Dreams of Matter. Ernst Bloch on Religion as Organized Fantasy

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to reconstruct Bloch’s philosophy of religion as the defense of fantasy. For Bloch, religious systems, centered around fantastical images, constitute unique forms in which matter itself can express the most intimate dreams about its utopian, not yet realized possibilities. The religious ‘unarbitrary’ fantasy is thus an indispensable tool in Bloch’s messianic strategy the purpose of which is to breathe the living air of possibility into the seemingly necessitarian universe of dead things. The role of fantasy is to shake the apparent deadness of the material cosmos and tell a different story of matter which may not be so completely hostile to those instances of lively imagining; a story which this essay calls a fantastical materialism. This highly original apology of fantasy – not as an irrational force of anti-enlightenment, but, to the contrary, as the true and most precious core of the enlightenment rightly understood – puts Bloch in a peculiar position towards his most significant precursors: Hegel and Marx. Instead of the Hegelian-Marxian ‘sublation of religion into philosophy, ’ which was to secure the progress of mankind in secular terms, Bloch consciously proposes a countermove: a return to the religious idiom of revelation as a more natural element of the category of hope without which no genuine progress can take place. The reason why Bloch, even while calling himself an atheist, never gave up on the religious imagery, lies precisely in this: faith remains bolder than even the most daring projects dreamt by our philosophy.