solution, but it is prepared for its Possible and is thus at least receptive as something prepared. There is a driving in things in which our affairs can still be conducted, a Front in which our future, precisely this, can be decided. Such changeable material is by no means self-evident: there could in fact also be nothing new under the sun.* But as it is, there is in the flow of things, i.e. of events, definitely still a Still and a Not-Yet, which is the same as genuine future, i.e. future composed of what has never been like this. Ages in which nothing happens have almost lost the feeling for the Novum; they live in habit and what is coming is no such thing, but rather as circumscribed as what happened yesterday. But ages like the modern one, in which history, perhaps for centuries, stands in the balance, have the feeling for the Novum in the extreme, they sense what future is, with bated breath, by working to promote what is approaching, the approaching possible. Such ages are the place to experience the correlate of the Possible particularly intensely, beyond shattered Becomeness. The Now of the driving only has room among unclosed things to realize, to make its contents increasingly manifest.

Source and outflow: astonishment as absolute question If something is properly realized, life comes to the place where it has never been, that is, it comes home. In this possible realization of something still possible, however, two moments ultimately constitute source and outflow. Cf. Eccles. i, 9.

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The source is characterized by the darkness of the Now, in which realization rises, the outflow by the openness of the object-based background, towards which hope goes. It has already been seen: in the process of realization there is something itself unripe and not yet realized, hence it weakens (cf. p. 192); this unripeness makes itself evident in the darkness of the lived moment. It has further been seen: in the object-based background or correlate there is openness, still decidable Real-Possible, there is utopia as Front-determination of objects themselves (cf. p. 204f.); this material capable of ripening makes itself evident as still continuing tendency, still dawning latency. Dark moment on the one hand, adequate openness on the other, consequently characterize source and outflow of the process of coming up; they are the poles of anticipatory consciousness as well as that which corresponds to it in object-based terms. Outflow, however, characterizes a moment of the final state which signifies more than adequate openness, on the contrary: in which the latter presents itself as open adequacy. Invariance of something constantly intended or of a utopian end which is in the direction, this solely valid invariance has also already been distinguished (cf. p. 221); it is Unum Necessarium in the direction, is an always identically disposed element of the utopian final state. And now: open adequacy does not make itself evident in experiences of the continuing world-process, with experimented outflow, but in short, strange experience of an anticipated keeping still. The briefest symbol-intentions of an Absolute have always been experienced in this keeping still, subjective at first, in fact appearing to be lyrical and yet archphilosophically founded in the matter itself, namely in a flash of utopian final state. Such experiences of a utopian final state certainly do not fix it, other¬ wise they would not be experiences of mere symbol-intention and not utopian, let alone central utopian ones. But they actually do touch upon the core of latency, and in fact as final question, echoing within themselves. This question cannot be construed towards any readily available answer, or be referred to any material already settled anywhere in the available world. Examples of this are given in the book ‘Traces’, where ‘questioning, bottomless astonish¬ ment’ is explained with reference to a passage from Hamsun (Ernst Bloch, Spuren, 1930, p. 274ff.). Particularly, however, in ‘The Spirit of Utopia’, in which such an ultimate symbol-intention was first characterized as ‘shape of the unconstruable question’, this means in fact, as shape of questions which cannot be bent or construed towards any readily available solutions: ‘A drop falls, and it is here; a hut, the child cries, an old woman in the hut, wind outside, heath, autumn evening, and it is here again, exactly as it was, the same; or we read that Dimitri Karamazov wonders in his

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dream why the peasant always says “babby”, and we sense it can be found here; “let the rat rustle as long as it likes! If only it could find a crumb!”, and we feel with this little, miserable, peculiar verse from Goethe’s “Wedding Song”, here in this direction the ineffable lies, that which the little boy left behind when he came out of the mountain again, “don’t forget the best thing!” the old man had said to him, but nobody could ever discover and put into words this inconspicuous, deeply hidden, enormous thing’ (Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 1918, p. 364). We can see from this that it is quite figurative occasions and contents to which the subject thus possibly inclines, but in these, the occasions and contents which are different for every person, but always identical in their significance, the substance of deepest astonishment announces itself, between subject and object, identifying both in intense consternation towards one moment. Thus, once again, the unconstruable, the absolute question certainly also runs towards the moment, into its darkness. Not as a clearing, but as an unmistakable allusion to the immediate darkness of the Now, in so far as its central latency in terms of content nevertheless depicts itself in such astonished questioning, such questioning astonishment. If the content of what is driving in the Now, what is touched in the Here, were extracted positively, a ‘Stay awhile, you are so fair’, then conceived hope, hoped-for world would have reached their goal. Once more: darkness of the lived moment; Carpe diem* That within us which makes us capable of being stimulated, we have said, does not stimulate itself. It sleeps warm and at the same time in darkness, wakes itself up least of all with feeling. Even the feeling of internal and external stimuli, at the point where these plunge into the Now, participates in the latter’s darkness. Just as little as the eye can see at its blind spot, where the nerve enters the retina, is what has just been experienced perceived by any sense. This blind spot in the mind, this darkness of the lived moment, must nevertheless be thoroughly distinguished from the darkness of for¬ gotten or past events. When past material is increasingly covered by night, this night can be lifted, memory helps out, sources and finds can be exca¬ vated, in fact historically past material, even if only patchily, is especially objectifiable precisely for contemplative consciousness. The darkness of the just lived moment, on the other hand, stays in its bed-chamber; topical consciousness only exists precisely in relation to an experience which has This idea originally appears in Horace, Ode XI, Bk. 1.

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just passed or for an expected advancing experience and its content. Together with its content, the lived moment itself remains essentially invisible, and in fact all the more securely, the more energetically attention is directed towards it: at this root, in the lived In-itself, in punctual immediacy, all world is still dark. In punctual immediacy: - does all experience in fact occur punctually and atomistically, consequently in moments and as these? This is denied by vitalist psychologists, they let mental material flow without a pulse. Thus James, regardless of the fact that he allows ‘transitive parts of the consciousness’, sees psychological life as a stream. Division is regarded by vitalists in general, especially by Bergson, as artifical, as scientific-ideal abstraction, supposedly manufactured according to mathematical models; even the moment would not be an immediate self-locatedness here, both gliding and discrete, but a manufactured fiction. However, all this vitalistic denial of the moment remains quite irrelevant in the present case; since the punctual pulse is in fact part of life, it is not an abstraction from it. Whereas the stream of the consciousness-vitalists themselves is abstract; since what it lacks is precisely the beating pulse, this element of the stream of life as opposed to a waveless, uninterrupted pushing and shoving. The image of the stream of consciousness shows its own abstractness in the fact that it contains almost nothing of a real stream any more, but is instead stationary in itself. The stream of consciousness of the vitalists is also so little a real stream that it manifests neither source nor outflow, and above all it has nothing in common with the only concrete concept of the stream, with that of process, which does decidedly consist of interruptions, namely of dialectical moments of the dialectical context. As certainly as process is not ‘composed’ of these, following an interpretation which is itself reified and mechanistic, it does nevertheless owe its discontinuous character to them, precisely the ‘pulse of liveliness’, as Hegel says. James, even Bergson not only fell back behind Hegel on this point, but even behind Hume, who is so much closer to them, namely because he is undialectical. His theory of the ‘indivisible moments of time and consciousness’ is significantly more concrete than the mere superficial conception: stream of consciousness, with the pulseless abstractness into which it has been reified. The correct version could even be learnt from Husserl here, at least as far as the temporal aspect in the supposed ‘act-continuum’ is concerned: ‘As a movement is being perceived, moment by moment an As-Now-Comprehension is taking place in which the topical phase of the movement itself is constituted.’ And further: ‘The flowing is not only flowing in general, but each phase is of one and the same form... The form consists in a Now constituting

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itself through an impression, and a tail of retentions affiliating itself to this and a horizon of protentions’ (Zur Phanomenologie des inneren ZeitbewuBtseins, 1928, p. 391, 476). No flow can be thought of at all, let alone dialectically understood without that Now-Amidst in its time, which is not even itself time, but ‘the peculiar something’, in Plato’s words, out of which the time (not only the conception of time) of the real stream of movement arises and in which movement is united with restless rest itself. Plato, who has a better understanding than James and Bergson of the discontinuous continuum, for this very reason decisively distinguishes the moment (to e£cd(t>vr)s, the sudden). It figures here as momentum of transition between movement and rest, rest and movement: ‘For nothing crosses over out of rest as long as it is still at rest, nor out of movement while it is still moving, into rest; but the moment, this peculiar something, lies between movement and rest, belonging to no time; and within it, out of it, what is moved crosses over into rest and what is resting into movement’ (Parmenides, 156 D-E). And finally - as regards the flow as one towards outflow (rest) - both the tenor of the Faust plan and the related tenor of mysticism has the moment as no abstraction within it. ‘Stay awhile, you are so fair’: supposedly this can be said to the moment as a highest moment, even to that perfectly fulfilled and so steadfast and steadily lasting moment which is stressed in Eckhart’s mysticism as the trice (nunc stans) of perfection. Thus all these statements, so different from each other, are united in their recognition of a real Now; in contrast to the stream of abstraction of the vitalists. And ultimately the pulse remains which also provides the model for the intermitting momentary character of consciousness, or rather: occurs analogously in the body. Derived from the pulse-beat, the mental moment is experienced in the throbbing of its Now, in the forward-surging, also transitive character of all moments. But no more is yet revealed in this immediacy, and becoming aware only stretches to the point where the lived moment can in fact be experienced and characterized as dark. And here the crucial factor is added which has in any case driven the problem beyond mere psychology in all that has come before: the darkness of the lived moment is depictive for the darkness of the objective moment. That is, for the Not-Having-Itself of that intensive time-element which has itself not yet unfolded in time and process as manifested in terms of content. Not the most distant therefore, but the nearest is still completely dark, and precisely because it is the nearest and most immanent; the knot of the riddle of existence is to he found in this nearest. The life of the Now, the most genuinely intensive life, is not yet

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brought before itself, brought to itself as seen, as opened up; thus it is least of all being-here, let alone being-evident. The Now of the existere, which drives everything and in which everything drives, is the most inexperienced thing that there is; it still drives continually under the world. It constitutes the realizing aspect which has least realized itself - an active moment-darkness of itself. From which the strange idea emerges that no person is really here yet, is really alive. Because, after all, life means being-present, does not mean only before or after, foretaste or aftertaste. It means plucking the day, in the simplest and most basic sense, means acting concretely towards the Now. But precisely because our nearest, most genuine, continuous beingpresent is not one, no person is yet really living, precisely from this perspective. Carpe diem in quick, thoughtless enjoyment, it seems so simple, widespread even, but is so rare that it never appears as real plucking. Nothing is more fleeting from the present than that usual Carpe diem that appears to be completely absorbed in the enjoyment of the Now, nothing with less power over being, nothing more banality ante rem. Thus the plucking of the day cannot be achieved so quickly, unless the ‘Stay awhile’ spoken to the moment is in reality confused with a bed of ease. However much credit is due to elementally forceful contentment, it is only apparently at home in Auerbach’s cellar* or even in philistine pleasure in possessions. Already above (cf. p. i8iff.), Lenau and Kierkegaard were recalled as non-masters of the Carpe diem, not unobjectionable ones, but very worthy objects of consideration. They were both condemned to see the image of the loved-one jostling with the loved-one herself. This may often be weakness of life, but the powerful subject of the Egyptian Helen indicates that with weakness, even with Romantic exuberance, even with a kind of utopian neurosis, the case is not closed. The usual Carpe diem does not get beyond the mere impressible, beyond the surface of the moment of pleasure and pain, in fact it is - contrary to the version of it in Horace - that which is dispersed, that which does not stay awhile, that which is without present itself. In short: curiosity is just as little utopian as the usual Carpe diem, which in fact jumps from one ‘moment’ to the next, wasting the day in the day, has power over being. There is only a more genuine contact with the moment in strong experiences and in sharp turningpoints of existence, either of our own existence or of the time, in so far * The Leipzig wine-cellar where Mephistopheles takes Faust to show him ‘how easy life can be’ and where he plays tricks on the gullible drinkers.

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as they are noticed by the eye that has presence of mind. Extraordinary men of action seem to offer genuine Carpe diem, as decision at the required moment, as power not to miss its opportunity. Mommsen gives Caesar as an example of this power, calls it ‘the sobriety of genius’ and continues significantly: ‘To this he owed the ability to live energetically in the moment, undistracted by memory and expectation; to this the capability of acting at any moment with gathered strength.’ But did Caesar, did most men of action of the class society, which means here: of unfathomed history, equally grasp the moment when they acted in terms of its historical content? This case is so rare that Goethe offers almost the only example, a man furthermore who was not a man of action, but rather a man with incomparable concrete vision. Thus Goethe’s statement on the day of the bombardment of Valmy* is relevant here: ‘From here on and today a new epoch of world history commences, and you can say that you were present at its inception’; there are, however, not many examples of this kind of presence of mind. Not many such observations of an otherwise unobserved moment: of a transitory moment with the most fertile motif, of a meeting place of highly ramified mediations between past and future - in the midst of the unsighted Now. A sudden, not historically horizontal, but vertically striking light then falls on immediacy so that it almost appears to be mediated, though without ceasing to be immediate or overdose nearness. The situation-analyses of Marx and Engels give the most splendid example of fathomed presence of mind, headed by the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’. And Lenin grasped the present with historical insight all his life, right up to that thoroughly thought-out Carpe diem which is called the Great Sorialist October Revolution. All this of course already presupposed a totally uncontemplative stance, namely apprehending-comprehending of the topical driving forces of occurrence itself. This cannot be achieved by the class society which necessarily overlooked the truly producing element in face of the product; but the correct path to active topicality likewise only began with situation-analysis. Its goal remains the illumination of that which both drives and remains hidden to itself in the final That-ground of occurrence. Certainly too: all societies are pervaded by in no way merely lyrical, but rather arch-philosophical experiences of the unconstruable question, of absolute astonishment, an incipient Carpe diem in the unusual,

20th August 1792, when the Duke of Brunswick’s Prussian army, thought to be the best in Europe, was forced to retreat by the army of the French Republic under Kellermann. Goethe was actually present at the bombardment.

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genuine sense; but, on the other hand, how much timidity, how much mere symbol-intention there is in this inconspicuous everyday mysticism, the only kind which has remained, which is worthy of remaining. Every¬ where else, Not-there is the condition of the Now, and even the Here of this Not-there forms a zone of silence in the very place where the music is being played. Consequently, not only the existing, but also above all the subject of existing stands in the incognito, precisely therefore what is driving and ultimately what is contained in what exists itself. For this the full Carpe diem would first be crucial, so that the existing-topical material and the environment that borders on it temporally-spatially would not in any way be made gloomy and difficult by the nearness which has this still immediate difficulty in experiencing things. But the moments still beat unheard, unseen, their present is at best in the forecourt of its presence which is not yet conscious, which has not yet become.

Darkness of the lived moment, continuation: foreground, dead space, melancholy of fulfilment, self mediation The lived darkness is so strong that it is not even confined to its most immediate nearness. Instead it also has an influence in its environment, in the time adjoining the just Now, and then in the space adjoining the just Here. This influence prevents experientially real nearness, particularly as an occurring one, from achieving proper and reassuring distance, that is, from being contemplated in the usual fashion. Consequently, the peculiar twilight of the respectively topical foreground arises which cannot be easily contemplated, but also not easily grasped and known. Several proverbs have more idea of this than most previous philosophers; as for example: No weaver knows what he weaves, or: There is no light at the foot of the lighthouse. And was not Oedipus, because he was himself standing in the light, the last to realize that he had married his own mother? He had competently solved the riddle of the Sphinx which could be contem¬ plated from outside, but he reacted helplessly towards his own case, because it was immediately near him. And so on in the obscure text of the Now¬ time, of the Here-space, wherever mere contemplation, from a distance, from the usual perspective, ventures forward towards it. This sort of thing appears most treacherously, as we have often noticed (cf. p. 283E), as soon as reified contemplation, that of something petrified, Become, arrives in

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the present and attempts to say its piece to this something which is near, happening, becoming. Then the habituation to the kind of contexts to which the distancing aspect had given rise way back in the past is torn apart. Even the relative nearness of the nineteenth century makes bourgeois historians characteristically embarrassed when they arrive at this century in the course of their account; opinions intrude in place of the previous contextual judgements. And the completely baffling unscientific approach of these historians is to be remembered when history went to world war; the academic became the tub-thumping or even jingoistic senior primary school master. This not only because of the class-conditioned unconcrete attitude of the bourgeois to the annexes of the Now, but this particular weakness of vision together with the ideological interest in falsification is centrally encouraged by the general collapse of objective contemplation so to speak which nearness causes, and the false judgements of bourgeois partiality step with particular engagement into the breach of topical immediacy which can never be overcome by mere contemplation. All this may be elucidated by considering a problem from landscape painting, in that and in so far as it concerns the difficulty of the Topical together with the adjoining Now-foreground, Here-foreground. The problem of the Topical for painting is: Where does the portrayed landscape begin in a picture? The painter does not include himself in the painting, although he is also immediately located in the landscape, as the innermost ring of the Immediate. However, the second ring of immediacy: the authentic foreground of the picture, can also only be objectified with difficulty; it still has too much nearness to the standpoint of the painter. And precisely the confusion created by nearness causes the relative lack of developed form of the spatial foreground too, the fact that it does not really belong to the authentic landscape. The portrayed landscape therefore does not only begin, as is obvious, outside the painter who is painting it, but also beyond the still diffuse objects of his nearer environment. A concept taken from the physics of the air pump will make this clear: the foreground is for the portrayal dead space, that is, a space from which the atmosphere has not yet wholly escaped. In this case the atmosphere of immediacy, the persisting darkness and the persisting disorder of the Here and Now, of nearness. Hence to the question: Where does the landscape begin? Where does coherent objectification start? we can only answer: beyond detrimental space, at a distance from it, precisely at the point where the darkness of immediacy together with its outskirts begins to stop. And since this curious gap always lies between subject and object of contemplation, precisely as

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dead space sui generis, from which the atmosphere of unmediated immediacy has not yet been sufficiently removed: the difficult problem of the foreground of the landscape painting sharply corresponds methodologically to the above-mentioned difficulty of occurring topicality, occurring in time. Within this, however, the influence of the lived darkness is still incom¬ parably more significant than the subject-matter is itself in the spatial attention-relief, and is not only an example of it, as in the composition of painting. This is already demonstrated by the fact that the Here-space as spatial foreground can ultimately cross over into landscape, can as it were conclude within it, and by the fact that an unfinished trace of nearness does not announce itself in the repose of this conclusion. Whereas the Now-time, as foreground of time, does not automatically run over into what can be comprehended, formed and known, and in fact - a new difficulty - not automatically into knowability either, which is not passive contemplation, but active tendency-lore. For otherwise this knowability would have to get in its objective grasp what subsequently surrounds the Now-time, i.e. the future as completely as, mutatis mutandis, the landscape-picture the landscape behind the Here-space. Which, as regards the future, except for the next step to be taken, and the next after that, and the grand perspective, quite obviously cannot be the case, not even in the basic science of mastered occurrence, in the finally concrete tendency science: Marxism. And it cannot be so because the future dimension - in contrast to spatial distance - itself contains unmastered Now, i.e. darkness, just as the Now itself still contains unopened future, i.e. newness, and surges forward to meet it. Past, this dimension which is only ostensibly closed, in fact only for contemplation, and thus can ostensibly be compared with the objectifiable space-landscape, appears only later in time-consciousness and in time-phase, only after the surging into future, and for this reason cannot after all be compared with the objectified landscape, which directly adjoins space-topicality and stands behind it as finished. On the contrary: what contains the future in the Now-topicality remorselessly continues on its way - above and beyond all other past forms - even in its foreground-topicality and in all its horizonenvironments. But since the future thus belongs to topicality, the former with all its foreground- and horizon-objectivities also participates in the darkness of the lived moment. And it participates in it in a way which constitutes the most essential characteristic of the future: being sealed off from contemplation, but also still relatively unknown to tendency-lore. This connection between moment- and future-darkness was formulated for the first time in ‘The Spirit of Utopia’ thus: ‘The darkness is intensified

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as soon as not only we ourselves but also the other, turned side remains undecided, hence as soon as we turn to the future dimension, which itself, in so far as it is above all logically new, means nothing other than our expanded darkness, than our darkness in the bearing of its womb, in the expansion of its further history; and it is likewise intensified with regard to God as the problem of the radically New, who must not only become visible for us in order to be, so that the whole world-process is reduced elastically to a movement relationship between two “separated” realities, but who contains himself only as hope, as Not-Being-For-Itself, like us in the shadowy dimension of what has not occurred, of what is still unreal’ (Geist der Utopie, 1918, p. 372). In line with this uncanny formulation the darkness of the lived moment therefore coincides in its total depth with the essential, but not here-existing mode of existence of the goal-content itself, which was once intended by the mythological term God, and which, according to the passage quoted above, is in fact the goal-content, that does not yet exist here, has not yet been brought out, of existing itself. However, the Carpe diem or present of the absolute goal-content stands in the same ground in which the subject of existing stands, and from the same ground as the latter the goal-content as a Realized* goal-content is still outstanding: from the ground of that unclarified hearth of existence which is unmythologically termed agent and core of developing matter. So widely, so deeply therefore the root darkness of the lived moment extends; so precisely is it assigned to the Novum in both, to the Ultimum of the content. And it is likewise the same future: what is contained in the womb of the ages, which is called upon to reveal what is contained in the moment. Solely the capability-of-being, which has been encouraged to develop the power of guidance and has been opened up, brings the immediate being of the driving-concealed moment to itself and up; solely this opened transcendere into the Novum opens up immanent existing in terms of content. The nearer the presence is here to the existential creator of occurrence, hence - historically - to man, and the more radical the self¬ apprehension of the history-forming subject, the more blind topicality frees itself, the more effectively it can be recognized as the transit point of widely ramified dialectical mediations. The authentic, metaphysical darkness of the lived moment is not yet or only initially illuminated by means of such historical subject-comprehension, but the foreground problem, with

As in section 16, Bloch once again begins to alternate ‘verwirklichen’ and ‘realisieren’ for to realize. The latter and its compounds are indicated with capitals.

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the crack of Here and Now in the depictions of the world context, is finally grasped. It is assimilated into the problem of the mediated transit point and therein of topical-concrete decision on the Front of world-occurrence. Not that this crack in life, even in non-contemplative life, consequently disappears. For ultimately the influence of the lived darkness is not confined to the various foregrounds mentioned above either. But the blind spot, this not-seeing of the immediately entering Here and Now, also in fact appears in every realization. Indeed, seeing is only dimmed by all too near distance, whereas the kind of realizing which has been available so far does not darken in a foreground of any kind, but in the realized material itself. Even genuine Carpe diem is not exempted from this melancholy, namely when it is not merely presence of mind, but plucks the fruits of a fulfilled hope. And the experiences of central astonishment, in the unconstruable question, are only spared this melancholy because they in fact contain merely lightning signs of a here-existing Now, a Here and There, and this in representative, often ludicrous Objects, but not, not yet in the realized subject-matter in and for itself. Everywhere else there is a crack, even an abyss in the realizing itself, in the actuated-topical entrance of what has been so beautifully foreseen, dreamed out; and this abyss is that of the ungrasped existere itself. So the darkness of nearness also gives the final reason for the melancholy of fulfilment: no earthly paradise remains on entry without the shadow which the entry still casts over it. It is not just that a fiasco threatens when too far-fetched dreams are supposed to be realized, or when all too sublime dreams jeopardize their fulfilment. A trace in Realizing itself is even still felt and is present where appropriate goals have been Realized, or where monumental dream-images appear to have entered reality with skin and hair, with body and soul. There is a realizing which disregards the deed of the realizers themselves and does not contain it; there are ideals which pretend to be elevated, remote from tendency, abstractly fixed, and thus also suppress the unfinished, unrealized aspect of their realizers. Precisely in the melancholy of fulfilment this most profoundly not yet fulfilled aspect in the subject announces itself in exactly the same way as the insufficient aspect in the fixed material of the ideal criticizes itself within it. It is therefore also necessary increasingly to set free the element of realizing simultaneously with the element of the future society. A similar process has in fact already been seen in the problem of realization (Egyptian Helen): the wish- or ideal-content, precisely when it reaches its realization-goal, arrives at a point of darker reality than it possessed

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in the hovering, utopian, merely existing real character. And to repeat: Realization, however much it cancels contemplative distance, never acts entirely as Realization, because there is something in the subject-factor of Realiza¬ tion itself which has never realized itself The subject-factor of lending existence is itself not yet here, it is not predicated, not objectified, not Realized; ultimately this is what is announced in the darkness of the lived moment. And this incognito still remains the basic impediment which accompanies every realization, when it is a full one. To remove it, to educate the educator himself, to create the creator himself, to Realize the Realizer himself, all humanistic wishful dreams are directed towards this; they are the most radical and the most practical. Growing self-mediation of the producer of history is thus not merely the help to realize concrete tendency-anticipations concretely, it is also the help to introduce realization without its peculiarly bitter trace. Without that remaining minus which characterizes the imme¬ diate aspect of existing itself that has remained dark, and which ultimately constitutes the element of non-arrival in arrival. A being-human which in its sphere of existence is no longer encumbered with anything that is alien to it, a Realizing element that is itself Realized: this is the borderconcept of realization as fulfilment.

More on astonishment as absolute question, in the shape of anxiety and of happiness; the directly utopian archetype: highest good We said that what is driving in the Now also surges forward in the future into something open. This openness has a double location in mental activity behind it, from which its fruits are expected and also driven. The one location remains anxiety, of a kind which is all the greater the more uncertainly it can expect its causes from all sides. Neither the neurotic anxiety which may stem from unusable libido, nor the normal real anxiety in dangerous situations is relevant here any longer, but rather an anxiety which is both unconditional and related to something final. Even anxiety-dreams, as already noted, even children’s horror of the dark, even fear of ghosts only border atavistically on this anxiety, but they do indicate the direction. For the believer, hell was populated with nothing but phobias of this kind, even when external anxiety, that towards unknown nature, no longer needed to be anything like as great. Hell has disappeared thanks to the Enlightenment, but the correlate problem of utterly pervasive horror, of metaphysical horror, has remained. Its abode is always the Now, a bloody

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gash in the darkness of the Now and of what is to be found within it. It is beyond doubt that such an immediate horror exists, that it is of a different kind from the terrible real anxiety towards the really Become. Its element is the unbearable moment, an often, though not always pathological figment, an almost crippling terror in itself. Epilepsy, in the aura before the attack, seems to have a particularly close connection with this unbearable state, paranoia supplies the images of it closest to the anxiety-dream, the anxiety-dream in broad daylight. Buchner’s fragment about the poet Lenz going mad gives us an unforgettable account of this: ‘Can’t you hear anything?’ asks the mad poet, ‘can’t you hear the terrible voice which is screaming around the whole horizon and which we usually call silence?’ And in Buchner’s ‘Woyzeck’, anxiety is aroused everywhere by a roaring nothingness, by the wind, by the evening sky, by the expectation of an uncertain negative something below, above all things, threatening the poor devil from every direction. Anxiety appears in all these testimonies which are still so very distant from one another as an expectation on the uncertain darkest side, on the side of the strangulating, staring nothingness in the Real-Possible. This unpicturable thing is also noted pictorially, in Durer’s ‘Melencolia’, in fact both this side and the other side of the astrological references contained within it. Even on the other side of the Saturn shining out of the eyes of the woman figure, whose emblems fill the engraving, only interrupted by the friendlier square of Jupiter, on the wall behind the figure. Saturn, however, the star of brooding and yet also of collection, does not explain, although he is also the star of misfortune, the ground into which Melencolia is gazing. Collection is only in the eye of the figure, perhaps in the sphere in the foreground, perhaps even in the dog curled up asleep, but not in the ensemble of Objects, nor in the object at which the figure is gazing. This object itself is not in the picture, but precisely its completely uncollected nature is indicated by the ensemble. Dehio strikingly drew attention to the dissolute aspect of this interior: the compasses rest idly in her hand, scattered, mournful light lies on scattered Objects, the order which otherwise characterizes scholars’ studies of the sixteenth century is completely missing, there could be no greater contrast than between this ensemble and the tidied one in the engraving ‘St Jerome in his Cell’. This in fact means: Durer’s engraving ‘Melencolia’ pictures, with astrological aids, anxiety as the contact with a possible abyss which does not even have a bottom on which the fall is dashed. The engraving pictures stupor into which a desperation opened up in enduring Now stares; Durer’s ‘Melencolia’ is thus the invaluable

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document of negative astonishment, precisely without spooks or hell, even without the determination of Saturn. Even in the negative there are therefore forms of the unconstruable, the absolute question, there are unbearable moments of astonishment. They are correspondingly more blurred than the latter’s positive qualities, since they are only precise in that they signify radically indeterminate horror, in the location of the abyss. Of course: the abyss is not present alone in this location, even in the Melencolia the Gorgonian is not alone in the world, but beside the stupor of astonish¬ ment there is in fact a Jerome-repose of astonishment, and this indicates intentionally the other location of what is still open. Because the changing face, the ‘counter-sense of primal words’, which was already to be seen in all radical emotional states, particularly in the expectant emotions, is lacking least of all in radical astonishment. Hence often the same cause which produces negative astonishment is capable of producing happiness as the Positivum of astonishment. And here too the location is always the Now, yet not as a bloody gash in the darkness of the Now and what is to be found within it, but hope begins to blossom, with positive symbolintention breaking into this darkness, hope mysteriously confirmed in the inconspicuous. The element of this positive astonishment is the reposeful moment, the moment where an otherwise quite insignificant perception or an image felicitously shatters and - catches the existing-intensive. Tolstoy speaks in the ‘Death of Ivan Illyich’ of shrubs in the snowstorm, storm and cold ruled hostile to life, the landscape itself lay in the most extreme desolation; despite or because of this, in an ineffable incidental detail, suddenly homecoming and answer appear in this landscape, more centrally than in any apotheosis. Tolstoy even associates the little, almost ridiculous central incidental detail of the shrubs in the snowstorm very definitely with the rare great moments in which, mostly at the moment of death, One and All suddenly becomes clear for men, appears to become clear. There is a parallel here with the experience of the fatally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky on the battlefield of Austerlitz who glimpses the starry sky as never before, and also with the experience of unity of Karenin and Vronsky at Anna’s death-bed; - but also of course: this unio mystica with meaning, eternity, totality is again much too big and too determined, much too contrived in its theological Object to cope with the modesty of the peripheral, never formulated material. The house stands already real in all conventional religious experiences, as if it lay only in man’s blindness not to see it, only in the weakness of his flesh not to enter. Nevertheless, the connection with the inconspicuous symbol-intentions is unavoidable,

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they are contained in all these experiences of consternation like seeds of a summum bonum, of an absolutely human-adequate There. The There which announces itself in this way, however, stands in mere real possibility, and all the positive symbol-intentions only evoke its sign in man, this without doubt; they call the comprehensible-incomprehensible name of good existence, in anticipated silence. And they also call it in central peripheralness, close beside anxiety-consternation, with equally abrupt, equally undecided concentration. Utopia of the end touches man in such objective, at the same time object-based astonishment; though a content of horror can most definitely be interwoven with that of the wonderful. As a sign of the paradoxical nature of the wonderful or in fact of the NotYet-Determinedness, Not-Yet-Decidedness, which befits the final character of the Authentic and of tendency in general. At all stages here, this adequacy (the naturalization of man, the humanization of nature) is still open: not only with regard to its future entrance, but also with regard to its still unfixable content which lies one jump ahead of everything that has so far been gained. This kind of thing only takes place in the separate Now, because it takes place at the source of everything. And an outflow is inherent in the source, whether it is reached is another question. But the outflow itself takes precedence over everything as a living question, as that into the Absolute, as that of the not yet existing Absolute itself. Unconstruable question and its astonishment were defined above as the flash of the at last Real-Possible breaking in upon itself, concerning the core of latency; by breaking in upon itself in this way, the Real-Possible gives itself a hand to make a stop, ceases to be endless. And this stop occurs precisely in the driver of the Real-Possible itself: the overbright consternation of the astonishment at flashing moments and signatures of adequation thus has the most precise connection with the That of existing in the bed-chamber of the lived moment. Therefore just as the darkness of the lived moment represents one pole of anticipatory consciousness, of anticipating world-composition itself, so real astonishment with open adequacy as content represents the other; and they attract each other intensely, the symbol-intention of the Absolute and Omega points to the darkness of the Alpha or nearest nearness. It is the source or beginning of the world, still driving and still hidden in the darkness of the lived moment, which grasps and dissolves itself for the first time in the signatures of its outflow. Grasps and dissolves only in an anticipatory way, in quite weak, quite small signs: the world-knot, which is concealed nowhere else but in the immediate That of existing,

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is also only disentangled through the most intensive nearness to this most immanent That-intensity, through evidences in nearness. Precisely the so very nearest inconspicuous aspect, the fine signature of these evidences, is the only thing which has remained of the earlier putative closeness to the gods, in fact which has always formed the core in it, in so far as it seemed to contain an ens perfectissimum. The great pre-appearances of genuine mysticism remain as such in experimenting force, since what had also appeared in them as final symbols, as real-symbols, had contact with fine signature and incorporated it. Here lies the pre-appearance of the Andante, even the idyll as finale, with that Tao of the world which Lao Tzu claims has no taste, and which therefore has the sharpest taste. Repose, depth has always been founded in this inconspicuous element and has remained designable: ‘But not as if the secret drawer in every object still had to contain great unfurlings and documents as in earlier times, when enormous wrappings still accompanied all depth and these wrappings - gods, heaven, great powers, glories, thrones - were considered essential. But instead, sleeping, silently, Odysseus came to Ithaca, precisely to Ithaca he came sleeping, that Odysseus called Nobody, and into that Ithaca which can in fact be the way that this pipe is lying there or however else something wholly inconspicuous suddenly presents itself and what has steadily been intended finally appears to perceive itself. So firmly, so very immediately evident that a leap into the Not-Yet-Conscious, into the more deeply identical, into the truth and the word that solves things is made which is irrevocable; that simultaneously with the sudden last meaning-intention of the viewer in the object the face of something still nameless, the element of the final state, embedded everywhere, emerges in the world and no longer leaves it’ (Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 1923, p. 248). The thunder which believes it is the ultimate and the apparent expression of this ultimate has become decadent; since what is final is silent and simple. However, the fact that the final state, even in the most inconspicuous astonishment, in front of and behind each pre-appearance, is not yet established was demonstrated in the equally negative and positive utopia which opens up at this end and has not yet become reality precisely in its ultimate aspect, either as negative reality of the Pessimum and its Nothing or as positive reality of the Optimum and its All. Between both there still exists even in unconditional astonishment the dangerous merging of an ultimately undecided alternative, and it exists in object-based fashion in the outflowproblem of the world. But equally, of course - and this is also the major plus of hope-consternation in terms of its prospect - equally the Optimum

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of the goal-content has in its favour the openness of the historical process which is continuing and has by no means been defeated up to now: it is not yet the evening to end all days, every night still has a morning. Even the defeat of the wished-for good includes its future possible victory as long as not all possibilities of becoming different, becoming better are exhausted in history and world; as long as the Real-Possible with its dialectically utopian process has in fact not yet been finally fixed. As long as wish, will, plan, pre-appearance, symbol-intention, cipher of the OneThing-Intended still have space in process, in fact form virtual paradises in process. And the last symbol-intention remains in fact the homelandbased one of the unconstruable question of the ‘Stay awhile, you are so fair’ in its Optimum. The invariant of this direction leads in the end, as we are now in a position to say, to the only archetype which has nothing archaic about it. That is: to the purely utopian archetype, which lives in the evidence of nearness, to that of the still unknown, all-surpassing summum bonum. The archetype: highest good is the invariance-content of the most felicitous astonishment, its possession would be that which transforms in the moment and in fact as this moment, into its completely resolved That. The archetype of the highest good is therefore not archaic, not even historical, because there has never been a single appearance which could have even begun to fulfil its image. Even less does it return, with Plato’s anamnesis, to the immemorial dimension of a perfection in order to fill its Optimum with it. The place to which this archetype of unconstruable happiness returns is solely the itself still completely unappeared origin at which it stops off and which, through its Omega, it brings to its Alpha, to the appearing genesis of Alpha and Omega at the same time. All the forms of the unconstruable absolute question, in their bright part, hence circle or surround the Optimum of this breaking into the successful achievement of the Omega, in which the riddle-Alpha of the That or world-impulse emerges as solved. Summum bonum would be perfectly successful appearance of the Successful: hence it has also withdrawn from appearance; hence it is itself inconspicuous, a utopian summum of those inconspicuous symbol-intentions through which every appearance passes over into the matter itself. The content of the most basic desirability which the highest good designates is of course still just as much in the fermenting incognito as that which wishes this content in people. But its intended All always designated the peak of the dreams of the better life, its utopian Totum continuously governs the outflow-tendencies in well-managed process.

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The Not in origin, the Not-Yet in history, the Nothing or conversely the All at the end That which in itself and immediately proceeds as Now is thus still empty. The That in the Now is hollow, is only undefined to begin with, a fermenting Not. The Not with which everything starts up and begins, around which every Something is still built. The Not is not there, but because it is thus the Not of a There, it is not simply Not, but at the same time the Not-There. As such the Not cannot bear the presence of itself, is instead related in a driving way to the There of a Something. The Not is lack of Something and also escape from this lack; thus it is a driving towards what is missing. Thus the driving in living things is depicted with Not: as drive, need, striving and primarily as hunger. In the latter, however, the Not of a There announces itself as a Not-Having, and in fact definitely as a Not, not as a Nothing. Because the Not is the beginning of every movement towards something, it is precisely for this reason by no means a Nothing. Instead: Not and Nothing must first be kept as far apart as possible; the whole adventure of definition lies between them. The Not lies in origin as the still empty, undefined, undecided, as the start of the beginning; whereas the Nothing is something definite. It presupposes exertions, long erupted process which is finally thwarted; and the act of Nothing is not, like that of the Not, a driving, but an annihilation. The darkness of the lived moment refers to the Not, only negative astonishment to the Nothing, just as positive astonishment refers to the All. The Not is of course emptiness, but at the same time the drive to break out of it; in hunger, in privation the emptiness mediates itself precisely as horror vacui, precisely therefore as abhorrence of the Not at the Nothing. And even at this point, particularly at this point, it is clear that categorial basic concepts (fundamentals) are made accessible solely by a thorough knowledge of the theory of the emotions. Since only the emotions, not the emotionless thoughts, or rather the thoughts which have been made emotionless, reach so deeply into the ontic roots that concepts which appear to be so inherently abstract like Not, Nothing, All, together with their distinctions, become synonymous with hunger, desperation (annihilation), confidence (rescue). These concepts thus illuminate the basic emotions, as the basic emotions do the ontological basic concepts, in that they make the intensive substance evident to them from which they spring, through which they burn, and which they

SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION

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illuminate. Ontological basic concepts: here then the Not, the Not-Yet, the Nothing or conversely the All are distinguished as those which make evident in the most abbreviated terminology the intensively moving worldsubstance in its three principal moments. Consequently, these sharply compressed basic concepts designate real categories, namely area categories of reality in general; since their concise ontology most nearly approaches a depiction of the objective emotion-substance, i.e. intensity-substance in the three principal moments of the process-matter. In such a way, however, that the Not, unable to bear the presence of itself, characterizes the intensive, ultimately interest-based origin (the That-based Realizing element) of everything. The Not-Yet characterizes the tendency in material process, of the origin which is processing itself out, tending towards the manifestation of its content. The Nothing or conversely the All characterizes the latency in this tendency, negative or positive towards us, chiefly on the foremost Front-field of material process. Even this latency, however, refers again only to the content of the intensive origin, i.e. to the filling of what is intended in its hunger, to the satisfaction of this interest which is breaking in. Furthermore, as noted: in hunger, in privation, emptiness (the zero of the immediate That of existing) mediates itself precisely as horror vacui. This horror vacui is the original That-factor and positing factor, the intensive realization-factor which sets the world going and keeps it going, keeps it going as experiment of the spilling of its That-content. The start of the beginning of all Being-Here lies here always in the darkness which is still unmediated with itself, namely in the darkness of the Now or of the just lived moment; the fiat of all world-movements occurs most imme¬ diately in this darkness. And the darkness is in fact not a far removed, not an immemorial darkness at the beginning of time, a long since passed beginning masked by continuation or cosmos. But on the contrary: the darkness of the origin remains, as immediate darkness, unchanged in nearest nearness or in the continuing That of all existing itself. This That is still unresolved in every moment; the mysterious question of why anything is at all is posed by the immediate existing itself as its own question. Its expression is creation renewed in and by every moment; the world as process is the experiment towards the resolution of the always and everywhere driving question of origin. Above, we described this unresolved element as the world-knot which is concealed in the unresolved That of existing; thus the world creates every moment anew in its immediate Being-Here, and this continued creation appears also as preservation of the world, namely of the world-process. The start of the beginning and the starting-point

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called origin and world-ground is to be found in precisely that Now and Here which has not yet emerged from itself, i.e. which has not yet moved from its place at all. This origin in the strict sense has itself not yet arisen, arisen out of itself; its Not is therefore in fact precisely the one which is ultimately driving history and tailoring historical processes to its requirements, but which has itself not yet become historical. The origin remains the incognito of the core which moves throughout all times, but which has not yet moved out of itself. Every lived moment would therefore, if it had eyes, be a witness of the beginning of the world which begins in it time and time again; every moment, when it has not emerged, is in the year zero of the beginning of the world. The beginning occurs in it time and time again for as long as it takes until the undefined Not of the That-ground is decided, through the experimental definitions of the world-process and its forms, either as definite Nothing or definite All, according to its content; every moment therefore likewise potentially contains the date of the completion of the world and the data of its content. Because the Not gets involved in its What- or content-objectifications, in so far as it becomes mediated it changes, ceaselessly in fact, since it now itself stands in the temporal-spatial process which it posits and in which it experimentally spills its content. So the creation which it constantly posits anew is not preservation in the sense of Becomeness, but rather preservation in the sense of Becoming, that is, of experimenting with the content of the Thatcore. And the constantly new positing mediates itself in historical terms towards particularly distinguished points: towards the breakthrough of a historically New. Precisely because the most basic content of existing, as not yet manifest, must be driven out continually in historical terms, the formation process repeatedly develops Front-appearances of this material which has not come, i.e. the Never-Yet-Been-So or Novum on the horizon, in that into which it is streaming, into which it finally tends to flow out with single purpose. The whole manifold fullness in this search of the core for its fruit is of course, together with the repeatedly possible Novum, equally a persistent lack, namely of One Thing that has not yet been found; which is why the temporal-spatial sphere of influence is no less covered with innumerable fragments and husks, with wild saurian-like monstrosities, as progressive preparations appear for the One Thing, for what is good, for what will bring a solution. Similarly, however, at the same time the Not also inevitably appears - taken here in its continuation - as Not-Yet: in terms of occurrence and of history, it opens up as this. The Not as Not-Yet passes straight through Becomeness and beyond it; hunger becomes

SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION

309

the force of production on the repeatedly bursting Front of an unfinished world. The Not as processive Not-Yet thus turns utopia into the real condition of unfinishedness, of only fragmentary essential being in all objects. Hence the world as process is itself the enormous testing of its satisfied solution, that is, of the realm of its satisfaction. The Not expresses itself, as noted, as hunger and what actively joins on to it. As meaning and intending, as longing, wish, will, waking dream, with all visualizations of the Something that is missing. But the Not expresses itself also as dissatisfaction with what has Become for it, hence it is both that which is driving beneath all Becoming, and what is driving on ahead in history. The Not appears in every previous definition to the Something as the unappeased denial which says: predicate is not the ultimately adequate definition of its subject. fact the Not makes itself evident as active-utopian Not-Yet in as negation which drives on ahead in a utopian and dialectical

but this Thus in process, fashion.

As a denial which is growing up in the positive positing itself, and in fact ultimately from the perspective of the adequate final state of the All, the only place where the Not would come to rest, namely to the positive rendition of what is intended in it. Thus the Not-Yet is of course also destructive or the dissolving contradiction in all Becomeness, in accordance with the materialist dialectic. And it is this contradiction precisely because every stage of the definition must also become a barrier again for what is defined and reared by it, in other words: because no Becomeness in the tendency towards the All already represents a successful achievement. The contradiction to Becomeness expresses itself both in the subject and the object of conscious which is objective

the process, as the two sides of the same moved reality. In the or human subject the subjective contradiction arises to Becomeness insufficient or which has become inhibiting, in the object the contradiction corresponds to this which appears in the Become

itself, as the ripened tendency towards the form of existence which is due next and which is more mediated with the forces of production. The NotYet here becomes all the more defined, its tendency to what is fulfilling all the stronger, the more the tasks which it sets itself have become objectively soluble. Now, however, we must further keep the crucial point in mind: the Not as mere Not-Yet alone could both subjectively and objec¬ tively only in fact unsettle inadequate Becomeness, it could not immanently explode it in the way we have described. Explosion is annihilation: and the act of annihilating by definition and by nature is only obtainable from the circulating Nothing. The Not seeking its All thus also enters - in the Die

3io

ANTICIPATORY CONSCIOUSNESS

and become* - into a connection with the Nothing, as well as having one with the All. Even fading, not to mention annihilation, is only constituted by the fact that in the change involved in process and as this change the Nothing is circulating or the constantly threatening frustration. Similarly, however, in fading an - as always still insufficient - All is circulating, that which makes relative successfulness possible, above all in masterpieces: otherwise there would only be forgetting of the past and not also the partially rescued and rescuable element which is called history and after-ripening. The connection of the Not and the Not-Yet with the All is one of the goal, it was cited as that which says and reveals: this predicate is surely not the ultimately adequate definition of a subject; or concretely: human beings and the whole world still find themselves rebus sic stantibus in prehistory, in exile. The connection of the Not and the Not-Yet with the Nothing is however not one of the goal, but rather it is one of the use to which dialectical negation puts the Nihil of annihilation, namely in the sense of the annihilation of inadequate Becomeness by immanent explosion. This dialectical use of the Nothing in no way conceals the already noted basic difference between Not and Nothing, between the start and horror vacui on the one hand, the possible Definitum of annihilation and mors aeterna on the other. Nor does the dialectical usefulness of the Nothing conceal the completely anti-historical pre-appearance which the Nothing has as down¬ right destruction, as a den of murderers repeatedly opening up in history; since in this den there is certainly very much a piece of history, a piece of light annihilated as it opens up. There is no dialectic of the determined mightiness, determined pre-appearance of this kind of Nothing, i.e. no progressive negation of the negation: annihilations like the Peloponnesian Wars, the Thirty Years War, are merely misfortunes, not dialectical change; the mortification of Nero, Hitler, all these apparently satanic outbursts belong to the dragon of the final abyss, not to the furthering of history. However, a quite different impression is in fact created by the connection of the use which occurs in not so determined appearances of the Nothing, especially in negations immanent in the matter, therefore in those in which history continues. Then the Nothing must definitely serve for the best, and the act

From Goethe’s ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ in the ‘West-ostlicher Divan’. The verse runs: ‘And until you have possessed this truth: Die and become! You are just a gloomy guest In the earth’s dark medium.’

SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION

311

of annihilation becomes productive as negation, above all as negation of the negation. Thus dialectic through Nothing consists in the fact that all that which still unsuccessfully exists carries the seed of its fading within it, so that in fact at the same time war is declared on persistence in the temporary material of each attained Becomeness. This war must combine with the constant demandingness of the Not-Yet and be at its service: the inadequate is cleared away from the path to the All, passes from the Becomeness into the No-Longerness of the Orcus. Indeed, the dialectic through Nothing even refers to the monstrous complex of Becomeness which raises itself not as the All, hut as mere cosmos* or universe out of process, and even substitutes itself for the All in all purely cosmic perspectives of philosophy, from Parmenides to Spinoza. The cosmos is the first astral mythical, then pantheistic, then mechanistic substitute for the All and stands in its place as the embodiment of the given world and of satisfaction in it. It thus appears as the whole of movement which does not move, as harmony of Becomeness, in which the differences of Becoming and the deficit of particulars, as according to the Law of the Large Numbers,! balance each other out; an elapsed, a positive stability. But the dialectic through Nothing has even included world-annihilation within itself, has certified temporariness for the universe, by using the Nothing. The Orcus which is described in physical terms as freezing death, in mythological terms conversely as world-conflagration, physically contains the birth of another cosmos or universe, utopianly even the birth of a totally fulfilling All. New heaven, new earth, the logic of the apocalypse presuppose the dialectical functional change of the fire of annihilation which is otherwise considered to be satanic; every advent contains nihilism as something utilized and defeated, death as something devoured in the victory. Frustration and annihilation is of course the constant danger for every process-experiment, the coffin that constantly waits beside each hope, but it is also the means to break inadequate statics. And this dialectic through Nothing intermixes not least with all significant positive aspects, not as their danger here, but as their important foil, as obstruction of their evidence. Blackness is at home in this obstruction, the included element of roughness, of eeriness which prevents pure rosy red even in higher regions. Blackness prevents levelling out, in so far as it is produced by cheap gloss, by rotten apotheosis; in

* Bloch is playing on the connection between the German ‘Alles’ meaning ‘all’, and the German ‘All’ meaning cosmos. f The Law of Large Numbers. Bernoulli’s theorem - a concept in probability theory.

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their place, precisely through non-smoothness, through roughness, the deep and the sublime are encountered. If shuddering is the best part of mankind,* then it is precisely the Nothing to all smoothness, to all contrived solution which is conceived in and devoured along with the shudder of sublimity. Thus the Nihil into which Diirer’s Melencolia gazes is also a useful and formative element of positive astonishment or of the perception of the All in the confident sense. Indeed, only when enormously raised consciousness of the Nothing in the world, especially in the conspicuously false supernatural world, is taken seriously, does the central inconspicuousness of a landing, of an All emerge, which had previously been masked by cosmic jubilation or even by thrones, powers, glories. Consequently, the advanced state of Nothing, breaking out with greater and greater strength in history, and not in fact increasingly obscured by it, has given constitutive power to the dialectic towards the All itself. Utopia presses forward, in the will of the subject and in the tendency-latency of the process-world; behind the cracked ontology of a supposedly attained, even finished There. Thus the path of conscious reality-process is in fact increasingly one of the loss of fixed, even hypostatized static being, a path of increasingly perceived Nothing, though consequently also of utopia. The latter now completely encompasses the NotYet and the dialecticization of the Nothing in the world; but it just as little suppresses in the Real-Possible the open alternative between absolute Nothing and absolute All. Utopia, in its concrete form, is the tested will towards the Being of the All; the pathos of Being is therefore now at work in it which was previously devoted to a supposedly already completely founded, successfully existing world order, even supernatural world order. But this pathos acts as one of Not-Yet-Being and of hope for the summum bonum within it; and: despite all use of that Nothing in which history still con¬ tinues, it does not in fact ignore the danger of annihilation, even the still hypothetically possible Definitivum of a Nothing. Here it depends on the work of militant optimism: just as without it proletariat and bourgeoisie could perish in the same barbarism, so without it in the broader and deeper perspective, sea without shore, midnight without easterly point could still threaten as Definitivum. This kind of Definitivum would then designate the absolute In-Vain of the historical process, and it is, as something that has not yet happened, as little out of the question as is, in the positive sense, the Definitivum of an all-fulfilling All. What ultimately remains therefore is the changeable alternative between absolute Nothing and absolute All: the Cf. Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part II, 6272.

SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION

313

absolute Nothing is the sealed frustration of utopia; the absolute All-in the pre-appearance of the realm of freedom - is the sealed fulfilment of utopia or Being as utopia. The ultimate triumph of the Nothing has been conceived mythologically as hell, ultimate triumph of the All as heaven: in reality the All is itself nothing hut identity of man who has come to himself with his world successfully achieved for him. The That-proposition: In the beginning was the deed,* the All-proposition: The insufficient, here it is donet both unidealistic propositions define the tendency-arc of matter which is qualifying itself. Our intention-invariant within it remains: naturalization of man, humanization of nature - of the world totally mediated with man.

Utopia no lasting state; therefore after all: Carpe diem, but a genuine one in genuine present The Now as something merely fleeting is nevertheless not correct, should not be like this. But just as little should there be an endlessly drifting dreaming in which present enjoyment is impeded, even shunned. After all, the substance of utopia is ultimately nothing if it does not refer to the Now and seek its spilled present. Genuine present, no longer one pieced together out of Now, what is just past and the simultaneity of the surround¬ ing space. Of course, the mere immediate fleeting Now is too little, it fades and makes way for the next, because nothing in it has yet been properly achieved. Hence Jean Paul’s sentiments are true when he says: ‘If there was nothing except the moment for the heart, then you might say, around me and inside me everything is empty.’ But he says the wrong thing about this emptiness when he reifies past, even future instead; when, in a romantic and idealistic way, he will not let them move into the present at all. When - with genuinely felt darkness of the lived moment, yet equally with stay made absolute in memory, even hope - he disparages not only a still insufficient, poorly external Carpe diem, but every present in the following manner: ‘Since you can never experience beautiful days as beautifully as they later shine in memory or previously shine in hope: you would rather * Cf. Goethe, ‘Faust’, Part I, 1237. Cf. also John 1, I. ‘In the beginning was the Word... ’ t Bloch is compressing the words of the Chorus Mysticus from Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part II, 12106-9, which reads: ‘The insufficient Here becomes an event. The indescribable Here it is done;’

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ask for the day without either; and since one only hears the gentle music of the spheres at both poles of the elliptical vault of time and nothing at all in the middle of the present; you would rather remain in the middle and listen, but past and future - both of which no man can experience, because they are only two different poetic genres of our heart, an Iliad and an Odyssey, a lost and regained Miltonic paradise - you do not want to hear at all or let them come near, so that you can just nest deaf and blind in an animal present.’ Even where a complete present and reality is conceded to the future by the idealism of Jean Paul, a disparagement of this tangibility, consequently reification of striving, eternalizing of utopia, manifests itself: ‘If in this world, I say, poetry became fife and our pastoral world a sheep farm and every dream a day: this would only heighten our wishes, not fulfil them, the higher reality would only give birth to a higher poetic art and higher memories and hopes - in Arcadia we would pine for utopias, and at every sunrise we would see a deep starry sky departing, and we would - sigh as we do here’ (Titan, 45th cycle, conclusion). This kind of thing is of course only spoken in a melancholy spirit and not with approval, even in the prophesied endlessness of longing a warning is issued against that utopianism which considers an Arcadia as intensified summer holiday or even as resigned sheep-farm to be the final wish-content. But where from the outset, as in the case of Arcadia, only the wish for escape and the tired wish for contrast are driving us on, the escape of course easily runs on further - in fact longing itself, sighing itself out of Arcadia again. Though of course Jean Paul himself, with Goethe and Gottfried Keller the greatest master of graphic description in the German language and of the golden superabundance of the world, ultimately refuses the eternalized utopian. It is also the political aspect of the democrat in him which, for the sake of ‘Dawnings for Germany’,* finally breaks free from being besotted with the Not-Now in a mere romantic dream. Jean Paul himself thus gives the last word to a will towards the present, towards utopian present: ‘The present is chained to the past as prisoners used to be to corpses, and the future is tugging at the other end; but one day it will be free.’ Thus nothing is more repugnant to utopian conscience itself than utopia with unlimited travel; endless striving is vertigo, hell. Just as there should be a hold instead of the repeatedly fleeting moments or merely tasted points in time, so too there should be present instead of utopia, and within utopia at least present in spe or utopian present tense; A political work by Jean Paul, which appeared in 1809.

SUMMARY/ANTICIPATORY COMPOSITION

315

if utopia is no longer necessary, there should at long last be Being as utopia. The essential content of hope is not hope, but since it does not allow precisely the latter to be wrecked, it is distanceless Being-Here, present tense. Utopia works only for the sake of the present which is to be attained, and so in the end present, as the finally intended distancelessness, is sprinkled into all utopian distances. Precisely because utopian conscience will not be fobbed off with what is poorly existing, precisely because the furthestreaching telescope is necessary to see the real star of the Earth, and the telescope is called concrete utopia: precisely for this reason utopia does not intend an eternal distance from the object, with which it wishes to coincide instead, an object that is no longer estranged from the subject. The That, for which reason and for the illumination of which the worldodyssey is under way and not yet odyssey of quiescence, does not throw itself forever into designing and process; for the Intensivum of this That basically just wants a concise result instead of endless process. Even if a stationary halt in the On The Way is as bad as or even worse than On The Way itself made absolute, every halt is still correct in which the utopian present moment of the final state itself is not forgotten, on the contrary, in which it is retained by the agreement of the will with the anticipated final purpose (summum bonum). There are such moments in all concrete revolutionary work, in the realization of the proletariat as abolition of philosophy, in the abolition of the proletariat as realization of philosophy. They are in every articulation of unknown self-being through artistic pre¬ appearance and in the hearth of all articulations of the central question. They are even in the stupor of negative astonishment, and all the more so in the shiver of positive astonishment, as a landing announced by bells. There is definitely utopian present in this, precisely in the sense of begun abolition of the distance of subject and object, therefore also of self-abolishing utopian distance itself. The magnetic needle of intention then begins to sink, because the pole is near, the distance between subject and object diminishes, as the point of unity dawns pre-consciously, where the two poles of utopian consciousness: dark moment, open adequacy (for the That-intention) reach the point, coincide. Accordingly utopia cannot go any further here, it goes instead into the content of this presence, i.e. into the presence of the Thatcontent, together with its no longer alienated, no longer alien world. As is unfortunately only too evident, what is intendable as such presence, as such manifested identity does not yet lie anywhere in a Becomeness, but it lies irrefutably in the intention towards it, in the intention which is never demolished, and lies unmistakably in the historical and world process

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itself. The latter most certainly has not been damaged by a decisive InVain and Nothing. That is why the identity of man who has come to himself with his world successfully achieved for him does admittedly present itself as mere border-concept of utopia, in fact as the utopissimum in utopia and precisely in concrete utopia: but this most hoped-for thing of all in hope, called highest good, also represents the region of final purpose in which every solid positing of a purpose in man’s struggle for liberation participates. The All in the identifying sense is the Absolute of that which people basically want. Thus this identity lies in the dark ground of all waking dreams, hopes, utopias themselves and is also the gold ground on to which the concrete utopias are applied. Every solid daydream intends this double ground as homeland; it is the still unfound, the experienced Not-YetExperience in every experience that has previously become.

DAYDREAM IN DELIGHTFUL FORM:

21

PAMINA OR THE PICTURE AS EROTIC PROMISE

It then inflames my soul, there it becomes bigger and bigger and I spread it out further and further, more and more brightly; and the thing really becomes almost ready in my head, even if it is long, so that subsequently I can survey it at a glance in my mind, just as if it were a beautiful picture or a pretty person, and I do not hear it at all consecutively in my imagination in the way it must subsequently come, but as if all together at once. Mozart

The tender morning We dream all the more, the less we have already experienced. Love, above all, always paints its Own earlier than it has it. It imagines the one girl, the one boy vaguely, before the consequently lovable creature has appeared in person. A glance, an outline, a way of walking, are dreamed, the chosen one must look like this in order to be chosen. The beloved features hover ahead like a picture, and the external stimulus must be commensurate with them, otherwise it cannot excite us as one to be loved. The external stimulus is thus not only accepted here, so that it excites us, for instance as the

DAYDREAM IN DELIGHTFUL FORM

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first which has appeared, but it is chosen as an exciting stimulus by inner inclination, preparation. What is then intended, the coming features of the figure are of course not seen clearly, but clearly and selectively sought after. A fulfilling appearance hovers and strides ahead of those who are awaited, themselves await. With this eye, this outline, something to be loved rises in the morning, something distant stands outside the door. Many girls and many boys have made their infatuated choice very early in this way, it often has a lasting effect. Sometimes the choice occurred at home, in individual features of father and mother, sometimes in the street, sometimes in a face in a picture. Much remains inward here, a dream of what we do not know or what cannot yet be attained. The dream with the picture in it is loved for a long time, and alone.

Effect through the portrait It expresses itself more clearly when it sees itself in a picture. Thus long ago girls believed they would see their future husband on St Andrew’s night. Or the girls went to a witch who, after an anxious curiosity had intoxicated them, showed them their bridegroom in the so-called mirror of the earth. Kathchen von Heilbronn and Graf Wetter vom Strahl* appear to one another across time and space on somnambulant New Year’s Eve. Elsa von Brabant sees her knight in similar rapture. Once again a mirror of the earth is set up in the magic mirror of the witches’ kitchen, t with the ‘most beautiful image of a woman’; even Helen first appears in the Emperor’s palace as a similar spectre. Then, however, with secularized magic which can be much more easily experienced, the actual portrait appears, erotically compelling the will, possibly even non-will through enchantment. The enchantment extends from the silhouette and the photograph to the surrogate painting of the woman not yet known; the original can moreover be surrounded by danger or can itself be a danger, which increases its aura. The special medium of love that is created in this way is, as is only right and proper, best described by a fairytale, by Grimm’s fairytale of Faithful John: ‘After my death’, said the old King

The lovers in Heinrich von Kleist’s play ‘Das Kathchen von Heilbronn’, written in 1808, based on a Schwabian legend. t Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I. The scene where Faust first glimpses Helen in the witches’ mirror.

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to Faithful John, ‘you must show my son the whole castle, but you must not show him the last chamber down the long gallery in which the picture of the Princess of the Golden Dwelling stands hidden. If he sees the picture, he will be overwhelmed by love for her and will fall down in a swoon and will get into great danger on her account.’ The young King nevertheless sees the forbidden painting and shirks no danger until he has won his beloved and brought her home. Thus enchantment is created by the portrait, and not in fact, as in sympathetic magic, enchantment which is supposed to strike the person represented, but one which conversely strikes the viewer, fantasizing erotically from the painted object. Through the burning lens of the painting, the spell of a distant sun strikes the person standing in front of it, excites utopian unrest in him. This kind of love-potion effect, conveyed by painted anticipation, is presented in more detail than in Grimm in the story of Prince Kalaf and Princess Turandot in the Arabian Nights. Prince Kalaf tries to contemplate without being aroused the picture of the dangerous Turandot, her triumphant and murderous features, even hopes to discover defects in it, but he immediately falls for the fire which inflames him from the pre-appearance. The Chinese motif spread from the Orient into European chivalry and into its dream-figure, Amadis of Gaul. Amadis of Gaul then, the original European dream-knight, saw the picture of Oriana, an English princess, not a Chinese one: nevertheless, portrait magic makes complete Orient out of love here. Drives him into adventures, obstacles, countless dangers, into the whole of the known world at that time, including the Sultan of Ancient Babylon, and into the ghostly depths of hell, until the union is consummated and Oriana sinks into the arms of the prize of chivalry. What Turandot promised as a picture, Amadis’ lady kept during the whole course of her winning and did not lose after he had won her. Schiller merely reworked the theme of Turandot, but a full ray of Amadis and his courtly love, of woman as image and like the image in a picture, still fell on Maria Stuart; Mortimer’s first appearance before the queen definitely falls into this category: One day, while I was looking round the bishop’s palace, my gaze was drawn towards a woman’s portrait of stirring wondrous charm, and violently a feeling seized me deeply in my soul, it overwhelmed me so, I stood transfixed. But then the bishop said to me: Well may

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you linger by this picture with emotion. The loveliest of all the women living, she most deserves our pity of them all, enduring for the sake of our belief her suffering in your own fatherland. Thus Mortimer saw Mary’s portrait in France, the sensory-supersensory splendour of Catholicism radiated from it and sparked off a rush of images which drove the knight in the same breath to the Scottish queen and to the heavenly Mary. The motif however remains the portrait-utopia of the Gothic and also of the Baroque romance of chivalry: passion is combined with devout worship of the image, with such a vividly exchanged and secularized adoration of Mary that it makes the knight into Perseus who frees Andromeda, into the crusader bent on rescuing the damsel in distress. The distant quests of the knights have long since been forgotten, but the Baroque, which took up the motif of being sent far afield, echoes in wonder¬ fully pure fashion in Mozart, in a miniature which understandably the painting has now become, in Tamino’s song: ‘This portrait is enchantingly beautiful.’ Pamina presents the sweetest figure of all dream-beloved and with the music of her pre-appearance the epitome of them. The fine miniature of Pamina lies in Tamino’s hand and is enclosed by it, the most delicate of frames, Pamina is regarding the boy even in the unearthly beauties of his song itself, she drifts in front of Tamino as a magical image and as the musical form of his love. With heavy coarsening, though also magnetization of the miniature from the ‘Magic Flute’, the Turandotmotif recurs again in Wagner, in the ‘Flying Dutchman’. His picture keeps Senta under its spell and in hope: optically in the disturbing likeness over the door, musically in the demonic ballad. Wagner’s neo-Baroque in general particularly likes to modify this spell; not painted in Elsa’s Lohengrinvision, long before she saw him, painted in Eva’s, though only indirect, preparation in the ‘Meistersinger’, concerning Stolzing. ‘What made me feel such sudden anguish was the fact that I had seen him long ago in the picture’, in the picture of David ‘as Master Diirer painted him for us.’ Characteristically, the still Baroque building of the opera has the Turandot-picture hanging on its walls more often than the play. There are many such examples, they all tempt us to the dream and promise. It is not even necessary for the picture itself which stimulates the dream to be a particularly good one. In fact, in experience, far from fairytale and opera, even the photograph lends itself to utopian tenderness.

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Dostoevsky, in ‘The Idiot’, lets Myshkin hear about Nastasia Filippovna through Rogozhin, he sees her picture, he sees the suffering, yet arrogant expression, he quickly brings the girl’s photograph to his lips and kisses it. In this Dostoevsky-world the portrait is ‘the collective contradiction of a person, the portent of beauty in suffering’; it does not only arouse the desire to find this woman, but to free her from her face through love, to fulfil her longing for childhood and innocence which the picture promises besides her beauty. Reason enough for the sick saint or holy fool to be dedicated to this woman through her portrait. The enchanted have after all, besides the danger which surrounds their beloved, almost invariably also seen the sorrow caused her by the fact that she is herself far removed from her beloved, in a strange place, far removed from love; this creates the deepest seduction alongside beauty. Even behind the painting of the unfortunate, aloof Princess Turandot the archetype of Andromeda is still at work, who finds herself in the power of a dragon. Ultimately this is so even when the idol does not stop at any picture, not even the most exquisite, when the picture is completely painted over by love, if not basically itself painted by it. This was ultimately the case in all instances of portrait-magic we have considered and only culminates in the purest dream-woman there is, and her most faithful dreamer: in Dulcinea and Don Quixote. Hence none other than Don Quixote’s Dulcinea is and remains the concentration of all these picture-beloved, both the cautionary and the most completely utopian one. Taken to the point of comedy: a ridiculous picture of happiness in ridiculous unhappiness; condensed to the basic phenomenon of all mere erotic dream-beings: to Dulcinea as the femme introuvable. Nevertheless, the picture of the beloved creates the first strong waking dream even in happy situations in life; imago substitutes as well as sending us out into the unknown.

Nimbus around encounter, betrothal This is different again when the woman has already been seen in the flesh, but only fleetingly. Then an image also closes in around the event, one that is won from the first or the last impression. No matter how brief the first impression may have been, it remains as such, outlines and colours itself. The glance at the passing, vanishing woman stops still, agonizing, not lived out, but pictorially decided. Or instead, it comes to a very hasty farewell with unanswered, frozen, suffocated love, to a farewell in which

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the briefly experienced sinks away again, but of course also composes itself. Then not the first, but the last impression remains, is decorated with the few features of a happiness missed. The impression is preserved in both cases as remembered image, which nevertheless possesses nothing that has been lived to the end, but is still confronted by the fullness which was possible. Again, there can be unhealthy imago in this nimbus, and yet again it can also indicate a most human kind of love. Heine’s poem: I stood in darkening dreams and stared upon her likeness enters completely into this fruitless melancholy. Morike’s Peregrina* songs capture the same interrupted feeling not in a sentimental, but in a shocking way: Oh, yesterday into the lighted nursery by flickering of dainty candles arrayed where I forgot myself in noise and play you stepped, o picture of pity-sweet agony; it was your ghost who came to dine with me, we sat as strangers keeping grief at bay until my sobbing burst out in the end and hand in hand we left the house as friends. In this unfulfilled, though once corporeal wishful image there is the agony of a love which does not live and does not fade, which wanders in its morning twilight, returns eternally and departs eternally. The same imagemotif of Ahasueric beginnings repeats itself, in a much weaker form, but moving precisely in what is left unsaid, in Morike’s Mozart novella;t the poet of Peregrina relates the encounter of a young bride (the happy bride of another) with Mozart and the afterglow of this encounter: ‘A few moments later, as she crossed the big room upstairs which had just been cleared and set straight again, the drawn green damask curtains of which admitted only a soft twilight, she stopped and stood wistfully by the piano. It was just like a dream to think who had been sitting at it a few hours before. She looked thoughtfully at the keyboard for a long time which * These were included in Eduard Morike’s Bildungsroman ‘Maler Nolten’, 1832. t Eduard Morike, ‘Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag’, 1855.

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He had last touched, then she quietly closed the lid and pulled out the key, jealous to ensure that no other hand might open it again so soon.’ Here a fleeting, though extraordinarily significant reality has framed itself, as it were; at least its mental picture, which points ahead in utopian fashion, was won from unfulfillable love. Thus the imago of the passing woman never found again is also radically added to the wishful images composed of fragmentary or incomplete reality. Hebbel wrote a sad song to the unknown woman in a similar vein: But now my eyes will never know you again, not even if you pass me by one day, and should strange lips your destiny explain I would not recognize the name they say. Yet you will live in me forever more, as music lingers in a silent room, and though I cannot shape the form you wore, no form can drag you with it to the tomb. In fact, an image of this imminent, non-imminent presence is sprinkled even at the beginning of successful love; curiously, spellbound in fine fetishes, the rising morning then stands still. Tolstoy, in the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, makes the red belt of a girl glow, love is ignited by it, even the later ascetic memory has not forgotten the belt. With what a felicitous flash even the space around Werther’s Lotte* stands still: she herself appears, sharp and abiding down to the pale-red bows on her arms and breasts and the black bread in her hand, with the children round about her, absorbed in the tender gesture of sharing out the bread to them, so perfectly feminine, a whole spectacle of goodness shining forth. In the midst of this beautiful beginning the image leaps out in this way, even remains afterwards as the shape of the secret betrothal, preserves this in its untouched landscape. No miniature drifts ahead here, like that of Pamina, but it forms itself in love at first sight and creates with a tune which is so purely emotionalized in this frame ‘dream of the highest graces, heavenly morning glow’, as the quintet in the ‘Meistersinger’ sings.

In Goethe’s ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werthers’.

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Too much image, rescue from it, nimbus around marriage If the intended woman is won, then of course the fantasy around her ebbs away. But it does not necessarily disappear, in fact too much initial image is reluctant to become flesh. Above all, when the dream-image nourished itself more from the lover who had it than from the loved-one it referred to. Very romantic spirits who fell deeply in love with the fairytale-time of young love and who are weak in reality have thus generally been notable for their fear of fulfilment, especially for their hatred of marriage. Here we may once more recall Lenau, impelled to remain forever in the company of the image of the loved-one only out on the wild sea. And the imaginary, though equally tangible figure of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s conductor Kreisler can be recalled as another example, who saw only heavenly images in love, only smashed soup-dishes in marriage, and did not want to swap the images for the dishes. Darkness of the lived moment and reification of the Trojan Helen are romantically travestied in all this kind of thing, as we have seen, but also, when pathologically sharpened, are brought into focus and made clear. Even a naturalistic late or half-Romantic like Ibsen celebrated and exaggerated in a particularly instructive way the sheer morning value of love, love as sheer morning value. In a very radical bohemian way in ‘Love’s Comedy’, where Falk and Schwanhild leave each other voluntarily, precisely out of the deepest affection, so that their ‘spring love’ does not disappear in marriage, as it would in reality, where the leaves fall. This is over-blown of course, but no more over-blown than the shock Menelaus experiences when confronted with his Egyptian Helen, which returns here, includes all this, is again relevant for it all. And no more over-blown than another reactionary character of Ibsen’s, one who was by no means vilified for being romantic in her time, but so to speak for being ultra-modern: the ‘Woman from the Sea’, with the same initial value complex. This woman, Ellida Wangel, also reifies a hardly realized beginning and consequently ruins her marriage. Though the undomestic, sea-related element is also in Ellida Wangel herself when she is constantly gazing out at the ocean and at the strange man of her first love, at the silhouette which he forms far out in the ocean.But the limitless image of abduction remains essential, opposed in a decidedly unrealistic way to a world which invariably appears to it as the narrowness of the fiords. And the abstractly utopian trade in eroticis goes on; finally, Spitteler also portrayed it in the dream-obsessed hero of his novel ‘Imago’ and in the beautiful Theuda, spurned out of

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loyalty to her image. Being married to another, the ‘governor’, makes her into ‘a slice of bread’; but her visionary poet will not acknowledge reality, and the situation, deranged out of the world, is not improved again until he changes from the sensory-supersensory suitor into the supersensory one once more. Theuda-imago must not become real, the poet’s muse herself will not stand for it, as Spitteler indicates; after so much fantasy, reality would not stand for it either. ‘Imago’ is bizarrely excessive, but what remains true about it is: all too heavenly love never becomes earthly love, the one disturbs the other. Thus precisely also in love-marriage the so much more general problem of realization is discernible, the decrescendo through darkness of the lived moment and through its repercussions. The pitiful hungering for the pure dream-image ante rem thus almost gets into the state where it appears to itself indiscriminately, in fact particularly when discriminated in the world-light, as the higher thing itself. After all, the various conductor Kreislers do seem to have their case confirmed even by the anti-Romantic enemy of all wishful dreams, by the advocate of reality: ‘However long a man has been knocking around the world, has been pushed around by it, usually he still ultimately gets his girl and some sort of a position, marries and becomes a philistine just like all the others; his wife holds the purse strings, children come along, the woman he worshipped, who was at first the only one, an angel, starts to look more or less just like all the others, his job brings him work and aggravation, marriage a shrewish wife, and so the whole miserable business of all the rest has arrived’ (Hegel, Werke X2, p. 2i6f.). Much of this may also have re¬ mained true outside this Biedermeier* embourgeoisement, precisely as the melancholy of fulfilment which at this level accompanies anything invested with too much image. It is this melancholy which drives back so dubiously into the love-dream before the real matter or even at the beginning of the real matter, causes it to encapsulate itself and reify itself as distant love per se. And in fact precisely because its fantasy, as one which essentially only contains distant love, ebbs away once the reality is perceived; abstract utopia is then even more certain to be remembered. Here is a source for genuinely utopistic neurosis: namely for lingering in the waking dream, for the image getting stuck in the first signs, in the mere initials of reality.

See Vol. I, p. 40n. Biedermeier also suggests petit-bourgeois domesticity. The name derives from the fictitious, hapless poet Gottlieb Biedermeier satirized in the comic Munich weekly ‘Fliegende Blatter’ (Broadsheets). ‘Bieder’ means respectable, and ‘Meier’ is a very common surname, suggesting ordinariness.

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The case is immediately different, however, where the fantasy does not block itself off from what is coming. Where the image in it not only seeks to be preserved, but proved in flesh and blood. And that becomes the course of the matter itself, as soon as the pre-appearance, instead of merely proliferating subjectively in itself, has also been sufficiently stimulated by the Object itself. Because the imago of an already perceived loved person can definitely manifest traits which may not be completely unfounded in the Object. After all, not every love-object has the power of reaching into the imagination through its imago, of moving the latter towards it, even when there is such receptive disposition or mere analogy of the original with its image. In particularly acute instances of the living image-effect an attraction must have been contained in the object itself, namely a founded wishful image within it itself, so that it can at least appear in this way, and the power to act as this wishful image. Pamina when encountered in reality is perhaps not the same as she appeared to Tamino in the picture, but the utopian imago she created is still in fact her own. Thus what is true of every imago drawn from a person is especially true of the erotic image: those who know how to create it are poetic natures, that is, those with a high degree of objective imagination in them. With real possibility of becoming in a good climate that which reaches into the imagination, which they seem to be not without reason and radiate as preappearance. Love, which does not exhaust itself post festum in the enjoyment or in the disappointment of its images, thus keeps faith with the love-object in what may also have been a wishful image of itself in the object, therefore, possibly, a propensity towards the self-transcendence beyond what is innate and what has become in it. The probation of the imago thus occurs in terms of the object and by means of the object; in this way it finds accom¬ modation. If, however, this power of exposure through an image is missing, or if the lover alone was the poetic nature, in such unrestrained overflowing unreality that Helen truly does appear to him in every woman:* then the catastrophe of the image is completely unavoidable. Not only the youth of love then runs away from Hegel’s unveiled shrewish wife, unhappy marriage knows no other remedy than at most to become band, a shadow in the numbness of limbo. What was loved will never again become in this marriage what it was before, in contrast to the happy marriage, where space remains for a dream-image which was constitutive to prove itself, that is, to develop what has been exposed in it. And here simultaneously * Cf. Goethe’s ‘Faust’, Part I, 2603-4. See also Vol. I, p. I59«.

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a freshness proves itself which can be in a position to dispel the whole usual, all too usual alternative between initial dream and apathy in this field. For precisely what is utopian is by no means, in line with Romantic psy¬ chology, confined to the Alpha, in such a way that the following alphabet of things is merely problematic stretching of something already known. Rather, marriage also contains its own specific utopia and a nimbus which does not coincide with the morning of love, hence by no means fades with it. This utopia arises in fact from the probation of the love-imago, and its poetry is always one of prose, though of a prose with the richest of backgrounds: of the house. The house is itself a symbol, and indeed an open one despite all its closedness; it has as its background the goal-hope of the homelandsymbol, which persists throughout most wishful dreams and stands at the end of all. This hope is so original that it does not give way to the morning images of love; on the contrary, it has already communicated itself to the Lotte-image, to both the landscape of secret betrothal and the spectacle of goodness shining forth. Though the wishful image here is not one of passion, which is never a constituent of marriage; by feeling affection, a person already detaches himself from passion. The wishful image is most definitely not one of being provided for sexually and socially, of rationalized sexuality which made marriage into the most bourgeois institution in the bourgeoisie. Marriage is just as little visualized as an objet d’art, with a limited life right from the outset, as an inner bourgeois revolt against anticipated philistinism. Rather, imago of marriage posits the developing space of house exactly around two people, with its many careers beyond philistinism. This above all in socialist society, because it no longer needs to posit the family as a refuge from the struggle of life, but keeps it going as the nearest manifestation of solidarity. With the partner as constant guest in the house, with the alliance of unique intimacy based on special differentness. This phenomenon is full of tension and yet it is not dramatic, but thoroughly epic; thus Chesterton says very rightly here in a felicitously conservative way: ‘All the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing;’* And yet marriage is so far from being a mere moral appendage to love that it represents, precisely in comparison with it, something strangely new: the adventure of erotic wisdom. So that it represents the successful or From ‘George Bernard Shaw’, 1935.

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unsuccessful experiment of a communion which finds no equal either in sexual love or in any social community which has previously appeared. Thus marriage appears as the utopia of one of the most friendly and most strict expressions of the substance of human life; thus its probation is not only, in fact ultimately no longer at all that of the painted Pamina picture, the virginal one of encounter. Rather, the music of the ordeals by fire and water is added to the utopia of the Pamina picture in Tamino’s hand; this music now no longer designates and signifies the bride, but marriage, no longer passion, but the friendship of love, which is in fact called marriage. Pamina herself guides the music of fidelity or the probation of the imago far beyond the first mere enchantment by this imago. Marriage initiates and survives the fire-ordeal of truth in the life of the partners, of the steadfast befriending of gender in everyday life. Guest in the house, peaceful unity in fine, burning otherness, this therefore becomes the imago of marriage and the nimbus it undertakes to win. Often making the wrong choice, as is well-known, with resignation as the rule, with happiness as the exception, almost even as mere chance. And seldom does marriage become the outbidding truth of what was initially hoped for, therefore deeper, not merely more real than all the songs of the bride. Nevertheless it has its utopian nimbus with justification: only in this form does the by no means simple, the cryptic wishful symbol of the house work, is there any prospect at all of good surprise and ripeness. Just as the pain of love is a thousand times better than unhappy marriage, in which there only remains pain, fruitless pain, so too the landlocked adventures of love are diffuse compared with the great sea voyage which marriage can be, and which does not end with old age, not even with the death of one partner.

High Pair, Corpus Christi or previous cosmic and Christ-like utopia of marriage The ship which takes us on board in this way was painted in a doubly luminous way. In earthly and celestial colours, they present two mythical utopias of marriage. The first can be described as that of the High Pair, it is aristocratic-pagan, the other classifies marriage as Corpus Christi. Little attention has been previously paid to the category of High Pair, even though it emerged immediately after the matrilinear society. Significantly, Bachofen conspicuously avoided it, always placed only woman or man alone on the respective matrilinear or patrilinear peak. And yet the high couple developed

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the most peculiar wishful image of marriage, even in the eyes of its viewers, not only of the partners. Woman and man are each imagined here concentrically within themselves as a picture, the one graceful and providinggood, the other powerful and dominating-good; however, only their connection brings blessing per se. It appears as unity of tenderness and sternness, of grace and power, in fact of whore and prophet, all this here with the old astral-mythic background of moon and sun, and also earth and sun. The woman has in her favour the glittering moon-goddess or the primally wise earth-goddess, the man the radiant light system; both can or should be at work and dispense in the High Pair together in the human heaven. The High Pair nimbus lies around Pericles and Aspasia, around Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, around the ‘Helios’ Anthony and the ‘Isis’ Cleopatra, around Simon Magus and Helen. The last two, Simon, the Gnostic of Jesus’ time, Helen, a hetaira from Tyre, were particularly venerated by their followers - as ‘Dynamis’ and ‘Sophia’ in unity; the world appeared redeemed to them through the rediscovery of this primally male, primally female element. After all, an echo of this SimonHelen cult at the time of Christ lived on throughout the whole of the Middle Ages and was preserved, by changing its characters, in the FaustHomeric Helen relationship. Whereas late antiquity also provided especially adventurous examples for the category of High Pair: thus the Emperor Eleagabal, as priest of the Syrian sun-god Baal, married the priestess of the Carthaginian moon-goddess Tamit - day and night, Baal and Tamit in one. A further astral myth streamed in heavily here, the Babylonian myth of a ‘sacred wedding’ in God himself. It lived in gnosis when this divided up its powers of imagery shining down from above into male and female (‘primal ground and silence’, ‘light and life’, ‘concept and Sophia’), it was preserved in the cabbala. Christianity, with its womanless God the Father, allowed no or only indistinct High Pairs on this earth, but gnosticcabbalistic Judaism most definitely did. Thus around 1650 the pseudoMessiah Sabbatai Zewi had his wife Sara, a hetaira like Helen of Tyre, as ‘second person in divinity’ beside him. Indeed, the Tamino-Pamina image deriving from Hellenistic sources, the Faust-Helen image under the con¬ tinuing influence of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre - these continue poetically to consummate the ancient nuptials. In two people, in the erotically fixed couple, the category of the High Pair thus sought to cause to appear what did not combine in the cults, in the external firma¬ ment: moon and sun simultaneously, with equal intensity in the sky, in heaven. Whether the misera contribuens plebs itself ever came to see this

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dream-image is debatable; it probably contented itself with the sight of its demi-gods. Nevertheless, the image of such a union still runs through the nimbus of every young marriage, when it occurs between well-favoured people. The image has been expressly preserved in kitsch as well as in dynastic pairs (robber and robber’s bride, heir to the throne and his high¬ born consort) and gave a powerful highlight on marriage even where the aristocratic background and the astral myth had disappeared. The compatible partner for the most beautiful woman has long engaged the imagination of erotic fulfilment, as perfect pair-image of grace and power. And though Christianity no longer justified the High Pairs theologically, this pair-myth, acting like a guiding image, does in fact live on in the Faust-Helen legend, in the Pamina-Tamino union (further dealt with by Goethe in ‘The Magic Flute Part Two’). Indeed, it is ranked very highly as ‘image of our bliss’ in the Suleika book in the ‘West-ostlicher Divan’, expressly related to the simultaneity of crescent moon and sunrise and to what it means to unite the former’s refinement with the latter’s power: The Sultan managed this, connected The highest world-pair in the land, To designate they were elected, The bravest of the loyal band. In all this the double unity of sexuality seems so peculiarly large and did not rest until it believed it had found a hold in the firmament itself. A unity of people who are man and woman in a fuller sense than Adam and Eve, a sacrament of sun and moon. Christianity, however, no longer has a place for it not only on account of its womanless God the Father, but above all in fact as non-astral-mythic religion. No place in a world in which moon and sun now equally sink, as externalities with which the cosmic utopia of marriage likewise sinks. Instead, however, its second face rises, an inner one which promises and binds in a different way. Devotion and strength, maidenliness and leadership are not to be combined in a worldly, but in an extra-worldly way and thus completed. Marriage becomes community in nuce, that is, the Corpus Christi imitated by wife and husband. In this too there is an image which first begins with marriage and has its erotic promise in marriage, as the house, with sensory-supersensory brilliance. Millions still believe in it, as in the sacrament of marriage, for them marriage is made in heaven and remains there until death, despite possible earthly wretchedness

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or catastrophe. The marriage partners themselves consummate the sacrament through marriage, they themselves already enter into relation with God, as the creator of children’s souls. Every marriage, Pius IX impressed on us, is in itself a sacrament, even if only an empty one; not so that marriage becomes sacred, but because marriage is sacred, is the collaboration of the priest necessary, in the only sacrament which the church itself does not dispense, which it only makes into a full one through its ratification. Then of course, in the sacramentum plenum, a vast gold ground should emerge in marriage to the believer; wife and husband stand in imago beyond compare. According to the teachings of the church, they come together as consecrated limbs of Christ’s body, in order to devote themselves to the extension of this body, to the spreading of the kingdom of God in the rational human creature. The bond of Christ with his community remains the image and model image of marriage: ‘For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church’ (Eph. 5, 30-32).* Sulamith’s love for Solomon in the Song of Songs, with breasts sweeter than wine, with the beloved who has gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies, t this glowing wedding song is clerically transformed and presented allegorically as the love-talk of Christ with his community, as devotion of the head to the body, as purification of the body through the head. Despite the Fall, our bodies are the limbs of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6, 16-19), always in such a way that marriage is rooted in the marriage of Christ with the community and with its extension and continuing effect, its organ and depiction in the rational human creature. Sexual communion and fidelity to it are completely con¬ nected in this image of marriage with religious and with social communion - though only in the form of the Christian community related to the other world. In St Paul, marriage becomes the connection of disciple and female disciple out of kinship and convention, in order to blend themselves in the image of the new God, in order to belong to him in the new house; comradeship between the sexes ideally becomes comradeship of the cult. Though the human creature added a great deal of water and misfortune

‘Church’ in the Authorized Version corresponds in versions of the German Bible to ‘Gemeinde’, which means ‘community’ and is the word Bloch is using here, t Cf. The Song of Songs 6, 2.

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to the wine of this miracle, especially the absolutely un-Christ-like society in which in fact, as late Roman, feudal, capitalist society respectively, the Corpus Christi did not exactly reveal itself in perfect form in the social context. But the utopia of the grapevine and the vines was nevertheless at work in the refuge as which the family wanted to preserve itself nonantagonistically within class society. Despite all strongly patrilinear, patriarchal features and despite the extra-worldly vanishing and reference point, there was no utopia of love which could have considered marriage to be as deeply important and made its image as deeply binding as the former. The essential patriarchal feature, with the man as ‘head’, was never¬ theless included in a community of love of a more extensive order in which there was to be no more domination, nor any loneliness a deux. Unus Christianus nullus Christianus, this principle of a cryptic collective was reflected here as the faith, love, hope of marriage.

After-image of love Even if a dream becomes real, it will not always remain so. Even if it is not carried to the grave, the body is which it found. Death does not cut love off, but what was visible and alive for it. The magic wand of the first impression was followed, the gold was pure, its time is past. Then, however, a waking dream is restored again in images, it remains an after¬ image of love, fulfilled and yet, then again, not fulfilled. This after-image is as distant as possible from the Peregrina-vision composed of unfulfilled love, the vision of the never achieved farewell, and yet related in one point. Since even the woman happily loved can become Peregrina through death, in so far as death is alien to her, in so far as it only interrupts externally. Undoubtedly, there is widespread self-deception here, right down to the kitsch which forms in the memory around the so-called late blessed husband or wife;* this caricature is never the subject of discussion, not even transfiguring memory of a less insipid kind. Rather, no after-image of love is unequivocal, unless already able to develop in the lifetime of its object; then of course, in its brilliance, it is unerring. As in the Peregrinavision, hope also repeatedly rises out of memory in such cases, and a promise

* ‘Blessed’ is the ordinary term of endearment in German for a departed husband or wife. Bloch’s first wife Elsa, whose death in 1921 caused him so much grief, seems to be very much present in this passage.

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out of the after-image; Theodor Storm’s novella ‘Viola Tricolor’ circles around this problem twice. Since unsatisfied-remembering wishfulness is at work here both in the child who garlands the picture of his dead mother with roses and because of his stepmother least of all forgets his own mother, and also in the man entering his second marriage, and he too takes a long retrospective glance. He takes it on lonely paths, in his lonely study with the picture of his late wife over his writing-desk, by the window which opens out on to the garden, down to the little hut which he has not entered for so long. The retrospective glance goes there, the after-image goes and lives there: ‘The sky was full of clouds; the light of the moon could not reach down. Down there in the little garden the overgrown shrubbery lay like a dark mass; only where the steep path led down between black pyramid-shaped conifers to the bamboo-hut did white gravel glimmer between them. And out of the imagination of the man who was looking down into this loneliness, a lovely figure stepped who no longer belonged to the living; he saw her down there wandering on the path, and it seemed to him as if he were walking at her side.’ Storm’s hero is thus prone to seduction by the dead, a peculiar and extremely complex infidelity appears: he breaks his marriage to his second wife by committing adultery with a shadow. Curiously, this very disturbing kind of after-image seldom appears in great literature, just as if for the avenger, Hamlet, only the marriage tables of funeral baked meats were a problem, because of a crime.* Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale’, however, is full of the power of the erotic after-image: it is at work in the culpable longing of the King in front of the statue of Hermione; only here, in Shakespeare’s mysteriously light game, a deep jest causes a desire to go back again, causes a powerful pull towards the past and makes it present again; only here the statue of a past-unpast life is brought to life again. This is a fairytale solution; everywhere else in life awkward complications surround the erotic after¬ image: as one which is uneasy about being merely an image of What Has Been. A differently beautiful love is easily offered witches’ brews here which do not rejuvenate, but only draw it into an intermediate state between ghostly spring and after-ripening. But the distinction must be made: the falsely celebrated after-image closes off new life and closes in old life in an authentic Now, with all the disadvantages of what may also be called

‘Hamlet’, I, 2, 180-1. HAMLET: Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral bak’d meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

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‘repeated mirroring’ in spiritual optics. Whereas the correctly secured after-image, which has not the least in common either with return through after-taste or with death-cult, may be the most fruitful, since it shines in that sphere in which even in the past something Unbecome still awaits and approaches. The dead loved-one has moved out of mere memory, the imago does not make us long fruitlessly for the past but has the same effect as a star shining from the future. Epimetheus, in Goethe’s ‘Pandora’, sees the after-image even in tangible aspects of the existing world, albeit transparently; the vanished Pandora shines through: In thousands of patterns her shape is concealed,’ she floats on the waters, she strides in the field, in sacred proportions she flashes and sounds, their content ennobled within formal bounds, which lend it, are lent the highest of powers; to me she appeared where young womanhood flowers. In Dante’s Beatrice this kind of erotic promise found its most silent power, one of continuing encounter with perfection, as sacred perfection. In death sancta illuminates the Beyond, itself still approaches us out of this future, awaits, receives, completes. Wherever such inconceivable consolation arises, the beloved the after-image represents proves to be descended from Beatrice’s line. However little the image ends as promise, the founded fidelity to it just as surely plants hope, not only at the grave, but also in visualization.

DAYDREAM IN SYMBOLIC FORM:

22

PANDORA’S BOX; THE GOOD THING THAT REMAINS

Every dream remains one by virtue of the fact that too little has yet succeeded, become finished for it. That is why it cannot forget what is missing, why it holds the door open in all things. The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open on to pleasant objects, is marked hope. Though, as we have seen, there is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope, they keep each other hovering in the balance, no matter how far hope outweighs for the brave man, through the brave man. However, hope too, which can deceive with will-o’-the-wisp, must

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be of a knowing kind, one that is in itself thought out in advance. The consistently curious Pandora legend has hope brought to men by a woman, but in a demonic way. Pandora is tender as Pamina, dazzling as Helen, but evil or sent with evil intention and so after all like the usual snake in the myth of the Fall. She comes from Zeus, who seeks through her to take his revenge on Prometheus for stealing fire, an enticing picture of beauty itself, but with a sealed collection of dangerous gifts, Prometheus refuses her, but Epimetheus, the deliberator after the event, allows himself to be seduced, and so Pandora opens the box she has brought with her. Now this contained, according to Hesiod’s portrayal of the legend, the whole army of evils which has subsequently descended on men: disease, trouble, hunger, deformity, all flew out. Only at the end Zeus closed the lid, supposedly in sympathy, before hope came out too. This is, however, a very contradictory legend or version of the legend; since hope, with which after all Zeus also wanted to help the men created by Prometheus to get over their weakness, lies here amidst the explicit evils. In Hesiod’s version it is distinguished from the other evils only by the fact that it remains untapped, i.e. has not in fact been distributed among men. But this provides no real understanding in Hesiod’s account unless in fact hope as evil refers to its deceptive aspect, even to the powerless aspect which it still represents for itself alone. The ancients had depicted Elpis in this way, tender, covered in veils and fleeing, this is how the Stoics wanted to leave the images of hope behind them, just like those of anxiety and fear. The same effect is created by the unforgettable Spes which Andrea Pisano depicted on the door of the Baptistry in Florence; she sits waiting, although she is winged, and despite her wings, like Tantalus, she raises her arms towards an unattainable fruit. Thus hope, so much less endowed with possessions than memory, may appear as an evil on the side of uncertainty, and the deceptive, the unfounded kind certainly is one. But of course, even unfounded hope cannot be ordered among the usual evils of the world as if it were the same as illness or worry. And founded hope especially, that is, hope mediated with the real Possible, is so far removed from evil, even from jack-o’-lantern, that it in fact represents the at least half-open door appearing to open on to pleasant objects, in a world which has not become a prison, which is not a prison. The longer time went on, the less the ancients sought to relinquish hope. Hence a later, Hellenistic version (even Goethe’s ‘Pandora’ adopted it) portrays Pandora’s dowry not as container of misfortune but, on the contrary, of good things, ultimately as a box of mysteries. Pandora’s box

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is Pandora herself in this version, i.e. the ‘all-talented’ woman, full of charms, gifts, felicitous talents. These too, according to the Hellenistic version of the myth, came out of the box, but in contrast to the vices they completely escaped and were not distributed among men; thus, accordingly, hope nevertheless remained in the box, as the only good thing left. It keeps up courage for the good things that are missing, steadfastness and non-resignation in the face of those which fail to appear, and where it vanishes, the process pending in the world gets lost. Thus in the long run the second version of the Pandora myth is surely the only true one; hope is the good thing that remains for men, which has in no way already ripened but which has also in no way been destroyed. In fact, the halfopened door with adventistic dawning in advance, through which subjectively and objectively hope is indicated, is the Pandora-box of the unfinished world itself together with the hollow space with sparks (ciphers, positive symbol-intentions), which its latency represents. With a historical symbol, the friendliest there is, the box opens as the deep warm study, the cabin on land in which the promising light of home burns. With a landscape symbol, the strongest there is, the box opens as the open sea, with heavy evening clouds in the storm, with the golden red morning clouds over the horizon, when the sun is no longer far away and the day begins which may also be praised before the evening comes.* Both aspects are equally the perspective of philosophy which finally replies to hope materialistically and openly and is sworn to the new earth of the Totum. This Totum or All still stands in process and its tendency, it is approaching, with utopian elements of the final state, the Front of process, in latency. Illusions and their good things which have in any case never been existent have flown out of Pandora’s box, but really founded hope, in which man can become man for man and the world homeland for man, has remained. Thus, for the same reason, concrete anticipation is as familiar with enlightenment (destruction of illusions) as it is with genuine mystery (That-riddle, utopian Totum). As much with a maximum of freedom from illusion as with a maximum (pregnant with decision) of optimism. And that is why no moment of comprehended hope is missing from the theory-practice of Marxism which is kept total and not kept up artificially. Mechanical materialism, of course, is true as materialism, that is, as explanation of the world in terms of itself, but it is untrue when, as merely mechanical materialism, it teaches an as it were stupid world, * Bloch is reversing the standard German proverb here ‘Don’t praise the day before evening comes’, which would be equivalent to the English ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’.

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certainly a half and narrow world, moved without goal, with the old cycle of becoming and fading, locked to the chain of unchanging necessity. But this is not the world in which the contradictions occur that drive us ahead, in which better life, becoming human, Thing for Us are really possible, have space in forward development and capability of development. The real open world is that of dialectical materialism, which is not carrying any mechanistic eggshells. It is as powerfully removed as mechanical materialism from the idealisms of reason as creator, of spirit as demiurge, from bible-bashing and hypostases of the other world, but also from the statics in the particular, above all in the whole of the world, which mechanical materialism still venerates, as does idealism. We cannot think well enough and greatly enough about matter; its days, which are equally ours, have neither unchanging number and proportion nor anywhere near their full weight. Not only movement and such an apparently ‘anthropomorphic aspect’ as contradiction (with movement itself as first contradiction) are its modes of existence, hut also such an apparently so much greater ‘anthropomorphic aspect’ as anticipation. This is felt out and opened up by hope, depicted by its objectively positive tendency- and latency-concept. And such an auroral aspect not only breaks forth repeatedly in human-historical terms, it even qualifies and embraces the landscape of the physical world, which is in no way merely quantitative and cyclical. There is also within it, precisely within it, ciphers of the development of a homeland, in mediation with the human-historical one, on the basis of the as yet so little reflected morning-land: objective-real possibility. The substance-formations of the world - right down to the unleashing of the most intensive force of production, of the true atomic nucleus: existere, quodditas - are full of the tendency of the Not-Yet towards the All, of the alienated towards identity, of the surrounding world towards mediated homeland. Even after and precisely after the building of a classless society these substance-problems (tasks) of salvage, humanization continue to work. The hope of the goal, however, is necessarily at odds with false satisfaction, necessarily at one with revolutionary thoroughness; - crooked seeks to be straight, half to be full.

PART THREE

(Transition) WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR (DISPLAY, FAIRYTALE, TRAVEL, FILM, THEATRE)

MAKING OURSELVES MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN WE ARE

Not everyone looks a bit special. But most want to make a good impression and strive to do so. The most external way of doing this is the easiest here. The drab person colours himself as if he were glowing. Thus many shine in front of others, show off. Grooming is soon learnt and fleeting. The woman, the applicant show themselves, as they say, from their best side. Which means from that side which is most readily marketable.The ego changes itself into a commodity, into a saleable, even sparkling commodity. It sees how others behave, what others wear, what is on display in the shop-window, and places itself into it. Of course, people cannot make of themselves what has not already previously begun within them. Equally, in terms of pretty wrappings, gestures and things, they are attracted outside only by what has already existed for a long time in their own wishes, even if only vaguely, and what is therefore quite willingly seduced. Lipstick, make-up, borrowed plumes help the dream of themselves, as it were, out of the cave. Then they go and pose, pep up the little bit that is really there or falsify it. But not as if it were possible for someone to make themselves completely false; at least their wishing is genuine. This shows itself, in fact betrays itself in the pose they strike. Wishing, however, only moves upwards in a conventional way, the assiduous young man of this type is dissatisfied with the state in which he finds himself, but not with the state of rich and poor in general. So he smiles at this in a really friendly way, so he blossoms out in accordance with the image which he sees as his own, or rather the one which he is made to see as his own. To appear more than he is, that is consequently all that is allowed to him in the petit-bourgeois urge to be considered top dog. To be more than he appears, however, this reversed formula is not imitated by any grooming; which is why there is never so much kitsch as in the class which tolerates itself not being genuine. What is ours and non-fading, it is still not often worn apart from the tie.

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WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR

WHAT THE MIRROR TELLS US TODAY

24

I was privileged to serve. Saying

Being slim Not to give oneself a second glance, that is really something. But for the little employee it usually just means to be finished. If he is not yet that, and if he does not want to end up like that, then the applicant must be conscious of himself as spruce and dressed accordingly. A mirror is part of getting dressed, the threatened man looks at himself with the eyes of his master. With eyes which tell him how the boss wishes him to be, when he wants to rely on his employees. Of course the mirrored man believes he sees himself as he wishes to see himself, wishes himself to be, in fact, even the man who has no choice but to be mirrored believes it, shortly before his appearance in public, at the office. The face now composes itself as smoothly as possible, the employee wants to be as slim, as creaseless as his suit and holds himself accordingly. He puts himself at an advantage in this way, but at that advantage which the real masters gain from the little man. Therefore the glass does not even reflect the way he wishes himself to be but simply the way he is wished to be. This kind of thing is standardized like the gloves in the shop, like the shop-smile of the salesman that has become a general and prescribed smile. To keep smiling through anxiety and in tedium, this is now the American mark of the gentlemen who are no such thing. The intention here is that they should resemble each other as one egg does another, and nothing but creeping chickens hatch out.

Good at cringing Those who offer themselves for sale have to please. The girl the way she should be, the young man the way he should carry himself, they are therefore also put on show outside. As the ruling class requires, on pain of destruction. The feminine aspect of the employee consists of pink, the masculine of wax (but must be smart). To keep them both up to scratch there is therefore a mirror hanging in the street too, in every public place,

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there are lots of them hanging wherever they go. The window-display mirrors and by doing so increases what is supposed to be happening in the buyer, what he would like to be in petit-bourgeois terms, so that he buys. The usual reading- and film-matter of the West supplies many such images of desirable good conduct, of fruitless appearance. Deceitful signposts are erected here: to the dancing work-animal, to the travelling man-in¬ chains, to the perfect marriage of the castrated husband. All in the manner of a lie which must be sweet though impossible enough to intoxicate us and yet still keep us in harness. Sport seems to be a real escape from the tedium; genuine wishes are felt here at the start; competition, almost extinct for small people, provides a refuge. But the field is narrow, getting ahead is just a game, seriousness is left standing, the swimmer improves on records only in the water, but the boss does so in terms of profit. Of course, quite different peak performances would emerge if there were medals for being first in suffering in silence, for being number one cringer, champion at swallowing your pride, at grinning and bearing it. These are the unhailed victors of that life which is really still offered to people on the capitalist road through life, without a lie. The boxer stands in the ring, dishes it out, but the one who can take it best stands outside the ropes, as a spectator. Is the true master when it comes to taking the right hook to the jaw, to coming out when the bell goes. Thus above all he pleases those who keep the duped punch-ball pinned down.

NEW CLOTHES, THE ILLUMINATED DISPLAY

25

A velvet collar polishes. Saying

Nobody can shed their skin of course. But it is easy to slip into a new one, hence all grooming is in fact getting dressed. In any case, the clean shirt lies spread out in the morning like the new day, a new coat covers the whole past of the man just released from prison. Clothes which can be chosen distinguish men from animals, and jewellery is even older than these clothes, it sets them off even today by standing out. With garments women in particular put on a new part of themselves. She is a new woman in new clothes, in the fine lather of feminine finery. However, the wish to try oneself out in various ways also begins for most other people with

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WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR

the both spotless and variable illusion which a tailor can lend. Hence old or sedentary people feel most comfortable always being dressed in the same way. Others immediately feel they have no creases if their trousers do not show any.

Well laid out After this, out on to the busy street, itself idle, watching. Light comes through the trees from the bright houses, from the square at the end, and calls. But what is calling here is the commodity dazzlingly illuminated behind glass, looking for customers. Thus in addition to the sewing-pattern there is the window-display, to stimulate elegant wishful life. The windowdisplay first came into being with the open capitalist market, and it still possesses, characteristically in the West above all, the capacity to stimulate needs, primarily those with ‘the personal touch’. For the purpose of fulfilling the wish closest to the heart of the businessman himself: making profit. A good window-display must therefore be suggestive, always presents parts to represent the whole and the parts themselves again as merely intimating ones, and thus it makes us uneasy about lingering before shop-windows. Here is the delicatessen with dishes we cannot help but call appetizing. Coffee, tea, schnaps are best presented against Delft tiles, on red varnish; Dutch-Indian air lulls the purchaser in. Here is a china shop: in the middle the laid table, blossom-white, crystal, candle-lit, waiting for guests who are as refined as it is itself. Here is a ladies’ fashion shop of higher distinction: outfits gathered in to an unbelievable slimness at the height of fashion like little else in the world and yet a kind of other world: no earthly women walk like that. Here is a tailor’s for general managers and for those who would like to be like them: the ulster has been thrown over the Chippendale chair in an inimitable way, a soft hat waits beside it, pigskin gloves, shoes that look as if they were made out of the cover of an old Florentine book. The wanderer, however, and all those others who, like most of us, cannot afford to buy, is not made rebellious, however great the uneasiness of his desire for possession, precisely by what is all too high. Anyone who is after more cosy happiness, however, will find it behind the windows of the furniture store. Dining-room, bedroom, studio, drawing room everything is ready like a made bed, and the young civil servant who no longer feels the need to go chasing infatuated round the park, only needs to fling his bride into it. He sees behind the windows, in down-feather

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343

and salmon-pink, the most legitimate bourgeois wishful dream, but also that fulfillable for the fewest of all: the dream-house for two from inside. The dream of the beautiful house fills itself with the furniture on display which is itself living beyond its means, with factory-goods which are always got up in fancy dress: the broad odalisque-style armchair,* the Califor¬ nian bar-top, the Faustian studio. At every corner the shop-window thus forms wishful dreams, to make the rich people who have no money draw it out of their pockets. And no one knows better when it comes to this sort of dream than the dresser who arranges its displays. He does not only set out commodities, but also the enticing image which arises between men and commodities; he builds with happiness and glass. And the passer-by continues to build on this capitalist enticing image in a purely human way, even though it exists close by slums or cheerless streets of bourgeois conformity, presupposes these and is supposed to make us forget them. Uneasy, certainly, but not made rebellious (for the magic behind the glass of course shows no enviably visible owner), the petit bourgeois affirms precisely in front of the displays which are beyond his means the elegant and praiseworthy aspect into which the bosses shape their lives. The woman must exist for these flowers, for this perfume, there must be the abundance of life; but where is it to be found? Around Christmas, when we do not give presents to ourselves, but to others, the shopping streets of the cosmopolitan cities become almost pious. With double, treble intensity the neon-adverts, the wishes glow up and down, go blue, yellow, red, green, pour drinks, billow as tobacco smoke, make out of the commodity everywhere a so-called Christ-child, t As much a cute picture as the over¬ filled shop-windows are a deceitful one. The coffee which is poured into the sea does not need to be put on display first.

Light of advertising But the commodity always still needs a label which praises it. Which makes it especially appealing in competition and does not only make it shine in the shop-window. The designed and spoken display, the big drum for

* Odalisque - a woman slave or concubine in an Eastern harem, especially in the seraglio of the Turkish Sultan. t The German equivalent of Santa Claus, the baby Jesus who brings the children presents at Christmas.

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this is called advertising. It especially transforms man into the most sacred thing there is next to property, into the customer. Even earlier ages, countries that were not capitalist had a kind of advertising, but it was more contented self-importance than a weapon in the acquisitive struggle. It skipped over, it even ironized the commodity; just as even today a coal-merchant’s might commend itself, almost mockingly, as ‘Orcus’. Even in old Peking there were the following business signs: over a basketmaker’s ‘The Ten Virtues’; over an opium shop ‘The Threefold Uprightness’; over a wine-shop ‘Neighbourhood of the Highest Beauty’; over a charcoal-shop ‘Fountain of All Beauty’; over a hard-coal shop ‘Heavenly Embroidery’; over a butcher’s ‘Mutton-shop of the Morning Twilight’. But these are poems, not big draws, even if, as enticement and exaggeration, so to speak, they do long precede capitalist advertising. Even more beautifully than the window-dresser, the man in advertising plays on the piano of wishful dreams, making them irresistible in the stimulated person, until a customer ripens out of him. Atlantic hits like the following now emerge: Spring hats are no longer a luxury these days; Call for Philip Morris; Purity and a big bottle, that’s Pepsi Cola; Modern design is modern design; Buick, the car for the successful businessman. Buying ladies’ stockings causes a literal rebirth, guarantees the New York Times: ‘Van Raalte covers you with Leg Glory from sunrise till dark.’ Thriftiness, wish for the latest thing and morning red have a rendezvous even for gentlemen and at a cheap price: ‘Howard Clothes, styled with an eye for the world of tomorrow.’ Advertising makes magic out of the commodity, even out of the most incidental commodity, a magic in which each and every thing will be solved if only we buy it. The lady in the illustration who is dabbing eau-de-cologne on her temples, who is accept¬ ing Swiss chocolate from gentlemen, becomes the picture of happiness precisely by doing so. Shop-windows and advertising are in their capitalist form exclusively lime-twigs for the attracted dream-birds. The so gleaming and acclaimed commodities become, as Marx says, the bait with which people try to entice the essence of the others, their money, to themselves, and to transform every real and possible need into a weakness. All this is made possible by painted, highly recommended commodities, a parade of Christmas and Easter values throughout the whole year. Thus the employees are charged up without them exploding, and the many lights of the several faces of Berlin West, all of them rotten, only serve to increase the darkness.

BEAUTIFUL MASK

345

BEAUTIFUL MASK, KU KLUX KLAN,

26

THE GLOSSY MAGAZINES

Your daddy’s rich, but your mamma’s good-looking. Jazz song*

The obsession with transforming ourselves lures us even more strongly. A person does not then only put on new clothes, but becomes unrecogniz¬ able in them. The means of doing this is not dress, but dressing up in disguise. The wish emerges for a mask which is most definitely not an everyday one. The mask is superficial to begin with, as such it hides, indeed denies the previous ego, the ego portrayed in previous life. The housewife, the salesman disappear, a colourful image of themselves takes their place. This is now carried over on to the body, the wearer caters for himself with it. That dressing up in disguise takes place which in many cases is not dressing up at all, but a small fulfilment. The mask enables the bourgeois not only to look as he wishes to be and to be taken for at parties, it also allows him to act in a really boisterous way. In fact, often when he is dressed up as a criminal, hangman or pasha, it suits his style better than his everyday coat, which is, so to speak, forced upon him. With this disguise he throws a dream over himself, the dream of the colourful or great animal. And we see which role the disguised man would like to play in life, even could play if he was not prevented. He is by no means only masked as hangman, sex murderer, prince. Those who have dressed up in a good disguise have undressed, that is how they look on the inside.

The crooked paths It more seldom turns out that someone is a colourful animal on the outside as well. It is surprising that more crimes are not committed simply for richly striking effect. All criminals, even if they come from the scum of the earth, are petit-bourgeois, the good fife is only possible in affluence, that is what they want. Crime, so it seems, makes rich overnight, if you know how to use the night as well as the man of property knows how to use his day. Doubtless, for poor, that is, would-be exploiters, there * Bloch is presumably quoting from Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ here.

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WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR

is a persistent urge to go into the underworld, into what is for them a cross between a killing-feast* and a beggars’ banquet. The lure of the revolver is succumbed to relatively seldom in the petit bourgeoisie, and it remains at the planning stage, only because the consequences require very good nerves, and also have many Black Fridays.! It’s an honest man who only dreams of the crimes which the others commit, so says an old saying; even outside the masked ball, however, the confidence trickster is what he wishes to be, a prince. In fact, the beggars’ banquet is often retained as working clothes even by more capital criminals: the crooked road is supposed to be and remain at the same time the colourful-eerie road, crime itself loves and preserves the anarchic romanticism in which the petit bourgeois cloaks it. Thus wayward youth is seduced by the image of the gangster, the image of the wish for bloodshed; but there are also really droll robbers and murderers, above all sex-murderers, who to all intents and purposes ply their trade in a kind of dream-game, mostly with wishes for revenge, and thus exaggerate it in a theatrical way. They dupe the police in letters which lead to their discovery; the pleasure taken in the role, in the role which is ultimately not only one they play, is too great. What is longed for and intended as such a role is verified by their testimonies; they are furthermore poetic in a terrible way. For example, a letter to the police, around 1930, from the Diisseldorf sex-murderer Kiirten who murdered nineteen times, dripping with bloodthirstiness and grinning suffering, yet suffering draped in moral sentiments, and in a smarmy, but very self-relishing criminal style. The sex-murderer is skilled at being doubly chilling and writes: ‘I expect you are interested in my activities. Since my beginning lies in another region, the following may be deserving of your special attention. In Langenfeld (north of Cologne) was the beginning and, if my luck holds, will also be the end of my affliction. A creature lives there, which in its moral life and in its thoughts is hardly comparable with any other soul. That she cannot belong to me has driven me to all my terrible actions. She must still die, even if it costs me my life, I wanted to poison her, but her totally pure body overcame the poison. Now things are going better for me, my girl has to walk home in the evening from Hilden, I enclose a sketch of her route. She is my next victim’ - and a later letter closes with verses which read like something written on the toilet-walls of Cockaigne, but their contents were true:

A rural feast where freshly slaughtered pigs are eaten. | ‘Black Friday’ is also the expression for the Wall Street Crash in German.

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At the foot of Pappendelle At the spot my cross foretells, Where no weeds have grown, And which is marked with a stone, Lies a corpse one and a half metres deep. The letters were put in black-bordered condolence envelopes; the selfsatisfaction in the committed, yet still draped murder is great. Something of the Nazi announced itself in all this, he later sucked in many droll robbers and murderers, moral sex-murderers. The crooked paths are thus filled with cruel wishful images in a particularly precise way, including those of the gallows at the end, with the inconceivable cruelty of which the Christian bourgeoisie has for centuries sweetened the misfortune of not being allowed to break people on the wheel, to hang, draw and quarter them, and to burn them at the stake, in person.

Success through terror More and more people of this kind clamoured to be disguised in life too. Grotesque masks and hoods are not only desired by Mr Would-be at balls, but also during the day. The mask did not only move beyond the fancydress party among old-fashioned private criminals, it became fascist seriousness. Public seriousness made political, then came the Night of the Long Knives and its day. ‘Wolf’s fangs’ and ‘Scary monsters’, joke articles which travelling salesmen put on to amuse fellow passengers in railway compartments, became party insignia. Papa had recently gone to a fancydress party at the Glee Club as Judge Lynch and it was unanimously declared the best mask of the evening. Now he was the same in the street, but for real and faultless; and the Jews with cut-off trousers and with witty placards around their necks, the Jewish sweethearts with shorn heads in the train triggered salvos of laughter, before they triggered different salvos. ‘Regression’ broke out, apaches, death’s-heads, knights of the Fiery Night¬ shirt enlivened the streets, police made them doubly insecure. All wishes came true which the petit bourgeois had acted out at Carnival time, every scream of blue murder, and in particular the wishes of those who as Lynchers, Ku Kluxers, hooded avengers and the like drove false revolt into genuine barbarity. The fascist charlatan reached for the werewolf mask, he conjured with half-crazy names, with scenes from horror stories, where these descend to the level of kitsch, but also to the level of the well-oiled,

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serviceably built schizophrenia of the bourgeois conformist. That is, of the Cockaigne of emergency, this too comes from the golden West. The American Ku Klux Klan still sets the tone for this, the reactionary under¬ ground movement of the Southern States of America after the Civil War, then again after the First World War. The gang wore domino robes with a hood, the material was dark with white insignia sewn on which were supposed to look ghostly in torch-light. There were insignia in the shape of a Bowie Knife, there were also bullets, half-moons, crosses, snakes, stars, frogs, wheels, hearts, scissors, birds, cattle. The clan called itself the Invisible Empire; the realm has an ‘Imperial Wizard’ at its head, followed by the ‘Great Dragon’, the ‘Great Titan’, the ‘Great Cyclops’. There are ‘Clan-wolves’ and ‘Clan-eagles’, the names of the ordinary members are the same as the motifs on their dominorobes; but a fiery cross burns on the hills where they meet. This mummery is intended to appear extremely different, barbarically colourful, so that the bloodthirsty Babbitt can make a taboo out of himself. Following in the footsteps of Red Indian stories and totems, even of the medieval Vehmgericht, * of the exclusively dark Middle Ages in general, as the American magazines imagine them to be. The masks of the Ku Klux Klan were thus the first fascist uniform, and its proclamations were the first to colour with their wishful images the ‘revolution’ from the right, the Lynch revolution. The beginning of the movement is instructive here, which will perhaps appear again, the call to the Arkansas Klan in April 1868, which runs as follows: K K K Special Order No.2 Spirit Brothers; Shadows of Martyrs; Phantoms from gory fields; Followers of Brutus!!! Rally, rally, rally. - When shadows gather, moons grow dim and stars tremble, glide to the Council Hall and wash your hands in tyrant’s blood; and gaze upon the list of condemned traitors. The time has arrived. Blood must flow. The true must be saved. Work in darkness Bury in waters Make no sound Trust not the air Strike high and sure Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance! A secret court which operated in Westphalia from the late twelfth century to the middle of the sixteenth century.

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This immediately sounds like the sex-murderer Kiirten’s criminal language quoted above, but with revolutionary masquerade. In the truly primitive person the mask-wearer intruded through his disguise into the creature that is portrayed by the mask. The wild man in the lion’s mask becomes the Lion-god himself, he imagines he can act like him. Even the dancing dervish, when he is turning on his axis, feels himself to be a heavenly body turning around the sun; in this way in his imagination he pulls down the powers of the sun to himself. Civilized barbarity, however, by no means uses the mask, in this case that of the man-eater, merely to partici¬ pate more than usual in the wishful idol it represents for it, but above all also in order to arouse horror, and to paralyse through terror. And the mask fitted like a glove when big business summoned it, when ‘moons grew dim and stars trembled’ and the Kristallnacht* came out on to the streets.

Bestsellers, syrupy stories But this pleasure in transforming oneself must also be able to wander in friendlier fields. Since behind all its criminal images there in fact lies something spruced up by the petit bourgeoisie, the wild Babbitt runs to it in the end. It is to be found both in prose, in bestsellers, and in the as it were poetically plotted sweetness, in the sweetness with plot, in short, in the magazine story. The bestsellers are those which, with or without the use of elbows, promise the path to contrived happiness. These can just be cosmetic books, they are like the French chef who knew how to make a beefsteak out of a glove. To these we may add the guidance counsellors in life’s struggle, for the would-be beauty-queen, for the prospective lucky devil. Illustrations (teaching good manners) back up the explanation, finally the employee is shown his goal in a grand tableau: he is sitting at the dinner table with the boss’s family, next to him the half-won daughter; monogamy, coated with marriage into the business, concludes the bestseller. This genre flourishes most extensively in North America; how to win friends and influence people, precisely this is part of the business. The headings of a ‘Popular Guide to Desirable Living’ run: ‘How to live your life; The secrets of health; Love and marriage; Kristallnacht. The night of 9th/ioth November 1938 when the Nazis launched a pogrom throughout Germany, burning and looting Jewish homes and synagogues.

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How to make money; The way to charm; Success with your children; How to sharpen your memory; Unmarried, but -; Never too old to love; How to make people like you; How to talk about books, theatre, music, arts.’ In short, this is a veritable Pharos in the wishful sea of the petit bourgeoisie, and it guides to the perfect Babbitt, that is, to the wishful goal of the Babbitt with credit. So much for rational success courses and their winner’s purse; there are, however, to our least surprise, also irrational ones. They awake ‘the secret powers’ in man, they establish: ‘The intensive demands of today’s hectic business life cause many men to experience a premature decline in the best of their powers’, they make people magnetic. They relieve shyness in contact with the opposite sex, create social lions and the man to whom ladies will gladly hand over the tiller of the little boat that is their life. Among bestsellers belong even the various manuals of sexual erudition, in so far as they are not pure substitutes or there simply for voyeurs. The peak of bourgeois conformity was reached in van de Velde’s ‘Ideal Marriage’, the respectable dirty-joke book, the pedantic guide on the roundabout route to pleasure. The privately published edition for winedealers, which the ars amandi had already long since become, now becomes mother’s milk with whisky, at the same time creating a substitute for the wise, counselling father confessor of old. But love fades and the insurance company remains; that is why every how-to-succeed book is ultimately dedicated to the latter or to the instincts which lead to it. The dreambook of accomplished love-making bows before the significantly more American dream-book of well-to-do accounts, of nest-eggs already home and dry. Right at the end, where otherwise panic at the closing of the gates threatens, there thus appears in the insurance brochure an exclusive house set back from the road, with forest and lake and the friendly postman at the gate, just bringing the insurance annuity to the rose-growing head of the house and his slumbering wife. This is all promised by the guide to life and slips from prose entirely into poetry, namely into the rose-pink which no longer exists for any would-be capitalist who has to reach for a bestseller. Even if all pretentious strivers are disappointed, those who read without pretension are not. They are offered the magazine story, in the German version it looms dimly out of the time where boy gets girl, in the American version it downright lies. Here faked lives are surveyed on a rising curve, up to money and splendour, on paper. And the trick by which the rise is achieved is always the same, it is, as Upton Sinclair once said, that of the impossible coincidence. Servant girls marry successful gold-diggers or

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men with a heart of gold who soon afterwards discover a kerosene dump. Poor shorthand typists who spare every calorie for silk stockings meet an employee, love follows, her lover takes her on a few modest trips which give him the opportunity of discovering the noble character of his beloved, but ultimately he discovers himself to her, namely as the boss in person, and carries his bride home - sounds like magic, doesn’t it? Ora lad who is as poor as he is pretty stops a horse which has bolted and so gets to know the rich heiress who then becomes his wife - a golden bed of free enterprise in the midst of monopoly capitalism. The magazine story, with impossible coincidence, is full of these swift changes in private fortunes, namely upturns on to the peaks of society. It mediates the view from the fence, full of false hope, into the richest circles, it is, especially in America, the rot-gut epic of the jackpot, run off in millions. All this, this time in bourgeois-conformist Germany, interspersed with emotion from the plush age of the previous, in no way extinct century: ‘I know a seat where the wild thyme blooms.’ Or still again a la Marlitt:* ‘And then it was ding-a-ling, with a merry jingle out into the winter splendour, it echoed like joyful bells in the hearts of youth as if heralding only happy and beautiful things for the whole of life to come.’ Or romantically solid: ‘How cosy it was in the manor house! In all the downstairs rooms the shaded lamps burned in pretty colours, for dusk had fallen earlier than usual today with the driving snow. And the stout greenwood logs crackled in all the glowing stoves, and even outside in the great hall warmth streamed from a great old-fashioned tiled stove.’ Or romantically demonic, once again upwards, even if with equally stout prose, towards the aristocratic highlands of bourgeois-conformist respect, of transfiguration: ‘These old castles, sombre and taciturn from outside, fairy-like inside - with their magnificent brocade walls, heavy curtains at their doors. What a strange and fantastic spectacle confronts us there! Intrigue lurks at every door, but along the half-lit corridors love ties its delicate bond. ’ The magazine story thus remains the most deeply moved story in its feudal images, the most miracle-believing in its capitalist images. It exudes deep contentment with the upper class, seeks to teach it, disseminate it, preserve it intact. All this, as far as the dream of success is concerned, with the constantly open arms of the happy end, in fact of the capitalist-feudal one; there is no other end, can, must, will not be. The parasitical life of the upper class is presented by it as highly acceptable, wealth is grace. The poor devil does not rebel, he flies Marlitt. The pen-name of Eugenie John (1825-87), popular novelist.

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of his own accord into the lap of the rich heiress. This complacent, impossible aspect, which does not however upset any of the rules of the game, already alone distinguishes the kitschy happiness of the magazine story from the far less passive colportage, * which is consequently detested by noble bourgeois conformists. In general, nothing happens in the mirrors of this scribbled kitsch-dream except coincidence, and the blessing which it brings the lucky devil multiplies, in all its Atlantic magic, the cheap Don Quixotes of meaningless hope.

BETTER CASTLES IN THE AIR IN FAIR

27

AND CIRCUS, IN FAIRYTALE AND COLPORTAGE

Duckling, duckling, here are Gretel and Hansel. No bridge, not even a track, take us over on your white back.

Hansel and Gretel

Then we went to bed. But I did not sleep, I lay awake. I thought about who could help. I racked my brains for a solution. The book I had been reading bore the title: ‘The Robbers’ Cave in the Sierra Morena or The Angel of All the Oppressed.’ When father had come home and fallen asleep, I climbed out of bed, stole out of my bedroom and got dressed. Then I wrote a note: ‘You shouldn’t work your fingers to the bone, I’m going to Spain; I’m going to get help.’ I put this note on the table, put a piece of dry bread in my pocket together with a few pennies from my skittles money, crept down the stairs, opened the door, drew another deep sobbing breath, but quietly, quietly, so nobody would hear, and then went down into the market-place with muffled steps and out along the Niedergasse, the Lungwitzer Weg which leads via Lichtenstein and Zwickau to Spain, to the land of the noble robbers, the helpers in need.

Karl May, Mein Leben und Streben

* Bloch is using the term here to mean the genre of popular literature comprising adventure story, picaresque tale and thriller which he sees as distinct from the magazine story.

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If sailor tales to sailor tunes Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons, And Buccaneers and buried Gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as once they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of to-day: - So be it, and fall on! If not, If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave: So be it, also! And may I And all my pirates share the grave Where these and their creations lie! Stevenson, Treasure Island, To the Hesitating Purchaser Through the unplanned wanderings, through the unplanned expeditions of the imagination the quarry is not infrequently raised which carefully planned philosophy can use in its well-ordered household.

Lichtenherg

Towards evening is the best time for telling stories. The insignificant world near at hand disappears, distant things which seem better and nearer move up around us. Once upon a time: in fairytale that does not only mean something past, but a more colourful or lighter Elsewhere. And those who live happily ever after there, if they are not dead yet, are still alive to this day.* Even in the fairytale there is suffering, but it changes, and does so for good. Gentle, badly treated Cinderella goes to the little tree where her mother’s grave lies, little tree wake yourself and shake yourself, a dress falls down, the most splendid and dazzling Cinderella has ever seen, and the slippers are all golden. The fairytale always turns golden in the end, there is enough happiness to go round. It is always the little heroes and the poor folk here who manage to reach the place where life has come good.

A traditional ending to German fairytales, an alternative to ‘And they all lived happily ever after’.

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Courage of the clever Not all are content just to wait for this goodness. They go out in search of their happiness, clever versus rough. Courage and cunning are their shield, their spear is reason. Since courage alone little helps the weak against the fat lords, it does not cast their towers to the ground. Cunning of reason is the human part of the weak. Fantastic though the fairytale is, it is still always clever at overcoming difficulties. Courage and cunning also succeed in a very different way in the fairytale than they do in life, and not only that: it is, as Lenin says, always existing revolutionary elements which kick over the given traces here in the imagination. When the peasant was still in bondage, the poor fairytale boy thus won the king’s daughter. When educated Christendom trembled in fear of witches and devils, the fairytale soldier deceived witches and devils from beginning to end (only the fairytale stresses the ‘stupid devil’). The Golden Age is sought and mirrored when you could see right to the back of paradise. But the fairytale cannot be fooled by today’s owners of paradise; so it is rebellious, once bitten and with its wits about it. You can climb up a beanstalk to heaven and see how the angels mill money there. In the fairytale ‘Godfather Death’* dear God offers himself as a godfather to a poor man, but the poor man answers: ‘I don’t want you as a godfather because you give to the rich and leave the poor to starve.’ Always here, in courage and sobriety and hope, there is a touch of enlightenment, long before the Enlightenment existed.The valiant little tailor in Grimm’s fairytale, a born flyswatter, goes out into the world because he thinks the workshop is too small for his valour. He meets a giant, the giant picks up a stone and squeezes it until water drips out, throws another stone up so high that it can hardly be seen any more. But the tailor outdoes the giant by squeezing a cheese to pulp instead of a stone and by throwing a bird so high in the air that it never comes down again. Finally, at the end of the fairytale, the clever fellow overcomes all obstacles, wins the king’s daughter and half the kingdom. Thus in the fairytale a tailor can become a king, a king without taboo who has got rid of all the malevolent mischief of the big men. And when the world was still full of devils, another fairytale hero, the boy who went out to learn what fear was, staves off anxiety all along the line,

‘Gevatter Tod’. This carries a double significance in the Grimm fairytale because it also means ‘Death the Reaper’.

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he sets corpses on fire to keep them warm, plays skittles with ghosts in the haunted castle, takes the chief of the evil spirits prisoner and gains a treasure in the process. The devil himself can be deceived in the fairytale, a poor soldier deceives him by selling his soul on condition that he fills the soldier’s boot with gold. But the boot has a hole in it, the soldier places it over a deep pit, so the devil has to drag along sacks and sacks of gold until the first cock’s crow and then go away empty-handed. Thus in the fairytale even shoes with holes in them must serve those who know all about them to their best advantage. There is no lack of gentle fun poked at mere wishing or the simple fairytale means of reaching the goal, and this fun is also enlightened, but it does not discourage. In olden days, begins the fairytale of the Frog King, when wishing still helped, - so the fairytale does not pretend to be a substitute for action. But rather the clever Augustus* of the fairytale practises the art of not letting himself be impressed. The power of the giants is painted as one with a hole in it, through which the weak man can see his way to victory.

Magic Table, Genie of the Lamp Good things, such as have never been seen before, are on hand here too. Above all wishful gadgets of the handiest kind offer themselves to the weak, magically. The most striking example of this is Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Ass and the Cudgel in the Sack’: a hero, a poor outcast boy, becomes a joiner’s apprentice and when his time is up there he receives a little table which looks rather unremarkable but has remarkable properties. If one says ‘Table spread yourself’, it instantly spreads itself with food which is so good no innkeeper could have procured it, and a big glass of red wine stands by the plate. Together with this comes an ass which can work miracles, he spews out gold pieces on demand, back and front; finally the cudgel in the sack appears or the magic weapon without which the poor boy cannot exist in this world, even when he has become rich and happy. The Magic Table has many brothers in fairytale wishful magic: the flying slippers in Hauff’s story of little Muck and his little walking-stick that is really a divining rod; the piece of wood in the fairytale ‘The Fates of Said’, the wood underneath the ship-wrecked boy * Stupid Augustus is the hopeless clown in the German circus. Bloch sees a hopeful counterpart for him in the fairytale.

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turns into a dolphin which carries Said to the shore as swift as an arrow. Grimm’s fairytale ‘Brother Lustig’ has a satchel into which the Brother can conjure anything he wishes: roast geese, eight devils, ultimately, by throwing the satchel into heaven, he manages to get himself into heaven with it. Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Water-sprite’, which is equipped with an enormous cudgel-in-the-sack, has children throwing a brush, then a comb, then a mirror behind them to stop the evil sprite. These become first a great brush-mountain with thousands of bristles, then a combmountain with teeth, then a mountain of mirrors, so smooth that the sprite cannot get across any more and has to give up the chase. Thus in general, game and magic have a free hand in the fairytale, wish becomes command, the effort of doing things drops away, even separating space, separating time. In Andersen a flying suitcase carries us to the Land of the Turks, lucky galoshes take a Chief Justice back to the Copenhagen of the fifteenth century. In the Arabian Nights the ‘magic horse’ flies, it carries us up to heaven, and there too waits, with folded arms, the most powerful fulfiller of wishes: the Genie of the Lamp. Highly typically, precisely this most lavish fairytale ‘Aladdin and his Magic Lamp’ is based on pure wish-utensils for acquiring what is not available. The smoky lamps are lit, the wicked uncle murmurs mysterious words and suddenly the cave opens with its hidden treasures which are heaped up in the name of Aladdin. A subterranean garden appears, and jewels grow on the trees instead of fruit. The Slave of the Ring, the Genie of the Lamp appear - both hallucinated primal wishes for power, for a power which is not confined to particular goods as in the case of the Magic Table, rather the lamp brings its master everything, absolutely everything that he desires. The Genie of the Lamp bestows countless treasures, beauty of the body and instant prowess as a knight, refinement of speech and intellect. He builds a palace overnight, the like of which the earth has never contained, with treasure-chambers, royal stables and an armoury; the bricks are made of jasper and alabaster; the windows of gems. A gentle command: and in an instant the lamp transposes the palace from China to Tunis, then back to the old place without the carpet in front of the portal even having been disturbed by the wind. We must not overlook the magic board which gives the wicked uncle near omniscience of the events taking place on earth; ‘Then, however, one day among many, he designed a sandboard, and he spread the figures out and explored their sequence exactly; and immediately he established for certain the sequence of the figures, of the mothers as well as of the daughters’ - it is the same geomantic board with which

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the magician in Tunis had learnt of the distant treasure in China which Aladdin subsequently dug up. Pure wishful means, pure via regia, to reach by the shortest route (in the fairytale) what nature itself, outside of the fairytale, denies man. In general, technological-magical treasure-hunting is the fairytale aspect itself in this kind of fairytale; since the discovered treasure symbolizes like little else the miracle of sudden change, of abrupt good fortune. Keen perception and smoky lamps are necessary for this in the Aladdin fairytale. Keen perception alone suffices in the secularized treasure-hunter fairytale by Edgar Allan Poe ‘The Gold Bug’, in Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’. But even in these half-fairytales (passing over into adventure story) treasure creates tension and twists; it is itself the mandrake which unbolts life and lets us acquire its brilliance. The technological-magical fairytale thus only indirectly aims at possessions, or when it has to; it aims at the transformation of things into utility-goods which are available at any time. It paints, in place of the short blanket for which almost every man must stretch,* a bed of sloth in nature. It intends - to use another fairytale to denote the native region of all Magic Tables and also of the Magic Lamp - it intends the Land of Cockaigne. The roast pigeons in it: 'f this sounds moreover as if we were already listening to a social fairytale, to a fairytale of an ideal state, simpler in its wares, but still more nourishing than all the others.

‘On wings of song, my darling, I will carry you away’ The boy who went out to learn what fear was only dreamt weakly at first. Even the valiant little tailor won the princess almost without intending to, just because she was lying across his path. All fairytale heroes find happiness, but not all are clearly moved towards this happiness beforehand in the dream of it. Only the heroes of the later, but not therefore worse literary fairytales or fairytale legends J (with authors as different as Hauff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Keller) are also fairytale figures in psychological terms, namely of a dreamy, utopian nature. Little Muck in Hauff’s story: he went * Bloch is using a German saying here which is the equivalent of ‘to cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth’. t Bloch is thinking of Pieter Brueghel’s picture of the Land of Cockaigne here, where the glutton waits with open mouth to catch the roast pigeons. I In German literary criticism the ‘legend’ usually contains a religious component and is often associated with a specific shrine or relic.

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out to seek his fortune, he precisely pursued his dream of happiness. ‘When he saw a piece of glass glittering on the ground in the sunshine, he put it safely in his pocket in the belief that it would change into the most beautiful diamond; if he saw the domes of a mosque glowing like fire in the distance, if he saw a lake flashing like a mirror, then he hurried towards it full of joy, because he thought he had arrived in a magic land. But oh, those illusions vanished when he got close, and all too soon his weariness and his stomach rumbling with hunger reminded him that he was still in the land of ordinary mortals.’ To another genre, curious in a different way, but likewise bom to fairytale, belongs the student Anselmus in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Golden Pot’, the self-professed romantic ‘fairytale of the modern age’. Anselmus too has his head full of dreams, and the spirit world is not sealed to him, for this very reason he is hopeless at dealing with life. ‘So as was said, the student Anselmus fell.. .into a dreamy brooding which made him oblivious to all outside contact with ordinary life. He felt an unknown something stirring in his innermost being, causing him that exquisite pain which precisely constitues longing, which promises man another, higher being. He liked it best when he could wander alone through meadows and forests and, as if released from everything that bound him to his wretched existence, was able as it were to find himself again, just by contemplating the multifarious images which rose up from inside him.’ And yet Anselmus still managed to win resonant Serpentina, even if only after a struggle against the run of bad luck which hindered him, against hostile powers which disguised themselves in this very bad luck and worse. In the blue palm-tree room of Archivarius Lindhorst, in a brilliant triad of bright crystal bells, Serpentina appears, and he becomes worthy of her. Anselmus reaches Atlantis where he moves with the daughter of the Prince of Light to a nobleman’s estate, after having occupied a smallholding there for such a long time, a smallholding in dreams, the property of his inner sense. That is Anselmus, student of the Germany that has perished; and alongside him stand, as is only right, all the other wishful natures of the literary fairytale and of the legend descended from Don Quixote’s line. Especially if they only belong to Quixote in their vivid imagination, but not in their active power. Sir Zendelwald in Keller’s legend ‘The Virgin as a Knight’ is the most dreamy character of this kind. Thus he lived in complete indecision, knew almost nothing of the things that went on outside him. Though he knew all the better the wishful ideas which he built up about the world and about women in his lonely castle. ‘When his mind and his heart were

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seized by something, which always happened completely and in a fiery way, Zendelwald could not bring himself to take the first step towards realizing it, since the matter seemed closed for him as soon as he was inwardly clear about it. Although he liked to converse, he never said a word at the right time which might have brought him good fortune. Not only were his thoughts in advance of his tongue but also of his hand, so that in combat he was often almost defeated by his enemies because he hesitated to deliver the final blow, already seeing his opponent lying at his feet in advance.’ Then news came to the dreamy knight which, although it arrived out of the hurly-burly of the real world, rather coincided with the object which filled his imagination just then. On one of his scanty journeys Zendelwald had in fact seen the countess Bertrade, a young, exceedingly beautiful and rich widow; he had been at her castle, had been deeply smitten, but had departed from her in silence. After Zendelwald had spent many months thinking of nothing else except the distant gentlewoman, a message came that the Emperor had announced a tourna¬ ment and that the countess wished to offer her hand to the outright victor, in the firm belief that the divine Virgin would intercede and direct the hand of the right man worthy of her to victory. The knight finally set out on the journey, but soon fell into his old image and thought patterns again, anticipating according to his wishes and working out his dreams. ‘Step by step the adventure now took place in his imagination and turned out for the best, in fact while he was riding through the summer-green landscape for days on end he was already holding sweet conversations with his beloved in which he was expressing in advance sentiments of most eloquent invention so that her countenance blushed with sweet pleasure, all this took place in his thoughts.’ Since rumination slows one down, however, the knight did not arrive until the tournament was already over, and all would have been in vain for him had the heavenly Virgin not filled the gap between wishful dreams and reality. Because she herself had fought in the tournament in the form of Sir Zendelwald, in fact: when the delayed dreamer to his great astonishment saw his own person as the victor and bridegroom next to the beautiful countess, when, stung with wild jealousy, he broke through the crowd to see his double and rival, at that moment his likeness vanished from Bertrade’s side, the countess turned to the real Zendelwald and continued the conversation without having in the least noticed the change of person. ‘Zendelwald alone did not know what was happening to him when Bertrade spoke the familiar words, to which he replied several times without thinking, with words that he had already

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spoken somewhere before; in fact, after some time he realized that his predecessor must have carried on exactly the same conversation which he had thought up in his imagination during the days of his journey. ’ So the knight and the countess were happy together; this happiness emerged from a peculiar dream and a peculiar fairytale and became real. Real in a fairytale way; the Virgin Mary, herself a dream of belief, helped a dreamer with extremely woolly, almost ruinous wishful thinking into the wonder¬ land. Though, of course, neither Anselmus nor feeble Sir Zendelwald emerged from their inwardness, not even where Legend the Fairy gave them ground.

‘Let us go to the meadows of the Ganges, there I know the loveliest place’ And yet this kind of morning is not only fed from inside. The glittering fragments which little Muck put in his pocket shone for him outside too, in the external field where they lay, most clearly. Long before the inward dimension streams with wishful images, they are stimulated by the fairytale features of nature, particularly by clouds. In them the lofty distance appears for the first time, a wonderful tower-topped foreign land, above our heads. Children think of white cumulus clouds as icy mountains, a Switzerland in the sky; there are castles there too, taller than those on the ground, as tall as castles should be. Longing is the surest Being for this youth anyway, and the departing evening red where the sun is going away intensifies it. The boy in the fairytale by Lagerlof,* ‘Little Nils’ Journey with the Wild Geese’, migrates with the birds along their shining and singing path, the path to the south where the heavenly castle stands on the earth, where the happy islands of Wak-Wak are at home in the sea. Since for most people their first image of the sea is also derived from the broad sky and drifts towards it; i.e. the cloud is not only castle or icy mountain for the fairytale glance, it is also an island in the sea of the sky or a ship, and the blue sky in which the cloud sails mirrors the ocean. After all, the distance over our heads, the sea of air with its clouds, is not even confined to earthly shores or a reflection of them. Thus all fairytales in which heavenly blue appears plunge it into vast waters above, and the voyage continues unimpeded to the coast which especially reaches into this Selma Lagerlof, 1858-1940, the Swedish writer.

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imagination: to the morning star. In all this, astral-mythic traces are still at work, right down to the fairytale of the stars that became thalers;* but they are as little necessary to fairytales, which migrate even further or higher than the birds, as the Christian heaven is. Even without all these elements, there are wondrous glimpses in them, and if they are wondrous they still bring out the brilliance of a singular soul quite cosmically, and everything in it is redolent of poetry. As in the fairytale tricks that in ‘Der Grime Heinrich’ Gottfried Keller has his Frau Margret play with the rainbow-light, just as if it were a messenger boy. Like another little Muck with the glitter of fragments and utopia in an ignorance which does not need to be ashamed if it contains more beautiful things than the dis¬ enchanted world, Frau Margret lives among the flotsam and jetsam of her junk and curiosity shop, lost things crowd round and make themselves heard, the daylight itself is illustrated with pictures from distant lands and pagan books: ‘Everything was important to her and alive; when the sun shone in a glass of water and through it on to a brightly polished table, the seven colours that played were for her a direct reflection of the splendours which were said to be in heaven itself. She said: “Can’t you see the lovely flowers and garlands, the green railings and the red silk scarves? these little golden bells and the silver fountains?” and every time the sun shone in the room, she made the experiment so that she could see into heaven a little, so she thought.’ It is the realist Keller who incorporated this childishness and described it; it nevertheless continues, in an innocent spirit, the urge towards the sun which fulfils everything living, and embroiders on this urge. If distance roars in the shell like the sea, it may also look like a harbour light in the prism, like Frau Margret’s weird wonder-light, and the fairytale has no objection. It is even possible that its dream draws, i.e. that it designs a formal map of its coasts. The external field in which it moves invites it to do this anyway, from which it gathers and absorbs familiarized imaginative images ordered in a fairytale way. Kipling, in the dream fairytale ‘The Brushwood Boy’, has his boy design precisely such a map, he travels on it. Hong Kong is an island here, in the middle of the ‘Ocean of Dreams’, and on its coast lies Merciful Town, ‘where the poor may lay their wrongs away,/And the sick may forget to weep’. In his dream the Brushwood Boy rides his Thirty-Mile-Ride with the girl he has imagined since childhood, he rides with his dreamed Brushwood Girl through the dunes and steppes, through the evening light of his wishful * A Grimm’s fairytale.

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geography, through ‘the valleys of wonder and unreason’. In fact even when confronted with the reality of the Far East, which the grown-up man later reaches as a colonial officer, the dream-land does not disappear; Hong Kong is a city and yet remains an island, the dream-map does not become invalid. ‘Policeman Day’ wakes him up regularly to a bad reality, but even so the dream-map does not fade in the real world. The wishful image of the hero mingles in this fairytale with mere night-dreams, but in such a way that he forces these to dress up his actual daydreams in sensual form, into the wishful land of India and the wishful princess who emerges from it. Neither does the beloved in Kipling’s fairytale ultimately only become the girl whom the lonely man imagines to himself, whom he bedecks with dream-jewellery and accommodates in mirage. The Brushwood Girl does also exist, very much so, has met her hero in her own identical wishful dream; so in the end the two dream-subjects do discover themselves for real and find in each other, in the real mysticism of love, their India again. A real India of a higher order, one to which the dreamed India was a promise and the cause, the imaginative substance, the unrefuted background. In fact it is, besides clouds, heavenly blue, rainbows, the Orient in general, far away around the banks of the Ganges, an itself fantastic external world, through which the contact of the fairytale is facilitated with what is available in the external field. There the Brushwood Boy is at home, there the jungle welcomes and opens the view of a foreign land which in the fairytale is just inland and homeland. South Seas, turquoise blue sky, bazaar dome, the mysterious house - all this oriental scenery yields with the greatest affinity to the fairytale wish, incorporates it. The reason for this is not at all simple: of course - most of the material for fairytales comes from the Orient, especially from India, and inclines to go back there, but also the nature of fairytale, precisely the cloud and evening castle made of sky, in fact even the German fairytale forest border on the Morning Land. It is not the already discussed rebelliousness in so many of Grimm’s fairytales that culminates there of course, but rather the wonderful aspect, the adventure and the landscape of the magical; these constitute the archetypal splendour of the Arabian Nights. This may also lie on the island of Hong Kong or in the imago of the Brushwood Girl herself, the wonder-woman: the most inward fairytale contains this element of outward place. In the Indian Ocean of Dreams, in the image which puts in from distant lands and itself sends us off on a voyage.

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South Seas in fair and circus Distant lands can put in even in a quite sensual way for a boy and be immediate. In colours and shapes, raw as meat, colourful as the little flag the Italian butchers stick into it. The booths at the fair likewise did not grow here, any more than the time and again dusted down, time and again freshly unveiled magic they bring with them. It seems as if it comes from extraordinary foreign parts, is no doubt vulgar and a complete swindle, but nevertheless of more substance than the irritation the bourgeois conformist feels about this time-honoured pleasure of youth and folk. Thus these ship-booths sail in, borne on the South Seas for the simple and innocently complicated spirit; the tent-ships tie up for a short time in the dusty towns. Are tattooed with pale-green or bloodthirsty-red pictures in which votive images for sea-rescue clash with harem. The generator drives the orchestrion with a foreign, fat, inhuman, breathless-lethargic sound, sometimes it is connected with a girl of wax dancing next to the entrance screwed to the floor. And with crazy contortions, which pass from screwed-down wax to dancing wax, she throws her head back from time to time, to stand trembling in just this position, right behind the crier who is himself afraid of nothing. The world, the one sold in this way, has the secrets of the bridal bed and also of the born deformity on one edge, the secrets of the bier on the other. ‘The lady will reveal her splendidly built torso, you will see the secrets of human sculpture’; but also: ‘At nine o’clock this evening, at the very hour at which she died, Professor Mystos will call an Egyptian mummy back to life’. Freakish people and their art put themselves on display, in pure side-chapels of abnormality. The sword-swallower and the fire-eater, the man with the untearable tongue and the iron skull, the snake-charmer and the living aquarium. Dusky Turks, pumpkin-men, giant women are there: ‘nature was so lavish with the substance of her body that at the time when she blossomed to her highest perfection she attained the mass of four hundred pounds’. And the extraordinary foreignness is repeatedly joined by that of the fairytale, even of the Gothic novel: oriental maze, jaws of hell, haunted castle. This is the fair, a colourfully rough fantasy, in Americanized cities it is increas¬ ingly infiltrated by loudspeakers, technologized fun-establishments, but the wishful land of medieval South Seas, so to speak, has remained. And is preserved, going back much further from the Middle Ages, all the more in the fair of a higher order, in the kind of show presented entirely without

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a curtain: the circenses. Since if the various wonders of the booths come under one roof, into a ring, and if the menagerie breaks out in it, then Colosseum develops out of the South Seas, or the circus. The waxwork cabinet aspect is missing of course, all semblance of death, every mechanical organ, because here in the circus everything is alive. And in contrast to the fair, which works with cloaking, with stage, showcase, curtain, the circus is completely open; the ring brings this with it. In fact it is the only honest, fundamentally honest performance that art knows; in front of spectators in a complete circle a wall can never be erected. Nevertheless estrangement does occur, the somersaults are the most extreme acts the human body performs, but it does perform them, jugglers appear, but there is no sleight of hand. Created as if by pure gypsies in the green caravan, older than the oldest reader can remember, perhaps even prehistoric, circus art is a kind of bourgeois uprightness in art and the model for it. It is the pub without back rooms, apart from cloakroom and stable, and that can be viewed during the interval, everything happens under bright lights in the ring, on the trapeze under the big-top, and is still magic, a separate wishful world of eccentricity and precise dexterity. The characters have changed little, the stern, comic and gymnastic characters, they are pre¬ arranged like the types of animals we get to see: the elephants, Hons, horses trotting round and round, the ringmaster with his whip and the equerry between the acts, the riding mistress, the tightrope-walkers and other aerial acrobats, half sylphs, half on the verge of death, the animal-tamers and the escapologists. But the clowns who appear in the intermission see to it that the circus is also folk entertainment without intermission. They range from the glittering and powdered ones of the Elizabethan age to the tramp with the bulbous red nose, black-and-white laughing mouth, to the crown of poverty, stupid Augustus. These are all figures from a Colosseum which has become friendly, and so they are most certainly second-half spectacles or pantomimes. The performance is introduced by the most beautiful music of its kind, by Fuiik’s March of the Gladiators, concluded with the march Per Aspera Ad Astra. The circus still represents today the most colourful mass spectacle or the image of the sensation; it is Arabian fantasia in the most brightened Roman arena. What booth and tent mirror is seldom mirrored again. Not really even surrealistically, although the fun can be fairly creepy, its face perverse. Even though the wax figure plunges us into terror, the glitter-clown hangs over into what is unknown. Only Meyrink fetched a separate fairytale, a separate colportage out of this world, jokey, affinitive, badly written,

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uncanny, all mixed together. Thus describing Mohammed Darashekoh’s oriental waxworks: ‘The generator at the entrance beat out its tempo and drove an instrument similar to an organ. A stumbling, breathless music was playing - with tones which, loud and muffled at the same time, had something peculiar about them, muted, as if they sounded underwater. Smell of wax and smouldering oil-lamps hung about the tent. The main act: Fatima, the pearl of the Orient, was over, and the spectators were milling here and there or looking through the peep-holes in the walls covered in red cloth into a roughly painted panorama which represented the storming of Delhi. Others stood silently around a glass coffin in which a Turco* lay dying, breathing heavily, his bared breast shot through by a cannonball - the edges of his wound gangrenous and bluish. When the wax-dummy opened its lead-coloured eyelids the creaking of the watchspring shook gently through the cabinet’. Contrived, but no less intense horror is contrived again here, in impression and towards it, but there is no lack of dream-lights consistent with fair and circus either. Meyrink’s ‘The Golem’ is fairytale-colportage of the fair, as is also his colportage ‘The Green Face’, sprinkled with the showmanship of the circus. ‘The Golem’ deals in its colportage with no more, but also no less than the secret of the booth which you cannot see by paying more. Here is the hum that comes in from the street, the moonshine at the end of the bed, a pale slab which looks like a slice of fat, the room without a door, somewhere in the city of Prague, with the Golem as its occupant, the ledge of stone on the window of the Golem’s room to which the guest clings and looks and looks and falls, because the stone is as smooth as a slice of fat. Even a beautiful Miriam is drifting around, a wax-dream of perfection, and her house stands in the morning light, inaccessible as the booth of the secrets of Greece for visitors under sixteen, as the sidereal life. The strange mixture of Jakob Bohme and jokiness jars which characterizes precisely this kind of literature, to the point of surrealism, but it is consistent with the ambivalent, two-headed, thoroughly allegorical genre. The pictures of Dali, sometimes even of Max Ernst move in a similar mixed atmosphere of fun and depth, indeed cosiness and horror; the model for all this is provided by the contemporary humorously animated and Medusanly staring wax-dummy. Meyrink, like the whole fairground magic of varying degrees, is a nonsense about which showman and author leave us in no doubt, but a longing inhabits it all, itself not nonsensical, although * A nineteenth-century native Algerian infantryman in the French Army, a Zouave.

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garish and deceivable, cheap and disordered. It is the longing for a formation of figures in the world consisting of perversities and oddities, for curiousness as an objective property. Both Dali and Meyrink are of course eclipsed, which is self-evident in this case, indeed they are trounced precisely in their base horror, which is not so self-evident, as soon as a great writer, who is nevertheless also expert at the droll-strange, bad-humorous and may be in league with it, takes on the metaphysical affront. The writer is Gottfried Keller, and his ‘Dreambook’ of 1848 reports the following on the subject under discussion that can never quite be discussed: ‘I entered a waxworks; the company of the potentate looked very slovenly and neglected, there was a terrible loneliness and I hurried through the place into a closed room where an anatomical collection was on view. Here almost all parts of the human body were to be found, artificially reproduced in wax, most in diseased, terrible states, a highly remarkable general meeting of human states which seemed to be debating an address to their creator. A substantial part of the worshipful company consisted of a long row of glass jars which contained the progressive stages of human growth from the smallest embryo to the fully-formed foetus. These were not made of wax, but natural tissue and were suspended in alcohol in very profound postures. This reflectiveness was all the more conspicuous since the boys actually represented hopeful youth in the meeting. But suddenly in the tightrope-walkers’ hut next door, which was only separated by a thin wooden wall, loud music started up with drumming and cymbals, someone stepped on the tightrope, the wall trembled, and the silent attentiveness of the little people was gone, they began to quiver and to dance to the beat of the wild polka which was pounding through the wall: anarchy entered, and I do not think that the address was ever delivered.’ Thus far the young Keller, and again the humour is noticeable, together with that kind of mocking depth which makes use of the wit in a doubly droll way here. Ancient folk-pleasure, in no way simple, but also in no way decadent, is preserved in the fair, travels with it. A bit of frontier-land is there, at a very reduced price of admission, but with preserved meanings, with curiously utopian meanings, conserved in brutal show, in vulgar enigmaticness. It is a world which has been too little investigated in terms of its specific wishful regions. Precisely ‘curiosities’, as these things were ultimately called in the Baroque period, hold themselves above water here, above land.

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The wild fairytale: as colportage Even in the fairytale not everything immediately runs smoothly. There are giants and witches, they block off, make us spin all night, lead us astray. And there is, against the all too smooth or hurried sky-blue, a kind of fairytale which is seldom regarded as such, a wild, as it were sweeping kind. In general it has been little regarded, not only because it easily descends into trash, but because the ruling class does not like tattooed Hansel and Gretels. The sweeping fairytale is the adventure story, it best lives on today as colportage. On its face there is the expression of an admittedly unrefined creature, and it is often so. But colportage con¬ sistently manifests features of fairytale; because its hero does not wait, as in the magazine story, for happiness to fall into his lap, he does not bend down to pick it up either like a bag thrown to him. Rather, its hero remains related to the poor thickskin* of the folk-tale, the bold boy who sets corpses on fire, who takes the devil for a ride. There is a courage about the hero of colportage which, usually like its reader, has nothing to lose. And an approved chunk of bourgeois ne’er-do-well pushes forward, absconded and burned out, but still alive; when he returns, an atmosphere of palms, knives, the teeming cities of Asia clings to him. The dream of colportage is: never again the everyday; and at the end stands: happiness, love, victory. The splendour towards which the adventure story moves is not attained as it is in the magazine story by wealthy marriage and the like, but by actively sailing out into the Orient of the dream. If the magazine story has something of an unspeakably dilapidated legend about it, then colportage is the last, but still recognizable gleam from the romance of chivalry, from Amadis of Gaul. Hence the vaingloriousness which is already familiar from the oldest epic poems, such as the Walthariliedt where the hero overcomes ten knights at once, or from the saga of King Rother and Asprian the Strong who flings a lion against the wall so hard that it smashes to pieces. But hence also the pathos against the philistines, against a life whose epitaph is already written at twenty, against corner by the fire and juste milieu. A true fairytale aura of a wild kind is created; the

* Bloch is referring back to ‘The Boy Who Went Out to Learn What Fear Was’, collected in Grimm. t Written by Ekkehard I of St Gallen around 925, concerning the flight of Walther of Aqui¬ taine and his beloved Hildegunde from the court of Attila.

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aura of the Stevenson world of ‘Storm and adventure, heat and cold... schooners, islands, and maroons, and Buccaneers and buried Gold’. And the whole group, particularly where it gets by without making excuses for itself as it were, i.e. without literary refinement, time and again has a foul stench. It is ambivalent, can point to Ku Kluxers and fascists, even be a special stimulant for them; but the foul stench also in fact points to the cosy bourgeoisie’s justified mistrust of too much of the poor devil and his campfire. Every adventure story breaks the moral commandment ‘Pray and work’; instead of the first cursing prevails, instead of the second the pirateship appears, the rifleman not in the King’s pay. The romanticism of the robber thus shows a different face, one which has appealed to poor folk for centuries, and colportage knows all about it. The brigand was the man who had fallen out with authority, often he had a common enemy with the people and frequently had bases among the peasantry as well. Not without reason therefore, Italian, Serbian, and above all Russian folktraditions tell of robbers with a different slant to that of the police-reports; Schiller’s robbers-play - with the motto: In tyrannos! - is only so to speak the classical manifestation in a literature in w'hich the figures of brigand and Brutus could be exchanged. Here there is immature, but honest substitute for revolution, and where else did it express itself but in colportage? Had Schiller, its authentic genius, only remained more loyal to it, this genre would definitely have become a different one to that of the debased romance of chivalry and of treasure-hunter stories. Ku Klux Klan and fascism simply turn into life the criminal abbreviation and the wilderness of the colportage. Whereas the uncommon goal in the wilderness: imprison¬ ment and liberation, stunning the dragon, rescuing the damsel, cleverness, breakthrough, revenge - all these pieces belong to freedom and to the brilliant light behind it. Not Fascism, but the revolutionary act in its Romantic age is this kind of chap-book come to life. Hence, besides Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’, rescue-plays, we could even say: rescue-fairytales appeared immediately before and after 1789; they dug round for prisoners as if they were digging for treasures in a cave. And significantly: the libretto for ‘Fidelio’, the trumpet signal itself would not have been nor have been the way they were without the colportage which they represent. The Fidelio-plot itself is sharpest, explosive colportage, as we know, and it belongs to liberation. Deep dungeon, pistol, signal, rescue: things which in elevated literature of the modern kind never appear, or never in their original form, create suspense in one of its most powerfully available forms: that of night to the light. Consequently the need for re-evaluation of this

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genre, by virtue of the highly legitimate wishful image in its mirror, is especially evident. At all points here lost meanings are fresh, awaiting meanings which have not been lost, as in the fairytale. A happy outcome is secured, no trace remains of the dragon, except in chains, the treasurehunter finds his dream-money, the couple are united. Fairytales and colportage are castle in the air par excellence, but one in good air and, as far as it can be true at all of mere wishing-work: the castle in the air is right. It comes in the end from the Golden Age and wants to be in one again, in happiness which penetrates from the night to the light. Ultimately, in such a way that laughter deserts the bourgeois and disbelief in the power of the poor deserts the giant, who today is called the Big Bank.

LURE OF TRAVEL,

28

ANTIQUITY, HAPPINESS OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL

Stuck here in Berlin’s close atmosphere Come July we start to feel quite blank, What I would give to be a courier With the Dresden Bank. O to hear dark pleasure’s organ rousing, When abroad the heart begins to stray For with three times a hundred thousand You can go a decent way. Hail the boy released from daily rota Who conceives this dream spectacular, Like a man who reads his wanted poster Dining in a distant spa. Sad, I brush away my silent tear, Quash the rotten urge to quit the ranks Looking at the poor investors here At the Dresden Bank.

Peter Scher

When I now saw the towers from a long way off and the blue smoke of Nuremberg, I almost thought I was looking not at a single city but at a whole world. Johann Butzhach’s Little Book of Wandering

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The same things every day slowly kill us off. To crave anew, the pleasure of travel helps us to do this. It not merely freshens up expectation before the journey starts, but does this in the midst of the enjoyment of seeing. Wishes which nothing can be done about any more, superannuated wishes which have become spinsterish, drop away. The stagnant element drops away which may characterize not only everyday life that always remains the same, but also wishes carried around for all too long. Wishful dreams can after all have passed out of the time appropriate to them, in such a way that they can never again be fulfilled. Someone who wished for a Kodak in his youth and never got one will never again find the Kodak of his wishes, even if as a man he is in a position to buy the very best. Such things were not accorded to the desire at the time or in the circum¬ stances when they would have given the most extreme pleasure. The hunger for them has gone grey, in fact almost every goal can become tedious if it is launched towards for too long, too hopelessly or even in too habitual a way. Whereas new wares create new needs, and in particular new impressions.

Beautiful foreign lands Every journey must be voluntary if it is to give pleasure. For this it needs a situation which is gladly, at least not reluctantly left. The first feeling in the car or the train, when it finally departs, is crucial for what is coming. If travel is enforced or on business, i.e. not a happy breaking off from something, then it is not travel. If it is undertaken out of boredom, because nothing else occurs to us, then boredom travels with us. It is the baggage and the fate which is dragged over the rails with us in the steel crate. The train is then deprived of the enjoyable quality which so seldom appears elsewhere: of travelling exactly in the direction in which we want to go. Commercial travellers, sailors, emigrants are not on a journey either, the latter even despite their possible liberation. In all these cases, travel is enforced or on business, spell in the latter, banishment in the former. Is an endlessly moving band, as in the elevator and factory, not a band of blue which the spring causes to flutter through the air again. In any case, the happiness of travel is and remains temporary escape from home without subsequent demand, it is a drastic change without external compulsion to make it. The traveller of the capitalist age must also be able to be a consumer, not a suitor, otherwise he loses the world of attractive strangers,

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among whom he has nothing to do, among whom he has no habit. Of course it remains true: nothing is as exotic in a foreign country as the foreigner himself; but the latter as bourgeois enthusiast at first does not see the everyday life of foreign countries at all, least of all does he want to see the misery in it which does not cash the cheque for him made out in the name of beauty; he sees in foreign countries, often with incurable subjectivism, the personal wishful image of them he has brought with him. And this of course is usually exotic enough either for disappointment to follow, because Italy does not consist of paper lanterns for example, or, if it has not fudged the matter itself but exceeded it, for the old wishful image to remain stationary alongside that of the experience already gained, uneducated but partly also undisappointed. Because the wishful image remains uneducated, it does not penetrate properly into what soberly exists; the average traveller, in any case isolated by hotel, guide-book, taxi-rides, in fact perceives the poverty even less than at home. On the other hand, however, the same bourgeois is in a position, thanks to his own defamiliar¬ ization which he passes on to the objects, not to experience any of the deadening effect of everyday life and possibly to see meanings in the objects which in everyday life only a competent painter would discover. Defamiliar¬ ization is here the exact opposite to alienation; within the bourgeois-private world, travel is the May which makes everything new, the only one. And the refreshing defamiliarization is supported by another paradox of travel, by one which now not only befalls the bourgeois enthusiast, but which is also materially connected with the apparently unfurling juxtaposition of space. A kind of subjective temporalization of space, subjective spatialization of time arises out of this, especially when the scenery changes quickly. Travel time is filled in a way in which usually only space is filled, and space becomes the medium of change which usually only time is. So a reversal of the usual orders of perception arises, filled time arises in space which appears mobile, changed. The old adventure stories completely unrolled space in this way, disturbed its mythic rigidity; every journey still lives, itself mutatis mutandis, from the paradox of this changing dream. This above all in youth, and especially in youth as a couple. If love is itself a journey, into entirely new life, then the value of foreign lands, experienced together, is doubled by it. Just as the loved-one already makes the street where she lives enchanting, together with the smallest conspicuous features of her part of town, the windows, lampposts, trees, so this magic passes over all the more into the things which the lovers’ journey gets to see. Freshly poured love in its first frothing foam carries us away in

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any case, and erotic transformation also seeks transformation of the outside world. Our own surprises are combined with those of the unknown land, of the foreign-beautiful city; then light falls even in the dullest minds, and the lively ones become full of figure. Wanderer, path and goal become as one in the journey of love; which is also why, when they are apart, nothing beautiful appears to the boy and girl in love which they do not wish the other could see at the same time, so that it could be seen together. Even the bourgeois honeymoon copies this, even if it has made a part of the dowry out of it. Eroticism makes the world vivid and everywhere into Cythera; for eroticism everything beautiful becomes a flight of wishful dreams, of elopements and revelations. The Indian book of love, the Kamasutra, thus advises with great refinement that the loved one should be shown beautiful objects after making love, and sublime, especially unusual ones, be they works of art or constellations. For most people their first true journey of love remains the richest in dreams, the memory which is most youthfully, therefore most powerfully surrounded by utopia. The foreign setting seals all earlier wishes for distance; defamiliarization in beauty is the evening and the night of the city of love, lives during the day. And just as travel is related to eroticism, so too in a different type of combination to the activities of the Muse. It may not be accidental that the happily transformed stay commits us to the wish that significant things be achieved in this uncommon place. Nothing has a stronger effect on such plans and hopes than an environment which is removed from the habitual diffusion, a vivid environment which itself seems pre-formed. At the rough table in the loggia of this country-house, the wine in front of us, under sturdy old arches through which the Roman sky peeps - here work seems to succeed. Especially if objects of great nature, of great history gaze into the flow of the sentences, then it appears as if they are reflected in them, as if Vesuvius or Monreale were imparting themselves to them. This is a fine superstition, and it has achieved unusual things which justify belief. Out of this differently erotic, productive pathos of travel Shelley wrote his ‘Prometheus Unbound’ in the bushes on the Palatine Hill;* in the preface he stresses that he wants to feel under obligation to a majestic past, Shelley writes in the preface: ‘This poem was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.’

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he wants to vindicate himself before it. Even contrast can have this effect: Ibsen’s ‘Nora’, which was written in a Norman watchtower near Amalfi, or especially Goethe’s Witches’ Kitchen scene,* * * § composed in the garden of the Villa Borghese: in both the author and the work, from the contrast between the place of composition and the place and tenor of the action flourished seclusion and counterlandscape which had never before appeared in such a complementary way.‘As one goes further north, witches and soot increase’:! but the witches’ smoke which can be formulated in fact in¬ creased under pines, in the clarity of the Pincio; J even the Walpurgisnacht§ was conceived in the South. Nothing homely altered or created blurred edges between the work and the diffuse everyday. The defamiliarization which makes every significant object doubly enhanced, like a mountain peak above clouds, possibly exposes, with or without complementary effect, the greatness of the work itself. These are the effects of travelling defamiliarization on hope; with Eros in both forms, that of love and that of creation. And in the end, with such frequent sudden change, as far as defamiliarization is concerned: one of the innovations of the journey may even be that it also defamiliarizes the habitual at home. The emotion thus created is called homesickness; it is correspondingly an emotion of longing which is as aroused by distance as it is changed. After all, homesickness is not only stimulated by the displeasure which the non¬ availability of habitual objects evokes, but besides the homesickness created by loss of the habitual world of sensory perception there is the productive kind which makes the abandoned, long since dully experienced environment itself colourful, in fact utopian, and finds new sides to it. Then homesickness is carried by a wishful image just like the foreign lands before the beginning of the journey and in it. And it is carried by the same, often unjustly, but often also justly gilded memory which afterwards completes the course of the journey itself and characterizes the utopian lands in the exotic dimension. With the difference, of course, that the gilding of homesickness disappears upon our return, whereas the image of travel becomes even more exotic post festum, even attains a transformation which connects up with or is capable of connecting up with the good wishful land of art and other elopements. Anyone who travels across the sea, Horace says, * A scene from Goethe’s ‘Faust’, t ‘Faust’, Part I, Paralipomena 38. I Pincio: the northern hill of Rome (mons Pincius) where Lucullus and Sallust had their great gardens. § A further scene from Goethe’s ‘Faust’.

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only changes the clime, not himself. But at least he changes the clime: in the simple case this is a rearrangement of the scenery, in more significant cases there grows out of the changed content of consciousness a changed situation of consciousness which wishes to be commensurate with the content. Further, the lure of travel certainly relates to a beauty which is for the most part merely subjective, that is to a beauty which is coated with defamiliarization from the perspective of the mere viewer and from the mere wishful image of the highly intensified matter. In a foreign country nobody is exotic but the foreigner himself, but neither is the foreign country in any way defamiliarized from itself in a beautiful way, and the native inhabitant has, apart from his own need which the mere travelling enthusiast does not see, the wish to travel to foreign lands himself. Possibly to those from where the travelling enthusiast himself comes; all this out of the same subject-wish existing on both sides for alienation. So we can see how much subjectivity there is in every travel experience as such from the outset, and how difficult this can ultimately make it to advance to that changed situation of consciousness which not only seeks to do justice to the content perceived, but is able to do justice to it. Even Goethe’s ‘Italian Journey’, such a splendidly and objectively directed journey, by virtue of the fact that as much as possible it seeks to perceive only proClassicism, anti-Baroque, manages to reach from this subjectivity only half of real Italy. But the journey pursues a wishful image of beautiful otherness at least on this distant point, and one which in a foreign country, with its freshly perceived wonders, is nevertheless often embodied in reality. Which is in fact also why post festum the travel-image may remain so closely related to art, indeed to another transformation as well, namely the gathering transformation towards a final journey. The often reported procession of memories at the hour of death, or even possibly in old age, therefore not only has people, figures, objects on its concentrated route which were as it were foretold at the hour of our birth or sung in our own house, but especially travel-images - even embellished again post festum with utopian festiveness. And this last spice was perhaps already at work in the first sight of uncommon objects, burning and concealing, or conversely intensifying the real taste of the matter. The best thing not only about history but also about geography is thus that it arouses enthusiasm; though of a kind which meets and sets out for all the more intense insight into the objects - which do not only contrast to the habitual - in their proper place.

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Distance-wish and historicizing room in the nineteenth century A story from the tenth century? - ‘Who rides so late through night and wind?’* Scheffel, Preface to ‘Ekkehard’

Since the journey has become comfortable, it does not take us so far any more. It takes more homely habitual material with it and penetrates into the custom of the land even less than before. The walk, the ride, the never avoidable adventure were replaced by transport in the nineteenth century, a railway network - compared with today’s airlines - built up with amazing speed. Little has been as canalized as travel; two world wars served to disrupt this useful progress. The nineteenth century had nevertheless managed to get the express train to roar past a place undisturbed where according to old travel-guides there had previously been a den of robbers, and the dangerous life at home had not yet really blossomed. Instead, however, precisely beautiful foreign lands were falsified into a petitbourgeois holiday binge. The so-called tour operators emerged, as a means of cheaply carrying out not only the journey but also the previous wishful images turned towards it. So-called sightseeing began, and the sights stood inside a world set up ready for the tour, an arranged-Italian, arrangedoriental world. In 1864 the former railway official Louis Stangen organized the first of his group tours which subsequently became so popular; they revealed to moderate distant yearning not only its Italy, but also its Near East. Sorrento was greeted, the shimmering bloom of the waves, even the blue Adriatic, the island pearl of Corfu, Cairo, the gateway to the East, and the gigantic pyramids. Fully guaranteed, tips inclusive, everything like clockwork, guides thrown in, for a lump sum with no surcharge. But even the tourism which was not spoonfed had been growing since the middle of the century in a more and more rationalized way with the increased affluence of the middle class; the world was catalogued so that it could be seen in a week, in a fortnight, in four to six weeks. Only alpinism still provided, in places, space for untroddenness, even for specific distance-, that is peak-wishes. Likewise the reading interest of the public persisted, in fact increased in the last remaining journeys of discovery, in those into darkest Africa and in the North Pole expeditions; Nansen’s book * The first line of Goethe’s celebrated poem ‘Erlkonig’, written in 1782.

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‘Farthest North’, with its highly Arctic photographs and colour plates: Northern Lights Corona, Northern Lights Baldachin, still gave a hint of unsold nature to the widest circles. Of course the normal traveller also sought unsold nature where he took his whole homely comfort-cell (livingroom) with him, and where the same Coca-Cola world which encouraged tourism increasingly cancelled out the dreamed otherness, even fairytale distance of places to visit. Above all, however, on the basis of all this organization: tourism acquired, by making sea-voyages, washing against the Near East or at least distributing the images ‘On a flight across the world’ at home, increasing propagandistic significance for the home-based wishes for world markets, wishes for world power. For the imperialist age promoted and surrounded the travel agencies continuously; at the same time, however, it most definitely deformed the foreign world. The latter was at best pushed back into areas off the beaten capitalist track, but mainly it became an immobile foreign article, until it became a different, colonial one; - everything declines, with the exception of the West,* from this standpoint this is a valid proposition. The preoccupation with folk life, the expedition into what is not posed, this concrete perception of real curiosities is long since gone. Goethe’s ‘Italian Journey’, even Viktor Hehn’s Italy book showed this objectivity, above all also as far as experienced folklore is concerned. The otherwise so precise Baedeker no longer shows folklore, or only slanders it when it does not fit into the standardized window with a view. And the dream of distance was most definitely only preserved at the cost of wishes for contrast flooding over the exotic, though admittedly also making the immobile foreign article into an article again, into one which simply bears the brand-name: Not-Home. As if foreign countries were solely the opposite of Krefeld or even Minneapolis or even Liverpool, as if they did not bring their own significances with them, those which are only comparable with themselves. Thus now to the mere wish for contrast peculiar things like Southern Italian Church Festivals, for example, or the still preserved caravans, camel-markets and bazaars of the Orient do not, as might be expected, stand in a disparate relationship with the home-based world, neither do these Middle Ages at the gates of Europe open up, as might be expected, features of its own past Middle Ages, but on the contrary: an exact counterpart to the homeland of the visitor was

Bloch is alluding here to the title of Spengler’s work ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes’, ‘The Decline of the West’, a book which celebrated the primitive and in which much of Nazi ideology was prefigured. It first appeared in 1918.

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sought after, a contrast which after all has nothing whatsoever to do with what is being visited. Such wishes for contrast are of course older than the nineteenth century, though not much older than the eighteenth. In Winckelmann they acted as a guide in the search for noble simplicity, silent greatness, they were at work in Goethe, in so far as he did not pass judgement on the Italian people and landscape, but on specific Italian works of art, and made him blind, now he had had enough of German ‘tobaccopipe columns’, to the extremely prevalent, extremely predominant Baroque in Italy. Delacroix sought contrast in a different way in his Algerian and Moroccan pictures, this time in a Romantic way. The glow of his predators, harem concubines, desert scenes (‘ferocite et verve’) is not only Africa, but anti-Louis Philippe, anti-Citizen Kingdom. Out of pure anti-classicism, Delacroix had even preached that true antiquity was to be found among the Arabs. But from these earlier wishes for contrast those of the later nineteenth century are not merely distinguished by the sunken level of those who bore them, but above all also by that of the world which they sought to contrast with, even if in a negative way. Because Venice now simply had to provide the opposite to what Krefeld provided or to what was Liverpool-like, it could easily appear itself as an overdone non-Liverpool; in which the real Venice is in fact completely uninvolved. And the socalled Italian night is something quite different from the opposite of a Northern European industrial day; unless the night is posed for foreigners. But only in this way did the never-heard-of, never-seen appear which going abroad was supposed to present subjectively, even objectively. A blissful dream of flight and distance, of contrast-images in the midst of canalized decorativeness created its travel souvenirs, and Sphinx-like mystery, which lies around everywhere, waited on better times. For the wonders of beautiful foreign lands reveal themselves only without transferred masked ball, only with the significant object, perhaps even full of premonition, in its own juice, in its proper place. Not least, after 1850 the four walls of home were themselves supposed to be made unrecognizable. This too with ornament fetched from afar, of a kind that their own arid time did not supply. People turned away from everything white, everything unshrouded, just as if they had become aware of a corpse in it. It mattered a perfidious great deal to the high capitalist century that every one of the things it prided itself on was masked. The Biedermeier period still loved to have its walls unwhitewashed or walls in simple green, its furniture was so honest-clear, bright-beautiful like little else before. Gathered net-curtain let the light in doubly white,

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it fell on the glass cabinet and the cherrywood cupboard, on the plain round table with slim legs or supported by a well-proportioned column, on modest-rich lyre-chairs, on the soft-mighty settee. And even if they called this whole atmosphere neo-Grecian at that time, it was nevertheless completely at home with itself, was always more Being than Appearing. With a fine scent of fairytale, punch, of the art of E. T. A. Hoffmann so closely related to these rooms. Then this stopped all of a sudden around the middle of the century, reproduced distance-magic, machined bulls’eye panes began. A bourgeoisie that was becoming rich lay down in the bed of nobility, dreamed there after past styles, old-German, French, Italian, oriental, pure souvenir. A constantly astonishing desire emerged to transform even No-Being into Appearing, to have their everyday apartment sailing under different colours. Travel-substitute, indeed outdoing travel between their own four walls became the password, partly a historical, partly an exotic one. From here came the obsession with material-draping in the Griinderjahre,* the collection of bric-a-brac, nouveau riche swanky style, velvet and satin all mixed together. From here came the sideboards in the form of knight’s castles, the halberds and the harem sumptuousness, the mosque-lamps and the bullhorns - a quite mysterious montage. And it lay in dim light falling through many layers of material draped at the windows, through the most pseudo-oriental curtains possible to keep the street at bay, to protect the masquerade of the ensemble. And in this ensemble there chimed the salon-pieces of the young ladies, those orna¬ mented with little bows, little trumpets, amoretti, all the false Rococo of the ‘Cascades’, ‘Carillons’ and ‘Papillons’, of the ‘Pensees fugitives’ and ‘Cloches du monastere’, not forgetting the ‘Souvenirs de Varsovie’. Furthermore, right into the room, they liked to hang a polished pole with a giant kilim,| as if this were a mast and sail and the room were cruising in Arabian fashion on the sea of the world or lay in the harbour in front of an Indian city. Next to it the spinning wheel was not forgotten and the souvenir from Venice: the mother-of-pearl gondola in front of a skyhigh Murano mirror. J However, for all this wishful mask as decor (executed in all sorts of price-ranges, as goes without saying) the studio of the Viennese painter Makart§ ultimately provided the model: this was the original of The period of industrial expansion after 1871 in Germany. Also the style of architecture of that period, t An Eastern carpet, t Of Venetian glass. § Hans Makart, 1840-84, the Austrian painter.

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historical-exotic disguise. Every commercial councillor, advised by decorators, received the stimulus from here for homely foreign life, right down to the easel in the comer with the just completed oil-painting. To depict the glossutopia of the nouveau riche which had never existed like this before, we would have to dip our brush into Makart ourselves where he is thickest. ‘The studio in Gufihausgasse’, wrote a contemporary of Makart’s in 1886, ‘acquired through the profligate splendour and love of art of its master more and more the character of an artistically arranged museum which provided Makart’s imagination with an apparatus of props and models for convenient use, in which his own existence and the brilliant conviviality with which he surrounded himself transformed itself for him into a work of art shimmering with colour.’ Shimmering with colour, Titian, Venice and above all of course Orient, this was the dream- and flight-password for this so deeply bourgeois-conformist, bored and pessimistic age, for the covering age, decoration age, mask age par excellence. Disguise no less governed the his¬ torical novel, old-German in Scheffel (Ekkehard), Romano-Germanic in Felix Dahn (A Struggle for Rome), Egyptian in Georg Ebers (Uarda, Semiramis); all in the light of the bulls’-eye pane, even on the Tiber and the Nile. And this historical defamiliarization was necessary, because the exotic apartment was not entirely sufficient to fulfil the swanky dream of knight’s castle, and because the shopping streets outside could certainly not be furnished with spinning wheels. Despite the trouble which even external architecture, if we can call it such, took with its costumes, with its Romanesque stations and Gothic post-offices, with Indian bandstands and Moorish monkey-houses. And since the raw mechanism of this age could still not be covered up by all this, it then also bought, so that it would likewise be decorated with a gigantic apartment decor as it were, a travel-souvenir of an enormous kind: nature. The connoisseur of the nineteenth century saw in this the repro¬ duction of an inherently dreary, but well-draped mechanical-materialist prospect, a kind of imitation panorama of energy and material. These last two remained of course, as Ludwig Buchner* said, ‘the raw materials out of which the whole universe builds itself with its wonders and beauties’, whereas for holidays, which did not want to be deprived of their beauty, nature became the luxury edition. Here, even the most enlightened person used the words ‘goddess’ and ‘temple’; this sort of thing shone like a diorama of firnf or

* Ludwig Buchner, 1824-99, German physician, philosopher and popularizer of science, wrote the influential ‘Kraft und Stoff’ (Force and Matter), 1855. t Last year’s snow.

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Alpine glow in the homely window. ‘The goddess of truth lives in the temple of nature’, says Hackel’s ‘World-riddle’, which so coloured and ennobled material and energy, ‘she lives in the green forest, on the blue sea, on the snow-covered mountain-tops.’ In fact to the same extent that the world of Makart diminished around the turn of the century towards Bocklin, and in a different way towards Klinger, the overcrowded apartment became more classical again so to speak, and the Orient was exchanged for pure Mediterranean, though without the drapery disappearing. The room only put on the white-gold mask as it were; the gaslight was joined by Casar Flaischlen’s ‘Sun in the Heart’, Carl Larsson’s ‘House in the Sun’ joined the architecture of the historical novel, in 1895, as a kind of cosmically, but no longer Bengal-lit form of life. This now resulted in an art nouveau eroticism next to that of the painted markets of female slaves in Cairo, a ‘halcyon’ eroticism next to that of the palm-tree in the drawing-room and the German Renaissance in Turkish. The specific dream-layer that was present only in the nineteenth century, in which the overcrowded kitsch and all the oddities mentioned above stood, decorating in a historicalexotic-utopian way, now stocked itself with more brightly conjured visions but conjured visions nonetheless. A harem heaven had stood over almost all interior decor in the nineteenth century, now it becomes oriental Cyprus in one’s own home, in one’s own nature-temple exchanged for a secessionistancient one - and yet it remains Cyprus as a genre-piece, as exoticism of the century of illusion. This not least in the prospect which the Hackelian Wilhelm Bolsche painted of the nature temple like a drapery ‘of noble nakedness’: ‘Bright future world of a better Hellenism cleared of its dross; where decency and nakedness, pure consecration of art and hot scent of the spring of love can camp together on the common flowery meadow, without disturbing each other, while the white temple with its sacred curtain before the deepest mysteries of life and thought silently towered above them into the heavenly blue...When will we reach your Isle of the Blest from the deep shadowy valley of our aberrations?’ As is evident, here too the curtain is not missing, a kind of antique portiere which is happily imagined in front of the entrance to the temple, like tantalizing underwear on a lover or even like the hanging kilim in the earlier drawing¬ room, only not thought of as a sail. Such ancient temples with curtains in flowery meadows did not exist, they are equally dreamed contrastimages from travel pictures. They were to be found, more white oil-paint than marble, at exhibitions of that time, their prototype appears as a toy, sometimes in castle gardens of the late Rococo, even in classicistic

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engravings. In all these cases, even around the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful foreign lands still have a decorative effect, namely as the special kind of arranged, posed utopia. Above all, on the room- and picture-world of the Griinderzeit lay the real curse of the reproduction (produced by factories), the false blessing of a plush exoticism, of an arcade as apartment, of a panorama as decor. There is no gainsaying the rich, Corinthian column, but it especially must be the most genuine of all; for its place is not the swankiness of the petit-bourgeois nouveau riche, not blocked lack of imagination, but its surplus.

Aura of antique furniture, magic of ruins, museum Collecting is a particularly complicated way of departing, has always been so. It draws together, keeps everything with it, borders on acquisitiveness and greed, to this extent it remains quite narrowly at home. On the other hand, it looks for its material in as wide a field as possible, roams high and low in search of old equipment, thinks nothing of ruining the person obsessed with it, to this extent it is sufficiently extrovert. That is contra¬ dictory, but united in the wish to surround itself with what is rare, to have temporally or spatially distant things as a capsule, as it were. Everything can be collected: buttons, wine-labels, butterflies, very often stamps. Amongst the rest, the collecting of antique objects, of no longer available or exotic art is only the most noble form of hunting. The obsession with perfection is also to be found in the stamp-collector, as much as it is in the collector of porcelain; the wish to have a set, and that to have a service complete is the same. And rarity determines the price in the former as well as the latter, whether it is a matter of a variation in perforation or of a Baroque commode which curves at the sides too, costing half as much again as one that only curves at the front, around the drawers. With all collector’s items the work of the dealer, as a finder of rarities, is productive (one of the few productive kinds in the business of distribution); with all of them the competition of the collectors regulates the price. Despite this, art-collecting is essentially different from the other kinds, because in this field what is rare is at the same time the unreproducible, the irretrievable. Whereas stamps and similar things are more or less the same today as they were a hundred years ago, old furniture, velvet, porcelain are characterized by a lost quality, a vanished handiwork, a sunken culture; and this qualifies them as rare. In contrast to the monotonous, increasingly

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more monotonous machine-made goods, an unstandardized wealth opens up in the land of antiques, one which never ceases to be a fresh source of amazement. The simplest faience plates are already different if the places where they were made were five hours walk apart. No one oriental carpet, with the exception of Bukhara and Afghan, is like another; there are as many differences between a Frankfurt and a Danzig cabinet, although they are both Baroque, as between a yard-gate and the portal of a castle. All this is separated by locality, commission, convention, but everything is unrepeatably united in solid handiwork, specially made piece by piece, and everything was linked by a closed, slowly developed culture. Today’s collecting of antiquities thus means a turning away from manufactured goods, a turning towards an image of the house that has become irretriev¬ able, that was both the most cosy and the most imaginative. Neither is this collector-Eros weakened by the undeniable origins of its present form in the previous century, more precisely: in its decorative rooms. It is not weakened because pleasure in antiques would rather relate to anything other than swankily dressed-up reproductions and so-called period furniture. Even fake antiques are seldom adapted to the needs and decorative wishes of a nouveau riche swankiness. All genuine ones, however, are witnesses of a formal certainty destroyed by capitalism, surviving flotsam from a lost beauty. The embarkation for the land of antiques has nothing what¬ soever to do with romantic-reactionary anti-capitalism, but rather with the realization that late capitalism was the deadly enemy of art, particularly of that in household fittings. As a formerly beautifully wrought ensemble, these continue to form their delightful ensemble, stemming from the same ground, from the same imaginative fertility. All these good pieces complement each other too, join on to each other, even though still in a mixture, as, to take examples from architecture, from Wurzburg, from Worms, a side-portal of pure Rococo joined on seamlessly to a Romanesque cathedral. It of course remains true that the wish to depart also underlies the collection of genuine old things. This combines to some extent with the rotten distance-magic of previous times, this was unknown to the really genuine inhabitant of a really genuine environment. But he did know the wish which today still forms an important part of the antiquarian sojourn: the wish to be present in several old periods, distant lands. It is the wish of the Chief Justice in Andersen’s ‘Lucky Galoshes’ to get to Gothic Copenhagen; the many tales of magic which transport the adept to ancient Troy or to the distant Ganges are of a similar kind. What a dream to

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be able to pass a day, only an hour in the porcelain century, let alone in ancient Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Memphis, Babylon. To be able to walk in the flesh through the old streets and houses, on a journey backwards in time, against death, behind our own birth. The visitor finds a reflection of this unnatural wishful image, braced against the course of things, in Pompeii. And there is certainly a bit of Pompeii in every old wine-jug, alive in the sound of the Baroque cabinet door slamming in the mighty lock, in the remote gleam of the pewter plate. This backward journey with wishes is at its wildest, is most full of jumbled reflections in every good overcrowded antique shop. Balzac describes quite unforgettably a wishful series or mirror-montage presented in this way in ‘The wild ass’s skin’. Here a young poet enters the storehouse, ‘intoxicated with life and perhaps already by death’, and as such a voyeur he grasps the cross-section montage, experiences the jumbled spell of the sojourn in the past, in distance, in the hall of mirrors. ‘He had to see the skeletons of twenty worlds... crocodiles, monkeys, giant stuffed snakes grinned at church-windows, seemed to snap at busts, to want to seize hold of enamelled caskets and to climb on chandeliers. A Sevres vase, on which Madame Jacotot had painted Napoleon, stood next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris ... instruments of death, daggers, strange pistols and secret weapons were mixed up in a motley array with the instruments of life: with porcelain soup-dishes, Meissen plates, transparent Chinese cups, antique salt-cellars and feudal sweet-jars, an ivory ship under full sail floated on the back of an immobile turtle. An air-pump poked in the eye of Caesar Augustus, who remained in motionless majesty... On this rubbish-heap of the world nothing was missing, not the calumet of the Indians,* not the green-golden slippers of the harem, not the Moorish yatagan,f nor the idol of the Tartars. There was everything right down to the soldier’s tobacco-pouch, the priest’s ciboriumf and the feather trimming of a throne. In addition, a thousand capricious lights played over this confusion of images, full of a wild turmoil of nuances and of the most intense contrast of brightness and darkness. The ear seemed to hear strangled screams, reason fetched a thousand uncompleted tragedies from chaos, and the eye imagined it could perceive barely shrouded illumination.’ The despair of the young poet which drove him into the storehouse is stilled, he is transformed into knights and

* A Red Indian pipe, t A curved Moslem sword. | A lidded chalice for the sacraments.

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bayaderes,* into faded wax, iron, sandalwood, round about him a hundred times and spaces are compressed into a single perspective. ‘Soon he became a pirate and surrounded himself with this man’s lugubrious poetry, then he admired delicate miniatures, azure and golden ornaments which embellished the precious manuscript of a missal, and forgot the excitement of the sea again. Lulled with thoughts of peace, he once again espoused learning, lay in the depths of a cell and looked through its lancet window across the meadows, woods and vineyards of his monastery.’ The fantasies described in this way clearly indulge continually in flotsam-montage, not in the decorative rooms of the second French, let alone German Empire. Balzac’s consternation is not even Romantic, but it is, in a new way, downright Baroque in its addiction to what is ruined. Balzac’s antique shop is a showroom for the past and for distance, flotsam thus becomes allegoric. Which means that the things preserved as vanished seem as if they were only now releasing their final beauty. The weather-beaten aspect then appears, being simply a surface one, like melancholic-cheerful clearing, like a clearing; thus, in a manneristic way, still discernible in Balzac, the cult of the ruin arose. Transitoriness, so bewailed in human body and happiness, acquired at that time, as a formed and also revealed transitoriness, a strange figurative value. ‘Resplendent with pale corpses’, this provided the end of the Baroque tragedy with its ornament; the ruins were honoured no differently as such which stared out from antiquity (cf. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928, p. 176L). The whole of Baroque mannerism reflected the twilight which arose out of the merging of the rising bourgeoisie and predominant, precarious-mighty neo-feudalism; though admittedly transitoriness, as one interrupted in its fall, still definitely created form, and hence in no way descended into nihilism. The ruin thus had to hold the centre course fairly precisely between decay and a line which was shining through, an only now integral line so to speak; this wavering centre, held in the balance as it were, made it picturesque, in the Baroque sense. The ruin furthermore enabled Baroque Christianity to combine the glance into transitoriness with that of a world on the last day; this mixture of transitoriness and apotheosis made ancient ruins venerable, not only beautiful. Thus the ruin - more of a terror to unbroken ages than a wishful image - became the category in which antiquity became edifying for the first time. And more than that: a reflection of the many Hindu dancing girls.

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martyr scenes in the paintings of the Baroque also fell upon the ruins of past beauty. The Renaissance, when it depicted ruins of ancient temples, had still allowed these to consist of purely redeemed and as it were demonstrable models. But paintings and engravings of the two subsequent centuries of Baroque use the ruin precisely to transform the classical model, as one of proportion and symmetry, in a Baroque way. The ruins became new elements of a separate, decidedly unclassical emblem, of an allegory of transitoriness, on which eternity alights. Thus the remains of antiquity were over-beautified in disintegration by Baroque interpreters, rather than restored into intactness; this even in Piranesi, and all the more so in the sentimentalizers of antiquity as sunset. Piranesi’s ‘Vedute di Roma’ are very precise, they want to give a view and were received in this way at the beginning of the Winckelmann century, but even here the torsos as such, in their elegiacally desirable beauty, are thoroughly overaccentuated. Even the actual Baroque painters, those of melancholic-drunken imagination, also set ruins-antiquity where in reality it does not appear at all: Chisolfi’s ‘Ruins of Carthage’ (Dresden) provide an excellent example of this genre around 1650. Bushes, broken walls, columns which have picturesquely been rolled down and scattered make the splendour of antiquity through transi¬ toriness especially precious here. If painted architecture always expresses wishful dreams most freely, then here they are: to have Christian elegy in the hymn of antiquity. And the sentimentality of ‘where the shudders of the pre-world fan round us’ was still a resonance of the Baroque; hence it is populated by artificial column-stumps, not only on graves, also by artificial ruins in general, as it is in the castle garden at Schwetzingen. In addition, apart from ancient ruins, those of the medieval castles now also entered into view, especially suitable for ghosts, alongside antiquarian edification. Ruins have always been regarded as good lodgings for the departed, even in antiquity itself and in the Arabian Nights: thus this scenery, particularly when it shifted into native, Gothic moonshine, became the legitimate setting for the Gothic novel which began with the eighteenth century. How different these sentimentally contrived ruins seem from the horribly real ones which the American terror-attacks have left behind. How different too, however, was the aura at that time, which mere transitoriness and its elegy bestowed, from the horror which lived without any aura whatsoever (unless it was that of senselessness) in the deserted gaping windows. How far away, however, the category of antiquity also was at that time, this category augmented by ruin-magic, indeed ruin-ciphers, from the restoration concepts of the nineteenth century; how different

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is the devotion to the torso from the drive to its completion. Soon after 1820 when the Venus de Milo was ploughed up, and throughout the whole of the century, the missing arms were reproduced in more than a hundred reconstructions ex ingenio; the Baroque would have had its edification precisely from the torso, that of transitoriness and of the final light on it. But of course in important respects the ruin vision remains even today, outside the transfigured facies hippocratica: as in the pathos of patina, as in that of block-unity. The wishful pathos of patina extends from irides¬ cent glasses to the gold tone of Paestum, from weathered roof-tiles (monk and nun) to the noble green bronze; this pathos wants the time that has flown since then, wants it like old wine or like the evening of a life wellspent. In a different way, however, quite unromantically, but also not ungrateful to destruction, love of block-unity reveres the influence of time, namely in the sculptural-Greek field: the armless Venus de Milo appears here as more strict form compared with the illusionistic form of the complete original. Thus precious flotsam can indicate meanings everywhere, which it raises above its original state and previous, in fact everyday context. This most powerfully in empty ages; it was no accident that the museum itself, developing from the princely treasury, first rose in the nineteenth century to its instructive, admired-reminding splendour. Antiquity as a whole: it is largely of course something irretrievable, a Vineta under the waters of the past. But it is also, in the age of machine-made goods and formalistic Bauhaus-impotence,* which so proudly superseded the decorative impotence of the nineteenth century - a utopian sign. A reminding-utopian sign of what fullness, what ornament, what effectively encompassing imagination was, and not merely was, but unceasingly is. Even a real new creation will and must - as such - also have antiquity within it, working with and continuing to work beyond it, obviously, not copying it. The degree of newness makes a work important, but the degree of antiquity makes it precious, and in the work that claims as well as leaves a cultural inheritance both determinations go hand in hand. The machine created other conditions to the manually-skilled conditions from which all antiques derive, but just as little as the capitalistically produced machine-man of today will remain, just as little are machine-made goods, which only correspond to the general mechanical response and its lack of ideas, the last word. ‘Surgical tongs for

Bauhaus. A German artistic school founded in 1910 in Weimar by Walther Gropius, which attempted to break down the barriers between architecture and the fine and applied arts and to encourage the co-operation of art, science and technology. It was closed by Hitler in 1932.

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delivering babies must be smooth, but sugar-tongs certainly must not’ (Geist der Utopie, 1918, p. 22); every true artist loves ornament, even if an epoch which has been so decimated by mechanical response and kitsch does not yet love the genuine ornament in return. The purification of the atrocities of the nineteenth century is presupposed, this certainly as conditio sine qua non, but beyond this purification a world of expression stands as a task, a world which continues the fullness of what has become antique, does not destroy it. An intense will towards colour, form and ornament, even though in no way already blessed or even freed from the epigonism of epigonism, pervades the world freed from the mechanical response. It demonstrates that the light which has shone throughout history until the intrusion of the machine-made commodity, and fills all our museums, has not been extinguished in the Bauhaus and similar hollow cheering. The more drastic the architectural pseudo-progress, namely into nothingness, the more antiques become in the old wishful image a new forget-me-not, a non-romantic one. The reality which is now in progress has enough pre-appearance - against all loans on the security of the nineteenth century - to be able to produce creations of as yet unknown human expression. It is the sign of something poorly built, therefore of most of the new gadgets and streets, that it cannot grow old, but only rots in the course of the years. And equally it is the sign of something innately precious that after an appropriate time it joins up with the great old inheritance and is worthy of it.

Castle garden and the buildings of Arcadia It is now infinitely beautiful here, yesterday evening, as we stole through the lakes, canals and woods, I was very moved to see how the gods had allowed the Prince to create a dream around himself. When one passes through it, it is like a fairytale that is being read aloud, and has quite the character of the Elysian fields...

Goethe 1778 to Charlotte von Stein about the English park in Dessau There is no cheerful house which does not stand in greenery or cannot look out on to it. The open air belongs to it, above all the open air shaped in accordance with our wishes: the garden. It collects and arranges the flowers, tames rock and water, provides walls which open by themselves. The garden belongs to the stroll and incorporates it, it belongs to a wife and to Cythera. It was no accident that the Arabian garden adjoined the

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harem, a landscape of love, surprise and peace. To this end it was enlivened by shade and nook, by playing waterspouts and kiosks, there was no lack of oddities. The park of the Baghdad caliphs contained brooks made of tin, a pond filled with mercury, all around hung golden cages with blinded nightingales which also sang in the daytime, aeolian harps murmured in the trees. The walls of the love-pavilion were perforated like ivory filigree, through them shone the turquoise, oriental sky. Mazes were popular, mirror effects which increased the pleasures of love (the most famous were in the castle gardens of Arabian Palermo, even Rome had already fetched such arts from the ancient Orient). And just as the beautiful woman is bedecked with silver bangles and chains, so too the oriental garden with metalwork, glass flowers, jade from China - a fine pleasure-dream of nature itself, of nature as woman. The second blossoming of the garden then came in the Baroque; the interest of western absolutism in oriental despotism at the same time caused it to reach into the Arabian imagination. This above all in the castle gardens of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, despite the new element of representation which had become a pressing requirement. This new element then prevailed in the second heyday of all garden-art, in its Baroque heyday, but it never completely prevailed. The Baroque park became the measured, geometrically measured-out stage for ceremonial festivals, but also for a nature which overacts all over the place. It had to behave as a peripheral zone of the court, half mathematical entity, half tamed fantasy; it was panorama. Barbaric-comic excesses revealed themselves here which corresponded to the Baroque wish to form emblems out of each and every thing: Adam and Eve in yew, St George in box¬ wood, a dragon with a tail of creeping ivy, prominent poets in laurel. But equally the Baroque garden created the non plus ultra of what the society of that time wished and imagined from a nature ‘sans la barbe limoneuse’, although with full-bottomed wig. This was, however, imitation of the opera. It was moreover still illuminated nature, not only posed scenery, in the sense intended by a nobleman of the time who said he loved nature; because it was both a perfect and rational bafflement, great veduta, as a mixture of ancient circumstances and oriental moods, in short, as an ensemble of both convention and strangeness. The Rococo caused the representation at work in all this to vanish, it even removed the fullbottomed wig from nature, but the oriental mood remained even in Arcadian apparel. Marble wishful images were a new addition, whose allegory had been defused to so-called dalliance: Cupid and the Graces, goat-footed Pans embracing nymphs, voluptuous rape of maidens. All in

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reduced form reminiscent of porcelain and childlikeness, under a leafy canopy, next to a dreamily trickling spring, inviting imitation, a Jardin Eden in amorous fashion, hidden in quiet boskets. In reality here in fact, as in the oriental garden, the harem came out into the open air, augmented by extraordinary refinement only attainable in a Catholic context. And in the Baroque park, sentimental Orient is recognizable even without its refinement, at least when this wishful world is once again concentrated, i.e. painted. Through the Baroque garden world of high antiquity, as which Claude Lorrain and the heroic Poussin portrayed the Southern landscape, peeps a thoroughly eastern-ancient Mediterranean; it peeps through in the bright gold light behind shining bushes, it peeps through even in the colonnaded temples and ruins which all appear like Palmyra, not like Rome. Veduta is also extremely prevalent in the Baroque garden, echappee de vue into the infinite, but also into nook and fullness. Nature appears as a pre-ordered adventure of representation and pleasure, with a magic castle in the middle. Thus houses were extended in the most delightful way by a green which did not grow anywhere in this form by itself. Even the apparent turning away from the artificial conception, which was an artistic one, did not do away with this kind of garden. The turning away from the French garden happened around 1750 on account of the ever more powerfully advancing bourgeois life; the English so-called natural style began. But even the English park tended its wilderness as a very cultivated one, and it kept man in the landscape, the landscape for man. Of course the English park, even the one in the Rococo which is still often mixed with the French, appears to distance itself from the castle, also it is not supposed to have any more borders against wild nature. The middle-mountain garden was once more preferred to the garden artificially laid out on the plain: Romanti¬ cism announced itself, the Heidelberg landscape began to be discovered, Lake Zurich, the garden nature supposedly for itself, apparently without human intervention. But what arose in this way was once again not given, but wishful nature throughout, that of Addison and Pope, then above all of Rousseau, that of an Arcadia that had become sentimental, and the English park was its prelude. It distanced itself from castle and house only in so far as it formed a new parterre in meadows and woods, in weeping willows, reedy lakes and urns, namely one for the sensitive construction or Romantic house of the whole world. That nature in its original, perfect state was a garden: this biblical idea now became the pagan one, it pervaded an Elysian dream. Even wilderness, the apparently most extreme anti-pole

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to the world of men and plants, was incorporated in Rousseauism in this way, even if only on the roundabout route of Romanticism. ‘The garden’, says Friedrich Schlegel in this vein, ‘in this symbolic-artistic sense is already an enhanced, beautified and transfigured state; in wilderness, however, it is real nature itself whose feeling fills us with that deep sorrow which at the same time has something so wonderfully attractive about it’ - the attractive aspect of absorption, indeed isolation, which enjoys itself living to itself. Gradually even deserts and icy mountains had a place in it, already from the time of Haller’s poem about the Alps.* They were endowed with eeriness, they lay at the edges where nature falls down into ancient chaos, but also where it stretches over the inhabited borders into the solitary and sublime. The English garden as architectural creation could of course no longer indicate this kind of thing, but its lay-out loved such twilights or crumblings of habit, it even built follies, which it took over from Baroque, in solitude, remoteness. One garden in transition from Rococo to English lay-out gives us a particularly instructive and as it were encyclopaedic impression here: the most beautiful, the castle garden at Schwetzingen. Alongside reedy lakes and urns, the attempt was made here to bring together what is worthy of memory in the world by using dummies and fa9ades, a green showroom. But a showroom which once again only revealed expressed moods and wishful images, a natural treasure-house of purely artificial and sentimental treasures. Green yew and white gods, volieret and secluded bathing-hut, temple of Apollo and mosque - all these wishful constructions of the earliest montage are combined. There is a temple of Mercury, one of Minerva (with an underground chamber, as cult-space of ‘wisdom’), an artificial ruin, a temple to Botany and a Roman water-castle - all transferred from the theatre of the Baroque or Rococo into the open park. This was the pleasure garden of great gentlemen, the space for courtly nature festivals and promenades, but equally a lingering air of a fantastic abduction and remoteness lies over it. Susanna’s aria in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ lives precisely in this region, the nobility of Mozart’s music resounds in such gardens close beside an extravagance which makes out of history, mythology, foreign zones its sentimental and curious panorama. Even Voltaire wrote in 1768 to Collini about the most beautiful of these parks: ‘Before I die I want to fulfil one more duty and enjoy one more consolation: I want to see Schwetzingen again, this idea governs Albrecht von Haller, ‘Die Alpen’, 1729. t An aviary.

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my entire soul.’ And under all the construction-masks with which such gardens were provided, there was always one missing, that of the church. Precisely in place of this, Arcadia was to be dressed up or symbolized in sensory form : in the Baroque garden an Arcadia with curiosity, in the English garden one with zephyr, crescent moon and nocturno.

Wild weather, Apollo by night There is also a way of defamiliarizing things when reading. And in fact into the very region where it blows and whispers and ominous things happen. This kind of thing admittedly lies a long way from the refined evening sensibility of the English garden, but still has the sensitive element, coarsened, now and then even deepened, within it. This has now become a completely bourgeois pleasure, it is absorbed through reading, so it can take place in the armchair, very easily in fact. Not only the previous century achieved considerable things in the reading enjoyment of shudders under the cosy lamp. The warm study made people doubly receptive to wild weather outside and to the events they read about to which this weather whistled. Rough wind served to abduct the reader into circumstances which curiously belong to the anti-fireside of total foreignness. This abduction usually occurs even at the beginning of such stories; the deserted house, ‘spine-chilling twilight’ are per se, November nights, themselves, astonishingly, to - although possibly still at a

desirable for this. At best, unfriendly world screams, weird even ghostly events offer the warmth of the outlook. Wishes land here much reduced price - which are not entirely

dissimilar to those which once gave the impetus to the world of Ossian, to stormy wind, heath, fog, groaning carried away on the wind. Most effectively at work in the wishes here is the touch of shock and roughnight, indeed anxiety-wish, which we dealt with above (cf. p. 85), the ‘countersense of primal words’, which is always dialectical. Without this, without the mixed emotion, in fact mixed object which is at work in shuddering, the props for night-horror would not be so full of veiled pleasure. Because the defamiliarization is also fulfilled by them which constitutes the totally sensational relish of horror: the Gothic novel. Its particular bad weather begins in the age of Ossian, it first announces itself in Horace Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ in 1764, extends to E. T. A. Hoffmann where it is always the witching hour. But also to Jean Paul whose ‘Titan’ turns on flickering light and Hades as generously as it does

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sun, Alps and Rome. Edgar Allan Poe would certainly not have been thinkable without such sojourn in the last gleam of the evening light and in the night which has set in. Travel images of this kind live in a grotto, as it were in the sea-grotto in which according to the Nordic saga salt is ground, not Attic but Gothic salt. Bitter water and night stream through the landscape, the scenery becomes furnished Niflheim.* Dark corridor and staircase, night, cemetery, owls, clocks, uncertain light, mysterious noise, trapdoors, Gothic rooms, hiding place per se, eerie portraits with all too lively eyes: this ensemble predominantly fills the Gothic novel, is its essence. And time and again the peculiar wishful happiness in horror remains essential to its spirit: ‘It was indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this - yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars - nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion’ (Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher). Thus acclimatized as never before, the atavisms of the spirit world also loom into the Gothic novel, with pale or sooty fire, with slurping and knocking, with cheap-precious and in any case disparate magic. The strangest mirror is opened up here, but as always it phosphoresces, it shows something uncanny in experience too. Precisely this glance, at work in Hoffmann in the midst of the most precise description of his Biedermeier world, constitutes Hoffmann’s peculiar realism. One which shows so incisively the distance between the average misery of existence and the images of hope, but which also, when it demonizes this misery and localizes the images of hope, reveals a dimension in the real world which causes the Gothic novel and the images of hope in it not only to be confined here as sociological realism with entertaining style all around it. Rather: forgotten border-situations emerge in the dejected cleanliness, the hot punch * The realm of cold in Norse mythology, an underworld of the dead.

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of the Biedermeier situations; Hoffmann reports all the things that may still slip through from the abandoned sectors, infiltrate everyday life, exposing them with humour. Midnight is at any time of day for this Hoffmann, but at the same time men are neither hopelessly enslaved by the so-called gruesomeness of the spirit world, nor does its spell in fact retain the last word. But even the wildest goings-on awaken clever counter¬ forces as in the fairytale; they turn remoteness into what is bright, into the ether which appears especially blue in its foil of night, into humanism. Thus the justiciary in ‘The Estate’, a genuine horror-story, casts departed Daniel back into the void again, thus the Archivarius Lindhorst in ‘The Golden Pot’ conquers the Hecate apple-wife and carries defamiliarization forward into the light of a cloudless Atlantis. This is objective opposite direction to horror in the antique journey of the Gothic novel.

WISHFUL IMAGE IN THE DANCE; PANTOMIME AND FILMLAND

29

Nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus.* Horace Hippolyta: But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Also what dances wants to become different and depart there. We are the vehicle ourselves, combined with our partner or with our group. The body moves to a beat which lightly intoxicates us and at the same time brings us into a measure. Wooing and fleeing above all, a movement which always gives a hint of sexual movement, this constitutes a basic feature of the social dance, and the more coarsened this is, the more evident it is. But it is not exhausted by this, another step or whirl is imitated too, brought into form, the dainty, the measured step, and in many preserved folk-dances, particularly Russian ones, that of joy after work is done. But also in the sexual dance there is something lifted, something lifted away which makes itself visibly felt, becomes feelingly * Odes I, 37, ‘Now we must dance without restraint.’

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visible. The dance allows us to move in a completely different way to the way we move in the day, at least in the everyday, it imitates something which the latter has lost or never even possessed. It paces out the wish for more beautifully moved being, fixes it in the eye, ear, the whole body, just as if it already existed now. Light, exhilarated or strict, in every case the body steps out differently here, into something different. And a drive remains to carry on going within it more and more strongly.

New dance and old Where everything is disintegrating though, the body also contorts itself effortlessly along with it. Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak musical accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting. Man is to be soiled and his brain emptied; he has even less idea amongst his exploiters where he stands, for whom he is grafting, what he is being sent off to die for. But turning to the real dance, out of the same disintegration which in wide circles brought up the American filth, a kind of movement of purification emerged in signifi¬ cantly narrower ones. It did not direct itself against jazz though, for the simple reason that it had already begun before the First World War. It directed itself, in conjunction with the simultaneous reform of arts and crafts, against the milder disintegration, against the uglifications of the nineteenth century to which jazz then added the final hideousness. The new schools of dance developing from Isadora Duncan, then from Dalcroze, attempted to demonstrate a more beautiful human image in the flesh; whereby they certainly began the building from a high roof, and consequently had to be extremely ‘ideological’. As one among many let us remember the Loheland School, if only because it sought to be the natural school. It looked at the beautiful animals with their superbly fit stride well-suspended within them. It was intent on breaking down from top to bottom the purposely concealed or frozen posture which the master-servant relationship brought with it. The limbs were encour¬ aged, in courses which no longer wished to have anything in common with the learning of manners, not even with chivalrous attitudes, into

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unconstricted movement ‘playing round the body’s centre’. In the audience, women as well as men, particularly after the First World War and in Germany, looked delightedly into the mirror in front of which and in which such studied dancers moved. A new kind of Bohemianism, a so to speak naturally stylish, slimly fencer-like one became the decora¬ tive fashion at that time; it did at least create a new type of woman and actor. Forms were adopted and performed through which people seemed trained in freedom. Though the best that was sought after so artificially in those days could have been found at any time in the only place where people moved naturally - in the folk-dance. It alone really stands on the ground which the progressively degenerating bourgeois dance of recuperation has lost. And it does not need arts and crafts to remember the so-called centre of the body, to be well-suspended in the body. Peasant regions preserved this dance for a long time, even after the capitalist destruction of traditional costumes, the devastation of festival customs; a new socialist love of homeland animates it again and makes it true. The folk-dance always has a national flavour and thus, if it remains genuine, cannot be transposed at all. Unless as witness and measure of every uncorrupted successful group-expression of drive-images and wishful images. Whether German Landler, Spanish Bolero, Polish Krakowiak or Russian Hopak, the form is exact and comprehensible, the content it signifies is joy beyond the day of drudgery. The calmness and boisterousness both say: Here I am human, here I am entitled to be.* And a human being with human beings in the group, a rhythmically moved form-sequence in unison. Individual boys and girls may of course step forward at any time, whole dances can serve to represent selected sagaheroes, like the Georgian one of the Mountain Eagle, but the group remains essential even then, absorbing, enclosing the movements again. Every folk-dance is thus agreement, the time of the common, of the common field is still remembered in it, together with ancient pantomimic forms. The whole body always participates here, gives itself up to the flow. But even dance which was only posed in an artificial posture did not die out at the same time. It lives in the exact ballet, of courtly origin, originally highly remote from the folk-dance, but also incompatible with the arts and crafts of the new dance which had prided itself so much on relaxed movement. What a contrast to the body playing around * Cf. ‘Faust’, Part I, 940.

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its centre, in the Loheland School, and to everything similar which might billow as a kind of artificial nature. The ballet has no longing for this whatsoever, but rather a longing for the gracefully or illustriously controlled posture which once accorded with Rococo and even Empire style, chiefly with refined suffering and cool jubilation. The expression of both goes silently on tip-toe, in a cloud of gauze and powder. The classical ballet puts a truly spiritualized handiwork alongside, or better, against mere circling around the centre of one’s own body. Because it sketches out a human landscape where both the centre of gravity of the body and also gravity are missing; even the ground is denied. It is curious here that the light-exact element which distinguishes this completely artificial dance coincides with the mechanical; Kleist’s essay on the puppet-theatre significantly borders on the ballet on this point. Admittedly, according to Kleist, the puppeteer puts himself completely into the centre of gravity of his puppets and lets their curving movements play around it, and yet ‘these puppets have the advantage of defying gravity’. This succeeds even more perfectly here than in the elfin-spirit way the ballet strives for when it denies the ground: ‘The puppets only need the ground, like the elves, in order to brush it and to animate the swing of their limbs afresh through the momentary impediment; we need it in order to rest on it and to recover from the exertion of the dance: a moment which is obviously not a dance itself and with which nothing more can be done than to make it disappear as soon as possible.’ Kleist further grounds the superiority of the puppet in the fact that the consciousness which it lacks has caused much disorder in the natural grace of man. And with this he is in no way aiming at irrational preju¬ dices, but in fact at the mechanical quality which the puppet possesses, and which lends it grace at the same time as exactness. And this perfect grace is only supposed to fall to man again on the other side of know¬ ledge, after a complete traversing of consciousness and of knowledge. Now, even though ballet is far removed from this kind of traversing, its complete Ratio shows what is to be represented, depicted here in fact with that grace which like the puppets seems to have abolished gravity. Elegant proof, that is not a mechanical but rather a mathematical concept, much more a point of honour; the cooled Ratio of the ballet is therefore graceful and precise in one. Thus the ‘Dying Swan’ of Pavlova, as far as the expressive-essential element in the exact is concerned, conceived something white, pure, frail in appearance, and in Japanese ballet even a battle is expressed only by a few sparingly descriptive gestures with

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the fan. The ballet is the school of every thought-out dance; it is no coincidence that it is flourishing in the Soviet Union together with the folk-dance, this other colourful-peasant genuineness. And in such a way that, according to the practical theoretician Moisseyev, without this folkdance the way the Soviet ballet expresses itself today would not be possible at all. The folk-dance (with its pantomimic-dramatic devices) and the always non-dramatic ballet can also be used in succession, in the same ‘dancepoem’, according to the wishful emotions and the sequence of the action. The Soviet ballet (because the balletic aspect remains dominant even in the mixed form) thus shows no stylistic break. The gestural-rich expression of the folk-dance and the sparing-precise expression of the ballet unite realistically in the action to be depicted.

New dance as formerly Expressionist dance, exoticism Where everything is disintegrating, the path into foreignness is or was never missing. It was even weakly pursued in the Loheland School, towards the beautiful, well-suspended animals, with their superbly fit stride. But the playing around the centre of the body and the like was not sufficient where the ‘posture’ striven for by a large part of bourgeois youth began to run wild. Where a rebellion against the image of man presented by the bourgeois was no rebellion at all, not even where the apparent rebellion did not become its fascist opposite. There were here, in the reflex of the dance, curious formations, shallow- and certainly also unclear-irrational ones in which a rapport was sought with uncontrolled otherness, with uncivilized foreignness. This still seemed bourgeois-conformist in Impekoven when she danced unrecognizably tarted-up genre pictures. The same thing became banal and crazy in so-called Eurhythmies, an anthroposophic danceschool full of dervishes and dervishesses from the parlour, but very cosmic, as it was fashionable to say at the time. Here the so-called ethereal body was supposed to be developed in the dancers, in addition the solar plexus and interrelation with the so-called cosmic forces of becoming. To this end, in a more than literal way, poems were danced, in such a way that symbolic movement corresponded to each vowel so to speak - an astrological exercise of the most insipid kind, yet in fact, together with the whole of anthroposophy, banally and irrationally effective. Foreignness in the geographical sense, but at the same time archaic foreignness was shown in the dance-landscape which was offered by Sent M’ahesa. This was

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ethnologically and above all arty-crafty-mythically decorated, fundamentally wrong, but fitted the wish for exoticism in Red Indian, Siamese, Indian copy-dances. There remains Mary Wigman or genuine Expressionism in the dance-picture, incomparable with the above, with irrational bourgeois conformity. Wigman most advanced the limits of expression of the dance, much about this advanced dance and its imaginary scenes was merely evocative, but little was abstract, nothing was empty. The landscape which on the beat of the gong spreads out around the new dance seemed filled here with a characteristic merging of Niflheim and Baghdad in which, we could say, a Hoffmann world moved seen through the eyes of Chagall. This world was even there when Wigman danced Bizet’s Arlesienne, and, highly improved Hoffmann, the genre-picture of Saint-Saens’ Danse macabre. In addition of course Wigman, together with her school, with her mist-flame nature, also participated in the night-side of Expressionism, which it manifested - as banished as flown, as flown as banished - alongside its utopian glare or brightness. And the whole dimension of dance - in the original itself, not merely in its imitations - belonged to a Dionysian element in the ambiguous sense; just as this kind of new dance would never have come about without Nietzsche. Here is Dionysus who called down to the dance of the murderers, and for whom in the end even negrosculpture was only a roundabout route to the blond beast. Here is the other Dionysus who praised the dance against the spirit of gravity,* who in admittedly more vague dithyrambs praised the god of life, against the mechanical response of reduction and denaturing: ‘My wise longing thus screamed and laughed out of me which was born on the mountains, truly a wild wisdom! - my great roaring-winged longing.’t Even this kind of roaring of wings, at its very short end, partly carried not to distant seas, but into the local bloodlake of fascism; for which this kind of roaring of wings was already foreseeable in its imperialist premises. Nevertheless there is ambivalence in Dionysus and thus also in Expressionist, even exoticizing dance, which without the pathos of this god of life would not have gone into ecstasy either. Not into the decorative kind and even Nietzsche used this term consistently in ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ to denote the type of leaden consciousness man must give up if he is to become the superman. It would not have escaped Bloch’s attention that it is used by Zarathustra in connection with the dance in ‘The dance-song’: ‘A dance and scorn-song of scorn on the spirit of gravity... and this may account for Nietzsche’s appearance at this point. The Spirit of Gravity is also a section heading in Part 3 of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’. t ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, ‘Of old and new tables’, Part Three.

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less into genuine ecstasy which equally wanted to portray oppressed life with creeping, panting, crouching as it did liberated life with the roaring of wings. Thus the Wigman-world, admittedly as the only and most genuine one from the Expressionist dance age, was also free of blood on its night-side, and was a figure-formation which strove out of the darkness inflicted on it as well as out of its own, with rich imagination, into the brightness. From original dance-creations of this type an inheritance may be claimed which sets them once again, differently on their feet, on those which know which way to go.

Ritual dance, dervishes, blessed circles The dance was always the first and most bodily form of setting out. To another place than the regular one where we find ourselves a regular. And in fact the primitive dancer feels himself universally enchanted, bones and all. His dance begins orgiastically, but is also supposed to be an instrument which carries him a long way away. Because even if the possessed man gets beside himself, he is also hoping to transform himself into the powers which are lodged outside him, outside the tribe and its huts in the bush, in the desert, in the sky. With the mask depicting the demons he makes these demons visibly present, he becomes the tree-spirit, spirit of the leopard, rain-god; at the same time, however, by imagining he is inside these gods, the dancer also wants to draw their powers over to man. By the consecrated place on which the ritual dance proceeds, seed, harvest, war are supposed to be protected from their evil demons, surrounded by their favourable or favourably disposed ones. Drum-beat, handclapping, monotonously raving chant intensify the trance in which horror itself is supposed to help and is incorporated. And not only the mask is important, but in fact the dance which moves it, in whose leaps it shakes itself and makes proces¬ sion. Nothing is arbitrary here, every step is schooled and prescribed, but no different from the way convulsions are not arbitrary, and the possessed man has no gesture free. Magic dance is schooling in these convulsions, it is thoroughly demonic and wants to be so. Its vehicles are without consciousness in a deliberate fashion and wild in regulated fashion. It always haunts the dance that it belongs to the night and began with it. The Greeks, of course, invented the measure, the raving aspect seems to lie not only beneath them but also behind them. But even in their case it returned in the horde of bacchantes who swarmed out almost mysteriously

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in the spring. Almost mysteriously in a culture whose visible and clandestine aspect, precisely in terms of movement, is constituted in a completely different way, in terms of the will towards measure in an exactly similar way to how Goethe sees or longs for it: When the Graces secretly come down from Olympus, to join the rows of nymphs, gathered in sacred moonlight: Here the poet listens to them and hears the lovely songs, Sees the mysterious movement of secret dances. The Maenads, however, at home far behind the nymphs, of all this showed only eerie, Dionysian movement of secret dances. The arms of the Maenads were wound round with snakes, and their tread invoked the underworld Bacchus with the double sex and the bull’s head. But admittedly the depictive movement around the gods of night, fertility and the abyss vanished to the same extent that the Dionysian abyss was built over. And this not only in Greece, but also in the Near Eastern countries with their equally, in fact most blatantly orgiastic dance-rites, night-cults. The abyss was built over in two ways, matrilinearly and patrilinearly; this produced new and diverse magical dances, but they were united in their attempted turning away from the merely orgiastic. The Phrygian dances were constructed matrilinearly-chthonically around the tree of life, they even live on in the May-dances which were spread across the whole earth. In these the couples held long colourful ribbons tied around the maypole, the ribbons wound and unwound in the movement of the dance, which was thus supposed to depict the interweaving of becoming, fading, new becoming. The couples participated with their ribbon-dance in this chthonic weaving, which was considered to be happy or wished to be so. But the temple-dances of Babylon were constructed patrilinearly-uranically, they reflected an ascent on to the seven planet-levels of the heavens, and also a shedding of the seven ‘veils’ of these spheres, so that the soul can come pure to the highest God. A memory of this no longer chthonic, but cosmic pantomimicry has been preserved in Islam, in the dance of the dervishes. The trance is considered here as preparation, as the reclothing of the soul so to speak in order to be able to take part in the round dance of the houris, in fact of the angels. The houris were not only regarded as the heavenly maidens in this order however, but in fact as the star-spirits who - in quite Babylonian, quite Chaldean fashion - direct human destinies. By penetrating depictively into the rotation of the houris, the dervish is therefore attempting to conform to

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the stars, to reflect in motor fashion their rotation in his own dance figures, he is attempting to absorb the effusion of the primum agens around which the stars themselves are circling. Ibn Tofail explained this in the twelfth century by saying that the dervishes, whose order began around the same time, ‘take the heavenly circling motions as a duty upon themselves’. By doing this they believed they could ultimately draw down a reflection of divine movement upon themselves, no longer demonic, but sidereal, devoted to the external sky, to astrology. In all of this, matrilinearly as well as patrilinearly, earth-mythically as well as astral-mythically, the ancient orgiastic trance is so clearly tempted to overform. So visibly also in these cults outside Christianity, however, shamanistic elements still balanced out the law of the day. The dance found it more difficult to get going, though, when the body itself was no longer supposed to interrupt it. Christianity repressed in its intention not only the sensual but also the religious dance. Misgivings about it, at least as a trance-like dance, already begin with the Jews: dance belongs to the priests of Baal. They froth, they leap around the altar (1 Kings 18, 26), they have their dervishes, and even the Jewish ‘company of prophets’ at the time of Saul appeared as dervishes, beating tabrets and ecstatic (1 Sam. 10, 5); they were despised for this very reason. And for this very reason people asked in astonishment: ‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ (1 Sam. 10, 12); the latter were at that time still considered to be heathenly possessed. Even though alongside this or above it, with high honour, David’s dance before the Ark of the Covenant is reported, not only Michal, his wife, felt this to be a degradation, but David himself admits his degradation to her (2 Sam. 6, 22), although with its sacred signs reversed, as trance before Yahweh. This sanctification, however, was absent in early Christianity and in the Church; the dance flourished in the Middle Ages as a courtly dance and as folk-dance, but not as a liturgical one. ‘It is permitted to nobody’, a council of 680 decrees, ‘to perform games and dances which, inspired by the devil, the heathens invented’; - the gestures of the body are no longer the place for the transcending spiritual motion to make its home. The prescribed steps of the Catholic priests before the altar did in fact perhaps contain a memory of Roman temple dances, but it is reduced to the most sparing symbolic hints, and the procession has a stiff stride. Ecstatic dance only breaks out irregularly, as in the case of the flagellants at the time of the Black Death, and is then convulsive. In the next world, however, there are blessed circles, as Fra Angelico painted them; as a wishful being of movement for which

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the earthly body is weighed and found too heavy.* The movements of the blessed and of the angels were above all defined in such a way that they do not take place in space, but carry their moving-space with them, in fact first form it. The place, says Thomas Aquinas with such highly remarkable utopia of motion (perfectio motus), is surrounded by the angel, not the angel by the place, the angels are extended in a virtual, not in a corporeal way. Hence the heavenly dance was thought of as one without steps and distances, as flight which does not need continually to measure its length, and which, being immaterial, no longer knows any effort and any separating space. But this kind of thing is not built for man; the only Christian dance was imagined as heavenly, not as earthly. The wishful image of a dance of this kind persisted, could not however - unlike the dances of the participation magique - evoke or become human movement. It still lived on in the Baroque, here in fact particularly vividly when it painted its jubilantly hovering angels on the dome; but this canonical hovering is hardly achievable in the dream for unwinged men walking in the flesh. It is no coincidence then that every more recent attempt at an art of dance has also been considered unchristian or conversely: the gravity-free flying of those who are walking in the flesh takes on and takes up in the ballet affinities with something as wholly unspiritual as the puppet represents. Thus the continuing and definitely unclosed art of dance always acts as one which affirms the body transformed in a highly earthly way; whether it draws on folklore or on the tradition of courtly dances of which the ballet is the last. Though true new art of dance can only arise if a well-founded reason for joy is present, shared by the spectator, for ‘nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus’. The most substantiated joy arises with the storming of the Bastille and its consequences, free people on free ground; it did not exist before this storming and will not exist without it.

The deaf and dumb and the significant pantomime The dance needs no words, it does not want to sing either. What it draws in the air, in the unknown region, lies beneath language or is remote from it. If it lies beneath language, then, wherever the dance is disposed towards communication, especially also in groups, the usual pantomime arises. It seems as if it is deaf and dumb, has been like this for a long time, as if Cf. Daniel 5, 27: ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting’. Bloch is reversing the German idiom derived from this biblical passage, ‘weighed and found too light’.

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the other limbs were slaving away only as substitute for the tongue. This begins even in such graceful figures as Pierrot and Colombine, but it culminates as soon as no gesture can say more than: ‘I love you’ or: ‘I hate you’ or at most: ‘I am consumed by jealousy.’ In ancient mime, which was astonishingly elaborate and powerful, this gesture was significantly more expressive and meaningful, particularly in the East Asian kind. This did not derive from the fact that people were still closer to a supposedly more primitive gestural language here, which preceded spoken language. Spoken language, as the basis of thought, first developed with mental activity the ability to express itself also wordlessly and mimically. At least to be able to express itself so much more richly, variously, above all more in the mime of a situation than the speechless animals. Thus the reason for the outstanding mime of the Mediterranean peoples, compared with that of the North, lies in the preserved interaction here between spoken language and gestural language. And the gestural language, which is only developed in human-mental terms after spoken language, could thus cultivate an expres¬ sion outside language here, because in the South for one thing plastic embodiment is stronger and because for another the emotion-expression - at least in the middle class, not to mention the lower class - was not cut back or stunted. ‘Every spiritual excitation has by nature its mien and gesture (quendam vultum et gestum)’, says Cicero on this subject in very Southern fashion in his book about the orator. And although the Greeks did not particularly foster the pantomime, the spiritual excitation was nevertheless so closely connected with corporeal performance for them that Aristotle characteristically dealt with the emotions not so much in his work on the soul as in that concerning rhetoric. Because, as still today in the Mediterranean peoples, it is the emotions which chiefly expressed themselves, in fact explained themselves in oratorical mimic expression. Even the Baroque did not eradicate gestural language from the standpoint of its predominantly Italian origin, but quite the contrary, it exaggerated it; thus the Baroque launched pantomime in a big way. The Italians, but also the French at that time developed an entire so-called dictionary of nature concerning gestures and attitudes; though Batteux again, in his otherwise so rationalist theory of art, stressed that gestural language was readily comprehensible to un¬ civilized peoples, even to animals. The thus developed canon interacted with that of Baroque sculpture, which indeed equally excelled itself in expressive attitudes. Even the statues at that time stood as if on the stage, and the mime on the stage profited from the highly developed expressivo of the Baroque statue. Precisely here though it was demonstrated how much

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every more complicated set of gestures, including Batteux’s ‘naturel dictionnaire de la nature’, presupposes developed language, although it leaves it out and laconizes it suo modo. The man who is furious about an injustice which he cannot change looks upwards, calling down the avenging bolt of lightning: this and similar attitudes were in no way comprehensible to uncivilized peoples, nor to animals, in fact they contained so little ‘nature’ that they hardly appear outside of the Baroque idiom, Baroque Catholicism and the lightning-Zeus visualized by it. Nevertheless this kind of pantomimicry never appeared deaf and dumb, on the contrary, it seemed at that time more eloquent than any interjection or even tirade. Even in the eighteenth century a pantomime ‘Medea and Jason’, with richly substantial feeling and action, came on to the London stage and received European acclaim. Terpsichore, the muse of the dance, combined everywhere here with Polyhymnia, the resonant muse of mimic expression; the scale of expression, especially of the pathetic kind, was evidently great. Since then it has become conspicuously much smaller, but has not completely lost its gradations. Even in its decline a trace of meaning was retained, at least of the peculiar approval which the play without words arouses. And after all, in any case, intelligible silence when there is move¬ ment present continually appears in the dream, in its otherwise so divergent forms: that of the nocturnal dream and that of the waking state. Even in the night-dream far more forms, incidents, actions are seen than voices heard; and the incidents speak for themselves. Especially in the waking dream entire long series of games and wishes silently unfold; because in most people the optical imagination requires less effort than the acoustic. Mute images rise almost automatically out of the realm of the waking dream mood, whereas dialogue must usually first be invented. And the significant pantomime provides a mirror of this predominantly optical phenomenon, whether it is under the water of sleep or in the smoke of the waking dream. Indeed, the wordless reason which makes the pantomime speak also stretches beyond the dream into the terra firma of not always talkative life. Even coitus is not eloquent, even the bitter struggle, even the solemn reception, together with long stretches of every ceremonial, and the archetypal memory remains: original pantomime, long before the ancient mime and outside it, was like the dance with which it coincided, wordless-magic. It wanted to stimulate the equally wordless forces of nature: the Navahos dance round fire in the direction the sun moves, the image of the sun is raised aloft in silence. Among the Aztecs in the spring festival even the struggle of the old and new demons was portrayed pantomimically,

DANCE, PANTOMIME, FILMLAND

405

in Japan priestesses performed the Kagura dances, imitating the emergence of the sun with all mythically traditional details. In short, there is no cult in which pantomime is missing; it was to say to the community in the language of gesture what could not be expressed in the same way in words. And precisely the dream has preserved this soundless-expressive game, the course and sequence of figures; the daydream consciously continues, in its animated picturing of desirable events, this silent procession, out of its own material. Hence therefore the formed and considered pantomime has never quite been forgotten either, hence it wanted and was able to be expressively renewed, after the all-time low in the last century, when the scale of silent expression had shrunk to a half dozen vulgar or comicexaggerated conventions. Nothing provided more encouragement to this than the remarkable new form of pantomime in film; it came very soon, after the folded arms, the extended index-fingers had disappeared from its screen. Because Asta Nielsen, the first great film actress, with a flicker of the eyelid, a raising of the shoulder, possessed the art of expressing more than a hundred mediocre poets put together, silence had not yet become stupid. Likewise a renewal of pantomime was attempted by the Expressionist dance, as in the significant rhythmic allegory which the poet Paul Claudel created in the Twenties with the Swedish ballet; this panto¬ mime bears the clear waking-dream title: ‘Man and his Longing’. Memory and longing play around man here, he rouses himself from sleep, dances his own will and that of all creatures. Claudel explains this in the following manner: ‘All animals, all noises of the infinite forest detach themselves, come around to look at him... Thus feverish people plagued with insomnia toss and turn through long nights, thus caged animals fling themselves over and over again against steel bars which cannot be broken out of.’ A woman appears, turns as if spellbound around the man, he grasps a corner of her veil, ‘but she continues to turn it around him, unwinding the veil from herself until he is wrapped in it like the chrysalis of a butterfly, while she is almost naked’ (cf. Blab, Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst, 1922, p. 77). Blab, in an excessively Georgian* way, called this allegorical dance sequence a moving tapestry of life, that is literature, but he could also explain it from itself, ‘as infinitely returning, not to be pacified human movement as it finally raises itself again incomplete out of all the artistic disguises and completions and as these themselves’. In reality this kind of thing did not produce insignificant pantomime and one which, without * Bloch is again referring to the poet Stefan George.

40 6

WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR

the earlier mythological materials, concerns itself with human longing and its waking-dream figures. All the more so if universal man and his still more universally tailed longing do not dance, but concreteness finally approaches, an aimed concreteness. This happens in Asafyev’s balletpantomime ‘The Flame of Paris’, concerning the storm on the Tuileries during a banquet for Louis XVI. In the contrast between the steps of the court dances and the £a ira* of the revolution, a completely comprehen¬ sible plot arises, almost a drama without words. This all becomes possible as soon as the meaning of the story communicates itself in gestures of silence, in the characteristically open aura around wordless indicating and acting. ‘Saltare fabulam’: this glory of the old mime has not become submerged or inaccessible to the pantomime. In fact, even half of the spoken play still takes place in gesture and thus actually first creates the show-play, t show in the play.

New mime through the camera It is striking how the gesture was able to become so rich precisely in the context of the film. Because here to begin with it flickered especially feebly and crudely, seemed to remain kitsch. The suitor on his knees, the palpitating adored woman, they were the best the flicks could muster. But soon the film itself, developed to some extent, made an astonishing contribution to the degenerate pantomime, in general, through the good fortune that the film began as silent film, not as sound-film, an incompar¬ able mimic power was discovered, an until then unknown treasury of the clearest gestures. The sources of this power are in no way evident, no matter how indisputable its effect is compared with that of the usual pantomime, or even that of the theatre gesture, in the silent play. Some things may immediately appear unaffected in the film, because the gesturing film-people move without a frame, but also without an emphasized distance from us. The camera takes the eye with it, continuously changes the view¬ points of the spectator, which become those of the actors themselves, no longer those of the spectator in the stalls. Ever since Griffith! cut the ‘£a ira!’ A song of the French Revolution, see Vol. I, p. 14371. t Bloch is playing on the word ‘SchauspieF here, the ordinary German word for a play in the theatre. t D. W. Griffith (1875-1948), the American film director. His major film was ‘Birth of a Nation’ (1915).

DANCE, PANTOMIME, FILMLAND

407

heads of people into the action for the first time, since this employment of the close-up, the play of the facial muscles has also appeared as revealed suffering, joy, hope. The spectator now learns from the close-up of a gigan¬ tically isolated head, much more visibly than from that of the speaking actor on the whole stage, what incarnate emotion itself looks like. But all this camera-life would be nothing without exceptional actors who in the still silent film - sharpened gestures to concentrated keenness or many-sidedness. The path here started out precisely from nuance, that is from a refinement particularly surprising in the earlier half-art of the film. Asta Nielsen, as we have seen, first brought that studio theatre into gesture which so far removed the film from the pantomime which had become usual and terribly degenerate. Only with studio theatre of this kind was it at all possible to enlarge, without coarsening, to put nuances or apparently incidental elements into the centre of vision, to make transitions of a rapid or fleeting kind (like the passing of a spoon, the play of the eyebrow in the case of hopeless love and so on) essential, indeed into an ecce homo. The film is filled with sheer mirrored Up and Down of the movement of wishful dream or - beyond the ‘dream-factory’ which became more and more of a dizzy swindle - with desired-real tendency-movements of the age, but so that this can be brought home in a filmic way through figures and their actions, a micrologically developed intonation is necessary - not of the word, but of the gesture. Such intonation is natural in the spoken theatre, and its effects are astonishing: ‘Give me the helmet’ is the first line of the ‘Maid of Orleans’,* if the ‘give’ is stressed, even lightly drawn out, not the ‘me’, then the whole court theatre of the nineteenth century stops, and the shyly possessed maid stands there. Good films applied this new emphasis or process of making visible to the body and to move¬ ment, evidently instructed by the new dance; which might also solve the riddle of how the gesture was able to become so rich precisely in the context of film. There are thousands of examples of the micrology of the incidental, which is not such; every good suspense-film is already charged with mimic instances from the subconscious and from premonition, how much more so - completely without waxworks and dummy - the socially critical and revolutionary film. In fact, not only does the remarkable new mime extend to men, but even to things, which are naturally silent, but also, if the director can achieve it, unnaturally eloquent. The cooking-pots swaying with the ship in Eisenstein’s ‘Potemkin’ belong here, and precisely here * A play by Schiller, 1801.

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the great rough stamping boots, shown in isolation, on the steps in Odessa. The film ‘Ten Days Which Shook the World’ does not show the wavering defenders in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, it shows a giant chandelier whose crystals shake gently, then more and more violently - on account of the explosions, as is obvious, with over-meaning, as is particularly obvious. But even this pantomime of film-things is first learnt from that of film -people; all arts of the camera would have had nothing of this kind to show if the flickering eyelash of Asta Nielsen or the handshake in close-up had not previously made their contribution. Above all the objects of the nineteenth century express in the film their awkward ridiculousness or their uncanny hide-and-seek; as in Rene Clair’s masterpiece ‘Chapeau de paille’ (1927), as in the sound-film ‘Gaslight’ (1943). And the sound-film, as a form itself, only made it look, in its early days, when it was photographing theatre-substitute, as if the pantomime, which the the silent film had renewed, was now going to die for the second time. However, even the sound-film is still always pantomimic where the dialogue is silent, there is even an exceptional plus of a pantomimic kind which is only achieved through the sound-film. Because through the fact that they are also recorded acoustically, things here acquire a quite separate additional layer of mimic expression. In fact we can say: the sound-film brought about the paradox of a so to speak audible pantomime, namely one relating to noises. The microphone makes a pair of scissors cutting through canvas audible, through wool, through silk, and the really different noise which is produced by this; drumming of raindrops on the window, a silver spoon dropped on a stone-floor, creaking furniture reach into a micrological world of sensory perception and of expression. In general the backdrop not only becomes mobile as in the silent film, but an acoustic backdrop, and its sound transforms itself into thing-like gestures. We can listen to what was previously unnoticed, even the softest whispering, so that it in fact still remains a whispering through the microphone, a secret, a treacherous whispering, one which is closely related to the gesture and the sign. In general therefore the film, in that it is capable through photography and microphone of incorporating the whole of real experience in a streamlike mime, belongs to the most powerful mirror- and distortion- but also concentration-images which are displayed to the wish for the fullness of life, as substitute and glossy deception, but also as information rich in imagery. Hollywood has become an incomparable falsification, whereas the realistic film in its anti- capitalist, no longer capitalist peak perfor¬ mances can, as critical, as stylizing film and as mirror of hope, certainly

DANCE, PANTOMIME, FILMLAND

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portray the mime of the days which change the world. The pantomimic aspect of the film is ultimately that of society, both in the ways in which it expresses itself and above all in the deterring or inspiring, promising contents which are set out.

Dream-factory in the rotten and in the transparent sense The more grey the everyday, the more colourful material we read. But a book means sitting around in our room, we cannot go out with it. Also, wishful life read in books only becomes vivid in so far as the reader already knows it from his environment, however much he interprets it. Everyone has love inside them, but not everybody is already given a noble soiree, i.e. this cannot quite be imagined by everybody. Far more deceptively than the stage, the film presents events like this, with the wandering camera as the eye of the guest-spectator himself who can see through them. Most people certainly do need the screen to see desert and high mountains, Monte Carlo and Tibet, the casino from inside. In the nineteenth century there were strange optical establishments for such views into the distance, they were already very popular. There were the so-called Kaiser panoramas: the visitor sat in front of one of the stereoscopic pairs of opera-glasses which were screwed into a rotunda, and behind the glass coloured photos from all corners of the earth drifted, at the ringing of a bell, jerkily past him. There were above all the great circular panoramas, the first was opened in Berlin in 1883, it represented the battle of Sedan, or rather: it led the spectator directly into the battle, as if he were an eye-witness. Wax figures, genuine earth, genuine cannon, a painted circular horizon allowed the spectator to be present at a historic moment; the construction was worthy of its creator, the court and uniform painter Anton von Werner. At the time though there was argument as to whether on level ground such compo¬ sitions were really art, almost as people have argued today about the cinema; but the ‘panoramic’ was discussed with the same very serious aesthetic expression as the ‘filmic’ is today. Those who were contemptuous of it called Anton von Werner’s construction too ‘naturalistic’, those who admired it pointed conversely to quite similar hybrid art in the Baroque, to the Baroque Christmas cribs, to the Stations of the Cross. The modern in the year 1883, in the wax, weapon and oil pantomime of Sedan, in this substitute for not having been there, was nevertheless a triumph of technology which those who had been there in 1870 had not yet experienced;

4io

WISHFUL IMAGES IN THE MIRROR

since for the evenings the guide promised ‘electric glowing light illumina¬ tion’ as well as an ‘electro-fountain of arc-light’ (cf. Sternberger, Panorama, 1938, p. 21). The film no longer needs this, it is itself without doubt new technology, together with all the genuine aesthetic questions which arise out of new technology, new material; and its affiliation to art is decided by its affiliation to genuine pantomime. Nevertheless, even the cinema, precisely the cinema, has not developed with impunity in the age of substitute living, in a society which has to divert its employees or deceive them with ideological ‘electro-fountains’. Lenin called the film one of the most important forms of art, and in the Soviet Union it has at least developed as the most important method of politically educating the masses. In Hollywood, as we know, it is so far removed from such wTork of enlightenment that it almost exceeds the crudeness and mendacity of the magazine stories; thanks to America the film has become the most desecrated form of art. The Hollywood cinema does not only supply the old kitsch: the sloppy kiss-romance, the nervebasher, where there is no longer a difference between enthusiasm and catastrophe, the happy end within a completely unchanged world; without exception it also uses this kitsch for ideological stupefaction and fascist incitement. And even social criticism which formerly appeared once in a while in some American films: even then it was, as regards capitalism, little more than the refinement of a critical apology; it has completely disappeared since the fascisization of Liberty, with spines bristling only against truth. In the Twenties Ilya Ehrenburg called Hollywood a dream-factory and was referring here to the mere diversion-films with their rotten sparkle. Since then, however, the dream-factory has become a poison-factory, no longer only for the purpose of dispensing escapist utopia (‘there is a goldmine in the sky far away’), but also White Guard propaganda. The cinema-panorama shows - in the imagination wishfully steered by fascism - red dawn as night and the Moloch as the children’s friend, the people’s friend. This is how far the capitalist cinema has degenerated, consigned to the technology of the war of aggression. A good dream-factory, a camera of dreams which are critically inspiring, overhauling according to a humanistic plan, would have had, had and undoubtedly has other possibilities - and this within reality itself. For it remains indicative that so much that is right emerges time and again in the film. Amidst so much futility, so much opium, such quick turnover, so little leisure. The technical reasons which rescue the film have been given above: no distance, no peep-show, rather the spectator walking

DANCE, PANTOMIME, FILMLAND

411

alongside; chamber-music pantomime, not entirely lost even in the massproduced commodity, predominant in good films; opening up of the wide world, especially nearby, in the incidental, in pantomimic detail. In addition there is the manoeuvrability of detail, of groupings which have become fixed themselves, made possible by the techniques of film and so closely related to the waking dream. Now, given this so good, if also thwarted technical How, as far as the What of the film is concerned, namely the subject-materials specific to it, the period in which the development of film falls not only had a capitalistically devastating, but in a limited sense also - we may say: ironically usable effect. For as a period of bourgeois decay it is also a period of cracked surface, of the previous groupings and iden¬ tities decaying; consequently it is, as in painting, so in film, the time of a not only subjectively, but objectively possible montage. Because this became objectively possible it is in no way necessarily arbitrary and completely unreal (with regard to the objective events); it is much rather in a position to correspond to changes in the external relation of appearance and essence itself. Here is the field of new hints and genuine authorities, the field of discovered-real separations between objects which previously appeared to be closely adjoining, of discovered-real attachment between apparently very remote ones in the bourgeois order of relations; good films correspondingly made constant use of such manoeuvrability which has become realistically possible even in terms of subject-materials. Thus the Soviet director Pudovkin (‘Storm over Asia’, 1928) went so far as to assert: ‘Film collects the elements of the real in order to show another reality with them; the dimensions of space and time which are fixed in the theatre are completely changed in film.’ The magic is combined with that photographable transparency which the the Soviet film has often shown, historic and modern, and which states that a different society, indeed world, is both hindered and circulating in the present one. This is the right thing and the best thing that emerges from the film, made easier not least by the completely new form in which the ‘transitory’ can be shown here. The art of film-illusion, although it is neither painting nor poetry, not even in its best examples, still gives an image which allows movement, and a narration which possibly demands the descriptive standstill of a close-up. The cinema does not thereby become a mixed creation, of the kind which, in so much higher regions, Lessing’s ‘Laocoon’ defined narrative painting, descriptive poetry. In higher regions narrative painting, descriptive poetry may be fatuous; Lessing allocates to painting only actions through bodies, to poetry only bodies through actions. Whereas the technique of film shows

412

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actions through quite different bodies to those of painting, namely through moved, not stationary bodies; so that the borders between descriptive spaceform, narrative time-form disappear. A soi-disant painting - because film, by virtue of the fact that it is able to portray all objects, in contrast to the stage-set, has at least become as broad as painting, and the image is always the primary thing even in the sound-film - a soi-disant painting has now therefore itself become a succession of actions, a soi-disant poetry itself a juxtaposition of bodies: and the Laocoon of the film, in contrast to that of the statue, screams. He can scream, without rigid grimace, because the film even in the standstill of the close-up shows this standstill only as a passing one, not as a rigid one. Every background turns towards the foreground here, and the wishful action or wishful landscape so essential to the film climbs, although only photographed, into the stalls.

THE THEATRE, REGARDED AS PARADIGMATIC INSTITUTION, AND THE DECISION IN IT

30

Already they are seated, eyebrows raised, and calmly wait out there to be amazed. The Theatre-Manager in ‘Faust’ The curtain rises

For ages especially eager people have been coming together here. The impetus which has led them to the box-office and into the windowless room varies. One section is bored and only wants to buy its way into an evening where they will be diverted after a fashion. A better active section, on the increase today, does not want to kill time, but to fill it. These visitors too want to be entertained in the performance, that is, to be released and become free, not automatically or simply free from something, but free to do something. There is, however, driving in all of them, what we may call mimic need. This need is more widespread than the poetic, it is connected positively with the not only submissive or hypocritical, but tempting desire to transform oneself. It shares this desire with the actor himself, seeks to satisfy it through him, that is, in all better cases, through what he respectively represents. Further, however,

THEATRE AS PARADIGMATIC INSTITUTION

413

above all the spectator does not want to see what the actor is representing mimically, but what he and the whole group of players give as a sensually colourful, eloquently moved representation of something. If the spectator is drawn into the life on the stage, then he is thus in no way simply drawn out of preceding everyday life like the friend of mere diversion. Not even when the stage dispenses so-called light fare, if this is distinguished from kitsch, which does not even divert, but stultifies instead. The curtain rises, the fourth wall is missing, in its place is the open proscenium and behind this show-side things must happen, in a pleasant, entertaining way, significantly, that is, signifying Something. From the life we have had the narrowness disappears into which it has so often led; remarkable and decisive people, a further scene, powerful fates now appear. The spectator is prepared in an equally expectant and involved way for the things which are now to come.

Rehearsal on the model But he does not merely remain prepared, the physically gripping actors incite to more. They require the spectator to decide, at least to decide about whether he likes the performance as such. And it is an objective play that is being per¬ formed, so the clapping or whistling in which the decision expresses itself must extend to the play which does after all give the actor his role in the first place. How much more so if the spectator, who is no teenager and no star-cult, then perceives the mimer simply as the medium of the dramatic character inside a likewise dramatic action. The displeasure that is expressed here, the applause which is given, sometimes during the performance itself: these are very different from the silent or even enthusiastic response given to literature when we read. For not until the spectator really sees on the stage what he wishes to see or even what he does not wish to see is he usually drawn into a response which goes considerably beyond the decision of mere judgements of taste. Not least, it is also important for there to be a formal assembly of voters in every theatre, whereas there is as a rule only a single reader confronting the book. Very interestingly this decision is made into the central point in Brecht, and precisely by virtue of the fact that it substantially breaks away from the merely ‘culinary’ judgement of taste. Also by virtue of the fact that it not only evaluates the people, encounters, actions represented, ‘as they are, but also as they could be’; that the theatrical construction of a person ‘does not start out from him, but towards him’. To this end in Brecht the deci¬ sion is so sharply and so deliberately demonstrated, in direction and guidance

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of the action, that it always has to extend beyond the evening in the theatre. And of course in an activated-instructed way, into life that can be better effected, i.e. really into the things which in the bolder sense of the word are to come. This firstly because the spectator no longer merely projects himself into the play. He remains with his senses alert and puts himself into the action and its actors while equally putting himself opposite it. The correct posi¬ tion is thus solely ‘the attitude of smoking observation’ (Notes to the ‘Threepenny Opera’), not that of the spellbound man who is selfindulgently working off his feelings, instead of forming ideas and learning them with pleasure and entertainment. There must be pleasure in the play, more than ever, deadly seriousness is more out of place here than anywhere, indeed, ‘the theatre must be able to remain something superficial’ (Brecht, Kleines Organon fur das Theater, §3), but the enjoyment experienced must not melt the spectator, rather it instructs him and makes him active. Secondly, the actor himself must never completely fuse with the character and its action which he is imitating. ‘He always remains merely the indicator, the one who is not involved himself’, he stands next to the character of the play, even as its critic or praiser, and his gestures are not those of immediate emotion, but make the emotions of another evident in a mediated way. Through this more epic than dynamic theatre the perfor¬ mance is supposed to receive - freed from all exhibition of the actors’ souls or of so-called theatrical blood - not less, but more liveliness, warmth, vividness. Consequently Brecht stresses, precisely with regard to the effect of the epic mime-style on the audience: ‘It is not the case - although it has been proposed from time to time - that epic theatre, which incidentally - as has also been proposed from time to time - is not just undramatic theatre, lets out the battlecry reason on the one hand - on the other emotion (feeling). It in no way renounces emotions. Particularly not the sense of justice, urge towards freedom and righteous anger: it renounces them so little that it does not even rely on their existence, but seeks to intensify or to create them. The “critical attitude” into which it endeavours to bring its audience can never be too passionate for it’ (Brecht, Theaterarbeit, 1952, p. 254). To the objectivization of the actor, however, corresponds that artistic device of objectively raising out a scene in general, which Brecht calls estrangement.* This means: ‘Particular events in the play should - through captions, backdrop of sound and music, and the acting styles of the actors - be

Verfremdung. Often falsely translated as ‘alienation’ in English, which is precisely what Brecht intended his epic theatre should lead away from.

THEATRE AS PARADIGMATIC INSTITUTION

415

raised (estranged) as self-enclosed scenes from the realm of the everyday, self-evident, expected’ (Brecht, Stiicke VI, 1957, p. 221). The effect should then be that wonderment appears, i.e. that scientific amazement, philosophical astonishment with which the thoughtless acceptance of phenomena, even theatrical phenomena stops, and posing questions, inquiring behaviour which wants to know begins. The ‘Advice of the Actors’, who are expert in the estrangement effect, is given thus in one of Brecht’s didactic plays (with astonishment as the beginning of reflection): You’ve seen what’s usual, what’s always bound to happen. But we are asking you: What’s not strange, find it surprising! What is ordinary, find it inexplicable! What’s usual here should astonish you. What is as a rule, recognize as misuse And when you have recognized misuse Take action against it! Epilogue to ‘The Exception and the Rule’ And in contrast to ineffective literature, estrangement makes an especially vehement appeal for thoughtfulness with anticipatory consequences. Since what has not changed for a long time easily appears as unchangeable, the estrangement of the life depicted in the theatre ultimately happens in order ‘to take away from events which can be socially influenced the stamp of the familiar which preserves them from intervention today’ (Kleines Organon fur das Theater, §43).With this, thirdly and lastly, the major concern of this way of directing is now reached: namely theatre as rehearsing on the model.* The attitudes and events should be thoroughly worked out, thoroughly experimented with in a play-like way, to see whether they are of use for changing the world or not. We can therefore say: the Brechtian theatre intends to be a series of varying attempts to produce the correct way of behaving. Or, which comes to the same thing: to be a laboratory of correct theory-practice on a small scale, in play-form, as it were in the stage-case which is experimentally submitted to the serious case. As experiment in re and yet ante rem, that is, without the real mistaken con¬ sequences of an as it were unrehearsed conception (cf. the didactic play ‘The Measure Taken’) and with a pedagogic approach, to perform these mistaken * In the idiomatic sense this also means ‘putting to the test’. Bloch is punning on the word ‘Probe’, which means both test and rehearsal.

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consequences dramatically. Even possible alternatives are thus portrayed on a trial basis, with the end of each of these alternatives carried out on stage (cf. the contrasting didactic plays ‘The Man Who Says Yes’ ‘The Man Who Says No’). A similar characteristic style is revealed not least in Brecht’s mature Galileo-drama, where the question must be thoroughly enacted whether Galileo’s retraction, for the sake of the major work still to be written, was the right way of going about things. All this strives to achieve ‘parable drama’, from hypothetically intensified,, often also simplified examples and decisions. And the Brechtian, as far as the information that was to result is concerned, more and more, more and more wisely discarded abstractness. Nowhere is simplification to be found in that truly terrible form called schematism, because schematism has already learnt the region that is access¬ ible to it by heart with five or six formulas or hurrah-conclusions; which is also why it hates the Brechtian. Brecht’s theatre seeks a mode of action in which there is only communist conclusiveness of conduct, i.e. conclusive¬ ness that is to be freshly tested time and again and that leads to the goal of the viable production of the really useful and its reason.

More on the rehearsal on the model to he sought It is undoubtedly unusual that plays teach when they are themselves only learning. That their people and their actions are turned in a questioningexamining way and also turned round. Nevertheless, an open form already appears in all dramas when a person, a situation is shown precisely in its lasting contradiction. Only where a central figure - as character or as social function - acts in a one-track, inevitable way, then there are no such variabilities. Othello’s jealousy does not waver and cannot be thought of in another way, in all its consequences and successive situations; Antigone’s matrilinearly traditional and persevering ‘piety’, Creon’s ‘reasons of state’ which have become socially victorious, waver just as little. The conflicts are unavoidable here, the experiment of a Being-able-to-be-different, Being-ableto-act-differently, Being-able-to-end-differently would be grotesque here even if merely hinted at in an interpretation and its direction. But are there not many-sided natures in a great series of dramas, and those with several possible paths before them? Is there not Hamlet or, in a so much smaller, more insignificant, cancelled alternative creation, the monologue of Fiesco* ‘Fiesco’, a play by Schiller.

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wavering between republic and monarchy? Were there not always dramas with several possible versions, evaluations of their course, their outcome? - Goethe’s ‘Stella’, Tasso compared to the original Tasso? Goethe ended ‘Stella’ with reconciliation in 1776, tragically in 1805, ‘Tasso’ showed in its original version the prosaic Antonio denied, the fanatical poet affirmed, in the second version this is almost reversed. Certainly there was no previous dramatic art - and the most greatly elaborated least of all - with a separate theory-practice relationship, let alone with the drama as a course of study which is always correcting itself (interrupting itself like a tableau). But even the unalterable dramas: if they were not rehearsals on the model to be sought, they were still models of a path taken to its end, a good or bad one, one to be sought or to be fled, with the recommended motto: exempla docent. This above all where the stage, with or without didactic thumping on it, has been endowed with a moral institution. Indeed, the unexpected thing occurs that Brecht wants to be far less moral and pedagogic than Schiller for example. Precisely the author of didactic plays and schooloperas rejects, as a friendly materialist, a theatre which only moralizes and therefore would not be one: ‘In no way could we raise it to a higher status by making it into a market for morals for example; it would then rather have to see to it that it was not in fact humiliated, which would happen immediately if it did not make the moral pleasurable and indeed pleasurable to the senses - from which the moral can certainly only stand to gain’ (Kleines Organon, §3). But this rejection of the blurbs and leading articles, of ‘visible advertizing’-kitsch on the stage does not hinder the old Brecht programme of a theatre to shape consciousness and to school decision. Thus this programme wants ‘to move the theatre as close to the places of education and publication as possible’. The theatre, as is obvious, as masterly place of entertainment, whose influence is exerted through poetry, not through leading articles and hurrah-conformism. Precisely the latter would not need any kind of rehearsal on a model, because it already knows everything anyway and because it translates the word model as model pupil. What is meant instead of this is moral institution with happiness, where the depth of the enlightenments and impulses achieved are accustomed to being directly proportional to the depth of the enjoyment. Not without reason we could point to the sensually most pleasurable theatrical illusion here, that of the opera: progressive masterpieces of opera like the ‘Magic Flute’, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ simultaneously provide in the noblest enjoyment the most activating humane wishful image. And like the means, so too the content of instruction mediated through the progressive theatre

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(medicine and teaching) is one of joy; as such it acts in the play as content that must be produced through struggle or content that shines ahead already produced. ‘Thus the choice of standpoint is another major part of theatrical art, and it must be chosen outside the theatre. Like the remodelling of nature, so too the remodelling of society is an act of liberation, and it is the joys of liberation which the theatre of a scientific age should communicate’ (Kleines Organon, §56). So much for the theatre here, when it appears as the house of decisive actions, about which and between which it is decided. As soon as the rehearsal on the model is acted, the goal is clearly visible, but the stage as experimental stage (preview-stage) goes on bullying the ways of behaving to reach it.

Reading, spoken mime and scene We said above that all real plays are better to see than to read. Because in front of the stage decisions can be made far less in terms of taste, far more collectively than in front of a book. But in woeful cases it does never¬ theless seem conceivable that performed plays are just as good, even better to read than to see. When, that is, the actors put themselves in front of their role, when for example we get to see and to hear the ‘scheming villain’ Miller instead of Iago. It becomes even more unpleasant when a star uses works of literature as a pretext to embody his oh so personal physical presence and delivery once again. It also happens, even in less flashy performances, that due to so-called temperament or even due to lack of time actors speak much too quickly on stage as a rule, above all when there are verses to be disposed of or even elaborate periods. Much that is precious gets lost in this reeling off, how dismally what was a more and more richly unfolding landscape in leisurely reading becomes an obstacle race. But the theatre must always prove to be a plus compared to reading, no matter how lively the pleasure ear and eye have derived from reading. And it must be so much of a plus that even the best conceived readingdrama stands in relation to the performed drama like the shades from the Odyssey straining for the blood in order to be really able to justify themselves. After all, whenever the work-true performance takes place, they are seldom good and never work-true dramas which are more beautiful unperformed. They are at best lyrical flights with speeches for and against which lack successive actions, thickening plots, entrance, exit, bad atmos¬ phere, as it were the noble, not only Schillerian but also Shakespearean

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colportage of what is bursting to get on stage. There is no world in the drama without the visible space for characters and alternating scenes which actors, above all directors bring out on stage. And even great lyric poetry, in so far as it exists in action, i.e. in drama, is first projected in the scene on to the movement of the mood or of the reflection, in short, on to the drama in its introverted form, to which this poetry belongs. Precisely for this reason - and not, as is obvious here, inner world of reading-verse, as escape from the theatre - Brecht’s statement is so important and true: The Elizabethan wrote verses for us about the heath at evening, which no lighting crew ever matches nor the heath itself! and the statement is true, the lighting crew does not match the verses because the Elizabethan’s heath at evening has been driven to its truest essence poetically, but inside the theatre, inside the Lear and Macbeth scenes for which Shakespeare wrote all these verses. The matching, surpassing, unlocking of the heath at evening by great poetry undoubtedly happens through the power of the keys* of such poetry over nature (cf. p. 215), but the theatre in fact shows the poetic heath as the ground on which even its own play is ultimately played. Not least, such a perfect theatre also first realizes the important pause which in the drama may not lie so much between the lines as between the words and phrases and between the scenes. Listening, knocking, attention to distant cries, something expectant therefore is especially evident in such pauses, together with the observance or fall of the folds of significant customs. Even the wonderful trumpet movement in Verdi’s Othello heralding the Doge’s legation derives on this side or the other side of the opera from the form immanent in the Shakespearean pause. Thus the theatre, in contrast to the book, is the sensual experience-reality in which unheard things are publicly heard, in which what is remote from experience-reality becomes vividly public, in which the composed-compressed, the full-filled really appears, as if it were in the flesh. And it is always mime through which poetry projects itself on to the level of the theatre; it is spoken mime plus gestural mime plus the aura mime of the scenery created by the set-designer. The proscenium * Bloch is using this expression in the legal, not the ecclesiastical sense, i.e. the power of a wife to act for or against her husband in household matters.

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becomes like a window here through which the world is changed to the point of recognition, sees and hears itself. Thus the theatre is the institution of a new, never again immediate experience-reality, laid bare by the dramatic poetry that refers to it. Everything depends on the tone here with which a role is provided. Indeed, we can say, portrayed man is a sound-figure, as this he is born for the stage. Hence at the beginning there is the speaking form, that is, the difficult art which modulates, models the intonation. The basic tone then to which this spoken mime is set (the excellent expression comes from Schleiermacher, preacher and philosopher into the bargain) is not for example given by the abstract outline of a figure, let alone by the cliche which has been formed from this outline. The true basic tone stems solely from the disposition, the ties and the goal-image of the figure, therefore from the possibility of acting, of being, revealed by its character together with its circumstances. This does not mean a character in the static sense of what is ingrained, engraved, but the character designates here the deter¬ mination towards an action which is only now shaping itself. Only in this direction is a dramatic sound-figure truthfully achieved, it is only varied from the perspective of its destination. As an example the great director Stanislavsky cites Hamlet, in such a way that we may discover in Hamlet the task: I want to avenge my father. We could, however, also discover a higher task: I want to discover the secrets of being. But we could even discover a still higher task: I want to save humanity (cf. Trepte, Leben und Werk Stanislawskijs, p. 78f.). Stanislavsky’s direction developed the figure of Hamlet, together with all its impediments, in accordance with this last ‘basic formula’. The well-aimed characteristic style becomes more difficult of course in spoken mime, as soon as this is already traditionally fixed by a certain abstract, indeed untrue-pathetic altitude. This is still the case with regard to Schiller, as the problem of being able to speak Schiller’s verses both in a cool and completely unsonorous way; this is the case in the song-mime and no less in that of the orchestra with regard to Wagner. The doggedly persistent court theatre tone, its yearning or rolling pathos is mysteriously difficult to break through even in the speaking of Wallenstein. With equally mysterious difficulty (although it seems it is being attempted at the new Bayreuth, not without success) can the plushy heroines’ and then the victory-avenue Baroque be removed from the intona¬ tion of the Nibelungenring. These obsolescences certainly have part of their origin in the original Schiller and Wagner: an origin in a rhetoric at an altitude which is all too similar and therefore often only sustained by force.

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But this is equally balanced out by Schiller’s sharply logical power of language, by Wagner’s sharply contrapuntal power of expression; and the restitutio of Schiller and Wagner means to portray, in the case of Schiller, the speakable piano of the reflective aspect in his work, in the case of Wagner, the singable bel canto of the endless melody in his work. In Richard Wagner, lying more originally, more as a result of his own time in excessive thunder, there is the more overdue case, as it were, of restitutio in integrum: to be achieved firstly by considering the song-mime and going on from here to grasp the whole construction. All the more important is the task of finally making the performance of Wagner, precisely from this perspective, commensurate with the blossoming, the sharp and powerful aspects and sudden depths of his work. The gestural mime and scenery, no longer torrid and rancid, no longer with thunder-clap, clashing of swords and booming of waves, then follows unimpeded. Then gestural mime itself, it stages the dramatic action communicated through words in terms of the bodies of the actors, but also in terms of the body, so to speak, of the things placed on the set. This set can be bare, as in Brecht, as in old English and old Spanish theatre, it can be luxurious as in several good examples of the former Meininger* and the decor and costumes of Max Reinhardt, it can above all allow poetry itself to spread out and settle in an aura-like way in the stage-set as in the art of Stanislavsky. Of whom it was rightly said, he possessed the keys to all doors and apartments, in fact he knew how to preside with equal proprietorial power in the Ibsen room of Doctor Stockmann, in the night-shelter cave, in the enormous chambers of Zaren Berendij. Thus, closely related to the gestural mime, the above-mentioned aura mime arose, of the scenery created by the setdesigner. The Calderon stage, especially the Shakespeare stage did not practise this sort of thing of course, but in all their bareness, indicating a cave, a forest, a palatial room merely with a caption, the dagger or the rope-ladder were by no means lacking as necessary props, and: the allegorical stage-set becomes the extension of these props, their impression and expression in space as it were. Somewhat exaggerated, but no less spread out in an aura-like way, Stanislavsky’s collaborator Nemirovitch-Dantshenko expresses this gestural mime and scenery thus: ‘A production can only be called good when one can let the performance continue running from any point whatever without words and the spectator can nevertheless still

* Meininger. A famous troupe of actors at the court theatre in Meiningen.

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understand what is happening on stage.’ In fact, even in Calderon the dagger in a drama of jealousy, in Shakespeare the rope-ladder in a drama of love are mimic per se. Indeed, the dagger in Calderon is jealousy itself in its external form, and the early light between nightingale and lark is no longer externality in Shakespeare, but the outwardness of Romeo and Juliet’s love and their death. Even if it is forced, this kind of thing does not divert us from the action, but the thing-aura which has become homogeneous directs us into the action, provided, as Shakespeare has his Hamlet say to the actors, ‘in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered’.* Obviously, spoken language remains the Alpha and Omega however successful gestural mime and its scenery. So that a pantomime does not become independent for example or merely thrust itself forward, but even the most successful pantomime device in Nemirovitch-Dantshenko’s sense serves the poetic work. But from the point of view of the mime, the theatre is at its best the sculpture of poetry and one in which even the most powerful movedness, one towards mimic expression, does not remove the sculpture.

Illusion, sincere appearance, moral institution The perennial question is, to what and to what end does the stage really remove us. It works with make-up and usually also predominantly with techniques and lights which feign in a considered way. The stage is therefore more appearance than any other mode of art and precisely because it allows its appearance to become experientially real, despite the separating pro¬ scenium. This gives the theatre its both delightful and illusionistic power, of course, but underlines the appearance more heavily than any other single pure art. Indeed, stage-appearance to an unfriendly eye - and it has often met with this, not only among bigots - can more closely resemble the highly ignoble appearance of a wax dummy than that of an image, shining through in a refined way, not in the least experientially real. In addition there is the so to speak dissembling aspect of the theatre hero or even the theatre martyr; transferred to real hypocrisy the concept of the play¬ actor comes from here. But of course the difference between moral appear¬ ance and theatrical appearance was obvious even at the time when play-acting was still not an ‘honest trade’. The play-actor is hypocritical, whereas the Hamlet, III, 2.

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actor transforms himself or rather, physically indicates the role which he is playing. And because the stage, by virtue of the poetry acted out, equally presents itself in the actor as governor of something that is not experientially real, any connection with the wax dummy or even with so-called tableaux, let alone bedazzlement, is lacking once again. Nevertheless the question remains, at the level which has become appropriate: is the theatre, if not dazzle, still nevertheless nothing more than illusion? In bourgeoisaesthetic use this concept in fact carries no disparaging connotation, however it refers even then to a something which is not externally real, which as pure, although as it were decent appearance has nothing at all in common with any kind of pre-appearance. In this way illusion was extended to all, even to the so-called pure arts, always with an echo of theatrical appearance of course. E. v. Hartmann for example cites in his three-quarters conformist-trivial, one-quarter summarizing ‘Philosophy of the Beautiful’ illusion as the character of art per se and defines it as ‘subjective correlate to objective aesthetic appearance’. But then nothing at all seems real about this appearance; since Kant-Schiller’s definition of the beautiful: as freedom from real Appearance,* this sort of thing has been agreed by almost all aestheticians who come from this tradition. Even if it is purposeful, Appearance only becomes beautiful ‘as soon as it is detached from the reality which gave rise to it and thus also from the reality of purpose which this same reality serves, and is transfigured into pure aesthetic appearance’ (E. v. Hartmann, Philosophic des Schonen, 1887, p. 174). But the surprise of course, not in E. v. Hartmann, but rather in Schiller, who was the best Kantian in aesthetics, follows hard on the heels of this. Because, if freedom from the reality of purpose is really supposed to be the objective correlate to the subjective illusion, then not even theatrical appearance is an illusion, indeed this least of all, as will shortly be seen. And if even Schiller himself calls it a ‘beneficent illusion’, precisely the beneficent element emphasized here still decisively removes its illusion-character once and for all. ‘The Theatre regarded as a Moral Institution’! says in this vein: ‘We are given back to ourselves, our sensibility awakens, salutary passions shake our slumbering nature and make the blood surge more freshly’; - likewise, precisely the supposed mere illusion puts into reality, refreshes it and points itself to a stronger, deliverable one. This lapse by Schiller mentioned above

* ‘Erscheinung’ in Kant and Schiller as opposed to ‘Schein’ which Bloch uses for ‘appearance’. We have indicated this basically linguistic distinction by the capital, t An essay by Schiller, 1784.

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brightens up his earlier work with the programme, so little bound to illusion, of a theatre which is precisely regarded as a moral, consequently in no way reality-free institution. But if and because the theatre is such an institution, then all illusion-character is incompatible with it; since no illusion activates the realizing will and the will towards reality. The theatre as illusion also certainly had to correspond to a bourgeoisie which completely tore apart reality on the one hand, art and ideal on the other, way beyond Kant. But it is true: art as illusion would be and would remain lies all the way, taken in a moral and extra-moral sense. That is, both in the intention to deceive and in view of the impossibilities which such an art produces. Conversely, the existing appearance of the theatre is never illusionary appearance, but sincere per se, it too ‘along a line of extension from the Become, in its formed and more commensurate expression’ (cf. p. 216). Its play does not quiesce, instead is able to influence precisely the will of this world, in its real possibilities - as paradigmatic institution. But in order for this institution to be effective, beautiful appearance must not be forgotten in it. The stage is of course not illusionary, but the raised index finger does not feature on its coat of arms either. Where this finger appeared, there was much bourgeois-puritanical hatred of art at work, or at least suspicion towards art. Not infrequently, unfortunately, this suspicion was also instigated by socialists, just as if theatre were no pleasure, but a Sunday School (with nothing except villains and model pupils). Above we showed how Brecht himself recalled us from the idea of theatre as instruction, the same author who first praised the consciousness¬ shaping stage rather than the merely culinary one. But the theatre was not supposed to be an unadorned moral institution in Brecht and at any rate not an obtrusive one. On the contrary: here too morality comes through pleasure, as the ‘noblest function that we have found for “theatre” ’. But the Gottschedian schoolmasterishness in the German aspect of the moral institution does not die out so easily; which is why time and again tolerance for the light with happiness must be requested. Which is why Goethe, in his essay ‘German Theatre’, has the following declaration of belief in beautiful-cheerful appearance to make: ‘From raw and yet weak beginn¬ ings, almost puppet-like, the German theatre would perhaps have gradually worked its way through various epochs to what is powerful and right, if it had found a quiet progress and development in Southern Germany where it was actually at home; except the first step, not to its betterment, but to its so-called improvement, was taken in Northern Germany by feeble-minded men incapable of any production.’ And after Goethe has

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so reservedly passed judgement on Gottsched’s reform, after he has even had to examine the Hamburg dispute for and against a clergyman being allowed to visit the theatre, he continues, not entirely without a memory of the title of Schiller’s youthful work: ‘This dispute, which was conducted with much animation on both sides, unfortunately obliged the friends of the theatre to present this institution which is actually only dedicated to higher sensousness as a moral one.. .The writers themselves, good, valiant men of the bourgeois estate, put up with this and worked with German uprightness and true reason towards this purpose, without noticing that they were thoroughly furthering the cause of Gottschedian mediocrity.’ In line with this sharp plea, Goethe also did not want the famous Aristotelian catharsis to be related to the audience and transferred to them, but rather to the characters of the drama. Undoubtedly in all this there was not so much an aristocratic reaction at work in Goethe against the public-spiritedness of the German bourgeois enlightenment, as aversion to the secularized servility which had attached itself even to the moral institution, to one ultimately minus - theatre. Likewise, Apollo without Muses and Minerva without Epicurus suit materialism in art far worse than they suited its idealism. What Schiller meant by his moral institution, however, rather than Gottschedian homespun, was flourishing theatre and only then moral purposefulness, was scene and only then tribunal. Only then, through the richness of the scene, can the theatre serve morality, as has so often happened in art, precisely the highest kind. The isolated perfection of this stands in the Hamlet scene where the play forces the royal murderer to reveal himself; the social revolutionary moral institu¬ tion is to be found in ‘Cabal and Love’ and ‘William Tell’,* in ‘Egmont’.t it is endowed with pure Brutus-music in ‘Fidelio’. And this moral institution is not only a tribunal, for above the corrected, even above the triumphant and thus precisely horror-engendering image of vice on the stage the paths of salvation appear, or at least the signs of their light. German classicism in general was the attempt to develop the whole, undismembered human being out of the society dismembered according to class. This attempt - built purely on the belief in aesthetic education - was naturally an abstract one, but it did also undoubtedly put remarkable guiding images on the stage. And among them are those which only today find their real mandate, entirely without abstraction or even gushing misery

* Plays by Schiller which appeared in 1784 and 1804 respectively, t A play by Goethe, 1788.

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around them. The sincere appearance of the stage is therefore, like illusion, least detached from the reality of purpose; it is instead its promotion through festivity.

False and genuine topicalization Good plays come back performed again, but never as the same ones. For every new generation there must therefore be new productions, many of them. The change in presentation becomes extremely sharp when another class begins to take its place in the stalls. But even if the stage then does not remain unchanged, i.e. junk-like, it is still not a cloakroom on whose hooks new clothes can continually be hung. This means: the people and scenes of an old play cannot be totally and radically ‘modernized’. In any case the costume of the period remains in which the play being performed is set. This is definitely not contradicted by the fact that the Baroque dressed up its ancient heroes a la mode and made them act accordingly. For the Baroque acted ancient heroes, but in fact no ancient dramas, rather ones it wrote itself; thus it did not distort any ancient dramas either when it transposed their material into its own bourgeois-courtly figures and conflicts. For a far less creative, but even more well-considered reason, Cocteau’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, for example, written in the Twenties of our century, wear sports shirts and horn-rimmed glasses; this equally without any difficulty. However, it is not easy to find a more fatuous piece of nonsense than the idea of playing Hamlet in a dinner-jacket or, to use a more modest example, the idea of setting the first act of ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ in a chrome-nickel bar. Or even of putting Schiller’s robbers in proletarian garb and giving Spiegelberg a Trotsky-mask. All this is a snobbish, at least exaggerated backlash against historicizing theatricals which expired long ago in any case. Correct is only the obvious fact that every theatre is that of its age and neither a faithful masked ball nor an outing for pedantic philologists. That is of course why, for its refreshment, the scene always needs a new perspective and one newly worked into it, but in such a way that the time-aroma of the writing and its stage-set never drifts away. For precisely the new partiality of the perspective needs the characters and actions at the place of their ideology given to them by the writing, if otherwise hatred and love, dross and model are to have the object shown by the writer. The stage-set towards which the author has composed, instead of being rejected, must therefore be changed to the point of recognition,

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to the recognition in fact of the class conflicts which take place in it and which have only now become ripe for expression. Only this is the theatre not stylized in a topical way, but really topicalized, and this, as in the stage-set, so much more precisely in the refreshed illumination, modelling of the stage-text. Here, apart from the well-known cuts, there is even the adaptation of a play, provided it is dusty in several places or even exists in an immature and unfinished form, and provided - as conditio sine qua non - the new adaptor or even completer is akin to and on a par with the author. Thus Karl Kraus not only rescued Offenbach texts, but the whole diamond of this music out of the rut into which it had fallen. Thus Brecht viewed ‘The Private Tutor’ by Lenz as a human plant which con¬ tinues to grow out of the feudal misery of the eighteenth century into the capitalist misery of the twentieth. But the matter also becomes precarious here immediately cavalier directors, frustrated authors or woeful epigones try to use old material as a crutch and as a substitute for production. The epigonal completers (model: finishing Schiller’s ‘Demetrius’) are for literature what the dreadful castle and palace restorers of the previous century were for what was called architecture at that time. Like the latter they have become rarer, whereas brash directors are continually introducing an unspeakable topicalization into the text of the drama in order to give it a vulgar-political ‘interpretation’. All for the purpose of making a tendency - however commendable it may be - visible outside the mirror of the work, instead of in it. We do not need to be reminded - when there is a highly uncommendable, namely pre-fascist tendency - of a ‘William Tell’ in which, by damping and retouching the men of freedom, Gessler was moved into the centre as ‘the most interesting’ figure. Or even where the comedy ‘The Merchant of Venice’ was forced to parade itself as shrill anti-semitic propaganda. For even with the most correct tendency, vulgar-political topicalization enters a field that is alien to the work, with the loss of the given drama. As for example when ‘Maria Stuart’ is so wrongly staged and got out of all proportion that the play no longer provides any tragedy, but rather the acclaimed triumph of Elizabeth. Because she is in fact - by virtue of an unparalleled new dramaturgical structure - supposed to represent rising capitalism opposite French-Catholic-neofeudal Mary. This is historically not incorrect of course, but for the given drama (final act) even worse, above all far more superfluous than a palacerestoration in the taste of the 1880s. Only in the case of an ambiguous figure in literature itself, Hamlet being the prime example, can the exaggeration of one of its features, possibly overlooked until now, at best be

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justified; however, even these features must have been illuminated in Shakespeare, and the director only has to develop them. Only as this kind of development and after-ripening does renovation take place in the theatre, and only to this end are masterpieces, however felicitous the destruc¬ tion of their ‘gallery-tone’, museum-value, quoted on the boards. Even Richard the Third does not act as if he was Hitler, but he more clearly embodies today a part of the Hitlerian character the more he portrays his own skin and that of his time through Shakespeare. In the same play, at least as far as the allegoric aspect of rescue is concerned, a similar sort of thing is true of Richmond and the lovely day of tomorrow around him. This portrayal must be meaningful of course and not a historical waxworks with ‘timeless material’, with ‘general human material’ in it. But meaningful material means here: the classical drama must be spoken and portrayed in such a way that the present is not forced on to the drama, but so that the drama also implies the present. And this on account of its temporally never exhausted conflicts, conflict-contents and solutions, or rather: every classically great drama shows in these conflicts and solutions within it an as it were overhauling concern overlapping the temporal. Indeed even plays written in the present only possess dramatically topical meaning (in the sense of instruction and elucidation) when they are expert at such overlapping concern. There is a social process (between individual and community, between contrasting forms of community themselves) which extends from the Greek beginnings of the drama into the future, right into the society of no longer antagonistic, but naturally not vanished contradictions. This process, dramatically concentrated between typical bearers, makes every great drama great precisely because it is capable of new topicality, and makes it topical precisely because it is transparent to the future task: optimistic tragedy. In ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ Diderot lets it be said: ‘There were many columns along the way, and the rising sun shone on them all, but only Memnon’s column resounded.’ This column signifies genius in contrast to mediocrity, but in more purely factual terms it signifies the lasting resounding power and topicality of great dramas in the direction of day break. The topical production will thus best adapt if it directs itself in this direction. It is immanent in the truest dramas, from ‘Prometheus Bound’ to ‘Faust’; it needs no added and inflicted visible advertizing but in fact visualization.

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Further genuine topicalization: not fear and pity, but defiance and hope The measure for this fresh aspect must however be freshly worked out time and again. It is gained most surely from the existence of important new plays and from understanding of them. It is gained not least from the great difference in which the wishful image in a socialist age is located as against the earlier one. This difference becomes tangible in what Schiller called the ‘reason for pleasure in tragic objects’. Even Schiller apparently cannot detach himself in the thus designated essay and more clearly in the subsequent one ‘On the Art of Tragedy’ from the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. And moreover he does not intend to distinguish between tragic play and tragedy,* because both had to move the spectator. And it is also emotion, from the perspective of which Aristotle reaches his famous purposetheory of tragedy: it must arouse the emotions of fear and pity. Schiller accentuates here only the pity, but tragedy, even in the Aristotelian original, shows us human beings, chiefly their heroes, in a condition of suffering. And the dramatically effected heightening of fear of suffering, of pity with it, is supposed, as is well known, to liberate the spectator from these emotions. That is, the emotions are supposed to be worked off again through the tragic intensification back to their normal height in life. This is the meaning of Aristotelian catharsis or purgation, as one which in fact always includes emotion through dramatically experienced suffering. Euripides was of course the first to introduce emotion into tragedy, which is indeed why Aristotle also ascribed to Euripides the strongest dramatic effect in the sense given above. Presupposed here, however, is not only the specific drama from which emotion emanates, but above all also a way of behaving which stresses less the revolt against fate as the - however steadfastly borne - suffering from it, the subjection to it. The whole of ancient slave-owning society did not perceive anything tragically rebellious in suffering, did not perceive Prometheus as a basic tragic hero or at least did not fully admit he was one. This despite Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy and despite the knowledge that the tragic heroes are better than the gods, even than Fate. And now it is instructive precisely for the measure of the

* German distinguishes between ‘Tragodie’ and ‘Trauerspiel’, the former conforming to Aristotle’s classical definition which Bloch discusses here, the latter designating a play about tragic events, often in the lives of ordinary people.

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refreshment of the dramatic aspect how above all purgation of fear, then of pity, is the tragic effect which has become most alien to us. It must still be conceded that, as we have seen, Schiller was still fond of it (albeit with exclusive emphasis on pity); that previously Lessing defended or once again purged it in the ‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’ (albeit likewise with reduction of fear, which is supposed to be pity referred to ourselves). But even the entrepreneurial, dynamic bourgeois society understood the ancient reason for pleasure in tragic objects only with misconceptions; even for it a quite different wishful image of the theatre was topicalized by the tragic hero, even that of Greek tragedy, from the one which brings with it the merely passive emotions of fear and pity. The emotion of fear in any case disappeared with the tragedy of fate, and what of pity? This kind of emotion in the Aeschylean Prometheus and in what is connected with it is of a far lesser order than admiration. Indeed something far more, something very different can be identified in the shifting of emotion which has occurred so strongly, in this most essential kind of topicalization. Because even if the tragically aroused reason is no longer fear and pity, it no longer remains only admiration either. It is instead - and now as such seen also in the tragic characters themselves - defiance and hope. These are the only two tragic emotions in the revolutionary relationship, and they do not capitulate before so-called fate. Defiance of course dwindles from and in the helping-victorious characters, the heroes of socialist society and drama; corresponding to no longer antagonistic contradictions, sub¬ stantial solidarity. It is all the more important, however, from and in the failing-victorious characters, the heroes of classically traditional drama, who - in Hebbel’s phrase - have touched on the great sleep of the world. And specific hope, as one which always carried out its proper paradox in this failure and which forms the best reason for pleasure in tragic objects, comes home for the very first time without paradox in socialist theatre. (So that here, however, in the sense of the last plays [‘Romances’] of Shakespeare, of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, the tragic may be dissolved.) Thus the theatre brightens in general in its moral, paradigmatic institution as a cheerful-anticipating one. That is why it is cheerful even in tragedy, not only in critical comedy, not only in the comic play. * That is why the circular horizon of morning spans precisely around the tragic heroes, in fact even around genuine emotion, namely around the noble downfalls of the tragic play. When German again makes a distinction between classical comedy ‘Komodie’ and the ‘LustspieP, a light comic play.

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Schiller says: ‘What has never ever come to pass, that alone will never age’, this statement is doubtless, one would say, exaggerated; and yet there is a material core to it, beneath so much pessimistic and idealistic resignation. Only the statement must read: What has never ever yet quite come to pass, but is imminent as a humanly worthy event and forms the task, precisely this will never age. The active portion of future thus provides the authentic measure for freshness, even in comedy, which criticizes the present, in the comic play which lets it end cosily, and all the more so in the sublimity of the tragic world. Because it becomes clear from the effect of its heroes, an effect rich in hope, that something is not quite right about their downfall, that the element of future raises in it.

MOCKED AND HATED WISHFUL IMAGES, VOLUNTARILY HUMOROUS ONES

If the next thing that happened was that someone used a capital of a hundred million to paint all negroes with white oil paint or to make Africa square,

G. Freytag, The Journalists

it wouldn’t surprise me.

The little word if Much is laughed at in a crooked way which is not amusing. We are fond of smiling at a person who has bad luck, and if that person is clever he will laugh along with us. A particularly stale, but striking kind of joke finds room here. How funny that someone has lost their key and so arrives too late. We tell everybody that we cannot get rid of our cold and it is treated like a good joke. Laughing serves here to make the matter small, peripheral and almost as if it did not exist. On the other hand it is fun, it is also itself funny, to be able to rearrange for oneself, with a little, merely inner finger so to speak, the things which do not suit us or which we are used to in others which do not suit them. Nice, if things were like that, but that things are not like that also arouses laughter. Hence the proverb: if the little word if were not there, there would be many a millionaire. Or: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. This mocking is correct, nevertheless much about it remains curious, even more soon becomes dubious. For such a merry tone loves to spread itself to the place

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where it simply grins and jeers. It spreads itself at the expense of anticipating in general, unusual anticipating. So may primitive man have laughed when a dreamer wanted to demonstrate to him that meat could and would one day be eaten roasted. It is the extremists, they always have the laughers against their side. The matter is wind and will become water like every wind. Not every wind does this of course, but the bourgeois conformist likes to hear it.

‘None of these new-fangled things are any good’ From this point of view the New is most easily, even most heartily mocked. Its bringers disturb, because supposedly man gets used to everything, even to what is bad. Unusual things remain a treasure trove of fun and aversion for the petit bourgeois; this is connected with his insecure self-contentment. The comedians come out with it freely, the new ladies’ hats are ghastly; according to this recipe the jest of the future is now cooked up and served. But of course, it must be added that the joke of this kind also reveals roots in a quite different class and in very old times. From these it lives, the aversion of the bourgeois conformist lives, without knowing it, and only spitefulness is his own growth. The peasant too does not eat what he does not know, he had good reason not to as long as the New came to him from the squire and from the city which plundered the peasants. This has stuck with the peasant for a long time, as an acquired characteristic, it made him, from quite a different basis, join in with the petit-bourgeois cry: None of these new-fangled things are any good. And another reason lies even in a very old, almost archetypally effective fear of innovation: in superstition as the remaining traces from a long past magical age. When the first iron ploughs were introduced into Poland and bad harvests followed, the peasants put it down to the iron and went back to the wooden plough. That is: in the good old days, in the wood, stone, bronze age, iron did not exist, so the later material does not suit the customs which have been handed down here. Likewise: circumcision is performed, in all tribes which practise it as the final trace of primitive human sacrifice, with a wood or stone knife; the temples of the ancient earth-gods could not be built or repaired with iron tools. Related to this, carried over from the old stone-knife to the priestly caste: in Rome the Plebeians finally attained the office of sacerdos which till then had been archaically reserved solely for the patricians. And of course the Roman Catholic God only

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understands Latin; a German mass here would be what iron was for old Mother Earth among the old Polish peasants: challenge, abomination. Thus for superstition all innovations bear the sign: no good will come of it. A trace of the old fear is analogously also used by backward and by anachronistic classes against the future which does not suit them. Something unusual is here in every way a stranger to the country, so it is mocked with a conspicuous counterblow to the wish for surprise.

Le Neant; Another World The joke gets more daring when it tries to demonstrate the New itself in a despicable way. When it even plays with the darkening in it and dissolves it into a tingling horror. The tingling element in it always designates the pleasure in the fact that there is now something odd, i.e. not usual, going on. Very early on the magic theatre picked holes in magic, not so much to disenchant it, as to let a curious, a strange shadow fall for the public even over the wonders of technology. The wishful image of climbing over the old borders is thus, among other things, reduced to a sensational prank; a play-actor can teach an inventor. Tricks with fire belong here: the art of walking on glowing coals, the fire-eater, fire-breather. Powel the Fire-Eater fried a steak on his tongue in 1762 by putting a glowing coal under it; his tongue was coated with an unknown protective salve. The optical illusions belong here, above all the use of reflecting mirrors which have been documented since the sixteenth century. Benvenuto Cellini tells of phantoms which were projected on smoke during a performance in the Colosseum; the mirrors used for this were introduced into Rome from the court of the Tartar Khans. The trick has been retained from this of making living people vanish and appear again with mirrors: ‘Le Neant’ on Montparnasse is a booth which even today spirits away people, even things which were standing on the stage a moment ago and lets them come back from Nothing into Being-here. In 1865 Tobin and Pepper constructed ‘The Cabinet of Proteus’, in which men and women reappeared transformed: naked in their bed of love or in a hair-shirt at the stake. However, ‘Le Neant’ on Montparnasse, does it not seem as if it already wished long before Sartre to devalue and to mock: All progress is progress into - Nothing. There is certainly no lack of this where new things are exaggerated in images. For a hundred years joke-books have been drawing material from

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how man will look in a hundred years. The mocking becomes all the stronger, the more peculiarly the mocker himself is affected by his grotesque cartoons painted in advance. Then of course the caricature can soar to heights which are necessarily missing in the joke-book. A grotesque picture-book is relevant here with text from the nineteenth century on a romantictechnological knife-edge: Grandville’s ‘Another World’ (1844); the author died three years later in a madhouse. A change of connection is made here from the old world to a new one, and the genre portrayal of the change is mixed with friendly genre-scenes of hell. On the title-page are promised: ‘Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions..., Metamorphoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metempsychoses, Apo¬ theoses et autres choses.’ Not all of these promises are kept, nevertheless the curtain rolls up to reveal a complicated-utopian variety. There are reconstructed men, double-eaters, back and front they bear head-biters and tuck in. Tools have long since made themselves independent, they are giant insects of iron, their limbs pincers or levers, their head a blacksmith’s hammer which rivets as it nods. A ‘Concert a la vapeur’ hisses, rattles, jangles up, with no people yet precise: all the instruments are driven by steam, they have almost become steam-engines themselves; an oscillating piston-rod with a hand on it provides the conductor. Even the ‘Mysteres de l’infini’ are technologized: Jupiter, Saturn, Earth, Mars are joined by an iron bridge; the bridge is shown illuminated by gas-lamps, as big as a little moon. Baudelaire said of Grandville and his drawings: ‘He is a diseased literary brain, always obsessed with illegitimate hybrids.. .This man has with superhuman courage spent his life improving creation.’ But in fact the only correct version is that he was the talent to picture out technological Gargantuas and to drive his horror with this foolery. Each of these pictures caricatures, excessively distorts the means of making people happy through technology. On the Palace of Justice of the future the axiom stands: ‘Les crimes sont abolis, il n’y a plus que des passions’* - a serious summit in the jumped-up mockery of utopian nonsense. So much for Grandville and his oracle; a schizophrenic petit-bourgeois, a significant horror of techno¬ logical imagination has eaten too much of Proteus or even Prometheus here, it made him feel sick. And in any case, every oddity, as we have seen, brings a bit of wit with it (cf. p. 102), as its reverse side; which was also noticeable in many products of Surrealism. Outside of Surrealism this can best be demonstrated from the montages of hell, the ‘paradisi ‘Crime has been abolished, only passions remain’.

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voluptatis’ of Hieronymus Bosch, whose mixed novelties were collected by the Spanish court solely for the sake of amusement. And not completely un¬ related appears the peculiar witty horror even in the exaggerated prosthesisfamily of Grandville, as one in which madness and joke break out together. Difficult to deal with this; cheerfulness rescues, itself frivolous, from that remoteness which is becoming demonic, to which man and later the machine can rearrange the world. Wit rescues from extreme artificiality or unhealthi¬ ness of abstract and yet portrayable mixed figures, from the realm of shadows of technological perversion, black utopia. At the same time, however, wit is objectively in it: as a beginning of the ‘grotesque’, which linguistically and factually stems from the ‘grotto’ or underworld, as father or brother of a laughter which precisely must not be absent from hell. Some of this appears in the above-mentioned caricatures, the fear-caricatures of technology and its prostheses. With spiteful or scornful anxiety-dream, full of terror of the technological challenge and of what it is calling. Giant slit-eyes open in a picture of Grandville’s in the sky; the Big Bombers of the future and the atom bomb were not foreseen even by the most terrible scorn.

The ‘Birds’ of Aristophanes and cloud-cuckoo-land Mockery of the New puffs itself up where there is a mandate. A mandate of the ruling class against spreading dissatisfactions and their images. Then eulogists of the old days are sought for, and long before they romantically blew the New away, they started to lay into it satirically. Inherently political satire is undoubtedly more natural to the oppressed class than to the owning class who feel comfortable in the Old and who want to preserve themselves within it. Thus the mockery of Sicilian mime most certainly lived in the people, and even the old Attic comedians did not just listen to what the people said, but also looked into its heart when they made them laugh about the traditional rut. But the reaction during and after the unfortunate Peloponnesian War caused mockery to be increasingly turned against claiming to know better and definitely not against superannuated things. Whereby, with superior means, the hatred of the bourgeois conformist was also mobilized in the demos, in fact the hatred of unusual things and their way. The first political satire was correspondingly reactionary, was directed precisely against utopias; its master: Aristophanes created several of his best comedies at the expense of revolutionary hope. One of the comedies is called ‘Ecclesiazusae’, it mocks the plan for women’s suffrage

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and community of property; another is called ‘Birds’ and mocks socialist utopia per se. Even the nickname ‘cloud-cuckoo-land’ (Nephelokokkygia) literally goes back to the ‘Birds’, as do the majority of humorous genrepictures with which the so-called future state has subsequently been con¬ ceived. Two Athenians suggest to the birds that they should found a city in the clouds, not without intending to fly there themselves. One of them: Peisthetairos (Trusty Friend) makes a ‘rabble-rousing speech’ to finches, tits and swallows, he teaches them that they once ruled the world instead of the gods and will rule it again. The other: Euelpides (Hopegood) believes with dumb loyalty in the founding of the city in the air, in Nephelokokkygia high above, between heaven and earth, controlling both. The city of the birds is supposed to become the realm of freedom: decency and morals are banned there, ‘nature’ rules. Quite in the spirit of the precedence of ‘nature’ over ‘statute’ which the Sophist enlightenment taught, the leader of the chorus turns to the audience: Those of you who wish to spend all your days that are to come living happily with us, the birds, please accept this invitation. All forbidden by your laws thought down there to be a sin is for us in our bird kingdom beautiful and virtuous. But how beautiful and virtuous this naturalness is emerges from the fact that Aristophanes introduces a comrade who defiles everything that gets in his way. And a law is considered, in the perfected malice, the inspired slander-strategy of this comedy, ‘according to which it brings glory to hang and bite your father’. Thus the whole social wishful dream appears here as a mixture of crime and farce; its ‘nature’ itself has no floor except that of cloud vapour. It is just curious that the beautiful city in the clouds, this reflection of all distant isles of happiness, first appeared in literature through the medium of mockery.

Merry outdoing: Lucian’s ‘Vera historia’ For ages the better life has been talked about as if it were already there somewhere. Even strange things can appear as something better because

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they are at least different and unheard of. The form in which this kind of thing is reported is the travelogue or conversely tales in the manner of Sinbad’s. Even fairytales of an ideal state have very often chosen this form; after all the land of happiness typically lies a long way away. On a distant island, in a South Sea; the wonders reported of it are intentionally uncontrollable. The most cheerful mockery of this kind of lie is Lucian’s ‘Vera historia’, there is even a model for Miinchhausen in it. Gottfried Burger took several stories from here almost verbatim, and Thomas More, who translated Lucian’s dialogues, also had no qualms about starting to spin his Utopia with sailor’s yarn. Even Rabelais’ wonderful giant-images (the world in Pantagruel’s mouth consisting of twenty-five inhabited kingdoms, not counting the deserts and a broad stretch of sea) reaped great benefits from the ‘Vera historia’; and Rabelais is the only one who surpassed Lucian in such grotesquerie, namely with Renaissance-dimension. The mere mocker Lucian, in a declining, sceptically destructive society, definitely lacked greatness of utopian mockery; but his scepticism made him give himself over precisely to the dissolute element which was the only thing to make an impression in the wonder-tidings. Not without the fabulous stories, as is very often the case with irony, being mocked so long that the mockery imitated and surpassed them. Thus Lucian gave a choice, fantastic vision of unavailable things, almost itself utopian, quite light, quite carefree, like an inhabitant of the happy islands themselves. He wanted, as the ambitious introduction says, to follow in the footsteps of the great liars, Odysseus at their head, but also poets, philosophers, historians and above all legendary geography. He mocks in particular fabulist writing in the vein of Antonios Diogenes, who had dealt with the ‘wonders beyond Thule’ in no less than twenty-four books. Concerning these events Lucian says: ‘I do not reproach them for their mendacity; but what surprises me is that they feared no discovery. By wishing to participate in the world of writers and liars, and not in a position to be able to report facts (because nothing of significance has happened to me), I will say the only true thing in advance, namely that I am going to tell lies. So I begin with what I neither saw nor heard, and what is more, I will write about things that never happened or could happen.’ Thus Lucian sails, still laughing off the possibility of his own lands of imagination, with fifty other liars beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The known world remains behind (as far as it is not reflected from time to time in the moon, a suspended earth-mirror). And in the unknown world there is everything that Tantalus craves and Zeus withholds. Lucian used motifs from his Syrian homeland which are

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to be found again later in the Arabian Nights, as in the stories of Sinbad the Sailor. There is a kind of bird like Rok, there is a giant fish which swallows Lucian’s ship, and more sparkling horrors besides. There are also alcoholic motifs, ‘Vinland’-motifs which only re-emerge in medieval travellegends, pictures of discovery. For on the island beyond the Pillars of Hercules the traveller sees giant footprints, those of Hercules and Dionysus. And following these he reaches a flowing river of wine, with fish which cause intoxication, with women on the river-bank who have been partly turned into vines and thus make doubly drunk. On the other hand, Lucian allots liquid air as a drink to the inhabitants of the moon, 1700 years before its production, while (so that nonsense is still proved right) colossal spiders cover the space between moon and morning star with a traversable web. But far more peculiar is this: the ship of lies on its voyage into the Atlantic is in fact underway in order to track down, literally: to track down ‘where the limit of the ocean is and which men live on the opposite shore’. This is clearer than the famous prophecy of Seneca that one day the girdle of the ocean would break apart, but the forecast of the opposite shore of the Atlantic is written in a work of mockery on lies and fantasy. Of course: if the truthful narrator then reaches a wonder-city, he again portrays it as fatuous for its sheer magic, and the wonderland still only consists of impossibility. To this extent the Lucian approach even provides a very good, in fact funny antidote to the poets who lie, especially to the Miinchhausens who utopianize. However, it remains a different thing whether a Miinchhausen occasionally utopianizes too in order to enhance his hunting tales, or whether a utopian enlists the wonders of travel to colour his happy island really boldly. The intentions in both are fundamen¬ tally different, just as the windbaggeries of Miinchhausen and the fairytales of happiness of a Thomas More are different in their methods. Even the most abstract utopian had nothing impossible, just sheer possibilities in mind, even if their true story was still so cock-eyed and still outstanding. There is no river flowing with wine, but an overflow for all, which likewise does not exist, immediately passes from the merry He into the merriest task.

Voluntary-humorous wishful images Finally there are rash dreams which believe in new things and yet laugh over them. They do this voluntarily, need no mockers from outside, they are already born humorous. And precisely because available things shift

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in them in a baffling way, with future everywhere and not believed as true. In a particularly funny way the formation of living creatures that have been swopped around presents itself for such games. Maurice Renard saw to this with the knife in his Gothic Novel ‘Docteur Lerne’, which dealt with the exchanging of brains. A doctor inserts calves’ brains into lions’ heads, monkeys’ brains into human heads and vice-versa. Thus he changes and mixes the species, his own nephew is raging in a bull into which he has inserted this nephew’s brain. The criminal doctor has killed himself long before and implanted his brain into the head of his great teacher, in whose body and titles he now lives. If that is surgical wishful mockery, it becomes electric-erotic in Villiers de Pile Adam in his Edison novel ‘The future Eve’, a kind of fairground booth with mechanical mermaids, but really alive. The creation (re-creation) of a woman by Edison is related here, the American wonderman himself. The inventor creates for Lord Ewald a precious imitation of Alicia, the Lord’s very beautiful mistress, made even more beautiful by the technologically added soul of a higher female being. Pure metal, perfumed flesh, the new mysteries of the microphone, phonograph, electric current (‘The future Eve’ appeared in 1886) combine to make the ‘Automate-electro-humain’. What the automaton-artists of the Rococo, what Spallanzani in ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ began, is completed here so to speak; for the new Olympia is not a doll any more, but a factive ideal of woman. Despite Edison the line is of course not modem, the plan itself: the virgo optime perfecta is even found in antiquity. She is conceived of magically in the Pygmalion myth, and Aphrodite was gracious to the sculptor because she animated the immaculate statue un¬ troubled by any organic frustration. And going further, again into the comic: In a preserved fragment of the Roman academic farce, in M. Terentius Varro’s ‘Liberated Prometheus’ the Titan opens a human-factory after his liberation, from which Goldshoe, a rich man, orders a girl ‘made of milk and finest wax, like the Milesian bees collect’. The joke is however the same as in the Edison novel, and its goal remains the old Homunculus which is just cultivated immediately as a synthentic virgin. An authentic new line in the electric-utopian field of humour, even field of paradox was first entered upon by H. G. Wells with his ‘Time Machine’. This machine is also much more effective as a story than Wells’ later lemonade¬ like liberal fairytales of an ideal state. The time-machine does not travel right or left, but only back and forth on the time-line, as a no longer imaginary axis of space. The inventor swings himself up on to the unheard of vehicle in his laboratory, sets the lever to the future. It becomes night

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around him, namely the coming one, becomes the day of tomorrow, becomes next week in an hour, becomes future winter and summer, which with an increasing number of revolutions of the machine only appear as a reflection of white and green. Decades are dashed through, centuries. Finally the traveller switches off the motor in the landscape which - in the same place in space as his room - will be in the year 802701. There he meets completely harmless people who have stayed at the level of children, singing, dancing, twining flowers; under the ground, however, the Morlocks live, sticky-blackish creatures of far higher intelligence. They are the proletarians of far higher intelligence. They are the proletarians of previous times, and the flower people are the rich who have grown stupid in idleness, they are now kept as cattle by the Morlocks, as living meat-supplies. After many dangers, the time-traveller returns from the year 802701 to his present friends, with a flower in his hand which does not grow currently on the whole of the earth. He promises to divulge the secret of the machine as soon as he has tried out the other direction in time, the past one. But from this journey, Wells assures us, the traveller did not return, either because he settled in the Ice Age, or because, slipping back further into the past, he fell prey to an ichthyosaurus. So much for this interesting prank, it plays like a virtuoso on the popular conception of time, it plays less like a virtuoso on the popular bourgeois conformist conception according to which ‘since man never changes’ there will still be classes even in hundreds of thousands of years. The class of the idlers up there, even though now edible, the workers down there, even though with the only remaining intelligence, that of canal-creatures. The last, the total Morlock-portrait that Aldous Huxley supplied beyond Wells, with the ironic Shakespeare title ‘Brave New World’ ends in a completely reactionary way. In this only reflex-people inhabit the future, clean, without feelings, unsentimentally divided into the reflex-groups of robots and leaders. Individuals are abolished, society functions as a switchboard, and the idiotic wishful image which Huxley makes out to be one belonging to the commu¬ nists or to the fascists, all the same to him apparently, is screamingly funny so to speak. It is bursting so much with laughter that it does not even know how to distinguish monopoly capitalism from socialization of the means of production. Thus the liberal bourgeoisie has become incapable of utopian humour; its game ends in horror and stupidity. As the individualagitator Huxley shows, is only still capable of the murder of hope and anti-utopia. Instead of this, it is better to stick to ‘The future Eve’, par¬ ticularly to the ‘Time Machine’ as far as it remains technical, and to related

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humorous stories. Precisely socialism has room for voluntary-humorous wishful images of a genuine, future kind; in fact they will be able to form a separate amusing genre of writing within it, that of effervescing projects. When one day a little Golden Age starts to begin, it will still be possible to exaggerate many wishful images, but not to caricature any of them.

HAPPY END, SEEN THROUGH AND YET STILL DEFENDED

I’d like to dance a Can-Can, As brazen as Pompadour, For we Parisian lasses can Think only l’amour, l’amour. Offenbach, Paris Life The salesman also has hours when he leans on a sugar barrel and is lost in sweet daydreams. Then it’s like a twenty-five pound load on his heart to think that he’s been chained to the shop like a watch-dog to its kennel ever since he was a boy. If your knowledge of the world’s confined to what you’ve picked up from shoddy chap-books with half their pages missing, if you only know the sunset from an attic window, and the evening glow merely from what customers tell you, then you feel an emptiness inside which all the oilkegs of the south and all the herring-kegs of the north can’t fill, a blandness which all the mace in India can’t season. Nestroy, On the Razzle

We know only too well men want to be deceived. But this not only because stupid people are in the majority. But because men, born to pleasure, have none, because they are crying out for pleasure. This at first even makes clever people one-track and simple at times, they are taken in by glitter, and it is not even necessary for the glitter to promise gold, here it can be enough that it glitters. We learn by our mistakes, but soon the obsession is at work again and hopes that this time it will not be deceived. It keeps itself fresh for the emergency and does not want to miss it; meanwhile however, new children with unburnt fingers are always growing up, new deceivers are always hooking into a weakness which could also be a strength. For this obsession still has a weakness for happiness, for laughing ultimately,

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and it is not of the beaten-up opinion that anything better could seldom follow. The exploiting of weakness need not come about through swindlers, on a small or large scale. Glossing over is sought after everywhere, bad books are full of it. But, characteristically, the sugar increases towards the end, it rises or rises up so to speak. Life is dubious, but on balance it should be worth it. Even the man who has otherwise learnt by experience is thus impressed by all’s well that ends well. There is a lot to be said for condemning outright the illusion at the end. When we consider the disaster which it has sown and sows today, in increasing fashion. Where work no longer gives any pleasure at all, art is forced to be good fun, merry swindle, tacked-on happy end. This keeps hold of the listeners; at the end of the Fascist national community* or of the American way of life everyone will get something, and indeed without the least thing having to be changed in existing reality. The cinemagoers and the readers of magazine stories catch sight of rosy red upward paths, as if they were the norm in present society, and only chance has blocked them for the chance viewer. Indeed, the happy end becomes all the more unavoidable in capitalist terms, the smaller the chances of moving upwards have become in the society that exists today, the less hope the latter can offer. In addition there is the ‘moral’ dosage of the good outcome; because not everyone becomes rich and happy, there is not enough sugar for this even in the magazine world. Rather, a bank account is only reserved for the virtuous, and misery for the wicked, and only for them; thus one of the most brazen inversions of the real situation takes place. The Rich Man Hotel is occupied everywhere by good people; but the many bad things, hunger, slums, prisons, which the ruling society cannot abolish and cannot even deny, are expediently allotted to the morally bad. These are the old Sunday sermons of crafty edification which have now become complete hypocrisy and part of the cosmetic industry too. ‘If money’, says Marx, ‘comes into the world with natural bloodstains on one cheek, then capital does so from head to toe, bleeding and dripping with filth at every pore’; thus it needs, all the more, the longer it goes on, a mask for the outcome, happiness of honesty at the outcome. The happy end is however not only a lie, it has also become shallower than at any other time, it confines itself to the smile of the car and perfume advertisements. Well-groomed gentlemen and ladies show the high-life of a declining society, without sweetness of life being compressed into this end as in ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: a National Socialist expression.

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the Rococo. The happiness of bourgeois wealth has itself become as crass as it is empty, its happiness borders in reality more on the void than the dead themselves. Nevertheless, this lying, prescribed happy end deceives millions for whom it replaces the church’s empty promises of the other world, and it is prescribed only for the sake of deception. With imagination that is always newly warmed up the poor devil who builds himself up in golden dreams is supposed to remain in the belief that these dreams are certainly fulfillable in capitalism, at least in capitalism plus patience and a little time to wait. But for the little man there is no stock-market killing, every rosy red ends for him as Black Friday. There are very sophisticated capitalist fireworks, not only in an optical respect, against which the socialist world can hardly compete. But after all the snakes of lightning and boxes of stars, de luxe Venetian bombs and the Queen of the Night, there follows the violent thunder-flash bomb and that is the highlight and the conclusion of the matter. Everything capitalism stages with happy end, business like never before, Greater Germany,* America first, even keep smiling, leads into death. In the most uninspired way the beautiful in the world of the whitewashed graves becomes the beginning of the terrible. And yet this is only one side of illusion, which is itself false. An un¬ mistakable drive is working in the direction of the good end, it is not only confined to gullibility. The fact that deceivers make use of this drive disproves it au fond almost as little as the ‘socialist’ Hitler disproved socialism. The deceivability of the happy end drive merely says something against the state of its reason; this, however, is as teachable as it is improvable. The deception represents the good end as if it were attainable in an unchanged Today of society or even the Today itself. But just because knowledge destroys rotten optimism, it does not also destroy urgent hope for a good end. For this hope is too indestructibly grounded in the human drive for happiness, and it has always been too clearly a motor of history. It has been so as expectation and incitement of a positively visible goal, for which it is important to fight and which sends a Forwards into barrenly continuing time. More than once the fiction of a happy end, when it seized the will, when the will had learnt both through mistakes and in fact through hope as well, and when reality did not stand in too harsh contradiction to it, reformed a bit of the world; that is: an initial fiction was made real.

A National Socialist concept.

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Sometimes even, when there was great belief, a paradox succeeded: the victory of the urgent the nasty probable. If the the good probable is left even the improbable can

over the mighty enemy, of the cheerful over will-content of the goal is missing, then even undone; if the goal remains, however, then be done or at least made more probable for

later. Not even the breaking of the chain at its weakest link succeeded and succeeds, if the breakers do not have the Positivum: anti-chain wholly in mind. Men reduce themselves when their purpose is reduced, whereas when it is great and cheerful it makes itself unavoidable in a world which only still has the choice between swamp or energetic new construction before it. So it never befits the colour red to be voluntarily timid. Every barrier, when it is felt as such, is at at the same time crossed. For just coming up against it presupposes a movement which goes beyond it and contains this in embryo. This is the most simple dialectical At-the-same-time in the objective factor, primarily when it completes and activates the consciousness of the barrier. Then consciousness reaches the other side in a mediated way, enters into the struggle for the happy end, which already senses itself, almost announces itself in the dissatisfaction with what is available. The discontented person then sees all at once how bad capitalist conditions are and how urgently the socialist beginnings need him, how good their consequence can and will be. This makes the barrier into a rung, assuming that the other side, the happiness of the goal, always remains present on the path. And the indispensable insight, unalterable, into the economic laws attests that these laws have, as recognized and used laws, the stuff in them to lead to a good end. Thus socialism does not need to borrow from other colours, customs, powers, as though its own colour were not sufficient. It does not need to do this above all when these colours or frames lie so much on this side of the crossed barrier and have already supported such very different things that they cannot easily, nor unequivocally be re-functioned. Socialism, which possesses and keeps its path to the happy end as its own, is precisely also as a cultural inheritance a socialism through its own creative power, its own fullness-goal, without plush, without intellectual timidity. The nouveau riche bourgeoisie of the second half of the previous century did not get by with its own material; so it cultivated finery and substitutes with bows, little covers, masked houses and pictures, uncomprehended ornaments, palatial fa9ades, historicisms; and the substitutes really looked the part. This is all miles away from socialism, which never ploughs

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with a strange team, which unmasks and aesthetically condemns masquerade and swankiness with social criticism. ‘Griinderzeiten’ are foreign bodies here, particularly noticeable in socialism; it finds no path to the cultural inheritance which goes through the parlour either. Politically the revolu¬ tionary proletariat never borders on the petit-bourgeoisie, how should it do so culturally? In reality this kind of thing is never practised either; because a practice which has no realistic theory behind it and in its favour, would not be one, is impossible in socialism. Indeed, socialism does not incorporate the genuine cultural inheritance either in such a way that it begins with it and then continues to build on it as if it were a finished first floor so to speak. Instead, the drive to build is moral here for the first time in the history of civilization, is the building of a world without exploitation and its ideology. Furthermore, neither bareness nor epigonism characterize this work, but the matching colours red and gold, manifestly a splendidly bold match. However, already contained in the red is the gold that brings affinity to the best from tradition and forms its classical material - as growing substance, not as previous local form. Therefore: fresh air and great breadth belong to this outcome, as the one in which no plush happy end hangs any more and none from the laurelscheme of historicism. There are enough merry trading centres on the stream to the true happy end; for this flows solely through socialism. As observed above, every barrier, if it is felt as such, is already crossed. But equally: no barrier is actively crossed without the intended goal drifting ahead in genuine images and concepts and transposing us into such significant conditions. See the outcome of things as friendly, that is then not always foolish or stupid. The stupid drive to a good end can become a clever one, passive belief a knowledgeable and summoning one. To this extent we can proceed to the defence of the old merry farewell celebration, for it invites us, partly, to eat, not only to contemplate. And this wanting to eat has sometimes first made us sensitive to the block which - in the shape of the existing society - forces itself between the idea and the pleasure-banquet. Whereas people who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis. Unconditional pessimism therefore promotes the business of reaction not much less than artificially conditioned optimism; the latter is nevertheless not so stupid that it does not believe in anything at all. It does not immortalize the trudging of the little life, does not give humanity the face of a chloroformed gravestone. It does not give the world

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the deathly sad background in front of which it is not worth doing anything at all. In contrast to a pessimism which itself belongs to rottenness and may serve it, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from its eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it. For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is under¬ standable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference, hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone. Otherwise there would not in fact be, despite all mistakes in propaganda, the delays until socialism ignites in the massive majority whose interests belong to it, without it knowing. Thus pessimism is paralysis per se, whereas even the most rotten optimism can still be the stupefaction from which there is an awakening. Even the contentment with the minimum for existence so long as it is there, the shortsightedness in the daily struggle for bread and the miserable triumphs in this struggle ultimately stem from the disbelief in the goal; the first thing is therefore to break into this. It is no coincidence that capitalism has striven to spread, apart from the false happy end, its own genuine nihilism. Because this is the stronger danger and, in contrast to the happy end, cannot be corrected at all, except through its own demise. The truth is its demise, as expropriating and as liberating truth, towards a humanity which is finally socially possible. So truth then, sweeping clean, an instruction to build, is in no way grieving or ice. On the contrary, its attitude is, becomes, remains critical-militant optimism, and this orientates itself in the Become always towards the Not-Yet-Become, towards viable possibilities of the light. It creates the readiness, which is uninter¬ rupted and informed of tendency, to risk the intervention into what has not yet been achieved. As long as no absolute In-Vain (triumph of evil) has appeared, then the happy end of the right direction and path is not only our pleasure, but our duty. Where the dead bury their dead, grieving may rightly take place and failure may be the existential condition. Where snobs participated as traitors in the revolution until it broke out, all that is left to pray may in fact be: Give us this day our daily illusion. Where the capitalist sum no longer works out anywhere, the bankrupt may in fact be forced to pour and spread a blot over the ledger of the whole of existence, so that the world in general looks coal-black and no inspector will call the nightmaker to account. All this is an even worse deception than that of the radiant fa9ades which can no longer be kept up. The work against this, with which history continues, indeed has been continuing

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for a long time, leads to the matter which could be good, not as abyss, but as mountain into the future. Mankind and the world carry enough good future; no plan is itself good without this fundamental belief within it.

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