Hegel’s Absolute Spirit digests the world into subjectivity, which Bloch’s materialism rejects.
Evidence
It is in this notion of an ascending ladder of forms of the instant that Faust most closely resembles Hegel’s Phenomenology, a similarity which not Bloch alone, but Adorno and Lukács also have pointed out. If in the long run it is the Goethean vision which wins out in Bloch, this is on account of the essential idealism of that Absolute Spirit which is the final moment of fulfillment for Hegel and whose principal characteristic is the total elimination from the subject of any remnants of the external object itself, of any last shreds of objectivity as such. Hegel’s system, as we have seen in the critiques of Adorno and Marcuse, ultimately aims not at reconciliation with the world but at its total absorption, at the complete digestion of the world in all its contingency and otherness, its transformation into the self and into pure subjectivity. But for Bloch, for whom, in both a phenomenological and an emotional sense, consciousness pines away without an object, this ultimate suppression of the object-pole is constitutionally distasteful; and the lived source of Bloch’s materialism may be found in this conviction of the boredom of consciousness left to its own devices, of the necessity of an object which justifies, not labor in the sense of the work of the fallen world, but rather activity of a higher, nonalienated, Goethean nature, in a Utopian external world now reconciled with the self, but not for all that swallowed up inside it. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 273
Categorization
- XREF: Directly maps onto the Jameson-vs-Adorno-Marcuse critique of Hegel’s idealism; connects to Adorno’s negative dialectics and his objection to identity-thinking swallowing the object. — connects to: Marx’s inversion of Hegel is oppositional, not a simple turn from idealism to materialism
- DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between Bloch’s ‘reconciled but not swallowed’ Utopian object and Hegel’s complete digestion is a dense dialectical distinction about the fate of the object-pole in utopian thought.