Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 01:34:53 -0800 (PST)
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: BHA: PLATO ETC. (11)


Friday afternoon I finally finished PLATO ETC.  I'm going to have to go back
and get the specific notes I missed.  I was impatient to get through the
whole thing rather than pausing to evaluate each individual section.  The
further one reads into the book, the more Bhaskar gets to the meat of the
matter, the more interesting it becomes, though it periodically lapses into
incomprehensibility. Bhaskar saves his comprehensive evaluation of the
philosophical tradition for the final chapters.

I'm going to return to individual chapters and questions and objections,
esp. on Hegel and Marx.  For the moment I want to give some overall
impressions, which highlight the nature of the book, its potential for
somebody who could do with this mess what Collier did for the earlier work,
and the indications of bluffing, trendiness, and huckstering that break out
here and there.

This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink book.  Bhaskar seems so bent on
getting everything into this book, he sacrifices comprehensibility,
exposition, and even large chunks of his philosophy, just to get a little
bit of everything in.  For example, he states that aesthetics is very
important to him, but he's got nothing to say except to endorse Terry
Eagleton and utter one or two banalities (pp. 155-6). 

There are some disturbing indications that Bhaskar is accepting the validity
of other people's ideas at their say-so without seriously investigating them
for himself.  Also, he cites certain philosophers without either seriously
analyzing or criticizing them.  Aside from the impenetrable jargon, it
appears Bhaskar wants to take pains to let us know he is not some old
fashioned dialectical materialist but is au courant and has incorporated all
the big trends, esp. the most trendy trends, of our time, so that his
philosophy really is sophisticated enough to outdo all competitors.  So he
quotes but has almost nothing to say about Derrida and other trendy figures.
At various places in the book Heidegger pops up, but we are never given any
serious indication of how Heidegger fits into Bhaskar's system.  All this
smacks of superficiality, dishonesty, and fakery.

I want to cite a few examples of some of the more egregious examples of
asininity, which are a tip-off that Bhaskar needs to be P.C. with his mostly
academic audience--people like you and not like me.

Finally asking some essential questions about how and what counts as
philosophy and why it is the way it is, Bhaskar descends to the following
bit of banality:

"My story is obviously only a story of western philosophy, so we have to ask
to what extent the history of philosophy, indeed philosophy itself, is
Eurocentric. For, on the one hand, there is evidence, most dramatically
portrayed in Martin Bernal's _Black Athena_, of the African and Asian roots
of Greek culture, including its mythology and poetry out of which the
origins of Greek philosophy ... arose."  (p. 211)

Bhaskar asks a whole slew of rhetorical questions in addition to these,
which he doesn't take the trouble to seriously answer.  Aside from his
uncritical reliance on Bernal's amateur scholarship, Bhaskar fails to point
out what makes Greek philosophy any more or less a ruling class philosophy
than the ruling class philosophy of the Egyptians, or if the two are
isomorphic in the ways that interest us most: i.e. the rational content of
philosophy and not religious mysticism (overlooking the centrality of
reactionary mysticism to Afrocentric crackpots).  This is a lame gesture
towards the P.C. crowd, suggesting a certain opportunism.

Most obnoxious of Bhaskar's gestures toward trendy bullshit is his kowtowing
to feminist drivel (pp. 212-213).  It's as if Hilary Wainwright were looking
over his shoulder with one hand grabbing onto his testicles.  Here are a
couple gems of contemptible idiocy:

"Notoriously Freud did not stop to consider that women might possess a
superior morality, viz. one based on solidarity, trust, and care, to that
which pitted super-ego against id, or, in the Kantian story, duty against
desire."  (p. 212f)

Such a group of women so described do not exist nor have ever existed
anywhere in the world, except in bourgeois feminist propaganda.  A person
claiming to be an underlabourer of science has no business uncritically
parroting such rubbish.

Bhaskar also uncharacteristically descends from the level of concepts to
myth and metaphor to bolster otherwise untenable and trivial conjectures.
Worse, Bhaskar is too much of a coward (does Hilary have the shears in the
other hand?) to bother to venture answers or even opinions to all these
questions.  He doesn't bother to venture an opinion on the most moronic
question of all: is there a distinct female rationality?  (p. 213)
  
Now there is much of value in the later chapters of the book, and there are
indications that Bhaskar understands a great deal of what makes philosophy
tick, but the garbage cited above and much else also suggests he is
bullshitting, bluffing where he does not know, and playing to the crowd most
susceptible to swallowing this crap--and that's you out there in hackademia.



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