Hope and History by Josef Pieper

Author:Josef Pieper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Catholicism, Christianity
ISBN: 9780898704655
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV

In both scope and depth, the most penetrating statement on the topic of “hope” to be found in present-day literature is undoubtedly the work of Ernst Block. The subject that has motivated his activity as a writer, for more than fifty years now, is expressed in the title of an early book from 1918, Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia). In a postscript added by the author to the new edition of that work in 1963, he expressly confirms the continuity of that leading theme throughout all the works published in the meantime, up to his comprehensive concluding work, written in exile, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The principle of hope). The identity and uniformity of the basic idea signify, however, anything but monotony. One need only scan the table of contents of the book on hope, and page through it a bit, in order to appreciate the unexpected, almost unmasterable, kaleidoscopic profusion of the concrete things discussed in it: from the daydreams of children playing hide-and-seek; through the new dress in the brightly lit shop window, the “happy ending” of the popular movie, the Mozartian opera, social Utopias from Plato to Marx, the wish structure implicit in fairy tales, the celestial rose of the Dantean Commedia, the aria on longing from Mignon, Don Quixote, the fugue in Bach; Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and Mohammed; and up to the Marxian atheism of the kingdom of freedom. The whole thing is written, moreover, in a thoroughly nontechnical, directly human language, fueled by the author’s passionate devotion to his subject matter, and with a sonority and polyphony of diction that both fascinate from the first moment on (especially for the first moment!) and are not usually to be encountered elsewhere in philosophical writings. The “other side of the coin”, of course, is also implicit in these observations. It is by no means easy to ascertain, both on the whole and in particular, just what, “specifically and exactly”, is actually being maintained; this difficulty extends even to the’ most centrally relevant concepts, including that of “hope” itself. “Music resounding in the shaft of the soul”—this phrase from Hegel, which Bloch retrospectively applies to his own early work,1 is also quite apposite to his later, major work on hope, in which, for example, the following terms, used almost synonymously and strung together in a few lines, are invoked to characterize the object of hope: “happiness; freedom; nonalienation; golden age; land of milk and honey; the eternal feminine; the trumpet signal in Fidelio; the conformity with Christ on the day of Resurrection”.2 As we can see, references to Bloch’s “dream-hued” language are not unjustified. But precisely the quality thus extolled makes it nearly impossible to present his basic ideas in what must be, at best, a highly condensed summary and to discuss them critically. Nevertheless, that has to be attempted here.

Bloch likes to describe his opus as an “encyclopedia”, i.e., as a comprehensive survey of human images of hope. This aspect of his undertaking is, in fact, both the most convincing and the least problematic one.

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