ABSTRACT
Ernst Bloch was born in 1885 to an assimilated Jewish family in Ludwigshafen, a German city located across the Rhine from Mannheim. He left Germany for Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I to avoid military service. In 1949, Bloch received and accepted an offer of a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, replacing Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had recently left Leipzig for West Germany. Bloch’s language, like that of Thomas Münzer, is littered with phrases from and allusions to the Bible, but also the Talmud and the Qu’ran, as well as Gnostic and Kabbalistic writings. Bloch distinguishes between two types of objective-real possibility that he traces back to Aristotle: kata to dynaton, what-is-according-to-possibility, and dynamei on, what-is-in-possibility. The element of dialectics that appears most absent from Bloch’s thought is that of what Hegel calls “the tremendous power of the negative”.
