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Ernst BlochGerman philosopher, sociologist and publicist of neo-Marxist orientation. Creator of the “philosophy of hope” and the “ontology of Yet-Not-Being.”
Date of Birth: 08.07.1885
Country:  Germany |
Content:
Biography of Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch was a German philosopher, sociologist, and publicist of neo-Marxist orientation. He was the creator of the "Philosophy of Hope" and the "Ontology of Not-Yet-Being." Born into a prosperous Jewish family of a railway official in Ludwigshafen, Bloch wrote his first philosophical work at the age of 13. During this time, he became acquainted with socialist ideas through the speeches of August Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg and by reading the social democratic newspaper "Vorwärts." He corresponded with Ernst Mach, Theodor Lipps, Eduard von Hartmann, and Wilhelm Windelband during his school years. Bloch studied philosophy, physics, German studies, and music in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg under the guidance of Theodor Lipps, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Oswald Külpe. He had a keen interest in music, with Gustav Mahler being one of his favorite composers, and he was also fascinated by art, particularly expressionism. Bloch maintained friendships with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno.
In 1908, Bloch defended his doctoral dissertation on the neo-Kantianism and epistemological problems of Heinrich Rickert. In 1911, he began a creative collaboration with György Lukács. When Lukács was forced to emigrate from Hungary after the fall of the Soviet republic, Bloch initiated a campaign for the release of Lukács from Austrian imprisonment and wrote an appeal titled "To Save Georg Lukács." From 1915 to 1917, in Grünwald near Munich, Bloch wrote his first major work, "The Spirit of Utopia."
In 1917, as an opponent of the war, Bloch was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, where he began working on his philosophy of hope. His defeatist position was so radical that he was not satisfied with the decisions of the anti-war socialist Zimmerwald Conference, which assigned blame for the outbreak of war to both warring sides. His views led him to join a pacifist group, which included German Hess, René Schickele, and Hugo Ball. Bloch wrote over 100 articles about war, militarism, pacifism, democracy, socialism, and the October Revolution for the associated "Free Newspaper." He sympathetically viewed the October Revolution, although he did not hide his disappointment with the negative phenomena in Soviet Russia and the defeat of the socialist revolution in Germany. He later recalled that he and Lukács were deeply impressed by Alexander Blok's poem "The Twelve." In 1919, after the end of World War I, Bloch returned to Germany with his sick wife and joined the Communist Party.
During the 1920s, Bloch traveled through Europe and North Africa, visiting Berlin, Bern, Munich, southern France, Paris, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In 1933, he emigrated from Germany to Zurich due to the rise of the Nazis, who declared Bloch a wanted man. In 1934, he was expelled from Switzerland and moved to Vienna, then to Paris. From 1937 to 1938, he lived and worked in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
In 1938, Bloch emigrated to the United States, where he initially lived in cramped conditions. Even the left-wing sociologist Max Horkheimer refused to employ him at the Institute for Social Research, which had relocated from Frankfurt to New York, considering Bloch's views "too communist." He relied on the assistance of friends such as Hans Eisler, Alfred Kantorowicz, Adolf Löwe, and others. Bloch eventually learned English and obtained American citizenship.
In 1948, on the recommendation of Werner Krauss and the Ministry of Education of Saxony, Bloch was appointed as a professor of philosophy at Leipzig University, East Germany, succeeding Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had moved to Frankfurt. Herbert Marcuse was also invited to Leipzig but declined, providing a positive recommendation for Bloch instead.
From 1949 to 1956, Bloch was a professor of philosophy at Leipzig University and the director of the Institute of Philosophy at Leipzig University. He taught courses on the history of philosophy and delivered public lectures such as "University, Marxism, Philosophy" (1949) and "University, Truth, Freedom" (1955), in which he argued against the simplification of higher education. In 1953, together with Wolfgang Harich, he co-founded the leading philosophical publication in East Germany, the "German Journal of Philosophy" (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie). Bloch processed and published the works that had accumulated during his years of exile, including "Subject-Object: Explanations of Hegel" (1951), "Avicenna and Left Aristotelians" (1952), "Christian Thomasius, the Uncompromising German Scholar" (1953), and two volumes of "The Principle of Hope" (1954-1955). He was elected chairman of the Union of Cultural Workers for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund) in Leipzig.
In 1954 and 1955, Bloch received recognition and awards, including becoming a full member of the German Academy of Sciences (which was still undivided) and heading the philosophy section. He was awarded the National Prize of East Germany in science and technology (1954) and the "Order of Merit for the Fatherland" (1955). The Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany sent a greeting acknowledging Bloch's efforts in the struggle for a "new democratic Germany," and the SEP newspaper "Neues Deutschland" published congratulations from Secretary Kurt Hager. However, criticism of Bloch's philosophy grew, as it did not conform to the understanding of dialectical and historical materialism prevalent in the USSR and East Germany. In 1954, a discussion on bourgeois heritage in GDR philosophy began with an article by another Leipzig philosophy professor, Rudolf Otto Grotkopp, titled "The Marxist Dialectical Method and its Opposition to Idealistic Dialectics," in which Bloch was referred to as a representative of Hegelian idealism. After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the influence of Ernst Bloch, the publishing house Aufbau-Verlag, founded by Walter Janka, established the "Circle of Like-Minded Individuals" - an informal group of Marxist thinkers calling for internal reforms within the party. Wolfgang Harich, who developed the "Platform of the Special German Path to Socialism" on behalf of the group and submitted it to both party leadership and the West, was publicly charged with plotting a coup. Bloch was not arrested but was deprived of the right to public appearances and subjected to a campaign of harassment in the East German press and at various conferences. The newspaper "Neues Deutschland" participated in this campaign, and even Walter Ulbricht himself took part.
In 1957, Bloch was stripped of his professorship after prolonged conflicts with the authorities of East Germany due to his opposition to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Many of his colleagues and comrades, including theologian Emil Fuchs, spoke out against his forced retirement. However, even after his removal, Bloch continued to receive payments and enjoy certain privileges, including the right to free travel around the world – he visited Greece, Egypt, France, Albania, and West Germany multiple times.
In 1961, while on summer vacation in Bavaria, West Germany, Bloch made the decision not to return to East Germany, which he had reluctantly obtained permission to leave. He became a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen. His lectures, which drew crowds of up to a thousand people, were published in 1963 under the title "Tübingen Introductions to Philosophy." Suhrkamp Verlag, one of the leading West German publishers, began publishing Bloch's collected works. In 1964, he was awarded the Culture Prize of the Federation of German Trade Unions, and in 1967, he received the International Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association. He was honored with honorary doctorates from the University of Zagreb (1969) and the Sorbonne (1975).
Bloch participated in the dialogue between Marxism and Christianity. Although he did not directly align himself with any specific Marxist school or tendency, Bloch collaborated closely with the Yugoslav group "Praxis" from the mid-1960s, serving on the editorial board of the eponymous journal. Until his death, he remained a socialist, asserting that "the cause of socialism cannot be destroyed." While he agreed with Lukács that even the worst socialism is still better than the best capitalism, he believed that the "real socialism" in the Eastern Bloc was further away from socialism than the most meager reformism.
He insisted on condemning both American intervention in Vietnam and Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, stating that "what the Russians established in Prague is a direct contradiction to Marxism." He critically supported the "New Left" and the student movement of the 1960s, establishing friendly relationships with Rudi Dutschke. He spoke at protests against the Emergency Act, bans on professions, nuclear armament races, Israeli militarism, and German anti-Semitism.
Psychiatrist and eco-socialist Joel Kovel called Bloch the "greatest of contemporary utopian thinkers." Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a second-generation member of the Frankfurt School, previously referred to Bloch as a "Marxist Schelling," stating that "only Ernst Bloch and Karl Mannheim have purified the expression 'utopia' of the taste of utopianism and rehabilitated it as a pure environment for the project of alternative life possibilities, which must be laid down in the historical process itself."
Personal Life:
In 1913, Bloch married Else von Stritzky, the daughter of a brewer from Riga. He became a widower in 1921. He remarried, but his marriage to Linda Oppenheimer was short-lived. His third wife was Polish architect and anti-Stalinist communist Karola Piotrkowska, whom Bloch married in Vienna in 1934 and remained with until his death.
Bloch passed away in Tübingen in 1977.
Honors and Awards:
- Full member of the German Academy of Sciences (1955, undivided)
- National Prize, 2nd class, for Science and Technology (1954)
- Order of Merit for the Fatherland (1955)
- Culture Prize of the Federation of German Trade Unions (1964)
- International Peace Prize of the German Publishers' Association (1967)
- Honorary doctorate from the University of Zagreb (1969)
- Honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne and the University of Tübingen (1975)
- Streets in Obermenzing, Tübingen, and Stuttgart are named after Bloch. The Ernst Bloch Archive was established in Ludwigshafen. The Ernst Bloch International Association was founded in Hamburg in 1985 to commemorate the philosopher's centenary.
