File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 213


Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 23:48:48 +0700
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones)
Subject: nescience and decadence


In my last post, I butchered Lukacs argument in Destruction of Reason.  I
think that his real concern here is not with social life per se (modern
art, sexuality, clubs) or with imperialism but with epistemology.  For him
decadence was an attitude towards reason--that is nescience. Scott Meikle's
oft-cited book is helpful in stating the question here (and much more):

"Any essentialist or organicist hisorian seeking a deeper level of
explanation and law is faulted, not because he makes mistakes, but for the
very nature of his enterprise (Thus atomism obstructs more serious
intellectual endeabour, for which reason it is justly called nescient.)  He
will be accusedof cramming history into preconceived categories, or of
forcing a framework of theory on to a congeries of 'events' whose richness
and infinite varienty makes such attempts prentious and false.  Such
humility in the face of 'events', such becoming modestry about the limited
powers of the human reason, sometimes show a truer face in outright
hostility to theory as such.  Nescience of this kind suggests perhaps that
it is found preferable not to understand, and so not to seek understanding,
and to belittle those who do." (p.162)

The line from such nescience in its intuitionist and mythical forms to the
nihilism it inspires and finally to it brownshirted enforcement captures
the epistemological dimension of decadenence to which Lukacs was calling
attention.

Epistemological decadence then is nescience towards essences,towards that
which is explanatorily fundamental, and--as Mattick,jr put it-- towards"the
capacity to understand the social world, including the problems and needs
of human beings, and to reshape the social as well as the natural world the
better to meet those needs."  I must say that it just this conception of
rationality that I believe to be most under attack (and one I find myself
incapable of defending).

What such understanding entails--in terms of ontological and
epistemological concerns--is discussed often brilliantly by Daniel Little
in Scientific Marx and, I think,  David-Hillel Ruben's Explaining
Explanation. In fact Little advances well beyond Lukacs--in my
opinion--because he elaborates with impressive precision  what is entailed
by explanation and understanding. (Little also rejects a
naturalist-predictive science). It is the destruction of  social
understanding that could be said to be in the interest of a declining
ruling class, as well as its (decadent?) hangers-on.  However, one can also
speak of the link between a certain kind of technocratic reason and
progression into barbarism.  
 
d jones



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