Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch (July 8, 1885 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein - August 4, 1977 in Tübingen) was a German philosopher.

Life

Ernst Bloch came from a Jewish family in the Palatinate. When studying high school in 1905, his major was in philosophy and his secondary subjects were physics, music and contemporary dance in Würzburg and Munich. In 1908 he was received with a thesis on Critical Disquisitions on Rickert and the Problem of Modern Epistemology .

In 1913, he married the sculptor Else von Stritzky (who died in 1921). On the occasion of a trip to Italy he met Max Weber in Heidelberg.

According to Bloch, because of the German wars of conquest, he went into exile with his wife in Switzerland from 1917 to 1919. In the 1920s he lived in Berlin and worked as a journalist. He thus establishes friendly contacts with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno, among others. In 1922 he married the painter Linda Oppenheimer. His daughter Mirjam was born from this marriage in 1928, the year in which the marriage was dissolved.

In 1933 he emigrated again to Switzerland. Being expelled from there, Bloch goes through Italy to Vienna. There he remarries, now with Karola Bloch, n. Piotrowska, a Polish architect, with whom he will stay until he dies. In 1937 his son Jan Robert was born. From 1936 to 1938 Bloch lived in Prague, where he was a contributor to the weekly Die Weltbühne. Shortly before the entry of the Nazis, he flees to the United States.

In exile in the United States, he wrote some of his works, such as The Hope Principle, Subject-Object or Tescolabis. In 1948 he was offered the chair of philosophy in Leipzig; a year he moves to that city. In 1955 he was awarded the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic. Furthermore, he becomes a member of the German Academy of Sciences. However, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 confronted the convinced Marxist with the government of the United Socialist Party of Germany: when Bloch revealed his libertarian ideals, he was forced to retire in 1957. In 1961 (after the construction of the Berlin Wall), he no longer returns from a trip to the West to the GDR.

Bloch became a visiting professor at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. In 1967 he is awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1972 he became an honorary citizen of Ludwigshafen, his hometown. The doctorates honoris causa from the University of Zagreb, the Sorbonne and its University of Tübingen follow next. In 1975 he is awarded the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa.

He welcomes the student movement of the late 1960s with benevolent criticism, of which he is considered one of the intellectual precursors. With one of the most prominent leaders of the movement, Rudi Dutschke, he later established a relationship of paternal friendship.

On August 4, 1977, Ernst Bloch died of cardiac arrest.

Bloch's Philosophy

Ernst Bloch is the philosopher of concrete utopias, of dreams, of hopes. In the center of his thought stands the man who conceives himself. Man's consciousness is not only the product of his being, but, moreover, it is endowed with a "surplus." This "surplus" finds its expression in social, economic and religious utopias, in graphic art, in music. As a Marxist, Bloch sees in socialism and communism the instruments to transfer this “surplus” to the world. to the facts.

Works

• 1909 Thesis Critical insights about Rickert and the problem of epistemology
• 1918 The spirit of utopia
• 1921 Thomas Münzer as theologian of the revolutionMunich
• 1930 Vestigios, Berlin
• 1935 The legacy of this timeZurich.
• 1949 Subject-object, Christian Thomasius, The Hope principle, Avicena and the left aristotelianLeipzig
• 1959 Vestigios and The Principle of Hope
• 1961 Natural Law and Human Dignity, Frankfurt (Ed. Spanish Aguilar, Madrid, 1980)