FRIEDRICH STOLTZE
I did not write the year in my copy of the first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie [Spirit of Utopia, 1918], but I must have read it in 1921. In the spring of that year, having passed my Abitur, I had become acquainted with Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, and I learned that Bloch was associated with Lukács. I devoured the book, which was Bloch’s masterpiece until The Principle of Hope appeared. And in fact the chapter on Don Quixote, the comic hero, is closely related to The Theory of the Novel in its approach, even if the excursus on the theory of drama sets itself off from Lukács’ work. The distinction Bloch makes between the hero as “the bleeding one” and the hero as “the perfected one” is in fact the distinction between the expressionist and the classicist stance; into his late years, in shifting categories and varying subject matter, Bloch continued to define the domains of these two related attitudes. But that was not the essential difference between them that my early experience registered. The dark brown volume of over 400 pages, printed on thick paper, promised something of what one hopes for from medieval books, something I had felt, as a child at home, in the calf’s leather Heldenschatz [Treasury of the Heroic], a belated eighteenth-century book of magic full of abstruse instructions many of which I am still pondering. The Spirit of Utopia looked as though it had been written by Nostradamus himself. The name Bloch had the same aura. Dark as a gateway, with a muffled blare like a trumpet blast, it aroused the expectation of something vast, an expectation that quickly rendered the philosophy with which I had become acquainted as a student suspect as shallow and unworthy of its own concept. When I met Bloch seven years later, I found the same tone in his voice. His disrespectful remarks about Karl Jaspers, at that time highly regarded as a psychologist of Weltanschauungen, which he confided to me early on, may have contributed to this promise of heresy.
In the obscure way a seventeen-year-old perceives such phenomena, I had the feeling that here philosophy had escaped the curse of being official. I also sensed where it had escaped to, an interior space that is not self-enclosed and self-positing like an idyllic inwardness but rather a space through which the thinking hand leads one to an abundance of content not offered by outward life—which, Bloch teaches, is always less than it could be—or by traditional philosophy, which, as intentio obliqua, shrinks back from the very content the adept expects from it. Bloch’s was a philosophy that could hold its head high in front of the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology. Concepts like “departure for the interior,” which walked the fine line between magic formula and theorem, bore witness to that. If, as Plato said, philosophy originated in amazement and—one drew the conclusion spontaneously—allayed that amazement through its further course, then Bloch’s volume, a folio in quarto, protests the nonsensical state of affairs, frozenly taken for granted, in which that philosophy pompously cheats itself of what it ought to be. Bloch’s philosophy did not merely begin with amazement: it was intended to open out onto the amazing. Mystical and hochfahrend in the double sense of explosive and ascending, it wanted to do away with the ceremonials of intellectual discipline that prevent it from achieving its goal; fraternally, it allied itself with the boldest aspects of contemporary art and would have preferred to transcend them by extending them through intellectual reflection. The book, Bloch’s first, bearing all his later work within it, seemed to me to be one prolonged rebellion against the renunciation within thought that extends even into its purely formal character. Prior to any theoretical content, I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever written anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit.
Even in the utopia book, for all its colorful abundance, what is specific to Bloch’s philosophy is to be sought more in the gesture than in the individual ideas, not excepting his central, orienting idea of the messianic end of history, the breakthrough of transcendence; and in any case Lukács, at that time occupied with his metaphysical interpretation of Dostoevsky, shared this theme with him. The primacy of gesture, however, derives from the content. With the concept of the form of the unconstruable question, Bloch contrasted the only thing worth thinking with the arrogant idea that thought could of itself speak its own name. This makes it all the more difficult to indicate concretely what gave the experience of his work its power; to say how he makes one “betroffen,” [thunderstruck], to use his word. It may help to compare a short passage from Bloch’s old book on utopia with one by another author with whom Bloch’s work has something in common thematically. The incomparable is constituted only by the comparable, however much Bloch’s intentions and intellectual approach were from the first consciously opposed to that temperate circumstantiality that everyone concerned with philosophical content cultivated before the First World War—as though to justify themselves academically. But Georg Simmel, whom Bloch knew well, as he did most of the famous philosophers of his youth, was, for all his psychological idealism, the first to accomplish the return of philosophy to concrete subjects, a shift that remained canonical for everyone dissatisfied with the chattering of epistemology or intellectual history. If we reacted so strongly against Simmel at one time, it was only because he withheld from us the very thing with which he enticed us. Brilliant in a way much faded today, his attitude surrounded its posh objects with simple categories or supplemented them with general reflections, without ever losing itself unreservedly in the material itself, as is required if knowledge is to be more than a self-satisfied spinning of the wheels of its preestablished apparatus. Simmel has an essay entitled “Der Henkel” [“The Handle”] in a book with the irritatingly complicitous title Philosophische Kultur [Philosophical Culture]; the book on utopia opens with a few pages called “Ein alter Krug” [“An Old Pot”]. They are, to be sure, about a pot without a handle, one not so versed in the ways of the world of utility as the one that inspired Simmel’s observations.
In the old-fashioned manner, Simmel proceeds from a core thesis, that every work of art stands “in…two worlds at the same time”: “Whereas in the pure work of art the moment of reality is completely irrelevant, completely consumed, so to speak, that moment has claims on the vase, which is used, which is filled and emptied, handed here and set there. It is this double status of the vase that is most decisively expressed in its handle.”1 While the double function of the handle is indisputable, its discovery is equally trivial. Simmel is oblivious to the fact that the moments of empirical reality which the work of art must incorporate in order to constitute itself as a work do not simply perish; they survive even in its sublime aspect, and it is essentially in its tension with these moments that the work of art lives. Simmel does not recognize works of art as being inherently mediated by the sublated empirical moments. The mediation on which he meditates remains as external to them as the handle to the vase. Simmel’s conventional view of the unquestionable immanence of works of art corresponds to this. Works of art are neutralized from the outset, made the objects of contemplative enjoyment: “The work of art constructs a sovereign realm from the views of reality from which it draws its content; and while the canvas and the colors placed on it are pieces of reality, the work of art that is represented by means of them leads its life in an ideal space which has no more contact with real space than sounds can have contact with smells.”2 True as it is that works of art belong to what Simmel calls “ideal space,” it is equally true that the space exists only in dialectical relationship to real space; the mere fact that Simmel has to borrow the word “space” from extra-aesthetic reality testifies to that. His undialectical thesis, a thesis of static universality, affords him all manner of philosophical ideas that are neither quite cogent as ideas nor do justice to the object. Aesthetics becomes aestheticizing: “The issue is precisely that utility and beauty approach the handle as two demands that are alien to one another—the first coming from the world, the second from the formal law of the vase—and that now a higher-order beauty, as it were, takes hold of both and reveals their dualism to be in the last analysis a unity not further describable.”3 Since it is supposed to be “not further describable,” this kind of generality does not deter Simmel from platitudes which he does not hesitate to label with the concept of Lebenskunst, the art of living: “Perhaps this allows us to formulate the richness of the life human beings and objects have; for that richness rests on the multiplicity of ways in which they belong to one another in the simultaneity of within and without, and in their association and fusion in one direction—which is dissolution, because association and fusion in another direction stand opposed to it.”4 It is debatable whether the attitude of someone offering this kind of incoherent wit to those listening respectfully over tea is superior to academic pedantry. Simmel is by no means lacking in the latter, the correlate of the collector’s refined taste; he pronounces judgment on vases as categorically as any professor ever did, in accordance with his inalienable laws of the beautiful: “What creates the decidedly ugly impression of these pieces is neither an immediate sin against the visual nor a sin against praxis: for why indeed should a vessel not be tilted in several directions?”5 Or he postulates that “the handle and the spout correspond to one another visually as the endpoints of the diameter of the vessel, and they must maintain a certain balance,”6 unconcerned with the possibility that the construction of a form or even considerations of functionality might produce other arrangements than symmetrical ones of this kind. Tastelessness is inherent in taste, which is the supreme elevation of this kind of aesthetics, and in its mature form not even domestic horrors can put tastelessness out of countenance: “This kind of interval between the vase and the handle is more pointed when, as frequently occurs, the handle is shaped like a snake, a lizard, or a dragon.”7 Some amazing impulses in his work toward a program of functionalism, as when he sees so-called aesthetic effect compromised by lack of purposefulness, are thereby devalued. The need for philosophical externalization, the need to disappear into the object, becomes distorted into a readiness to philosophize about anything and everything, and the parapraxes arise from this distortion. An impoverished scaffolding of invariant fundamental concepts on the one hand, such as form and life, and on the other hand, blindness to the aspects of the phenomenon that philosophy ought to redeem are correlated here. Only the unyielding theoretical power of a philosophy richly developed in itself is capable of the suppleness in its dealings with objects that could decipher them. In Simmel culture takes the place of that theoretical power. Culture takes potluck from the stock of approved commodities that spirit hoards, as it were, in its china cupboard. In his essay on the handle, Simmel talks only of pleasing objets d’art; nothing prehistoric is deemed worthy of his fastidious attention. Simmel’s philosophy uses the silver stylus, as Brecht was in the habit of saying about all refined sensitivity; the fiber of his thought capitulates before arts and crafts. It does not escape Simmel, who is a clever man, that the imago of the vase has something to do with the human being, but he takes it no farther than the idea of a comparison. He takes care not to discover, through immersion in the incommensurable aspects of the object, anything about the human being that might be hidden from him, or anything he might not already know about the object. Bloch’s text, in contrast, bears the heading “Encounter with Oneself.”
Bloch’s text is prima vista distinguished from Simmel’s by its tempo. No idea is expounded or developed in ponderous excurses. Just as after Schönberg, under the pressure of the new music, older music too must be played much faster so that the speculative ear is not offended by the music’s lingering on things that go without saying, so Ernst Bloch’s speculative head is in a hurry. The two pages of Bloch’s text leave themselves no time; they move breathlessly between the extremes of the description of a pot, a particular pot, and quixotic speculation, or rather, its implicit power. Bloch tells us the path his unsatiated gaze follows: “Here one feels oneself to be looking into a long sunlit corridor with a door at the end.”8 The tempo is more than the mere medium of a subjectively excited delivery. Its intensity is that of something to be expressed, the breakthrough that, explicitly or implicitly, forms the theme of every sentence Bloch ever wrote, a breakthrough he tries to evoke through the figure of his speech. This tempo is comparable to the expressionist tempo, which abbreviates. Philosophically, it indicates a change of attitude toward the object. The object can no longer be contemplated peacefully and with composure. As in emancipated film, thought uses a handheld camera. As far as the impulses of this kind of philosophy are concerned, the bourgeois organization of experience with its seemingly fixed distance between the viewer and the viewed is a thing of the past, right in the middle of the First World War. This shakeup in the relationship of the subject to what he wants to say alters the idea of truth itself. And with this, presentation, which except for Nietzsche had long been neglected in academia, becomes essential to the matter at hand again for the first time. If Hegel rescued the notion of mediation from the idea that it was something in the middle between different things and moved it to the interior of the material concerned, which came to life under the suction-like gaze of the argument, becoming its own Other, then Bloch was the first to transpose this intellectual structure into the literary form of philosophy. Even today, nothing provokes the rage of mediocre intellectuals toward Bloch so much as the shifting perspective and tempo of his manner of thinking. The postulate of his tempo is the same as the postulate of condensation. The philosophical establishment could not muster the capacity and the strength to satisfy a demand which is nevertheless sensed to be ineluctable. And therefore resentment denigrates the demand itself as unscientific.
The conditions under which the young Bloch philosophized were not so very different from those of Simmel. It was not the way it is for poor folk: “The wall is green, the mirror gold, the window black, the lamp burns bright,”9 and the pot Bloch describes is “not only simply warm or as unquestionably beautiful as the other old, noble things.”10 He will have owned many of them; perhaps he was a collector like Benjamin. But in his thinking he does not treat the objects he has collected like possessions. His attitude is more that of the allegorist toward the emblems with which he is surrounded and which speak to him eloquently, or even that of my mystic toward the manuscripts he carries off in a frenzy, hoping that they will yield their secrets to him. This altered experience is not satisfied with the customary experience of aesthetic form that has been turned into philosophy. Hegelianly, Bloch’s experience encompasses the content as well. It is no longer the proportions of the pot that are beautiful but rather what has been accumulated within it, its process of becoming and its history, what has disappeared into it and what the thinker’s gaze, which is both tender and aggressive, arouses in it. The pot Bloch is thinking of is not a “precious ancient specimen,” not “beautifully preserved, narrow-necked, consciously modelled, with much fluting, a beautifully coiffeured head on its neck and a coat of arms on its belly.”11 One would hardly go wrong to hear a polemic against Simmel in Bloch’s aversion to works of art that stop being works of art under the spell of refinement: “But anyone who loves this pot recognizes how superficial the expensive jugs are and prefers the brown, ungainly utensil, almost neckless, with the face of a wild man on its curvature, to its brothers.”12 The Blochian tempo: it is also impatience with a culture that puts things off and interferes with what ought to exist here and now. Bloch prefers the half-barbaric piece, and crude material like the wild man, who embodies more mystery—the mystery which opposes death—than any accomplished immanence. In Bloch’s parti pris one sees, in extreme form, how identical motifs can take on contrary function and significance in the movement of history. In his love for the ungainly object Bloch does not shrink from formulations such as “good indigenous handiwork.” Bloch’s archaism, his sympathy with the peasant-like, is in line with that of the radical Expressionists, who reproduced Bavarian art in the Blaue Reiter. The run-of-the-mill artistic object is renounced in favor of something that is absolute and no longer unreconciled with the subject—the extreme opposite of what such archaism became in Blood and Soil ideology. What is age-old and has been forgotten since the beginning of time speaks to this intention to create something that has not yet existed, something that has to be produced, something that is distorted in a cultural regime that celebrates a cheap triumph over the imperfect work, whose very imperfection poses questions. “There is nothing artistic about the old pot,” Bloch concludes by saying, “but a work of art would at least have to look like this in order to be one.”13
A dimension that has been taboo for philosophy since the extravagances of its speculative ways is forced open, a dimension philosophy had conceded to the apocryphal, all the way down to Rudolf Steiner, of whom Bloch speaks with a measure of ironic respect in the utopia book. The desperate quality that the speculative element takes on when it falls out of the dialectic echoes in Bloch’s music in the form of an exaggerated passion for the possibility lying defeated, as impossibility, in the midst of reality. Like all thought worthy of the name, Bloch’s thrives on the edge of failure, in close proximity to sympathy for the occult. That sympathy is broken only by the fact that in the yearning for something irretrievably past, things not seriously to be wished for are said of the time “when Floppy Ear and the Fiery Man are said to have been seen in the fields of the Rhein-Frankish region at evening.”14 Bloch’s new dimension, however, is not that old fourth dimension. In the tertium comparationis of the abstract concept, Simmel had compared his vase to the nature of the human being, of which it is demanded that it “preserve its role in the organic closedness of the one circle while at the same time becoming serviceable for the purposes of a wider unity and through such serviceability helping to integrate the narrower circle into the surrounding one.”15 Bloch reduces such field-and-forest metaphysics to ashes. The human being and the pot do not resemble one another in this thin double citizenship in the two worlds of aesthetic autonomy and practical purposefulness. I am Bloch’s pot, literally and directly, a dull, inarticulate model of what I could be but am not permitted to be: “But certainly I can become shaped like a jug, and can look on myself as a brown, strangely formed, Nordic amphora-like something, and this is not only through imitation or simple empathy but in such a way that I become richer for my part by doing so, more present, more educated to what I am through this work I have come to partake of.”16 What the hollow depths of the pot express is not a metaphor; to be in those depths, Bloch suggests, would be to be in the thing-in-itself, in what it is in the nature of the human being that eludes introspection. Physically and spiritually, in its unfathomable interior the artifact embodies for those who made it what they have neglected and missed out on. And it is no longer an object of contemplation, because it wants of them what they have unintentionally embedded in its form. Art, the Kantian sphere of disinterested pleasure, is redeemed from that sphere, not through the individual work pursuing real tendencies but rather through the whole sphere of aesthetic transcendence standing in for something authentic and nonillusory.
Amazement is rediscovered, but it is an astonishment at individual things, not a Platonic amazement; an amazement saturated with nominalism and also emphatically opposed to the power of convention, which is a dingy lens in front of the eye and a layer of dust on the object. Audacious reflection wants to give thought what cautious reflection drove out of it—naiveté. For just as, in the words of Bloch’s master, there is nothing immediate between heaven and earth which is not mediated, so too there can be nothing mediated without the concept of mediation involving a moment of the immediate. Bloch’s pathos is indefatigably directed to that moment. He asks the pot, What is that?, not like a catechism that tries to pound things he is supposed to believe into the head of the stupid peasant, duping him at the same time by talking him into the idea that repetition is hidden meaning; instead, Bloch teaches persistence in the face of what is unfamiliar and unknown, yet known: “It is difficult to fathom how things look in the dark, spacious belly of these jugs. One would certainly like to know this. The persistent, curious children’s question comes up again. For the jug is closely related to the childlike.”17 No ontology is to be extracted from the belly of the pot. What Bloch is after is this: if one only really knew what the pot in its thing-language is saying and concealing at the same time, then one would know what ought to be known and what the discipline of civilizing thought, climaxing in the authority of Kant, has forbidden consciousness to ask. This secret would be the opposite of something that has always been and will always be, the opposite of invariance: something that would finally be different.
But this is not stated in so many words in Bloch’s short text. While that “What is that?” is indelibly present in my mind as the content of “The Old Pot,” when I reread it after more than forty years I could not find in it what I read out of it. It has mystically disappeared in the text. The substance of the text unfolded only in memory. It contains much more than it contains, and not only in the vague sense of potential associations. It unambiguously communicates what it unequivocally refuses to communicate. That is Bloch in a nutshell. The transformation that takes place in remembrance of what he wrote corroborates his own philosophy. Bloch would be able to invent a Hasidic tale to tell of that transformation.