Ernst Bloch on Law and the State (Revised)

This is a revision of an entry originally posted on 11 February 2010.

Bloch Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood.  Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 32. The translation is by E. B Ashton):  

 

. . . the law as a whole, and the greater part of the criminal law as well, is simply an instrument by which the ruling classes maintain the legal standards that protect their interests . . . If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.

No property, no need for law? That is plainly and inexcusably false. Obviously,  not all crimes are crimes against property; there are also crimes  against persons: rape, assault, battery, murder. Even if the State  owned all the cars, there would still be drunk driving. And so on. So  even without private property, there would still be the need for laws.

Laws reasonable and just are the positive expressions of (some of) what we believe to  morally permissible, impermissible,  and obligatory. As along as there is a gap between what people do and what they ought to do and leave undone — that is, as long as people exist — there will be need for positive law, the law posited or enacted by legislatures.  And since laws are useless unless enforced, there is need of agencies of enforcement, which are state functions.

But of course the very notion that a society in which no one owned anything would be desirable is ludicrous as well. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. When the State owns everything and I own nothing, then concretely speaking my liberty is nonexistent. But of course, Bloch, leftist utopian that he is, thinks that the State will wither away:

Though for a time it may continue to function in a bolshevist form, as a necessary transitional evil, in any socialist perspective a true conception of the State demands its withering away — its transformation into an international regulator of production and consumption, an immense apparatus set up to control inessentials and no longer containing, or capable of attracting, anything of import. (p. 33)

Sorry, Ernst, but this is just nonsense. The State cannot both "wither away" and be tranformed into an "immense apparatus" that regulates production and consumption. But even apart from this incoherence, no State powerful enough to establish socialism — which of course requires the forcible redistribution of wealth — is going to surrender one iota of its power, no matter what socialists "demand." Power always seeks its own consolidation, perpetuation, and expansion.  That is one thing that Nietzsche got right.

This brings us to the fundamental contradiction of socialism. Since forcible equalization of wealth will be resisted by those who possess it and feel entitled to their possession of it, a revolutionary vanguard will be needed to impose the equalization. But this vanguard cannot have power equal to the power of those upon whom it imposes its will: the power of the vanguard must far outstrip the power of those to be socialized. So right at the outset of the new society an inequality of power is instituted to bring about an equality of wealth — in contradiction to the socialist demand for equality. The upshot is that no equality is attained, neither of wealth nor of power. The apparatchiks end up with both, and their subjects end up far worse off   than they would have ended up in a free and competitive society. And once the apparatchiks get a taste of the good life with their luxury  apartments in Moscow and their dachas on the Black Sea, they will not  want to give it up.

The USSR withered away all right, but not in approved Marxist fashion:  it just collapsed under the weight of its own evil and incompetence —  with some helpful kicks from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

Remembering Albert Camus

Albert_Camus2Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash.  Not tragically, straining hubristically against limits, but absurdly, a passenger in a recklessly-piloted vehicle. "In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him.[15]" (Wikipedia)

Camus was 46, in the middle of the middle decade of middle age.  Here is a review of A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky, Belknap Press, 240 pages.

Here I remember my former colleague, Xavier Ortiz Monasterio, whose philosophical hero was Camus and who also, curiously enough, died on January 4th (2011).

Stoner

StonerJohn Williams' 1965 novel  Stoner with its overcast feel proved to be a perfect  read for a deep and dark December.  An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is.  Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.

 

 

 

 

In Five Books of Professors, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:

(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.

"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget.  For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.

My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives."  Yes.

What is the difference between the philosopher and the novelist?  Perhaps this: the philosopher tries but fails to articulate the Impersonal Ineffable; the novelist tries but fails to articulate the Personal Ineffable, the 'inside' of a person's life, the felt quality of it.  In both cases, there is the attempt to speak the Unspeakable.

Two very different uses of language and thought in a reach for what is Unreachable by those routes.  And perhaps by any route.

Put that it in your pipe, John Anderson. And smoke it.

Companion post: John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy.

Do Communists Lie?

I just now found this at the CPUSA website:

Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism.

A communist who is not against religion would be like a Catholic who is not against atheism or a teetotaler who is not against drinking alcoholic beverages.  

What we have here is further proof that truth is not a leftist value.

Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda.  And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance  since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The glorious end justifies the shabby means. 

The quotation above is a piece of Orwellian mendacity

As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.

Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.

You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says.  Always assume they are lying and then look into it.  Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie.  It is right out of the commie playbook.  "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."

Companion post:  Orwellian Bullshit

Hypocrites in Reverse: Those Who Do Not Preach What They Practice

Hypocrites are those who will not practice what they preach. They espouse high standards of behavior — which is of course good — but they make little or no attempt to live in accordance with them. Hypocrisy is rightly considered to be a moral defect. But what are we to say about those people who will not preach what they practice? For want of a better term, I will call them hypocrites in reverse.

Suppose a person manifests in his behavior such virtues as honesty, frugality, willingness to take responsibility for his actions, ability to defer gratification, respect for others, self-control, and the like, but refuses to advocate or promote these virtues even though their practice has led to the person's success and well-being. Such a person is perhaps not as bad, morally speaking, as a hypocrite but evinces nonetheless a low-level moral defect akin to a lack of gratitude to the conditions of his own success.

These hypocrites-in-reverse owe much to the old virtues and to having been brought up in a climate where they were honored and instilled; but they won't do their share in promoting them. They will not preach what they themselves practice. And in some cases, they will preach against, or otherwise undermine, what they themselves practice.

The hypocrite will not honor in deeds what he honors in words. The reverse hypocrite will not honor in words what he honors in deeds.

I am thinking of certain liberals who have gotten where they are in life by the practice of the old-time virtues, some of which I just mentioned, but who never, or infrequently, promote the very virtues whose practice is responsible for their success. It is almost as if they are embarrassed by them. What's worse, of course, is the advocacy by some of these liberals of policies that positively undermine the practice of the traditional virtues. Think of welfare programs that militate against self-reliance or reward bad behavior or of tax policies that penalize such virtuous activities as saving and investing.

First Day of the Year, First Hike of the Year

IMG_0966I began the year right with a two-hour ramble right out my front door over the local hills. Very cold temps ramped up the usual saunter to a serious march.  I always go light: short pants, T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, bandanna, light cotton gloves.  Rain that turned to snow overnight gave Superstition Mountain a serious dusting.

And I always take a notebook and a pen in case I get a really good idea.  Haven't had one yet, but you never know.

Walking in the wild, alone, is a pleasure to keep one sound in body and mind. "Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever." (Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle.)

Click on image to enlarge.

For the New Year

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. [ . . . ]

Why Are Italians So Good at Personal Finance?

Why are Italians and Americans of Italian extraction 'over-represented' — to use, sarcastically, an ambiguous word whose very ambiguity endears it to the politically correct — among the fiscally responsible?  Ten reasons.

Sadly, two highly-valued male friends of mine, one a philosopher who does not hike and the other a hiker who does not philosophize, are either clueless or inattentive when it comes to personal finance, like most Americans.  Why do they lack basic common sense about matters monetary? 

Do I enjoy a species of 'white privilege,' namely, 'Italian privilege?'

My use of 'privilege' here is of course derisive.