July 8, 1885

Ernst Bloch (July 8, 1885 to August 4, 1977) was a Marxist philosopher. Against the spirit killing racist insanities of the 20th century he offered the a world in which man's dreaming could make his fantasy come true. In retrospect those Marxist fantasies always cost in blood, and the worker's paradise turns out to be just another facade for totalitarian dictators. In terms of gallons of guts and horror, there doesn't seem to be much difference between these two great alternatives of the last century. Though perhaps you prefer the words of the Google blurb: "Ernst Bloch was one of the greatest thinkers and public intellectuals of twentieth-century Germany."

All our quotes are  from a collection of his briefer writings: Literary Essays published in 1998.

Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.‎

You can hear if you listen the violence behind this kind of idea: overturn, strip, subjugate.  Our next selection features that scene so familiar to nature documentaries, the lion jumping on a gazelle. Bloch wants his reader to hold that picture:

Africa, as is known, does not have many predators anymore; one assumes that the camera crew must have waited a number of days for the great cats, shown in the scene ...
The philosopher then make an abstruse point. In this case, comparing a Hindu vision of birth life and death intertwining.

And since it is of interest to a minor theme in this blog, the purpose of fairy tales, we include the following analysis. Instead of viewing the fiction of Jules Verne as a glimpse of the future, Bloch says Verne's stories --

and other creative narrations of a technological capacity or not-yet-capacity are still pure formations of fairy tales. What is significant about such kinds of 'modern fairy tales' is that it is reason itself which leads to the wish projections of the old fairy tale and serves them. Again what proves itself is a harmony with courage and cunning, as that earliest kind of enlightenment which already characterizes Hansel and Gretel: consider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. These are the genuine maxims of fairy tales....

We often think of intellectuals as gentle folk. When they chose a fairy tale logic, over sober analysis this is at our peril.