From: "Martti Puttonen" <marttipu-AT-cc.spt.fi>
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 12:11:31 +0200
Subject: Re: BHA: The role of the intellectual



Hi Tobin, all,

It seems to me, you, Tobin have made a conclusion, that RB declines 
his social 'left wing'  responsibility as an intellectual and or as a 
philosopher. I don't agree with that because RB helps to take 
into account of all the political philosophy's irrealist features. 

You compare RB's writing style to some other philosopher's according 
the formal ordinal  basis with its narrow reflexivity. RB is well 
aware of  the dilemma of writing for great masses, but he has not 
idea of going with that line in his DPF, which main purpose was 
to elaborate accurately the general idea of dialectics and by that 
forms he presented  new conceptualizations about the totality and  
reflexive action. 

You say that CDR being or becoming accessible for all the people 
depends crucially, at the first hand or at least indirectly, on the 
ability to write for all the people being 'targets' in that society 
and also in a global sphere. I can't catch the logic from where you 
have made that conclusion, because you only presented some intuitive 
comparisons without taking into account the CDR's role and impact 
(not the role of the philosopher in society) on the social 
contextual argumentation and the social scientific explanative 
critics based on CDR logical and dialectical comments.
 
Tobin:
> The larger issue is this: What should be the role of the intellectual in
> society?  Is it strictly to think great thoughts without any requirement
> (such as communicating them), should it consist mainly of talking (or
> bickering) with each other, or should it touch on public life?  In a
> just-published editorial, Edward Said cogently argues that in an era when
> the humanities are sharply under attack both from right-wingers outside the
> scholarly arena and from university administrators eager to sell off
> academic institutions to corporate R&D, humanist intellectuals must back
> away from "highly specialized, exclusivist, and rebarbative approaches" and
> instead rededicate themselves to a sense of intellectual responsibility.
> "As humanists we have a significant place in the society," Said writes, "a
> place that it would be idiotic simply to abandon."

RB perhaps thinks intellectuals (maybe philosophers)  being 
individuals  with their social contextual contradictions who have 
their minimal but so crucial task of preventing some irrealist 
(political) theories and other master-slave relations to have so 
great impact on a given society. The philosopher's ethical task *in 
his or her own society* depends on her taking part in that 
argumentation and everyday living and making absences more visible by 
all means (and also by argumentation). By making ethical natural 
arguments aimed at having new links and impacts on moral realism of 
that society, and that means to have much argumentative cooperation 
with the new social science based on CDR.  That is the world of the 
undetermined open totality and metareflexivity - the third and 
fourth degrees of dialettics.
> 
> Said's use of the word "idiotic" is telling.  It comes from the Greek
> *idios*, and refers to a person who keeps private, separate, alone--who
> doesn't participate in the affairs of the *polis*.  To be idiotic is to be
> anti-political ... and vice versa.  An idiot denies his or her social
> responsibility entirely, in favor of private passions (aestheticism,
> perhaps?).  While I feel that no philosophy's political credentials are set
> in stone (even Heidegger's, whose support of Nazism seems to have escaped
> Mervyn entirely), I think Michael has a point when he says that "CR is a
> leftwing philosophy or it is nothing."  That commitment needs to be taken
> seriously, down to the style of our writing. 

RB does not value philosopher's political  role as very crucial or 
important. For RB there is not or there is no use for the leftwing or 
rightwing philosophy as a science any more, there only is more 
contextual argumentative social life with its undetermined totalities 
and reflexive human actions. 
> 
> So let me ask: Just who are the philosophers for whom Bhaskar is supposedly
> writing?  Have many paid more than the slightest attention to him?  Is he
> discussed or even cited by Habermas, Derrida, or Bhaskar's nemesis Rorty?
> The people who have found Bhaskar most interesting have not been
> professional philosophers, as this list demonstrates.  Most in fact seem to
> be concerned with applying critical realism to a realm of practical
> engagement.  Call us pragmatists, if it makes you feel more highly of
> yourself--but "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
> ways; the point, however, is to change it."  That we have struggled with and
> gained from Bhaskar's recent writing is more a credit to us than to Bhaskar.
> He should bear a responsibility to society, or at least to his actual
> readers.  If a fair number of us are critical of Bhaskar's writing--and
> we're not idiots, despite our lowly PhDs--he should take it seriously.

For RB there always are different philosophers in current times, 
some more engaged with science and with real social life some others, 
maybe more interested in practical political matters in smaller 
subtotalities. But for me CDR  in DPF is before all  a philosophical 
basis for new realist science and epistemology without any new 
irreal and not exact epistemology.
> 
> The point is vital for critical realism.  If it truly strives for human
> emancipation and the absenting of contraints, it *must* engage the issue of
> the intellectual's role in society, and how that role shapes the
> intellectual's product, which for the time being is principally the written
> word.  Does Bhaskar's style (or its absence) absent a constraint, or impose
> one?  My contention (which I believe Ruth and others share) is that in
> certain works, particularly *Dialectic*, it definitely does the latter.  In
> other words, Bhaskar is himself caught in a performative contradiction.

As I said above *Dialectic* is a general formulation of the 
philosophical science with a dynamic relation to social science. RB 
is well aware (which he also said in the introduction of that 
book) that this book is not made for more important ethical political 
matters. That contradiction is not possible to avoid in that sense, 
but that does not decrease DPF's value as a scientific philosophy, 
quite the opposite. 
> 
> Although "comparisons are odorous," as Dogberry says, if we really must
> compare Bhaskar to someone, the most appropriate is not an idealist
> apologist for the right like those Mervyn proposes, but Marx.  Marx is not
> simple, he's not easy to digest, he's not always clear.  But he didn't allow
> himself needless convolutions or ignore the importance of grounding theory
> in the concrete.  And he could *write*.  Who can ignore the play of
> language, the reversals, the metaphors, the allegories, and the delicious
> black humor in the Critique of Hegel or the Communist Manifesto or Capital
> itself?  Marx operated on a very high level, but once he got past Hegel and
> Feuerbach he didn't particularly write for other philosophers or even for
> other economists.  He wrote for those who needed and could use his writing.
> And for a time at least, Capital could often be found dog-eared in workers'
> homes.  Despite our reduced numbers and power, Marxists still today are a
> force in the world in a way that Kantians aren't.  Forgive me, list, but I
> think that--for a long time at least--Marx will remain far more influential
> than Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, or even Bhaskar.  This is not, by any stretch
> of the imagination, solely due to his writing; but his writing contributed
> and contributes to that power.

Marx never understood or argumented more exactly about those third 
and fourth degrees of dialectics, and making that makes it necessary 
to take a leave from the formal and irrealist  argumentation, 
which seems to be  so stylistic and politically powerfull for Tobin 
(?). Reflexive humanity is a new conception which was not possible at 
the times of Marx.
> 
> If it is anything, a left-wing philosophy is first of all one that accepts
> its responsibility to society.  I *don't* expect Bhaskar to become a great
> stylist, whatever that means; but I'm within my rights to insist that he
> accept the responsibility his own theories call for.  When some of us
> criticize Bhaskar's writing, it is not a sign of our stupidity or
> superficiality: it is a sign that (unlike idiots, who value only pleasures
> that are private) we hold a sense of social, political responsibility.  When
> Bhaskar declines that responsibility, he may remain extraordinarily
> brilliant, but in the Greek sense, he's acting like an idiot.  And if he
> consistently declines social responsibility, his work will become nothing,
> or at least nothing for the left.

Tobin, do you think that for pushing forward of the general ideas 
of CDR by theoretical argumentation is possible for a single 
person to have a great role in today's ethical and political 
sphere in some society? I can't see how it is possible, 
because if you are politically more active, other's take you 
arguments for their own irrealist political purposes. There is no 
urgent need or use  for general political philosophy in western 
countries for RB, according to my interpretation, because of the new 
more firm scientific basis, which is not in itself a guarantee of the 
more eudaimonistic societies.
-
> Tobin Nellhaus

Martti Puttonen, Finland 



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