Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 13:42:30 +0000 From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: BHA: style, etc., one last time Hi Ruth and all, To say that Adorno celebrates obscurity is IMO to misunderstand his arguments: the notion that each and every thought is universally communicable is a liberal fiction; genuinely original thought is necessarily opposed to and negates 'the continuity of the familiar'; and thought is always thickly mediated by experience - there is no such thing as a pure, clear thought. (To recognize this is not necessarily to celebrate it.) The celebration of 'the struggle for clarity' (for Adorno 'the empty chatter about expression') thus has the opposite of its intended effect: it sabotages genuinely novel thought which might challenge the status quo; we do it to drown out the silence effected by our imposed powerlessness, instead of getting on with and prizing the critical thinking that matters. I do not see that this is at all at odds with core elements in Bhaskar. On the contrary, as a fellow philosopher of negation and absence, he would agree that (as I summarized Adorno) 'it is thought's necessary gaps or absences that drives thought on'. It seems to me that Ruth's kind of position presupposes a purely positive account of representation and ultimately of reality, which both philosophers relentlessly criticize. (Adorno is, incidentally, one of Bhaskar's favourites, though of course he has his criticisms.) As for Kant, the issue IMO has never been whether DPF could do with a good edit (nobody denies this). The issue is rather whether a certain level of difficulty in major philosophical texts is irreducible. Kant made his improvements, but his text remains very difficult - and necessarily so, in Kant's opinion. I find Ruth's suggestion that CR is, from an Adornoian perspective, a form of idealism intriguing. On the one side it would have to take into account Bhaskar's reassessment in DPF of the mature Marx as a critical realist. On the other, I can see that taking the lid off ontology could lead in the direction of idealism in a grand sense. I think any arguments about this, stemming from Adorno or otherwise, would be of great interest to the list - certainly to me anyhow. Yours in the struggle for truth, Mervyn Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> writes >Hi all, > >I see that I haven't expressed myself clearly. [:-)] > >I hadn't intended to evade Mervyn's suggestion that Adorno's comments on >style are relevant to the question of whether the ideas in DPF might have >been more clearly expressed. My intention was to respond that Adorno's >celebration of obscurity is based on views that are at odds with core >elements of Bhaskar's thought. I don't believe that one can coherently >adopt both stances at once. I also tried to add that, as I read him, >Bhaskar's own accounts of thought, of language and of philosophy, in >contrast to those of Adorno, allow - even invite - one to raise the ideal of >clarity (which is not, while I'm at it, the same thing as accessibility) as >an internal demand. > >On the matter of what one is to make of my suspicion that Adorno would >regard critical realism as a tacit form of idealism, I stand by it. This is >not to say that I *agree* with what I think would be Adorno's position -- >just to say that, unsettling or no, I think that it would be his view. I am >hoping to write on this question at some point, and would be genuinely happy >to talk further to anyone who's interested in it. It would probably be best >to do so offlist, though, so as not to take up list time on Adorno. > >As to Mervyn's claim that the Kant quotation ["Yet as regards a certain >obscurity...owing to which the principle points of the investigation are >easily lost sight of, the complaint is just, and I intend to remove it by >the present Prolegomena"] supports the position DPF in principle could not >withstand a good edit, I'm lost as to how to respond. [Not to mention >Kant's going on and on about how beautifully Hume wrote, and how his own >work would be so much better if only he could write that way.] In any case, >the whole aside about Kant was simply to counter his being included in a >list of authors intended to support a claim that good philosophy has to be >hard to read. > > >Yours in the struggle for clarity, >r. > > > > > > --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- -- Mervyn Hartwig --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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