Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 12:08:05 -0700 (PDT)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: Bhaskar, immanent criticism, Adorno, Lukacs, Rockmore--oy!
Cc: frankfurt-school-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


Michael already knows some of my thoughts concerning his query (see below),
but I can see I will have to find ways of expressing them with greater
clarity and logical connectedness.  But instead of doing that right now, I
want to indulge in a little digression.  But before I digress, let me say
that there seems to be a paradox involved in Michael's project, namely the
discussion of immanent critique in a generalized and formalistic manner,
irrespective of any possible subject matter and philosophical commitment of
the material to be analyzed.  What if the general, context-free formulation
of the principles of immanent critique themselves constitute an external and
not immanent approach?  Now to the digression.

I've just read 100 pages of Tom Rockmore's IRRATIONALISM: LUKACS AND THE
MARXIST VIEW OF REASON.  This is a very disturbing experience, one in which
I experience deja vu all over again.  Perhaps it will be relevant to this
Bhaskar-Adorno flap, perhaps not.  Rockmore begins by posing an important,
key issue, and then spoiling his entire project with a distorted perspective
and obtuseness that proves yet again what unbelievable blockheads all
philosophers are, esp. given their stubborn insistence on remaining
"philosophers".  

Rockmore wants to know what status Marx himself conceived for his own
thought--is it philosophy, is it science, how does it justify its own truth
claims, how does it justify its judgment of the ideological nature of all
previous philosophy and social thought, etc.?  How does Marx's and Marxist
(Rockmore distinguishes the two) rationality establish their own superiority
to bourgeois pretensions to rationality?  Rockmore is on to the fact that
Marx is not interested in merely proving the validity or invalidity of
knowledge claims by means of utilizing the traditional modes of
argumentation.  Because Marx sees all thought as a product of social
causation (a concept that Rockmore refuses to entertain as being a serious
one), the answers to the problems of philosophy cannot ultimately be
determined internal to philosophy itself.  And this is the problem that
vexes Rockmore, who, in the final analysis, is nothing more than a
(decidedly non-Marxist) philosopher, the pathetic bastard.

Then Rockmore proceeds, by means of his own categorization of abstract
ideas, to get Marx wrong, to get Engels wrong, to get Marxism as a tradition
wrong, and even to screw up on his hero Lukacs.  I haven't made a catalog of
all of the devices he uses to get everything wrong, but I find it
fascinating that one who has mastered the entire tradition of German
philosophy still insists that all concepts have to have fixed, definite
meanings ruthlessly demarcated and separated from one another, all preserved
in their autonomous identities, esp. the concepts of philosophy and science,
and the absolute demarcation of Marxism from non-Marxism.  Rockmore is
obsessed with what fits into the realm of philosophy and what counts as
distinctively philosophical as opposed to something else.  Indeed,
"philosophy" is all he knows.  Therefore he is well-equipped to show the
influence of Neo-Kantianism on the early Lukacs and its presence in HISTORY
AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS, particularly the influence of Rickert and Lask.  We
shall see how much farther Rockmore gets from here.

The very question of the social causation of ideal and ideological notions
is not only incomprehensible to Rockmore, but he misrepresents it with the
au courant petty bourgeois label of "contextualism", Marx help us.  Of
course Rockmore is vexed with the paradox of how does someone like Marx
manage to escape the general brainwashing, but he avoids (at least up to p.
106) taking a single step towards answering this question.  Rockmore
suggests some shadowy,  indeterminate areas in Marx's analysis, but he lacks
the tools to follow up.  Rockmore does not realize, to begin with, that an
argument for social causation is not by itself an argument for the falsity
of beliefs.  If beliefs may be socially caused and be either true or false
or illusory, then we have the whole project before us analyzing how any of
these outcomes becomes possible.  We should add that Marx is not interested
merely in truth and falsehood, but in reality and appearance, and how
appearance is structured and then fetishized, this too as a product of an
underlying reality.

Perhaps y'all can derive some lessons for this debate over Bhaskar, Adorno,
and immanent critique.  But I'm going to move on.

Now I segue into my next subtopic.  If the problems of philosophy cannot be
fully comprehended or answered within philosophy itself, where are we?  Here
is where I want to bring in the Feuerbachian and Marxian notion that
philosophy is a form of alienated, inverted consciousness, and is not truly
what it purports to be.  This is not the bourgeois "hermeneutics of
suspicion" we have heard so much about, for hermeneutics is not what it
purports to be, either, being the same sort of animal as the rest of
aprioristic and idealistic philosophy.  

Another crucial point: we need to distinguish, in a characteristic Marxian
inversion, between the philosophy of self-consciousness and the
self-consciousness of philosophy.  Marx rejected the philosophy of
self-consciousness (cf. mockery of Bruno Bauer) when he discovered how
thoroughly unconscious it really was. (Lesson for today there too!)
Feuerbach began the process of making philosophy truly self-conscious by
going beyond it, but he could not follow through.  This was left to Marx.

Now I jump forward to today and what we face dealing with a variety of
intellectual traditions claiming some connection to Marx.  First, critical
theory and the Frankfurt School.  The Franks collectively constitute the
most massive and most sustained and most sophisticated of the philosophical
strains of Marxism, dealing with the history of philosophy, methodology,
culture, ideology.  I would not make the same claims for them with respect
to political economy, history, or anything having to so with mathematics and
the natural sciences.  Overall, though, they carry a large bulk of the
self-consciousness of Marxism and society at large, in spite of some of
their own defects, understanding of which would bring self-consciousness to
a new level.  As the most cultivated of European humanistic intellectuals,
they bear all the advantages and some of the handicaps of their thorough
mastery of European philosophical and high-cultural tradition.  As bearers
of this tradition, they may be partly responsible but ultimately cannot be
held accountable for the sort of academic riffraff that gravitate to the
Franks precisely because they provide such a warm and cozy place to curl up
and contemplate their own alienation, to which they commit themselves for
all eternity.

Now, on to critical realism and Bhaskar.  I salute CR as an antidote to the
subjective idealism and irrationalism of postmodernism from within the
academy itself.  I'm glad the CR folks are there to fight back and reclaim
reality.  Though I am bored with the subject matter, I even support their
hair-splitting endeavors to combat methodological individualism (and
mystical holism, too I trust) and to construct an adequate ontology for the
social sciences.  And I also support the project of constructing ontologies
of the natural world as well.  As long as one recognizes, which I hope most
philosophers of science do today, that ontology today is always somewhat ex
post facto, or subject to revision with advances in the sciences, and not to
be superimposed in a Procrustean fashion upon empirical reality.  I'm sure
CR is also more sophisticated than the old dialectical materialism (and
constitutes a far more productive advance than Althusser ever did), which,
unlike others, I think is supportable insofar as it serves as a
non-dogmatic, rough-and-ready ontology for relating the categories of the
physical world to one another and to mental (ideal) categories.  Especially
the commitment to realism serves to rectify the anti-materialist and
antiscientiifc biases embedded in other otherwise productive strains of
Marxism, not to mention contemporary thought in its entirety.

Some time ago I expressed various sarcastic outbursts of skepticism
regarding Bhaskar, because I feared CR would become yet another bureaucratic
academic enterprise, facilitated by the obscurity of Bhaskar's own writing,
in which the goal becomes not to deal with the most intrinsically
interesting or pressing intellectual problems, but with merely impressing
one's colleagues in conformance with their agendas and priorities.  Of
course I realize that, as with any other group of workers, intellectual
workers lack the power to control the conditions of their work, but as
_intellectuals_ intellectuals have the obligation to rise above the
particularistic social networks in which they are trapped.  

I am not here to pass any judgments now, but I am vitally interested to
discover how Bhaskar incorporates the philosophy of self-consciousness into
his system.  Beyond that, I want to see if the CR-community as a whole
learns to embody within itself the self-consciousness of philosophy.

So here we stand: at one pole of modern history we have the still-enigmatic
Marx of 150 years ago.  Now we are reacting to various traditions that have
filtered Marx and other strains of the intellectual heritage in differential
and distinctive ways, which come between us and Marx.  (And some of those
who complain about Engels as an obstacle to the real Marx are much worse
obstacles than Engels ever was!)  And there are our own differing,
distinctive relationships to these traditions and to Marx, all of which
implicate our own methods of interpreting one another.  I mention the
Rockmore book because it seems to me to exemplify the same sorts of problems
we are struggling with here.

At 11:14 AM 8/21/97 -0400, MSalter1-AT-aol.com wrote:
>My own question is what are the limits of, and difficulties for, the
>dialectical strategy of immanent criticism, 



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