How
avoid the lure of "Feuilletonismus" when writing about Bloch?
Anyone who has been in the game of writing or publishing for some time (and I
have) is familiar with the lure of the non-committed, elegant, easily accessible
"Feuilletonismus" - much like the between-acts talk in opera broadcasts from The
Met. Working in the overall public forum, you either try to infuse your text or
your talk with this feuilleton "essence" - or you avoid it by every means.
In the sunken Atlantis of social-democratic and egalitarian Sweden,
"Feuilletonismus" was still regarded as a sort of virtue and held in high
esteem, much like culinary cooking. It was part of the heritage from bourgeois
past, to be modified and refined under new conditions. Scientists loved to
perform it, given the opportunity; they felt acknowledged and useful when
appearing in
le feuilleton
in a wide sense. And it can't be denied: good "feuilleton" has some sort of
virtue, much like, say, Victorian gardening or French cooking; it
sets standards.
But that belongs to the past, today the feuilleton ability is on the wane,
gradually being replaced by the threadbare, uninspired (and non-inspiring)
contributions of chats and blogs.
These new developments in turn have left the remnants of
le feuilleton
with an undeserved gloss: "Ah, those were the days when we had some good
feuilleton!" (Give us a repeat, spread the table for us!) But the decay of
public utterance actually began there, when clever preparation ushered in, or
accentuated the division of labour between manipulators of opinion and a
passive, consuming public. In that process the public gradually sank to the
bottom of the media ocean and found its standards there. If we reject today's
prattling, superficial, non-committed journalism,
le feuilleton
should be included in the rejection, as one of its precursors.
It took me some time to reach this somewhat ambivalent "consciousness" (I'm
ambivalent to the blogging, too), and I must admit: I have given my due
contribution to
le feuilleton
in the past. In addition I have cuttings of book reviews by different writers,
saved for thirty or forty years, so I have read my due share of it as well.
Still, I'm finished with it, I can't accept what journalism is offering its
readers today. So: what am I to do when I get a request to write something on
this or that topic, anno Domini 2007? ("Write about Ernst Bloch"). The only
honest and tenable way to solve the "write-about" task today must include some
sort of metacommunication over
le feuilleton
as a tasty condensation and
Ersatz.
But that wasn't included in the request, and any too overt meta-attitude is
likely to be rejected.
The request came from a minor periodical called "Subaltern", its name to me
implying some petty-bourgeois and/or anarchist point of departure, the eternal,
ubiquitous West European Proudhon pattern. Subalternity as a literary attitude can be nothing
else in reformist and liberal Sweden - although the term also belongs
in the vocabulary of utopian theory, here denoting some "speechless" silent
majority, using utopia to express needs and dreams. (Free churches
served that purpose in the 19th century, but "subalternity" of some
stature has always been rare in the arts, we have to go back to
Swedenborg and Jonas Love Almqvist in the Swedish case).
And I found some evidence
confirming my suspicion: the editors seek their approval or praise in and from
le feuilleton,
quoting mentions of their charming subalternity in liberal papers. (I have a
Germanic sigh for that: A-a-a-ach-ja!) So, what should I do, how should i go
about the task? It is also a question of people, persons; the writers and
editors of "Subaltern" shouldn't be judged along with the technical,
structural, ideological vehicles they have at hand. They may be the best, most
animated and energetic writers we presently have in anaemic Sweden, and there
is always the possibility of process and improvement. (Get rid of that stupid
name!) In the end I decided to try a compromise that might satisfy both sides
equally.
I couldn't avoid some feuilletonist devices altogether, but I could at least
dodge the most obvious clichés (like: hope and utopia) and I could do something
about the general perspective, the
angle
of attack. Make it a little alienating, unexpected, non-ingratiating. The whole
thing was done in ten days, so I didn't have that much time for reflection, or
for that part: for reading. The result is a little awkward, but it was accepted
immediately, maybe partly owing to its refractory character.
Three months later I read Ingrid and Gerhard Zwerenz's "Twelve theses on Bloch"
in
Ossietzky 18/2003
, in particular noting their tenth thesis:
Describing Bloch as a philosopher of Hope invites "Feuilletonismus". His crucial
categories are "Defiance and Hope". Both help to specify Bloch's double revolt
as a stance.
And I read my contribution to "Subaltern" anew: I managed to get more than one
thing right there! So, I make it available in English here, for others to judge
for themselves. My thanks to Bebhinn OMeadhra for correcting the translation. /
Christer Persson, 25.10.2007, latest modified 11.12.07.
Reading with the hazel-rod of affinity: Ernst Bloch and others.
I have been considering the option for some time now: to circum-write a person
in an indirect way, implying, suggesting, so that the work proper is still to
come for anyone who reads my text. Conveying a minimum of biographical
information, a minimum of concepts and terms, a quotation, like a backheel kick,
maybe two. A void, set in a frame, and this frame is the only prompting, the
only enticement. The main part of the reading effort, when it comes to it
all of the reading work
remains to be done, but must be performed somewhere else, departing from
original texts.
The header could be modified: Searching with the hazel-rod of
chosen kinship.
The change of terms immediately functions as a new stroke, arousing
associations that flow again from all sides. Once, in a moment of weakness,
Goethe appointed his own colour theory his own most essential achievement on
the whole, this could be interpreted as coquettishness from the author of
"Faust", or a natural science scientism of a kind that would spread rapidly in
Germany within a near future. A tendency of a similar kind presents itself in
the novel "Wahlverwandtschaften" (1808), here Goethe converts an idea from
natural science with roots at least as far back as Albertus Magnus (I presume
ten Greek philosophers came before him) to a
ménage à quatre.
No longer a description of the foaming dissolution of a piece of sodium in a
glass of water, but instead referring to the attraction and disposition for
reaction between humans.
This is my point of departure: the experience that we follow complex dynamisms
for search and recognition when reading a text, listening to music. (I didn't
write mechanisms, the eminent Leibniz shoved me away from the keyboard,
emphatically tap-tapping:
dynamism
). I remember how I was standing in the kitchen, helping my mother to stretch
sheets, suddenly a guy who called himself Bob Dylan sang on the music radio,
every hair prickled on my body (
ah, but i was so much older then, i'm younger than that now
). Not quite a housebroken way of approaching the phenomena; shouldn't one
demand that each central figure on the Great Stage be investigated for solvency
and allowed to present his message only after getting a green card from some
proper authority? The same reaction repeating itself before Woody Guthrie,
gooseflesh, and next the discovery: there was a stage in Dylan's life when he
rotated in the gravity field of Guthrie. Affinity is expansive, it may stretch
and include friends of friends. This in turn suggesting that the phenomenon may
be stable in some way, not built on running sand. As if there was some obscure
accrediting, a watchword, intercepted and accepted by the receivers, quick as
lightning…
Even today I approach much in the same fashion, reaching out my snake's tongue,
tasting the atmosphere surrounding someone or something. Skims one of Torbjörn
Fagerström's pro-Darwin-epistles in Dagens Nyheter, bristling after four words
and thinking: How come that the former Lund professor of theoretical ecology is
always preaching Darwin in a way reminding me of Samuel Wilberforce - and is
there any connection between this and the theoretical state of emergency of
biology? In some other context (perhaps when reading Gregory Bateson) I come
upon the British biologist C. H. Waddington, immediately knowing: here is my
man. Next, with Waddington as go-between, I spot the French mathematician René
Thom, new affinity; I read Thom the same way I listened to Dylan. All the time
it's about basic signals: choice of words, supporting structures of the
discourse. With the couples Dylan/Guthrie and Waddington/Thom I have sketched
fragments of a formation, with a strange, intuitive affinity as a "tutor". Such
a method is not without its risks, one shouldn't buy it unchecked. But it may
turn out astute, selective, suddenly discovering that Dylan is singing out of
tune; he doesn't reach his own level. I think one should not underestimate one's
own affinity; there lies some honesty in the fact that it may give negative
signals about yesterday's heroes.
What is affinity holding under its coat?
I suggest that we have on the inside a set of highly abstract master models or
outlines, social in origin, installed during some stage of adolescence, forms by
which we classify some experience, quick as lightning. An important precondition
mustn't be forgotten:
the need felt.
A click! signals some sort of conformity, and we are ready to open our doors
wide, continuing the "communication", at the same time constantly relating to
the original need, still hovering in the background.
Once upon a time we were for example standing up to our necks in philosophical
nominalism, scientific progress as a result being halted for centuries, and the
interior discomfort over this state of things being well established; then all
of a sudden a thinker drew a line through divine Providence, instead letting
biological "evolution" be governed by the competitive struggle between
individuals and species. Click! Ten thousand biologists pulled on the Darwin
coat. The individual response is an inevitable precondition, the immediate
enthusiasm in front of ninety-five theses on indulgence, or the slogan
liberté, égalité, fraternité,
but more important, of more social consequence is the
collective dynamics
that occurs when an army of minds is put in motion. Nota bene: on the next step
again locking their notion of how things stand and should stand, by a new
magnet of thought, a new energetic minimum. The wonderful dynamics is the short
exception, statics is the rule.
Let us assume provisionally, that I, Christer Persson, for some incomprehensible
reason am cultivating a solidarity with the overdue, possible paradigm shifts,
and that some signal system is injecting adrenaline into my circulatory system
each time I'm close to a possible agent for such a change. That might turn out
to be an interesting and important function, the question is only whether it is
useful to an extent that it might, talking with a Darwinist tongue, get selected
in the historical process, for the benefit of individuals or societies. Ugh!
More likely de-selected, considering the fate of
Thomas Münzer,
who thought himself summoned to carry the sword of Gideon against princes and
popes and found himself placing his head under the axe instead. I guess his
prospects for reproduction weren't good after that event, either... So, a
problematic quality, probably not overly automatic or unconditional where it
occurs. We had better recourse to Goethe's alternative term: chosen kinship,
indicating a possibility for choosing a standpoint that might include social
parameters: will, preferences, values, class. One possibility could be to bet
on outsiders instead of the safe, socially accepted horses - the need perhaps
springing from some dissatisfaction with our society as a
fait accompli
- or just a general
Unbehagen in der Kultur
.
Now the cards are on the table, I have stated a point of departure, and names
have been mentioned, in passing. One already in the header, the name of the
central void in my article, but I won't produce it from my sleeve until I have
dug deeper into my chosen kinship with a couple of other underminers and
grave-diggers of paradigms. Conrad Hal Waddington has already been mentioned as
well, in Her Majesty's and Darwin's England he was something of a partisan for
Lamarck, in this context bordering on High Treason. Cultivating his theoretical
interests he arranged towards the end of the sixties a series of symposia, for
which he mobilised a true parnassus of natural science "free thinkers", the
project yielding four symposium reports: "Towards a Theoretical Biology I - IV"
(an interesting
not-yet
in the title!). The French also guard and defend their own thinkers, with
aggressive chauvinism, and the mathematician René Thom probably came running
pretty quickly when this Waddington snapped his fingers. There is a difference
to consider when Anglo-Saxon meets French: in all situations the Anglo-Saxon
mind takes pains to achieve some proximity to empirics (and this tendency gets
accentuated when we approach Scotland, the heartland of empiricism), while the
French mind is allowed to soar a little in the space of theory, in certain
contexts it's even respectable. Waddington never climbed the ladders of
abstraction for long, always quick to return to obvious, clear illustrations.
His achievement consisted of a series of rather intuitive concepts, without
proper theory formation behind them. To Thom, on the other hand, all
abstraction seemed self-evident, and sometimes one is aware of a swift
irritation when his audience gave him blank looks, confronted with his
expositions. In that respect the symposia turned out something of a culture
clash.
Instead Waddington was primarily a man with a
guiding idea
that he pursued with the stubbornness of a badger. As he saw it, Darwin's
dismantling of teleology was premature, much too convenient; by liquidating
all
telos
he had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. To achieve some sort of
compromise he pleaded for the target-seeking,
teleonomic
processes that he thought that he saw at many biological levels (e.g. in
embryonic development and in evolution), and he attempted to connect them with
existing dynamics theory in different ways. Anthony Wilden gives an excellent
summary of what it's all about in "System and Structure":
When the present system-state is determined by its past states, we have the
one-to-one linearity of efficient causality. When the present system-state is
determined by its future state, we have the determinism of traditional
philosophical teleology. The teleonomy of goalseeking is distinct from both of
these determinisms, just as it is distinct from the fantasy of the opposition
between determinism and so-called "free will".
The geneticist Waddington experienced processes of the
epigenetic landscape
as being canalized, with a Greek word naming these channels
chreods,
and it was here that his and Thom's interests coincided; from his dynamic
topology the latter offered the concept
attractor
to characterise an energetic minimum, that was capable of capturing and
directing the movements of objects involved in a dynamic process. Thom had no
intention of allowing himself to be reduced into a mere mathematician, however,
he had wider ambitions; by this time establishing himself as a philosopher of
science, with dynamic
catastrophe theory
(the slightly unfortunate term not coined by himself, but by one of his
prophets, Christopher Zeeman; the catastrophe is the dynamic "landslide") as
his particular hobby-horse. Irrespective of his relation to Waddington, Thom
himself had at an early stage reflected on Darwin and Lamarck, with French or
Continental bias, as is evident from the following quotation from
Rivista di Biologia
1983:
I am among those, who never ceased being surprised at Darwin's enormous
gloire.
Considering the fact that the evolution theory is, when it comes to it, the
only theory embraced by biologists, and considering that its deductive contents
proper is practically zero, this gives a correct notion of the fundamental
incompatibility between biological thinking and biological theory. And things
weren't always like that: already Aristotle drew up a program for a biology ( a
"moriology", according to Pierre Pellegrin) of essentially comparative nature;
and later on, between 1780 and 1840, there was with the German Naturphilosophie
and the French anatomic school an enormous flourishing of ideas (I would like
to call these thinkers "the presocratics of biology"). Among all misdeeds
burdening the conscience of Darwinism is the fact that it radically broke off
this speculative heyday in favour of expositions of adaptation that are as good
as tautologous (and often highly suspect as well).
There is a remarkable parallelism here, and I think it escapes no one: In
analogy to the teleonomic biological process, aligning its object with the
'sight' of an attractor, there is reason to believe
that a social target, communicated between people craving for it - e.g. the
overdue revolution of any kind of petrified paradigm - can be kept, and is kept
on course by means of similar dynamisms.
When a collective is seeking a
novum,
a loose discourse initially establishes a coarse attractor, keeping the
thinking aimed at its proper target:
so sind wir Wandernde und Kompass zugleich.
One of the most beautiful examples I know of is John Ericsson's atheoretical,
practicist 'invention' of the screw propeller, with the deplorably ineffective
"goose foot propeller" as a thought-provoking intermediary. Jørn Utzon's architectural labour pains in Sydney belong in the same category, aiming at some not-yet, but of course Parthenon loomed, and a few other "beforehands". (Conclusion: these innovators were never on their own, they were nodes in a vast, vibrating network of Invention). It is important that we reflect on these processes, theoretically as well as practically.
Next step: chosen kinship as a metaphysical litmus test
At a less intuitive, more rational level we might for example tell ourselves:
these dynamical processes have some sort of reality, demonstrable by their
effects in particularly accentuated situations, transitions, collapses,
turn-arounds. I would like to call a thinking dealing with the effects of a
dynamics of this kind, concentrating on its effects in systems: ecosystems or
human societies (both information-processing, least of all aggregates of dead
blocks),
materialist,
from its ambition to found its explanations in the
processes
of the physical world (it's never a question of merely its
elements
per se). This again suggests that we link up with Thom's presocratic thinkers -
pointed out as the only materialists of importance in the history of philosophy
by Ernst Bloch as well - far back there is a phase when matter wasn't
embarrassment. My affinity most definitely acts as a litmus test for such
thinking, again I'm not quite sure how it came about - but I provisionally
suggest my Marx & Engels reading in early years, the description of how they
"put Hegel on his feet". At the same time I have absorbed more sophisticated
materialism, by way of the discourse with metaphysical overtones imbibed from
natural science pioneers of the late 19th and the 20th centuries. I will offer
one example here of
the naturalist's more or less materialist discourse, an example illustrating its
expansive tendencies, its inclination to make the discourse valid for society at
large (economy, language, attitudes) and the nature that "biology" has claimed
for itself up till now.
My point of departure is a worker in the vineyard who has shunned the limelight
and the block-letter headers: the present Oxford professor Robert McCredie May.
He was born in Australia, at the age of 33 he became professor of theoretical
physics at Sydney University, before he took over as professor of biology at
Princeton university in 1973, here we have an example of the development
advocated by Waddington: from physics to biology. Till recently he acted as an
advisor to the Blair government, raised to the nobility, and a wash proof
biologist (with the hallmark of Royal Society) - maybe he has learnt to produce
the reverences to Darwin necessary in the UK.
In 1976 May published the article "Simple mathematical models with very
complicated dynamics" in the journal
Nature
, here he matter-of-factly analysed the dynamics of the seemingly innocent
difference equation X
t+1
= a X
t
(1-X
t
), a hump on the interval 0 to 1, illustrating what science calls a
"density-dependent" relation, growing when density is low, decreasing when
density is high. By intersecting with the line X
t+1
= X
t
(equilibrium) and studying the slope of the tangent at the point of
intersection it is possible to draw conclusions about the stability of points
of equilibrium, and the whole thing gets even more interesting when X
t+2
= F(X
t
) is studied: for certain parameter values there is not only one, but 2, 4, 8,
16 etc. initially stable equilibrium points, "a bifurcating hierarchy of stable
cycles". This result conforms to the "chaos theory" making its appearance at
much the same time, but the most interesting thing is not biological
consequences (biological applications quickly came to a standstill, since most
biologists are good for little more than raking in tadpoles from ditches), but
other possible applications, anticipated by May:
Examples in economics include models for the relationship between commodity
quantity and price, for the theory of business cycles, and for the temporal
sequences generated by various other economic quantities. The general equation
also is germane to the social sciences, where it arises, for example, in
theories of learning (where X may be the number of bits of information that can
be remembered after an interval t), or in the propagation of rumours in
variously structured societies (where X is the number of people to have heard
the rumour after time t). (…)Not only in research, but also in the everyday
world of politics and economics, we would all be better off if more people
realised that simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple
dynamical properties.
Up till now everything has been overture. What might happen if one attempted in
any way to cultivate such theoretical interests in the Swedish "everyday world"?
The following section may seem trivial, a plain tale of a shipwreck, but the
original project and its defeat in turn
represents some sort of a wider analogy with the topic it attempted to promote
and propagate,
so there could be some possible insight from a short account.
In the sign of affinity: a quixotic translation.
In the late seventies I worked within a small group, that published the
periodical "Nature and Society" from Lund. Environmental and technological
issues, tackled from a leftist point of view, ideology-critical, were on the
agenda. We were a group not without talent; today several members are taking the
king's shilling as professors in their particular domains. I remember
translating Enzensberger's "Zur Kritik der politischen Ökologie" for the group,
I was the group's German contact surface, loving knotty Marxist expositions, dry
as dust. Another member of the group was Andrew Jamison, historian of science,
today professor in Aalborg, he used to bring his own hobby-horses to the
meetings, in that way we were confronted with material from an Anglo-Saxon
tradition, that was lighter and heartier than the German one, among other things
Andy was rooted in the American "alternative" movement. He tucked Ernest
Callenbach's "Ecotopia" under my nose, and my copy of William Morris's "News
from Nowhere" was originally his. This was typical of the time, that Marxists,
free Socialists, "alternative thinkers" flirted a little with utopia, and the
thinking surrounding it.
Andrew Jamison was also involved with the Nordic Summer University, and trying
every means of persuasion he pulled us into a recently started evening class on
the topic "Social utopias". I was expected to contribute in some way, so I
translated the introduction of a large work on utopian thinking by the German
philosopher Ernst Bloch:
Das Prinzip Hoffnung.
Bloch's philosophical style really set me running on all cylinders! The
translation wasn't up to much, the group members raised their eyebrows when
reading and Andy made faces, I think everyone agreed that this was highly
irrelevant for the evening class on "Social utopias" of "Nature and Society"!
We went off to a summer session in Lövånger in Västerbotten, I remember that
Andy and I were sitting in the grass alternately reading from "News from
Nowhere", the chapter where the traveller wants to buy some tobacco, enters a
shop and much to his astonishment finds out that money has been abolished. It
was all very charming and close-to-earth, and enough to mobilise the utopian
affinity of all participants. I met with talent in the evening class as well;
one member was the eloquent Horace Engdahl, to the members of "Nature and
Society" appearing almost as an alien from some distant planet.
We all carry the torch: Horace Engdahl entered
one
sort of social establishment, Andy Jamison another, both touching upon the
territory of social utopia during a stage of their lives, and they most likely
still have access to concepts and fragments that make them capable of thinking
over and discussing utopia in a non-trivial way to this day. That way projects
like the Nordic Summer University yield a certain return that is not visible in
personal records. Still the evening class was in a way a failure; there was no
communication between a camp advancing in its study of Bloch and a camp reading
everything except Bloch with a clear profit. When the whole thing was over this
first group laboured on with the translation of "Das Prinzip Hoffnung".
Publishers Daidalos organised the project, but when it came to it, they got
cold feet: printing was expensive, it was a matter of getting financial support
from funds. And that turned out to be impossible: the funders in question
preferred to ration out their subsidies so that they were coined into quantity;
rather ten philosophical brochures than one single "Principle of Hope". By the
same time the Soviet Empire collapsed, the old leftist self-evidence
disappeared in particular among students, book cafés became rare and finally
disappeared altogether, and Daidalos concentrated on surviving by way of
mail-order distribution and flogging books at the autumn book-fair of
Gothenburg
It was an entirely new situation relative to how it was when we started.
The project was stone dead.
Here my history begins. Daidalos wanted the texts from its translators on
diskettes, to that end they had equipped them with small Mac Plus computers. The
little pot transformed me into a computer freak in no time: I programmed in
Basic with my sons, ran graphics on chaos functions (it took half a day to print
one with a matrix printer), learnt to handle pictures, vector graphics, HTML
text and trivial computer games. It wasn't long before the sons demanded more
memory and faster computers, but I stayed with the little Plus for a long time.
By then you could connect to a phenomenon called the Internet by way of your
telephone line. I viewed early applications: endless literature lists, but also
an emerging publication of papers, essays, even whole books. All people around
me had nothing but contempt for the Internet: pornography, 99.99 % crap…
But I only remembered how I hated the paperwork necessary to produce "Natur och
Samhälle", the slow, long-winded production process, and I saw the alternative.
I crouched down, picked up the stone-dead project from the floor and began
translating anew. And now I
read
Bloch, I read the chapters on religion, struggled with the music philosophy.
Got fed up more than once, the man is beyond improvement in places. Translating
was even more difficult than before. As time passed on I understood more,
fitting Bloch's philosophy into its context helped. Finally I knocked up a
defiant preface declaring that I had usurped the work (a nice quixotic gesture,
but fully adequate) - and within a year I published "The Principle of Hope" in
Swedish on the web. Later "The Spirit of Utopia", Bloch's expressionist
overture and introduction to "The Principle of Hope", followed, in addition
both translations are linked to a common subject directory. The curtain could
fall here; no doubt it's a defeat to have to publish Ernst Bloch amidst the
pornography and the empty chats of the web. (I came across a porno shop in
Dublin calling itself "Utopia II", maybe I'm rash in my judgement here; there
is
a surface of contact). It was caused by the opposition from an influential camp
of philosophers that controls strategic economic resources, a camp that knew
from the very start that it lacked affinity with Bloch. From this point of
departure there is no reasoning, the backs are turned, what you don't want is
blocked.
At an early stage I saw the analogy between the behaviour of philosophers and
the shielding of Darwinism by biologists; in both cases the theoretical
petrification justifies an enormous production of stupidities, a fact speaking
in favour of a "concerted" attack on prevalent biology + ontology.
The "not-yet-ontologist" Bloch
After such a prehistory there is only one road to walk: distancing oneself a
little from the originally admired object, continuing to
argue
for its usefulness, critically and in solidarity. I will conclude by making my
plea for Ernst Bloch as a "would be"-overthrower of paradigms, not because he
always distinguished himself in that field, but because he has thought over how
it can and should be done. Of course it would be wrong to go beyond that,
trying to allot him paradigm status of his own: may Bloch remain in the cold,
actively ignored, even if it would be possible to heighten his philosophical
status also outside of Germany!
The earlier mentioned Sturm und Drang work "Geist der Utopie" is written
1915/16, published in 1918; many of the basic concepts and thoughts of "Das
Prinzip Hoffnung" can be met with here, in one form or other. The book about the
religious leader of the Peasant Wars, Thomas Münzer, also appeared early, in
1921. By then Bloch had already defended a doctor's thesis on the neo-Kantian
Rickert and modern theory of knowledge (1908). Rickert pleaded for a separation
between the methods of natural and human sciences, regarding only the method of
natural sciences as exact and worthy of imitation. A restriction of this kind of
course cast its shadow on philosophy as well: e.g. it mustn't occupy itself with
"world view" questions. Marxist projects in one area or other shouldn't take the
trouble - and we mustn't forget that Engels had opened his mouth as a Marxist to
devour even natural science with the attempt "Dialectics of Nature". Bloch is
critical of Rickert's restriction, and at that it becomes obvious that he is
leaning not only on classical metaphysicians like Aristotle, Schelling, Leibniz
and Hegel; he is well read in what was German philosophy "of the season" in the
early 20th century: Dilthey, Meinong, Scheler, Hartmann, Simmel and not least
Husserl, who had introduced the phenomenological method with the second book of
"Logische Untersuchungen" in 1901. Bloch is holding out the prospect of a
phenomenology of utopian thought
to himself very early, by this time, with the intention of creating as it were
an opposite pole to the positivist tendencies in the surrounding time. A
central concept of his,
the dusk (dimness) of the lived moment
("the just lived second" in the dissertation), is a phenomenological figure,
as are the
fore-light
(pre-gleam, fore-gleam) and the
self-encounter,
both states where insights break through the confusion and chaos of appearance,
giving us a hunch, a foretaste of the potential of some matter, or of our future
selves.
Bloch has an even more central concept, however, and that concept turned up very
early, too, about 1907. I'm referring to the formulation of the concept of
the not-yet-conscious
, the concept that Bloch late in life called his "first and only original
thought". The
not-yet
is a differential, or a difference, much the same as in May's difference
equation; a historical, cultural, sociological, political, scientific dX, with
ancestry back to the "discoverer" of the differential, Leibniz (and even
further back, to the scholastics, who attempted to approximate God with
differentials). So, the not-yet is not particularly phenomenological, but
rather a mathematical-dynamic concept that is justified primarily by the
allowed analogy (reference e.g.: Bertalanffy) between different types of
systems. The famous slogan: "Thinking implies going beyond" should be seen
against the background of the "not-yet".
From my own point of departure I experience this differential - even when
introduced as a purely philosophical concept, without mathematical formulas and
equations - as extremely "correct", and on the next step I am as convinced that
Bloch's "not-yet-being" combined with the whole of the natural science
discussion surrounding teleonomic processes (the larger part of it taking place
"post-Bloch") should have revolutionary effects on ontology
(the only subdivision to metaphysics that Heidegger was prepared to award
scientific status…). It's quite obvious to me that Bloch should have a branch
of his own in the ontological tree on the Brentano-Husserl-side - but among
philosophic schools this branch is missing, ignored. On the website
Ontology. A Resource guide for philosophers
Bloch is not included, on the website
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, originally created and published by Stanford's "Metaphysics Research Lab",
there's not a line about Bloch. (Once upon a time, when I pointed it out, one of
the Stanford editors admitted that this was a wee bit of a disgrace, that is ten
years ago, and things haven't changed for the better in 2007).
Central parts of Bloch's concepts and ideas thus came about during the
extraordinarily intense and receptive period of early years (1905-1920), and
references to e.g. physics and astronomy from these years are defective, one has
to live with that. What comes next is a very comprehensive
explication,
and explication of course means a consecutive revision of scientific (and
historical) facts, but the problems with references remain in the utopian
phenomenology "Das Prinzip Hoffnung", first published in the German Democratic
Republic from 1954 onwards and in a revised edition on Suhrkamp from 1959.
About his philosophy Bloch has said: "I will explain myself till I'm
understood", closing his eyes to the fact that explication from a defective
point of departure to some extent compromises the whole philosophy. Explication
continues from where Bloch called it a day, there is, in particular in Germany,
an extensive secondary literature, but the "seal" on his thinking still is
conspicuous by its absence -
a proper application of the central guiding thought, from a critical and
surpassing (überschreitend) point of departure.
I myself am sick and tired of all Indian novels based on the life of Bloch, my
own contributions to the genre as well, and I want to see central applications.
That takes a reader, who chooses Bloch with a feeling of kinship, not departing
from more or less elegant introductions, but
from the oeuvre itself.
As long as that doesn't happen, Bloch will roam like a shadow, a
"not-yet-ontologist", not very different from the Ulysses bewailing his
situation to Dante in the glum "Forecourt of Heathens" at Paradise. And Bloch,
being the most Christian of atheists! (Monsignore Ratzinger knew). It's a task
for us, his kin of own choice, to liberate him from this unworthy state.
Christer Persson is an author, born in 1943. "Hoppets princip" and "Utopins
anda" can be reached on the website
Hoppets Princip
, part of the translation was revised in 2007, "Utopins anda" proof-read
twice. Peter Zudeick's introduction "The hind-part of the Devil. Ernst Bloch's
life and work", was published by publishers Daidalos in 1989. With knowledge of
German one could read e.g. H. H. Holz "Logos Spermatikos" and Burghart Schmidt
(ed.) "Materialien zu Ernst Blochs 'Prinzip Hoffnung'". "Towards a Theoretical
Biology" is only to be found in the deep cellar-vaults of libraries (sometimes
it has been weeded out even from here), May's article is printed in Nature 261
(June 1976). As a critic of indiscriminate applications of Darwinism I create a
distinctive image of myself with the
Dunlin Website
(see e.g. the introduction of the paper: Risk-prone or risk-averse? Dunlin
Calidris alpina
migrating with and without moult-gaps in the Baltic area); the webpage is much
read, ecologists consenting by not commenting. The author experiments with
dynamisms and attractors in a pronounced utopian-marginal project: the novel
"Black Hole" (
To Svarta Hål
).
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