Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 13:11:05 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: MT: "Ideology" (1) [was: RAKESH--JUST CHECKING]


For Rakesh:

I presume you also received my commentary on that Marxist-Leninist critique
of Cornel West, which I forgot to mention in my last private post to you.
You should keep this critique in mind as you read my posts on Sidney Hook,
pragmatism, Mead and Marx, and ideology on M-THAXIS AND M-THEORY.  I have to
fight confused Stalinist cliches on the one hand and idealist obscurantism
on the other.

BTW, the last thing I did before I passed out between 5:30 and 6 am was to
pull Patrick Murray's book off the shelf.  It looks very impressive from a
cursory and very drousy perusal.  It's got it in just the kind of stuff I
love.  Murray seems to be very sensitive to the issues that surrounded Marx
in his emergence from the Young Hegelians. Also, I chanced on a passage
where Murray says everybody has got Marx's conception of the unity of theory
and practice all wrong.  Most excellent and important!

I did browse some passages regarding immanent critique just as I passed out,
so I got a hint of how Bauer comes in for criticism, and it seems to follow
my hunches.  The reason I was startled by this phrase "immanent critique" is
that it comes from a certain tradition and addresses a set of problems, but
the sort of people who advocate immanent critique are the same people who
attack materialism, hence I wonder if this concept may not also obscure the
other ontological issues we need to keep in mind.  I think I understand the
methodological issue involved in "immanence", which I believe to be
absolutely compatible with--even inseparable from--materialism.  I am
troubled, though, by the setting up of the immanence-transcendence pair as
the ultimate philosophical categories.  I don't want to revert to the
radical historicist twaddle of a Cornel West. Matter should not be lumped in
as one of those misleading transcendental categories.

It seems that my critique of pragmatism may have something to do with this
issue of "immanence"--that pragmatism can never be truly immanent as it
pretends, but must always remain external to its subject matter.  This is
certainly true of the infantile ravings of Cornel West, who simply reduces
the issue of truth claims to arbitrarily and vaguely defined cultural
interests, badmouthing science, upholding religion, just as it pleases him.
The problem with radical historicism is that it itself is a transcendental,
aprioristic argument.  (It is caught in a paradox from which it cannot
escape.  And if it chooses to revel in its very paradox, it has to conceal
its incompetence in that it has no basis at all from which to oppose the
materialist perspective.)  This is the same old-fashioned metaphysical
reasoning, though subjectivist, that Engels so perspicaciously nailed in
reference to empiricism over a century ago.  (Engels perhaps does not fully
resolve the axiological paradox in the opening pages of LUDWIG FEUERBACH,
but that is a different argument.)

At 09:25 PM 12/13/97 -0500, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>Hi Ralph, Yes, I have received your recent messages.