File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-03-08.181, message 109


Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:37:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Spoon Collective <spoons-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Re: BHA: truth (fwd)




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 1997 10:14:43 -0500 (EST)
From: MSPRINKER-AT-ccmail.sunysb.edu
To: owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: truth


               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            08-Mar-1997 10:01am EST
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    shmage-AT-pipeline.com                  ( _owner-bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU )
 
Subject: Re: BHA: truth

The Marx passage to which Shane refers comes, not in a letter to
Engels, but at the end of the Introduction to the Grundrisse.
Nor is it as silly as it's been made to sound.

Marx's worry is perfectly reasonable--commonsensical, even--from
the ponit of view of historical materialism:  to wit, how is it
that even though the mode of social being (which determines consciousness,
according to Marx) that produced Greek epic and tragedy (for
Marx, the slave mode of production) is now a thing of the past,
we can still experience the pleasures offered by these works?
If one believes in historical determination of consciousness,
the question is a real one.  Marx's answer, which is not entirely
satisfactory, but neither is it just loopy, is that works of
art possess a set of distinctive features, linked to fundamental
human experiences of play, that make them continually available
to different cultures and epochs.  Marx was a faithful disciple
of Weimar Classicism in this respect.

What Marx might have said, in answer to his own question, was
that the appreciation of Greek art that he, like so many of his
generation, valued so highly was less a matter of anything
intrinsic to the art than it was to do with a specific educational
attainment that made these objects desirable for a particular
class of people.  After all, plenty of people around the
world would not experience similar pleasure when viewing Greek
art, either in Marx's day or our own.  Realist aesthetic
theory need not entail cultural chauvinism.

Michael Sprinker



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