File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-05-14.000, message 20


Date: Wed, 30 Apr 1997 21:38:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: BHA: HAS BHASKAR ADVANCED SOCIAL THEORY & SOCIAL ANALYSIS OF PHILOSOPHY?


Thanks to all for their thoughtful responses.  I single out Doug
Porpora for reply only because he interestingly mischaracterizes
my aims in the process of trying to define them.  My objection is
not exactly that discussion is focused on conceptual rather than
empirical matters, though the spirit behind such a suggestion is
groping towards a more apt characterization.  I would say the
issue is deliberation about primitive concepts which however
significant are not such that cover much conceptual territory in
the long run.   Let me give an analogous example.  Several times
in the past few years I have got caught up in debates over
dialectics and formal logic, and the relationship between the
possible existence of dialectical "contradictions", esp. in
nature, to contradictions in thought.  While this is also a
legitimate intellectual issue, it is not only an old one, but one
that never gets beyond the most elementary considerations.  When
all is said and done one has not progressed very far in
productively applying dialectical notions to explain anything of
any range or complexity.  The problem is that one remains fixated
on only the most elementary logical conceptions without
productively elaborating them.  Suppose we were to endlessly
debate over the definitions of time and space without ever
discovering the rate at which objects fall to earth and that they
reach the ground at the same time, barring wind resistance.  This
is how I see the debate on methodological individualism and other
debates conducted so far within the Bhaskarite camp.  I am still
looking for new developments.

I brought up the Young Hegelians and Marx's development for at
least one important reason: the question of what philosophy is and
whether it has a future.  Feuerbach's most important innovation
was to recognize that philosophy was not what it purported to be,
i.e. its logical structures and arguments, but that it reflected
an inverted, alienated consciousness, just like religion.  Hence
the task of the new philosophy is not just to point out errors in
previous philosophy, i.e. to engage in debate within the camp of
philosophy itself, but to jump outside of philosophy and diagnose
it from another perspective.

There is also debate over the end of philosophy and whether Marx
intended to further the project of philosophy or abolish it.
Bhaskar, like Engels, has been accused of betraying Marx's
intention by attempting to construct a philosophy, whereas the
very project of Marxist philosophy is held to be an illusion.  I
don't subscribe to this view myself.  But the question is: is
Bhaskar's philosophy supple enough to capture the dynamism of
philosophy as a social-ideological phenomenon, and not just by
exposing the duplicitous logical structures of idealist thought.

>Well, i agree that such idealism has often been reactionary but
>would question whether the political consequences of a
>philosophy measure its truth.  To counter the politics of a
>movement, we need also to counter its claim to truth, and to do
>that, we need to arrive at the truth ourselves. If idealism is
>our political enemy, then we must conceptually argue through the
>truth of realism. Did the Frankfurt school, which analyzed
>idealism, do that?

I don't know the answer re Frankfurt School.  However, your
argument is a red herring and has nothing to do with me.  Idealism
is reactionary because it obscures the truth, not because of its
political consequences, which can only flow from its falsification
of reality.

>Finally, there is a tendency to think that concrete, empirical
>work is closer to "the struggle" than abstract, conceptual work.

Another red herring, because this is not my issue.

The way to destroy postmodernism is to attack its very historical
roots.  It is necessary to go back to the foundations of
lebensphilosophie and hermeneutics and expose their lies, and
postmodernism will come tumbling down as a consequence.  I am
amassing a whole reading list but have not yet begun to read.  On
my list are Adorno's critiques of Kierkegaard and Adorno, Lukacs'
THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON which I cannot find anywhere, and
several other books which promise to get at the root of the
hypocritical illusions fostered in the tradition leading up to and
beyond Heidegger.   Right now I am reading a little-known but
instructive book called CRISIS CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY by Andras Gedo, which though issuing from the Stalinist
camp, effectively trashes the entire history of both positivism
and lebensphilosophie, while suggesting their ultimate
interdependence as outgrowths of bourgeois culture.

In sum, my aim is to expose how and why reality is falsified and
where the corrupt delusions of bourgeois intellectuals come from.
Marketing an unoriginal philosophy under the name of "critical
realism" (authored by somebody who intentionally writes unreadable
prose) in the academic marketplace and engaging in microscopic
professional debates on methodological individualism does not move
me.  I am not claiming that critical realism is no more than this.
I am waiting to see if it bears fruit.


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