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The Spirit of Utopia
I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation―which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto―concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.
298 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1918
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About the author
Ernst Bloch
197 books140 followersErnst Bloch was one of the great philosophers and political intellectuals of twentieth-century Germany. Among his works to have appeared in English are The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford University Press, 2000), Literary Essays (Stanford University Press, 1998), The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (1987), and The Principle of Hope (1986).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 21, 2020
Virtually everybody quotes the opening lines to the work: "I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start." Maybe that is because they were unable to get much further into the book... Typical of so many other German philosophers from the period of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel through Martin Heidegger, Bloch buries the reader in a nearly incomprehensible word salad that seems to betray an intellectual inferiority complex, rather than provide any philosophical illumination. Instead of coming out and saying what he means, he exhausts the reader with a lengthy and ill-informed section on music criticism, perhaps inferring that the clever and worthy reader would be able to elicit, extrapolate, and otherwise piece together Bloch's philosophy thereby. Bloch, and several of his German fellows, are precisely what gives philosophy a bad name among lay people today, and what turns them off toward it, despite its necessary and foundational application in life.
This is not to say that reading this unnecessarily long, painful, ranting string of the most uncommonly-used longest multisyllabic words Bloch could find is entirely without benefit. The diligent reader will find everything from pearls of wisdom to very quotable one-liners. It's just that these little treasures are separated by the vast, arid expanse of Bloch convincing himself that he is good enough and smart enough owing to his over-educated-sounding prattle.
Bloch begins by affirming the need for Marxist revolution and returns to that train of thought periodically. The entire rest of the book betrays a rather bourgeois attachment to art, culture, religion, and the finer things of life, such that if Bloch actually lived in the gathering Marxist regime he praised, the Soviet Union, he would have ended up convicted of being an aesthete and in prison sharing a cell with Vladimir Bukovsky.
He claims to be in favor of Socialism, but apart from his bourgeois attachments, he also reveals himself to be quite the German nationalist (vice the internationalist that Socialism is supposed to promote). Don't get me wrong: he accuses imperial Germany of despicable nationalism in causing the late war (his first draft was published during World War I), and he rejects the more extreme versions of nationalism even then percolating into Nazi toxin. However, in the endless pages of music criticism, he reduces composers of any real import to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner, all of whom, you may have noticed, spring from among the German peoples. He tends to discount German Jewish composers for the most part, but was willing to consider his favorite German Jewish composer an "honorary" German, as a sort of condescending, patronizing compliment, I'm sure. Which is to say, the fact that he permits himself a favorite German Jewish composer sets him apart from his young proto-Nazi contemporaries.
In like manner, he reduces the significant cultures of the world to Egypt, Greece, and Germany/Gothic civilization. For that matter, the only real significant philosophers were Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Karl Marx, with Friedrich Nietzsche making a pretty good honorable mention, and a few other mentioned by-the-bye, like Blaise Pascal and that fellow Plato. His ethnocentrism is likely to be shocking to many of today's readers, especially for an "internationalist" Socialist.
So what is he really getting at, through all this dense swamp of almost incomprehensible vocabulary? Despite his paltry nod toward Plato, Bloch is 100% Platonist, and very self-centered/egotistical as a result. He goes so far as to make the astonishing claim:
every organism first became on the way toward human form, which had always been meant by us alone. So little did man appear last and as though fortuitously, that everything that took shape before him is pure larve, indeed deformations and errors, which the proper kind of presentiment had first to remove and eliminate. (p 233, emphasis in original)
Also: "man is not the point of nature, but rather just the strongest, most diurnal, clearest objectivation of Will." (p 147) Let's hope some superior alien race doesn't land near poor old Bloch and dissuade him of the notion of the primacy of humankind...
Other samples showing Bloch's self-centeredness: "we seek the artist who lets us approach ourselves purely, encounter ourselves," (p 43) and, "We hear only ourselves. For we are gradually becoming blind to the outside," (p 47) and, "We have never really wanted anything but to see ourselves openly." (p 18) Or, "one simply cannot omit oneself when one is building with the energies of the Son of Man inside oneself," (p 25) and, "We have become more individual, searching, homeless; we are formed more flowingly, the self of us all rises up close by." (p 27, emphasis in original) One gets the distinct impression that Bloch was the sort of fellow who had to wander around Bohemian-style for a year or six after finishing college to go "find himself." Perhaps some of this self-focus is the result of Bloch's own discomfort around other people being mirror-imaged onto all of humanity: "But we hear only ourselves...This has to do with the highly insecure and derivative way people feel together." (p 94)
What seems to be really bothering Bloch, what prompted him to write this in the first place, was the idea that something so fine as a human being might not live to 100% of his or her potential: "The problem which arose foremost was: who lives this life in its totality." (p 163) Since our mediocrity and failure to live life fully stared Bloch right in the face, his only conclusion was that reincarnation must be taking place, so that we can keep trying until we get it right:
Memory itself is already a very strange gift, where the intimacy of the lived moment is preserved for another time, and the concept of the transmigration of souls, as the unity of Epimetheus and Prometheus, is absolutely able without contradiction to add hope to this gift, a higher metaphysical enigma. (p 261)
And:
from its migrations the soul gains only the power to bend external destiny to itself, to use it, to shape it to be ironically conformal with itself, to use it, like death, as the equipment for very unworldly goals, to achieve this destiny intelligibly, in the midst of the empirical world, by going through this world. (p 265)
In this he breaks hard from Marx and Socialism, criticizing Marx for unnecessarily giving up religion, when only our attachment to and grasping toward God (a rather heterodox God custom-made by Bloch, to be sure) will permit humans to retain the necessary focus and rise above the empirical world that Bloch holds in contempt:
everyone producing according to his abilities, everybody consuming according to his needs, everyone openly "comprehended" according to the degree of his assistance, his moral-spiritual lay ministry and humanity's journey through the world's darkness. (p 246)
However, despite his strong condemnation of the Great War as the defense of the reactionary establishment and big business, he joins Marx in calling for violent, remorseless revolution to bring about his intended utopia: "a revolutionary mission absolutely inscribed in utopia." (p 237) Further:
as a rule the soul must assume guilt in order to destroy the existing evil, in order not to assume even more guilt by an idyllic retreat, a hypocritical connivance in injustice. Dominance and power in themselves are evil, but it is necessary to confront power in terms of power, as a categorical imperative with revolver in hand. (p 242)
Bloch naturally completely fails to address the obvious consequences of such calls for violent revolution, chiefly, the fact that a system born of such violence will tend to continue to perpetuate it, even after the revolution. This of course was witnessed already by the Jacobins, and would later repeat itself in Joseph Stalin's purges and Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution, etc. This is exacerbated by Bloch's own contempt of the rule of law (another trait almost universal with his fellow Socialists): "all law, far and away the preponderance of criminal law, too, is merely the ruling class's means of maintaining a rule of law protecting its interests." (p 239) He reveals his own antipathy toward government itself, "the state as coercive formation culminates in the military state," (p 239) but surely recognizes that collectivism can only be imposed (and has only been imposed) through main force, hence Bloch's own calls for bloody revolution. His version of Socialism leads to:
the basic motif of socialist ideology: to bestow on every human being time outside of work, his own need, boredom, wretchedness, privation and gloom, his own submerged light calling, a life in the Dostoevskyan sense, so that he will have set things right with himself. (p 268)
Yet this Socialism is not the regular, atheist variety, but one of Bloch's heterodox, reincarnating Christian version:
So the basic metaphysical phenomenon of true Christian charity remains this: that it lets one who loves live completely within his fellow, without substituting his soul or the soul of him whom he loves but into the We, into the salvation of all these souls, the preserved And and About Us no longer marked by anything alien to us. (p 212)
Bloch seems to have the young man's fixation on death, perhaps magnified by World War I and the fact that many of his contemporaries either came home from the front as traumatized cripples or not at all. He even posits: "there can never be too much death and end for one person alone." (p 259) But for all his fascination about death, his thoughts about reincarnation seem to allay them, especially as such reincarnation takes place through the action of lovers together.
For all of its flaws, some of Bloch's syncretic approaches to various religions can be provocative, if not especially well-grounded, theologically speaking. And despite its generally verbose nature, Bloch slides in some pithy one-liners that are quite penetrating and insightful. I wish I could easily publish my highlights and notes, but alas!, I could not find a commercial copy for my Kindle, so I had fall back on an available pdf instead.
If one is highly motivated by the study of Utopianism, Socialism, or perhaps philosophy generally, then this book probably belongs on your reading list (though not necessarily right at the top). For all of its occasional benefits, Bloch's maddening style make this much more work than it tends to be worth, so I'm afraid I can't give it more recommendation than that.
This is not to say that reading this unnecessarily long, painful, ranting string of the most uncommonly-used longest multisyllabic words Bloch could find is entirely without benefit. The diligent reader will find everything from pearls of wisdom to very quotable one-liners. It's just that these little treasures are separated by the vast, arid expanse of Bloch convincing himself that he is good enough and smart enough owing to his over-educated-sounding prattle.
Bloch begins by affirming the need for Marxist revolution and returns to that train of thought periodically. The entire rest of the book betrays a rather bourgeois attachment to art, culture, religion, and the finer things of life, such that if Bloch actually lived in the gathering Marxist regime he praised, the Soviet Union, he would have ended up convicted of being an aesthete and in prison sharing a cell with Vladimir Bukovsky.
He claims to be in favor of Socialism, but apart from his bourgeois attachments, he also reveals himself to be quite the German nationalist (vice the internationalist that Socialism is supposed to promote). Don't get me wrong: he accuses imperial Germany of despicable nationalism in causing the late war (his first draft was published during World War I), and he rejects the more extreme versions of nationalism even then percolating into Nazi toxin. However, in the endless pages of music criticism, he reduces composers of any real import to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner, all of whom, you may have noticed, spring from among the German peoples. He tends to discount German Jewish composers for the most part, but was willing to consider his favorite German Jewish composer an "honorary" German, as a sort of condescending, patronizing compliment, I'm sure. Which is to say, the fact that he permits himself a favorite German Jewish composer sets him apart from his young proto-Nazi contemporaries.
In like manner, he reduces the significant cultures of the world to Egypt, Greece, and Germany/Gothic civilization. For that matter, the only real significant philosophers were Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Karl Marx, with Friedrich Nietzsche making a pretty good honorable mention, and a few other mentioned by-the-bye, like Blaise Pascal and that fellow Plato. His ethnocentrism is likely to be shocking to many of today's readers, especially for an "internationalist" Socialist.
So what is he really getting at, through all this dense swamp of almost incomprehensible vocabulary? Despite his paltry nod toward Plato, Bloch is 100% Platonist, and very self-centered/egotistical as a result. He goes so far as to make the astonishing claim:
every organism first became on the way toward human form, which had always been meant by us alone. So little did man appear last and as though fortuitously, that everything that took shape before him is pure larve, indeed deformations and errors, which the proper kind of presentiment had first to remove and eliminate. (p 233, emphasis in original)
Also: "man is not the point of nature, but rather just the strongest, most diurnal, clearest objectivation of Will." (p 147) Let's hope some superior alien race doesn't land near poor old Bloch and dissuade him of the notion of the primacy of humankind...
Other samples showing Bloch's self-centeredness: "we seek the artist who lets us approach ourselves purely, encounter ourselves," (p 43) and, "We hear only ourselves. For we are gradually becoming blind to the outside," (p 47) and, "We have never really wanted anything but to see ourselves openly." (p 18) Or, "one simply cannot omit oneself when one is building with the energies of the Son of Man inside oneself," (p 25) and, "We have become more individual, searching, homeless; we are formed more flowingly, the self of us all rises up close by." (p 27, emphasis in original) One gets the distinct impression that Bloch was the sort of fellow who had to wander around Bohemian-style for a year or six after finishing college to go "find himself." Perhaps some of this self-focus is the result of Bloch's own discomfort around other people being mirror-imaged onto all of humanity: "But we hear only ourselves...This has to do with the highly insecure and derivative way people feel together." (p 94)
What seems to be really bothering Bloch, what prompted him to write this in the first place, was the idea that something so fine as a human being might not live to 100% of his or her potential: "The problem which arose foremost was: who lives this life in its totality." (p 163) Since our mediocrity and failure to live life fully stared Bloch right in the face, his only conclusion was that reincarnation must be taking place, so that we can keep trying until we get it right:
Memory itself is already a very strange gift, where the intimacy of the lived moment is preserved for another time, and the concept of the transmigration of souls, as the unity of Epimetheus and Prometheus, is absolutely able without contradiction to add hope to this gift, a higher metaphysical enigma. (p 261)
And:
from its migrations the soul gains only the power to bend external destiny to itself, to use it, to shape it to be ironically conformal with itself, to use it, like death, as the equipment for very unworldly goals, to achieve this destiny intelligibly, in the midst of the empirical world, by going through this world. (p 265)
In this he breaks hard from Marx and Socialism, criticizing Marx for unnecessarily giving up religion, when only our attachment to and grasping toward God (a rather heterodox God custom-made by Bloch, to be sure) will permit humans to retain the necessary focus and rise above the empirical world that Bloch holds in contempt:
everyone producing according to his abilities, everybody consuming according to his needs, everyone openly "comprehended" according to the degree of his assistance, his moral-spiritual lay ministry and humanity's journey through the world's darkness. (p 246)
However, despite his strong condemnation of the Great War as the defense of the reactionary establishment and big business, he joins Marx in calling for violent, remorseless revolution to bring about his intended utopia: "a revolutionary mission absolutely inscribed in utopia." (p 237) Further:
as a rule the soul must assume guilt in order to destroy the existing evil, in order not to assume even more guilt by an idyllic retreat, a hypocritical connivance in injustice. Dominance and power in themselves are evil, but it is necessary to confront power in terms of power, as a categorical imperative with revolver in hand. (p 242)
Bloch naturally completely fails to address the obvious consequences of such calls for violent revolution, chiefly, the fact that a system born of such violence will tend to continue to perpetuate it, even after the revolution. This of course was witnessed already by the Jacobins, and would later repeat itself in Joseph Stalin's purges and Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution, etc. This is exacerbated by Bloch's own contempt of the rule of law (another trait almost universal with his fellow Socialists): "all law, far and away the preponderance of criminal law, too, is merely the ruling class's means of maintaining a rule of law protecting its interests." (p 239) He reveals his own antipathy toward government itself, "the state as coercive formation culminates in the military state," (p 239) but surely recognizes that collectivism can only be imposed (and has only been imposed) through main force, hence Bloch's own calls for bloody revolution. His version of Socialism leads to:
the basic motif of socialist ideology: to bestow on every human being time outside of work, his own need, boredom, wretchedness, privation and gloom, his own submerged light calling, a life in the Dostoevskyan sense, so that he will have set things right with himself. (p 268)
Yet this Socialism is not the regular, atheist variety, but one of Bloch's heterodox, reincarnating Christian version:
So the basic metaphysical phenomenon of true Christian charity remains this: that it lets one who loves live completely within his fellow, without substituting his soul or the soul of him whom he loves but into the We, into the salvation of all these souls, the preserved And and About Us no longer marked by anything alien to us. (p 212)
Bloch seems to have the young man's fixation on death, perhaps magnified by World War I and the fact that many of his contemporaries either came home from the front as traumatized cripples or not at all. He even posits: "there can never be too much death and end for one person alone." (p 259) But for all his fascination about death, his thoughts about reincarnation seem to allay them, especially as such reincarnation takes place through the action of lovers together.
For all of its flaws, some of Bloch's syncretic approaches to various religions can be provocative, if not especially well-grounded, theologically speaking. And despite its generally verbose nature, Bloch slides in some pithy one-liners that are quite penetrating and insightful. I wish I could easily publish my highlights and notes, but alas!, I could not find a commercial copy for my Kindle, so I had fall back on an available pdf instead.
If one is highly motivated by the study of Utopianism, Socialism, or perhaps philosophy generally, then this book probably belongs on your reading list (though not necessarily right at the top). For all of its occasional benefits, Bloch's maddening style make this much more work than it tends to be worth, so I'm afraid I can't give it more recommendation than that.
November 3, 2022
hab original maximal 1% von dem geschreibsel gerafft ich weiß nicht was ernst bloch mir mit dem buch mitteilen wollte
August 25, 2020
The Spirit of Utopia, known for its influence upon the thinking of Adorno and his contributions to the Frankfurt School philosophy, is a wonderfully composed and creatively structured text which, though it says only so much in many many words, has its thrilling passages that are sure to further and expound even the slightest of Utopian thoughts.
Bloch opens with a rather poetic statement of society's State insofar as he sees it. As he makes quite clear in his penultimate section, "The Shape of the Inconstruable Question", Bloch's theory appears quite Hegelian in its own way. Doubling down on that, the second and by far the longest section, "The Philosophy of Music" Bloch attempts to rouse the philosophical question, the unbounded thought, the question of substantiating the human Spirit, by tracing a path through the history and evolution of music.
This section is incredibly dense. Not just in Bloch's own style of writing but in his revealing of such depth of knowledge when it comes to his analysis. His references not only to particular composers, but to their contemporaries and the effects with which one had upon the other. Without having some idea of who he references, things can get a little hard to follow. That being said, Bloch most definitely presents an entrancing thread through history not by tracing the most prominent cases of human action, but by tracing the most prominent demands of particular human satisfaction. Bloch, much like Hegel, sees an circular influence of Society and Spirit which is emphasized by exposing the thought and the preference applied to music since antiquity. For Bloch, The Philosophy of Music is precisely the awakening agent for the dormant Spirit as he saw it.
After the lengthy exposition of musical philosophy, the medium and the contours of the Spirit have been divulged. It is from here in which Bloch now poses the Inconstruable Question. This question is one which Bloch poses as something more recent and, indeed, we see this in his criticism of Kant's philosophy as something inhuman in its nature which, he believes, is why it was possible for his symmetrical holism; the notion of his Pure and Practical reason. This is where Bloch makes his stance clear by not only pitting Hegel against Kant, but by emphasizing Hegel's intentional asymmetry. Hegel wasn't intending to delude anyone with his Phenomenology, himself included. Hegel, like Bloch, sees the Spirit as something inevitable and necessitating of enrichment. It is here that Bloch speaks to the fire that went up too quickly, as a result of the optimism and innocence of the newly enlightened thinker and, as such, it could not help supressing itself to smoke.
The cornerstone of Bloch's thought is finalized with the final section, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse." Bloch emphasizes the unity of Marxism which he appreciates for its simplistic approach to the unknown in its attempt to insulate itself with its then quite scientific veneer. Bloch's primary purpose here is to disassemble the purity of Marxist doctrine and expose it as it is: an Idea, just like any other. Death, being another importance to the Spirit, is something else that Bloch tackles, though I didn't personally find anything too enlivening here. He seeks to make Death something of wonder while rationalizing it insofar as it can be without making it exactly Nothing. The final subject, the Apocalypse, is Bloch's term for the reinvigorated Spirit of Society (which, to me, seemed relatively similar to the modern Marxist notion of "infinite revolution") which is simply the salvation and redemption of us all – something that is only possible when we are freed from the Idea and the Notion as Absolute.
Three stars mostly because of the effort I personally had to put in through the Philosophy of Music. Having to track down the compositions of many composers and pieces that I haven't heard in some time or have not heard at all took quite a bit of effort. This certainly helped in understanding some very particular things, but overall, this section is quite long (too long, in my opinion) and nothing would be lost with a good skim.
Bloch opens with a rather poetic statement of society's State insofar as he sees it. As he makes quite clear in his penultimate section, "The Shape of the Inconstruable Question", Bloch's theory appears quite Hegelian in its own way. Doubling down on that, the second and by far the longest section, "The Philosophy of Music" Bloch attempts to rouse the philosophical question, the unbounded thought, the question of substantiating the human Spirit, by tracing a path through the history and evolution of music.
This section is incredibly dense. Not just in Bloch's own style of writing but in his revealing of such depth of knowledge when it comes to his analysis. His references not only to particular composers, but to their contemporaries and the effects with which one had upon the other. Without having some idea of who he references, things can get a little hard to follow. That being said, Bloch most definitely presents an entrancing thread through history not by tracing the most prominent cases of human action, but by tracing the most prominent demands of particular human satisfaction. Bloch, much like Hegel, sees an circular influence of Society and Spirit which is emphasized by exposing the thought and the preference applied to music since antiquity. For Bloch, The Philosophy of Music is precisely the awakening agent for the dormant Spirit as he saw it.
After the lengthy exposition of musical philosophy, the medium and the contours of the Spirit have been divulged. It is from here in which Bloch now poses the Inconstruable Question. This question is one which Bloch poses as something more recent and, indeed, we see this in his criticism of Kant's philosophy as something inhuman in its nature which, he believes, is why it was possible for his symmetrical holism; the notion of his Pure and Practical reason. This is where Bloch makes his stance clear by not only pitting Hegel against Kant, but by emphasizing Hegel's intentional asymmetry. Hegel wasn't intending to delude anyone with his Phenomenology, himself included. Hegel, like Bloch, sees the Spirit as something inevitable and necessitating of enrichment. It is here that Bloch speaks to the fire that went up too quickly, as a result of the optimism and innocence of the newly enlightened thinker and, as such, it could not help supressing itself to smoke.
The cornerstone of Bloch's thought is finalized with the final section, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse." Bloch emphasizes the unity of Marxism which he appreciates for its simplistic approach to the unknown in its attempt to insulate itself with its then quite scientific veneer. Bloch's primary purpose here is to disassemble the purity of Marxist doctrine and expose it as it is: an Idea, just like any other. Death, being another importance to the Spirit, is something else that Bloch tackles, though I didn't personally find anything too enlivening here. He seeks to make Death something of wonder while rationalizing it insofar as it can be without making it exactly Nothing. The final subject, the Apocalypse, is Bloch's term for the reinvigorated Spirit of Society (which, to me, seemed relatively similar to the modern Marxist notion of "infinite revolution") which is simply the salvation and redemption of us all – something that is only possible when we are freed from the Idea and the Notion as Absolute.
Three stars mostly because of the effort I personally had to put in through the Philosophy of Music. Having to track down the compositions of many composers and pieces that I haven't heard in some time or have not heard at all took quite a bit of effort. This certainly helped in understanding some very particular things, but overall, this section is quite long (too long, in my opinion) and nothing would be lost with a good skim.
May 6, 2020
Yup, this is my kind of book; definitely.
November 13, 2013
I started reading this because of the influence it had on Adorno. Some moments are sublime -- "It is the same force expressed in lava, in hot lead thrown into cold water, in the veining of the wood and above all in the twitching, bleeding, ragged or peculiarly compacted form of internal organs." But refer to "Primitive Man" enough times and I lose interest. Bloch, as a Marxist and ergo Hegelian, arranges his humanity on the ladder rungs of progress, in a way that I can't help but find damaging. And tiresome, to boot.
July 7, 2015
Rezi spiegelt meine Gefühle während der Erstlektüre (1989) wieder, deren Vollständigkeit mehr als zweifelhaft ist, auch wenn ich das letzte Kapitel mehr als einmal gelesen habe. Aber weiter als beim ersten mal, bin ich sicher nicht mehr gekommen. Der zweite Anlauf (1994) geriet, trotz gewachsenem Verständnis zum Abbruch, inzwischen ist das Buch nur noch Kauderwelsch, der mich in Erstaunen versetzt, das ich glaubte, mal etwas davon verstanden zu haben.
December 9, 2020
a very difficult reading..
January 26, 2026
There are some sections where you have to hold on for dear life (the music chapter is still impenetrable for me at times) and he certainly emboldens, clarifies, and surpasses some of his earlier concepts (not-yet-conscious, darkness of the lived moment, etc.) in works such as Heritage of Our Times and The Principle of Hope but there are passages in here that border on unimaginable:
"The unknowing around us is the final ground for the manifestation of this world, and for precisely this reason does knowing, the lightning flash of a future knowledge striking unerringly ito our darkness and the inconstruable question, constitute at the same time the inevitably sufficient ground for the manifestation, for the arrival in the other world." (229)
Like Blake where you wonder what were they seeing and how could they bring it crashing down to reality with an almost arrogant optimism.
"The unknowing around us is the final ground for the manifestation of this world, and for precisely this reason does knowing, the lightning flash of a future knowledge striking unerringly ito our darkness and the inconstruable question, constitute at the same time the inevitably sufficient ground for the manifestation, for the arrival in the other world." (229)
Like Blake where you wonder what were they seeing and how could they bring it crashing down to reality with an almost arrogant optimism.
September 1, 2013
This book was a bit of a let-down after Principle of Hope, but that's what I get for not reading in chronological order. The amount of time spent on music in this book almost made me put it down, but I talked to my wife and some friends who know about classical music and supplemented the reading with a lot of You Tube and Pandora use to get an idea of the main composers and their works. I can't say it's my favorite Bloch book, but it is pretty good. The main reason I give four stars is for the informative look it provides in Bloch's maturation as a thinker and writer in comparison to later works.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews