The Guardian

I contribute for the Guardian occasionally in the Comment is Free: Belief section and you here is a link to those scribblings:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/peter-thompson

Brecht Benjamin Bloch and Birkbeck

I have done a couple of things recently at Birkbeck (which my spell checker identified as Brickbat!) on Bloch and on Erdmut Wizisla’s book on Brecht and Benjamin. These are now up as podcasts and I thought this should encourage me to reinvigorate this Blog, which I have sorely neglected. I hope I get the time to put more postings up here as well.

Anyway, the sites are here:

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/10/atheism-in-christianity-only-an-atheist-can-be-a-good-christian-only-a-christian-can-be-a-good-atheist/

and here

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/11/walter-benjamin-bertolt-brecht-story-of-a-friendship/comment-page-1/#comment-638

I have also responded to one of my own responses to one of the questions asked about transcendence and the transcendental in Benjamin, Brecht and Bloch with the following:

Just to answer again the question about the difficulty of raising the difference between transcendence and the transcendental in Bloch and Kant I found the following today in a response by Zizek to Badiou. IN it he referes back, as he often does to Stephen King and the idea of the undead. He states: ‘ my idea is that this undead is the Kantian transcendental subject. It is non-human precisely in this sense; non-human not in the sense of the animalistic, but rather as the excessive dimension of the human itself. Seen in this way, there is something unique in that which Kant names the dimension of the transcendental’ (Badiou and Zizek Pjhilosphy in the Present, Polity 2009, pp. 78-79). Though it is kind of turned upside down, I think this is an interesting complement to what I was saying about Benjamin and Bloch in that the idea of an undead of the transcendental can also be seen as the not yet of the transcendental. It is something which emerges from but which is in excess to the human, is non-human and yet is a product of the human and, in many ways, can be seen as the future of the human. If we put a positive spin on this idea then the undead could also be termed the not-yet living. Rather than a descent of man into death via a transitional and transformative dimension we could actually see it as a stage in the process of human becoming, in the ascent of the human into the non-human, into that state of human becoming which promises to go beyond what is now understood as human. And yet that transcendence is not something out there, beyond the human but immanent, contained within the human as latent transcendence.

The creation of religion?

Andrea, yes, I think one of the things that I now see is that no one who says they are an atheist is actually an atheist, as many of the values which we hold to be entirely rationally and individually arrived at are actually the product of many generations of social conditioning and development which include many elements of Christian thinking. It is for this reason that Bloch says that only a good Christian can be an atheist and only an atheist can be a good Christian. The reason I am intersted in Bloch is precisely because he doesn’t say that this means that all ideas are essentially religious or metaphysical, but that on the contrary, previous social epochs were not developed enough to see ideas in anything other than metaphysical terms. In many ways, therefore, Christianity was simply rationalism waiting for the term to be invented. He covers this with the term Ungleichzeitigkeit, or non-contemporaneity, i.e. that ideas exist out of their time and for that reason cannot be fully developed until the social conditions for their fulfilment are fully developed. Therefore we carry utopian hopes and dreams within us but think of them differently in different epochs. Christianity became all powerful for so long because it carried the most concrete and widely applicable utopian impulse of the meek inheriting the earth (which is essentially socialism spelt differently) but that it could not be realised until the meek were strong enough to do so (which is communism spelt differently). Radical islam is probably just the most recent and most-backward looking and dangerous form of this utopianism, with its Caliphates and Jihads and martyrs and Virgins waiting in paradise etc. This too shall pass. The sooner the better.

Andrea

fascinating. so there never has been, and never will be, a set of values that are non-religious in their creation? really?

peterthompson

Well, it depends whether you take the religious formulation of the views to be the starting point I suppose. If you see religious views as a response to the enormity and confusion of existence then their origin actually lies in the development of human consciousness about the reality which pre-existed us and will be there after us. As Nietzsche said, we are just clever animals who came about but then spent all their time thinking that the whole universe was just one big machine to bring them into being. “One day, the clever animals had to die out.” (Uber Wahrheit und Luege)  Just as Christianity took over all sorts of traditions from pre-Christian and pagan traditions, and they in turn probably developed out of basic elemental and real fear of the earth and nature and our place in it all then all ideas are actually ultimately non-metaphysical in their origin. What rationalism and scientific ideas could do perhaps is return us to an earthly understanding of our place in existence, this time though, on the basis of understanding rather than fear. What we will have done though, I think is have absorbed the “religious” codes of the middle period into our rationalism. On the one hand this is a good thing I think because it will constantly remind us of the intangible nature of what it is to be a human being, our dignity as individuals – what the religious would call our souls. On the other hand this is a bad thing because we are simply clever animals whose exisence matters not a jot in the grand scheme of things and as long as we don’t recognise that then we are condemned to live provisional lives. The arguments for existentialism seem to me incontrovertible, the only question is how we choose to spend our existence, how we give it meaning if it has no meaning. Of course, this opens the door to all sorts of metaphysical systems because they help us to find patterns where there are none, but the search for them is good, even if they aren’t there.  The current debate about embryonic stem cell research is very interesting in this respect. I am absolutely in favour of it as it creates a moral good in its own right by removing human diseases and illnesses. But at the same time, individual human rights have to be brought into the equation and the constant question has to be about whether this or that scientific technique improves human existence and whether the cost of that technique is worth the end result. I suppose that in a non-medical sense that is also what we do all the time with political ideas and actions. Do they improve the lot of human beings and is the cost of their implementation worth it? Religious belief has a role to play in determining the answer to that question but it does not and should not have a determining role. The Bishops do not hold some sort of top trump card of morality. So, to answer your question perhaps; religious in their development but not religious in their “creation”.

Inverted Stagism

Trying to sort out views I realised the other day that I have always been a liberal but just thought that in order to achieve it, it was first necessary to go through the stage of Communism. I guess I have now come to see that this was probably wrong, though that may also be a very complacent and contemporary euro-centric view of things. Things were different in 1917 after all. The cataclysm of the First World War and the collapse of liberalism at the first hurdle made Communism look like an inevitablity to many. The hangover lasted the whole of the 20th century.

Glaxo Smith Klein and the Law

Marx and Engels stated in the Communist Manifesto that all law is class law, and bourgeois law holds itself to be “natural law” only because the bourgeoisie is the ruling class and capitalism is therefore seen as the natural order of things. This has come about not because of some God-given order as under hierarcical and Catholic feudalism (you can see hangovers of this in the second verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful which is now only sung in the better and more established private schools: The rich man in his castle/the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/And ordered their estate). Bourgeois society emered out of the triumph of reason and the enlightenment and therefore represents the democratisation of hierarchy. Anyone can become the president of the United States (as GWB has proved). And yet, and yet, of course Marx and Engels don’t leave it there (maybe they should have) and they said that the new ruling class which has emerged to impose its will upon the generality will do so now not through force, coercion, droit de signeur etc. but through the rule of law. These laws, however, will be drawn up by the rulers and will serve the rulers and is therefore no less class law than was the feudal sytem. The state is therefore not something neutral, a referee adjudicating objectively in disputes between free and equal individuals as the doctrine of the Separation of Powers would have us think, but a coat-holder for the bourgeoisie Of course, when the Communist Manifesto was drawn up in 1848 the bourgeoisie was well on its way to taking over power (at least economic power) in the whole of Europe and the condition of the workers and mass of the population in the great cities (Engels Condition of the Working Class in England shows this quite clearly) was one indeed of absolute misery, disenfranchisement, exploitation and exclusion from power. The need for a permanent revolution which would not just allow the bourgeoisie to reap the benefits of human labour was clear and it was also clear that the class which would carry put this task was the very one which industrialisation had created; namely the proletarat. Many years have passed since then and in many ways bourgeois law has been hoist by its own petard. Its theoretical guarantee of freedom of organisation, movement, equality before the law etc. facilitated the growth of representational powers so that eventually, by the 1930s (apart from in a few places such as parts Switzerland and Liechtenstein) the deveolped world had reached a stage where Trades Unions could represent their workers, women could vote and take part fully in society (even though there are still real structural problems with them taking a full part in economic life) and people in general had more control over justice and the allocation of resources. In this sense the period of the existence of the Soviet Union (1917-1990 – though the collapse actually already occurred in 1974 but the cadaver was kept alive by pumping more money into its veins) could be seen as the high-water mark of the fulfilment of the putative freedoms guaranteed by bourgeois legalism. This is because during this period, the existence of a social alternative (no matter how inadequate) which demonstrated that the workers could take power (no matter that it was exercised for them by a degenerate and self-serving bureaucracy) forced the democratic countries to replace the untrammelled primacy of the market and economics with th primacy of political stabilisation and the smoothing out of class antagonisms. This means that all the benefits of western democracy which we rightly take for granted are acually pre-illuminations (Vorscheine) of socialist democracy out of their time (Ungleichzeitigkeit – ah I knew you’d be expecting Bloch to come in here somewhere). Alexander Kojeve actually maintained that because of this we were actually already living in socialism without noticing it, and certainly the mantra of the early 1970s was one of convergence between Eastern and Western Europe into some sort of socialist system. BUT, this is now changing back. The primacy of economics and the market is now once more on the march. The workers have been atomised, defeated, scattered and filled full of the pleasures of life (at least in the western world). The great corporations are once more setting the tone and politics and the political arena has become a show place for empty posturing about infantile issues. Just now and again this becomes clear. The ruling that Glaxo Smith Klein will not be prosecuted even though it admits that it withheld evidence of the increased risk of suicide amongst teenagers prescribed Seroxat shows that the state is well on the way back to becoming simply the adminstrative arm of the bourgeoisie once more. That’s why we hate politics and why voter turn-out has never been lower. If you care about liberal democracy and parliamentarism then it is necessary to defend the primacy of politics over the hegemony of the market. Marx won’t go away because the issues which he raised are still salient. I can’t get him out of my head – no matter how much I may want to kill off that paternal voice – because my head is rooted in the these realities of class rule. As Rorty says, the prophecies in the Communit Manifesto are almost all wrong, but the socio-economic analysis and the hope for true justice which emanates from them is almost entirely correct. Defence of the achievements of western democratic socialism under the guise of bourgeois democracy has become a Transitional Demand, comrades! We just won’t know where it will take us until we get there.

Heidegger, Rorty, Bloch, Marx and Pragmatism

The other day Sarah said “so yr into german philosophers & you’re a Marxist, what do u reckon of heidigger? ” and aso asked me to outline some of Bloch’s  thoughts and I kind of answered in a kind of flippant way with regard to the relative (de-) merits of Fascism and Communism, but I actually wanted to come back to this because it seems to me that the relationship between Heidegger and Marxism is of fairly central importance and this blog, which, with its informal status, seems as good a place as any to work this out. This is because it goes to the heart of the epistimo-ontological nature of reality, of Dasein as such, and also because working out - as Thomas Kuhn put it - of what is going on at the interface between the phenomenal world and the things we believe about it is central to our concerns as human becomings in a becoming world. The reason I have actually moved away from “Marxism” is not really about anything Marx himself wrote but more to do with the way in which he has been incorprated and reified into all sorts of dogmatic “systems” of thought. Marx himself was a kind of relativist, uncertain about what we know, always questioning our understanding of that same interface between what is and what is becoming (his guiding motto being De Omnibus Dubitandum – question everything). He saw our views of the world as structured by our (class) position within that world and maintained that all things are constantly in flux, that the relationship between what is and what emerges is in reciprocal, dialectical relationship. My Marxism aspired to be the sort which sought to implement that understanding of the world and of everything in it as “ein werdendes Sein” (a becoming being). As a result, I was attracted to the relatively sophisticated branch of Marxism to be found in parts of the Trotskyist movement (Rorty started as a Trot too). I would still say that Trotsky was not only one of the greatest political activists but also one of the greatest philosophers within the Marxist movement because he too saw Marx merely as a way of understanding the world, though of course he gave it primacy over all other methods. Rorty, however, went on to move away from this world view as he began to see Marxism not as ”The Tool”, indeed “The Key” in some quasi-metaphysical way, to understanding the world but simply as one of the implements in the toolbox of human philosophy. I haven’t made it that far yet and still believe in an explanatory hierarchy in which Marx is somewhere near the top (though I see the hierachy as a lot flatter and more equal than I used to). Rorty’s relativism led him to categorise all tools in the toolbox as equally useful for some task or other but this is at one with his concept of the contingency of everything that emerges from what is and thus changes it. With Nietzsche, he maintains that we can only be sure that there is change and not progress. The progress which we do discern has to be constructed on the basis of constantly choosing between the options which are thrown up by non-linear and contingent change. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong and the “darkness of the lived moment” (Bloch), which is only illuminated in hindsight, is the barrier to us always understanding the precise relationship between epistemology and ontology. For Bloch and Rorty, there is effect no gap between the two because ontology shades into epistemology at an imperceptible point which we call Now. Zizek maintains that it is Freud’s death drive which is at that interface but this seems to me to be simply picking something dark and profound to fit in with something which is just dark. Illumination -en-light-enment – comes about as a result of hindsightful appreciation of the practical outcomes of our decisions. As we make more and more decisions and our insights into the world become fuller and more complex we are creating and changing what we know about the world and therefore also changing and creating the world. For both Bloch and Rorty, the world is not something found but “in becoming” and what it becomes is dependent on what we make of it, and there is no teleology. I would maintain that Marx rejected teleology as well, but standing in the tradition of the accretion of experience of human change made certain statements and predictions about the way things could/would develop given certain conditons. The vulgarist will take what they want from Marx and leave the more nuanced stuff. The nuancers will take what they want and downplay the vulgarism. It is in this context, for example, that Rorty maintains that if it is possible to concur with the findings of Leftist/Marxist philosophers such as Sidney Hook whilst at the same time being critical of their support for Stalin’s Russia, then it is should also be possible to take what we like from Heidegger’s toolbox without seeing it as irredeemably contaminated by his support for Nazism. The reason this becomes appealing is because my interest in Bloch as a philosopher is tries to see what is important in his work, despite his support for the Stalinist purges in 1936/37 and, indeed his description of Trotsky as Gestapo agent. The reason I do so is beause it seems to me that Bloch – though his view of material reality as being in a constant state of flux - could actually provide a means of overcomig the epistomo-ontological conundrum at the heart of the debate between contingent and dualist views of the world. Dewey, Rorty and the other, mainly US, Pragmatists essentially eschewed the notion that there is any such thing as objective reality in favour of a neo-Nietzschean perspectivism which maintained that that which exists, though not the product of our perception (a rock exists, as does a table when we turn our back on it), can only be understood by seeing our perception of it as the only reality about which we can actually say  anything. For Pragmatism, ontology, the beingness of the rock, the rockness of the rock, is conditioned by what we understand of rocks and that understanding of rocks is the product not simply of some objective ontological being but, epistemologically, what we know about rocks. He debates this beingness in a nice little essay on Weinberg’s criticism of pragmatist relativism in which the latter maintains a neo-platonic hierachy of dsciplines in which physics, with its objective understanding of the world based on experiment and knowledge, is given supreme status. (’Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics’, 1997, quoted in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin 1999, pp.175-189).The philosophical consequences of changing and relative nature of nature and the phenomenal world are interesting in their own right of course, and give rise to the speculation about what to do with the short span in which Nietzsche’s “clever animals”, who thought they had worked out what it was all about, are in contingent existence on this small planet. However, what Bloch drew from his understanding and incorporation of Nietzsche’s insistence on the contingency and transience of existence is of greater significance I think. Bloch has been called the Left-wing Heidegger, not least because of their common attempt, at least in Heidegger’s early years, to revive Aristotelean concepts of Matter. As my colleague, Henk de Berg, has pointed out in an email, this similarity also raises the problem of the relationship between deteminism, teleology and voluntarism. Now Henk and I have this disagrement pretty regularly about teleology in Marx and he can produce eveidence to show that it is there and I try to produce evidence which shows that it is not, or at least that it is not necessariy there. Bloch too recognises this problem. His adherence to Aristotle’s view of matter is actualy undertaken, I think, despite its teleological nature. The Hegelian Werdendes Sein which is taken up by Marx and Bloch does not posit a pre-existing Sein towards which the Werden is heading but a Werden which will, in time, create a new Sein. Of course we can ask whether that Sein itself will be the end point of anything rather than simply a new Genesis and therefore merely a sage in the process as Bloch puts it at the end of Prinzip Hoffnung (and it is this Gensis which gives rise to the description of Bloch as a messianic eschatologist), but the point is that though the concept is taken by Marx and later Bloch from both Aritostle and Hegel, they transform it into a voluntaristic and non-teleological version of the achievement of a “noch-nicht gewordenes Sein” a state of being “not yet” become. Not Yetness is central to Bloch’s conception of history and turns him from a simple neo-Hegelian Teleogician into a responsive voluntarist in my view. This is also where Bloch differs fundamentally from Heidegger’s concept of “Sein” rather than “Dasein” (you are quite right Henk) as this is not even telelogogical but actually metaphysical in the same way that Nietzsches concept of the Dionysian “Sein” is metaphysical. Both Heidegger’s “Sein” and Nietzsches Dionysus are illuminated occasionally, but the remain hidden, eternal and outside of reality.

 In an essay from 1999 by Rorty ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism’ (also in Philosophy of Hope, op cit. pp. 190-197) he, Rorty, says that he wishes to keep Heidegger’s critique and history of metaphysics whilst rejecting its “downbeat ending”(p.191). (incidentally,  ”Philosophy of Social Hope” Rorty criticises Derrida for being selective about what he takes from Marx in his 1995 work “Spectres of Marx”, which seems a bit odd, given that he himself in the same book present the Communist Manifesto as one of the two most important texts in human history (the other being the New Testament) but only if one takes the message of hope selectively from it and rejects the prophecies. The alternative Heidegger he creates in his counterfactual history of Heidegger’s reaction to the Nazis and his subsequent life is pretty close to a description of Bloch, in that Bloch, throughout his life and his writing remained an anti-essentialist and an anti-dualist, but he also remained a non-dualist dialectician, true to the Hegelian principle of the world as something unfolding but opposed to the idea that there was some teleological endpoint, some Nirvana, or some abyss to which it was all heading. Optimism and Hope remained his driving ideas and the accretion of human hope became the precondition for human liberation. And that is not so very far from Rorty’s social pragmatism of hope.  

Hello world!

This is the official Blog for the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies based at the University of Sheffield and maintained by Peter Thompson. I shall be posting various issues and points on here for discussion as well as providing a forum for discussion of matters relating to Bloch and the wider world of Philosophy.

Fragen und Beitraege koennen sowohl auf Deutsch als auf Englisch gestellt oder gesendet werden und ich freue mich auf eine rege Dikussion auf diesen Seiten!

Peter Thompson