Cultural Interpretation Of Bloch’s Utopian Spirit

Ernst Bloch is praised as one of the most creative Western Marxists in the 20 th century.He promoted the utopia of Thomas Moore,to a philosophical category,created a utopian spiritual phenomenology with a complete discourse system.The theoretical origins of Bloch’s utopian spirit are the fusion of messianism,German classical philosophy,Marxist philosophy,Dostoevsky’s doctrine and theoretical innovation based on the fusion of all kinds of mysticisms and utopian thought.Bloch faced up to the crisis of Western civilization,he saw the essence of the crisis of the loss of human transcendental dimension,he pointed out the way out of this crisis for us,that is,to awaken the spirit of human Utopia and devote to the combination of utopian spirit and Marxism.Bloch claims to be a firm Marxist,whose utopian spirit has a solid foundation of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.Bloch found the dynamic existence characteristics of material from Aristotle’s material view,the internal power source of material from Leibniz’s "power theory",the "qualitative potential" of material from Schelling’s natural philosophy,and the ultimate source power and realistic guarantee of utopian spirit from Marx’s material view.Then he pointed out that material is a dialectical,dynamic,procedural,and overall concept,and put forward the original concept of "Material-Utopia’s Bow",which laid a solid dialectical materialistic foundation for the utopian spirit.In the transition of "natural subject-human",what should be reflected is not the image of "engineer-mechanic",but the creative image of "dialectic law-revolutionary".Then he analyzed that the key link to the road of Utopia lies in the transformation from the revolution in the field of economy and politics to the revolution of human beings,summarized the utopian height of socialist society,and pointed out that Marxism is a specific Utopia from the perspective of Utopian historical materialism.The content of Bloch’s utopian spirit is constructed through ideological reflection.Bloch analyzed the utopian function of ideology and the dialectical relationship between ideology and utopia.We interpret Bloch’s utopian spirit from the perspective of cultural philosophy,start by analyzing its broader connotation of its ideological concept,excavate the connotation of Utopian factors displayed by ideology under the influence of cultural surplus and cultural heritage,as well as the utopian factors of modern totalitarian ideology.Meanwhile,we showed a panoramic view of Bloch’s cultural criticism on personal consciousness such as daydreams,psychoanalysis,and the utopian function of mass cultural life forms such as art,architecture and literary works.From the standpoint and viewpoint of Marxist philosophy,the contribution and limitation of Bloch’s "interpretation model of ’utopian spirit-culture’" is that although the "material-utopian philosophy" combines materialism and humanism,it weakens the scientific nature of the "material power";Although the liberation philosophy of "History-Utopian Spirit" supplements Marx’s "liberation theory" to some extent,it is caught in mysticism;"Art-the dream of a better life" has opened the horizon of cultural life but slipped into elitism.