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Ernst Bloch's essay was written in the 1930s and appears here for the first time in print. We are presenting it in the original German, which conveys its buoyancy and poetic dialectic. In Bloch's writings, the “argument” takes the shape of metaphor, symbol, and analogy, and his imagery often produces surprising juxtapositions that open up unusual perspectives.
The paper discusses problems in epistemological theory. Differentiating his position from those of Kant and Hegel, as well as from those of Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, Bloch develops the point that a theory of knowledge needs to be anchored in labor and in the labor process, for these give it a “dynamic dialectic,” with matter as the “crucial” pivot. “Matter,” he writes, is the “changing lap of all births.” Labor and the labor process are seen as action-laden and action-pointing. We have here one of the highly original applications of Bloch's Utopian Marxism.
In this country, Bloch has yet to receive the recognition due him. In Europe, he has long been regarded as among the most seminal thinkers of our era. Shortly after his death in 1977, aged ninety-two, the town of Tübingen named the street on which he and his wife Karola lived: Ernst Bloch-Strasse.
Bloß unmittelbares Sehen ist noch leicht zu haben. Denn daß ein Tisch hier steht, eine Lampe darauf scheint, das ist sinnlich sozusagen sonnenklar. Sogar kleiner Zusammenhang, wie der, daß anbrechender Tag die Lampe überflüssig macht, gehört noch über die Hälfte zur sinnlichen Gewißheit. Wo er über sie hinausgeht, ist er durch tausendfache Wiederholung sozusagen selbstverständlich geworden, braucht zunächst wenigstens keinen Denkakt mehr noch gar dessen Arbeit. Jedoch über den eben gebrauchten Begriff Arbeit, in Verbindung