Pas-Encore (Not-Yet)
das Noch-Nicht — le Pas-Encore ; das Noch-Nicht-Bewußte / le non-encore-conscient ; das Noch-Nicht-Gewordene / le non-encore-advenu
Ontological category forged by Ernst Bloch: reality is not closed but oriented, stretched toward a future that has not yet come to pass. The Not-Yet has two faces. On the side of consciousness, the not-yet-conscious (*Noch-Nicht-Bewußte*): not a buried repression, but a dawn turned forward, a presentiment of what is rising—a new class of consciousness that Bloch sets against psychoanalysis’s unconscious term for term. On the side of the world, the not-yet-come-to-be (*Noch-Nicht-Gewordene*): reality’s very matter as an unfinished process, pregnant with a *Novum*, with what has never been. The two faces correspond: anticipatory consciousness aims in the subject at what the world labors to become. The knowledge that accompanies this aim, Bloch calls *docta spes*, instructed hope.
That is: a relatively still Unconscious disposed towards its other side, forwards rather than backwards.
Bloch upends a habit of thought. From Leibniz to Freud, he says, only one direction of the non-conscious has been explored: the backward dawning, the dawn turned toward the past, the cellar where memory, the repressed, and the archaic lie dormant. The other slope was missing. The not-yet-conscious (Noch-Nicht-Bewußte) is not what once was and has been forgotten; it is what has never yet been conscious and is only now beginning to emerge—a dawn ahead. Not the cellar, but the front line of consciousness.
To this subjective side corresponds an objective one: the not-yet-become (Noch-Nicht-Gewordene). The world itself is not a fait accompli but an open process, charged with Novum, with what was not contained in advance. Bloch holds the two together: “the Not-Yet-Conscious in man belongs entirely to the Not-Yet-Become.” Anticipating consciousness and the world coming into being call to each other. Hence an ontology not of fact, but of the Not-Yet—an ontology of “not yet, but perhaps.”
What Bloch calls docta spes, instructed hope, is the knowledge that accompanies this aim: not blind emotion, but a directed act of cognition, turned toward the light where the Novum appears. Here his principle of hope takes root— the Not-Yet as its ontological ground.
The Not-Yet ≠ the Freudian unconscious: Bloch sets them in direct opposition. The non-conscious of psychoanalysis is “never a Not-Yet-Conscious”; it is made of regressions, it illuminates only what has been, and nothing new arises there. The Not-Yet, by contrast, is a slope of progression, straining toward what has never been. The Not-Yet ≠ the principle of hope: the former is the ontological category, the unfinished structure of reality; the latter is the disposition—the instructed affect— that aims at and sustains it.