Revolutionaries (26 page)

Hope is a fact, but for Professor Bloch also a desirable one. The object of his work is not merely its study but its propagation: the philosopher must be not only analyst but enthusiast. To teach men to hope in the right way and for the right things, to recognize what hoping implies, is his primary purpose. Consequently it is essential to criticize what denies, or rather what obscures and diverts hope, for
desiderium
(‘dreaming forwards') is so deeply rooted in man that even the most pessimistic (indeed, especially the most pessimistic) attitudes can be shown to be merely diversions rather than denials of the utopian urge; even Angst or the concept of ‘nothingness'. Those who really deny Utopia are those who create a closed and middling world from which the great avenues opening upon perfection are hedged off: the bourgeoisie.

For the bourgeois world replaces Utopia by ‘adjustment' or
escape – the society without want or unhappiness, by window-shopping and the
New Yorker
ad life; the anti-philistine life by gangster-romance; the undiscovered Eden by holidays in Positano and Chianti bottles as lampstands. Instead of hope there are lies, instead of truth, a mask. (For the middle-class ideal of the period before industrialism, as exemplified in Dutch seventeenth-century painting and Biedermeier interiors, Professor Bloch has respect and a certain tenderness. It can hardly be fitted even into his extended concept of Utopia, though he tries; de Hooch paints ‘those tiny sharp pictures that carry homesickness within them'. But it had clarity and honesty, and in it ‘the corner grocery of happiness was made to look like a genuine treasure chamber'.) And yet the nature of hope is such that there is truth even in the lies of capitalism. The desire for a ‘happy end', however commercially exploited, is man's desire for the good life; our ever-deceived optimism, superior to unconditional pessimism, the belief that something can be done about it.

Professor Bloch's attacks against the theories which stand in the way of the recognition of hope, and especially his contemptuous dissection of Freudian and even more contemptuous dismissal of Adlerian and Jungian psychoanalysis, are therefore essential to his argument. However, though they sometimes coincide with what used to be marxist orthodoxy, they must not be confused with it. His critique of the fashions of the west is not indiscriminate: if he rejects philosophical pragmatism or functionalism in architecture, and brushes aside D.H. Lawrence (not without some silent sympathy from some of us) as a ‘sentimental penis-poet', he cherishes Schönberg and respects abstract painting. Moreover, his arguments are strictly his own, for whatever his conclusions, Professor Bloch's philosophical provenance is un-marxist, or rather only one-third marxist.

He is in fact a surviving German ‘natural philosopher' of the Coleridgean era who has turned revolutionary; a natural rebel against mechanical rationalism, a natural denizen of that world of
semi-mystical cosmic harmonies, vital principles, living organisms, evolution, the interplay of polar opposites, and so on, in which Herder, Schelling or for that matter Goethe, not to mention Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, moved. (It is highly characteristic of Professor Bloch's book that Paracelsus should be referred to more often in it than Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Darwin put together.) Admittedly marxism has, via Hegel, deeper roots in this tradition than is commonly allowed. As late as
Anti-Duehring
Engels still writes a characteristic passage exalting Kepler above Newton and, indeed, a specific defence of the positive aspects of ‘nature philosophy'. Still, the other two acknowledged components of marxism, the British and the French, have quite a different pedigree, and indeed its strength lies in the combination of both the ‘classical' and the ‘romantic' traditions of thought, if the term may be used in this context. But Professor Bloch is almost wholly a ‘romantic'.

Hence both the strength and the weakness of his work. His views about the natural sciences will strike Anglo-Saxon readers as wilfully absurd, perhaps because we live in an age when the major advances in science are made by mathematics and a sophisticated neomechanism. But if his critiques may strike scientists as incomprehensible for the same reason as Goethe's rejection of Newton's optics, neither are the aberrations of fools. On the other hand Professor Bloch's approach gives him great penetration into the logic of what appears to be irrational (such as the world of visionary and symbolic statement), a navigational mastery of the oceans of the human heart, and a deep understanding of men's aspirations. These are the gifts of the artist, and indeed Professor Bloch is an artist, with a major writer's psychological insight and a remarkable style, where concise and gnomic foothills flank sinewy mountain ranges of prose, broken by cascades of noble rhetoric, and on which the glaciers of wit sparkle and glow.

But he is not an artist who has strayed into philosophy. He is a
philosopher who also requires the techniques of the artist, for whom it is equally essential not only, say, to make an acute analysis of the middle-class preconceptions of Freud but also to express Spinoza's aspirations metaphorically but not vaguely as ‘to see the world as a crystal, with the sun at its zenith, so that nothing throws a shadow'. Romanticism has taught Professor Bloch that there are things not readily expressible, at present in quantities or verifiable propositions, which nevertheless ‘are there' and ought to be expressed. What is left of love when Kinsey has counted its orgasms, sample inquiries have measured its attitudes, physiologists described its mechanism and analysts the propositions which can be made about it, is still meaningful, and not only subjectively to lovers.

Das Prinzip Hoffnung
is a long, discursive and sometimes repetitive book. To attempt any summary of its content beyond the briefest and driest oversimplification is quite impracticable, for it is a work of gigantic size and encyclopaedic range. (How many philosophical books, marxist or otherwise, contain analyses of the relation between music and medieval scholastic logic, discussions of feminism as a variant of Utopia, of Don Juan, Don Quixote and Faust as myths, of Natural Law in the eighteenth century, the evolution of Rosicrucianism, the history of town planning, yoga, the baroque, Joachim of Fiore, fun-fairs, Zoroaster, the nature of dancing, tourism and the symbolism of the alchemists?) Probably most readers will enjoy the book mainly for its variety and as the sum of often profoundly brilliant, sometimes rather peculiar, always stimulating, parts. Probably few readers will follow the author all the way, though none will fail to discover in him flashes of dazzling insight or – embedded in page-long paragraphs like flakes of mica in granite – the most polished of aphorisms.

However, even the most critically inclined should make the attempt to follow him to the end of his journey, where man, ‘ein unterdrücktes und verschollenes Wesen', finds that ‘the true
Genesis is not at the beginning but at the end', where Blake fuses with Marx, and alienation ends in man's discovery of his true situation. For it is not every day that we are reminded, with so much wisdom, erudition, wit and mastery of language, that hope and the building of the earthly paradise are man's fate.

¹
Ernst Bloch,
Das Prinzip Hoffnung
, 2 vols., Frankfurt, 1959.

A few years ago an able and acute observer of marxism could suggest that the history of its evolution as a theory was virtually at an end; or at all events at a standstill. It is plainly not possible to take such a view today. The cracking of the apparently smooth and firmly frozen surface of stalinism in the Soviet Union and of the unified and apparently integrated international communist movement has not merely produced, or revealed, equivalent cracks in the systematic compendium of dogma elaborated in the 1930s, and brilliantly simplified for pedagogic purposes in the
Short History of the CPSU
. The thaw of the ice-cap also watered the numerous plants of heterodoxy, schism or mere unofficial growth which had survived on the margin of, or under, the giant glacier. The hundred flowers bloomed, the schools began once again to contend, in a manner unfamiliar to all except the elderly who could throw their minds back to the 1920s or the old who recalled the days before 1914. Marxism, which had apparently aspired to turn itself – and by
force majeure
had largely turned itself – into a closed system, communicating with the outside world chiefly by a series of operations designed to show that it had no need to do so, was opened up again.

If we leave aside, as lacking much theoretical interest, the attempts to retain something like the old orthodoxy unchanged (as in China or among some groups of sectarians in other
countries), and the moves to accept useful theories and techniques from the ‘bourgeois' world without integrating them into the nominally unmodified marxist system (as happened to some extent in the Soviet Union), the marxist re-thinking of the past ten years has, broadly speaking, followed four paths. First, it has attempted something like an archaeological operation, by identifying the strata of theoretical thinking which had gradually accumulated on top of Marx's original thought, and for that matter pursuing the evolution of the great man's ideas themselves through its various stages. Second, it has sought to identify and to pursue the various original theoretical developments made from time to time on the basis of marxism, but for various reasons officially expelled from, or never absorbed into, the main corpus of its ideas. Third, it has attempted to come to terms, where this seemed apposite, with the various intellectual developments which had taken place outside marxism, and once again were deliberately extruded from it in the stalinist period. Last, it has tried to return to an analysis of the world (i.e. primarily of its social, economic and political developments) after a long period when the official interpretation had become increasingly remote from reality.

Among the pre-stalinist currents of marxism, one has long proved to be particularly fruitful and attractive to the re-thinkers, the ‘central European' strain, to use George Lichtheim's convenient term. Most of the rare communist writers who retained any reputation as independent minds in the 1940s and early 1950s belonged to this tradition, e.g. Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre or, nourished in the Italian rather than German version of Hegelianism, Gramsci. The central Europeans formed part of that passionate reaction against the evolutionist positivism and mechanical determinism to which the theoretical leaders of the Second International had tended to reduce marxism, and which, in one form or another, provided the intellectual base for a return to revolutionary ideology in the
year preceding and following the October revolution. For a brief period after the collapse of syndicalism (which had absorbed part of this left-wing revulsion against the Kautskys of the pre-1914 era) virtually all the rebel currents flowed together into the single cataract of bolshevism. After Lenin's death they began to diverge again, or rather the gradual and systematic construction of a single channel of official theory called ‘leninism' forced the rest out of the main stream. Yet though Lenin's own thought was one of the forms of this reassertion of revolutionary theory against ‘revisionism' and ‘reformism', and by far the most important in practice, it had been by no means the only one. Luxemburg and Mehring in Germany, the central-European Hegelians, and others, converged with Lenin in practice as revolutionaries, but were in no sense leninist in origin or intellectual procedures.

Politically the central European strain was revolutionary, not to say ultra-left. Socially, it was not so much a collection of intellectuals – all ideological schools are that – as one of men and women whose taste ran to agitation, writing and discussion rather than organization and the (bolshevik) executive life. In theory it was above all hostile to the Darwinian and positivist versions of marxism
à la
Kautsky, and suspicious even of those aspects of the mature Marx and Engels which might have encouraged determinism rather than voluntarism. Even the young Gramsci in Turin reacted to the October Revolution by calling for a ‘revolt against Marx's
Capital
'. Philosophically it tended to stress – against the more official theorists of social democracy and the revisionists – the Hegelian origins of Marx and such of his youthful writings as were then available. The publication of the
Fruehschriften
by Landshut and Mayer in 1932 was to provide the central Europeans with what has turned out to be their basic text, the 1844 Manuscripts, and their basic operational tool, ‘alienation'. By this time, however, the political situation had changed. The central Europeans no longer stood
on the extreme left of the movement, a place now occupied by the Trotskyists (though in the west most of these, as J. P. Nettl has pointed out, were in fact Luxemburgians). Their passionate voluntarism, their own contempt for bourgeois science and their idealization of proletarian consciousness had been selectively absorbed into, even exaggerated by, the official Soviet doctrine. The main advantage the central Europeans retained was the capacity to combine the passion for social revolution, even the readiness to accept the Jesuit discipline of the communist parties, with the interests of mid-twentieth-century western intellectuals – such as
avant-garde
culture and psychoanalysis – and a version of marxist theory which, against the apparent trend of events in the Soviet Union itself, reaffirmed the humanist Utopia of Marx. War and resistance brought them political reinforcements, especially in France, from revolutionary intellectuals to whom the discovery of German philosophy (in this instance not mediated by marxism) gave a justification for the assertion of human liberty, the act of this assertion and struggle, and therefore the function of the ‘engaged' intellectual. Via the phenomenologists Sartre moved into something like a position as honorary central European, and eventually into what he at any rate considered marxism. The collapse of stalinism relieved what had become an increasingly intolerable pressure on the central Europeans within the communist movement – stalinist theory had shown a diminishing toleration for the Hegelian or pre-1848 elements in Marx – and left them as the most obvious ideological nucleus for critical communist thought. Paradoxically a strain of ideas which began on the ultra-left ended on the right wing of the revolutionary movement.