Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 17:21:29 -0600 (CST)
From: viren viven murthy <vvmurthy-AT-midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: on Hegel, Bhaskar, Descartes


Hi Mervyn:

I just read your review of Daly's book and I think it gave me enough of a
background to jump in to this discussion, or at least part of it.

I am now quite confused about the pre-bourgeois Enlightenment.  I agree
with the thrust of Daly's (and your) attempt to provide an ethical
grounding for Marxist thought.  Many Marxists interpret him as a radical
historicist and as having no room for ethical universalism.  Against this
trend, you, Daly and Bhaskar argue that Marxism is at least compatible
with a modern Aristotelianism.  The trick however seems to be to maintain
Marx's historical sensitivities without lapsing into relativism.  I wonder
whether talking about a pre-bourgeois enlightenment doesn't risk making
the term "Enlightenment" meaningless, precisely because such an
application of the term does not historically analyze its emergence. I
wonder what is gained  by lumping Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato and Plotinus
with Descartes, Kant, Mill and Voltaire and calling them all Enlightenment
thinkers.  In your review, you mention that elements of pre-bourgeois
thinking continue to exist in Enlightenment thinkers, such as Kant.  I
agree and would add that such elements exist in Mill and Montesquieu as
well.  If this is the case, then there is no need to prefer the
"pre-bourgeois enlightenment" to the bourgeois Enlightenment.

This brings me to another question, namely how capitalist is the bourgeois
Enlightenment?  The answer to this question hinges on when we conceive of
capitalism as emerging in Europe.  Ellen Wood <<Pristine Culture of
Capitalism>>) argues that while Locke and
others in the English liberal tradition theorize in the context of
agrarian capitalism, Rousseau and other French liberals were theorizing
with the threat of feudal fragmentation.  Hence, while Locke stresses the
rights of the individual, Rousseau stresses the importance of
community.  Clearly, elements of Rousseau can be retrieved today as we
criticize the atomization related to capitalism as well.  Moreover,
Rousseau speaks highly of the ancients, especially when he contrasts them
to the moderns.

Although Bhaskar may disagree, I tend to be more sympathetic to the 
bourgeois
Enlightenment, or at least, some of versions of it.  Mill and Rousseau,
for example, drew on classical sources to combat some of the problems of
their time ( commodification, fragmentation).  I would say that this is
precisely what Daly is doing with Acquinas and Aristotle.  So,  rather
than posing an alternative the bourgeois Enlightenment, I would claim that
Marx, and Bhaskarians continue this tradition.  In continuing this
tradition, they point out that many of the fundamental ideals of the
bourgeois Enlightenment, such as freedom and liberty, are incompatible
with capitalism, which perpaps the original members of the bourgeois
enlightenment would not have accepted.

Viren

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Mervyn Hartwig wrote:

> Hi Phil,
> 
> Well, there's nothing wrong with a bit of liveliness.
> 
> >We are not
> >just creatures of instinct 
> 
> IMO Bhaskar's theory of human nature doesn't imply that we are; it is
> profoundly historical and social.
> 
> >Alienation is not a needs-based thing,
> >Alienation is an ideology-based thing.  The root cause of our species'
> >alienation lies at the level of ideology - alienated ideology, such as
> >religion or bourgeois reformism.
> 
> I'm really puzzled by this formulation. If alienation is ideology-based,
> what are we alienated *from*? Religion as ideology is ideology from our
> essential human nature. Cf Bhaskar's definition at DPF114: '
> "Alienation" ... means *being something other than*, (having been)
> separated, split, torn or estranged from, oneself, or *what is essential
> ... to one's nature* or identity.'
> 
> >Bourgeois ideology fails to grasp the true essence of humanity, 
> 
> Bhaskar certainly agrees with that
> 
> >whereas
> >materialist ideology comes closer to grasping this because it understands
> >that we are material beings both in a bodily sense and in a mental sense
> >(ideas are matter). 
> 
> and if you'd said 'ideas are an expression of an emergent power of
> matter, i.e. mind' Bhaskar could come close to agreeing with this too.
> Cf his November 2001 talk on 'Who am I?' in which he said that he
> doesn't reject [ontological] materialism, but doesn't accept it either:
> either mind is implicitly enfolded in matter or matter is enfolded in
> mind. This also seems to mean that to refer to him as a metaphysical
> idealist, as I have done in print, isn't true to his own self-
> understanding - he doesn't reject or accept that either. I think he's
> claiming that both are sublated in his ontological realism, according to
> which idealism and materialism are seen (by valid perspectival switch)
> to be distinct but inter-enfolded aspects of the one ultimate reality.
> While Hegel equally seems to have thought that mind is enfolded in
> matter and vice versa, you may have a point in regarding him as more
> (metaphysically) 'materialist' than Bhaskar in that he rejects any
> notion of a disembodied spiritual reality whereas Bhaskar seems to
> accept it in such notions that of discarnate souls; but this is not to
> say that for Hegel 'ideas *are* matter'.
> 
> But why call 'materialist ideology' by the name of ideology? Surely you
> mean 'materialist or realist science'?
> 
> >But when
> >Roy says that "all we need to do is to shed our illusions" I have to come
> >back to my point about alienation lying at the level of ideology.  We are
> >all trapped within alienated ideology at an epistemological and a
> >philosophical level, because idealist ideas are so dominant over materialist
> >ones.  Thus ALIENATION IS ACTUALLY MUCH MORE PROFOUND THAN ROY THINKS IT IS.
> 
> I'm not quite sure how it could be more profound because Roy says once
> we've entered the web of *maya* there is 'scant chance of escape' (FEW
> 9). 'All (!) we need to do is to shed our illusions' - he makes it very
> clear this is enormously difficult. 
> 
> I said in my previous that ideology according to Roy is the result of
> alienation; actually I think it would be better if I put that the other
> way around - alienation is the result of ideology - i.e. ideology is the
> more fundamental, though of course they reinforce each other. In FEW
> what gives rise to alienation is categorial error resulting from the
> exercise of free will, above all the absenting of ontology in the
> doctrine of actualism; and more fundamentally yet, the absenting of the
> concept of absence itself, and therefore of God and the true nature of
> humans and their "social-natural Totality" (33), in the doctrine of
> ontological monovalence. I suppose getting things fundamentally wrong
> could be said to be an epistemological issue. But I take it that the
> reason why you're empasizing 'epistemology' is because the bourgeois
> Enlightenment was (inter alia) an epistemological revolution - which
> precisely endorsed the above 'errors' (and ended up with a mechanistic
> and atomistic theory of the human being and society based on them).
> 
> >Certainly at one level Hegel was trying to reconcile
> >Christianity with reason.  But I think that if you read Hegel carefully you
> >will see that in all his mature writings the word *God* is used by him
> >merely as a metaphor, and to take on board Christian ideas (and
> >Christians!).  
> 
> Yes, Phil. But a metaphor for what? For the intrinsic structuring of the
> universe (the principle of *Geist* i.e. cosmic spirit) such that it
> necessarily produces and sustains self-conscious, eventually fully
> rational, life. I.e. such life is not some cosmic accident. History is
> 'meaningful'. Terry Pinkard has an excellent discussion of Hegel's
> philosophy of religion in his biography of Hegel. He insists that
> Hegel's own self-understanding is that this 'was a *religious* attitude
> ... because it expressed itself in a reverential attitude towards life
> and divinity [the intrinsic structuring] in general ... Faith in God was
> faith in the everlastingness of life (though not of one's own individual
> life) and the goodness of being, in the conviction that what was
> absolutely good in life was written into the structure of things and
> that we, humanity as a whole, were collectively capable of gradual
> realizations of that good and of substantial realizations in our own
> lives.' Chas Taylor 486 also unambiguously asserts that Hegel saw
> himself as a Lutheran Christian and dismisses the notion that he saw no
> role for religion (as defined above, ie basically the practice of
> devotion, of a reverential attitude to the structure of Being) in the
> reconciled society.
> 
> If Hegel's view isn't religious, then I think it follows Bhaskar isn't
> religious and you're tilting at windmills. For, while there are
> important differences between Bhaskar's philosophy of religion and
> Hegel's, it is of the essence of Bhaskar's position that the intrinsic
> structuring of the pluriverse is such that self-conscious rational life
> is possible. This is basically what Bhaskar means by 'God'. (NB.
> 'possible' not 'necessary' - Bhaskar imo offers no cosmic guarantee, for
> the world is open; he is not, like Hegel, an expressivist or Platonic
> 'absolute idealist' in the sense that the cosmos and human history -
> everything that exists - can be seen as an expression of rational
> necessity, of the Idea). 
> 
> I should perhaps add that this is a position I myself have come to
> accept, so to that extent I suppose I'm no longer 'agnostic'. One of the
> main considerations that has moved me is that in order for the universe
> by sheer chance to be 'just right' for the production of self-conscious
> life, we need to postulate an infinity of universes. But in that case we
> are already into one of the attributes of 'God'.... There's a sense in
> which it can be said of course that it's precisely because the species
> has lost a sense of reverential awe for the structuring of the cosmos
> and stopped putting it into practice that we're heading for ecological
> disaster. 
> 
> >The mature Hegel had no religious commitment.  He sought
> >secular answers to the real, material problems he saw in the world.  He saw
> >that that meant trying to assimilate backward and reactionary Christianity
> >into progressive secularism.  (Instead of what some critical realists seem
> >to be trying to do, which is to regress back a few centuries and assimilate
> >secularism into religion).
> 
> 'Progressive', and 'secular answers', yes, but not 'secularism'. In fact
> Hegel thought modern Protestant Christianity (as reinterpreted within
> his own philosophical framework) the first truly 'human' or universal
> religion. (Such 'imperialism' contrasts  with the notion sustained I
> think by Bhaskar, that every religion is in Ranke's phrase 'immediate to
> God').
> 
> As for 'regress', if everyone, including scientists, come to approach
> their work with the religious attitude (as above), that is not 'regress'
> in your terms, it's 'progress'; we would have escaped your rightly
> dreaded 'bourgeois ideology'. Your own hero Hegel holds that as a
> species we necessarily move from the primitive identity of thought and
> life, reason and nature; to the divorce of the two as exemplified in the
> bourgeois Enlightenment; to their reconciliation in a higher unity as
> raw nature is made to be an expression of reason and as reason comes to
> see nature itself as part of a rational plan. (This from Chas. Taylor,
> Hegel, 86). (I agree with James Daly though that there are problems
> about the idea of progress; may be one should speak instead of the
> 'recuperation' or 'redemption' of our essential humanity, or of
> 'reconciliation'. One can equally well view the bourgeois enlightenment
> as 'regressive' - back to the market-inspired views of the Sophists
> etc.)
> 
> >Descartes is not "up-himself", that is to fail to credit Descartes with
> >opening up vistas in philosophy that the pre-bourgeois and bourgeois
> >medieval and Renaissance religious "thinkers" were closing off all the time
> >through their own obtuseness and conformism.  It is the religious thinkers
> >of old and today who are "up-themselves".  Their reading of the history of
> >philosophy is instrumentally designed to fit their pre-existing views (in
> >other words, closed-minded), and because of that they have to attack the
> >most open-minded figures in the history of philosophy such as Descartes and
> >Hegel.
> 
> I think you've got a big problem here because your two heroes are
> fundamentally at odds with one another. Descartes' theory of the
> subject, with its accompanying mind-body, spirit-nature dichotomy
> (dualism), underpins Enlightenment mechanism, whereas Hegel (while
> endorsing some aspects of this) basically rebels against it, opposing
> mechanism and reasserting the unity of the human and divine mind (anti-
> dualism). If one takes Charles Taylor's understanding of the essential
> difference between the modern enlightenment understanding of the subject
> and that which it displaced (the view of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-
> Platonists etc) - 'the modern subject is self-defining, where on
> previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order' -
> Descartes comes down on one side, Hegel (and Bhaskar and arguably Marx)
> on the other. 
> 
> >For freedom of thought,
> 
> Indeed. *Think* then! (:-  (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
> 
> Mervyn
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Phil Walden <phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk> writes
> >Hi Mervyn and listers,
> >
> >It seems that the lines between you (Mervyn) and me are starting to be more
> >clearly drawn.  My responses are interspersed with your text below.  But I
> >note that you do not dispute some of the claims in my earlier post, such as
> >that Roy has failed to take on board the materialist aspects of Hegel's
> >work - some of which, but only some of which, were taken over by Marx.  (See
> >below).
> >>
> >>
> >> Hi Phil
> >>
> >> > Typically, for
> >> >Roy, a practice is alienated because it violates an axiological
> >> commitment
> >> >or moral imperative.  For me, this is a regression from Hegel, because it
> >> >relies upon a weak Kantian *Sollen* (ought), and fails to
> >> connect practice
> >> >to theoretical reason.
> >>
> >> No, I think this is very wrong. An axiological commitment for Roy
> >> derives not from a Kantian 'Sollen' but from our essential human needs
> >> (for food and drink, sex, de-alienation, recognition and autonomy) in
> >> the establishment of which theoretical reason is centrally involved e.g.
> >> the theory of alienation.
> >
> >No Mervyn.  Alienation is not a needs-based thing, that is to remain at the
> >level of Kantian practical reasoning or the world of appearance.  We are not
> >just creatures of instinct - this is an illusion that Descartes blew apart,
> >much to the chagrin of all those who want to think of humanity as *fallen*.
> >Alienation is an ideology-based thing.  The root cause of our species'
> >alienation lies at the level of ideology - alienated ideology, such as
> >religion or bourgeois reformism.
> >>
> >> >For me, Hegel is better on all this because he saw
> >> >(perhaps dimly) that alienation is the result of alienated ideology. In
> >> >other words, the root of humanity's alienation lies at the level of
> >> >unresolved epistemological problems,
> >>
> >> I can't vouch for what Hegel thought, but certainly in the later Bhaskar
> >> ideology is the result of alienation (from God, from ourselves, from our
> >> fellow humans, from the products of our labour etc), from which
> >> perspective what you say looks like a complete tautology. There seems to
> >> be something deeply regressive (and bourgeois!) in sourcing our problems
> >> to epistemology.
> >
> >In my view Roy has grasped some aspects of alienation, but not the most
> >important ones.  Yes, we are alienated from the products of our labour -
> >fine, this is Marx, and it is still as important as ever.  Yes, we are
> >alienated from other humans.  But that is because of alienated ideology.
> >Bourgeois ideology fails to grasp the true essence of humanity, whereas
> >materialist ideology comes closer to grasping this because it understands
> >that we are material beings both in a bodily sense and in a mental sense
> >(ideas are matter).  Yes, we are alienated from ourselves.  I am actually
> >not uncomfortable with Roy's view that "all individuals are potentially God"
> >(even if I would not express it in that way) because for Roy this is linked
> >to the idea that revolution starts with doing work on your self.  But when
> >Roy says that "all we need to do is to shed our illusions" I have to come
> >back to my point about alienation lying at the level of ideology.  We are
> >all trapped within alienated ideology at an epistemological and a
> >philosophical level, because idealist ideas are so dominant over materialist
> >ones.  Thus ALIENATION IS ACTUALLY MUCH MORE PROFOUND THAN ROY THINKS IT IS.
> >In my view Sartre started to approach a better view of alienation (than Roy)
> >in the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, but even Sartre doesn't grasp the
> >full import of alienated ideology (and like Roy, Sartre does not understand
> >Hegel's epistemology).
> >>
> >> >Whereas absolute
> >> >reason, as I think Hegel came to understand, implies a constant
> >> challenge to
> >> >all alienated ideology - such as religion.
> >>
> >> Whoaaa! Hegel was deeply religious, but certain institutionalised forms
> >> of religion no doubt...
> >
> >No Mervyn.  Certainly at one level Hegel was trying to reconcile
> >Christianity with reason.  But I think that if you read Hegel carefully you
> >will see that in all his mature writings the word *God* is used by him
> >merely as a metaphor, and to take on board Christian ideas (and
> >Christians!).  The mature Hegel had no religious commitment.  He sought
> >secular answers to the real, material problems he saw in the world.  He saw
> >that that meant trying to assimilate backward and reactionary Christianity
> >into progressive secularism.  (Instead of what some critical realists seem
> >to be trying to do, which is to regress back a few centuries and assimilate
> >secularism into religion).
> >>
> >> >I confess to being
> >> >astonished at the unremitting ire that Roy directs at Descartes.
> >>  Was it not
> >> >the great Frenchman who established the philosophical subject in modern
> >> >philosophy?  Was it not primarily Descartes who opened up the field of
> >> >epistemology and lifted humanity out of the shackles of medieval
> >> religious
> >> >ideology?  But then I'm forgetting, aren't I, that these achievements of
> >> >Descartes - and epistemological advance in general - represent a
> >> threat to
> >> >the plausibility of religion.  We can't have that, now, can we?!
> >>
> >> You're right, Roy detests Rene - I think he calls him a philosophical
> >> onanist at one stage, meaning in particular I take it a 'self-abuser' in
> >> Roy's specific sense of the 'self'. I love it, and to persuade you to my
> >> point of view, the best I can suggest is a reading of James Daly, *Deals
> >> and Ideals*, the main arguments of which are summarised in my review in
> >> the current JCR. From James' perspective you are operating within the
> >> paradigm of bourgeois enlightenment, whereas Roy (and Marx and Hegel for
> >> the most part) is operating within the earlier tradition of dialectical
> >> and spiritual enlightenment. All we can do is choose. There are only
> >> (complex, holsitic) arguments to help us in this. I take my stance
> >> ultimately with the poet Adrian Mitchell: 'Shake your money and shut
> >> your mouth, bourgeois!' (not you, Phil, the real one, and certainly
> >> Descartes.). I think this a particularly appropriate slogan because
> >> money for the bourgeois is the measure of all value.
> >
> >I will read James Daly's book.  I don't agree with anything you have said
> >above, Mervyn, so it looks like life is going to get quite lively!
> >Descartes is not "up-himself", that is to fail to credit Descartes with
> >opening up vistas in philosophy that the pre-bourgeois and bourgeois
> >medieval and Renaissance religious "thinkers" were closing off all the time
> >through their own obtuseness and conformism.  It is the religious thinkers
> >of old and today who are "up-themselves".  Their reading of the history of
> >philosophy is instrumentally designed to fit their pre-existing views (in
> >other words, closed-minded), and because of that they have to attack the
> >most open-minded figures in the history of philosophy such as Descartes and
> >Hegel.
> >
> >For freedom of thought,
> >
> >Phil
> >>
> >> Mervyn
> >>
> 
> 
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