Principle of Hope: Volume 1

Politics & Social Sciences

Ernst, Bloch

Philosophy

The MIT Press

The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world. The Principle of Hope is published in three volumes: Volume 1 lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious -- the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains a remarkable account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian "wishful images" in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theater, dance, and the cinema. Volume 2 presents "the outlines of a better world." It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is nothing less than an encyclopedic account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume 3 offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper "homeland," where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

Principle of Hope: Volume 2

Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT

Principle of Hope: Volume 3

MIT Press (MA)

Excerpt from A Philosophy of the FutureIt is always better to take your reader straight to the point and spare him a long preamble. This is particularly advisable when the book itself is offered as an introduction. If it takes a long time to get to the matter, the mind tends to refuse what is really needful.This work consists largely of material first delivered as lec tures. If the spoken word can still be heard (where it should be heard), well and good. It helps if you tell someone the way as well as point it out; yet what the voice spends only the letter preserves: vita brevis, ars longa.There are many schools of thought and primers for the ascent to the heights. The steps are as old as (if not older than) Parnassus. And there are many Introductions to Philosophy that advertise themselves as such. This one is different: its' prole gomena are more direct than indirect; it doesn't represent all the branches, or accord space to all the topics. Still, -there's compensation, even if the approach seems rather precipitate for the first affair with wisdom. Too many guides offer roads that end up nowhere in particular; and too often the lack of any philosophy to introduce is the reason for writing an introduction to it. The kind of neutral commentary produced for the un Sophisticated tends also to intimidate the reader, and the dis interested report of an impersonal and ideologically reticent narrator can obscure the matter itself.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A Philosophy of the Future (Classic Reprint)

Forgotten Books

The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays

The Principle of Hope

WileyBlackwell

This is an examination of modern culture and its legacy which argues that the key elements of a genuine cultural tradition are not just to be found in the conveniently closed and neatly labelled 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. An associate of Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno and Brecht, the author wrote "The Principle of Hope". The work should interest advanced students of sociology, politics, social and political theory, literary theory and theology, especially those interested in the legacy of Hegel and Marx and the tradition of critical theory; advanced students and researchers in European history, culture and ideology, and in particular, those interested in the Weimar period and the emergence of Nazism.

Heritage of our times

Politics & Government

Polity Press

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.

The Spirit of Utopia (Meridian)

Stanford University Press

Traces (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

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.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

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.

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