File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-09-26.073, message 69


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




   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005