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 ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005