Ernst Bloch
German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) was a theorist of the avant-garde and a
philosopher of expressionism. With Georg Lukacs he had studied under Georg Simmel,
and was also influenced by Hegel and Schelling. Bloch was part of the Max Weber circle,
and subsequently became a close associate of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.
Politically Bloch remained a controversial figure. An outspoken critic of various political
regimes, including the United States which he accused of fascism and imperialism, Bloch
nonetheless supported Stalinist Russia, a gesture that effectively isolated him from many
of his academic colleagues. Although he developed into a committed Marxist, Bloch’s
politics remained suffused with bourgeois humanism. Likewise his intellectual position
was an ideosyncratic one, embodying traces of Jewish mysticism.
Bloch was a deeply utopian aesthetic theorist who looked to art and literature as means
of illuminating a better future. Art, literature and other everyday phenomena offered a
means of criticizing existing social conditions, and provided a glimpse of a world where
there would no longer be any exploitation of humans by fellow humans. ‘More than
anything else, Bloch placed great faith in art and literature to raise the not yet conscious
to a point where it could grasp the direction humankind would have to take to bring about
the fulfilment of those needs, wants and wishes that he saw scattered in dreams and
daydreams.’^1 Thus aesthetic formulations exposed what was missing in contemporary life
and revealed what might still come in a utopian world of the future.
Bloch’s interest in architecture stemmed from his work in aesthetics, and was
reinforced by his subsequent marriage to the architect Karola Piotrowski. He established
himself as a defender of ornament, and a champion of expressionism. Contemporary
architecture for Bloch was impoverished. It had lost ‘the caresses of the Muse’.
Functionalism had paralysed architecture and stripped it of all imagination. If architecture
was to fulfil its utopian function in line with art and literature, and provide a more
intuitive means for experiencing the world—as had the Gothic cathedral—it needed to be
more humane. Architecture should learn the lesson of art and sculpture, and free itself
from the harsh shackles of enlightenment rationality. For Bloch, Hans Scharoun’s
Philharmonic Hall in Berlin offered an example of the way forward, an architecture with
‘wings’ which would confront the alienation of the ‘railway-station character of our
existence’.
Bloch’s criticism of functionalism as a manifestation of the shortcomings of
enlightenment rationality has clear parallels in Adorno’s article ‘Functionalism Today’,
included in this volume. Comparisons can also be made with the work of Simmel,
Benjamin and Kracauer.
NOTE
1 Jack Zipes, introduction to Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Jack
Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (trans.), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988.