ABSTRACT
Throughout his life and work, Walter Benjamin was highly critical of the ‘worship of progress’, often articulating a ‘deep distrust of the ideology of progress’. He saw the ‘smug complacent affirmation of progress’ as ‘the quintessential modern myth’ that needed exploding. Bloch criticises Hegel’s certainty that the movement of history is ultimately toward Absolute Spirit, and argues that there is too much reassurance in the Hegelian ‘panlogical pathos of perfection’, too much certainty that ‘the secretary of the world-spirit triumphs in an unsubjective, panlogical objectivity’. In Hegel philosophy becomes a headmaster, or indiscriminate lawyer for the Being that hired him, and the night of the world retreats into the merely ignorant subject. Far from being a proponent of a grand teleology (an accusation sometimes made against him), these passages show that Bloch, like Benjamin, is highly critical of any narrative of pre-ordained progress.
