I met Ernst Bloch in 1975, a little more than two years before his death. I had, some time before, picked up a copy of The Principle of Hope in the German edition. My German was much weaker then than it is today (although it still leaves much to be desired), and I stolidly ploughed through the first fifty pages with the help of a dictionary before giving up. Yet what I gathered from that first fragmentary reading prompted what I can only describe as an intellectual chain reaction.
Hope, Bloch declared at the outset of his book Daydreaming, is nurtured by individual daydreams that are the very substance of the future: "Everybody's life is pervaded by daydreams: One part of this is just stale, even enervating, escapism, even booty for swindlers; but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable . . . .Nobody has ever lived without daydreams."
Bloch's analytic view, I felt, brought a corrective to the way in which critical thought reduced things of value to being "no more than. . . . ." The critical tools were beyond refuting, and yet the need remained for something of value that was the object of hope. Hope, said Bloch, was "teachable"--it could be taught. With this, things seemed to fall into place by themselves, connections that had long seemed obscure flashed clearly to mind, bridges appeared where none had been before.
"Thinking," I also read, "means venturing beyond."
From this first short dip into a work of encyclopedic scope that, in German, covers over fifteen hundred pages, I gathered that Bloch, a materialist philosopher himself, had worked out an understanding of the future and of a possibility that carried one quite beyond the scientistic (not scientific) fatalism of what he liked to call vulgar materialism. In this view, as in the worldview of antiquity, man appears to be a plaything of fate, a passive pawn of necessity and chance. According to Bloch, however, the future is written in no other place than in the creative daydreams of all men. Bloch's thought thus reaches beyond the closed world familiar to antiquity and beyond the restricted notion of possibility that seems inherent to modern scientific determinism. It manages to integrate the philosophical potential developed by certain strains of Christian theology and gives that integration a critical foundation that is acceptable to those who, like myself, acknowledge the validity of the nonreligious, nontheistic perspective dominant today. His notions also appear compatible with the fundamental premises of contemporary physics. I suspected as much from this first reading and heard it confirmed later by the Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves.
I had to meet this man, I decided.
The easiest approach was to persuade Radio Canada, for whom I was then doing occasional cultural broadcasts, to let me undertake a broadcast on, and with, him. "Bloch lived eleven years in the United States [before and] during the war," I told Aline Legrand, my Canadian producer. "He obviously must speak English."
In fact, he did not. I wrote to Tubingen University and got a cordial response from his wife, Karola, welcoming my visit but warning me:
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