Date: Fri, 31 Oct 1997 13:11:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: re: materialism vs idealism (was: master-slave)


On Thu, 30 Oct 1997, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> Two main things I want to point out here (1) "idealism" as a weasel word, 
> (2) why people get confused over Hegel's idealism.

I agree with (1), but the explanation for (2) is that  the sense in
which Hegel is an idealist is not at all clear. 

> Many protest: Hegel is not an idealist, because he doesn't
> believe reality is a projection of the individual mind.  One would think 
> professional philosophers would be a bit smarter than this, but it indicates
> just how intellectually corrupt bourgeois philosophy is. 

That would be dumb thing to say, but I think what you can conclude from it
reflects the caliber of people attracted to Hegel studies here (low),
apart from a handful of serious scholars. Most analytical philosophers
won't have anything to do with Hegel, partly because of the company they'd
have to keep. (And partly because they'd rather puzzle over obscurities in
Quine or Davidson than obscurities in Hegel.) But no AP with half a brain
would make the mistake you attribute to these half-baked Hegelians.

 Others find it 
> necessary to counter that there is such a thing as absolute idealism, too.
> But the confusion rages on.  It is a shibboleth of Marxism that there is
> such a thing as both subjective idealism and objective idealism, but our 
> beloved Justin doesn't understand that either, as an analytical product 
> of the academy.

Oh, come on Ralph, What I don't understand is what is meant by these
terms. Or insofar as I do I do not find it a useful division, I certainly
do understand that not all idealism is Berkeleyian.

> 
> At 04:22 PM 10/30/97 EET+200, Jukka Laari wrote:
> > We may today say to Schelling 
> >that Hegel's point was rather to show the 'intersubjective' nature of 
> >thinking and mind, but that doesn't change a thing: the result would 
> >only be sort of collective idealism ('objective idealism'?), 
> >unsubstantiated - perhaps a quasi-mystical - collective 
> >consciousness.
> 
> Lenin understood this, but Justin does not.

Certainly Hegel insisted that thinking is intersubjective or social. But
that point is utterly consistent with not only scientific realism but also
with reductive materialism. Hegel's idealism, whatever it amiunts to, is
something more than that. Moreover, it cannot be reduced to a sort of
collective version of Berkleyeanism, on which the percepi which is esse of
things is somehow ours together rather than mine alone. Hegel's idealism
turns on the notion that somewhat what there is is Geist, spirit, whatever
that means, without the moments of the whole losing their concrete
particularity, and in the case of material things, that means their
materiality and physicality. How this is supposed to work is a puzzle that
is not illuminated but only labelled by calling it objective idealism. 

> 
> >Behind Schelling's and Hegel's dispute was the question of identity of
> >nature and thought, and the beginning of The System (from where it
> >must begin?). They saw that somehow the Absolute Identity of nature
> >and thought, so to speak, must be the basic reference or ground of The
> >System.
> 
> This is a basic problem of Hegel's approach, whatever its other virtues.
> He inherited this problematic and went with it, didn't he?

Well, I don't know. I think that Hegel would (and did, in the Intro to the
Lesser Logic) out it this way, The problematic of presuming the
non-identity of nature and thought means we are stuck with the hopeless
task of showing how thought represents nature accurately from inside
thought. That can't be done; and it's the wrong starting place; it poses
the wriong questions. The question to ask is that given that we know
stuff, how can this be? ANd this requires us to show the identity of
thought and nature, so we don't end up in skeoptical chambers of mirrors,
but without reducing thought to nature or vice versa. 

> 
> (2) There has been a lot of confusion here and elsewhere over the
> materiality of social life and the ontological question of idealism or
> materialism. Some people take Marx's cryptic quote about Hegel only
> recognizing thought and not practical activity as such, so as to make out of
> him an idealist in the sociological sense.  I'm going to have to do some
> homework before I can properly explicate this quote, but there is some
> confusion that can be straightened out.  Hegel certainly does recognize
> practical activity, and that as prior to intellectual activity.

Quite right.

  The
> confusion can be straightened out with the help of my following ad hoc diagram.
> 
> Geist -> nature & society -> practical life -> philosophical reflection
> 

I don't think this is helpful. Geist sort of emerages at the end as it
becomes self-conscious. It realizes it was always there and what was there
was always geistlich, ok, but not in a geistlich way, not self-consciously.

> If you just throw away geist as the basis of Hegel' system, you can take the
> rest of it more or less materialistically.  

Here I think you might learn from Marx's thought that we have to stand
Hegel on his feet. It's not just a matter of lopping off a false
foundation--the notion of a foundation is very unHegelian anyway. It's
matter of putting it right side up, getting the order of explnatory
priority correct.

Of course you can't just throw
> it away, and this is the crux of the issue.  Not only does geist give
> Hegel's system a foundation in objective idealism, but it distorts his
> understanding of the world and of world history, which is what makes it
> malicious. 

"Foundation"--in Hegelian terms, an impossible notion. And what is the
Geist, and how does it distort H's conceptions, etc.?

 What makes it pernicious for social science is thatworld
> history proceeds as the succession of different stages in the development of
> the weltgeist.  But how do we ascertain what these stages are?

H is not interested in "social science," which he thinks a fraud, He his
comments on phrenology in the PhG. As for how we determine what the
different stages are, what's the question here? How to tell one from the
other or whether H has the right sequence to start with, if there is one?

 Here's where
> the problem of both uncritical positivism and uncritical metaphysics comes
> in.  Poorly digested empirical facts are given a metaphorical and
> metaphysical signification and a system is arbitrarily constructed out of
> our fractured knowledge of the material world.

I think this gets it backwards. H _illustrates_ his story about the
development of the spirit with empirical examples, but it is not told as
an indictive description of what's happened. The development is supposed
to follow on the internal logic of the categories, so not arbitraily.
Whether this works is another story.

  Of course Hegel recognized
> such material factors as climate, technology, etc., but he uses these
> metaphysical constructs concerning Africa, China, Greece, Christiandom,
> etc., and finally the modern German spirit where all are free,
> to create a dangerously distorted and ultimately idealist picture of
> society. 

I would like some details on wehat is (a) distorted, (b) dangerous, and
(c) idealist about H's account of society.

 This is the foundation of all the right-Hegelianism that has
> followed since Hegel.  It is the ideological foundation of imperialism,
> orientalism and occidentalism. 

Nonsense.The ideological foundations of imperialism are a lot more
simple-minded, being based in a biological racism Hegel would dispise, As
for "orientalism," this is a useful but quite different sort of category
constructed by Said to explain certain cultural attitudes of imperialists.
I doubt whether H had anything to do with it.

 The Young Hegelians took over this schema of
> history uncritically,

What schema?

 and it is they Marx had to fight by grounding his
> analysis of history in the mode of production rather than in Geist, race,
> national character, culture, ideas, and other metaphysical constructs.  
> 

Quite a grab bag of "metaphysical constructs," as real Chinese
encyclopaedia (Borges). Presumably you mean "invalid."

--Justin






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