The Principle of Hope

"Ernst Bloch writes in a complicated, abstract and poetic style that is very difficult to comprehend. A lot of contemporary writers think that he has his own type of language, which is true to a certain extent. He wrote many different books, and the book I admire the most is The Principle of Hope . It is a three-volume study which he began writing in Europe in the late 1930s while he was escaping the Nazis. He was not only a Marxist but also a nonpractising Jew. He fled Germany and went to America rather than the Soviet Union because he didn’t trust the Soviet Union. The book came at a time when the political difficulties stimulated him to develop a notion of hope that was to offset the terrible wars that had been going on. In this book he also, surprisingly, deals with fairy tales and popular culture. He felt that fairy tales and popular culture had traces of hope that made them really important and relevant to the lives of the majority of the people. For example, he was interested in characters whom he called the small hero, like Tom Thumb. He talked about the importance of fairy tales because they provided encouragement and stimulus for the masses of people who read them. Bloch believed that fairy tales represented a way for us to gain humanity. In other words, life is a struggle, and there is a focus in fairy tales on what we can gain from the struggle to bring meaning to our lives. One of his concepts concerns the upright gait, and he argued that we shall not learn to be humane until we differentiate ourselves from apes and learn to walk upright with integrity. He talks about the utopian disposition in human beings to be immortal and gain the deepest of pleasures. These are the types of themes that he looks at in his philosophical works. Of course, we don’t know what utopia is. The word utopia means ‘no place’, and those people who put a face on utopia, like the Nazis or the Communists of the Soviet Union, are mistaken because we have to determine what utopia is through the struggles and through our hope for a better life. All the best works of art, including popular culture, have what Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. In other words, they anticipate utopia and they illuminate the way towards it. For me this is very important when I look at the philosophical aspect of fairy tales."