{"id":14690,"date":"2024-07-31T20:50:09","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T10:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=14690"},"modified":"2024-08-01T14:23:21","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T04:23:21","slug":"a-philosophy-of-hope-for-a-post-political-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/31\/a-philosophy-of-hope-for-a-post-political-era\/","title":{"rendered":"A philosophy of hope for a post-political era"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US philosopher and literary critic, Fredric Jameson, once\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that it is \u201ceasier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism\u201d. As quotes go, this one captures an important aspect of our times, which is that we seem unable to imagine a world different from the present.<\/p>\n

Political scientists describe the age we are living in as \u201cpost-political<\/a>\u201d. This controversial concept refers to a noted lack of political alternatives on a global scale.<\/p>\n

Most point to the\u00a0collapse of the Soviet Union<\/a>\u00a0in the 1990s as the beginning of the post-political era and a new global order marked by what US anthropologist David Harvey defines as a\u00a0\u201cnew imperialism\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Belgian political theorist\u00a0Chantal Mouffe<\/a>\u00a0ascribes the post-political to a \u201ccrisis of representation<\/a>\u201d and the disappearance of contestation. Politics, she says, requires antagonism: the dichotomy of left and right, us and them. Without contestation, there is no politics.<\/p>\n

The question then is whether it is possible to find ways to be a visionary in the 21st century. My research\u00a0suggests<\/a>\u00a0looking at the 20th-century German philosopher,\u00a0Ernst Bloch<\/a>, whose life\u2019s work showed that the future lies in what is still pending from the past.<\/p>\n

In his\u00a0Literary Essays<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Bloch writes about \u201cawakening with a shock to all the past disruptions of this kind, all the aborted beginnings of our life\u201d. His point was that the future lies in resuming what was left unfinished from the past.<\/p>\n

Born in Germany in 1885, Bloch wrote a book titled\u00a0The Spirit of Utopia<\/a><\/em>\u00a0at an early age. It was a response to\u00a0Expressionism<\/a>\u00a0in art and it inspired a generation of thinkers, including Bloch\u2019s friend and rival,\u00a0Georg Luk\u00e1cs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Being Marxist and Jewish, Bloch escaped Nazi Germany in 1934. He settled in the US in 1939, where he worked on what would be his most important research: a three-volume work titled\u00a0The Principle of Hope<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bloch returned to Europe after the second world war and became professor philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany in 1948. He was an unorthodox, independent mind and was soon ostracised by the authorities.<\/p>\n

In 1961, he moved to the University of T\u00fcbingen, where he taught philosophy. His late lectures were collected in the\u00a013th volume of his works<\/a>\u00a0and partially translated in English in 1970, under the title,\u00a0A Philosophy of the Future<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Bloch\u2019s Principle of Hope<\/em> rewrites the history of humanity in an unexpected way. He goes through centuries of scientific, medical and geographical discoveries, religious beliefs, social movements, innovations and philosophies. He does not just tell his readers how things were. Instead, he highlights a simple fact: across the ages, human beings have been guided by an idea of the future. They have struggled and researched and innovated because they were striving towards something \u2013 towards a better world.<\/p>\n

In many cases, this envisaged future was cloudy or improbable. Often it simply didn\u2019t happen. But, Bloch points out, that didn\u2019t mean it couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

In his T\u00fcbingen lectures, his work on\u00a0the philosophy of the Renaissance<\/a>, as well as the\u00a0second volume of The Principle of Hope<\/em><\/a>, he notes how Sir Francis Bacon\u2019s 1626 utopian novel,\u00a0New Atlantis<\/a><\/em>, contains \u201can inventory of discoveries that have not yet been made\u201d. These things were impossible in Bacon\u2019s times. Centuries later, though, some of these discoveries did become a reality.<\/p>\n

In the post-political era, by contrast, people might seek to address specific urgent problems… But because these struggles are not couched within a broader, collective idea of the future, the struggles they trigger are short-lived.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beyond impossible discoveries, Bloch took note of defeated revolutions, too. The German Peasant wars<\/a>\u00a0of 1524-25 inspired him to write a passionate book on their leader, the millenarian preacher,\u00a0Thomas M\u00fcnzer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcnzer\u2019s fight for the rights of the poor was crushed. However, it anticipated revolutions to come. M\u00fcnzer\u2019s legacy thus survives as an incomplete project that belongs to the future precisely because its demands remain relevant. In other words, it still asks to be completed.<\/p>\n

The decades before the advent of the post-political era are marked by struggles that, however partisan or ideological, were predicated on the idea that things could be different. The Pakistani-British author Tariq Ali aptly describes the 1960s as \u201cstreet-fighting years<\/a>\u201d. People protested. But they also trusted that a better world could be possible.<\/p>\n

Similarly, decolonisation was guided by what Indian historian Vijay Prashad describes as the \u201cvital assertion of an alternative future<\/a>\u201d. So too, the\u00a0civil rights movement<\/a>\u00a0in the US, the\u00a0October Revolution<\/a>\u00a0in Russia, or the global\u00a0campaign against apartheid<\/a>\u00a0in South Africa.<\/p>\n

These movements hinged on big words and big, possibly utopian, dreams: communism, socialism, freedom, peace. As anti-colonial intellectual\u00a0Frantz Fanon<\/a>\u00a0put it, they sought to create a new human being.<\/p>\n

In the post-political era, by contrast,\u00a0people\u00a0might seek<\/a> to address specific urgent problems, from\u00a0workers\u2019 rights<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0patriarchy<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0racism<\/a>, species\u2019\u00a0extinction<\/a>, war and genocide. But because these struggles are not couched within a broader, collective idea of the future, the struggles they trigger are short-lived.<\/p>\n

Bloch\u2019s great lesson is to recuperate a sense of the future that is not distant but a project of human liberation and equality to be prepared for and anticipated. Bloch was a Marxist. So he located that future within the utopia of communism, a society where no one would be exploited, where there would be no social classes and people could live with dignity.<\/p>\n

But even for those who do not believe that communism is the answer, Bloch\u2019s work provides a key in that it emphasises the importance of the dream. Of imagination. As Marx himself famously put it in his\u00a01843 letter to Arnold Ruge<\/a>: \u201cIt will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

The possibility of the future lies therefore in rediscovering and recentering the idea of a concrete utopia within everyday life. As Bloch put in the\u00a0first volume<\/a>\u00a0of The Principle of Hope<\/em>, we need a \u201ccarpe diem, but a genuine one in genuine present\u201d.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published in <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by Nathan Dumlao<\/a> on Unsplash.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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