“Denken heißt überschreiten” — to think is to transgress,
— Ernst Bloch
Prompted by this post about the intersections of Goethe and Marx, I can think of no better thinker than Ernst Bloch who fits the bill. Like many German intellectuals of his day, Bloch was enormously influenced by Goethe, particularly Faust but was also a deeply committed Marxist. In fact the two thinkers he quotes most extensively throughout his work are Marx and Goethe. The Principle of Hope, Bloch’s magnificent three volume encyclical of hope and the Utopian impulse is full of quotes and references to Goethe’s work, essays, plays and novels. This is, in part, due to his deliberate allegorical and allusive style, by which points of argument are explicated and deepened through through linking his own philosophical project to the great tapestry of human culture. So, here are two moments in The Principle of Hope (TPoH) that showcase Bloch’s interest in Goethe and his own particular brand of Goethean Marxism.
In the section “Encounter of the Utopian Function with Ideology” (TPoH Vol 1) Bloch discusses the degree to which superstructural cultural objects persist and remain meaningful even though the economic base in which such objects were produced have ended. Or, as Bloch puts it, “the problem as to how works of the superstructure progressively reproduce themselves in cultural consciousness even after the disappearance of their social bases.” Of course, in the history of class society, these superstructural productions and objects are formed by the self-same false consciousness that justifies the exploitations of a class society’s base. The examples that Bloch uses are things like the Acropolis, Strasbourg Cathedral, and from the realm of philosophy The Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Mind. To quote Bloch again,
In short, these great works are not deficient as on their first day, nor glorious as on the first day: but instead they shed their deficiency and their first glory while being capable of a later glory, in fact a final one to which they can intend. The classical element in every classicism equally stands before each age as revolutionary Romanticism, i.e. as a task that points the way forward and as a solution that approaches from the future, not from the past, and, itself still full of future, speaks, addresses, calls us on. But this, together with more modest things, is only the case because ideologies seen from this side are not exhausted with the false consciousness of their base, nor with the active work for their respective bases
There is, within these cultural objects a surplus that speaks beyond and above the false consciousness of capitalist history. Unsurprisingly, it’s here that Bloch quotes one of his passages from Marx, the letter to Ruge in 1843. “The world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought-dash between past and future, but of the carrying through of the thoughts of the past.” The great objects of culture are a “substratum of the claimable cultural inheritance,” possessing a utopian function through which we perceive one of Bloch’s great themes — the dream of a better life. Here, at the end of the section he comes to Goethe, in a passage well worth quoting at length:
All great cultural works also have implicitly, though not always (as in Goethe’s ‘Faust’) explicitly, a utopian background…They are now, from the point of view of the philosophical concept of utopia, not an ideological prank of a higher kind, but the attempted path and content of known hope… There is a spirit of utopia in the final predicate of every great statement, in Strasbourg cathedral and in the Divine Comedy, in the expectant music of Beethoven and in the latencies of the Mass in B minor. It is in the despair which still contains an unum necessarium even as something lost, and in the Hymn to Joy. Kyrie and Credo rise in the concept of utopia as that of comprehended hope in a completely different way, even when the reflection of mere time-bound ideology has been shed, precisely then. The exact imagination of the Not-Yet-Conscious thus completes the critical enlightenment itself, by revealing the gold that was not affected by aqua fortis,* and the good content which remains most valid, indeed rises when class illusion, class ideology have been destroyed. Thus beyond the end of class ideologies, for which it could only be mere decoration up till then, culture has no other loss than the business of decoration itself, of falsely concluding harmonization. Utopian function tears the concerns of human culture away from such an idle bed of mere contemplation: it thus opens up, on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of the content of human hope.
As a side point it’s worth paying attention to the intensities of Bloch language — poetic choices which are distinctly Goethean, ever rising cadences that seem to rush on irresistibly. Not for nothing did Adorno refer to the great passages of Bloch-Musik as his prose style, but he is deliberately taking on Goethe’s notion of intensification to make the structure and language of his writing part of its overall philosophy.
About eight hundred pages later and in Volume three of TPoH, there is another chapter, called “Young Goethe, non renunciation, Ariel.” There is so much about this brief section worth highlighting — Ariel, of course, was P.B Shelley’s poetic namesake, as well as the spirit from the Tempest that is made to serve Prospero. In this section Bloch recounts a story of a young Goethe. “An urge to destroy exists, as a small child Goethe brought it into play. It impelled the boy, one fine afternoon when all in the house was quiet, to keep throwing crockery on to the road because it “shattered so delightfully’” As Johan Siebers points out, writing about this chapter,
In Goethe’s few words we sense how the boy, mustered by the spirit of transgression, forgot everything around him, and became one with the desire to smash things. Hegel wrote that the best thing children can do with their toys is to break them. Smashing plates – what more appropriate action could the child have chosen to symbolize what it was that he wanted to break away from: the order of the parental house
Smashing the plates leads the young Goethe into the realm of freedom from parental law, but also a way of, as Bloch points out, his “fine breeding” which did not last either. To transgress it to become creative — it is an act of poesis that leads Goethe out into the realm of art. Contemporary readers will read this in the language and tone of Nietzsche, but for Bloch this is an existential philosophy that is completely within the traditional of classical German idealism, in which we move from the darkness of the lived moment to the incipit vita nova, the new way of living. The short story of the plates is, again as Johan Siebers puts it,
In this short episode we see the facial characteristics, as it were, of Bloch’s philosophy. His position was a deliberate choice for a Janus-face, looking as much at the speculative systems of German idealism and the literature of the classical period – for which Goethe stands in – as it does at Marx, dialectical materialism and existentialism. This synthesis has troubled the reception of Bloch’s philosophy and marginalized it both for those committed to the revival or continued relevance of German idealism, whose language Bloch does speak quite clearly, as well as for the Marxists. But the utopian moment is difficult to conceive from any other juncture than the one chosen by Bloch, for it is here that the materialist affirmation of immanence and the idealist affirmation of transformation can find each other in what Bloch called transcending without transcendence.
It is this I think that serves as a model of what we might term a Go(e)thic Marxism, one which is fundamentally double faced, looking back at the unfinished and not comprehended utopian surplus of the past, and one which simultaneously looks to instantiations of the New. What this allows for is a philosophical approach that is open ended, creative and yet restorative, not simply hoping to overcome history, but to fulfill it and find within it’s ruins the possibilities of new emancipatory collectives. So much of the past is reduced to being fodder for neoreactionary statue avatar accounts on social media who bemoan a lost world without trying to understand the radical potential that still resides and echoes throughout culture. Bloch’s sensitivity to the lived moment and the broad sweep of history makes his own Goethean Marxism profoundly valuable as we form new attempts to articulate a possible future for us all.
thelitcritguy 