Ernst Bloch - Böcker

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle.Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle.Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

Heritage of Our Times is a brilliant examination of modern culture and its legacy by one of the most important and deeply influential thinkers of the 20th century. Bloch argues that the key elements of a genuine cultural tradition are not just to be found in the conveniently closed and neatly labeled ages of the past, but also in the open and experimental cultural process of our time. One of the most compelling aspects of this work is a contemporary analysis of the rise of Nazism. It probes its bogus roots in German history and mythology at the very moment when the ideologies of Blood and Soil and the Blond Beast were actually taking hold of the German people.The breadth and depth of Bloch's vision, together with the rich diversity of his interest, ensure this work a place as one of the key books of the 20th century.

I am. We are.That is enough. Now we have to start.These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation.The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything.But enough to start.

Written between 1910 and 1929, Traces is considered Ernst Bloch's most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch's interest in showing how attention to "traces"—to the marks people make or to natural marks—can serve as a mode of philosophizing. In an elegant example of how the literary can become a privileged medium for philosophy, Bloch's chief philosophical invention is to begin with what gives an observer pause—what seems strange and astonishing. He then follows such traces into an awareness of the individual's relations to himself or herself and to history, conceived as a thinking into the unknown, the "not yet," and thus as utopian in essence.Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar, and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

Written between 1910 and 1929, Traces is considered Ernst Bloch's most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch's interest in showing how attention to "traces"—to the marks people make or to natural marks—can serve as a mode of philosophizing. In an elegant example of how the literary can become a privileged medium for philosophy, Bloch's chief philosophical invention is to begin with what gives an observer pause—what seems strange and astonishing. He then follows such traces into an awareness of the individual's relations to himself or herself and to history, conceived as a thinking into the unknown, the "not yet," and thus as utopian in essence.Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar, and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

This study of Marx serves not only as an excellent introduction to that most influential of "worldly philosophers" but is also a significant resume of the central issues of Bloch's own profound and wide-ranging thought.Special attention is given to the political maturation of the young Karl Marx and to his studies and intellectual relationship to important thinkers of his time. Bloch concludes with an insightful summons to the West to consider Marx anew as a thinker still vitally relevant to contemporary social issues, and not merely as the father of a sovietized political system.

In the twenty-first century, religion has come under determined attack from secular progressives in documentaries, opinion pieces and international bestsellers. Combative atheists have denounced faiths of every stripe, resulting in a crude intellectual polarization in which religious convictions and heritage must be rejected or accepted wholesale.In the long unavailable Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch provides a way out from this either/or debate. He examines the origins of Christianity in an attempt to find its social roots, pursuing a detailed study of the Bible and its fascination for 'ordinary and unimportant' people. In the biblical promise of utopia and the scriptures' antagonism to authority, Bloch locates Christianity's appeal to the oppressed. Through a lyrical yet close and nuanced analysis, he explores the tensions within the Bible that promote atheism as a counter to the authoritarian metaphysical theism imposed by clerical exegesis. At the Bible's heart he finds a heretical core and the concealed message that, paradoxically, a good Christian must necessarily be a good atheist.This new edition includes an introduction by Peter Thompson, the Director of the Centre for Enrst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield.