Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left

Ernst Bloch, Loren Goldman, Peter Thompson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231548144
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle.

Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna's and Aquinas's interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna's reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna's world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch's own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

NOTES

A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION

1. Ernst Bloch, “Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke,” Sinn und Form 4, no. 3 (1952): 8–59.

2. Ernst Bloch, Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1952); Ernst Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem: seine Geschichte und Substanz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972).

3. Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 7:479–546. Bloch describes the work’s publication history in a letter to Peter Huchel, no. 8, in Ernst Bloch, Briefe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 2:859.

4. Jordani Bruni Nolani [Giordano Bruno], Opera Latine Conscripta, trans. Francesco Fiorentino (Neapoli: D. Morano, 1879), 1.1.58–71.

5. Avicenna, Die Metaphysik Avicennas, enthaltend die Metaphysik, Theologie, Kosmologie und Ethik, trans. Max Horten (Halle an der Saale: Rudolf Haupt, 1907); Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, trans. Michael Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005).

INTRODUCTION

1. Ernst Bloch to Peter Huchel, no. 8, in Ernst Bloch, Briefe (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 2:858. Bloch uses both “Ibn Sina” and “Avicenna,” and we follow him throughout.

2. See Robert Pasnau, introduction to The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, rev. ed., ed. Robert Pasnau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–8; Dimitri Gutas, “Origins in Baghdad,” in Pasnau, The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, 9–25.

3. For treatments of Bloch in English, see Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996); Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (London: St. Martin’s, 1982); Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Privatization of Hope (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). The literature in German is more extensive; see the indispensable volumes Unseld Siegried, ed., Ernst Bloch zu Ehren: Beiträge zu seinem Werk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965); Ernst Blochs Wirkung: ein Arbeitsbuch zum 90. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1975); Beat Dietschy, Doris Zeilinger, and Rainer Zimmermann, eds., Bloch-Wörterbuch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

4. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 65, 69; Pierre Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 427.

5. That is, he lived in East Germany at first. Bloch defected to West Germany in 1961.

6. Ernst Bloch’s works in English include Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970); A Philosophy of the Future, trans John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970); Atheism in Christianity (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972; London: Verso, 2009); The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); The Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Steven Plaice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); On Karl Marx (London: Verso, 2018). Man on His Own is a collection of essays, and A Philosophy of the Future is the first part of his Tübingen introductory lectures to philosophy. The main discussions of Bloch’s materialism currently available in English are in The Principle of Hope, 2:686–91, 3:1354–76; the latter section comprises the bulk of On Karl Marx.

7. See Theodor Adorno, “Blochs Spuren” (originally “Grosse Blochmusik”), in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 233–50; Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 408n244; on Nostradamus, see Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future, 427.

8. Jürgen Habermas, “Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 66.

9. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, introduction to Utopia, by Thomas More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ix.

10. Hope is one of Christianity’s three theological virtues alongside faith and love; see 1 Corinthians 13:13.

11. Hesiod, Works and Days, in Hesiod and Theognis, trans. Dorothea Wender (London: Penguin, 1973), ll. 93–99.

12. See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, chaps. 43–55.

13. See Johan Siebers, “Novum,” in Bloch-Wörterbuch, 633–64.

14. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), Gesamtausgabe 5:728; Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:624; Bloch’s emphasis.

15. Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, in Gesamtausg...