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We humans are hopeful. Ernst Bloch was on to something. But man on his own is without reasonable hope. We are reduced to praying.
The above thought occurred to me during the penumbral twilight period betwixt sleeping and waking.
Ernst Bloch on Law and the State
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5 responses to “Ernst Bloch on Law and the State”
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Hi Bill
“If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.”
What a piece of nonsense as you rightly say in the post.
But I’m wondering why Bloch deserves any philosophical, as opposed to historical, attention — and yours in particular — if he makes such fundamental blunders and builds his conclusions upon them? From false premises everything follows logically… So Aristotle didn’t bother to count teeth but his thought and impact on future generations mightily outweighs such errors. Why would anyone read Bloch as a philosopher? -
Hi Dmitri,
I think what you want to say is that from contradictory premises everything follows logically. Ex contradictione quodlibet. If a number of premises are all false, not everything follows from them.
But you raise an interesting question. Any number of untenable positions have been maintained in all sorts of areas. Eliminative materialism, for example, has been rightly described as a lunatic philosophy of mind. One reason to study it, write about it, and refute it is to show its adherents why it is not rationally tenable. This is of some importance if there are a lot of such adherents. Second, knowing what is not the case helps us arrive at what is the case. Third, to really understand the problems in any area such as the philosophy of mind, one has to study all the proposed solutions to the various problems. Fourth, some false views have abominable practical consequences. For example, Descartes’ view that nonhuman animals are insentient machines gave aid and comfort to vivisectionism. The views of the Marquis de Sade, etc. Antisemitism, racism, etc.
Fifth, there is something we could call the pathology of thought. Why do medical pathologists study diseases? Why do psychiatrists study psychiatric disorders? To arrive at adequate views of physical and mental health. To find a cure for cancer, etc. So we study diseased thinking to arrive at sound thinking.
Part of logic studies formal and informal fallacies, which are typical patterns of reasoning that tend to seduce people into making incorrect inferences. Knowing what those fallacies are and how easy it is to fall into them, helps us avoid them.
And then there is the pathology of those benighted pathologists who, like David Stove (The Plato Cult), think philosophy is pathological. Meta-pathology would separate the good pathology from the pathological pathology.
Finally, “nothing human is foreign to me” (Terence) and nothing uninteresting. Why climb a mountain? Because it’s there! Why climb a mountain of thought? Because it’s there and I want to see how things look from the top of it. Benatar’s anti-natalism, for example.
And in the case of Benatar you will learn a lot of good philosophy on the way to the conclusion that he is wrong in his main conclusions — assuming he is wrong. -
Thank you for an elaborate and clear answer Bill. Nothing to disagree with… What I should have said instead is this: there are some thinkers who make grand false assumptions — many times begging the key question at issue — and build upon this shaky foundation an elaborate theory which is philosophically and practically useless.
For example, David Lewis in philosophy of mind (his contributions to possible world semantics and conventionalism are a different story). He just assumes materialism is true and applies his inventive and strong intellect to elaborate the consequences of this assumption. He never really engages with other points of view on the subject. His philosophy of mind is simply not worth the long time required to learn it unless one is a PhD student or professor in a related area.
Bloch’s quote on property is so wrong that — it seems to me — any deeper study of this work for someone who is genuinely interested in coherent and constructive ideas in political philosophy is a complete waste of valuable time. It is as fruitless as studying orthodox Marxists’ endless writings trying to better understand the principles of functioning of modern capitalist economy or learning from them how to build a better economic system.
Am I strongly off target here? -
Dmitri,
You are right about David Lewis and many other philosophers of the recent past. Colin McGinn, Galen Strawson, Daniel Dennett, et al. All very bright and very creative. They all just assume that materialism/naturalism is true. For them it is not an issue worth discussing, not a live option. They are ‘presuppositionalists’ in the sense that they presuppose that materialism/naturalism is true. They will not allow anything to budge them from it. Some things are just obvious. And so they work out the consequences of this presupposition in all areas.
My question for you would be, are you not also a presuppositionalist? I don’t know quite know what you believe, but I’m guessing you are an anti-materialist/naturalist. If you are a theist (but not a pantheist), then you would have to be.
If A accuses B of begging the question, is not B within his epistemic rights if he turns the tables and accuses A of begging the question? One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
I suppose you could say that you are not begging any questions or presupposing anything. You could say that you have examined all the positions in the phil. of mind, say, and have arrived at the correct view.
But then I will ask you: why do your brilliant and sincere opponents disagree with you? What explains their disagreement? It could be that you are right and they are wrong, but are you quite sure about that? Might it be that you are illicitly privileging your own position simply because it is yours? -
Bill
No thinking is possible without some presuppositions, neither in philosophy nor in any other intellectual area, e.g. math. I think this is a universally valid starting point even if it is rarely stated explicitly. What’s not kosher is taking a preferable theoretical conclusion for granted and arguing for it or its consequences ignoring serious competing approaches. Thinkers who do that usually lack intellectual integrity and their work is not worth the time of a serious student.
Thinkers whose work is worth studying usually have the intellectual integrity and consider in detail conflicting views of their worthy opponents.
As to me, I still am an agnostic who has some sympathy with the position of the so-called mysterians (like McGinn and Chomsky 30-40 years ago) regarding the mind/body problem.
On a purely personal level, since it is very difficult for me to imagine that immaterial objects can and have material impact on material ones– it is almost a contradiction given our common sense concept of causation, I do have a soft spot for certain forms of naturalism/physicalism of the emergent variety.
On the other hand, I am quite persuaded by Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat” argument. And some “intelligent design” arguments have their attraction especially when there are no alternative scientific explanations. And the miraculous applicability of abstract math to real life and the fact that it is indispensable in scientific explanations leaves me in awe and undecided. I mean i, the square root of -1, and Pi not to mention much more far-fetched structures are scientifically indispensable…
I think philosophy would benefit in the future when it develops the notion of philosophical equivalence similar to that of set theory and logic. An aspirational example: the proven equivalence of Turing machines, Post’s formalism and lambda calculus of Church for capturing the intuitive notion of effective computability. Such a development, coupled with much more work on the poorly understood notions of dimension and dependency would bring philosophy to a new level and, as a by-product, push away nonsense peddlers and charlatans. Nelson Goodman was onto something in this direction in his Ways of Worldmaking (and with his notion of projectability from mid-20th century), but he stopped at almost complete relativism which is way premature IMHO. And, in the same ball park in terms of the practical value and strong philosophical work in a similar direction, Bas van Fraassen’s notion of empirical adequacy provides a useful tool set for demarcating nonsense, propaganda and pure fantasy in science from promising theories (on a concluding side note, metaphysical truth is not a concept to BvFs liking).
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