Dialectics and Hope

Author(s): Ernst Bloch and Mark Ritter

Source: New German Critique, No. 9 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 3-10
Published by: New German Critique
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Dialectics and Hope

by Ernst Bloch*
1. Mankind, as it is, has been called a premature birth. The human being
comes into the world more helpless and less finished than any animal, takes
considerably longer to mature, and is threatened in the process even by itself.
It wavers and makes mistakes which would never occur to a young animal in
its innate environment. It is in the dark, does not know up from down, seldom
or only indistinctly has in its body the infallible guide which leads a horse to
water, or even a returning swallow to its nest from last year. It comes into
unforeseen circumstances, such as the animal seldom experiences, must find
its way in situations which have never existed before, and with which it is
consequently not acquainted; whereas the young animal is soon whistled to a
stop. The finished armor of the animal's species is soon hung around its
shoulders, and its face, which in young animals often resembles a human
baby's face, soon ossifies. The form of many hundred thousands of years
triumphs; the curtain soon falls decisively over its potentiality for
development. Of necessity animals repeat the proven factory pattern of their
body and life, hence, they are beings but also very narrowly bound. Human
beings can participate only very approximately in this boundedness; they do
so as the usual mass-produced goods; they did so in a different way, fertilely
and distinctly, in the earlier peasant class. But mass-produced goods
themselves are historical, and what fit the average yesterday no longer fits
today, for uniformity, at least, has its fashions. It is great that we humans are
born unfinished as a species, not only as children. But it is also a hard lot to be
engaged in a development which proceeds so slowly, since it is trapped over and
over again by deceivers. Socialist society has been a practical possibility for at
least a hundred years; and how many among the educated, of whom there is
always ample number, do not even know its ABC's today. Mankind is the
animal who takes detours, yet often in an obdurate and flagrantly foolish
way, not just cunningly. Otherwise, all of outward life would run as easily and
peacefully as now happens, at best, among friends.
2. All being is still built around the Not which induces hunger. There does
not yet exist a food which could calm and fill up the lack entirely, or the boon
*This essay represents a chapter taken from Bloch's Subjekt-Objekt. Erlauterungen zu Hegel
which first appeared in the GDR in 1951 and was republished by the Suhrkamp Verlag
(Frankfurt am Main) in a slightly expanded edition in 1962. It appears here in English for the
first time with the permission of the Suhrkamp Verlag.

NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

one has incurred would again become a nuisance. And all previous history is
still human prehistory, that is, not consciously produced. This history shows
human self-alienation in various and variously vehement forms. For the most
part, it still shows "Nature" in the Hegelian sense, in the sense of a beingoutside-oneself, in which the powers produced by mankind, but not comprehended as produced, have broken away and become reified. Hence, they
appear as an uncontrollable fate, which they have in fact been in previous
history. The so-called iron logic of events proceeds behind the backs of the
individual actors and their consciousness, thus completely without the light of
logic. Completely as a blind, external necessity and consequently a contingency, completely without mediation with the human subject, like a landslide
or a conflagration in Nature, which is independent of mankind. All human
activity--measured against something completely satisfying, indeed fulfilling
-has been called patchwork, and the possible fulfillment lies by nature not
within history, but puts an end to it; that is the religious view. But previous
history displays this patchwork to an extent that is not even necessary on
earth: in the misery of by far the majority of people, in production
relationships whose provisionality, whose finiteness as it were, is proved by the
fact that they have again and again become strait jackets. Whereupon the
human subjects as well as the productive forces constituted or unleashed by
them have fallen into a renewed tension with the present objectivities of
existence. Dialectics, in the world made by mankind, is the relationship of
subject and object, nothing else; it is subjectivity working its way forward,
again and again overtaking the objectivation and objectivity it has attained,
and seeking to explode them. In the final analysis, the needy subject, by
finding itself and its work inadequately objectified, is always the motor of
historically appearing contradictions. It is the intensive motor which is set
into motion as a consequence of the inadequacy of the achieved form of
existence, and which, by contradicting the contradiction within the thing
itself, activates in a revolutionary way the contradiction stemming from the
inadequacy of these forms to the totum of the subject's content. For if
unfulfilled need is the motive and motor of the dialectical-material motion,
then-on the basis of the same, not yet present content-the
totality of the
not present All (Alles) is its cohering goal. Further: omnia sub luna caduca,
everything beneath the moon is perishable (likewise above the moon):
however, this perishability, this barrier and finiteness, presupposes the
non-resigning desire of a subject as well as a real not yet frozen possibility in
the world in order even to appear as a barrier, much less a superable one. The
point has not yet been reached where society can go no further, where an "in
vain" would be conferred upon history. Most assuredly the point is not yet

AND HOPE 5
DIALECTICS

visible, except in mere anticipations of the direction, where the All of the
Real and the General (des Eigentlichen und Ueberhaupt) could rest its head
even fleetingly. It would be the same as the truth of phenomenal being; this is
not spurious or mere so-called factual truth as a static truth of havingbecome-so; neither is it, however, truth passed off as being pan-logical,
making its peace with the world by presenting its having-become-so as a
having-succeeded. Dialectical truth can least of all be such an apologetic, in
spite of and, in a certain sense, precisely because of Hegel. Truth in the sense
meant here of the Real and the General has above all nothing to do with some
sort of heavenly light, which allegedly has already come home; such a mythological hypostasis likewise foists off perfection as something already attained
and existing, only in an imaginary place. The question of truth which
philosophy poses cannot even be understood, much less answered, by
mythology. In this particular sense Hegel very rightly says: "Philosophy must
avoid wanting to be edifying" (II, 9); for the superstition of a supraterrestrial-static empiricism has been for philosophy even more of a barrier
before the unattained than has the dogma of a terrestrial-static empiricism.
There is quite a different meaning, however, if, instead of various idolatries
or the worship of an existing absolute (be it called fact or mechanical matter
or hypostasis of God), Hope seeks the truth of history: as its most powerful
know-thyself or its uncovered face. As the not yet present truth of the Real
and the General extremely threatened in the process leading to its existence,
as the still utopian totum of the goal. This truth need by no means beware of
being edifying; on the contrary: an intensely illuminating, intensely fulfilling
nature is the constituent of truth in this second sense. Hegel did not merely
renew the old unchanging condition for truth, that it should be the
correspondence of perception with its object, but he immediately turned this
into an objective-identifying condition, that truth is the correspondence of
the object with itself, in such a way that reality should be appropriate to its
concept, i.e., to reason. In the latter condition, no matter how much it
remains situated upon the form of existence or entelechia as marked at any
particular time, that volitional, value-predicating character of truth in the
fulfilling sense is operative. The practical Idea of the Good is operative in it:
"Untrue means roughly bad, inadequate (unangemessen). In this sense a bad
state is an untrue state, and the bad and the untrue in general exist in the
contradiction that occurs between the constitution and the concept and the
existence of an object." And further, with the most familiar pathos of the
Goal and its truth, for which the dialectics is the vehicle: "All finite things
have an untruth in them; they have a concept and an existence which,
however, is inadequate to their concept. Therefore they must perish, by

6 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

which means the inadequacy of their concept and of their existence is

manifested" (Enc. sec. 24, Appendix 2). It requires no great exertion to arrive
at that pessimism, which is just as much a militant optimism, that truth in the
second sense, in the sense of positive fulfillment of "concepts," will require an
extraordinarily great amount of history in order to appear manifested with
even the first few silver rays of existence. After all, what is rational has always
become irrational, because it was too narrow; relatively attained being has
passed over into non-being, since it was not really mediated with its
foundation. It has passed over into something that must be checked, which,
for the sake of the self-realization of mankind and the total ground, demands
an ever stronger negation of its negation. The truth-reality of the full totality
was called above an entelechia of the All! There are many stages (Instanzen)
for it; but there is no attainment while the process is continuing.
3. Therefore, all being is built around the Not, which cannot bear to
remain at rest. Since our cause itself has not been brought to a successful
conclusion as yet, it acts in the form it has achieved in a contradictory way.
Human beings are not slaves, but neither are they masters, not serfs, but not
feudal lords either, not proletarians, but certainly not capitalists. What they
are has not yet become clear in the division of labor in previously existing class
society. Even the changing prototypes of the right life, even the great cultural
works are more than half mixed with the ideology of the respective class
society. And, as it is among people, so it is in the entire world surrounding us,
to which we stand in a relation of exchange: the cause of totality is not yet
finished, otherwise there would be no process, not even in nature, and no
dialectics of this process. Dissatisfaction and hope are the constantly
impelling relation to this cause of totality, as a being without alienation from
oneself. The teleological content of the totum is represented negatively in
dissatisfaction, restlessly impelling, as its own lack, as the non-possession of
itself. The same content is represented positively in hope, restlessly
illuminating, as its own attraction, as the possibility of possessing itself. In
order that it might be something concrete, there corresponds to this actively
contradicting relation, on the objective side, precisely the developing
contradiction in the cause itself, but again and again as a contradiction which
itself results from not yet possessing the essence of the phenomenon,
consequently from the continuing untruth, imperfection, unreality in the
real. To be sure--a fact which constitutes the restlessness of dialectics in
general--there is more on the objective side than this mere harmless gap
between the phenomenon and the total fullness of the essence. Otherwise
there would be no such trouble with opening the world up for cultivation, and

DIALECTICS AND HOPE

no such resistance of matter to it, alongside the helping tendency. In the

negative of objective dialectics (sickness, crisis, imminent decline into
barbarism) there is doubtless some association of annihilation, thus not only
of the Not, as the active motive force, but also of nothingness, as merely
effacing negation, which of itself by no means automatically has the negation
of its negation within itself. It is consequently an action which, of itself,
without the intervention of the subjectively active contradiction, leads rather
to the development of an In Vain than to that of an All. Indeed, a subjectively
active counter-move against annihilation can be necessary, in order that the
latter can be used for the annihilation of what is worth annihilating and, by
this means, for the opening-up of new life. An automatism of objective
dialectics towards the good, with the comforting motto: Through the night to
the light, simply does not exist. Rather, only a co-move and-in times of
catastrophe--a counter-move of the subjective factor can make the negativity
in the objective dialectics completely the servant of a possible success. While
negativity of itself--as in the Thirty Years' War, the Peleponnesian War, and
no fruit historically, that is, the
all complete downfalls
whatsoever--bears
no
of
the
means
is
negation by
capable of developing itself from its
negation
own objectivity alone.
This very fact summons up the properly timed deed, the more so, the closer
human prehistory seems to its end. The deed not as a putsch, abstract
spontaneity or whatever, but as the liberation of what is due (das Fallige).
What is due lies--since, even in objective dialectics, not only nothingness but
essentially the real problem of the All is ever present -what is due lies on the
way home, in so far as humanity boards the ship and maintains the drift of
tendency. But in the final analysis, this homecoming, as the liberation from
the incongruous, as the overcoming of nothingness in the world and in its
resistances, is precisely the non-frustratedness of the All. This is again
utopia in utopia, but it is at work in dissatisfaction (rejected servitude) as well
as in hope (anticipated freedom to be-for-oneself). Hegel, who wanted so
much to keep his distance from any dissatisfaction, even from any
unwarranted hope, nevertheless stated, in his idealist way, that the truth of
hope is simultaneously that of freedom. Freedom denotes the for-itself, in
which "the subject finds nothing alien and has no limits or barriers in that
which confronts him, but rather finds himself' (X, p. 126). Where Hegel's
dialectic says: "Being has attained the meaning of truth," so that the absolute
is no longer encumbered, either with alienated objectivity or with mere
subjectivity or ideals: that is where the content of hope lies. However, it was
necessary that materialist dialectics come along in order to recognize and to
push along this content in the real process, instead of in the idealist process of

8 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

Hegel, who only recognizes what is of itself already extant in time and space.
That is the limit of idealist dialectics: it is the limit of mere contemplation,
which per se ipsum is applied to what is past and its horizons, to an essence
which has been revealed in the phenomena that have already come into
of the teleological content have a
existence. Dissatisfaction-hope-totum
function only in a dialectics which do not take place in the head and draw out
their purely idealistic movements over something that is objectively static.
Knowledge itself becomes transformative only in these dialectics, a dialectics
of events, which are not contemplated, not enclosed within contemplated
history. It is not applied merely to the knowable past, but to a real becoming,
to that which is occurring and not yet finished, to a knowable and pursuable
future content. S is not yet P, the proletariat has not yet been sublated (aufgehoben), nature is not yet a home, the real is not yet articulated reality: this
Not Yet is in process, indeed it has attained or is beginning to carve out its
skyline here and there. At the same time, it creates the believed meaning
(Sinnglauben) of true human effort and the effort's militant optimism.
Precisely for that reason, the dialectic agent of the Not, which drives forward
through all the stagnation and reification to the articulation and manifestation of its own enigmatic, teleological content, is, according to its All,
nothing more, but certainly nothing less, than hope. And as tested hope,
docta spes, hope is the critically anticipatory dialectic materialist knowledge
which is mediated and allied with the objective process. In this way, the
dialectical principle, S is not yet P, means with respect to what is inadequately
determined (has become restraining): Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse
delendam. In respect to the imminent adequate determinability (of the
contentual Novum) it means: Quidquid latet apparebit.
4. Mankind is not yet finished; therefore, neither is its past. It continues to
affect us under a different sign, in the drive of its questions, in the experiment
of its answers; we are all in the same boat. The dead return transformed:
those whose actions were too bold to have come to an end (like Thomas
Miinzer); those whose work is too all-encompassing to have coincided with the
locality of their times (like Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe).
The discovery of the future in the past, that is the philosophy of history,
hence, of philosophical history as well. The farewell to Hegel is therefore none
at all, no more than the first encounter with him, when it has caught fire,
seems like a first one. As far as the power and continued ripening of this work
are concerned, Hegel creates a continuous, a happily fruitful, an admiringly
1. "Among other things, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed," was said so
frequently by Cato that it practically became his motto. "Whatever is hidden will appear" recalls
the Bible.

DIALECTICS AND HOPE

grateful reunion. Times of transition, such as the present age, make one
sensitive to the genius of dialectics, to the great teacher. Precisely because the
owl of Minerva does not fly in the dusk, among the ruins of contemplation, in
the thoroughly false circle of circles, but rather because a thought is rising
which belongs to the dawn, to that open time of day which is least alien of all
to Minerva, the goddess of light. Times of transition: today there are such
times of a very strong type, in the sense of the fermenting and threatened
departure to a form of existence more similar to the human. An evolutionary
word of the master of dialectics is very apt here; in it the owl has even become
what it really is for Minerva: the allegory of vigilance. In 1816 Hegel wrote to
his friend Niethammer: "I hold the view that the World Spirit has given the
times the order to advance; such an order is obeyed; this being strides
forward like an armored, firmly closed phalanx, irresistibly and as imperceptibly as the sun moves, through thick and thin; it is flanked by
innumerable light troops for and against it; most of them have no idea of
what is at stake, and only get knocked on over the head, as if by an invisible
hand. All the hesitant fibbing and sophisticated shadow boxing in the world is
of no help against it; it can only reach about as high as the shoelaces of this
colossus and smear a bit of mud or shoe polish on them, but it cannot loosen
them, much less remove the divine shoes with the elastic soles or the sevenleague boots, if the colossus puts them on. The safest game (both inwardly
and outwardly) is, I dare say, to keep one's eye on the advancing giant." The
drill regulations of the eighteenth century, from which the movements of this
simile stem, have been lost, but the image of the advancing giant, mutatis
mutandis, is not yet completely incomprehensible even today. The rational
can become real, the real rational; it all depends upon the phenomenology or
the phenomenal history of true action. This is the action of the true or the
ending of its continuing prehistory, it is the changing of the world in
accordance with its understood dialectic-material tendency, it is the agreement of human theory-practice with a reality that is in accordance with itself.
Passive contemplation has no place here anywhere; on the contrary,
knowledge, for which there is theoretically no barrier, must prove itself to be
equally practical in the socialist liberation from the barrier, in the breaking
up of servitude and of the rule of necessity. Here, above all, Marxism is qualitatively differentiated from every previous philosophy, hence from the
Hegelian as well, to which it is closest. For with a leap into the new such as
previous history had never experienced there begins through Marx--with a
continuation as well as a sublation of Hegel - the changing of philosophy into
a philosophy of changing the world. Philosophy is no longer philosophy zf it is
not dialectical-materialist, but, as must be grasped now and for the entire

10 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

future, dialectical materialism is nothing if it is not philosophical, that is,

proceeding towards great open horizons. This intervention is theoreticalpractical work against alienation, therefore for the externalization-disposal of
externalization, for the manifestation of that which is homelike, in which the
core or what is essential in mankind and the world will finally be able to begin
manifesting itself. And at this very time, on this earth, in the realm of our
finally producible content of freedom. Previous prehistory leads there,
without consciousness of the matter, but consciously produces history
possesses its determining theme in the permanently considered, mediately
anticipated totum content of the realm of freedom. Already, partially
fulfilled plans and realistic-symbolical figurations have made this real
Whither and Why discernible. It is the simple thing that is difficult to do,
being-for-onself, whose ways must be won by fighting, whose excellence
demands bravery. The more urgent the operation of the means which bring
this goal closer becomes, the more evident the goal becomes: objectification
of the subjects, subjective mediation of the objects. This goal of a humanized
existence always lay close as a dream wish, but was always utopically distant in
terms of its presence. The real movement to its reality has finally begun
consciously, against the externalization of human beings and of things, for
the coming-to of self-being. By liberating from all conditions of existence
which bear the features of alienated labor, socialism will liberate the entire
society from alienation and will thus create the foundation for an entire earth
as the homeland of humanization. That is the very ancient intention of
happiness, that the interior should become exterior and that the exterior
should become as the interior--an intention which does not beautify and yet
close the present world, as Hegel did, but which is allied with the not yet
present world, with those properties of reality which bear the future.

Translated by Mark Ritter