Bloch_Man as Possibility

ERNST BLOCH

MAN AS POSSIBILITY Ladies and Gentlemen: Let us begin in part at a reduced rate, but also with vigor and variety, i.e., with dreams.

The dream is thought of mostly as night dream. However, we dream not only at night; the day is also interwoven with dreams. But up to now the day dream has not been investigated with the same energy as has the night dream. Indeed the day dream is consideredeven "officially"as a mere preliminary stage of the night dream.

However, between the two there exist considerable differences: princi-pally in the fact that the ego does not disappear in the day dream. On the contrary, it is there very actively and does not exercise any sort of censorship, with the result that wishes function even better in the day dream, more visibly than in the night dream, not disguised, but shame-less, uninhibitedly open, often daring, and with a grudge.

The street is traversed by people with day dreams. In the displays of our stores people play a symphony of day dreams: this elegant shoe, this eve-ning dress, this washing machine, this rocking chair and all of the rest of the stuff there with the dream-house at the top to put it all in. In short: it is a world in which things proceed at a gusty pace; a world in which castles are built in the air with a moderate down payment.

But, on the other hand, we still have the following, too: the fact that so many of today's castles in the air become tomorrow's palaces, tomorrow's cities, or even tomorrow's form of society.

Now, this can be expanded into the observation, indeed, into the cal-culated estimation that, presumably, absolutely nothing that is great arises in the course of history which had not been sketched out in advance and which afterwardswhen it has cooled off and attained some maturityhas been planned out in advance. Absolutely different types of peoplereal-istic politicians like Bismarck on the one hand or Lenin on the other-have nonethelessthe one as well as the otherentertained airy plans. Lenin, a sober type, complained once that dreaming had as much as died out in his movement.

Ideas exist easily side by side; things rub and collide in space. But they

This article, a translation of "Der Mensch ah Mglichkeit," first appeared in Forum. Oesterreichische Monatsbltter fr Kulturelle Freiheit. Vol. XIII, Nos. 140-41 (1965), pp. 357-361. It is based on an impromptu speech delivered before Viennese students*

too were once in the space of wishful thinkingfor example, on paper which is not only patient, but which is also the maneuvering grounds of precise imagination.

But whatI repeat, things rub and collide in space-what is the relationship of the environment to the day dream after it has grown tall and has been reflected upon responsibly? In the very greatest number of cases we are surrounded by obstinacy. The world surrounding our dreams proves to be perhaps not only contrary, but disparate, absolutely incommensurate. The world gives the cold shoulder to the dreamsor not even the cold shoulder, for even that would be too much of a relationship. The old does not want to pass away and the new does not want to come into being.

The Usual Fate of a Dream In such a situation, the dream becomes a mere dream in the most un

fortunate meaning of the wordthe one called Utopian in the pejorative sense: nothing more than Utopian. That is the usual fate of a dream. But it is one thing to recognize this fate and another thing not to want to avert this fate, to yield to it. As Goethe says: "The fearful hesitation of cowardly thoughts does not avert misery and does not make you free."

That means: resist evil, evil visited from without, tenacious, obstructive evil. Things must not reach the point that the sourdougji will not even rise, but merely remains sour; the thing with which we counter evil must not become a lonely folly.

Reality does not have a definite dimension. The world is not finished. It is possible to face the world in a manner which is not mere griping, but which is otherwise defeatist, opportunistic or quietistic. "Accept things as they are" is not an empirically exact formula, it is not a positivism, but formula for vulgarity, cowardice and wretchedness.

What are these things, these factors of process which we call facti They are in flux. They have been made and are therefore changeable. There exists the possibility of being otherwise. Thereby, the presuppositionin a difficult senseis made that coincidence does occur, that there is room for contingencyall the way to the physical Uncertainty Principle and to the historical Uncertainty Principle which is even more significant.

"Things can also be otherwise." That means: things can also become otherwise: in the direction of evil, which would have to be avoided, or in the direction of good, which would have to be promoted.

There are many degrees of reality. There is no unavoidable compulsion which might exist independently of us. Reality is not self-righteous. It is openness toward the future where there is more than ever before an image of and, if we do not fail in our task, a place for progress as the avoidance of evil.

274 CROSS CURRENTS: SUMMER 1968

Ladies and Gentlemen: Reality is a category which is exposed to doubt and which is liable to change. It merely appears simple and solid. The realist is considered to be one who knows his way about, who stands solidly with both flat feet on the flat earth. This is a caricaturelike the opposite caricature of the dreamer.

Thomas Mann says that writers are people who have a more difficult time writing than others; one can expand this: philosophers are people who have a more difficult time thinking than others. [Laughter] Indeed, in every case, very much thinking has taken place before we arrive at a polished concept which can be taken at face value.

The visible is considered to be that which is there as clearly as the light of daybut it is from this very point that the doubts in the history of thought have started out. For example, in early Greek philosophy: the stick in the water appears bent, in truth it is straight. The awakening of philosophy began with doubt concerning the senses.

As far as what is as clear as the light of day is concerned: there is a statementnot yet sufficiently thought outby Anaxagoras according to which like has no perception of like: the eye has to be dark in order to perceive light, the body has to be cold in order to perceive heat. Thereby, we arrive at the statement that this is the reason why every perception is associated with a feeling of displeasure.

The Flying Arrow Is Stationary For this reason, not the world of the senses, but just the opposite,

thought, appears among the Eleatics and Parmenides as the clear light. Thought guarantees reality to the extent that according to the well-known proofs of Zeno there is no movementeven though our senses indicate it to us. In truth, the flying arrow is stationary.

Thought and Existence are, consequently, the same materialnamely spirit To be sure, this is not subsequently true for all thought. Thought which stems from mere opinion or from error is mythos in the bad sense. In order for a unity of Thought and Existence to arise, Thought itself must be tested. Now scepticism arises not only concerning the senses, but also concerning Thought: the sophists and Socrates.

Only in philosophy, only in the investigation of ideas, is there truth and indeed to the extent that thought and reality not only touch, greet and substantiate one another reciprocally, but also do so in the sense of a succession of differing degrees of clarity in thought and differing degrees of reality in existence.

Thus a succession arises. Reality becomes. Existence can have grada-tions. Something can be less than another thing. Existence runs more thinly when the degree of thought in it is lower. The highest thought does not merely not deceive, it is simultaneously the highest reality.

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This did not change until the time of Kant: one hundred real silver dollars are not more than one hundred possible silver dollars. The monetary value of the silver dollars, their color, roundness, silver con-tent; these are qualities. Existence is not a quality. Only since existence lost its logical definiteness in this questionable manner, or rather, since it has not been a logical definiteness, only since that time has the com-parability of Being been challenged, even though it continues to exist in speech and maintains itself in philosophy until Leibniz, Hegel and Marx.

If the superstructure, the hazy reflection in the sky, is fainter than the substructure, the economic conditions which are reflected upwards in the form of Law, Art, Religion and Philosophy, it does not follow that the superstructure is somehow not: false consciousness does indeed exist, but it is less real than the substructure. Here is comparable Being, the her-itage of Plato and also of Scholasticism.

The More Something Is, The More It Is The Scholastic ontological proof of the existence of God is not at all

understandable without the Platonic equation of worth and Being. The more something is, the more it is. For Anselm of Canterbury the Ens perfectissimum is of worth: the Summum bonum, an Existence, quo maius cogitan non potest. This is the case until Leibniz, whose Grandeur de la ralit coincides with Perfection.

Of this there is also the inverse. It comes very late with Schopen-hauer, whose pessimism is opposed to PlatonioAnselmian-Leibnizian-Hegelian optimism. Here the assertion is: the more something is, the less it is, the more weakly it occurs in the world, or it does not occur at all. In any case it is persecuted, travailed, small and minute. Ecce homo is, thus, the statement made about reality. The ascendance does not go to more Being, but to Nothingness, to Nirvana.

To be sure, we have here an inversion. However, the proportion re-mains: Thought and Being correspond to one another The world is illuminable and intelligible through thought because the world is flesh of its flesh, or rather, spirit of its spirit.

The critical turning point comes from somewhere else: Descartes and Leibniz. The ordo aeternus rerum which was "given" for the medieval world loses its cathedral-like character. Reality is no longer constructed upwards to the Summum bonum. Instead it is a phenomenon of light, an illumination. The Monads are citizens of 18th Century Enlighten-ment. They belong to the race which strives out of darkness into light.

Stones sleep, plants dream, animals turn in their dreams as though they wanted to wake up, and man awakes. A great illumination, a great awakening, goes through the world. Time is transferred over into the


cathedral. To the vertical hierarchy of the real (of course the hierarchy also remains) is joined a horizontal succession, and in such a manner that an ascendance, an evolutio, takes place which is not merely e-volutio --unwrapping of an already firm kernel out of its shell: instead, a novum takes place in that light penetrates. Only the Supreme Monad, called God, is luminous per se.

Such total rationalism is again destroyed later onas though the sophists had returnedby doubts concerning this sort of understanding of reality. In the intellectual portrayal of reality there takes place, with Locke and Hume, a decisive division into subject and object.

The fact that reality consists of ego and object, of Zustaendlichkeit and objectivity, works and smolders all the time in the history of thought, but until now the subject had not been made the precise place of illusions. For Locke the primary qualities are pressure and impact, space and time, and not color, tone, taste or feel: these are in us, they are secondary qualities. In Hume's case there is a thorough investigation of not only the colors, the sensory perceptions, but also of categories like substantiality and causality: scepticism in view of the contradictory appearance of substantiality; scepticism against causality which trans-forms a post hoc into a propter hocwith what right?

These doubts are not eliminated by the Socrates of this scepticism, the great Immanuel Kant, but they are placed at a level befitting them. Transcendental apperception gives substantiality and causality back their place: the world of phenomena, not the world of the thing in itself. Here one can know, and indeed, in an uninterruptedly deterministic manner. This is the world of natural science, the real world in which unbreak-able order reigns: without trace of freedom, immortality or God. Such things cannot be encountered in the world of science, or reality, in the world of knowledge in the strict sense. And the thing in itself remains unattainable, a mere limiting concept.

But at this point a strange rupture occurs, something completely different. A thing which, to be sure, is not reality but also not foolish-ness, also not unreality. There is this indestructible thing in us, in the world of total conditionality, in which not even the human mind has a place. There are ideas of the unconditional (which is not the same as the Absolute in the ordinary sense), ideas of the Not-determined, thus, perhaps freedom.

Reality Without Reality These are the moral ideas in us, and they have no place in the world of

mechanical reality, the sole knowable world and the only world with which one can deal in strict accordance with reason. There is an enig-matic alternate world without reality, a world which is not determined

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or at least not totally determined. In it, there is room for human freedom and human hope: not real, not knowable, but thinkable. Here postulates are madeso that one can actin accordance with the three questions of the three critiques: "What can I know?" "What ought I to do?" "What may I hope?'*

Both questions: "What ought I to do?" and "What may I hope?" have no place in this world of reality. In spite of this they are not nonsense, but rather the highest sense, the only thing which makes sense.

With Hegel, this separation between phenomenal world and essence ceases. The world again becomes Leibnizian, again becomes whole. The true and the real are one level. The subject does not exist in order to have a say in the World-Process, but rather in order to take it into account in accordance with the massive forward motion of the thing.

But the truth, in correspondence to the Process-character of the real, now becomes much broader than with Leibniz, In the introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel states, using a sentence from Lessing's Nathan: The true and real is not a coin which can be spent like ready money in one piece and received in the same way; instead, truth is a process, truth is truth as reality.

The Blemish of Reason With this categorical inversion something changes. If all that is real is

rational, then this is the ideology for peace with reality, then everything is in order. The students of that period who were rebelling against the Holy Alliance were thereby told: The Alliance is rational and you had better grasp it! The first statementthat everything that is rational is realis, however, just as revolutionary as the second is conservative. Also, whatever reason says, "la raison," and whatever is reasonthat, too, is real. The beauty of the argument has only one small blemishthat it does not occur, or has not yet occurred. The blemish must be touched up.

Thus, both the Right and the Left are contained in these Hegelian statements. The whole thing however, is an illumination in the Leibniz-ian sense: out of Being-in-Itself {An-sich-Sein) by way of Being-out-of-Itself (Ausser-sich'Sein) to Being-in-and-of-Itself (An-und-fuer-sich-Sein). With one limitation: namely, that the process of the realwhich is cele-brated as being suchis really appearance again; it is merely evolution; what has already existed eternally is being unrolled.

The Hegelian development, that dialectic which has had such a rich history, has very much in common with the explication of a maxim on a blackboard. It is a matter of pedagogy, it is being made clear for human consciousness or, expressed politically, for the limited servile intellect; how gloriously the world is arranged after all!


For this reason, the preface to the Philosophy of Law contains the fol-lowing statement: When philosophy paints her grays in gray, a figure of life has become old; with grays in gray the figure cannot be rejuvenated, but merely known. The owl on Minerva does not begin its flight until dusk approaches.

The idea always comes too late. The revolutionary movement of the conceptthe thing Hegel describes so wonderfully as "fetching the World Spirit's chestnuts out of the fire"is thereby again dulled by the charm of anamnesis which runs from Plato to Hegel and beyond: all knowledge is the reminiscence of primal ideas which the soul has seen before its incarnation. There is nothing new under this questionable sun of recol-lection; instead, only that is called forth which was already there anyway. No surprise is possible, no genuine future.

Hegel does not have much good to say about the future. For him it is chaff and wind, mist and haze, but nothing real. The world is finished. The World Spirit has emerged from its diligence and makes its entrance as Professor Hegel enters an auditorium of the University of Berlin. [Laughter]

Well, that didn't work. It could not be maintained. Indeed, it is an idea which can occur only in an asylum. The Left Hegelian School and its member, Karl Marx, again make a serious proposition out of the dialectic.

Dialectical reality is reality criticizing itself. In it truly new things happen. Things happen which have never occurred to any man. Things happen which likewise have never yet happened to any reality. The dialectic iss -the critical method of the world itself, not monologue of the World Spirit with itself in the course of which he is so friendly as to remember his configurations.

The dialectic has to be set up as a critical method, as a bitingly critical method of upheaval: first, so that something happens, so that something is going on not merely in the head under the sleeping cap; second, so that one knows what sort of contradictions are taking place, so that the Utopia-making, the chasing after things in advance which have never existed, has a foot to stand on, so that it becomes concrete and mediates with the world.

Only in this way, in this important self-analytical process of mediation is there openness toward the future, a genuine future which amounts to more than simply being before us. Only in this way can concrete changes be made. Marx's eleventh Feuerbach thesis states: the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in different ways: now, however, it is a question of changing it.

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Things Need Us But this process of mediation must have concreteness so that it does not

grasp for emptiness as is so often the case with impetuous heroic deeds or abstract utopias. It must be historical through and through. To grasp what has been means to grasp something not as that which it was, not as Having-Come-Into-Being (das Gewordensein), but as Coming-Into-Being (Werden), a thing which has not yet played out its hand, but which seeks what belongs to it and which above all needs man in order to realize the potential pending in the World-Processthe transition out of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.

In reality there also lies hidden something which first must be realized; grasped transcendentally as Deus Creator, pantheistically as World Spirit or as Man himself. For this reason Marx says: "Prometheus is the most noble Saint and Martyr in the calendar of philosophy. Man as active, subjective factor must be in harmony with the objective movement or reality. He must listen to this movement in an almost musical sense: in which direction does the melody want to turn?"

Ladies and Gentlemen: I presuppose that the world is open, that ob-jectively real possibility exists in it and not merely determined necessity, not merely mechanical determinism. To be sure, this Marxistic idea again transforms itself to a large extent into a fetishism of law: first, in the excessive deprecation of the individual man; second, in the idea that the World-Process proceeds without us and drags us, so to speak, by the hair along behind, whether we want it or not.

Thus, Marxism as well has not given a guarantee for the existence of genuine future, for genuine openness. Engles wrote the tract "The Devel-opment of Socialism from Utopia to Science." That is quite correct, there is a progress from the abstract utopia to mediated science. But there is also the somewhat too great progress from utopia to science; namely, in which one suppresses all dreaming, all anticipation, all hope, the pioneer existence which we humans lead on the foremost frontier of the World-Process.

Openness toward the future is a large category which is handled per-functorily. One must proceed beyond the horizon into that difficult degree of reality not of Being-Present (Vorhanden-Sein), nor of Being-in-Process (Im-Prozess-Sein), but of Not-Yet-Being (Noch-nicht-Sein), into the sphere of the Novum, of the mediation of the deed, of fear and hope.

Analysis of No Sample One must view the world as a task, as a model, as an analysis of sample

which is not at hand. Science is necessary for this, a speculative, meta-physical science which understands the sky, which understands building


up into the sky, the whole world is built up into the skyindeed, a sci-ence which not only understands the blue of the sky but even its ultra-violet; and this with the knowledge that the presence which is usually called reality is surrounded by a tremendously greater ocean of objec-tively real possibility. Possibility is not hocus-pocus. It is an exactly de-finable concept; namely, partial conditionality. The world is not yet completely determined, it is still somewhat open: like tomorrow's weather. There are conditions which we do not yet know or which do not even exist yet. Therefore, it can rain tomorrow or it can be pleasant. We live surrounded by possibility, not merely by presence. In the prison of mere presence we could not even move nor even breathe.

I am approaching the conclusion. Not-Yet-Being appears twice (since the split into subject and object has been imparted to us for a long time) : as something not-yet-conscious (noch-nicht-Bewusstes) and as something not-yet-come-into-being (Noch-nicht-Gewordenes). The not-yet-conscious in us, the creatively preconscious, represents the not-yet-come-into-being in the object so far as it contains genuine futurity in itself. If it does not contain this in itself it is wshful thinking, hocus-pocus.

The not-yet-conscious is alsoa fact which is curiously and tremen-dously misunderstoodno-longer-conscious (Nicht-mehr-Bewusstes), down there in the cellar of consciousness where what was once conscious has sunken down, where it either decays or is summoned up again.

Even at the height of consciousness there is a not-yet-conscious which is not yet in circulation but which is nonetheless visible to us: in youth, in the changing times and in productivity. These are the three conditions in which the percentage oir the not-yet-conscious is greatest: high oxygen conditions in which fire burns most strongly.

Youth is full of it. Something lies latent in us. We have our entire life before us. That is youthat least if its head is not on backwards. Genuine youth has everything before it and it takes part. It is addicted to what is new and is still independent of the contents of the new.

The changing times: the old does not want to pass away and the new does not want to come. But something is taking place, the age is pregnant, society is pregnant, a child wants to be born. Late Antiquity, the Renais-sance, Storm and Stress, the 18th Century, our agethese are epochs of changing times, overcharged with the not-yet-conscious.

Then productivity: the production of a work that had not previously existed, political, musical, poetic or religiousin any case surrounded by a twilight toward the future. Not the twilight of the setting sun. Instead, this state of producivity is dawn-like, most clearly, for instance, in the case of Goethe as a young man in whom all three phenomena appear simultaneously: youth, changing times and productivity.

The utopia is the place where the not-yet-conscious makes its appear-ance. To date the concept of the Utopian has not only been conceived of

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negatively, it has also been restricted to the political fable, the social utopia. That is one thing: the ancestral house, Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, Fourier, Saint Simon, Robert Owens, etc. These are magnifi-cent attempts to sketch a better society; dreams of a better life. But that is not the only thing. I have attempted to find the concept of the Utopian everywhere. Human life, history and culture are full of it: architecture which was never built, in which the Utopian is present and which is then toned down to reality; medical day dreams; or technological day dreams; science fiction which appears with Bacon in the "Nova Atlantis"; wish landscapes in painting, music and poetry; the Arcadian, Elysian, Para-disical, ranging high above to the moment to which one says: "Verweile doch, du bist so schn."

These are the tremendous herbs which can be dispensed against the hardest anti-utopia, against death: dreams of continued existence, of immortality in the artistic work, and the rest, religious utopias from top to bottom, dreams toward the future, wish mysteries: quomodo deus homoin what way can that come to us? Something salutary, even in the medical sense, extending to the salutary in the other redemptive sense. An antidote against death, resurrection and eternal life, in all great religions, applied to something not yet existent, reserved, possible-treasures undevoured by rust or moths.

In spite of all the cowardice, in spite of all the means of keeping the slaves in their place, in spite of all the consolations of the Hereafter with the continuing unjust distribution of worldly goods, but with the just distribution of heavenly goodsall of these utopias can happen here and they have their place in the gigantic realm of Utopian consciousness and Utopian obligation. Here it is a question of not allowing oneself to be misused for ideological purposes, but rather of eliminating everything that can be misused so that church, religion, indeed even atheism are possible.

Whatever has not yet come into being is a thing pending in the World-Process, in a physical, medical, judicial and theological trial which can neither be thwarted nor be won but which remains in abeyance. The substratum of the real seethes on a dialectical fire; the essence still has to be brought forth into a world which does not know which way is up and which therefore needs man.

Decision for the Undecided Man makes the decision for something undecided, so undecided that

Jahweh, when Moses asked him how he should call him, answered: "I shall be who I shall be."

This is an early mythological and similtaneously no longer mytholog-ical determination of the essence, a determination which corresponds to


the real condition of reality, a determination which posits no hereafter or "above," but rather a possible "before-us."

Substance, said Aristotle, is Being-in-Possibility: as wax is the possibility of the seal. Substance, passive possibility for Aristotle, became more and more active for the Aristotelian Left, through the Arabian philosophers until the Natura naturans which meets man halfway and gives him a well-founded direction so that he can act creatively in a concrete manner and in complete seriousnessnot with confidence, for that would be based upon a determined world, but with fear and hope which are based on the not yet determined.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I thinkand this is the last thing I want to sayif our universities want to preserve their old tradition of universities, I think that they cannot dedicate themselves too highly to the visible transition and to the radical change of our age and of our society over to openness toward the future. They must kindle the light. Especially philosophy oughtas Kant says in the Conflict of the Facultiesto bear the torch before and not the train behind.

Socialism and Christianity have many kinds of concordance, especially in the most important matters. It is good that it is so, both in order to give depth to the avowal of socialism as well asand perhaps even more importantto give the avowal of Christianity a sign of genuineness, and in such a manner that a new era of Christianity will be indicated, one which will light the way as the light of hope: a new era in which the kingdom of the Son of Man will occur not merely as something "above." If the salvation in the Gospel is to become fleshfor us or for men who followthere must not be merely something above, but also something before us.

I thank you. Translated by WILLIAM R. WHITE

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Bloch_Man as Possibility