Maurice Cornforth

[JimFar]

Anyone here (including especially Rosa) have comments on Maurice Cornforth's bookMarxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cornforth3/MLP0.html)? That book represented his attempt to engage contemporary analytical philosophy, particularly the ordinary language philosophy that was popular at the time, from the standpoint of a dialectical materialist. It seems to me that this work bears some resemblence to the efforts of sophisticated Soviet philosophers in the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev periods to engage Western analytical philosophy, while presenting it as a clarification of diamat. The main difference being of course that Cornforth was British and so lived at the center of analytical philosophy unlike the Soviets. And as I understand it, Cornforth studied under C.D. Broad who was a close associate of Bertrand Russell, one of the founding fathers of analytical philosophy. It is interesting to note that Cornforth in that book seemed to have a lot of kind words for Gilbert Ryle and he was an admirer of Wittgenstein.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Cornforth was a personal friend of Wittgenstein's (in fact all W's friends were Communists, Trotskyists or other 'lefties'), so his book is surprisingly poor.

He confuses Wittgenstein with Russell and Carnap, and makes the usual mistakes dialecticians make when they try to comprehend Analytic Philosophy (too liitle logic, too much a priori superscience, too much Hegel (zero Hegel is probably too much!)).

He later recanted most of his earlier ideas in 'Communism and Philosophy', written in the early 1980's, when it was clear (even to dialecticians) that the USSR was a travesty of a workers' state.

I have yet to find anything worthwhile in anything he wrote on Philosophy; his work on Historical Materialism (while solid) was not inspiring (crippled as it was by his adherence to dialectical mysticism, and his naive faith in Stalinism).

[JimFar]

Rosa writes:


He confuses Wittgenstein with Russell and Carnap, and makes the usual mistakes dialecticians make when they try to comprehend Analytic Philosophy (too liitle logic, too much a priori superscience, too much Hegel (zero Hegel is probably too much!)).

To be fair to Cornforth, that would seem to be a mistake that he shared with many of the logical positivists, much to the consternation of Wittgenstein, who thought that the positivists missed the point of what he was attempting to do. Carnap & Neurath in their manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle had hailed Wittgenstein as one of the chief progenitors of what they referred to as the scientific conception of the world, along with people like Russell and Mach as well as such figures as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Karl Marx. Old Ludgwig, over time, seems to have become increasingly less appreciative of the adulation that he was receiving from the positivists.

Any compared to his earlier writings on diamat (which struck me as pretty unremarkable), his Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy does look to me like a step forward from his previous work. By the 1960s he was able to freely admit the importance and value of analytical and linguistic philosophy and he was willing to concede that Marxists had much to learn from it. He was certainly correct in those judgments, even if he could never entirely shake himself loose from the constraints imposed on him by virtue of his membership in the CPGB.

I don't think that enough work has been done on exploring Wittgenstein's attitudes towards Marxism. You're right that many of his closest friends were commies of one sort or another. Thre is the economist, Pierro Sraffa (a close associate of Gramsci), who Wittgenstein had singled out for a special acknowledgement in his forward to his Philosophical Investigations. Then there were people like the Marxist economist, Maurice Dobb, the historian Christopher Hill and many others who were Marxist friends of Wittgenstein. I am sure that you are aware of how Wiitgenstein attempted to emigrate to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He had his good friend, John Maynard Keynes, sound out his contacts at the Soviet embassy in London, to see if the Soviets would permit him to emigrate. Wittgenstein's intention was to come to the Soviet Union and live the life of a simple manual worker. As it turned out, the Soviets were interested in him coming there but only if he would accept a post as a lecturer in logic and philosophy. That was a most unappealing prospect to Wittgenstein, who could hardly imagine a more dreadful fate than being a don. He then made another offer. He would go to medical school and train as a physician. Then he would come to the Soviet Union and make his life there as a practicing physician. The Soviets, however, wouldn't budge so he never relocated to the USSR.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Jim, you are absolutely correct; the early reception of W's work among the positivists (but not all; Waismann was a clear exception) was almost entirely incorrect.

The book in question (Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy) suffers from the defects I mentioned, but other serious ones too. I attempt to outline these at my site (in Essays Twelve and Nine, when they are published).

You are also right about the connections between W and Marx (via Sraffa), but there has now been an attempt to do this ('Marx and Wittgenstein', edited by Kitching and Pleasants, published in 2003 -- I am posting this from work, so I am relying on memory here). In this book, scholars have begun the task of trying to re-construct Sraffa's influence on W(and hence Gramsci’s influence on him). This will always be speculative until hard evidence turns up (which it probably won't).

In my work, I use W’s method to rid Historical Materialism of the pernicious ruling-class ideology that Engels smuggled in, irrespective of the links W’s work has with Marx’s.

[Although the existence of such links, if they can be found, will be useful in defusing the resistance of some comrades to my work – but as you can see from Red Che’s ramblings, some comrades are beyond help.]