Marxist philosopher (1885-1977)
Indiscriminate ideological suspicion of any idea, without the urge to exalt an idea of one's own, will discourage rather than promote lucidity.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own
The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
The soul must accept guilt in order to destroy existing evil, lest it incur the greater guilt of idyllic withdrawal, of seeming to be good by putting up with wrong.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own
Evil does not approach us as pride any more, but on the contrary as slumber, lassitude, concealment of the "I," and distortion of the beyond. It approaches us in far more dreadful fashion.... It may make us so quickly contented, that any definitive fire will die down. The venomous, breathtaking frigid mist seems able ... to harden hearts and fill them with envy, obduracy and resentment, with bloody scorn for the divine image and light, with all the causes of the only true original sin, which is not wanting to be like God.
ERNST BLOCH
Man on His Own
We walk in the forest and feel we are or might be what the forest is dreaming. We pass between the pillars of its tree trunks, small, spiritual and invisible to ourselves, as their sound, as that which could not become forest again or external appearance of day and visibility. We do not possess it, that which all this around us--moss, curious flowers, roots, trunks and streaks of light is or signifies--because we are it itself and are standing too close to it, the spectral and still ineffable nature of consciousness or interiorization. But the sound burns out of us, the heard note, not the sound itself or its forms. This, however, shows us our path without alien means, our historically inward path, as a fire in which not the vibrating air but we ourselves begin to quiver and to cast off our cloaks.
ERNST BLOCH
Essays on the Philosophy of Music
Exercise of the body without the mind ultimately meant being cannon fodder, and thugs beforehand.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope
Death is the prototype of every "imposed fate", as one which is equally undesired and alienly intervening and uncomprehended.
ERNST BLOCH
The Heritage of Our Times
Only in his brain is man the most highly developed living organism, not in other organic capabilities however.
ERNST BLOCH
The Principle of Hope