Ernst Bloch (1954) |
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| Full name | Ernst Bloch |
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| Born | July 8, 1885 Ludwigshafen, Germany |
| Died | August 4, 1977 (aged 92) Tübingen, Germany |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Marxism |
| Main interests | Utopianism, revolutionary ideology, liberation theology |
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Ernst Bloch (German pronunciation: [ˈɛʁnst ˈblɔx], July 8, 1885 – August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher.
Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx and, as he always confessed, by novelist Karl May. He was also interested in music (notably Gustav Mahler) and art (notably expressionism). He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on the concept that in a utopian humanistic world where oppression and exploitation have been eliminated there will always be a truly ideological revolutionary force.
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Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Piotrowska, a Polish architect, whom he married in 1934 in Vienna. When the Nazis came to power, they had to flee, first into Switzerland, then to Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and finally the USA. Bloch returned to the GDR in 1949 and obtained a chair in philosophy at Leipzig. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, he did not return to the GDR, but went to Tübingen in West Germany, where he received an honorary chair in Philosophy. He died in Tübingen.
Bloch's work became very influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology. It is cited as a key influence by Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope (1967, Harper and Row, New York), by Dorothee Sölle (Atheism in Christianity by Ernst Bloch / Atheist believe in God by Dorothee Sölle), and by Ernesto Balducci.
Bloch's Principle of Hope was written during his emigration in the USA, where he lived briefly in New Hampshire before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He wrote the lengthy three volume work in the reading room of Harvard's Widener Library. Bloch originally planned to publish it there under the title Dreams of a Better Life. The Principle of Hope tries to provide an encyclopedic account of mankind's and nature's orientation towards a socially and technologically improved future.