Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:16:55 -0500
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: Postmodernism: Materialist?


Jukka, what has happened to you?  In the old days on the marxism lists, you
were as cool as a cucumber, no matter how outrageous I got in the heated
atmosphere in which we cyber-battled.  But nowadays, I make the least
little remark about anything, and with you it becomes a major provocation
and you go completely nuts.

I hope this exchange does not duly distract from Jim J. getting the answer
he needs from others, but I'll try a brief response to clear up the mystery
that apparently hovers over my last post.

Historical materialism refers to the social origins and social structures
that presumably bear a causal relationship in the generation of human
behavior, cultural institutions, beliefs and ideas, etc.  While
specifically a Marxist term, the basic idea can be extended to any
non-Marxist school of thought or branch of study that operates along
comparable lines: cultural materialism, sociology of science....  The
question of ontological materialism ostensibly has to do with what really
exists and its nature, but there is obviously an epistemological interest
in this issue as well: how do we know what is really out there, how do we
know our beliefs about reality are true, etc.?  How could one be a
historical materialist without being an ontological materialist?  Well,
let's begin with those Marxists who always insisted that nature is a social
category and deny the validity of any assertions about anything objectively
existing beyond the social, and those (same or others) who think of Marxism
as a philosophy of political praxis only and not one pertaining to
objective material reality. (Just think of the terms often used to describe
this divide: humanistic vs. scientific Marxism.)   Whether or not you or I
think this is a defensible, viable position or not, the entire history of
Marxism, not to mention other tendencies, is suffused with this way of
thinking as an option.  One could subscribe to a basic historical
materialist approach while refusing ontological materialism.  The next
issue in line is the objectivity of knowledge.  While neither Marx nor
Engels ever made such an assertion, it is a commonplace among others that
the situated, socially motivated nature of knowledge claims (e.g. of the
sciences) implies the non-objectivity of scientific knowledge.  Once
objective knowledge of reality is thrown out the window, there go
ontological claims about reality, ergo ontological materialism.

I hope you can see how this distinction also applies to the question of
postmodernism.  A postmodernist could well adhere to some notion of
historical materialism in terms of the social causation of beliefs and
ideas about the world while denying the possibility of objective knowledge,
which is in effect to deny the materiality of the world and our relation to
it that establishes an objective basis for our truth claims.

You might well ask what is the "matter" in historical materialism.  Being
forced to answer this question could put the anti-realists into a
self-refuting contradiction when it comes to their own knowledge claims
about society.

I brought in the issues of dialectical materialism and the natural sciences
to illustrate divergent approaches to the question of objective knowledge.
By illegitimately ceding the realm of the natural sciences to positivism
and instrumental reason, and naively accepting the diremption that occurred
in bourgeois philosophy in the mid-19th century that created the polar
opposites of positivism and lebensphilosophie, many of the Frankfurters
allowed their own intellectual socialization in the ways of idealist
philosophy, which was also a source of their strength, to corrupt their
judgment.  This diremption creates an absolute split between the knowledge
derived from scientific methods and the realm of pure subjectivity, with
the philosopher being put into the dilemma of deciding which way to go as
his traditional terrain gets swallowed up by the march of science.

Think of the malignant influence that irrationalists such as Nietzsche and
Heidegger have had on the development of 20th century thought, including
much of Western Marxism, not to mention the soft left strains of
postmodernism.  The strength of such thinkers was in developing the
conceptualization of subjectivity and its relation to society, but by
cutting themselves off in haughty alienated spitefulness from the progress
of science, which has learned so much, leaving them behind--learned so much
not only in physics and chemistry, but about the constitution of living
matter itself (biology, neurophysiology), not to mention other developments
such as linguistics (I mean real linguistics, not philosophical
post-Saussurean pseudo-scientific masturbation) and cognitive science--that
the alienated philosophy of subjectivity in comparison looks like a
dried-up little turd deposited along the trail of intellectual progress.

So this is how and why the possible approaches to the word "materialism"
matter in answering Jim's question.  There are additional issues pertaining
to the Marxist use of "materialism" and "idealism", which I did not
explain, but I hope I have at least addressed the issues that Jukka brought
up.

At 11:21 PM 02/21/2000 +0200, j laari wrote:
>Puh-leeze, Ralph
>
>would you tell us dummies what you mean by all these materialisms:
>
>"historical materialism... ontological materialism... dialectical
>materialism"?
>
>So what do you mean by "historical materialism"? Is it
>an epistemological doctrine, or what?
>
>And what do you mean by "dialectical materialism"? Is it an ethical
>doctrine, or what? 
>
>What is the point to have so many materialisms? Does it clarify some
>important & basic issue in philosophy?
>
>What is the "matter" in historical materialism?
>
>What is the "matter" in dialectical materialism?
>
>What is the point to refer to *natural sciences* when talking about
>philosophical question?
>
>Can we have "a straight answer" (as you say)?
>
>Am I alone here to believe that the question of materialism is
>exactly an ontological question? (You don't have answer this one.)
>
>Yours, Jukka L