Ernst Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit, and the Philosophy of Being and Time

Abstract

This article addresses philosophies of time in the German context. We may well exist in time, thrown into the world, as Martin Heidegger puts it, and thus eternally separate from it, but Ernst Bloch uses the concept of time and humanity's separation from the world in time as the basis for a possible but as yet incomprehensible reconciliation with it. He sees no separate ontology but that of incompleteness, so that the transitive is given priority over the intransitive within being, thus transforming it, in a Hegelian sense, into becoming. For Heidegger, time is just the shell or clearing in which being exists. For Bloch, however, it is the means by which being can be transcended out of its own immanence. Bloch's utopia is concrete in that it is still emerging, but he claims that sparks from that possible utopia exist in all times. Lateness is therefore challenged as a separate category, in favor of a dynamic nonsimultaneity. This is then related to thinking in recent philosophy.