File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0210, message 43


From: "Jamie Morgan" <jamie-AT-morganj58.fsnet.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: values and social science
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 17:29:28 +0100


Hi James, Andrew Sayer wrote an article in JTSB on the normative limits of
critical science to provide the concrete elements of moral and ethical
practice. Late 1990s I think.

Jamie

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Daly" <james.irldaly-AT-ntlworld.com>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: BHA: values and social science


> Hi Jamie, interesting reply! I agree, "really existing" spiritualities are
a
> patchwork quilt; religious Daoism is very different from Lao Tse or Chuang
> Tzu (?), and Tibetan Buddhism is different from Zen. For that matter I
> gather that Buddhism was a critique of Hinduism, and Advaita Vedanta a
> reconciliation of the two. Religions as practised are disfigured by
> superstition, bigotry, authoritarianism etc. as well as the well-known
> characteristics, criticised by Marxists, of borrowing from and lending to
> oppressive social structures. Recognition of that, and of the simple
demands
> of rationality (e.g. non-contradiction), is accentuated by the mutual
> encounter of religions, and of branches of a religion such as
Christianity,
> leading to a downplaying of particular differences and a search for an
> essential meaning, which has been a very important spur to the creation of
a
> universalising concept of spirituality (as it has in Vedanta).
>
> Your other point raises perhaps more problems than you advert to here. My
> hope is that a critical realist social science (as Marx said "There will
be
> only one science" -- and he did not think science was value free) will
> tackle the problem of human, spiritual values -- beginning with critique
of
> the bourgeois values of the myriad current artificially separated social
> sciences, and of their separation. (To pass exams in history I had,
although
> a victim of it, to interiorise the Whig interpretation of history. I once
> had to "teach" the Hobbesian tract *Lord of the flies*). One utilitarian
> Marxist interpretation of Marx's saying about the unity of science is the
> mechanical linear-progressive historical materialist one of saying each
mode
> of production fails to satisfy the desires created by it. That belongs to
> the "muck of ages" quoted in my previous post.
>
> Another is Roy's critique of structures which require falsehoods (I'm a
bit
> out of touch at present with that area of his thought). This (to borrow
> Habermas's term) "quasi-transcendental" argument seems to me valid but
> anaemic. It seems to come from the same position as Rawls's confining
> himself to a "thin" theory of the good, because he is fleeing from the
> accusation of deriving values from facts. Dialectic and the Pulse of
Freedom
> speaks of moral realism and ethical naturalism, but all too briefly. It
> seems to me that in spite of the use of the Aristotelian term eudaimonia,
> there is here a non-Aristotelian loss of nerve about naming human goods,
the
> carrying out of which Roy elsewhere characterises as "utopian". Habermas
is
> coming under pressure at the moment to produce what is called a "less
> Kantian and more Hegelian" type of argument; he has long ago on principle
> ruled out a priori an Aristotelian approach. To my mind the concept of
> eudaimonia belongs to the spiritual, rather than the utilitarian or
> instrumental, concept of reason, and should be developed and debated.
>
>
>
> James.
>
> james.irldaly-AT-ntlworld.com
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