Non-Simultaneity and the Obligation to Its Dialectics (May 1932)

Abstract

The proposed translation of selected fragments of the work of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch “The Heritage of Our Times” is devoted to the temporal characteristics of various social groups of German society at the beginning of the 20th century. The first fundamental concept in these characteristics is the concept of non-simultaneity considered in different aspects. Second, it is the concept of heritage as a set of economic, political, cultural, mental elements of the past that remained in German society of the 1930s. Bloch showed the impact of these elements o on the life of the middle class (peasants, craftsmen, small-scale urban bourgeoisie). In Bloch’s view, the fact that the Nazis used these elements in their propaganda explains the popularity of Nazism in Germany. The author also forwards the characteristic of Germany as a classical state of non-simultaneity and poses the task to re-formulate the Marxist-style irrational in the mass consciousness and not to hand over dreams and images of the future to reactionary forces. Here Bloch makes use of the European philosophical tradition of Hegel and Marx. He introduces the concept of objectively non-simultaneous and subjectively non-simultaneous contradictions into the analysis of modern capitalism. Social dialectics, according to Bloch, should be multi-layered in the temporal aspect.