The Necessity of Errors

by John Roberts

Truth and error are interdependent; claims to truth can be made only in the light of previous error. In The Necessity of Errors, John Roberts explores how, up to Hegel, emphasis was placed on error as something that dissolves truth and needs to be eradicated. Drawing on the fragmented corpus of writing on error, from Locke to Luxemburg, Adorno to Vaneigem, and covering five key areas from philosophy to political praxis, this wide-ranging account explores how we learn from error, under what conditions, and with what means. Errors, Roberts finds, are productive, but not in any uniform sense or under all circumstances—a theory of errors needs a dialectics of error.

Genres: Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

John Roberts is a former Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art and now Professor of Art & Aethetics at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1997) and The Philistine Controversy (Verso, with Dave Beech, 2002), plus other books and numerous articles, in Radical Philosophy and elsewhere.

Reviews

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book on a whim after reading Henri Lefebvre’s “Critique of Everyday Life” trilogy. I appreciated Lefebvre’s use of Hegel and have been looking for resources that extend Hegel into other areas. I had hoped that this book was going to give an account of error that was more systematic and “world-building,” but instead it acts as an intervention into a few disciplines that have some relation to error (philosophy as such, science, politics, art). There were some “productive” points being made in this book but otherwise the points and analysis are too tendentious and scattered to know what much to do with them. I got the sense that the book was like a series of papers written in an academic setting that needed to conform to a research criteria (“write a paper that is so-and-so long, use a minimum number of sources, and provide examples as you go”) that were then placed together into a book. As such the book lacks a central argument (errors are good except when they aren’t?) or developmental thesis (the dialectic of truth and error takes on a different material form that is discipline-dependent?). The result is that it was sometimes enjoyable, sometimes helpful, but ultimately discardable. If I’m trying to rethink Hegel in todays context this book does not help me in that regard, so my view of this book may be tainted with the expectation I had going in. Furthermore, I am also reading George Lucas’s “The Destructjon of Reason,” a book I am more inclined to disagree with (there are many yikes to be had when reading Lucas), but one I am finding much more productive in trying to understand what a repetition of Hegel today would look like, which is not a point in “The Necessity of Error”’s favor.