Episode 230 - Transcript

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So taking in ideas that fall under the category of existentialism… basically guarantees you’re going to come across certain terminology.

What I mean is there’s WORDS… commonly thrown around in this space when trying to describe the human condition, and all the bad stuff that’s possible. Words like despair, or anxiety, nausea, alienation. There’s many more of these and you’ve no doubt HEARD all these words BEFORE.

And what you ALSO may have heard is that when it comes to a LOT of these philosophers that fall under the label of existentialism…common way you’ll hear their work described is that they’re framing this piece of existence in terms of a lack. Or a negation.

And what’s MEANT when someone says this…is that when it comes to these negative things we experience that get described with despair, nausea and the like…we FEEL these things…because there’s something LACKING, that’s CAUSING these experiences.

Many examples of this I could give.

Maybe if you’re Sartre what’s lacking is a fixed essence as to what it is to be a person…and the LACK of that essence…causes a lot of PROBLEMS for you as a human being.

Maybe if you’re Kierkegaard… it’s the lack of rational certainty or ultimate meaning…maybe not having those things…has consequences in how you feel sometimes too. If you’re Heidegger maybe what’s lacking is an obvious, stable ground of being that we can clearly define…POINT is: it’s the LACK of something…that EXPLAINS many of the difficult spots we find ourselves in.

But the guy we’re talking about today, Ernst Bloch, while he’s NOT TECHNICALLY an existentialist because he would go on to do far more than that in his LATER work…in his EARLIER work…this is a man who answered EXACTLY the kinds of questions that the existentialists were concerned with…but he answered them NOT by explaining our experience in terms of it LACKING something…to him, human experience can be explained by there being a SURPLUS of something. A surplus of what he called hope…or anticipatory consciousness.

By the END of this episode…you’re gonna see how DIFFERENT existentialism can look…if you try thinking of the problems in your life in terms of you having a SURPLUS of HOPE…instead of a LACK of meaning or truth or anything like that.

Let’s start with what he MEANS by hope though. Cause as we know…philosophers do this kind of thing all the time.

They’ll take a concept…something we think we know ALL about…something like hope…and they’ll show a side of it that makes us think of our RELATIONSHIP to it in a whole new way.

And in THIS case: think of hope…as a type of, again, anticipatory consciousness. The key word there being: anticipation.

Think of the piece of what it is to be a person…where we are always looking forward, to some FUTURE world, and the possibilities that can be brought about in it…that HAVEN’T been brought about yet. This is a core experience that we all have.

Put another way for Ernst Bloch: think of human consciousness as something that rooted in time, constantly oriented towards the Not-Yet, as he calls it, and constantly co-evolving WITH the world that its IN.

If for the sake of this conversation we can call this HOPE, if what we typically think of as hope stems OUT of this. Then the next question is: how fundamental IS this… as an ASPECT of our existence?

Cause it should be said: some people’ll say not that much. That hope and future planning like this… is in short supply in people. That’s why there’s so many cringe, motivational videos you can find on TikTok they’ll say. People shadowboxing on a mountaintop. People are STARVING for this stuff.

But Bloch is going to disagree with this. He’s gonna say that hope…is actually something you can see in pretty much EVERYTHING around you if you’re LOOKING for it… INCLUDING that person watching TikTok and all of their endless SCROLLING.

It’s important to understand that hope is not a psychological thing for Bloch…where depending on how well we’re doing we either HAVE it up in our heads or we don’t. Hope…is an ontological category for Bloch. It is IMMANENTLY a PART of our reality. It is THE dynamic… of being itself— and NOT ONLY as people that anticipate future possibilities…but the world ITSELF is also ALWAYS oriented towards the future and the Not-Yet. As Bloch says: even a stone is becoming world.

Our consciousness and the world…co-constitute each other. Neither one of them are ever totally separate. And to Bloch there IS no purely inward, static way of DESCRIBING human experience…it is ALWAYS moving and always connected to an OUTSIDE world that’s in a state of becoming.

And to him this is a fact about our existence…that often COMPLICATES things for people.

See Bloch might want to START by talking about his concept of the darkness of the lived moment. You ever been sitting around… on an otherwise totally normal day…and have you ever had a feeling, well up inside of you that something…is missing from this scene that you’re a part of right now.

Maybe you’re not even quite sure what it is…it could be that the world feels like it should be a bit different…it could be that you feel like something’s missing from YOU in a way that’s mysterious.

Whatever it is…Ernst Bloch would’ve PREDICTED this was going to happen…because in light of what we just talked about at a BASE level: there are no moments in this life… that are totally complete, and there’s never any way for the TYPE of consciousness we have…to ever GRASP a moment in full.

As HE says: the Now, is ALWAYS obscure to itself in some way. And what he MEANS is that firstly: the world will ALWAYS be partially unknown to us…BECAUSE we’re so CLOSE to it and because it ITSELF is always incomplete, and changing. And secondly: WE are ALWAYS unknown to OURSELVES to some degree…because we TOO are unfinished, and too close to OURSELVES to see our own potential.

Essentially for Bloch we live in a kind of blind spot of the present moment…or what he calls the “darkness of the lived moment”.

Now a LOT of thinkers have talked about concepts that are similar to this. And USUALLY this point will send people into kind of a spiral of negativity, but for BLOCH. Negativity…and HOPE…are going to be dialectically connected.

And what that’s gonna mean is that if there’s a darkness of the lived moment and an incompleteness that we will never be able to fully grasp…then another way to put that would be to say that every moment…carries WITHIN it latent possibilities. Future worlds that CAN be brought about…but haven’t been yet.

And as it turns out contemplating these future worlds that we may or may not WANT…is going to occupy a HUGE piece of what every human being ever THINKS about. The way you CONTEMPLATE these future worlds and the relationship between your consciousness AND the world…will dictate a LOT of things about the person you are.

But there’s a sense in which ALL this is me getting ahead of myself…because I’ll tell you what Bloch HAS to be saying here. IF everything he’s saying is true so far…then ALL the same phenomena that typically get explained by there being a LACK of something, the nausea the dread…well, HE’S saying these can apparently be explained by there being a SURPLUS… of this hope of his.

So maybe a good place to go if we wanted an example…is to have him explain, an existential crisis. How can you explain the extreme feelings and behaviors that are going ON there… by saying that the person has TOO much HOPE?

Because look when you SEE somebody laying on the couch, dark room, anxious, unmotivated: why do anything if nothing really MEANS anything kind of attitude. Doesn’t exactly look like the image of hope, Mr. Bloch. How do you explain that?

But let’s just take one piece of it at a time: how about the anxiety there in that image I just gave.

Now it COULD be… that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, as Kierkegaard says. That it’s a LACK of something. Because you LACK an objective direction to HEAD in…you find yourself TRAPPED in this dizziness of not knowing where to go next, of thinking of all the consequences of choosing the wrong way. You’re anxious.

But couldn’t it ALSO be…if we wanted to frame this more like Ernst Bloch…that you’re sitting on the couch, not doing anything…and that something about that activity… just fundamentally goes against the GRAIN of one of the most core things about the kind of creature you are.

If what you DO at the most fundamental level of your being is anticipate future possibilities and then try to bring them about. Then of COURSE laying around on the couch doing nothing but spinning up in your own head…is GOING to leave a LOT of unrealized ENERGY that’s PROBABLY going to feel really uncomfortable.

Now the point here isn’t that: Bloch’s right, Kierkegaard’s wrong. The point is: isn’t it interesting how the SAME set of phenomena…can be explained by multiple different framings.

Another example. Take the general ATTITUDE of the person on the couch…of why do ANYTHING if nothing MEANS anything?

An existentialist could hear this…and while none of them are ever gonna say that the couch is a stopping point, there’s ALWAYS work to be done…it is ENTIRELY possible they’d look at this person… and think this is someone that’s at least being HONEST about something inconvenient at the level of the universe.

In other words: the couch is understandable as an initial reaction…because they ARE, TOUCHING on the fact that there IS no objective meaning that’s been written into things…and their disappointment comes from the fact that they’re no longer RUNNING from it in bad faith.

But Ernst Bloch would see this person differently. This isn’t someone that’s living in utter nihilism where nothing MEANS anything to them…and the fact they FEEL like something’s MISSING should be the FIRST thing that makes them suspicious of that fact.

To Bloch…this person if we’re just playing the odds here…is likely someone who’s been hurt. And disappointed in the past.

Here’s what he’d predict: this person… at some PRIOR point in their life… had an IDEA of what the world was and of what future possibilities were supposed to look like. But it was an inaccurate PICTURE of how the world was going to play out. Then the ACTUAL world as it IS came to pass, reality set in, they were HIT with this disappointment…and then they tried to protect themselves from FUTURE disappointment…by retreating into a kind of cynicism about everything.

Picture someone raised in a religious household…that finds themselves in their 20’s not believing in what was promised to them. Picture someone deadset on finding love…they go out on dates for years, and when they finally find someone they like…the person ghosts them.

The problem is not a lack of meaning at the level of the universe here…the problem is a surplus of hope or anticipatory consciousness, it was EXPECTING a future world to come about that never materialized…and then the very understandable reaction of finding a way to RUN from relying on the future, so that you aren’t disappointed again.

And real quick before we get more into the details of this…can we just take a second to acknowledge HOW different the message is to the person that’s feeling kind of nihilistic. It’s not, oh look at how smart you are that you figured out the truth about the universe! Now you gotta CREATE a system of MEANING to be able to get OUT of that nihilism!

No it’s something MORE like…look, considering all the future worlds that you think would be better for you…taking action to make those things happen…that is ALWAYS gonna be a part of you. It’s a part of you in your most motivated moment…and your darkest moment, it’s IMMANENT to the kind of consciousness you have. And if you wanted out of this place…it’s not a matter of finding the right philosophical argument that’s gonna give you MEANING to your life…it’s gonna be allowing yourself to FEEL… this CORE PIECE of what you are again.

This is why getting OUT there…DOING things, participating…this is why bringing DOWN those cynical barriers that we put up can be so therapeutic to people. If Camus says in HIS work that philosophical suicide is when we fall into abstractions to avoid the absurd…then in Bloch’s work…HIS philosophical suicide might be CYNICISM…because cynicism is what STOPS your ability… to imagine and bring about the Not-Yet. It keeps you LOCKED IN to a kind of cynical present moment… where yeah you’re never gonna be disappointed, but you’re also living in denial of something that drives you at an ontological level.

Hope is a process that’s going on constantly and at practically every level. We are always, positioned within time, oriented towards the future, co-evolving with the events of history as they’re not only unfolding themselves but also being carried out by US.

Events happen, tensions build, say it’s something very simple like you need to drink some water. You start to get thirsty, tensions building, you imagine HOW to get a drink of water, you bring that world into being by FINDING the water and drinking it…and then the tension dissipates for a while. Say it’s a political election…there are issues that matter to the people in a society… tension builds, candidates campaign, arguments, people vote and finally someone gets elected, and then the tension dissipates for a while.

Our consciousness and the world…co-constitute each other.

Now MUCH of Bloch’s work in this area is going to be him looking at culture…and identifying places where we SEE EVIDENCE of this hope and anticipatory consciousness…but we often attribute it to something ELSE in everyday life.

One of his most FAMOUS examples of this…is the way that he frames MUSIC along these same lines.

This would become one of the most influential aesthetic theories of the 20th century after he wrote it. Essentially the question he asks is: why is it that listening to music…can get us SO viscerally fired up to DO something, EXCITED…but something else that’s no doubt still a big deal…say a policy paper that is gonna really change things, legislation…that doesn’t really have the same IMPACT on us. It’s kind of boring sometimes actually.

The REASON he thinks is that music is like a triple distilled, purified version…of that fundamental orientation we have towards bringing about a future world where things are resolved.

First of all just at a mechanical level: what is music…but chords and notes and rhythms that produce a tension…and then DIFFERENT chords notes and rhythms that RESOLVE that tension. Tension…resolution. Few measures later: Tension…resolution. Next time you’re listening to music try to hear it that way. Music speaks the same language…of a core aspect of what we are to Bloch.

But MORE than that: think about how many similarities music has to the way he sees our consciousness unfolding. Music is ALSO…something always rooted in time, and so it always captures the NOW of a lived experience. Music is, by design as HE says: incomplete, non-discursive, and ineffable. And JUST LIKE the future worlds we live in consideration of…there’s never gonna be a day where music just ENDS…because someone has WRITTEN the perfect song. This is ALWAYS going to be going on.

Music then is what he calls a type of experiential metaphysics. It’s a GATEWAY…into imagining a better future. It CALLS upon a person that listens to it… to encounter themselves…in a way that gets them to CONSIDER their own future possibilities.

But then aside from any TRANSCENDENT qualities music may have…it’s equally important for Bloch for us to remember how music is IMMANENTLY rooted in the historical, social conditions that it was produced in.

I mean after all: the MUSIC…produced in a particular time and place…can tell you a LOT about the people that created it, and the hope that drove them to create something in the first place.

He analyzes the music of Beethoven in his work…actually he analyzes the classical sonata as a form of music… that Beethoven’s seen as one of the BEST at. And what he says about it… is that on one hand it is definitely music that is a product of its times. It’s FILLED with revolutionary tension he says. There’s intensity in his music that is an obvious reflection of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars he lived through— a world FILLED with conflict.

You know, from the way that sonatas will have very different sounding themes that clash against each other…to the use of codas in the music as a way of returning back to the beginning with what feels like a provisional victory: for Ernst Bloch Beethoven’s music is more than just a genius collection of sounds. It actually is a REFLECTION…of the way history was unfolding during the time he was writing it.

In fact…this same thinking is going to extend… to any other piece of artwork you might see as well. Bloch says that there is no such thing… as a totally RANDOM piece of artwork…where someone’s just completely detached from the hope that drives them in every other aspect of life.

Art is ALWAYS a part of what he calls a “wish landscape”. Where everything is at least a SUBTLE reflection…of what the artist feels is missing in the present, or possible in the future.

Take something that SEEMS like it may be just escapism and fantasy…something like a superhero movie. To Ernst Bloch, powerful superheroes saving the world from evil that’s invading from another planet…is that just a totally random story? Or could that be a coded fantasy that a society has towards values like justice or strength…in a world where the PEOPLE, feel like they’re powerless to change anything.

The point of ALL of this is to say that hope, and anticipatory consciousness…is all AROUND us if you’re looking for it. In fact, that’s what he thinks one of the key tasks is for a would be philosopher. THEIR job is to look at the culture around them, decode and identify these wish landscapes by reading them dialectically…and then their job is to ILLUMINATE these possible future worlds in a way that allows for them to be understood by the public, so that it may lead to actual, historical striving TOWARD that new world.

Now it’s likely… there’s people out there listening to this that are a bit skeptical toward the idea of hope. I mean after all, don’t people that sit around hoping for things too much… often not take ACTION on the things that need to get done? I mean sure, hope may reveal future possibilities sometimes…but its JUST as likely someone has a delusional hope that PREVENTS them from bringing a new world about…what would Ernst Bloch have to say about that point?

Bloch addresses this directly and makes one of the most important distinctions in this entire early period of his work. There is a big difference he says between BLINDLY hoping for something that you have very little evidence is going to ever happen…and hoping for something that’s rooted in the actual conditions of the world that you’re paying close attention to.

Remember our friend from before that was having an existential crisis. And how they HOPED for something, maybe a little TOO ambitiously…and then were disappointed when the reality of the world hit them. For Ernst Bloch, this disappointment they experienced…where they were shown a disconnect between how they THINK the world is versus how it ACTUALLY is…disappointment under this HOPE way of looking at things, actually becomes a moment to celebrate.

Because disappointment…means you’ve now calibrated your understanding of the world to something MORE in line with how it actually is. Yet another example of how framing things in terms of hope…CHANGES the existential WEIGHT of whatever it is.

But how do you tell the difference in practice between something that’s just wishful thinking or fantasy…and something that’s actually rooted in history and the state of the world as it is: something he calls educated hope as opposed to false hope.

Well in the chapter he dedicates to this he lays out what you could call four criteria, where if you’re imagining a future world, you can run it through this filter to see if it holds up as something that’s more than fantasy.

Should be said: he only gives TWO of these explicitly in the chapter, but the other two are implied by the discussion that goes on IN the chapter. I’ll list them first and then I’ll go through with examples: a hope needs to have tendency, latency, the ability to be mobilized and the ability to be revised.

Let’s start with tendency. If you have a future world that you’re imagining that you think would make the world a better place…you have to ask: does this future… build on something that’s genuinely, already happening in the world?

I mean in the sense the historical events typically move from one thing to the next…is the world you’re imagining… something that can REALLY come about given the current state of things?

You can imagine why this is important. If I lost my job and I’m looking for a new one…and my big plan for the future is that I’m not gonna look for a job because AI is gonna take over the world in three weeks… and all those idiots that went to work the last three weeks are REALLY gonna wish they had that time back…this isn’t exactly imagining a possibility…that’s rooted in what’s currently going on. This is ONE filter you could run your scenario through.

The second filter is what he calls latency. DOES this future world reflect…SOME, REAL desire or hope that people are already FEELING? Even if it’s not fully conscious in public conversation yet…is there ARTWORK that’s being created where other people obviously feel this way too?

You can imagine why THIS is important. Say we have an energy crisis. Solar panels may be things that a lot of people wish they could use to supplement their energy needs. I mean who wouldn’t want to harness the sun if it were super easy to do.

But say the future world YOU’RE imagining…is to have hamsters run on wheels to generate power. You’re gonna summon the world’s hamster population and everyone out there’s gonna have clean, renewable energy.

Well, while this is POSSIBLE, I guess, from a material perspective…this isn’t something that anyone really wants. I guess a couple of you out there may want it now that I’ve said it. But you get what I’m saying: a plan has to be rooted in a place where there’s enough collective energy to be harnessed to bring it about.

Third filter: the ability to be mobilized. OUTSIDE of the future world being something people want in THEORY…ANY hope that is rooted… in real historical potential, HAS to be something that MOVES people. For example on a personal level: you can want something in THEORY…but if it doesn’t MOVE you to take action on it… then that’s probably a hope that belongs in the fantasy category at least for now. On a more societal level: same thing. Picture how many things people will sign a petition for…but won’t change their behavior in even SMALL ways to actually make it happen. This future world has to MOVE people.

Last filter is the ability to be revised. Is this plan for the future… something that can survive the unexpected nature of reality? If something serious that we didn’t expect were to happen and the plan gets messed up…are there ways to pivot… where this isn’t just going to end the whole operation just because we ran into one thing?

For the individual: say you wanna become an NBA basketball player. Is it a good idea… to quit your job, drop out of school, and bet everything in your life on some try out you’re gonna have in six months?

It’s not that the HOPE is wrong altogether… it’s that it’s too rigid. If the plan can’t be revised… are you REALLY ever putting yourself in a good place to make it a reality?

On a larger scale, something like Mao’s China comes to mind. The great leap forward was something that was so ideologically rigid…that once the plan was put in place…there was no possible way for ANYONE to correct course after that…people would lie about their production numbers just to avoid punishment…the government would silence people if they were critical of the plan…40 million people starved to death… in part because of how impossible it was to revise the future they were aiming for.

So these are four different FILTERS that you could use to analyze any hope you’re thinking about for a better future. And should be said they’re also useful if you wanted to critically think about some of the collective solutions that get brought up in the media sometimes.

Take colonizing Mars as a great example of this. And as you guys know personally, it’s never my ambition to put anything down here, it’s just not what I try to do on this podcast, but this is a great example to illustrate what Bloch’s talking about here. Does colonizing Mars… pass the test of being an educated hope rather than just wishful thinking?

Well let’s look at it… tendency: is traveling to and living on Mars… rooted in an actual reality that can exist right now? Uh, no. Because there are very real technological barriers to that happening that need to get solved first. Dealing with the reduced gravity, the terraforming, radiation, even just SUPPLYING an operation like that…it’s not that the DREAM of it is bad. But I think Bloch would say there are more immediate futures that need to be accomplished first…before ANYONE sits around idly waiting for Mars to be the solution to their problems.

Latency: is there a REAL, HOPE that people have to carry this out and LIVE on Mars. I think the answer to that is yes. People really DO want a fresh start, or to diversify humanity on multiple planets.

How bout mobilizing it. Is this something where the people that WANT it to happen… can actually take action on it? I think, no. This is mostly something billionaires dream about…and that billionaires can take action on. MOST people all they can really do is sit around and watch the rockets get launched…and then cheer really LOUD about it!

Revising this as we go: is there a fallback plan… if Mars fails? Doesn’t really seem like it. Where do we go Venus? Antarctica? I mean in terms of plans that imagine a better future for us…it does seem to have quite a bit of the whole: this HAS to WORK energy.

Anyway these filters can be applied to ANY future world that gets dreamed up.

One of my favorite ideas FROM the work of Ernst Bloch…is his concept of nonsynchronicity.

The idea is… with ONE of the cool things that stems out of this… is that when you look at people…when you SEE someone you disagree with about something important…try not to see this person as someone that’s DUMBER than you…or just isn’t as DEVELOPED and if only they could mature in their thinking more they’d be thinking the exact same way YOU do…INSTEAD think of people…as occupying different moments in TIME when it comes to the history of ideas.

Say you know someone who’s an atheist. Die hard materialist, nihilist, REASON is the most important thing in the universe.

Now this position…as we know from recently on this show…some of the most influential philosophers in the WORLD held this position back in the 19th century…this was the position that made SENSE given the philosophical climate they lived in. And there are both strengths and weaknesses to HOLDING this as a worldview: maybe this is someone that has a harder time connecting in a meaningful way to the world around them…but this is ALSO probably someone that has a much easier time not being renunciative, HATING things about themselves simply because they’re FEELING it.

To balance this out let’s consider ANOTHER example… of a religious person, a Christian. Strengths and weaknesses to this position too: maybe they struggle… with certain classic arguments like how to explain evil in the world, how to align the findings of science with scripture, those kinds of things…but maybe they have a much EASIER time with things like identity. They know exactly who they are. Or with meaning. They know exactly how things fit IN to a larger picture.

The point of all this is that Bloch would say we have people from different moments in history…living TOGETHER TODAY, all at the same time.

And when you DON’T see people as being on some linear stage of development…. but instead as being an embodiment of a type of historical consciousness…not only is it easier to have compassion for them I think, but if you wanted to have conversations with them that get them to see the world differently, if changing minds was a PART of some future world you’re trying to bring about… well instead of telling them that they need to just grow up and realize the TRUTH about the universe…you can instead… look at the conversations that MOVED historical consciousness along during the time that THEIR views were POPULAR, and try to ask THOSE questions in a way that might get them to see another possibility.

For example if you knew someone that believed in more or less the same stuff as a peasant from the Feudal system, well maybe the questions and ideas of the Renaissance could be particularly helpful to them if they wanted to see things differently. Just a very interesting ALTERNATIVE way of looking at other people and their ideas.

It’s important to say that to Ernst Bloch…there is no point…where these future possibilities are going to magically come to an end. Our consciousness and the world are ALWAYS gonna be entangled, imagining new ways that the world might be that could be better for us.

The only thing we can REALLY do… is to try to not get caught in the illusion that we HAVE arrived at some sort of endpoint, whether by retreating into cynicism, or by not looking critically enough at our OWN futures that we’d like to bring about.

You know it’s interesting…how the answers to existential questions CHANGE…when it’s a matter of immanence as opposed to something lacking. What in one view can be thought of as despair…despair because we SO DESIRE for there to BE something there… but there’s nothing…it’s ALSO possible for that SAME feeling of despair…to be evidence of the fact that more is possible…and more than that I OBVIOUSLY, CARE… about whether one of those world comes about over all the others. And I guess for Bloch it becomes a matter… of allowing ourselves to FEEL…how much we DO care.