A Primer on Utopian Philosophy By Jonathan Greenaway
Jonathan Greenaway’s primer introduces readers to Ernst Bloch’s Utopian philosophy, emphasizing its relevance to contemporary issues and its roots in Marxist thought. Bloch’s work explores the idea of Utopia as a dynamic process intertwined with human nature and historical development. The primer aims to show the value of engaging with Bloch’s visionary ideas in today’s world.
Highlights
‘“Utopia or bust” may be a bold wager, but the insidious attrition of utopian desires in fear of the “or bust” alternative is… a much darker prospect’.
But, as Bloch pointed out himself, Genesis comes at the end, not the beginning. Perhaps here, even now, there is the possibility of recuperating the philosophy of hope, of looking at the world and seeing not the gray deterministic malevolence of capitalist realism but something struggling to come into a fullness of being.
Utopia is not simply something that is to come, some teleological moment that will arrive eventually. Rather, Utopia is an open-ended, processual working out of the latencies and tendencies of history, from the daydreams of the alienated worker all the way up to the great mass revolutionary struggle of the working class acting for itself, and to the physical stuff of the universe.
If we are able to look at the past with the eyes to see, we may find new potentialities in our present. The past has a cultural inheritance which has yet to be fully exhausted.
Tendency is the pressures of the objectively real-possible blocked by the actual conditions of the present.
Another good example would be the ways in which the advancements of technology which could move us beyond artificially imposed capitalist scarcity are blocked by the same forces of capitalist production.
New highlights added January 19, 2025 at 9:21 AM
People, not things and not the mighty course of events outside ourselves (which Marx falsely places above us), write history.
thought was not the same thing as Being and the idea that the world was given to consciousness as nothing but concepts was one he rejected. The world was not simply given, at hand and easily solved, but was something that came to our consciousness through unfolding processes.
Bloch argued that emergent fascism had to be understood as a political synthesis and a twisted revolution; a swindle of fulfillment to use his own terms.
Marxism needed a theology. What Bloch means is a way of orienting imagination, enthusiasm and thought toward revolutionary Utopia.
As The Communist Manifesto puts it, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Capitalism will liquidate everything to the subordination of commodification; there is at the very heart of the capitalist process a hollow void.
The seed of the flower is never just the seed but contains within itself the fullness of the flower in bloom. Material reality is not something simply given, and as such, Utopia is fundamental to the unfinished nature of existence.
Utopia is a philosophical and ontological rupture, and it is a damning indictment of our own current imaginative and intellectual malnourishment that such a rupture is for many, quite literally unthinkable.
the process is made by those who are made by the process. There is no telos, no program or revolutionary committee which can enforce Utopia on us — the perfect State will not make it happen nor will the dictates of a Church point us the right way. Rather, Utopia is made, an open-ended and auto-poetic process embodied by the labouring, struggling, dreaming working classes.
Without the anchoring of the working classes, Utopian struggle collapses into a naive liberalism, a celebration that reduces things down to the equation: Utopia = when good things happen to me and others I like.
What Bloch is trying to do is excavate all of history, to comb through the sum of all things and find here, there and everywhere, the traces of the ‘not yet conscious’. He wants to bring us to a remembrance of the future in the past and, at the same time, place his central concepts of the ‘not yet’ as a philosophical and metaphysical fulcrum for all human existence.
He begins with a series of questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us? The aim of these is to orient the reader, by taking us on a tour of human history; through philosophy and revolutionary politics we might be returned to ourselves, transformed.
there is this existential problem — this gap, a darkness of the lived moment from which we are forced to move. We feel within ourselves a great need, and, to go even further, we do not yet even know who or what we are.
Pessimism is a choice. A choice for what, to do what? I think if we idealise the concept of pessimism, we think of it as a cold-hearted appraisal of just what is. And it is this which I think is precisely Bloch’s problem with pessimism — it involves choosing to settle for the facts in front of us and choosing not to see the latencies and possibilities within those facts.
Wherever you are, close your eyes, just for a moment. What do you dream of? Do you have the dreams of a better life — the unshakeable feeling that the world is not right? The beautiful and comforting thing about Bloch’s crowning achievement is the philosophical commitment to the simple truth that those dreams mean something, and that they are the ground on which we all may find a greater world, yet to come into being.
For Bloch, Utopia, even in its most nascent, abstract, and underdeveloped forms, is worth something — a brief, flickering glimpse of a potential future seen through a glass darkly.
Hope is something more than just a subjective feeling, but a fundamental re-orientation of our whole Being, both on the level of the individual and on the grounding of a class struggle.