Buffalo Souljah
20th December 2009, 03:46
I want to discuss reactionary philosophy and how it did/does its part to perpetuate a particular system of production, and like a good Marxist, I will begin with the ancients and continue through the various epochs defining Medieval and modern history. Comments and suggestions are welcome, so feel free to express your opinion about anything you see (or don't see) here.
I think a good gauge of the temperament and conditions in society at any given point is the philosophical discussions that are transpiring in that particular course or stage of society. This is true and valid in all cases, and you can't have a philosophical system at one stage of development represent another, that would be contradictory. There are a number of good books discussing this methodology, and a number of schools of thought (Habermas's "Hermeneutical Phenomenology" comes to mind right off bat...) in which the structural conditions (economic, social, political, etc.) come into play in the theoretical perspectives of any given era.
For the ancients, who lived in a system that was subsequently broken by the irrational basis upon which it was built (a system built on slavery is, for instance, incommensurable with modes of modern capitalistic production and therefore must give way to other forms of production. Georg Lukacs writes about this tendency for systems to "slip out from under" their propagators in History & Class Consciousness, a seminal text in Western Marxist historiography), particular forms of production allowed for and ancouraged certain particular modes of thought, which is represented by the transcendentalist idealist school of thought, defined by Plato and carried on through Christian scholasticism into the Middle Ages. This was a system which was predicated on revelation and divine intervention as working forces in society, on the eternity of the soul and on individual salvation, which in turn justified the autocratic and oligarchic tendencies of the Athenian government. The central bone of contentions was the transcendental "idea", which served as the backbone of Plato's philosophy. Another major feature of Platonic philosophy is the dialectic, which Schwegler calls "the science of the changeable, which never is, but is always becoming." According to Plato,
"the dialectic remains the only intellectual process whose method is that of dissecting hypotheses and ascending to first principles in order to obtain valid knowledge. Even when the soul’s eye is sunk in the muddy pit or barbarism, the dialectic will gently release it and draw it upward, calling upon the studies we recently examined to support its work of conversion. We should note here that habit has several times caused us to call these studies sciences. We really need another word that would connote something more enlightened than opinion but less pure than science. I believe we used the word understanding earlier." (St. 533d; S&S 227) Since there was no distinction between the knowing subject and the known object of thought in Plato's time, concepts such as those addressed by later dialecticians (Kant in particular) regarding the "objectivization" of thought and the "subjectivization" of the thinker played no role in his version of the dialectic. Neither was a distiction made, a la structuralism, between signifier and signified. Thought, according to Plato always correlated to "sight", or the senses, and the knower could not simultaneously "know and not know, see and not see" a particular phenomena. This means Plato's dialectic was bound (subconsciously) by the limitations of language and the extension of thought at his time.
Aristotle, the great materialist philosopher and critic of his mentor, evolved the dialectic to a stage far beyond that of his predecessor, by distinguishing the idea from the object of thought: "ideas do not assist us to the knowledge of the individual things participating in them, since the ideas are not immanent in these things, but seperate from them," he argues inis Metaphysics. Aristotle also seperated the categories of "potentiality" and "actuality", setting up what was later to become the theistic rationalism of Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle was also the first to attempt to unify the different sciences (anthropology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, mathematics, natural science) into one universal system, something which he was to share with his disciple, Hegel. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Aristotle often contrasts dialectical arguments with demonstrations. The difference, he tells us, is in the character of their premises, not in their logical structure: whether an argument is a sullogismos is only a matter of whether its conclusion results of necessity from its premises. The premises of demonstrations must be true and primary, that is, not only true but also prior to their conclusions in the way explained in the Posterior Analytics. The premises of dialectical deductions, by contrast, must be accepted (endoxos).more to come... feel free to add comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc.
I think a good gauge of the temperament and conditions in society at any given point is the philosophical discussions that are transpiring in that particular course or stage of society. This is true and valid in all cases, and you can't have a philosophical system at one stage of development represent another, that would be contradictory. There are a number of good books discussing this methodology, and a number of schools of thought (Habermas's "Hermeneutical Phenomenology" comes to mind right off bat...) in which the structural conditions (economic, social, political, etc.) come into play in the theoretical perspectives of any given era.
For the ancients, who lived in a system that was subsequently broken by the irrational basis upon which it was built (a system built on slavery is, for instance, incommensurable with modes of modern capitalistic production and therefore must give way to other forms of production. Georg Lukacs writes about this tendency for systems to "slip out from under" their propagators in History & Class Consciousness, a seminal text in Western Marxist historiography), particular forms of production allowed for and ancouraged certain particular modes of thought, which is represented by the transcendentalist idealist school of thought, defined by Plato and carried on through Christian scholasticism into the Middle Ages. This was a system which was predicated on revelation and divine intervention as working forces in society, on the eternity of the soul and on individual salvation, which in turn justified the autocratic and oligarchic tendencies of the Athenian government. The central bone of contentions was the transcendental "idea", which served as the backbone of Plato's philosophy. Another major feature of Platonic philosophy is the dialectic, which Schwegler calls "the science of the changeable, which never is, but is always becoming." According to Plato,
"the dialectic remains the only intellectual process whose method is that of dissecting hypotheses and ascending to first principles in order to obtain valid knowledge. Even when the soul’s eye is sunk in the muddy pit or barbarism, the dialectic will gently release it and draw it upward, calling upon the studies we recently examined to support its work of conversion. We should note here that habit has several times caused us to call these studies sciences. We really need another word that would connote something more enlightened than opinion but less pure than science. I believe we used the word understanding earlier." (St. 533d; S&S 227) Since there was no distinction between the knowing subject and the known object of thought in Plato's time, concepts such as those addressed by later dialecticians (Kant in particular) regarding the "objectivization" of thought and the "subjectivization" of the thinker played no role in his version of the dialectic. Neither was a distiction made, a la structuralism, between signifier and signified. Thought, according to Plato always correlated to "sight", or the senses, and the knower could not simultaneously "know and not know, see and not see" a particular phenomena. This means Plato's dialectic was bound (subconsciously) by the limitations of language and the extension of thought at his time.
Aristotle, the great materialist philosopher and critic of his mentor, evolved the dialectic to a stage far beyond that of his predecessor, by distinguishing the idea from the object of thought: "ideas do not assist us to the knowledge of the individual things participating in them, since the ideas are not immanent in these things, but seperate from them," he argues inis Metaphysics. Aristotle also seperated the categories of "potentiality" and "actuality", setting up what was later to become the theistic rationalism of Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle was also the first to attempt to unify the different sciences (anthropology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, mathematics, natural science) into one universal system, something which he was to share with his disciple, Hegel. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Aristotle often contrasts dialectical arguments with demonstrations. The difference, he tells us, is in the character of their premises, not in their logical structure: whether an argument is a sullogismos is only a matter of whether its conclusion results of necessity from its premises. The premises of demonstrations must be true and primary, that is, not only true but also prior to their conclusions in the way explained in the Posterior Analytics. The premises of dialectical deductions, by contrast, must be accepted (endoxos).more to come... feel free to add comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc.