Hope

4. Hope in Bloch’s thought

Ernst Bloch takes a Hegelian approach to religion. He conceives God not as radically opposed to the human subject, as the absolutely Other, in the way Kierkegaard does (1844: 44–5), but as a human ideal. Bloch interprets faith in God as a hypostatized longing for a utopian form of existence. Once this hypostatization is recognized for what it is, the concept of ‘God becomes the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of God no longer contains a god’ (1954–9: 1196). God is recognized as embodying the hope for an ideal but thoroughly human kingdom.

Bloch’s anthropological interpretation of religion owes a great deal to Feuerbach. He was, however, deeply critical of Feuerbach for eliminating all traces of the transcendent from religion. The human perfection which Feuerbach saw man as projecting onto God is not reappropriated in the recognition of this projection, but is recognized as the promise of reappropriation – that is, as the promise of human perfection. This promise of perfection is the transcendent element which remains in religion, even after its anthropologization (1954–9: 1284–8).

Bloch’s main critics included orthodox Marxists such as Manfred Buhr (1970), who were deeply suspicious of religious utopias. They see religion as tranquillizing, and socially stabilizing, as the ‘opium of the people’. Bloch acknowledged this conservative tendency within religion, but also interpreted the revolutionary tendency of religious hope as the most extreme manifestation of dissatisfaction with, and rebellion against, the present. For Bloch, religious utopias, especially the Christian utopia of the kingdom of God, express revolutionary hope for an utterly different and better form of existence (1954–9: 1193). They are not merely tranquillizing, but in principle transforming.