Volume 1.

“Introduction”

Bloch’s introductory chapter foregrounds his philosophical understanding of hope. Bloch’s interest in hope and in Utopia lie in his conceptualization of philosophy (except Marx) as being an act of knowledge production centered around the past and the What-Has-Been. For him, the production of philosophical knowledge must now lie in the Where To, the Future. He situates hope as opposed to memory (not fear), as both are means of knowing the world.

He concludes by claiming that Marxism and socialism are the only means to build towards a better future, a future in which “the lived in moment belongs to us” (instead of a fear of the future propelled by the burden of the past).

1. “Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over. Not in its deprivation, let alone in moving out of it … instead, it grasps the New as something that is mediated in what exists and is in motion” (4).
2. “Philosophy will have a conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge” (7).
3. “The anticipatory thus operates in the field of hope; so this hope is not taken only as emotion, as in the opposite of fear (because fear too can of course anticipate), but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind (and here the opposite is then not fear, but memory). The imagination and the thoughts of future intention described in this way are utopian, this again not in a narrow sense of the word which only defines what is bad (emotively reckless picturing, playful form of an abstract kind), but rather in fact in the newly tenable sense of the forward dream, of anticipation in general” (12).
4. “Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself. In other words: we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness” (12).
5. “Because of which, as noted, the concept utopia has been both unduly restricted, namely confined to novels of an ideal state, and also above all, through the predominant abstractness of these novels of an ideal state, it has preserved that abstract playful form which only the progress of socialism from these utopias towards science has moved out of the way and removed” (14).
6. “Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary (a sometimes almost forgotten totality) to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia” (15).
7. “The final will is that to be truly present. SO that the lived moment belongs to us and we to it and ‘Stay awhile’ could be said to it. Man wants at last to enter into the Here and Now as himself, wants to enter his full life without postponement and distance. The genuine utopian will is definitely not endless striving, rather: it wants to see the merely immediate and thus so unpossessed nature of self-location and being-here finally mediated, illuminated and fulfilled, fulled happily and adequately” (16).
8. “This road is and remains that of socialism, it is the practice of concrete utopia. Everything that is non-illusory, real-possible about the hope-images leas to Marx” (17).

“Little Daydreams”

Unusual attempt to refute Freudian models of development psychology (maybe). Bloch articulates the development process of the petty bourgeois in terms of anticipation (utopia) instead of in terms of memory (Freudian drives). Mostly, this chapter is a waste of time, but it is an interesting thought experiment.

1. “But the values of comfortable happiness shift in the prospects of the revolutionary wishful dream, if only because happiness no longer arises out of the unhappiness of others and measures itself against it. Because our fellow man is no longer the barrier to our own freedom, but rather the means by which this freedom is truly achieved. Instead of freedom of acquisition, there shines freedom from acquisition, instead of imagined pleasures of cheating in the economic struggle, there shines the imagined victory in the proletarian class struggle. And even higher above this shines the distant peace, the distant opportunity of being in solidarity and being friendly with all men, an opportunity for the sake of which the struggle moves in the distant goal.” (35).
2. “This obsession with what is better remains, even when what is better has been prevented for so long. When what is wished for arrives, it surprises us anyway” (42).