The Spirit of Utopia

by Ernst Bloch, Anthony A. Nassar (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804737654
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2000
Series:	Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

THE SPIRIT OF UTOPIA

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By Ernst Bloch

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3765-4

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

An Old Pitcher

Too Near

I am by my self.

That I move, that I speak: is not there. Only immediately afterward can I hold it up in front of me. Ourselves within: while we live, we do not see it; we trickle away. What really happened there, then, what we really were there, refuses to coincide with what we can really experience. It is not what one is, and certainly not what one means.

Slightly Beneath

I want to occupy my self, however.

Yet, I am still beneath the glass from which I drink. Insofar as I move it, and finally carry it to my mouth, I am above it: the glass serves me. But I do not keep myself in such an immaculate place as the glass, which I can at least see completely. While I stand so near to myself, whether I am drinking or not, that I have always just been experienced, not yet seen.

THE GLASS AND THE PITCHER

I am by the pitcher. Thus it leads inside, stands before the wall in the room. The wall is green, the mirror is golden, the window is black, the lamp burns brightly. But the pitcher is not simply warm, let alone so indisputably beautiful as other fine old artifacts.

Such pitchers are now often imitated. There is no harm in that, but there are expensive "bearded man" pitchers, beautifully preserved, deliberately sculpted and elaborately fluted, with narrow necks, a neatly coifed head on the neck and a heraldic shield on the belly, and they overshadow the simple pitcher. Who loves the pitcher, however, knows how superficial the expensive pitchers are, and prefers the clumsy, brown implement, with almost no neck, a wild man's bearded face, and a significant, snail-shaped solar emblem on the curvature.

They come mainly from the Rhine-Franconian area. Perhaps they are even Roman: at least the clay of which they are fired reminds one of inexpensive Roman pieces. They also echo the Italic sense of form, if much more muscular, even soldierly, and then Nordic, coarsened. And so they wandered from the taverna into the public houses of the German Imperial cities, where now they stand, filled with wine, on the shelves along every wall; here and there, farmers such as one sees in Tenier's paintings, with broad noses, still wrap their hands around them. Soon they had to disappear, as everything hand-crafted has disappeared. What one most notices is the bearded wild man on the belly of this solid, Northern artifact. With him, a strange thread weaves back to us. For the dead are thirsty and weary, and the little pitcher buried with them soon runs dry. Elsewhere, however, wild men keep new pitchers, magical pitchers filled with the water of life. One usually meets them on lonely hillsides, and even now, mostly in Low German areas, such places are still disreputably called "Nobiskrug," and the inn of the dead is supposed to lie close by. The men tend a herd not far from Urd's well from which the golden water flows, and no doubt they direct the souls of the dead so that they will not miss the way home. Hence the wild man holding an uprooted pine tree in his hand can still be seen on signs outside inns, and similarly, for he knows and guards the secrets of the eternal treasure, on coins and paper currency. Most often, however, one sees him in allegorical form, bearing the coats of arms of Low German as well as Prussian nobility. Here, however, on our pitcher, the bearded aspect of the forest spirit still peers out at us; the dark, moist, primordial forests have suddenly drawn very near, and this gigantic troll's head radiates his faunish, amulet-like, alchemical image. They speak to us, these old pitchers, from a time when they say the long-eared hare could still be seen dancing with the fiery man on Hessian fields before nightfall, and they preserve the old things, like farmers: literally.

It is hard to find out what it looks like inside the dark, spacious belly of these pitchers. One would no doubt like to occupy that space here. The endless, curious children's question arises again. For the pitcher is close kin to the child-like. And additionally, here the interior goes along; the pitcher holds and has its measure. But only the sense of smell can still deduce, rather than perceive, its faint aroma of long-forgotten beverages. And yet whoever looks long enough at the pitcher soon begins to carry its color and form with him. Not every puddle I step in makes me gray; not every railroad track bends me around a corner. But I could probably be formed like the pitcher, see myself as something brown, something peculiarly organic, some Nordic amphora, and not just mimetically or simply empathetically, but so that I thus become for my part richer, more present, cultivated further toward myself by this artifact that participates in me. That is true of all things that have grown, and here, in drinking pitchers, the people labored to express their pleasure and their deeper sense of contentment, to affix themselves to these implements of the household and the public house. Everything that was ever made in this way, out of love and necessity, leads a life of its own, leads into a strange, new territory, and returns with us formed as we could not be in life, adorned with a certain, however weak sign, the seal of our self. Here, too, one feels oneself looking down a long, sunlit corridor with a door at the far end, as in a work of art. The pitcher is not one, it has nothing of the work of art about it, but a work of art should at least be like this in order really to be one, and that alone would certainly already be a lot.

CHAPTER 2

The Production of the Ornament

THE DAWNING

We, however, start from the beginning.

We are poor, we have unlearned how to play. We have forgotten it, our hands have unlearned how to dabble.

This is also more or less how flint was smoothed. All around us it looks as though no one had ever known a craft and been capable of passing it down. But in return, we paint like savages again, in the best sense, in the sense of the primordial, the restless, unconcerned, concerned. For this is more or less how the mask was carved. This is more or less how primitive man shaped his fetishes, if only the simple need to express oneself should again be the same. Thus the two clearly and immediately separate, which helps us, forces us, to really kill the cold machinery, so one can see what still remains to be generously warmed up again.

TECHNOLOGICAL COLD

At first, certainly, almost everything just looks back at us hollowly.

How could it be otherwise, and where would a vital, beautifully made implement come from, now that no one knows living in one place to make his house warm and sturdy?

Yet that alone is not to blame for the lowlier things. Their basis is not only that the client has become unfamiliar or anonymous. For if we consider the problem of the office: then in the working man, who only uses his room in the evening, to relax, to read or to receive male guests, and in the writer or scholar, as the born occupant of the workroom and library, conceivable in so to speak Faustian terms, we are given at least two parallel sets of needs, demands, and design problems. Meanwhile what the market as well as every design offers, already anticipating the middle class, remains irredeemably predetermined by the lowest common denominator, the so-called smoking room. One could certainly claim, therefore, that customers are ready for something that the inanity of the available selection cannot provide. It is accordingly not so much the consumer but the producer who bears the blame for all this ugly stuff—and not even he alone; rather, the machine which he operates also has this misery and this pervasive destruction of the imagination on its conscience—this
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE SPIRIT OF UTOPIA by Ernst Bloch. Copyright © 2000 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Objective (1918, 1923)....................     1     

§ THE SELF-ENCOUNTER....................          

An Old Pitcher....................     7     

The Production of the Ornament....................     10     

The Philosophy of Music....................     34     

Dream....................     34     

On the History of Music....................     34     

On the Theory of Music....................     94     

The Mystery....................     158     

The Shape of the Inconstruable Question....................     165     

On the Metaphysics of Our Darkness, of the No-Longer-Conscious, the
Not-Yet-Conscious, and the Inconstruable We-Problem....................     187     

§ KARL MARX, DEATH, AND THE APOCALYPSE....................          

The Lower Life....................     233     

The Socialist Idea....................     234     

The True Ideology of the Kingdom....................     246     

The Countenance of the Will....................     275     

Afterword (1963)....................     279     

Translator's Notes....................     283     

Index of Names....................     295     

Editorial Reviews

When this book was first published, it had a profound effect on major thinkers and artists in Weimar Germany. A poetical philosophical treatise with unusual insights into culture and political commentary, Bloch’s book laid the groundwork for thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin.” —Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

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