MAN ON HIS OWN

Essays in the Philosophy of Religion

Foreword by Harvey Cox.

Introduction by Jürgen Moltmann.

In MAN ON HIS OWN, Bloch elaborates some of the central themes of his master- work, The Principle of Hope: apocalypse, utopia, the human mystery, death, and tran- scendence. The two formulations around which these themes are satellited are the Blochian concepts, "S is not yet P," and "Incipit vita nova": the first meaning that man the subject is never totally fulfilled, is always surpassing himself; the second, that every moment of history is a new beginning, a starting afresh. But the very choice of these terms illustrates the methodology of Bloch: one is a logical formula and the other, a tag from Dante. This, then, is a writer who em- ploys the most sophisticated argumentation in the broadest cultural context.

But even more than this, Ernst Bloch is a humanist whose ardent zeal has led him to denounce evil in all its manifestations, so- cial, institutional, and personal. It is no de- tached metaphysician who has written of the Christian church: "It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of man- kind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified." This is not the voice of the arid academic; it is the voice of the prophet.