Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 13:09:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> Subject: Re: Mental illness I wrote: "Our impositions (whether collective or individual) transform the world." To which Tobin responded: "These appear to be fairly classic conventionalist statements, in which consciousness creates reality itself, and there is no rational basis for preferring one analysis over another." This is an incorrect interpretation of my statement. I am a materialist, a historical materialist, to be precise. Human imposition on the world transforms the world materially through the labor process. Our consciousness is a production of past and present social interaction, just as other structures are products of the same historical labor process. I am in my posts precisely criticizing the position of idealism (and it borders on absolute idealism in many of these contributions). It is idealism to suppose that any one epistemological system can render the truth of the world, that a mental category can be an absolute statement of reality. Such a belief does not rise to the level of being even strongly objective (to borrow Sandra Harding's phrase). As for the ability to judge which knowledge system is superior, I have never had a problem with this. My value system remains intact despite my rejection of theology. > Andy, I don't think we should take even our own "first order reality" for > granted. Neither do I. As I said in my post, critique is best applied internal to a knowledge system. Since we are products of society we begin with self-criticism, and then we move out into the intersubjective, into the realm of our collective products. Our objective reality must be suspended in order to reveal truths in the social system. If we were to take our first order reality as gospel then we would fail to recognize in all the ways we suffer from false consciousness and inauthenticity. > If the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of individual agency, > or at most a concept of co-agency with the gods, did wholly human agency > *in fact* not exist? Or to take a modern example, if people in the U.S. > have no concept of class agency, would that mean there is no class agency > as a real force in the U.S.? I ask this without assuming classes are or > aren't actually agents: the point is whether the presence or absence of a > concept means the presence or absence of the reality. With regards to ancient Greece, human agency is a construction created in a latter age in a different culture, as Tobin has pointed out. He asserts what I would assert, that human agency did not exist, and I assume, therefore, it was not an objective reality. We have now objectivated the ontology of human agency. I see nothing that would prevent the social scientist from applying the (relatively new) social construct of human agency in understanding the Greek culture. Nothing I have said here would imply that one cannot use a knowledge system with respect to a culture >from which that knowledge system being employed was not a product. What is idealism is to believe that mental illness is an absolute truth, existing somehow independent of human society, and that through perfecting our knowledge system we have somehow revealed its (near) true form, and that the savages are still toiling in mysticism. I would consider this to be the ontological fallacy, that is assuming that because we objectivated it is somehow transhistorically and transculturally objective. This is religion. Andy
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