File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 38


Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 15:02:51 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism



Glad to have you back. Conversation here has deteriorited and there is a
very high noise-to-signal ratio as Malecki, neil, et al indulge in
sectarian rantings, so maybe your return will help restore the tone of the
neighborhood.

> >JKS: Why bother with what Aronowitz says?
> 
> RS: [I thought I had a case against someone whose celebrated rebuttal of
> historical materialism threatened to leave the academic left sans a
> practical theoretical arsenal.]
> 
Maybe it's celebrated in your neck of the woods. If so, I guess it's worth
attacking. It's very shoddy and hereabouts I don't know of anyone who pays
much attention to it. Maybe that's because I move in the right circles.

> RS: [Meaning that Aronowitz casts Habermas from the ranks of critical
> scholarship on rather moot grounds.  I'm sure Habermas would be surprised
> to find he's a naive positivist 

In what sense of "positivist"? There's the strict and philosophical sense,
on which no one is a P anymore, since the last of the P's, my old teacher
Carl Hempel, has departed this world, most unfortunately. He was a
wonderful man and a great scholar. There's Habermas' loose and vulgar
sense of P-ism, on which P's think that social sciences are scientific ins
omething like the way natural sciences are. I am a P in that sense, as are
most more or less traditional Marxists, although Habermas isn't.

- which, in Aronowitz's own a priori
> 'binarising' - is what you are if you are not a constructivist (ie. one who
> denies the role of experience as both source and verification of knowledge

Whom, except maybe Althusser, falls into this category? Certainly not
those classic constructivists Kuhn and Feyerabend! Maybe Aronowitz does,
less power to him. What a foolish notion.

> because, s/he argues, independent cultural and/or individual and/or
> intra-individual fragments etc construct experience and its objects).

This is hard to understand, but I think you are saying that experience is,
as we analytical philosophers say, theory-laden. Which is a
post-positivist and pragmatist truism, but no raeson to deny taht
experience matters in science.

> So yeah, I guess something like a Kuhnian/Feyerabendian
> incommensurability, between contending modes of rationality, of which the
> instrumental rationality characteristic of science is but one - and also
> irrationality - is what I'm trying to get at here. 

Obvously incommensurability does not follow from theory-ladenness. And 
incommensurability about norms is a wholly different stiory from
incommensurability about theories. Kuhn only maintains the second.
Feyerabend, more radically, mainatins the first as well.

RS:  My only points were
> that Habermas indeed wrote a whole book about (modernity and)
> incommensurable rationalities (*Knowledge & Human Interests*), argued that
> these allow for both science as it is done and emancipatory social
> reflection, by way of intersubjectivity.  The latter ideally critiques the
> former where 'scientism' (ideology in disguise) threatens (the
> Frankfurters' characteristic concern).]

Well, he did, althougha gain this is not perspiciously put, but what's the
point? That H doesn't believe in incommensurability of either sort> Whuch
is true, but so?

> RS: [I guess so - Caesar crossing the Rubicon is an objective truth (if one
> could show that the Rubicon did not cross Caesar, at any rate).  'Humans
> can cross rivers' might be a transcendetal truth, I s'pose.  A scientific
> premise I could live with anyway.]

I still don't get the distinction.

> 
> >> consequently the transhistorical subject,
> >
> >What's that?
> 
> RS: [The self-indulgence of one who has always read Marx as a humanist and
> refuses to take the Althusserian 'two Marxes theory'.

Well, me too, but what has that to do with a transhistorical subject?

RS:  I reckon I could
> carry an argument that, for Marx to make sense, his early implications as
> to the essential nature of the human must be borne in mind.  Granted that,
> humanity is a transhistorical subject

I still don't get it. Is the idea that there is a human nature that is
more or less independent of historical circumstances, e.g., in involving a
need for self-realization or something of that sort? Norman Geras has
argued powerfuly that Marx must have meant something of this sort in Marx
and Human Nature.

 - the danger lying in too detailed an
> account of what is essentially transcendentally human - there lies racism,
> sexism, ethnocentrism and economic rationalism.]
> 
You have been hanging out with the pomos too much. Racism, etc, do involve
"essentialism"--as the pomos put it--but the problem is not that the
racist notion of what is essentially human (and does "transcendentally"
add anything to "essentially"?) is too sdetailed, but that it is wrong.
And what's wrong with economic rationalism, btw? Is the notion that people
do what they to get what they want on a par with racism?

> >> RS: Rorty suspects that Habermas's 'unfinished project' need not
succumb to > >> this post-modernist criticism.
> >
> > What's the criticism?
> 
> RS: [That any theory of emancipation based on a view of human history as the
> ongoing resolution of contradictions, in light of (a) transhistorical
> material categories (the modest humanism mentioned above) and/or (b)
> historical material categories (the mode of production du juour - and also
> the mode of interaction, according to Habermas) is untenable because it is
> not only true that *nothing* is true (in the scientific sense) but also
> fundamentally importantly true. 

I'm lost. Did you leave something out? You have the apparently
contradictory claim that it's true that nothing is truw, supposedly saved
from inconsistency by the qualification of senses of truth. But what is
the nonscientific notion of truth in virtue of which it is
nonscientifically true that nothing is scientifically true? In addition,
what is fundamentally and importantly true in what sense?  

 RS: Material categories are always but
> fleeting ideational and ideological constructs 

Meaning what? I thought pomos didn't like the notion of ideology because
it presupposes a truth to which ideology is the distorted contrast.

RS: and emancipation is
> absolutely relative because 'to be human' has no fixed meaning.]
> 
Even supposing this to be so, what's the problem for the notion of
emancipation? Why can't we say that emancipation is being freed from the
evils that we suffer here and now, as we conceive them to be? This is the
line taht Raymond Geuss takes in The Idea of a Ctraical Theory.

> >> RS: In short, [Rorty] effectively denies that the truth of a statement
can be found > >> by checking it against an objective reality.
> >
> JKS: >Well, he's right about that. We can't see reality in the raw apart
from
> >some conception of it, or as conceprualized in some concrete way. That's
> >basic Kant. "Intuition without concepts is blind."
> >
> >> RS: Rather, truth is determined by what social practices allow as
evidence. > >
> >JKS: Rorty tends to be careless. Officially he accepts that truth is a
matter
> >of satisfying a Tarski sentence, which is objective, but empty. But he
> >does have a tendency to talk as if truth were merely consensus.
> 
> RS: [The latter point was what drew me to him in the first place - it was a
way
> in for a keen apprentice Habermasian.

Though Habermasian consensus is Piercean, consensus at the limit of
inquiry. Rorty's is consensus here and now.

  Marx said the 'socially valid' was
> 'therefore objective' and Lukacs (in H&CC) did too.  I've a feeling I'd
> benefit from the lash of your pedagogical powers here - wanna flail a
> little?]

Well, socially valid is objective in a perfectly good Hegelian sense. We
can't make class distinctions go away by wishing; they're socially created
and yet objective in the sense of being independent of our will, That does
not mean that all there is to truth is _this_ notion of objectivity, just
that this is an important sense of objectivity. I'd like the context for
the quote, by the way. 

But while Marx is ambiguous on a lot of things, it's pretty clear to me
that he does not collapse truth into any sort of consensus, except with
reference to truths about matters like, say, the existence of royalty (his
example in Capital I, in the context of attacking the convention theory
of money), whose existence is wholly socially constituted. You might
generally take Marx's insistence on the objectivity of value to involve a
sustained attack on conventionalism about truth (this just occurred to me;
I haven't thought it out).

Lukacs too, unlike Gramsci, insists that nature is objective in a strong
sense quite different from taht in which soicial norms and practices are
objective. 

> >  RS: This effectively makes of
> >> humanity the very 'basis of which all knowledge could be constituted as ...
> >> evidence'.  The subject is thus rescued from Foucault's antihumanist
> >> prescription.
> >
> >Where does Foucault come from here?
> 
> [Excerpts from a pretty unreadable blather were boring enough - the whole
> thing would have been unconscionable among comrades.  Surely you grant that
> Foucault was nearly always vociferously antihumanist?  The quotelet above
> is lifted from the last chapter in *The Order Of Things* - a rambling
> collection of futile and damaging flourishes; fun at times, but often
> unsubstantiated and rarely coherent to my untrained eye.]
> 

Well, actually, I think F is not antihumanist. What he means is pretty
plainly that the modern notion of the individual is constituted in certain
way, which he spells out in more detail in Discipline and Punish, as the
subject of various acts of survellience, data in dossiers, and such. In
the premodern era there were people, all right, but they were not like us
moderns in this respect. They were anonymous. That's all there is to F's
alleged antihumanism, in my view. Sociologiaclly it's pretty interesting,
but it carries no ontological burden.

> >JKS: Oh, no. Bradley's talking about something else. For Bradley, the
truth is
> >objective, it's the British Hegeliam Whole. But since we are finite beings
> >and not Spirit, we can only know part of it. The point could not be more
> >different.
> 
> [I'm quite aware of this.  I was trying to make the point
that it needn't be all that important whether one
> assumes the Hegelian history-as-self-realising-absolute  refutes it
> altogether (as do our pomo friends) or refutes a logically inevitable
> endpoint to the dialectic of human history - among which number I fear I
> must number Schaap the perpetually frustrated humanist).  I reckon
> important emancipatory work is always afoot for all these positions.]
> 
I guess I'm lost. I would have thought the differences among these
positions mattered a good deal, but I don't see how any of them relate to
conventionalist theories of truth.

> >> and (1914, 266):
> >>
> >JKS: Chapter and verse, please. I think Marx is a naive correspondance
> >theorist about truth. From the GI: "the priority of external (or
> >material?) nature remains unassailed."
> 
> [As I read this, we need not know, as positivists 'know', our reality.
> Material reality affords scope and limit to our thoughts and actions,
> regardless of our perceptions of it.  Those perceptions are themselves
> conditioned by it, and, as it is our perceptions which guide our actions,
> the ways in which we change 'out there' are contingent on a unity of Kant's
> nuomenal and phenomenal categories.  Where does it say a realist ontology
> requires a positivist epistemology?
> 

Nowhere, but what do _you_ mean by a positivist epistemology. I am pretty
sure I know what _I_ mean by it, which is roughly that the basis of
empirical knowledge is immediate "given" sense impressions. This doesn't
relate at all to ontology without a lot more work and I don't see that
bears in any way on what Marx is saying here or elsewhere.

> RS: Right now, an instrumental world-view predominates in conditioning our
> sociohistorical instance, where the world is a bunch of things,

As opposed to what? Processes or states of affairs or facts, or what? And
why does this matter?

 RS:and
> luxurious things have become for us necessary things,

Well, Marx says that capitalism, like any mode of production, creates new
wants. And so?

 and humans are
> themselves things that help transform other things, and that, as things,
> their activity too can be owned.  And so is the complex of  our relations
> with self, others and world conditioned.  The *GI*, which you know better
> than I, says something like this, doesn't it?
> 
Actually this sounds more like the 1844 Manuscripts.

> I could go on to argue it's transcendentally true 

As opposed to true in some other way? By me, if "transcendentally true"
has any meaning, it means necessarily true as a condition of any possible
experience (Kant). So if anything is transcendentally true, it's always
transcendentally true. I guess one might try to relavtive the notion in a
Hegelian way, saying something like, the nature of experience varies
depending on the form of consciousness, so what's T-true for one kind of
experience is not so for another.

that nuomenal reality is
> such that this way of seeing and relating can predominate, at least
> fleetingly, within its parameters.

"Noumenal" reality has no meaning outside Kant, where it means the way
things are independently of any possible experience, outside space, time,
and causality, all of which K thinks are transcwendental constructions of
the mind.

  I'd say it's objectively true that we
> are inclined to see the world so, for if we did not, we would not see and
> relate as we do.

This is trivial.

  I reckon you'd have to be a humanist to believe our
> seeing and relating should be different, but it is transcendentally true
> that it *could* be different.

Here you lose me. One might have an argument atht our experience could be
radically different--Marx clearly suggests something of the sort in the
1844 Manuscripots, though he doesn't take this idea up. But what this has
to do with T-truth escapes me.

  The truth that concerns me is humanism, for
> Rorty's pragmatism allows it because it 'works', Habermas because it is
> discursively redeemable in our world, and Marx because that's how I reckon
> he gets, if not from 'is' to 'ought' (my reading of him), then from 'is' to
> 'will be' (historical materialism as science plus, I suggest, more
> radically and dangerously humanist than even I dare be).]
> 

I'm lost here. What do you mean by "humanism"? Anyway, if you awnt to
argue for something called "humanism," formulate it cleraly and defend it.
There's no other way to argue for anything. 

> [So am I.  Marx self-consciously wrote from within capitalism about
> capitalism.  This is why he wrote little about the
> communism-possibly-to-come and went to some lengths to distinguish
> capitalism from other social modes in terms of those aspects,
> characteristic of capitalism (which he was in a position to know about),
> which were demonstrably absent or non-dominant in those modes (my copy of
> Grundrisse has been nicked so I may be talking through my hat here).
> Always capitalism is his point of departure.  His truth, the truth he
> explicates at length at any rate, is at once the truth about capitalism and
> the truth *in* capitalism,

This is OK so far.

 therefore as true as possible and as true as
> necessary.  This constitutes critical theory because it addresses the here
> and now, speaks deliberately and exclusively to people in that here and
> now, in their language, categories and norms of argument, about what the
> hidden dynamics of the here and now are, about how those dynamics might
> undo the here and now, and why this could be a good thing if an end to the
> thus-unmasked unfreedom is desired.  Habermas takes on part of this brief -
> but has perhaps taken a few too many liberties with the other bits - I
> dunno.]

Sure. He should talk to Martians, maybe?

> 
> >> Rorty (1991b, 168) sheets the responsibility home to the discourse of
> >> scientism:> 'we think we need this only because an overzealous philosophy of science
> >> has created an impossible ideal of ahistorical legitimation.'
> >
> >The resonsibility for what?
> 
> [The responsibility for allowing Lyotard to thrash Habermas with the
> argument that, as scientific standards of truth are untenable, nothing
> Habermas can contribute is any truer than anything absolutely anybody else
> might say - H is being a tyrannical expert, leading us to another Auschwitz
> through his baseless imposed metanarrative.  

Are you saying here that according to Rorty, Lyotard is right, or that
Habermas is, or that we don't have to worry about Lyotard's complaints or
about Habermas's solutuions toa  nonexistent problem? I think Rorty things
that Habermas is trying to solve a nonexistent problem, taht we don't need
any more legitimation that the fact taht something is in accord with our
own values because there's nothing else taht could be such legitimation. I
think Rorty thinks that Habermas is not going to lead to anything to
interesting as another Auschwitz; in fact, that H is not going to lead
anywhere at all.

Habermas reckons such a
> critique (effectively categorising all science as scientism) rids humanity
> of any possibility for coherent reform (never mind revolution).  I reckon
> Habermas is right.]
> 
Right, though Rorty thinks taht our values include a lot of space for
critque of our own practices.

> >You are running together, in a charcateristic Rortyian way, the historical
> >realtivity of argumentative norms with the supposed relativity of the
> >truth of the propositions that operate in the arguments.
> 
> [Not to do so is to say the world was not flat when everybody thought it
> was.  That's a realist ontology.  That's okay for the sort of Marxist I am,
> but not for pomos, for whom all truths are merely contending constructs -

Right, but they're idiots.

> and not for Rorty, for a round earth would not have 'worked' in a flat
> earth society bereft of both the scientific falsifiability norm nor the
> technology to falsify the theory anyway (the navigation instruments to
> allow sailing away from coasts, telescopes and mathematics etc).]
> 

This sort of example makers Rorty wriggle. I know. I pressed him on it at
length.

> 1)  I'm talking manifest enilightenment here.  
> elites etc).  Well, Habermas reckons we're throwing out the baby with the
> bathwater if we respond to the negative side of all this by rejecting the
> rational and ngating expertise to the point of denouncing experts.  As
> Habermas has it, the *intentions* of the enlightenment remain fundamentally
> necessary to nourish hope, inform change and fulfill human lives.  Hence,
> the modernist project is incomplete.  There's more to be gained down that
> road, if you like.

Of course.
> 
> 2)  If you are proudly ahistorical in your theorising and if you see all
> recorded history as nothing but a contending discourse of a status no
> different from any other, then you avoid the charge of modernist
> historicism.

What is this "charge"?

> 3)  Pomos rule in large chunks of Oz academe. 

Not just there, alas.

 You don't get anywhere
> quoting Smith, Ricardo or Marx to people whose whole self-concept is based
> on their negation (often sight unseen).  I was, and remain, convinced that
> pomos can be persuaded (or damned, if spiteful recreation is your aim) with
> recourse to the vaccuous obfuscations that come from the mouths of their
> own champions. 

Nah. But we can keep others from the error of their ways.

> [I remain confused as to just what Marxian materialism amounts to in terms
> of the old idealist-materialist dichotomy.  Have I got Marx right here:
> Unknowable reality conditions,

No, this is Kant, not Marx.

 informs and delimits possible perceptions ->
> these perceptions condition, inform and delimit possible actions -> these
> actions condition unknowable reality -> next verse same as the first.  If
> I'm wrong, it's because I unconsciously remain an idealist.  If I'm right,
> it might be because Marx's notion of materialism was, as he said very
> loudly, not Feuerbach's.]

The Marxian distinction between idealim and materialism is complex. I've
posted on this in the past. It's probably archived somewhere in spoons.

Happy new year.

--Justin




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