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. --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005