File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 62


Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 01:13:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: re: master-slave & pomos


At 11:45 PM 10/3/97 -0400, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>It seems to be my mission in life to disappoint Ralph.

You break-a you pappa's heart.... I get no nachas from you, 
boychik....  Yo' mama and I didn't raise no analytical 
philosopher; I shoulda made yuh stop quinein', snatched away yo' 
Mao, and whupped yuh mo'.

>It's worth fighting the Catholic right, but learning how to 
>do scholastic disputation is not a good way to do this. 

Today I snoozed through a lecture on Aquinas' theory of mind, 
consisting mostly of an interminable analysis of Aquinas'
critique of Plato's errors in refusing to admit the body as 
joining with the intellective substance of the human being as 
a unitary entity.  Thank goodness for modernity, hip hip for 
the Enlightenment, I say.  Parmenides, Plotinus .... all this 
is filling me with contempt for western philosophy.  Now I've 
got to finish my philosophical epic poem on Baruch Spinoza and 
John Lee Hooker.  

>The creation nuts, on the other hand, can be met, happily, 
>on our terms, since that they claim to be doing is science 
>and philosophy of science. 

Are the Promise Keepers into creationism?  I saw my first 
small contingent of these cretins in the subway this eve, all
wearing glow-in-the-dark baseball caps marked "PK".  I tried 
bad-mouthing dumb Christian crackers, but my ex would have 
none of this, being a black Baptist herself and hence upholding 
the patriarchal faith as she did with the Million Moron March 
and in the double standards with which she raised her children.  
BTW, PKs white and black have been doing the black talk show 
circuit, and I had to laugh bitterly at the futile efforts of 
Caucasian feminists to try and discourage black Washingtonians 
from being fooled by the PK outreach efforts, not having a clue 
as to whom they are dealing with.

I'm telling you, I hate the South!  I hate it!  I've been back 
here for two months and I'm turning into a drooling idiot 
from starvation for intelligent conversation.  I strain to 
retain my faith in humanity, but there's no help handy.

>I still don't know what Ralph means by objective idealism. He says
>Berkeley is an objective idealist because B thinks God, who is a
>nonphysical mind independent of ours--what, exists? Or keeps things in
>existence by knowing them our minds don't? 

Now this is the one aspect of my haranguing that I might be willing to
expand upon, given time constraints that bind me as well as you.  I never
really clarified my overall conception of the dynamics and tensions that
pull philosophers this way or that or in contradictory directions.  I did
not invent this way of thinking, but I see philosophies as tending toward
subjective idealism, objective idealism, or materialism, as ideal types.
Given the inherent instability of certain philosophical positions, a
philosophy may simultaneously contain tendencies towards more than one of
these positions.  Of course Berkeley is usually classified as a subjective
idealist, but like most of them, he can't accept the ultimate consequences.
Not many people can, the one cheerful exception that I know being Jorge Luis
Borges, who was willing to go all the way to solipsism.  He was a creative
writer, though, not a "philosopher" by vocation, so he didn't have to worry
about putting himself out of a job.  But most philosophers have bigger fish
to fry and total nihilism doesn't serve them well.  So to guarantee some
sense of objectivity while denying materialism as an option, Berkeley relies
on God, as Descartes did as well (though with a different set of values for
his parameters). Whatever piddling differences exist between, say, the
Platonic ideal realm and the mind of God, they are both based on the same
foundation, an objective order that is immaterial and ideal in nature, of
which the material world is an epiphenomenon.  This is what objective
idealism is as a tendency.

>But what has this to do with Hegel, for whom 
>physical things do exist and whose "God" is embodied in
>them, like Spinoza's? 

As I tried to tell you before, my arguments on the question of 
idealism concern the issue _in general_.  Hegel doesn't figure into 
them at all, except for isolated points being made apart from my 
general argument.  Hegel is a unique and extremely subtle case, 
and I have had little to say about him.  However, if I recall 
Hegel correctly, the ideal order, God, the Absolute, the primal 
philosophical categories, all exist prior to the material world as 
we know it.  Whether the physical things really exist or not, this 
is still objective idealism, ontologically, and idealism 
epistemologically, because of how ideas are used to establish this 
metaphysical view.  This too doesn't say anything about how Hegel's 
system is put together, but it is the fundamental issue that I was 
dealing with, in general.
 
>> However, is Hegel not guilty of doing precisely this in his philosophy of
>> history?  His nonsense about Africans, the temperate zone, the
>> non-philosophical character of non-european philosophy, etc.?  And worse,
>> tying all this crap to geist as an explanatory or developmental principle
>> regarding civilizations.
>
>OK, even Homer nods. And Marx and Engels thought the Slavs were brutes.

A riposte which says nothing at all.

> Jeff Gauthier, has written a book on Hegel and Feminism
>... arguing, I think, that Hegel's defense of male 
>supremacy doesn't square with Hegel's own way of analysing 
>human relations. 

Well, I heard a woman make this very same argument in a lecture 
at Georgetown in the late '80s.  Patricia Mills maybe?  She, whoever 
it was, was convincing.  She and/or some other woman published a 
book on this topic since then.  This enterprise seems sound to me.
It's about the only feminist analysis of any philosopher I'd be 
able to tolerate.  Better than having to endure the likes of 
Judith Butler: she gave me hives.  I say confiscate their Derrida 
and Iragaray and ship 'em all to me and I'll put 'em to work 
deconstructing the black church where they could do some good.  
Fucking stupid academics.  Silly people!

>If my views about Hegel depress Ralph, my proposition that epistemology,
>semantics, and ontology are seperate enterprises with only tenuous
>connections makes him suicical. I don't know why. If we are scientific
>realists, what else would we expect? The world is however it is, whatever
>we think or say. That's more or less, in not very exact terms, what
>realism means. But epistemology is just about what we think and semantics
>is about what we say. 

Either life in DC has gutted my cerebrum totally or this is a non sequitur.
You are confusing ontology as something we do as a theoretical enterprise,
with the actual independently existing world itself.  Because the world
exists independent of our notions doesn't entail that our ontological
notions can exist independently of our epistemological ones or vice versa.
Various combinations of the two might make sense and be productively
debatable (realism A or B with epistemology A or B), but I suggest that
other combinations, esp. some you cited, eventually cannot be sustainable,
unless of course you can get away with incoherence because you think you can
chop all issues up into discrete unrelated units and never have to be
responsible for putting them back into an intelligible whole.

Now I think I've spent all the time I can on this business for one evening.
I'm on the rag now, so watch yourself.



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