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. --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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