Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 18:22:54 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Response to Re: Christopher Phelps' *Young Sidney Hook*--chapter 1



The debates I had on pragmatism and Marxism were, as I recall, mainly with
Ralph, who was then no more sympathetic than he is now to my claim that
Marxism was essentially pragmatist, or anyway that pragmatism could be
Marxist. 

As fas as the history goes, I think the analogies have to be approached
cautiously. There is no reason to think that Marx knew of the 19th C
pragmatists, or that the 20th C ones knew much of him, until Hook. The
parallels mainly derive, historically, from some common roots in German
idealism, especially as regards Dewey and FCS Schiller (sort of
naturalized Hegelianism) also Royce here, and to a lesse extent Peirce
(roots in Kant and the medievals, but P always denied he was a
pragmatist). W. James gets his Germans from the psychologists, who were
infected with neo-Kantianism, so it's pretty attenuated. A careful schilar
or intellectual historian might be able to work out the ways in which
Marxism and pragmatism did represent variations on these Hegelian and
other German idealist themes, naturalized in different ways, I myself
don't pretend to have enough of a grip on the classical pragmatistics to
be able to do this intelligently.

Neopragmatism of the sort that I espouse, via Quine, Goodman, Sellars,
Putnam, and Rawls, is more clearly influenced by Marxism. In Word and
Object Quine uses as his epigraph a famous metaphor by the Marxist in the
Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath, who was also a distinguished contributor (onm
the pro planning side) to the socialist calculation debate of the '20s.
Sellars (Wilfred) explains in his autobiographical eassy that his
philosophical thinking was first most strongly influenced by raeding
Engels, in particular, The Dialectics of Nature. The positivists' slow
disengagement from Vienna Circle orthodoxy was in part stimulated nby
engagement with Marxism. Hempel's work on explanation is in part an
attemopt to see if historical materialism can be rigorously expressed.
Jumping a generation, Putnam, who influenced the generation of
philosophers of science, including my own teachers (his students) such as
my adviser Peter Railton or Michael Devitt, was himself a Marxist in the
60s. He used to teach phil of science from Materialiasma nd
Empiriocriticism. Railton and Devitt, along with other Putnam students
like Richard Miller, Richard Boyd, Phil Kitcher, etc. are or were Marxists
as well as pragmatists.

I should say, if it isn't obvious, that that's the strain of pragmatist
Marxism to which I belong.

Contrary to what Ralph says, it does not reduce Marx to the ststus of a
mere philosopher to view him as a quasipragmatist, or make Marxism mere
contemplative philosophy to treat it as pragmatist. In the first place
even if one restrict pragmatism to a philosophical theory of knowledge,
truth, and science, one can look at Marx's and Marxisms' views of these
things from a pragmatist angle without denying that there is more to Marx
and Marxism. Second, pragmatism itself is marked by a systematic denial
taht philosophy is a seperate subject matter with a distinctive
methodology taht is removed from practiacl social concerns. This in fact
is one of the points of convergence between Marx and the pragmatists.

--Justin 

  





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