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The Early Aesthetic Theories of Bloch and Lukcs

Author(s): Werner JungSource: New German Critique, No. 45, Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger (Autumn, 1988),pp. 41-54Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488093 .

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TheEarlyAestheticTheoriesofBlochand Lukdcs

Werner Jung

Life s a fragment....Withoutbeginningandwithoutend.That'sWhyit is so hardTo Understand.

AugustStrindberg

IHeidelberg, around the beginning of the firstdecade of this century:an intellectual center for the elite in the humanities. Setting the tone:the sociologist Max Weber and the philosopher Georg Simmel. Gain-ing status: two brilliant young men, Georg von Lukdicsand ErnstBloch, respected and wooed by the older philosophers, envied by the

younger philosophers, and soon to be persecuted by the overwhelm-ing mediocrity of the academic community.Through GeorgSimmel the two became acquainted, each unexpect-edly recognizing the other's enormous philosophical talent. On Jan-uary 11, 1911, Lukdicswrote to his then closest confidante, the artcriticLeo Popper:"Dr. Bloch, the Germanphilosopher, whom Simmel sentto me once, was the firstinspiringintellectual aftera long hiatus;he is areal philosopher in the Hegelian mold" (Correspondence,46).' Just1. Quotations in this text are from the following works: Ernst Bloch und GeorgLukdcs,Dokumentezum 100. Geburtstag,d. Mikl6sMesterhVziand Gy6rgyMezei (Buda-

pest: Archivumi Fiizetek IV, Lukics Archivum, 1984; GeorgLukdcs:SelectedCorrespondence41

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42 Bloch and Lukdcson Aesthetics

six months later the friendshipbetween the two had become so strongthat Bloch could then write to Lukaics:"I would like to become yourfriend with all my might and to become so more and more deeply"(Dokumente,5). Even in 1915, after their personal friendship haddampened considerably, Bloch once commented about Lukaics:"thereis no one with whom I feel such an intellectualaffinityas you ata time when I feel the past philosophers becoming as irrelevant aspeas" (Dokumente,94).During that time, affairsamong intellectualsbegan innocently andnaturally.Colleagues commonly sent work to one another, requestingan opinion, encouragement, and criticism.Normally, the contactend-ed aftera friendly reply. Occasionally there would be an exchange ofletters,and even less frequentlya personal friendship. But in this case apersonal bond resulted immediately. "Your manuscript," Bloch ac-knowledged in his firstletterto Lukaics,whom he had not yet personal-ly met, "made an extraordinary mpression on me" (Dokumente,) -not only because this text, the Beer-Hoffmann Essay from Lukaics'sSoul and Form(1910), dealt with the actual problematics of aesthetics,but even more because it brought up questions with which Bloch wasoccupied at the time. "I'd like to ask you to let me know somethingmore about your work about the aesthetically nvolved subject and itsrelease and liberation in artistic or theoreticalobjectivity.It is a ques-tion in which all greatideas must converge, and I hope to payyou backwith the second chapter of my book - the title has incidentallybeenchanged. It exclusively concerns the very rare problem of objectivityand comprehends within it all possible problems that can be con-ceived" (Dokumente,). And one year later Bloch was to work thethoughts from another one of Lukaics'sessaysinto his own philosophi-cal system. "I've attempted to bring your ideas into ethics, dogmatics,and axiomatics aside from aestheticsand don't know yet how far thiswill work with the specific pretextsgiven here." The letter ended withBloch's declaration of his keen interest in Lukacs's central theme: "Iwish you were here, and we could spend the entire night discussingyour manuscript and life and its form" (Dokumente,). From then onBloch's letters to his friend and confidante, in which he talked about1902-1920, eds. Judith Marcus and ZoltAn Tar (New York: 1986); Georg LukAcs,Entwicklungsgeschichtees modernenDramas, ed. Frank Benseler (Darmstadt: Luchterhand,1981); Georg LukaScs,Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostok (London: NLB, 1974); ErnstBloch, Geistder Utopie,vol. 16 in WerkausgabeFrankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).

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the continuing progressof his new greatphilosophical system, becamemore frequent. Most contemporaryphilosophers appearedto Bloch tobe weak, and only Simmel stimulated him. Nevertheless, he consid-ered Lukdics nd himself capable of delving into the deeper mysteriesof philosophy without "appearingagain as mere 'summarists' of axio-matics" (Dokumente,8). On November 18, 1911, with the completionand diffusion of his system practicallyin sight, he wrote: "I am theparaclete,and the people to whom I've been sent will experience andgrasp the god returning home in themselves" (Dokumente,9).Bloch, the "Paraclete,"who wrote a great deal and swiftly,was ac-customed to finishing up to 60 quarto pages in his dailywriting (Doku-mente,5), and he saw the aestheticistLuk~ics s both a stimulatingdis-cussion partnerand an inexorable critic. Bloch considered Lukacsthemore competent authorityon aesthetic and ethical questions, and heclearlyhad faithin Lukics's opinions andjudgment: "Listen,it's abso-lutely necessary for me to treat the contrast between immanent andtranscendental aesthetics somewhere in my present work on logics.How can I do it so your name and program are mentioned?" (Doku-mente,46). And in another passage referringto a recentlyfinished (ear-ly) publication:"The last partis mainly stolen from you. Itwas impos-sible to do it otherwise. In turn,your name will resound in my book allover the place. At least, so frequently and so loud as the nameHawkarrowin the eternal hunting grounds" (Dokumente,5).Bloch's consistently high regard for Lukaics,however, did not ex-clude his harsh criticism of Lukacs'swork in matters dealing with tra-dition, above all with regardto Hegel, but also with language and the

entire conception of Luklics'searly writings as a whole. After Lukicsfinished writing the manuscripts in Heidelberg for his habilitation,which were first published posthumously in 1974 under the title ofHeidelbergerPhilosophieder Kunst, Bloch recorded the following criticalsentences: "I find the methodological introduction of your manuscript- your endless 'but one must consider' or the constant division ofproblems into two - not correct. I believe that others must also feelthat this is sentimental in the way Schiller meant it and that it is notworthy of you. It is tortuous and boring" (Dokumente,3). Bloch wasalso extremely critical of the Theoryf theNovel,which he, along withPaul Ernstand Max Weber, became acquaintedwith as one of its firstreaders when it was in manuscript form, and which he later praisedseveral times in his correspondence. He criticized the abstract nature

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44 Blochand Lukdcson Aesthetics

of the first section ("dieses trockene Brot"),and he observed overall acleardivergenceof the two sections of the book (cf.Dokumente,00).Al-though Bloch's positive remarks about Lukfics'stexts outweigh hisnegativecriticisms,there is a postcarddated August 24, 1916, with thefollowing comment, which - all friendship aside - indicates far moresignificantdifferences:"Otherwise,you know that from the very begin-ning I've found essential points of your aesthetics to be completelystrange" (Dokumente,107).For a clearer understanding of these disagreements, however, aknowledge of Bloch's and Lukacs'scorrespondence is insufficient. It isnecessaryto read Bloch's and Lukacs'searlyworks. The comparison oftexts refutes the image of cooperation thatwas so eagerlycultivatedbyboth these philosophers as they grew older, an image which Blochsummarized completely in the concept of the two "connecting tubes"(cf. Dokumente, 01), and which Lukaicsfurther referred to as his"Erlebnis."2A parallelreadingof worksand letters raisesthe question of whetherthe image of the spiritualaffinity, portrayedin the letters and constant-ly confirmed by Bloch, the "sym-philosophy" of two lonely souls be-yond the plain of academic philosophy, was not more wishful thinkingor, even more, an intense requirement, than the practicalconsequenceof their intellectual deliberations and literary production. Only whenkept together and read together do the correspondence and worksprovide a portraitof the early development of Bloch and Lukacs,de-picting friendship as well as substantial disagreements. A one-sidedreadingof Bloch's letters(whichfurthermorein the early phase up un-til 1917 takeon productive, even playful,traits)can easilylead to a lossof perspective on the differing standpoints of the two philosophers.From a secure distance, the older Luka'csdescribed their earlyrela-tionship most appropriately,when he noted in 1962 in a draftof a let-ter (never sent?)to Bloch: "Even today I can still see one thing vividly:our meeting in Budapest in 1910, the meetings in Berlin, Florence,and Heidelberg. An impulse, whose memory I've preservedup till to-day. There was nothing of substance about it. It was the opening of aperspective in regard to a philosophy with a style that was different

2. Cf. definitions in Lukdcs's autobiographical draft Gelebtes Denken (Budapest:Istvin Edrsi and Frankfurt am Main, 1981): "Mein Erlebnis: Eine Philosophie imklassischen (und nicht im heutigen epigonalen UniversitAts-) Stil durch B'sPersdnlichkeit fiir bewiesen und damit auch fhirrmich als Lebensweg er6ffnet" (251).

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from the customary one of that time. Why did our divergences evolvealong completely different lines - the tendency to do this was alreadystronger in Heidelberg as we believed at that time - but they cannotextinguish the memory of the impulse, at least as far as I'm con-cerned" (Dokumente,144 f.). Three years later LukAcsreplied to Bloch'sfelicitations on Luktcs's 80th birthday with words that have appearedin Lukics's last autobiographical notes in the draft GelebtesDenken:"Theencounter in 1910 had something so vehement about it that it cannotbe compared with any other encounter of peers at that time. No matterhow quickly and decisively our ways parted, this remains a fact" (Doku-mente, 146).3 Bloch commented on this first meeting in Florence in1910 and the ensuing period in Heidelberg in a quite similar manner:

When I became acquaintedwith Luk~cs... first in Florence, to bemore exact, when I got to know him more closely in Florence andthen in Heidelberg, where we had a genuine symbiotic relation-ship - I remember we established a 'national park' to preserveour differences. ... I only needed to begin, and he only needed tobegin, and before you knew it, we were in the middle of our ownaffairs, 'Hey, I also thought and did that.' In Garmisch one of usdid the same or something related to what the other did in Heidel-berg so that we loved to have a difference and cultivatedit as ouragreements gradually developed. However, we really did say dif-ferent things. 'Djouri! we always say the same thing!' That waswhat we said to each other. 'Whatyou've just said is exactlywhat Imean. What I mean is exactlywhat you've said, etc.' And this wasthe way we artificially gathered such differences. That came outlater. But this strange affinitytook such a strong shape that thereare partsin my book Geist erUtopie,which was writtenatthat time,that are actually from Luk~icsand things in TheTheoryf theNovelthat are from me. I don't know anymore who thought what. Itdidn't matter! It didn't matter at all! (Dokumente,01 f.).

Without a doubt there are considerable similarities between the twoyoung philosophers, and the influence they had on one another can

3. Cf. "Gelebtes Denken," 251 ff.; in addition, the published interviewabout theautobiographicalsketch: "Bloch hatteaufmich gewaltigenEinflug, denn er hatte michdurch sein Beispiel davon uberzeugt, daB es miglich sei, in der althergebrachtenWeise zu philosophieren..., und nun begegnete ich bei Bloch dem Phinomen, daBjemand philosophierte, als wiirde die gesamte heutige Philosophie nicht existieren,da1B s m6glich war, wie Aristoteles oder Hegel zu philosophieren" (59).

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certainlybe proven in their respectiveworks. One need only glance atBloch's firstedition of GeistderUtopieo see how closely related it is toLukacs's collection of essays Soul and Formand his Theory f theNovel. Inboth cases an historical-philosophical (self)-reflectionof their meta-physical patternof ideas is substantiated- "Youthink," Bloch wroteto Lukdcson November 22, 1916, "like me in a historicaland philo-sophical manner" (Dokumente,113). TheTheory fthe Novel begins with analmost poetic description of the transcendentalhomelessness of mod-ern man, a descriptionwhich Bloch shortened in GeistderUtopieo theformula of "the darknessof the lived moment" (GU, 369). And yet thecritical description of society, the radical rejection of the alienatedpresence and the search for a new transcendentalmap, for orientationand for a new homeland, is only superficiallya common topic of thetwo philosophers. Underneath, completely differentopinions open upregarding possibilities and methods for conquering bourgeois societyand its alienated condition. And this divergence did not begin withLukacs'sapparentlycomplete break with his earlierdevelopment andhis membership in the newly founded Communist Partyof Hungary,but ratherright at the beginning of his friendshipwith Bloch, or - asBloch calls it - their "intellectual symbiotic relationship," which, ifone examines their texts from this period more closely, is scarcelyableto conceal the beginnings of a split.

IIIn 1911, in both Hungaryand Germany,Lukacs'sessay"Metaphysikder Trag6die: Paul Ernst"appeared, completing - in the same year- the collection Souland Form. n this collection, as in the letter to Leo

Popper,which appropriately ntroduced the volume with the title "Onthe Nature and Form of the Essay,"Lukacs sketchesthe outlines of hisearly existentialistphilosophy of life, which - in the tradition of theaesthetic idealism of Schelling or Solger - appear in the guise of ametaphysicsof art. The letter firstpresents fundamental reflections onthe importance and value of the intermediate form of the essay, as halfphilosophy, half literature,which, after the greatphilosophical systemshave come to an end, would step into the vacuum and replace philoso-phy until the awaited new, great philosophical system appears. "Theessayist is a Schopenhauer who writes his 'Parerga' while waiting forthe arrival of his own (or another's) The Worldas Will and Idea; he is a

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John the Baptistwho goes out to preach in the wilderness about anoth-er who is still to come, whose shoelace he is not worthy to untie" (SF,16).To Lukics, the essayistis "the pure type of the precursor"(SF, 16),the herald of the "great redeeming system" (SF, 17). He prefaces hiswork with the invisible words "Thoughts occasioned by . .."(SF, 15),and he finds his material in works of art, in which the experiences ofthe producers ("thesouls")have become form. This prompts essayists,in the re-constructiveact of interpretation,to deduce the transitoryval-ue and meaning of the work for life. "The essay is ajudgment, but theessential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as isthe case with the system) but the process of judging" (SF, 18).In certain individual concrete cases, then, variouspossiblities are re-constructed in essays, indicating how specific souls with their specificexperiences can objectify themselves in adequate artisticforms. ThePaul Ernstessay summarizes a few of Luka~cs'sasic insights about hissuggestion that the classicaldrama of Ernst is at the same time a para-digm of modern art.At the beginning there is the well-known histori-cal-philosophical staging, upon which Lukafcs rojectshis metaphysicsof the tragicform. Similar to Heidegger's SeinundZeit,one reads herethat life is "an anarchy of light and dark," in which nothing is com-pletelyfulfilled,and where nothing ever ends. "Everything lows, every-thing merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled andimpure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing everflowers into real life. To live is to live something through to the end:but lifemeans that nothing is ever fully and completely lived throughto the end. Life is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable exist-ences; one can describe it only negatively- by saying that somethingalways happens to disturb and interruptthe flow. ... Schelling wrote:'We say a thing "lasts" because its existence is not in conformity withits nature.' - Real life is alwaysunreal, always impossible, in the midstof empirical life" (SF, 153). A condition of solitude and isolation, ofalienation, and, ever since Historyand Class Consciousness, f "reificati-on," reigns after God has abandoned the world, and as a result theranscendentaltopography of human orientation has fallen into disor-der. Like Hegel, who in his aesthetics basicallydifferentiatesbetweenan original epic condition of the world and the modern prose of cir-cumstances, LukAcsdescribes the difference between the ancient levelof human development, that of the "closed" culture existing in Greekantiquity through the Middle Ages up to Shakespeare, and the modern,

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the "open" bourgeois society. While on the former level inside andoutside are still one, and "the same hand" guides "the destiny and thesoul," now the world goes "on its own way, untouched by such ques-tions or answers.All things have become dumb, and laurels or defeatsare awardedindifferentlyat the end of the struggle"(SF, 155). It is ex-actly in this historical situation or constellation that modern dramanow arises: the birth of tragedyafterthe death of God!Thus the ways and goals of humanity are no longer determined by"a judgment of God," but rather a thousand relativities and coinci-dences shape the course of human life, which ticks away "betweenpain and boredom" (Schopenhauer).Life dwindles to nothing in pureimmediate existence, without enlightenment, orientation,perspective,or goal. At the present level of development, humanity has again - inthe words of Schopenhauer - become "the manufactured commodi-ty of nature" (FabrikwareerNatur).Only the "greatermen" (SF, 165),who are still capable of experience and reflection, who suffer fromalienationand insubstantiality,can escape the frictionless flow of bour-geois capitalist everydaylife. And they form the charactersof the mod-ern tragedybecause only they are able, in certain lonely moments, toreveal their essence. This moment, when the "greatman" reaches thepoint, fittinglydescribed by the young Nietzsche in the spatialmeta-phor "Grenzpunkte der Peripherie"[boundary points of the periph-ery], at which the view is out into the darknessand back into a point-less existence, is where the essence of life is concentrated for Lukacs.For Luktcs it is about "the pure experience of self' (SF, 156), whenman raises himself out of the "ordinarylife" of the peripheryinto thesphere of his essence, the center. "Such a moment is a beginning andan end. Nothing can succeed it or follow upon it;nothing can connectit with ordinary life. It is a moment; it does not signify life, it is life - adifferent life opposed to and exclusive of ordinary life" (SF, 157-58).And, having become a literaryform, it is also the basis of tragedy. Inthe tragic moment - "Tragedy is only a moment" (SF, 158) - the ex-istence of the dramatispersonae revealsitself. "Any'development' of acharacterin drama is merely apparent;it consists of the experiencingof such a moment, of the characterbeing raised into the world of trag-edy inside whose periphery,until then, only his shadow could enter. Itis this character's becoming-man, his awakening from a confuseddream" (SF, 159).In this description the original motive for tragedy based on

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historicism becomes a philosophical-existentialinterpretationof the"modern." However, thiswas not Lukics's only goal. Instead,it was hisintent to raise historicism and the philosophy of art, in which the per-fectedwork assumes the highest position within the hierarchicalsystemof the arts,as in tragedy. Again, this is very similar to Hegel's philoso-phy of art as a symbol for the level reached in the timetable of the"Weltgeist,"meaning the development of humanity and society. Thevarioustragediescould then be used as indices for the advancedstateofalienation;the necessaryresult would be a complicationof the dramaticmoment up to its possible abolishment through the dramatizationoffates, which would notbe established through a drastic situation, butwould instead become suddenly tragic by pure accidentsand the link-ing together of unfortunate circumstances. But although Lukatcsac-knowledged the firsthalf of "Metaphysikder Tragbdie,"he drew backfrom the end result,which he saw dramaticallyexposed in Strindberg.The shrinkingawayfrom this result,which occurred parallelto a re-jection of Strindbergiandrama, appears to me to constitute Lukacs'smain disagreementwith the young Ernst Bloch's position. Although inthe end LukAcsried to understand the tragedyas a cipher for the rela-tionship between man and the world, the individual and society, evenfor history as a whole, a last sublime subjective trace must alwaysre-main in the dramaticproduction. The dramatic hero - typically,withLukAcs,"greaterman" - must still, in his destruction, triumph overthe conditions and relations which led to his ruin; he remains, in thewords of Hegel, "eine sittliche Macht" [a moral force]. He preservesthe concrete "Humanum" in that he acts as a representative - be-yond the downfall and destruction, that is, still in a negative way - ofthe belief in the meaning of history and its rationality.From the perspective of historicism, LukAcsdefines the function oftragedyin the following manner: "Tragedy'sfight for historyis a greatwar of conquest againstlife, an attempt to find the meaning of history(which is immeasurably far from ordinary life) in life, to extract themeaning of history from life as the true, concealed sense of life" (SF,167). LukAcsmaintains in the perfectedwork of art(in the tragedy,ex-plicitlyin the fate of the hero, as long as his life allows itself to be dram-atized) the belief in the meaning of history,which doesallow itself to beexplained, even if suddenly and only in certainmoments, in the sameway that he - with a view toward the future - leaves the perspectivesopen to a new time. However, he further requires the totality and

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perfectiveness of a harmonic and self-contained work of art, and onthe side of content a clearlycontoured (problematic) subject,who toilsat the insignificant though objective "prose of conditions" (ProsaderVerhdltnisse,egel) and whose tragedyconsists in his coming to a con-sciousness of the dichotomy of life and experience, of hislife and of life.On these grounds Lukacspresents the neo-classicisticworksof PaulErnst as paradigmaticexamples of modern tragedy,and for the samereason,he must almostinevitablyrejectthe dramaof AugustStrindberg.In Strindberg'sworks,the livesof merely responsivecharacters redom-inant, a trend which began in the greatnaturalisticdramasTheFatherrMissJulie,and which later dominated completely in ToDamascus nd ADreamPlay.The influenceof both Schopenhauerand Nietzsche is appar-ent when Strindbergdescribes theworld as one of "illusionandguiltandsufferingand death," one of "eternalchange and disappointmentandnever-endingpain,"4when he creates the fatefulentanglementof man,each man, in the mere realityof his existence,with its insignificantacci-dents, and - in his later dramas - when he names it as the last possi-ble, and at the same time highest, perception,namely the concept of apermanentdisharmony.In the lastmonologue of Indra'sdaughter,thedaughterof a god from Indianmythology,who came to earthin order toexperiencethe sufferingsof man, Strindberg ummarizes his pessimisticview of the world, accordingto which the power of alienationwreaks tsfinal victoryover the powerless, strugglingpeople: Now, now I knowwhat it means to live; I feel the pain of being human. You miss whatyou never wanted; regret even misdeeds never done. You want toleave, you want to stay;your heart'sdrawn and quartered, torn apartby conflictingwishes, indecision, doubt."5In this world, where man isnothing against chance and delusion, where he is either sucked intothe whirlpool of habits and commonness or he revolts, rebels, andgoes mad from the empty synchronicity, the eternal repetition, or islocked up and declared insane by the common people, relationshipsno longer exist. No one and nothing more can be relied upon, every-one lives for-himselfalone. "MissJulie: I thought you were my friend.Jean: I am - sometimes. Just don't count on it."6

In his first work, TheHistoryof ModernDrama, awarded a prize by the4. August Strindberg,Ghost onata,n Selectedlays, rans. EvertSprinchorn(Minne-apolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1986 ) 783.5. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, in SelectedPlays. 732.6. August Strindberg, MissJulie, in SelectedPlays. 247.

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respected Kisfaludy Society in 1908 and published in 1911 in Hunga-ry, Luk~ics said little about Strindberg's drama and view of the world.However, he had a very thorough and correct grasp of Strindberg's in-tentions and was right on the mark when he sketched Strindberg'sviews as follows:

The life of every human being is merely a game of a thousandchanging motifs, and its fate is the long series of subtle vibrations.There is very little that happens in such a play, and even thoughthis happening determines the captivatingeffect of the entire reali-ty, we cannot name the true reason for what has happened be-cause there is none. The essence of human beings and Strind-berg's view of the world consists in the fact that nothing happensonly from one reason (Entwicklungsgeschichte,99 f.).

But, because Lukitcs places essence before appearance, the substantialcore essence of a single (greater) human being before the purely arbi-trary nature of the present world, which for Strindberg holds the upperhand, he does not accept Strindberg's drama. Such drama would bemere potentiality, a short episode without consequence. (In the furtherdevelopment of Lukics's aesthetic theory, the person and merit ofStrindberg also faded increasingly into the background. LukAcs's greataesthetics, the peculiarity of the aesthetic, revealed Strindberg as a madartist, who aroused only pathological interest.)'What I find remarkable, then, is that Bloch chose Strindberg, whomhe rarely cited and who was not given much importance in his work, toattack Lukkics's early philosophy. Aside from Strindberg the individ-ual, a basic controversy regarding artistic modernity, its potential, andits method seemed to emerge, which also constituted the central pointof the expressionism debates in the 1930s and the argument over real-ism and the avantgarde.After Bloch had become acquainted with LukAcs's 1911 essay on PaulErnst, he wrote, "I've read through your sharp and austere essay aboutthe tragedy once again with a good deal of enjoyment - but not with-out some reservations" (Dokumente,11). Bloch expressed these misgiv-ings more precisely and fundamentally a few years later in the chapter"Zur Theorie des Dramas" in Geist der Utopie. He first recounted

7. Cf. Georg Luk~ics,Die Eigenart esAsthetischen,ev. ed. Jiirgen Jahn (BerlinandWeimar:1981) 2: 83, 85.

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Luklcs's ideas quite comprehensively and also brought up the centraltheme of the essay in the phrase, "aftereverything is said and done,only human beings determine their fate, even though it may seem toapproach them in such a strange way and to follow its own laws"(GU,68). Therein, however, lie Bloch's problems with Lukacs'stheory oftragedy,which always presupposes a dramatichero and thereby - inactuality- loses sight of the concrete conditions and relations,abovewhich the subject rises in the firstplace and which he regardsas insig-nificant.And yet Bloch agreed partiallywith Luki~cs's pinion "that thetragicindividual can only remain resolute without gliding over into theworld that surrounds him if this world drives him back into himself,into his exposed, rigid, statuaryprivacyand self and is basicallynot ina position to do anything insofar as it is blind and indifferent, insofaras it lets its sun shine overjust people as well as unjust people and notany less over the just" (GU, 70 f.). At the same time the external, sup-posedly trivialrelationships in a modern tragedy must be taken intoconsideration, so that one may actually speak about tragedy. Blochcited Strindberg'sGhost onataas an example of this point since it con-vinces us of the necessity of having to bleed and of "the murdering ofall light in this prison, insane asylum, and funeral home called earth"(GU, 72).With his deep expressionist, substantivestyle,which is purelyexpressed and which (GU, 72) he has chosen, Strindbergis presentedas the paradigm of a potentiallynew form of tragedy.In another pas-sage from GeistderUtopieBloch sees Strindbergas a visionary(GU, 238)whose tragicvision penetrates into the core of the modern world andmodern life. His drama is one which creates explicitly that whichLukacs wanted to see eliminated and which Bloch wanted to keep asthe constitutive featureof the modern world it has successfullydrama-tized, "the emptiness of the outer life," "that which is hostile to hu-manity," "all that which is slimy, colloidal, incalculable,arbitrarilyeftbehind, falsely complicated, moody, malevolently coincidental, andintermediaryof the outer causal nexus" (GU, 74).All of this, altogether"the nothingness of the god-forsaken world," should be consideredvalid in a modern drama as "the real background that plays a role ineverything"(GU, 74). Contraryto Lukaics,Bloch thoroughly accepted"the darknessof the lived moment" as the stuff and subject matter ofmodern art. The insignificant life, which for Lukics is already tran-scended in the totality of the perfected work, for Bloch is a require-ment for the production of art. This is obvious in the second

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passage, in which Bloch again employs Strindberg - together withDostoyevsky,Lukacs'sgreatmodel in his early yearsand targetin Theo-ry of the Novel - to refute Lukacs's aesthetics. Here the irreconcilableopposition clearly emerges, even though only its last, most consequen-tial result was a factor in the discussions of the 1930s. Where Lukicsplanned the objectivityand totalityof the perfected work, there Blochpleaded for the unfinished, which offers the receptive subject moreroom for play than the one-sided, linear, and exhaustible work of clas-sical or classicistictype (cf. Ernst).

Recently Giinther K. Lehmann correctlypointed out the commonfactor between Bloch and Luk?cs when he stated that art served bothas "the organon of the worldview."8Their considerable differencelay,however, in the question of what artis and from which point of view itshould be observed. While Lukdics, s Bloch noted, "stayedclose to theworks and forms" (GU, 178), and thus put forth a canon of greatworks,Bloch pleaded for the "principallyunfinished work of art"(GU,179), which would be created anew with every act of reception. ForBloch the work of artwas not the createdutopia as a work, the famous"anticipatory llumination" of a betterlife, but ratherthrough produc-tive reception the utopia opens up for the subjectin the work. It is notthe work but the imaginationwhich sets the utopia free;the acts of thesubject, the production (whetherin creatingthe work or in re-creatingthe work in reception), not the object, firstbring light to the "darknessof the lived moment."Consequently, expressionism, which turns awayfrom the "classicistidolatryof form" (GU, 182) and which, ratherthan being ashamed of

its own subjectivity, allows the "I" to express itself freely anduncensored, is for Bloch trulynew art. In the apologia for this new art,8. Cf. Giinther K. Lehmann, Stramin und totale Form. Der KunstphilosophGeorgLukdcsund sein Verhdltnis u Ernst BlochsAsthetikder Hoffnung, 4 WeimarerBeitrdge (1985) 534. Iwill dispense here with a lengthy disagreement with the secondary literatureand willinstead point out three additional articles that deal with Bloch's earlyaestheticsand itsreception of Lukficsphilosophy. Clearlythe best article comes from Lukics's Hungari-an pupil, Sandor Radnoti, "Bloch und LukAcs: Zwei radikale Kritiker in der

'gottverlassenen Welt,"' in Die Seele und das Leben. Studienzumfriihen Lukdcs,eds. AgnesHeller, Ferenc Feher, et al. (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) 177-91. To a greatextent, Arno Miinster agrees with him: Utopie,Messianismusund Apokalypsem Friihwerkvon ErnstBloch(Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) 57-76. See also the article byThomas Bremer,"Bloch'sAugenblicke.Anmerkungenzum Zusammenhangvon Zeit-erfahrung, Geschichtsphilosophie und Asthetik," in Ernst Bloch(Munich: Text +Kritik, 1985) 76-97.

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so to speak, "without a formal term that sustains and distances every-thing" (GU, 180), Bloch deviated the furthest from Lukiacs'saesthetics.

In other words a new, less conscious, originalemphasis on havingsomething to sayarises, and it does not at all shy awayfrom beingreproached for dilettantism,even when that which is dilettante,aprioridilettante,or purely concerned with aesthetics attainsa meta-physical level. However, here it is actual blundering of individualwretchedness and negative expression must be kept at a distance- that of the farewellto all enjoyment, the gain of the first-personexpression instead of the work; the descriptive 'naturalism,' orbetter said, expressionist realism of the subject; and finally thepower of the announcement of how it was and how it could havebeen or should have been, the worth of recognition, of the specificrecognition of an 'aesthetic' reality and the possible command-ment about ideas, of compunctioordes,ts sphere (GU, 182).

As literary history has proven, Bloch was correct in pointing toStrindberg as a significant forerunner of modernity at the turn of thecentury. His dramatic exposition of contemporary modern life -"Life is a fragment, without beginning, without end!"9 can be seen inthe structure of his later works, compositions with merely structuredscenes.

After the break with Lukics had become definitive, Bloch added asentence to the second edition of his book Geistder Utopie,directly be-fore the quoted Strindberg passage, that reiterated the difference and- strangely for a Hegelian - rejected the entire tradition of classic-idealistic aesthetics up to Lukics, a passage borrowed from Nietzsche(art as "Stimulans zum Leben"). At the same time, this statement anti-cipated thematically the reflection on "Heimat" in his opus maximumDas PrinzipHoffnung.The work of art, as Bloch defines it here, shouldbe "a reflected splendor, a star of anticipation and a song of consola-tion of the return home through darkness. And yet, it should also bedistance, shining splendor, declared contradiction of any completionon earth, incapable of making the needy human being feel at homeeven in the desperately anticipated glory" (GU/2, 151 f.).

9. August Strindberg,ToDamascus,n ThePlays,vol. 2, trans.Michael Meyer (Lon-don: Secker and arburg, 1975) 202.

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