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Ernst Bloch and Another Apology
Jul. 8th, 2010 01:21 pmHaving realized that I, not unlike most of the writers I encounter, recycle my favorite insights from books I have never completely read, I paged through Ernst Bloch again to confirm that Das Prinzip Hoffnung is one of those books I should someday read in its entirely in English, turning from The Principle of Hope to the German occasionally for the sheer pleasure of the prose style.
Bloch writes so lushly and lyrically about intrinsically interesting models of utopian hope that it is possible to forgive him his…I was going to write “transgressions,” basing my word choice on his apologia for Stalin for which a Marxist journal in Scotland excoriated him. But that would lead us into the byways of political mistakes in general—Mircea Eliade jumping in ambiguous directions in the face of King Carol’s royal dictatorship, and too many other thinkers’ transient or not so transient blunders that do not obviate their analytical insights into one or another problem of human consciousness—sometimes insights achieved late in life that effectively negated the premises of their earlier misdeeds of theory. (As in the old joke about those who can, do and those who can't, teach, none of these folks ever did anything heinous in practice.)
Perhaps in lieu of the faux-Protestant "transgressions" I should substitute the once-popular "theoretical blindnesses."
Which leads to my main point: that I should apologize again for having sent some readers off into unrewarding territory where there may well be only one essay out of a lifetime’s oeuvre that is worth anything at all in terms of pointing us in the right direction. The rest of their stuff constitutes their own dead ends, which they sometimes recognized were dead ends and sometimes did not.
There are writers who become known for only one work but who ought to be waded through more extensively in spite of their numerous dead ends—Walter Benjamin is so full of amazing moments that it is unfortunate that most students encounter only his turgid and not always completely thought out “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (or “Technical Reproducibility,” a more accurate translation that warns us that we are headed in turgid directions).
It is perfectly possible to get Benjamin entirely backwards, which is why one of Terry Eagleton’s earlier books excoriates George Steiner for doing exactly that. Eagleton later excoriated Christopher Hitchens for getting Catholic theology ass-backwards, so he is an equal opportunity excoriator when it comes to folks who get things wrong.
Which is why I realize I should have included him in my imaginary Conference on Consciousness, as I have included him in the actual Monologue on Consciousness that is the joculum journal.
I need to hunt up some of the single essays on consciousness by thinkers for whose work I have little use otherwise, just to see what I myself think of them all these decades later. This is, again, by way of apology to anyone who has found him- or herself wading through a few thousand pages of someone’s magnum opus when the only thing I found worth citing from them was the sentence from a forgotten essay. Sometimes an insight expressed in a single place is so penetrating that I can’t help but regret that the writer subsequently forgot he ever had it. or decided that it was in error.
This is another illustration of the point I keep making: that if, for what appear to be empirical reasons, we have decided that there is something wrong with the standard ways of dividing up the world’s multifarious aspects and finding categories with which to talk about them, we need to do several things:
1) Explain why the standard divisions are unacceptably partial (if not completely incorrect), and then defend ourselves against critics who think we are allying ourselves with every other crackpot who said the standard divisions are unacceptably partial. Some pots are less cracked than others, and some can even hold useful contents, even if they don’t hold water.
2) Explain what the alternative way of looking at the world might be, and defend ourselves against critics who think this is the silliest thing they have ever heard because they are confusing the alternative way with all the similar-sounding ways that are considered intolerably silly because, in fact, they are.
3) When appropriate, explain why the intolerably silly alternative ways of looking at the world were acting on valid insights about what the standard-issue ways of looking at the world were failing to explain adequately. Just because someone has seen what is wrong does not mean that he or she can propose a remotely correct version of the right explanation or the right solution.
4) And, at minimum, try to avoid using penetratingly memorable quotes in cases where the writer said nothing else that was remotely applicable to the topic. This is particularly difficult because so many writers wrote so many things that are applicable—but only applicable after being set in a historical context that removes likely sources of misunderstanding for a contemporary reader.
5) This list could go on interminably. I’ll stop.
Bloch writes so lushly and lyrically about intrinsically interesting models of utopian hope that it is possible to forgive him his…I was going to write “transgressions,” basing my word choice on his apologia for Stalin for which a Marxist journal in Scotland excoriated him. But that would lead us into the byways of political mistakes in general—Mircea Eliade jumping in ambiguous directions in the face of King Carol’s royal dictatorship, and too many other thinkers’ transient or not so transient blunders that do not obviate their analytical insights into one or another problem of human consciousness—sometimes insights achieved late in life that effectively negated the premises of their earlier misdeeds of theory. (As in the old joke about those who can, do and those who can't, teach, none of these folks ever did anything heinous in practice.)
Perhaps in lieu of the faux-Protestant "transgressions" I should substitute the once-popular "theoretical blindnesses."
Which leads to my main point: that I should apologize again for having sent some readers off into unrewarding territory where there may well be only one essay out of a lifetime’s oeuvre that is worth anything at all in terms of pointing us in the right direction. The rest of their stuff constitutes their own dead ends, which they sometimes recognized were dead ends and sometimes did not.
There are writers who become known for only one work but who ought to be waded through more extensively in spite of their numerous dead ends—Walter Benjamin is so full of amazing moments that it is unfortunate that most students encounter only his turgid and not always completely thought out “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (or “Technical Reproducibility,” a more accurate translation that warns us that we are headed in turgid directions).
It is perfectly possible to get Benjamin entirely backwards, which is why one of Terry Eagleton’s earlier books excoriates George Steiner for doing exactly that. Eagleton later excoriated Christopher Hitchens for getting Catholic theology ass-backwards, so he is an equal opportunity excoriator when it comes to folks who get things wrong.
Which is why I realize I should have included him in my imaginary Conference on Consciousness, as I have included him in the actual Monologue on Consciousness that is the joculum journal.
I need to hunt up some of the single essays on consciousness by thinkers for whose work I have little use otherwise, just to see what I myself think of them all these decades later. This is, again, by way of apology to anyone who has found him- or herself wading through a few thousand pages of someone’s magnum opus when the only thing I found worth citing from them was the sentence from a forgotten essay. Sometimes an insight expressed in a single place is so penetrating that I can’t help but regret that the writer subsequently forgot he ever had it. or decided that it was in error.
This is another illustration of the point I keep making: that if, for what appear to be empirical reasons, we have decided that there is something wrong with the standard ways of dividing up the world’s multifarious aspects and finding categories with which to talk about them, we need to do several things:
1) Explain why the standard divisions are unacceptably partial (if not completely incorrect), and then defend ourselves against critics who think we are allying ourselves with every other crackpot who said the standard divisions are unacceptably partial. Some pots are less cracked than others, and some can even hold useful contents, even if they don’t hold water.
2) Explain what the alternative way of looking at the world might be, and defend ourselves against critics who think this is the silliest thing they have ever heard because they are confusing the alternative way with all the similar-sounding ways that are considered intolerably silly because, in fact, they are.
3) When appropriate, explain why the intolerably silly alternative ways of looking at the world were acting on valid insights about what the standard-issue ways of looking at the world were failing to explain adequately. Just because someone has seen what is wrong does not mean that he or she can propose a remotely correct version of the right explanation or the right solution.
4) And, at minimum, try to avoid using penetratingly memorable quotes in cases where the writer said nothing else that was remotely applicable to the topic. This is particularly difficult because so many writers wrote so many things that are applicable—but only applicable after being set in a historical context that removes likely sources of misunderstanding for a contemporary reader.
5) This list could go on interminably. I’ll stop.
