Episode #230 ... Hope as an Existentialism (Ernst Bloch)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash philosophize this. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophize this and more stuff posted on there as the book gets closer to being published next year. Thanks for all the support to this podcast and philosophy in general. I hope you love the show today.

So taking in ideas that fall under the category of existentialism basically guarantees you're going to come across certain terminology. What I mean is there's words commonly thrown around in this space when trying to describe the human condition and all the bad stuff that's possible there. Words like despair or anxiety, nausea, alienation. There's many more of these and you've no doubt heard all these words before. And what you also may have heard is that when it comes to a lot of these philosophers that fall under the label of existentialism,

Common way you'll hear their work described is that they're framing this piece of existence in terms of a lack or a negation. And what's meant when someone says this is that when it comes to these negative feelings we experience, like described with despair, nausea, and the like, we feel these things because there's something lacking that's causing these experiences.

Many examples of this I could give. Maybe if you're Sartre, what's lacking is a fixed essence as to what it is to be a person. And the lack of that essence causes a lot of problems for you as a human being. Maybe if you're Kierkegaard, it's the lack of rational certainty or ultimate meaning. Maybe not having those things has consequences in how you feel sometimes too.

If you're a high digger, maybe what's lacking is an obvious, stable ground of being that we can clearly define. The point is, it's the lack of something that explains many of the difficult spots we find ourselves in. But the guy we're talking about today, Ernst Bloch, well he's not technically an existentialist, because he would go on to do far more than that in his later work. In his earlier work, this is a man who answered exactly the kinds of questions that the existentialists were concerned with,

But he answered them not by explaining our experience in terms of it lacking something. To him, human experience can be explained by there being a surplus of something, a surplus of what he called hope or anticipatory consciousness. By the end of this episode, you're going to see how different existentialism can look if you try thinking of the problems in your life in terms of having a surplus of hope instead of a lack of meaning or truth or anything like that.

Let's start with what he means by hope, though. Because as we know, philosophers will do this kind of thing all the time. They'll take a concept, something we think we know all about, something like hope, and they'll show a side of it that makes us think of our relationship to it in a whole new way. And in this case, think of hope as a type of, again, anticipatory consciousness. The key word there being anticipation.

Think of the piece of what it is to be a person, where we're always looking forward to some future world and the possibilities that can be brought about in it that haven't been brought about yet. This is a core experience that we all have. Put another way, for Ernst Bloch, think of human consciousness as something that's rooted in time, constantly oriented towards the not yet, as he calls it, and constantly co-evolving with the world that it's in. If, for the sake of this conversation, we can call this hope.

If what we typically think of as hope stems out of this, then the next question is, how fundamental is this as an aspect of our existence? Because it should be said, some people will say not that much. You know, that hope and future planning like this is in short supply in people. That's why there's so many cringe motivational videos you can find on TikTok, they'll say. You know, people shadowboxing on a mountaintop. People are starving for this stuff, they'll say.

But Block's going to disagree with this. He's going to say that hope is actually something you can see in pretty much everything around you if you're looking for it, including that person watching TikTok and all their endless scrolling. It's important to understand that hope is not a psychological thing for Block, where depending on how well we're doing, we either have it up in our heads or we don't have it.

Hope, for him, is an ontological category. It is eminently a part of our reality. It is the dynamic of being itself. And not only as people that anticipate future possibilities all the time, but the world itself is also always oriented towards the future and the not yet. As Bloch says, even a stone is becoming world.

Our consciousness and the world, to him, co-constitute each other. Neither one of them are ever totally separate. And to Bloch, there is no purely inward, static way of describing a human experience. It is always moving and always connected to an outside world that's in a state of becoming. And to him, this fact about our existence here, it often complicates things for people. See, Bloch might want to start by talking about what he calls the darkness of the lived moment. You ever

You ever been sitting around on an otherwise totally normal day? And have you ever had a feeling well up inside of you that something is missing from this scene that you're a part of right now? Maybe you're not even quite sure what it is. It could be that the world feels like it should be a bit different than it is. It could be that you feel like something's missing from you in a way that's kind of mysterious.

Whatever it is, Ernst Bloch would have predicted this feeling was going to happen. Because in light of what we just talked about, at a base level for him, there are no moments in this life that are totally complete. And there's never a way for the type of consciousness we have to grasp a moment in full.

As he says, the now is always obscure to itself in some way. And what he means is that firstly, the world will always be partially unknown to us because we're so close to it and because it itself is always incomplete and changing.

And secondly, we are always unknown to ourselves to some degree because we too are unfinished and too close to ourselves to see our own potential. Essentially for Bloch, we live in a kind of blind spot of the present moment, or what he calls the darkness of the lived moment. Now a lot of thinkers have talked about concepts that are very similar to this. And usually this point will send people into kind of a spiral of negativity. But for Bloch, negativity and hope are going to be dialectically connected.

And what that's going to mean is that if there's a darkness of the lived moment and an incompleteness that we'll never be able to fully grasp, then another way to put that would be to say that every moment carries within it latent possibilities, future worlds that can be brought about but haven't been yet.

As it turns out, contemplating these future worlds that we may or may not want is going to occupy a huge piece of what every human being ever thinks about. The way you contemplate these future worlds and the relationship between your consciousness and the world, it's going to dictate a lot of things about the person you end up becoming. But look, there's a sense in which all this is me getting ahead of myself, because I'll tell you what Bloch has to be saying here, if everything he's saying so far is true.

Then all the same phenomena that typically get explained by there being a lack of something, the nausea, the dread, well, he's saying these can apparently be explained by there being a surplus of this hope of his. So maybe a good place to go, if we wanted an example, is to have him explain an existential crisis. How can you explain the extreme feelings and behaviors that are going on there by saying that the person has too much hope?

Because look, when you see somebody laying on the couch, dark room, anxious, unmotivated, why do anything if nothing really means anything kind of attitude, it doesn't exactly look like the image of hope, Mr. Block. How do you explain all that? Let's just take it one piece at a time. How about the anxiety there in that image I just gave?

Now, it could be that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, as Kierkegaard says. That it's a lack of something. Because you lack an objective direction to head in, you find yourself trapped in this dizziness of not knowing where to go next. Of thinking about all the consequences of choosing the wrong way all the time. You're anxious. But couldn't it also be, if we wanted to frame this more like Ernst Bloch, that you're sitting on the couch, not doing anything,

And that something about that activity just fundamentally goes against the grain of one of the most core things about the kind of creature you are. If what you do at the most fundamental level of your being is anticipate future possibilities and then try to bring them about, then of course laying around on the couch doing nothing but spinning up in your own head, it's going to leave a lot of unrealized energy that's probably going to feel really uncomfortable.

Now the point here isn't that Bloch's right and Kierkegaard's wrong. The point is, isn't it interesting how the same set of phenomena can be explained by multiple different framings? Another example: take that general attitude of the person on the couch of "why do anything if nothing means anything?" An existentialist could hear this. And while none of them are ever going to say that the couch is a stopping point, there's always work to be done for them,

It is entirely possible they look at this person that's going through it and think this is someone that's at least being honest about something inconvenient at the level of the universe. In other words, the couch is understandable as an initial reaction because they are touching on the fact that there is no objective meaning that's been written into things. And their disappointment comes from the fact that they're no longer running from it in bad faith.

But Ernst Bloch would see this person differently. This isn't someone that's living in utter nihilism, where nothing means anything to them. And the fact they feel like something's missing should be the first thing that makes them suspicious of that fact. To Bloch, this person, if we're just playing the odds here, is likely someone who's been hurt and disappointed in the past.

Here's what he'd predict: this person, at some prior point in their life, had an idea of what the world was and of what future possibilities were supposed to look like. But it was an inaccurate picture of how the world was going to play out. Then the actual world as it is came to pass, reality set in, then they were hit with this disappointment, and then they tried to protect themselves from future disappointment by retreating into a kind of cynicism about everything.

Picture someone raised in a religious home that finds themselves in their 20s not believing in what was promised to them. Picture someone dead set on finding love. You know, they go out on dates for years and when they finally find someone they like, the person ghosts them.

The problem is not a lack of meaning at the level of the universe here. The problem is a surplus of hope or anticipatory consciousness. It was expecting a future world to come about that never materialized. And then it was a very understandable reaction of finding a way to run from relying on the future so that you aren't disappointed again.

And real quick, before we get more into the details of all this, can we just take a second to acknowledge how different the message is to the person that's feeling kind of nihilistic here. It's not, "Oh, look at how smart you are that you figured out the truth about the universe. Now you got to go create a system of meaning so you can get out of all this." No, it's something more like, "Look, considering all the future worlds that you think would be better for you, taking action to make those things happen,

That is always going to be a part of you. It's a part of you in your most motivated moment and your darkest moment. It's imminent to the kind of consciousness you have. And if you want it out of this place, it's not a matter of finding the right philosophical argument that's going to finally give you meaning to your life. It's going to be allowing yourself to feel this core piece of what you are again. That's why getting out there, doing things, participating, is why bringing down those cynical barriers that we put up can be so therapeutic to people.

If Camus says in his work that philosophical suicide is when we fall into abstractions to avoid the absurd, then in Bloch's work, his philosophical suicide might be cynicism. Because cynicism is what stops your ability to imagine and bring about the not yet. It keeps you locked in to a kind of cynical present moment where, yeah, you're never going to be disappointed, but you're also living in denial of something that drives you at an ontological level.

Hope is a process that's going on constantly and at practically every single level. We are always positioned within time, oriented towards the future, co-evolving with the events of history as they're not only unfolding themselves, but also being carried out by us. Events happen, tensions build within them. Say it's something very simple, like you need to drink some water. You start to get thirsty, tensions building, you imagine how to get a drink of water, you bring that world into being by finding the water and drinking it,

and then the tension dissipates for a while. Say it's a political election. There are issues that matter to the people in a society. Tensions build, candidates campaign, arguments, people vote, finally someone's elected, and then the tension dissipates for a while. Our consciousness and the world co-constitute each other.

Now, much of Bloch's work in this area is going to be him looking at culture and identifying places where we see evidence of this hope and anticipatory consciousness, but we often attribute it to something else in everyday life. One of his most famous examples of this is the way that he frames music along these same lines. This has become one of the most influential aesthetic theories of the 20th century after he wrote it. You know, essentially the question is, why is it that listening to music can get us so viscerally fired up to do something, excited,

But something else that's no doubt still a big deal, say a policy paper that's going to really change things, legislation, that doesn't really have the same impact on us. It's kind of boring sometimes actually. The reason, he thinks, is that music is kind of like a triple distilled, purified version of that fundamental orientation we have towards bringing about a future world where things are resolved.

First of all, just at a mechanical level, what is music but chords and notes and rhythms that produce a tension and then different chords, notes, and rhythms that resolve that tension? Tension, resolution. A few measures later, tension, resolution. Next time you're listening to music, try to hear it that way. Music speaks the same language of a core aspect of what we are to block.

But more than that, think about how many similarities music has to the way he sees our consciousness unfolding. Music is also something always rooted in time, and so it always captures the now of a lived experience. Music is by design, as he says, incomplete, non-discursive, and ineffable. And just like the future worlds we live in consideration of, there's never going to be a day where music just ends because somebody's written the perfect song. This is always going to be going on, music.

Music then is what he calls a type of experiential metaphysics. It's a gateway into imagining a better future. It calls upon the person that listens to it to encounter themselves in a way that gets them to consider their own future possibilities. But then aside from any transcendent qualities music may have, it's equally important for Block for us to remember how music is always eminently rooted in the historical social conditions that it was produced in.

I mean, after all, the music produced in a particular time and place can tell you a lot about the people that created it and the hope that drove them to create something in the first place.

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He analyzes the music of Beethoven in his work. Actually, he analyzes the classical sonata as a form of music that Beethoven's seen as one of the best at. And what he says about it is that, on one hand, Beethoven's music is definitely the product of its times. It's filled with revolutionary tension, he says. There's an intensity in his music that's an obvious reflection of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that he lived through. It's a world filled with conflict, obviously.

You know, from the way that the sonatas will have very different sounding themes that clash against each other to the use of codas in the music as a way of returning back to the beginning with what feels like a provisional victory. For Ernst Bloch, Beethoven's music is more than just a genius collection of sounds. It is actually a reflection of the way history was unfolding during the time that he was writing it.

In fact, this same thinking is going to extend to any other piece of artwork you might see as well. Bloch says that there is no such thing as a totally random piece of artwork where someone's just completely detached from the hope that drives them in every other aspect of their life. Art is always a part of what he calls a "wish landscape."

where everything is at least a subtle reflection of what the artist feels is missing in the present or possible in the future. Take something that seems like it may just be escapism or fantasy, something like a superhero movie. To Ernst Bloch, powerful superheroes saving the world from evil that's invading in from another planet.

Is that just a totally random story? Or could that be a coded fantasy that a society has towards values like justice or strength, in a world where the people feel like they're powerless to change anything?

The point of all this is to say that hope and anticipatory consciousness is all around us if you're looking for it. In fact, that's what he thinks is one of the key tasks for a would-be philosopher. Their job is to look at the culture around them, decode and identify these wish landscapes by reading them dialectically, and then their job is to illuminate these possible future worlds in a way that allows for them to be understood by the public so that it may lead to actual historical striving toward that new world.

Now, listen, it's likely that there's some people out there listening to this that are a bit skeptical towards the idea of hope. I mean, after all, don't people that sit around hoping for things too much often not take action on the things that need to get done? I mean, sure, hope may reveal future possibilities sometimes, but it's just as likely someone has a delusional hope that prevents them from bringing a new world about. What would Ernst Bloch have to say about that point?

Bloch addresses this directly and makes one of the most important distinctions in this entire early period of his work. There's a big difference, he says, between blindly hoping for something that you have very little evidence is ever going to happen and hoping for something that's rooted in the actual conditions of the world that you're paying close attention to.

Remember our friend from before that was having an existential crisis and how they hoped for something, maybe a little too ambitiously, and then were disappointed when the reality of the world hit them? For Ernst Bloch, this disappointment they experienced, where they were shown a disconnect between how they think the world is versus how it actually is? Disappointment under this hope way of looking at things actually becomes a moment to celebrate because disappointment means you've now calibrated your understanding of the world to something more in line with how it actually is.

Yet another example of how framing things in terms of hope changes the existential weight of whatever it is. But how do you tell the difference in practice between something that's just wishful thinking or fantasy and something that's actually rooted in history and the state of the world as it is? Something he calls educated hope as opposed to false hope. Well, in the chapter he dedicates to it, he lays out what you could call four criteria where if you're imagining a future world, you can run it through this filter to see if it holds up as something that's more than just fantasy.

Should be said, he only gives two of these explicitly in the chapter, but the other two are implied by the discussion that goes on in the chapter. I'll list them first here and then I'll go through with examples. A hope needs to have tendency, latency, the ability to be mobilized, and the ability to be revised. Let's start with tendency. If you have a future possibility you're imagining that you think would make the world a better place,

you have to ask, does this future build on something that's genuinely already happening in the world? I mean, in the sense that historical events typically move from one thing to the next, is the world you're imagining something that can really come about given the current state of things?

You can imagine why this is important. If I lost my job and I'm looking for a new one, and my big plan for the future is that I'm not going to look for a job because AI is going to take over the world in three weeks, and all those idiots that went to work the last three weeks, they're really going to wish they had all that time like I did. This isn't exactly imagining a possibility that's rooted in what's currently going on. This is one filter you could run your scenario through.

The second filter is what he calls latency. Does this future world reflect some real desire or hope that people are already feeling? Even if it's not fully conscious in public conversation yet, is there at least artwork that's being created where other people obviously feel this way too?

You can imagine why this is important. Say we have an energy crisis. Solar panels may be things that a lot of people wish they could use to supplement their energy needs. I mean, who wouldn't want to harness the sun if it were something that's super easy and cheap to do? But say the future world you're imagining is to have hamsters run on wheels to generate power. You're going to summon the world's hamster population, and now everyone out there is going to have clean, renewable energy. Well, this is possible, I guess, from a material perspective.

This isn't something that anyone really wants. I guess a couple of you out there might want it now that I've said it, but you get what I'm saying. A plan has to be rooted in a place where there's enough collective energy to be harnessed to bring it about. Third filter, the ability to be mobilized. Outside of the future world being something that people want in theory, any hope that is rooted in real historical potential has to be something that moves people.

For example, on a personal level, you can want something in theory, but if it doesn't move you to take action on it, then that's probably a hope that still belongs in the fantasy category, at least for now. On a more societal level, same thing. Picture how many people will sign a petition for something, but won't change their behavior in even small ways to actually make it happen. This future world has to move people. Last filter is the ability to be revised. Is this plan for the future? Something that can survive the unexpected nature of reality?

If something serious that we didn't expect were to happen and the plan gets messed up, are there ways to pivot where this isn't just going to end the whole operation because we ran into one thing?

For the individual, say you want to become an NBA basketball player. Is it a good idea for you to quit your job, drop out of school, and bet everything in your life on some tryout you're going to have in six months? It's not that the hope is wrong altogether, it's that it's too rigid. If the plan can't be revised, are you really ever putting yourself in a good place to make it a reality? On a larger scale, something like Mao's China comes to mind. You know, the great leap forward was something that was so ideologically rigid at the time.

that once the plan was put into place, there was no possible way for anyone to correct course after that. People would lie about the production numbers just to avoid punishment. The government would silence people if they were critical of the plan. 40 million people starved to death, in part because of how impossible it was to revise the future they were aiming for. So these are four different filters that you could use to try to analyze any hope you're thinking about for a better future.

And should be said, they're also useful if you wanted to critically think about some of the collective solutions that get brought up in the media sometimes. Take colonizing Mars as a great example of this.

And as you guys know, personally, it's never my ambition on this show to put anything down. It's just not what I'm going for on this podcast. But this is a great example to illustrate what Block's talking about here. Does colonizing Mars pass the test of being an educated hope rather than just wishful thinking? Well, let's look at it. Tendency. Is traveling to and living on Mars rooted in an actual reality that can exist right now? Probably not.

Because there are very real technological barriers to that happening that need to get solved first. Dealing with reduced gravity, terraforming, radiation. I mean, even just supplying an operation like that. It's not that the dream itself is bad, but I think Bloch would say that there are more immediate futures that need to be accomplished first before anyone sits around idly just waiting for Mars to be the solution to their problems.

Latency. Is there a real hope that people have to carry this out and live on Mars? I think the answer to that is yes. People really do want a fresh start or to diversify humanity on multiple different planets. That seems to be there. How about mobilizing it? Is this something where the people that want it to happen can actually take action on it?

I think no. This is mostly something that billionaires dream about and that only billionaires can take action on. I mean, most people, all they can really do is sit around and watch the rockets get launched and then cheer really loud when they, yay, yay. That's all you can do.

How about revising this as we go? Is there a fallback plan if Mars fails? Doesn't really seem like it. Where are we going to go? Venus? Antarctica? I mean, in terms of plans that imagine a better future for us, this one does seem to have quite a bit of the whole "this has to work now" energy to it. Anyway, these filters can be applied to any future world that gets dreamed up. They can be incredibly useful as tools.

One of my favorite ideas from the work of Ernst Bloch is his concept of non-synchronicity. The idea is, with one of the cool things that stems out of this, is that when you look at people, when you see someone that you disagree with about something important, try not to see that person as someone that's dumber than you or just isn't as developed. And if only they could mature in their thinking more, they'd be thinking the exact same way you do. Instead, think of people as occupying different moments in time when it comes to the history of ideas.

Say you know someone who's an atheist. Diehard materialist. This person's a nihilist. Reason is the most important thing in the universe, they say. Now, this position, as we know from recently on this show, some of the most influential philosophers in the world held this position back in the 19th century. This was the position that made sense given the philosophical climate they lived in. And there are both strengths and weaknesses to holding this as a worldview. Maybe this is someone that has a harder time connecting in a meaningful way to the world around them.

But this is also probably someone that has a much easier time not being renunciative, hating things about themselves simply because they're feeling it. To balance this out, let's consider another example of a religious person, a Christian. Strengths and weaknesses to this position too. Maybe they struggle with certain classic arguments like how to explain evil in the world, how to align the findings of science with scripture, those kinds of things. But maybe they have a much easier time with things like identity. They know exactly who they are.

or with meaning. They know exactly how things fit into a larger picture. The point of all this is that Bloch would say we have people from different moments in history living together today all at the same time. And when you don't see people as being on some linear stage of development, but instead as being the embodiment of a type of historical consciousness, not only is it easier to have compassion for them, I think,

But if you want to have conversations with them that get them to see the world differently, if changing minds was a part of some future world you're trying to bring about, well, instead of telling them that they just need to grow up and realize the truth about the universe, you can instead look at the conversations that moved historical consciousness along during the time that their views were popular and try to ask those questions in a way that might get them to see another possibility. For example, if you knew someone that believed in more or less the same stuff as a peasant from the feudal system,

Well, maybe the questions and ideas of the Renaissance could be particularly helpful to them if they wanted to see things differently. Just from Bloch, a very interesting alternative way of looking at other people and their ideas. It's important also to say that to Ernst Bloch, there is no point where these future possibilities are going to magically come to an end. Our consciousness and the world are always going to be entangled, imagining new ways that the world might be that could be better for us. The only thing we can really do, I think,

is try not to get caught in the illusion that we have arrived at some sort of endpoint, whether by retreating into cynicism or by not looking critically enough at our own futures that we'd like to bring about. You know, it's interesting how the answers to existential questions change when it's a matter of imminence as opposed to something lacking.

What in one view can be thought of as despair. Despair because we so desire for there to be something there, but there's nothing. It's also possible for that same feeling of despair to be evidence of the fact that more is possible. And more than that, that I obviously care about whether one of those worlds comes about over all the others. And I guess for Block, at this existential level, it really becomes a matter of allowing ourselves to feel just how much we do care.

Patreon.com slash philosophize this. Hope you enjoyed this one. Have a good week this week. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.