Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Non-Synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda

1976; Duke University Press; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/487688

1558-1462

Oskar Negt,

Critical Theory and Philosophy

Systematic Aspects in Bloch's Philosophical Biography Congratulating Ernst Bloch on his ninetieth birthday suggests taking a look at the concrete utopia of a human life that has taken shape in him, a life which had an almost unique opportunity, not only to experience more than six decades of non-synchronous, even catastrophic developments, but also to give them expression--in a continuity of conceptual analysis whose exertion cannot be better documented than through the fact that the ruptures are missing in his thought, that a renunciation of convictions and insights was never necessary. To be sure, the objective meaning of a systematic theory cannot be subsumed in its author's biographical background, but it would be equally wrong to consider philosophy and the structure of personality as totally indifferent to one another; they are connected in a very specific way. When Fichte says that the sort of philosophy one has depends upon the sort of person one is, then he does not mean the chance features of empirical character, but rather the subject's capability for reflection and experience, which however, as we know today, is also a product of the history of his theoretical and political socialization. Biography and philosophy stand in a necessary relationship to one another only in so far as experience is the organizing center of reflection; experience understood this way means primarily historical experience of the present. By detaching themselves from this frame of reference, as Hans Mayer has justly and emphatically pointed out in his article on Three Difficulties with Ernst Bloch,' Bloch interpreters are able to gain free rein and to take segments of his personality out of the context of his copious work as they see fit, to which they then attach the theory as a whole; in this way Bloch becomes a mystic, a theologian of hope, a prophet. Bloch's philosophical biography loses its mystical ideological veil and gains the sobriety of a merely clarifying description of human traits only under the doubtlessly over-simplified presupposition that he is primarily concerned with the solution of present-day problems; that the political-revolutionary substance of his theory is detectable even in places where he is concerned with seemingly quite abstract things, such as the latent essence of world matter or the co-productivity of Nature.