Hope among the remnants of Babel: Ernst Bloch's utopia of Heimat and the uncompleted edifice of enlightenment

The theorists of modernism inherited the project of completing the edifice of enlightenment, of making social structure rational. But postmodernist theory questions the possibility of achieving consensus in the lifeworld and thus lives among the remnants of Babel, resigning itself to relativism in the belief that the lifeworld can never be comprehended in a grand synthesis.;The work of the German Marxist-oriented philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) provides an alternative to modernism (which ignored differences of detail in its sweeping attempts to comprehend the whole) and postmodernism (which, in its criticism of the truth claims of the metanarratives of modernism, has undermined the notion of truth itself). Bloch's philosophy of hope with its utopian ideal of Heimat (home, homeland) avoids the reductionism of modernism and embraces the justified conclusions of postmodernism. This improved model of discourse might be termed (post)modernism.;Bloch re-integrates the concept of utopia in Marxist theory, developing a humanist perspective that seeks to inherit the utopian energy of art, religion and culture. Rather than a typical Marxist suspicion of tradition, Bloch thus incorporates a postmodern notion of re-functioning the cultural heritage. The concept of Heimat shifts the emphasis within Marxism back towards the individual subject and the non-economic categories. Heimat, characterized by the bounded horizons of a community, has an affinity for the postmodern focus on particularity. With his commitment to figurative language, Bloch is a forerunner of postmodern theorists who show how philosophical arguments rely on metaphors and images in asserting their truth claims.;But Bloch does not question truth itself: metaphoric truth is taken seriously. The task at present is to collect the traces of utopia for storage in a warehouse of hope that may yet provide the materials for the completion of the edifice of enlightenment, which is displaced to the future, the realm of the "not yet." Despite his occasional political lapses, Bloch's work strengthens hope and wards off the despair that the fate of Babel is final.