Dialectics and Hope

Bibliographic Data

ID4071509
AuthorsErnst Bloch, Mark Ritter
Year1976
Issue9
Pages3
Publication date1976-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/487685
OpenAlexW2328757445
LanguageEN
Citations received15

1. Mankind, as it is, has been called a premature birth. The human being comes into the world more helpless and less finished than any animal, takes considerably longer to mature, and is threatened in the process even by itself. It wavers and makes mistakes which would never occur to a young animal in its innate environment. It is in the dark, does not know up from down, seldom or only indistinctly has in its body the infallible guide which leads a horse to water, or even a returning swallow to its nest from last year. It comes into unforeseen circumstances, such as the animal seldom experiences, must find its way in situations which have never existed before, and with which it is consequently not acquainted; whereas the young animal is soon whistled to a stop. The finished armor of the animal's species is soon hung around its shoulders, and its face, which in young animals often resembles a human baby's face, soon ossifies. The form of many hundred thousands of years triumphs; the curtain soon falls decisively over its potentiality for development. Of necessity animals repeat the proven factory pattern of their body and life, hence, they are beings but also very narrowly bound. Human beings can participate only very approximately in this boundedness; they do so as the usual mass-produced goods; they did so in a different way, fertilely and distinctly, in the earlier peasant class. But mass-produced goods themselves are historical, and what fit the average yesterday no longer fits today, for uniformity, at least, has its fashions. It is great that we humans are born unfinished as a species, not only as children. But it is also a hard lot to be engaged in a development which proceeds so slowly, since it is trapped over and over again by deceivers. Socialist society has been a practical possibility for at least a hundred years; and how many among the educated, of whom there is always ample number, do not even know its ABC's today. Mankind is the animal who takes detours, yet often in an obdurate and flagrantly foolish way, not just cunningly. Otherwise, all of outward life would run as easily and peacefully as now happens, at best, among friends. 2. All being is still built around the Not which induces hunger. There does not yet exist a food which could calm and fill up the lack entirely, or the boon

Dialectic · Epistemology · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Philosophy

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