The Bloch Series #4: Ivan Boldyrev on Bloch & Hegel.
Ernst Bloch’s thought is largely anonymous in Britain. Nyx, a noctournal decided to depart this tremor of an as yet unknown adventure. The Bloch Series: sojourns with an heretic.
Nyx: I’d like to begin by turning to an interview Michael Löwy conducted with Bloch in Tübingen in 1974, roughly three years before Bloch’s death. The purpose of the interview, Löwy says, is to clarify aspects of Bloch’s affinity with the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács—an affinity which warrants a separate discussion, particularly on aesthetics. In any case, on at least two separate occasions in this short interview Bloch repeats the same remark, namely that what Lukács learnt from him (Bloch) was to study Hegel more deeply, as it were. Now, Bloch doesn’t elaborate on this, perhaps because Löwy doesn’t press him on it. But what do you think Bloch could have meant by this remark? In what way does Bloch believe Hegel needs to be read more deeply?
IB: We still do not know whether Bloch really read that much of Hegel during these formative and, in fact, extremely productive years of his close friendship with Lukács (1911-1913). It is true that they learned quite a lot from each other—in terms of both reading suggestions and demonstrating to each other how doing philosophy might look if one wishes to move beyond university neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. And it was this Hegelian turn that helped them (but especially Lukács) to come up, paradoxically, with a philosophy of a heterodox and revolutionary kind—with the most prominent German philosophy professor against the kind of work German university professors were doing at that time. Just think of Franz Rosenzweig, who had another background and another intellectual genealogy, but also moved—and pretty much in the same period—to a specific form of messianic thinking, very much shaped by Hegel.
Now, judging by their early work, one could say that, at the moment of their close friendship, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky were much more important for Bloch and Lukács than Hegel. However, this did not prevent Lukács from writing The Theory of the Novel and History of Class Consciousness—each of which can be considered a masterpiece of Hegelian philosophy in its own right. The history, as I see it today, does not go not in a linear way, we do not find Bloch ‘educating’ Lukács. In The Spirit of Utopia we also find passages prompting us to treat Bloch as an attentive and insightful reader of Hegel—again, in his own way. Two aspects are important here: figures and a style of thinking borrowed from Hegel, and a specific critique of dialectics. Thus, Hegelianism was a sort of language everybody began to use—perhaps inadvertently—but also the one associated with the system, which no one found tenable any more.
Nyx: Dialectics is of course a language practically synonymous with Hegel. And while Marx demanded dialectics be turned the right way up, while he demanded and saw to it that dialectics be materialised and so deal with real becoming, I wonder about Bloch in all this: does Bloch demand anything new of dialectics, does he contribute to dialectics’ unfolding, if it can be put in that way? On further reflection perhaps this question is related to another. S is not yet P: a memorable and fermenting proposition of Bloch’s, indeed one expressing the kernel of his philosophy: the not yet of subject-object identity. Now, to my mind Bloch’s proposition clearly recalls Hegel’s speculative sentence—and yet there’s something new there, too, isn’t there? And furthermore, perhaps the S is not yet P proposition can be related to a criticism Bloch repeatedly aims at Hegel, namely that Hegel’s philosophy is fundamentally coordinated by what has passed, by ‘Becomeness’, as Bloch says, so much so that Hegel is said to forget the future, in fact renounces any possibility of the future. There is no glance towards the East in Hegel, as it were, no glance towards where the sun will rise tomorrow.
IB: This is precisely what I mean when I am talking about Bloch’s critique of dialectics as a critique of ‘recollection’ as its major trope. In Hegel’s speculative sentence what you basically do is come back to the subject, S, and thus come to know that the only thing which is real is this restlessness of the dialectical transition, in which neither S nor P is stable and fixed. I think this is the major lesson of the dialectics, which—along with its Marxist reformulation and the general appraisal of the social/political dimension of human reality and knowledge—Bloch the critical theorist inherited from Hegel. But Bloch never accepted this imminent coming back, this inescapable circular movement of Hegelian Science—such a logic seemed to him both politically sterile and metaphysically suspect. (Another issue I do not discuss is whether Bloch’s reading really does justice to what Hegel himself was up to.) The Spirit of Utopia adds to this the theory of the ‘inconstruable question’ and thus comes quite close to the later deconstructivist readings of Hegel, many of which converge on seeing dialectics as a discourse that lacks openness and ‘unproductive’ negativity and hastens to answer all the questions even before they are posed. In fact, Adorno’s general criticism of Hegel and his appraisal of something not to be ‘sublated’ also might have its roots not only in Benjamin’s vision of history, but also in The Spirit of Utopia and in Bloch’s critique of anamnesis.
We thus see the ambiguity at work here: Bloch adopts dialectics, sees himself (and is often seen) as a successor of dialectical philosophy in the 20th century, but at the same time reproduces the problematic distinction dating back to Croce, deeming it possible to separate ‘the living’ and ‘the dead’ in Hegel’s philosophy. The years spent by Bloch in the anti-democratic state (1949-1961), when any reference to Hegel could become an act of civil disobedience (and civic courage!, recall the title of his lecture, Hegel and the Violence of the System), made this ambiguity even more troublesome. The reservations always had to be made—both ideological (the superiority of Marx) and metaphysical (Hegel’s purported ‘closure’), the same concerned the distinction between Hegel’s ‘method’ and ‘system.’ Perhaps this ambiguity is also inherent in Hegel’s thinking in the various shapes it took in the previous century.
Nyx: Finally, I’d like to touch on Bloch’s approach to Hegel’s notion of substance becoming subject. What’s your opinion on Bloch’s reading of this notion?
IB: The initial message of Bloch’s philosophy—something prominent also in the Traces and in many later essays on aesthetics or politics—is an existentially intensive subjectivity. The return to this innermost core of human (utopian) experience—essentially mediated by expressionist art and literature—was also somehow perceived as a subversive gesture with respect to any ‘systematic’ philosophy, Hegelian included. But, as Werner Hamacher once noted, Hegel’s system is organized in such a way that in the moment you think you are looking at it from outside, it is the system that looks at you and integrates you in its speculative movement. Hegel’s Phenomenology is also the movement of trembling—the idea that emerged after Jean Wahl’s appreciation of the early theological writings and took shape, for example, in Katrin Pahl’s recent analysis in Tropes of Transport. By the same token, the remnants of Hegel are to be found at many places in Bloch’s oeuvre, and our task is to problematise their dialogue both in terms of the historical accuracy of Bloch’s readings and in terms of consequences this discussion might have for our understanding of Hegel, Bloch, and philosophy.
Ivan Boldyrev, philosopher and historian of ideas, is currently a research fellow at the University Witten/Herdecke, visiting scholar at Humboldt University (Berlin), and associate professor at Higher School of Economics (Moscow). His research interests include poetics of philosophical texts and philosophy of history. He has also published widely on the history of economic knowledge. Among his recent publications are Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (Bloomsbury, 2014) and (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath) Hegel, Institutions and Economics: Performing the Social (Routledge, 2014). His current project is a study of dialectical imagery in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Nyx, a noctournal 