Gerd Irrlitz | Dreaming beyond the everyday

There are great things to be accomplished!" The social utopian Saint-Simon once began his days with this call – and Gerd Irrlitz also lives up to this lofty aspiration. Who, if not a philosopher, should think great thoughts that transcend the flood of opinions and the abyss of dominant interests?

Irrlitz is one of the few surviving Leipzig students of Ernst Bloch, the mastermind of the century. He pursued his career as an unorthodox Marxist philosopher, following his teacher's example. Bloch came to Marxism from the Jewish tradition and brought a "finished work" (Irrlitz) with him from his exile in the USA to Leipzig, where he received a professorship in 1948. Irrlitz admired Bloch, already an older man at the time, for his "youthful, fresh anticipation."

In a conversation with filmmaker Thomas Grimm (a former student of Irrlitz), Irrlitz expressed how a teacher influences his students: by transforming what he absorbs into something of his own. It was the world-opening insights in Irrlitz's lectures on the history of philosophy that continue to resonate with me to this day.

In his 2021 lecture "The Idea of ​​Socialism," he reflects on this: "Even the committed intellectual is no longer easy to speak of after the vanished dawn of the imagined new world. Yet they drew the intellectual line that remains of this age. Their courage and their defeats are the landmarks by which contemporaries dream beyond their everyday lives."

Of course, the encounter between an idea and its history inevitably leads to contradictions. Thinking through this contradiction is the business of philosophy. I attended Irrlitz's first lecture in 1985. It has remained with me, as it was on the topic "What is the History of Philosophy?" and was a sheer overwhelm. But that was precisely what we were looking for, as we were fed up with pre-formulated answers to repeat.

Irrlitz thus led us to the unity of the history of ideas, systems, and problems since Thales and the beginning of philosophy with the question of the origin of all things. The most important element in this simultaneous coexistence of diverse perspectives remains, of course, the history of problems. It is this that establishes the connection between all other areas and also brings them into temporal flux.

This philosopher dispelled any hint of provincialism and ideological simplification in just a few sentences. After all, Stalin hadn't "left the room" in the GDR until 1989, as Stefan Heym once put it. Bloch, deprived of any opportunity to work after his forced retirement, went to Tübingen in 1961.

In the GDR, however, there was a destructive debate in cultural policy over whether Bloch should be considered a Marxist and whether Nietzsche's texts could be published. Even in these debates, Irrlitz proved himself a fearless enlightener, warning that Marxism should not behave like a governess who only ensures that the child Marxism doesn't get its bow dirty.

Gerd Irrlitz, born 90 years ago in Leipzig, grew up in a rebellious middle-class environment. His father was one of the co-founders of the SAP in 1931, which was crushed by the Gestapo in 1935 (Irrlitz's father was sentenced to four and a half years in prison). A few years ago, Irrlitz wrote a worthwhile book about his father and the anti-fascist SAP ("Resistance Not Resignation"), an unorthodox party that was never allowed to be a topic of discussion in the GDR.

From 1953, he studied in Leipzig. After the Hungarian Uprising, he was sent to the Buna factory as a transport worker because of his views that were not in line with the party's. The workers were supposed to educate him. In a way, they actually did, because they respected young people who bore the consequences of their thinking.

I read Irrlitz's first text at the age of 14, in a highly official book of all things: "Socialism – Your World," the state gift everyone received for their youth consecration, which replaced the previous book, "Universe Earth Human." In it, Irrlitz wrote about Spartacus and the slave revolt. 70,000 slaves fought for their freedom and human dignity – in vain. Irrlitz drew not least from Bloch his respect for the poor's desire for freedom and justice. A radical will for humanity brews within them, accompanied by a desire for social change.

With Irrlitz, I learned to recognize fundamental philosophical problems in history. Above all, the relationship of the individual to society. He wrote about this in his 1968 book "The Claim of Reason" (together with Manfred Buhr). For Hegel, the whole thing was the truth – critics subsequently accused him of deifying the Prussian state, which, of course, is too simplistic.

Yet the line of conflict between those who think from the individual and those who start from the whole is indeed impossible to ignore. Hegel identified it in his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy" – and Irrlitz wrote an introduction to this work in 1981. He asks to whom Hegel devotes most extensively in his history. The astonishing result: Hegel needed a full 36 pages for Jakob Böhme (a self-taught shoemaker, and mystic on the threshold of the 17th century), even calling him "the first German philosopher." Thus, under Irrlitz's guidance, one can make numerous discoveries.

He never leveled out the contradiction between the individual and the whole, but cultivated it. This continued even after the "Wende," when he succeeded in astonishing the otherwise closed society of West German Kant scholars with his "Kant Handbook" and distinguished himself with a book on the intellectual biography of Fichte. A man who was dear to his heart—again, Bloch proves to be a guide—because he was someone from the most impoverished background who forged his own path of thought.

Anyone who refuses to surrender to the domination of emotions must practice balancing contradictions. Irrlitz repeatedly astonishes his readers with original interpretations, as in an essay on Mörike's "Fairy Tale of the Safe Man." In what form can a cultural tradition continue that, interrupted by the power of the present, awaits a better future? The answer, which echoes a secret sympathy for Romanticism: "Art is summoned against the shadows of life's sorrow."

A lasting idea must always strive to achieve something. It requires the energy without which all thought remains inconsequential. As a philosopher, Gerd Irrlitz radiates this energy to this day.