Episode #230 ... Hope as an Existentialism (Ernst Bloch)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophize this. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This, and more stuff posted on there as the book gets closer to being published next year. Thanks for all the support to this podcast and philosophy in general. I hope you love the show today. So taking in ideas that fall under the category of existentialism basically guarantees you're gonna come across certain terminology. What I mean is there's words commonly thrown around in this space when trying to describe the human condition and all the bad stuff that's possible there. Words like despair or anxiety, nausea, alienation. There's many more of these, and you've no doubt heard all these words before. What you also may have heard is that when it comes to a lot of these philosophers that fall under the label of existentialism, common way you'll hear their work described is that they're framing this piece of existence in terms of a lack or a negation. And what's meant when someone says this is that when it comes to these negative feelings we experience, it could describe with despair, nausea, and the like. We feel these things because there's something lacking that's causing these experiences. Many examples of this I could give. Maybe if you're Sartre, what's lacking is a fixed essence as to what it is to be a person, and the lack of that essence causes a lot of problems for you as a human being. Maybe if you're Kierkegaard, it's the lack of rational certainty or ultimate meaning. Maybe not having those things has consequences in how you feel sometimes too. If you're a high digger, maybe what's lacking is an obvious stable ground of being that we can clearly define. The point is, it's the lack of something that explains many of the difficult spots we find ourselves in. But the guy we're talking about today, Ernst Bloch, well, he's not technically an existentialist because he would go on to do far more than that in his later work. In his earlier work, there's a man who answered exactly the kinds of questions that the existentialists were concerned with, but he answered them not by explaining our experience in terms of it lacking something. To him, human experience can be explained by there being a surplus of something, a surplus of what he called hope or anticipatory consciousness. By the end of this episode, you're gonna see how different existentialism can look if you try thinking of the problems in your life in terms of having a surplus of hope instead of a lack of meaning or truth or anything like that. Let's start with what he means by hope though. Because as we know, philosophers will do this kind of thing all the time. They'll take a concept, something we think we know all about, something like hope, and they'll show a side of it that makes us think of our relationship to it …