Marx the philosopher

[Die Neue Zeit]

I was taken by surprise by Rosa's comments a couple of days ago that Marx never was a philosopher. I have to contest those comments, merely because of my peculiar stay-away attitude towards the Manifesto (the words describing my attitude being found only today here (http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2007/09/chavez-is-not-marxist-but-neither-was.html)) and increased receptiveness towards structuralist works like Brumaire, Zasulich, and so on.

While he may have steered away from dialectics later on to focus on historical development, in his early life he definitely employed a lot of philosophy (which would explain the more flowery language of his earlier works, language which evokes reticence on my part). Take, for example, this (obviously the part about monopoly interests me, but not in terms of reading Poverty (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02c.htm) instead of asking about Luxemburg's or Kalecki's accumulation stuff, begging for the link that Lenin never provided between accumulation and monopoly):


Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.

Antithesis: Competition.

Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

It really depends on what you mean by 'philosopher'.

In his day, even scientists were called 'natural philosophers'.

So we could call Marx a 'social philosopher' in that sense.

But what I meant was that he rejected traditional philosophy, as practiced by Hegel etc.

Here are some of his words to that effect:


"One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.

"We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." [Marx and Engels (1970), p.118.]


"Is it surprising that everything, in the final abstraction…presents itself as a logical category? Is it surprising that, if you let drop little by little all that constitutes the individuality of a house, leaving out first of all the materials of which it is composed, then the form that distinguishes it, you end up with nothing but a body; that if you leave out of account the limits of this body, you soon have nothing but a space -– that if, finally, you leave out of account the dimensions of this space, there is absolutely nothing left but pure quantity, the logical category? If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents, animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction the only substance left is the logical categories. Thus the metaphysicians, who in making these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and who, the more they detach themselves from things, imagine themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrating to their core…." [Marx (1978), p.99.]



"The mystery of critical presentation…is the mystery of speculative, of Hegelian construction….

"If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea 'Fruit', if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea 'Fruit', derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then -- in the language of speculative philosophy –- I am declaring that 'Fruit' is the 'Substance' of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea -– 'Fruit'…. Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is 'the substance' -– 'Fruit'….

"Having reduced the different real fruits to the one 'fruit' of abstraction -– 'the Fruit', speculation must, in order to attain some semblance of real content, try somehow to find its way back from 'the Fruit', from the Substance to the diverse, ordinary real fruits, the pear, the apple, the almond etc. It is as hard to produce real fruits from the abstract idea 'the Fruit' as it is easy to produce this abstract idea from real fruits. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at the opposite of an abstraction without relinquishing the abstraction….

"The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of 'the Fruit', this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind…. When you return from the abstraction, the supernatural creation of the mind, 'the Fruit', to real natural fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the unity of 'the Fruit' in all the manifestations of its life…that is, to show the mystical interconnection between these fruits, how in each of them 'the Fruit' realizes itself by degrees and necessarily progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence the value of the ordinary fruits no longer consists in their natural qualities, but in their speculative quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of 'the Absolute Fruit'.

"The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc., out of the unreal creation of the mind 'the Fruit'….

"It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, 'the Fruit.'

"In the speculative way of speaking, this operation is called comprehending Substance as Subject, as an inner process, as an Absolute Person, and this comprehension constitutes the essential character of Hegel's method." [Marx and Engels (1975), pp.72-75.]

And we all know this famous quote:


The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it.

And then there is this one:


"Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex."

A load of wankers then...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Finally:


Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.

Antithesis: Competition.

Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly.

This schema was adopted by Marx early on (he seems to have abandoned it later, though); he was taught it by one of his university professors who got Hegel wrong.

You can find the details here:

http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic...st&p=1292097892 (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=51512&view=findpost&p=1292097892)

And he used a few philosophical terms in Capital (derived from Hegel), but as he said, he merely 'coquetted' with them.

They played no genuine role in his work.

[Herman]

Young Marx might have been interested in philosophy, but Adult Marx understood that philosophy had to be practical.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Red, you are right, but that meant he abandoned philosophy in favour of social, economic and historical science (understood in the German sense).

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ You quoted a lot of Marx there, but care to elucidate upon the time frame (ie, when did he actually say those, before the 1860s or after)?

[Hehe, Holy Family, Poverty, and the Manifesto itself would be a really good study in a "philosophy" class, while most others suited to "heterodox" economics and historical development.]

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Most were from the German Ideology and The Holy Family. Mid-1840's.

So, he was still very young.

[Demogorgon]

No offence, but isn't this a bit of a pointless discussion given that the word philosophy can be understood in a nimber of ways? Under some definitions anyone working in the realm of political theory could be called a philosopher after all.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Demogorgon, you are right, but this is a philosphical point in itself: exactly what Philosophy is.

I tend to agree with Marx and Wittgenstein, here; it is a critical activity, one that does not reveal truths to us, but helps us make sense of what we already think we know -- among other things.

Amd it does this, as Marx says, by looking at things from the perspective of ordinary material language.

[McCaine]

It's really pointless to use citations like "(Marx 1970)" if you're not going to provide a bibliography, btw.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Apologies McCaine, but I have posted these before with the exact references, I just forgot this time.

Marx and Engels (1970) is the German Ideology, and Marx and Engels (1975) is the Holy Family.

If you want to know the editions I have used, let me know.

[gilhyle]

So, what is Marx 1978 ?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

A rare brand of Cuban cigars.



[Marx, K. (1978), 'The Poverty Of Philosophy' (Foreign Languages Press).]

[gilhyle]

I wanted to write few words about the nature of dialectics. I do this,despite the fact that – as I have said before – there is a connundrum facing any discussion of the topic, which is that Marxist dialectics has never been expounded with any great effect. The closest to it is the work of Engels and Adorno (and Benjamin’s related remarks). On philosophical questions Lukacs was no Marxist at all, nor were Althusser and Gramsci and Bukharin. Remarks by Lenin and Trotsky are journalistic in nature, or mere research notes. A writer like Cauldwell is ultimately glib. Epigones like Rees and Smith are simply irrelevant.

This fact is frustrating both for Marxists, who see that a dialectical method is at work in Marx’s Capital and for opponents of dialectics, who have no good target to aim at and end up constructing paper tigers to hit out at. On this board there is a militant critique of dialectics which suffers significantly from the impracticality of getting any definitive statement of the object of its criticism.

I have no intention of solving that. But there is one thought I can add that might be helpful. It is this : contrast Kant’s critique of Metaphysics with that of Wittgenstein and you get some idea of what dialectics is about. Wittgenstein came from a tradition which believed that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use. Wittgenstein emphasised the option of dissolving those problems rather than solving them. Thus for Wittgenstein the practice of philosophy is the practice of discerning logical form, i.e. what really follows from a proposition. In his later work this amounts to studying language games. In this later work he draws distinctions between what makes sense not by applying a général theory of what is an appropriate use of language, but pragmatically by seeing on the basis of the special features of each case whether there is a rule based language game. Notwithstanding that this is an unusual method, it remains the case that he believed that there are things which appear to follow from propositions which do not and that is the basis of his critique of metaphysics. It is also the basis of hiis belief that while there are no legitimate philosophical propositions, there is a legitimate activity of philosophising.

This belief that there is a significant social phenomenon of linguistic confusion has always appeared decidedly naive, a-political and simplistic to Marxists. It has seemed to Marxists that it ignores the social character of thinking….and the concept of language games does not rescue it in that regard. Consequently, notwithstanding the fact that Marxists sympathise with Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics they are unable to go along with his belief that there can be an effective social practice of discerning linguistic confusion. Marxists go further and reject the legitimacy of philosophical practise also.

Kant, by contrast is not interested so much in what can be expressed as in how judgements are made. So, like Wittgenstein, he does not claim that there must be a first cause (to take an example) of everything that exists, but unlike Wittgenstein, he beleives he can make the philosophical claim that causality is a necessary general and common ingredient in our minds.

But he also argues that there are errors that we necessarily enter into because reason cannot be extended to ever more general premises. These errors are the errors of metaphysics. Thus Kant differentiates between the general ideas that we must have to be able to think as we do and the general ideas we do not have to have tin order to think that way, but which we have to have because we think that way.

He is also very different from Wittgenstein in that he does not explain the existence of metaphysiscs as being a result of linguistic confusion, but rather as the result of the necessarily erroneous application of reason.

Reasoning for Kant is synthetic knowledge derived from the nature of concepts. Kant believes that concepts are « entirely our own work » (CPR A301 B358) and, consequently it should be contrary to common sense to think that we can derive knowledge of objects in themselves from our examination of our concepts – since sense data is not involved in their creation. Reasoning, for Kant, is legitimately about the coherence of our thinking with itself – it « secures the unity of rules of understanding under principles (CPR A302 B359) Kant sets out to explain false reasoning which we all necessarily enter into : « Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them. After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error but he will never be able to free himself from the illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him. » (CPR A339 B397) Believing this, Kant sets out to analyse the methods by which the very nature of reason itself creates illusions in our minds. These illusions, which are not errors of reason fall into three kinds : paralogisms, antinomies and ideals of reason.

Hegel disagrees with Kant that the examination of concepts can reveal nothing about external reality. He disagrees not because he reaffirms a traditional metaphysical way of thinking. He disagrees because, as part of his critique of scepticism, he has redefined what we must mean in philosophy by external reality. For him, external reality must be the total picture implied within each partial understanding and not some independent external reality. In other words, Hegel associates reality with coherent thinking and rejects the possibility of what might today be called, a bit loosely, ‘objective knowledge’. But Hegel also rejects the possibility of conducting a critque of knowledge which labels it as subjective. We never escape the criteria of coherence, even to the extent necessary to contrast coherence with correspondence. This is the foundation of Hegel’s (then) distinctive idealism, which has been replicated in many post-modern radical constructivist theories since the 1980s..

This view leads Hegel to the observations about dialectics that are relevant here. He looks at Kants analysis of paralogisms, antinomies and so-called ideals of reason (which are all different ways Kant identified in which reason necessarily leads to erroneous metaphysical conclusions) and Hegel asks what are we to make of these ways of thinking once we recognise that we do not have the priviledged independent access to reality to judge them true or false or meaningless. Hegel’s answer is that no simplistic concept of ‘error’ (whether error in reasoning or language) gives us a sufficient explanation of the complex pattern of thinking involved in such metaphysics.

Rather, to understand this practice of metaphysics we must recognise that it is always attempting to create a totalising picture, to make a transition from the well perceived to the less perceived, from the well understood to the less well understood – it is always speculative.

In other words metaphysisc has always been the refusal of agnosticism in all its forms. Unlike Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, many thinkers have refused to be satisfied to just remain silent about that of which we cannot speak with scientific authority. Such thinkers are more like the rest of us who, in our everyday lives all speculate on the nature of broader realities than are evident to us.

I cant go into how Hegel went on to analyse such speculaltive thinking, for reasons of length. The key point is Hegel’s observation that such totalising thinking suffuses all our thinking. We cannot separate out a legitimate, grounded type of thinking which does not involve metaphysical presuppositions. Thus he denies the legitimacy of Wittgenstien’s project - which for him would be like trying to purge humans of their hungers. He illustrated this point at great length and this is where ‘dialectics’ comes in. There are a series of patterns which can be discerned in the changes in the way we think which show that we are constantly engaged in the speculative completion and disruption of pour own ways of viewing the world in order to progress our thinking.

Then he observes, ia addition, that the way we think about the fact that we think this way can also be understood this way. We can, he argues, see our thinking about the nature of metaphysics itself evolving. When we recognise that, he argues, we can see the historical unity of all thinking as itself a totality moving towards a conclusion.

Marx rejects this last step. For him Hegel has mistaken the totality. The totality of thinking is not a significant one, since all thinking derives from the material circumstances in which it comes into existence. It is the unfolding of those material circumstances which needs to be grasped as the most significant totality. Consequently, the conclusion is that the proper critique of metaphysics is neither that it is an error of linguistic confusion, nor that it is an error of reasoning or that it is an erroneous attempt to grasp the totality of thought statically, when it is actually something that unfolds historically. All these are the erroneous critques of metaphysics by, respectively Wittgenstein, Kant and Hegel.

Rather the totalising activity that we see in metaphysics (and the patterns of change in human thinking that we see around us) are reflections of the constantly changing relationship of ideas to their constantly changing material circumstances. We can identify formal patterns in thinking which show that the changes in human thinking and the speculative use of reason are not random (they dont, by the way, ‘prove’ this point since it itself is a speculative completion of reality)

Marx’s equivalent of Hegel’s doctrine of the Concept is then to go on to accept that revolutionaries themselves are part of this. They must engage in totalising conceptualisations. They cannot confine themselves to what can be said within the dominant forms of science. It is a Comtean-style delusion to think that revolutionary socialism can be grounded merely in science as if it were an accessible‘truth’ available if we can only exclude error. This is a delusion that harks back to the Enlightenment and the false belief of the representatives of the bourgeoisie that there is a truth available to people by the mere exercise of their reason which indicates how society should be organised.

By contrast, Marxism necessarily involves speculative thinking, but not with an Enlightenment purpose. It should be disciplined and careful speculative thinking which proceeds not to paint pictures of how we would like things to be but which is built up carefully making transitions from concrete observation and scientific knowledge to abstract hypotheses about reality (which necessarily go further than the available evidence strictly ‘proves’) and then which are applied back again to concrete reality to inform action.

WHat the character of that set of thoughts is might seem at first sight very like what Wittgenstein does - both are critical processes of reflection on the ideas people have or the language people use. But Wittgenstein is validating logical relations, Marx is not. In that sense Marx is not a philosopher in a way that Wittgenstein is. Because Marx believes there is an unfolding dynamic in thinking that is derived from material relations and dialectical in form, the validity or otherwise of the logical relations postulated in a body of thinking critiqued by Marx is of minor importance. (It is not of no importance since Marx continued to use internal critique as a rhetorical device to call opposing views into question) but it is subordinate to the situating of ideas within their material relations.

This practice of critique by Marxists has always puzzled philosophers BECAUSE it does not prioritise the testing of logical relations. THey accuse Marxists of falling into the genetic fallacy, i.e. of thinking that they have disproved a proposition by showing that it was uttered with a malign purpose. In this, however, it is they who misunderstand Marxism which is not trying to test the truth of a proposition when situating it. Rather. Marxists are measuring the distance between the proposition and the interests of the working class. This kind of practice is best understood as being entirely outside the continuity of philosophy in a way neither Wittgenstein, Kant or Hegel were.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil, thank you for putting all this time into explaining a few things, but it was all wasted effort, for you have merely repeated the same old canards.


Wittgenstein came from a tradition which believed that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use.

Where in Wittgenstein's writings (or unpublished notes) does he say language needs reforming?

In fact he says "ordinary language is alright as it is".

You have confused him with Russell.

Sure you say he came from that tradition, but he actually invented that tradition, and it was Russell who went down the route you mention. The tradition Wittgenstein established never wanted to reform anything (linguistically).


This belief that there is a significant social phenomenon of linguistic confusion has always appeared decidedly naive, a-political and simplistic to Marxists. It has seemed to Marxists that it ignores the social character of thinking….and the concept of language games does not rescue it in that regard. Consequently, notwithstanding the fact that Marxists sympathise with Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics they are unable to go along with his belief that there can be an effective social practice of discerning linguistic confusion. Marxists go further and reject the legitimacy of philosophical practise also.

Not so; Wittgenstein's turn to the social (under the influence of Gramsci), is precisely this. I, for instance, have endeavoured to add the necessary detail.


Kant, by contrast is not interested so much in what can be expressed as in how judgements are made. So, like Wittgenstein, he does not claim that there must be a first cause (to take an example) of everything that exists, but unlike Wittgenstein, he beleives he can make the philosophical claim that causality is a necessary general and common ingredient in our minds.

Kant's a priori and dogmatic psychology is a classic example of such linguistic confusion.


He is also very different from Wittgenstein in that he does not explain the existence of metaphysiscs as being a result of linguistic confusion, but rather as the result of the necessarily erroneous application of reason.

But even one so great (and as confused) as Kant had to use language to do this -- and that is where his own garbled thought intervened.


Hegel disagrees with Kant that the examination of concepts can reveal nothing about external reality. He disagrees not because he reaffirms a traditional metaphysical way of thinking. He disagrees because, as part of his critique of scepticism, he has redefined what we must mean in philosophy by external reality. For him, external reality must be the total picture implied within each partial understanding and not some independent external reality. In other words, Hegel associates reality with coherent thinking and rejects the possibility of what might today be called, a bit loosely, ‘objective knowledge’. But Hegel also rejects the possibility of conducting a critque of knowledge which labels it as subjective. We never escape the criteria of coherence, even to the extent necessary to contrast coherence with correspondence. This is the foundation of Hegel’s (then) distinctive idealism, which has been replicated in many post-modern radical constructivist theories since the 1980s..

But Hegel is even worse; he committed more than his fair share of basic logical errors, and on that rotten edifice this 'theory' you are trying to defend was erected.


Rather, to understand this practice of metaphysics we must recognise that it is always attempting to create a totalising picture, to make a transition from the well perceived to the less perceived, from the well understood to the less well understood – it is always speculative.

In other words metaphysics has always been the refusal of agnosticism in all its forms. Unlike Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, many thinkers have refused to be satisfied to just remain silent about that of which we cannot speak with scientific authority. Such thinkers are more like the rest of us who, in our everyday lives all speculate on the nature of broader realities than are evident to us.

Not so, metaphyiscs is just bogus a priori super-science, and involves its practiotioners dressing up mystical ideas in obscure jargon to fool comrades like you.


I cant go into how Hegel went on to analyse such speculaltive thinking, for reasons of length. The key point is Hegel’s observation that such totalising thinking suffuses all our thinking. We cannot separate out a legitimate, grounded type of thinking which does not involve metaphysical presuppositions. Thus he denies the legitimacy of Wittgenstien’s project - which for him would be like trying to purge humans of their hungers. He illustrated this point at great length and this is where ‘dialectics’ comes in. There are a series of patterns which can be discerned in the changes in the way we think which show that we are constantly engaged in the speculative completion and disruption of pour own ways of viewing the world in order to progress our thinking.

Even if you were right, Hegel would be the last person we should look to for help here in view of the spurious nature of the 'logic' he used, and the incomprehensible jargon he layered ontop of it.


Marx rejects this last step. For him Hegel has mistaken the totality. The totality of thinking is not a significant one, since all thinking derives from the material circumstances in which it comes into existence. It is the unfolding of those material circumstances which needs to be grasped as the most significant totality. Consequently, the conclusion is that the proper critique of metaphysics is neither that it is an error of linguistic confusion, nor that it is an error of reasoning or that it is an erroneous attempt to grasp the totality of thought statically, when it is actually something that unfolds historically. All these are the erroneous critques of metaphysics by, respectively Wittgenstein, Kant and Hegel.

Marx went even further, and rejected Hegel in his entirety -- by the time he wrote Capital.

And as far as linguistic confusion is concerend, this is what Marx said:


"One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.

"We have shown that thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence in consequence of the personal circumstances and relations of individuals acquiring independent existence. We have shown that exclusive, systematic occupation with these thoughts on the part of ideologists and philosophers, and hence the systematisation of these thoughts, is a consequence of division of labour, and that, in particular, German philosophy is a consequence of German petty-bourgeois conditions. The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." [Marx and Engels The German Ideology (1970), p.118. Bold added.]

Apart from a few idiomatic differences, that could almost have been written by Wittgenstein himself.

But, we are still no clearer what exactly this super-duper theory of yours actually means.

Linguistic confusion, it seems, has cast its long shadow over you too!

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by [email protected] 29, 2007 09:12 am
I wanted to write few words about the nature of dialectics. I do this,despite the fact that – as I have said before – there is a connundrum facing any discussion of the topic, which is that Marxist dialectics has never been expounded with any great effect. The closest to it is the work of Engels and Adorno (and Benjamin’s related remarks). On philosophical questions Lukacs was no Marxist at all, nor were Althusser and Gramsci and Bukharin. Remarks by Lenin and Trotsky are journalistic in nature, or mere research notes. A writer like Cauldwell is ultimately glib. Epigones like Rees and Smith are simply irrelevant.

So what's with all the talk about Lenin being the "founder" of diamat? :huh:


This fact is frustrating both for Marxists, who see that a dialectical method is at work in Marx’s Capital and for opponents of dialectics, who have no good target to aim at and end up constructing paper tigers to hit out at. On this board there is a militant critique of dialectics which suffers significantly from the impracticality of getting any definitive statement of the object of its criticism.

*snip*

This practice of critique by Marxists has always puzzled philosophers BECAUSE it does not prioritise the testing of logical relations. THey accuse Marxists of falling into the genetic fallacy, i.e. of thinking that they have disproved a proposition by showing that it was uttered with a malign purpose. In this, however, it is they who misunderstand Marxism which is not trying to test the truth of a proposition when situating it. Rather. Marxists are measuring the distance between the proposition and the interests of the working class. This kind of practice is best understood as being entirely outside the continuity of philosophy in a way neither Wittgenstein, Kant or Hegel were.

That's something big to think about - that "logic" has nothing to do with Marx's dialectics (or lack thereof, depending on one's opinion) whatsoever.



[Personally, I'm on the neither side of the dialectics/anti-dialectics debate, since I've found dialectics to be of secondary nature to the more important stuff: emphasizing the "history" in "historical materialism."]

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hammer, the 'logic' Hegel used was already a garbled and bowdlerised version of Aristotle's highly limited system (which no scientist has ever used, nor has any human ever used to reason with -- except as an exercise) before he got his hands on it.

Hegel just screwed it up even more.

So, there is no logic even in Hegel!

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 29, 2007 05:24 pm
But, we are still no clearer what exactly this super-duper theory of yours actually means.

Rosa, you are more or less correct that you are no clearer on what dialectics means (i.e. what its content is), but then, I made it clear that I would not seek to answer that question.

My concern in observing threads on the topic on this board is that its historical place goes unremarked and even obfuscated in the somewhat arrogant idea that Hegel was befuddled.

Your approach - which is based on the philosophical practice of identifying supposed linguistic confusion and seeking to destroy or at least contain that confusion by clarification of logical relations - feeds off two phenomena. Firstly, it feeds off the fact (undoubted) that dialectics is difficult to engage with, given the inadequate forms in which it is formulated. Secondly your approach feeds off the inherent tendency in capitalist society for reflective thinking to be confined to the practice of science and logical analysis, where science is dominated by the social relations within which it operates and logical analysis is such an inadequate tool for understanding the complexities of reality that it becomes an area for undisciplined speculation.

Your point about Wittgenstein not supporting the reform of language is quite right. But I never said otherwise. My point was that Wittgenstein came from a tradition in which these alternative ways of examining language were articulated - he was part of that tradition, at one end of it. Of course I dont confuse Russell and Wittgenstein. My point is the tradition should be seen as one unit, by contrast with Kant.

From within this tradition for both you and a follower of Russell, Kant appears mired in linguistic confusion. But, then, from within Kant's tradition Wittgenstein appears to overestimate what ontological conclusions can be drawn from the examination of logical relations. In other words, for a Kantian - amusingly - Wittgenstein engages in metaphysics !

My point is to draw a contrast between different ways, as Broudeny calls it, of attempting to leave philosophy. What Kant did was to abandon Metaphysics as a positive doctrine, while accepting that it survives as a) a NECESSARY error and b) a presupposition of practical reasoning. Wittgenstein denies that it survives as a necessary error, thinking that metaphysical expressions are, at least in principle, capable of being dispelled by clear thinking. Thus both Kant and Wittgenstein retain conceptions of philosophical practice - practices which generate structures for the analysis of the practice of thinking/speaking.

You correctly quote from Marx, but the question left outstanding by your quote is how the postulation of consciousness as an independent realm is to be overcome. If one believes in the legitimacy of a philosophical practice of dispelling linguistic confusion, the answer is by tracing the correct logical relations to reveal the confusion. If, as Marx believes, one believes that men alter their thinking in the course of altering what he calls in the GI their material intercourse then the attempt to dispel linguistic confusion comes to be seen as itself treating consciousness as an independent realm. It is this which the GI surpasses. Marx situates the process of critique as subordinate to the project of revolution. The old formula of the working class serving as the tool of the 'theoretical communists' who also serve as the agents of the working class is surpassed. It is understood in the GI that the working class do not serve the intellectuals at all. Critique is now seen not to be a philosophical exercise, but part and parcel of the practical reasoning of the revolutionary, serving not to dispel linguistic confusion but to empower the revolutionary. This is the distinctive character of Marx's way of leaving philosophy, radicaly more complete than Wittgensteins and philosophically much more problematic.

(The marginal influence of Gramsci on Wittgenstein does not concern me, since neither man was Marxist in method. )

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Rosa, you are more or less correct that you are no clearer on what dialectics means (i.e. what its content is), but then, I made it clear that I would not seek to answer that question.

Indeed, it has yet to be answered by anyone.


My concern in observing threads on the topic on this board is that its historical place goes unremarked and even obfuscated in the somewhat arrogant idea that Hegel was befuddled.

Not so much 'arrogant' as accurate.

The man was a complete charlatan, who barely understood even the garbled Aristotelian logic he was 'taught'.


Your approach - which is based on the philosophical practice of identifying supposed linguistic confusion and seeking to destroy or at least contain that confusion by clarification of logical relations - feeds off two phenomena. Firstly, it feeds off the fact (undoubted) that dialectics is difficult to engage with, given the inadequate forms in which it is formulated. Secondly your approach feeds off the inherent tendency in capitalist society for reflective thinking to be confined to the practice of science and logical analysis, where science is dominated by the social relations within which it operates and logical analysis is such an inadequate tool for understanding the complexities of reality that it becomes an area for undisciplined speculation.

And I could say the same of you, except in my case I can substantiate what I say -- you merely assert.


Your point about Wittgenstein not supporting the reform of language is quite right. But I never said otherwise. My point was that Wittgenstein came from a tradition in which these alternative ways of examining language were articulated - he was part of that tradition, at one end of it. Of course I dont confuse Russell and Wittgenstein. My point is the tradition should be seen as one unit, by contrast with Kant.

Not so. As I pointed out, Wittgenstgein began this tradition, and it was not as you alleged. His approach was totally new, and cannot be seen as part of one 'unit' without serious distortion

You implied that he was a Russellian by your incautious description.


From within this tradition for both you and a follower of Russell, Kant appears mired in linguistic confusion. But, then, from within Kant's tradition Wittgenstein appears to overestimate what ontological conclusions can be drawn from the examination of logical relations. In other words, for a Kantian - amusingly - Wittgenstein engages in metaphysics !

Well, as with Marx, I take a stance in ordinary language -- the language of the working class, and from that stance Kant is a confused mystic.

You may prefer to adopt a view borrowed from ruling-class tradition, but then that is your problem.

And there are no ontological implications that can or have been drawn (by me) from this approach, and none that Wittgenstein depended on or derived -- not even in the Tractactus.


You correctly quote from Marx, but the question left outstanding by your quote is how the postulation of consciousness as an independent realm is to be overcome. If one believes in the legitimacy of a philosophical practice of dispelling linguistic confusion, the answer is by tracing the correct logical relations to reveal the confusion. If, as Marx believes, one believes that men alter their thinking in the course of altering what he calls in the GI their material intercourse then the attempt to dispel linguistic confusion comes to be seen as itself treating consciousness as an independent realm. It is this which the GI surpasses. Marx situates the process of critique as subordinate to the project of revolution. The old formula of the working class serving as the tool of the 'theoretical communists' who also serve as the agents of the working class is surpassed. It is understood in the GI that the working class do not serve the intellectuals at all. Critique is now seen not to be a philosophical exercise, but part and parcel of the practical reasoning of the revolutionary, serving not to dispel linguistic confusion but to empower the revolutionary. This is the distinctive character of Marx's way of leaving philosophy, radicaly more complete than Wittgensteins and philosophically much more problematic.

Well, none of that made the slightest bit of sense, and seems to contradict (if I grasped even 1% of it) the passage I quoted.

Is it any wonder academic Marxism is a dead end if you academics spout such meaningless stuff?

[gilhyle]

I take a stance in ordinary language -- the language of the working class

this is an interesting comment. Marx certainly had a view in 1845, which I dont find in later works and which he got from Feuerbach that there was a plain and simple, self-evident access to truth. It is a common theme in the GI which never appears again, although it vitiates Feuerbach's philosophy for the rest of his life and reduces it to a shadow of its original potential. This is the puzzle of Feuerbach for many writers that, despite his detailed knowledge of the history of philosophy acceptance of rationalist criteria of self-evidence led him to an uncritical philosophy in his later works.

I would generally think that I agree with everything Marx wrote from 1845 onwards; these sentiments - unargued and unexplained in the GI, although much relied on in the criticism of Stirner - are the only exception.

they run counter to his other expressed view that it is not the mental riches of the working class that make them the agent of revolution but the poverty of their culture, their enslavement to their material conditions....

If we try to reconcile the two we can only do so by treating the idea of self-evidence (an idea present in the American declaration of independence...or is it the constitution ?) as a theoretical point.

In other words, Marx can only be consistent if he is saying that there is a self evidence but that it is not accesible to the working class

[IronLion]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 20, 2007 06:46 am

"Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex."

A load of wankers then...
Hehehehe....




Load.


;)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


This is an interesting comment. Marx certainly had a view in 1845, which I dont find in later works and which he got from Feuerbach that there was a plain and simple, self-evident access to truth. It is a common theme in the GI which never appears again, although it vitiates Feuerbach's philosophy for the rest of his life and reduces it to a shadow of its original potential. This is the puzzle of Feuerbach for many writers that, despite his detailed knowledge of the history of philosophy acceptance of rationalist criteria of self-evidence led him to an uncritical philosophy in his later works.

Maybe, maybe not -- but it is certainly the stance I take.

But, I find it hard to believe that when Marx and Engels championed workers so much, and when they declared that the emancipation of the working class must be an act of the working class, and when Marx wrote this:


"The mystery of critical presentation…is the mystery of speculative, of Hegelian construction….

"If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea 'Fruit', if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea 'Fruit', derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then -- in the language of speculative philosophy –- I am declaring that 'Fruit' is the 'Substance' of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea -– 'Fruit'…. Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is 'the substance' -– 'Fruit'….

"Having reduced the different real fruits to the one 'fruit' of abstraction -– 'the Fruit', speculation must, in order to attain some semblance of real content, try somehow to find its way back from 'the Fruit', from the Substance to the diverse, ordinary real fruits, the pear, the apple, the almond etc. It is as hard to produce real fruits from the abstract idea 'the Fruit' as it is easy to produce this abstract idea from real fruits. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at the opposite of an abstraction without relinquishing the abstraction….

"The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of 'the Fruit', this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind…. When you return from the abstraction, the supernatural creation of the mind, 'the Fruit', to real natural fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the unity of 'the Fruit' in all the manifestations of its life…that is, to show the mystical interconnection between these fruits, how in each of them 'the Fruit' realizes itself by degrees and necessarily progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence the value of the ordinary fruits no longer consists in their natural qualities, but in their speculative quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of 'the Absolute Fruit'.

"The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc., out of the unreal creation of the mind 'the Fruit'….

"It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, 'the Fruit.'

"In the speculative way of speaking, this operation is called comprehending Substance as Subject, as an inner process, as an Absolute Person, and this comprehension constitutes the essential character of Hegel's method." [Marx and Engels (1975), pp.72-75. Bold added.]

And:


"Is it surprising that everything, in the final abstraction…presents itself as a logical category? Is it surprising that, if you let drop little by little all that constitutes the individuality of a house, leaving out first of all the materials of which it is composed, then the form that distinguishes it, you end up with nothing but a body; that if you leave out of account the limits of this body, you soon have nothing but a space -– that if, finally, you leave out of account the dimensions of this space, there is absolutely nothing left but pure quantity, the logical category? If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents, animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction the only substance left is the logical categories. Thus the metaphysicians, who in making these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and who, the more they detach themselves from things, imagine themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of penetrating to their core…." [Marx (1978), p.99.]

And:


"The object before us, to begin with, material production.

"Individuals producing in Society -- hence socially determined individual production -- is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of 'civil society', in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual -- the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century -- appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing.

"The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a Zwon politikon not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society -- a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness -- is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat, Carey, Proudhon etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made, and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus communis. [Marx (1973), pp.83-85. Bold emphasis added.]

"The main point here is this: In all these forms -- in which landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and where the economic aim is hence the production of use values, i.e., the reproduction of the individual within the specific relation to the commune in which he is its basis -- there is to be found: (1) Appropriation not through labour, but presupposed to labour; appropriation of the natural conditions of labour, of the earth as the original instrument of labour as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials. The individual relates simply to the objective conditions of labour as being his; [relates] to them as the inorganic nature of his subjectivity, in which the latter realizes itself; the chief objective condition of labour does not itself appear as a product of labour, but is already there as nature; on one side the living individual, on the other the earth, as the objective condition of his reproduction; (2) but this relation to land and soil, to the earth, as the property of the labouring individual -- who thus appears from the outset not merely as labouring individual, in this abstraction, but who has an objective mode of existence in his ownership of the land, an existence presupposed to his activity, and not merely as a result of it, a presupposition of his activity just like his skin, his sense organs, which of course he also reproduces and develops etc. in the life process, but which are nevertheless presuppositions of this process of his reproduction -- is instantly mediated by the naturally arisen, spontaneous, more or less historically developed and modified presence of the individual as member of a commune -- his naturally arisen presence as member of a tribe etc. An isolated individual could no more have property in land and soil than he could speak. He could, of course, live off it as substance, as do the animals. The relation to the earth as property is always mediated through the occupation of the land and soil, peacefully or violently, by the tribe, the commune, in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form. The individual can never appear here in the dot-like isolation...in which he appears as mere free worker. [Ibid., p.485. Bold emphasis added.] Bold added.

[Which are no less Wittgensteinian.]

And when Engels wrote:


"Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism. It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors. Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other....

"First labour, after it and then with it speech -- these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which, for all its similarity is far larger and more perfect...." [Engels (1876), pp.356-57. Bold emphases added.]

[The language of labour is ordinary language.]

[Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse (Penguin Books).

Engels, F. (1876). 'The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man', in Marx and Engels (1968).

Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1968), Selected Works In One Volume (Lawrence & Wishart).

The other references you know about.]

I find it hard to believe that either of them retreated from that earlier stance.

But, if you can show that they did, then I would have to disagree with them, and re-affirm my stance with the working class.

But can you?


they run counter to his other expressed view that it is not the mental riches of the working class that make them the agent of revolution but the poverty of their culture, their enslavement to their material conditions....

If we try to reconcile the two we can only do so by treating the idea of self-evidence (an idea present in the American declaration of independence...or is it the constitution ?) as a theoretical point.

In other words, Marx can only be consistent if he is saying that there is a self evidence but that it is not accesible to the working class

I think you are confusing the beliefs workers hold with their language. They are not the same thing.

This is a common error (even Wittgenstein committed it!).

Common sense and ordinary language are not the same.

This is easy to prove.

For every alleged common sense belief there exists its negtation in ordinary language.

I have started to post my extended thoughts on this here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm

[Be warned, that Essay is over 67,000 words long, and forms part of Essay Twelve where I will be addressing all these issues in detail over the next four or five years.]

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

IronLion -- too right!!

[gauchisme]

in the first quotation cited by rosa, marx and engels discuss "one of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers" as realism. this is hardly a negation of philosophy; in fact, it's a recognition central to many of its schools. we needn't go into so-termed 'postmodern' continental thought here; american pragmatists (i'm thinking of hilary putnam, for example), under the influence of philosophers like wittgenstein, have adopted the view that most traditional philosophical problems are nothing more than linguistic confusions created by philosophers who use ordinary vocabularies out of context. philosophy thus sinks or swims on the basis of whether it aids in our leaving behind outworn vocabularies, and helps us cope with new ones...

however, marx&engels' claim that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations..." merits some criticism. just as speculatory financial capital comes to operate, more and more, in a frictionless virutality where 'what's actually happening'/'the reality on the ground' becomes irrelevant, so too late capitalism (or more generally, the age we find ourselves at present) effectively changes reality, the way we perceive reality, our very relation to our life and world. nietzsche claimed that god died - the scientific revolution ate our religious faith. might not we claim also that reality has died? that the informational revolution ate our actual world? everything got commodified. all has or will become a simulation.

even if you won't go this far out (a la baudrillard), anybody can agree that thought and language are hardly neutral or objective means of data transmission. they aren't 'only manifestations'. they help to construct the very world to which they refer. representation isn't a static blueprint, but an interactive map. and some of the same pragmatists mentioned above have been instrumental in critiquing correspondence theories of truth and the myth of representation (rorty's 'philosophy and the mirror of nature' serves as the classic example).

that last point also falls more in the ballpark of two marxist post-structuralists named gilles deleuze and felix guattari. marx may answer plato well, but he has no answer for them - except to reassert the economic reductionism of base/superstructure, which is untenable philosophically, and would be considered by some as merely a remnant of platonism. that's why deleuze called hegel the last metaphysician, in full hatred.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gauchisme:


in the first quotation cited by rosa, marx and engels discuss "one of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers" as realism. this is hardly a negation of philosophy; in fact, it's a recognition central to many of its schools. we needn't go into so-termed 'postmodern' continental thought here; american pragmatists (i'm thinking of hilary putnam, for example), under the influence of philosophers like wittgenstein, have adopted the view that most traditional philosophical problems are nothing more than linguistic confusions created by philosophers who use ordinary vocabularies out of context. philosophy thus sinks or swims on the basis of whether it aids in our leaving behind outworn vocabularies, and helps us cope with new ones...

But anti-philosophers (like me) also discuss realism, and yet that does not mean they/we endorse either it or Philosophy in general.


however, marx&engels' claim that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations..." merits some criticism. just as speculatory financial capital comes to operate, more and more, in a frictionless virutality where 'what's actually happening'/'the reality on the ground' becomes irrelevant, so too late capitalism (or more generally, the age we find ourselves at present) effectively changes reality, the way we perceive reality, our very relation to our life and world. nietzsche claimed that god died - the scientific revolution ate our religious faith. might not we claim also that reality has died? that the informational revolution ate our actual world? everything got commodified. all has or will become a simulation.

I am not sure what this has to do with anything these two said.

And, when you say "might not we claim also that reality has died?" I presume you are trying to inform us about reality?

In which case, your question self-destructs.


even if you won't go this far out (a la baudrillard), anybody can agree that thought and language are hardly neutral or objective means of data transmission. they aren't 'only manifestations'. they help to construct the very world to which they refer. representation isn't a static blueprint, but an interactive map. and some of the same pragmatists mentioned above have been instrumental in critiquing correspondence theories of truth and the myth of representation (rorty's 'philosophy and the mirror of nature' serves as the classic example).

In fact I won't even go so far as to open another French Philosophy text, let alone agree with anything those charlatans have to say.

And, we may construct buidings, or puzzles or even a case for the defence, but we cannot "construct the...world", for it was there before we were even thought of.

I hope you now see why I allege that "most traditional philosophical problems are nothing more than linguistic confusions created by philosophers who use ordinary vocabularies out of context", although I would not put it that way.

You are doing just that.


that last point also falls more in the ballpark of two marxist post-structuralists named gilles deleuze and felix guattari. marx may answer plato well, but he has no answer for them - except to reassert the economic reductionism of base/superstructure, which is untenable philosophically, and would be considered by some as merely a remnant of platonism. that's why deleuze called hegel the last metaphysician, in full hatred.

Maybe so, maybe not -- but that does not prevent us from branding all of traditional philosophy a systematic capitulation to the misuse of language -- and then consign it all to the flames, as Hume suggested.

I'll get the matches...

[gauchisme]

rosa: "[A]nti-philosophers (like me) also discuss realism, and yet that does not mean they/we endorse either it or Philosophy in general."

speaking of self-destructive tasks, i'm not sure how it's possible to be anti-philosophy outside of philosophy. either one reads these texts and provides reasons why they're ill-informed (that is, engages in philosophy) or one doesn't and is guilty of irrational dismissiveness (e.g., person a: 'i don't like the beatles' / person b: 'well have you heard all their songs?' / person a: 'i've heard enough'). in the latter instance, one's argument has as much value as a matter of taste, in which case your hatred of all 'philosophy' (whatever that means) should be taken as seriously by anyone reading as if you'd written of your hatred for red wine.

so, three questions you&#39;ll need to answer: (1) what is philosophy?, (2) if you want to make rational arguments about why the underpinnings of this thing called philosophy are flawed, aren&#39;t you doing philosophy?, (3) shouldn&#39;t you be a bit more reticent to over-generalize about an entire <insert whatever you think philosophy is> when at least some of its branches pursue some of the same lines of inquiry as yourself?

r : "I am not sure what this has to do with anything these two said."

they argue that language is transparently representational. we have good reason to doubt this. searle puts it this way, characterizing rorty&#39;s (and other anti-realists&#39;) position...

"What Rorty would say is that he doesn&#39;t really deny that there&#39;s an external world. He thinks nobody denies that. What Rorty says is that we never really have objective knowledge of that reality. We ought to adopt a more pragmatic approach and think of what we call "truth" as what&#39;s useful to believe. So we shouldn&#39;t think of ourselves as answerable to an independently existing reality, though he wouldn&#39;t deny that there is such a thing.

The problem that all these guys have is that once you give me that first premise--that there is a reality that exists totally independently of us--then the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You&#39;ve got a real world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that external reality. And then step 3: If 1 and 2 are right, then some organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality. Step 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point they have to resist that derivation, because then you&#39;ve got this objectivity of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that&#39;s what they want to reject." (http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html)

r : "And, when you say "might not we claim also that reality has died?" I presume you are trying to inform us about reality? In which case, your question self-destructs."

not real-ly. =) ... we&#39;re using reality in two senses: the first sense is the actual world, the second sense is a true proposition. i can say, it&#39;s a truth that the actual world has died, which wouldn&#39;t be correctly translated as, &#39;the reality is reality has died&#39;, unless you take into account the distinction i just mentioned.

r: "In fact I won&#39;t even go so far as to open another French Philosophy text, let alone agree with anything those charlatans have to say."

it&#39;s hard for me not to immediately disqualify what you&#39;ve got to say when you say things like this. &#39;french philosophy&#39; is huge, on-going historical development, about which it&#39;s impossible to say anything that&#39;s both all-encompassing and profound. if there&#39;s a tinge of anti-french american nationalism there, i reject that as well, along with the ad hom.

r: "we may construct buidings, or puzzles or even a case for the defence, but we cannot &#39;construct the...world&#39;, for it was there before we were even thought of."

we construct how we relate to the world, and that relation is all we know. the coffee mug in front of me has an independent existence. if i leave the room, it&#39;s still &#39;there&#39;. but the ability to recognize &#39;a coffee mug&#39; isn&#39;t there alongside it. someone who has never seen a coffee mug will still see an object, but they won&#39;t know what it is. they might describe it, but they won&#39;t know which aspects of their description are needed to stand out and define the object. or if this someone isn&#39;t just a normal human, but what we&#39;d define as abnormal, or an alien intelligence, they might not be too skilled at object recognition in the first place, that is, they&#39;d have trouble making out where the thing begins and the background ends. in &#39;reality&#39;, there isn&#39;t a definite cut-off -- by &#39;reality&#39; here i mean at the atomic/subatomic levels, what we&#39;ve see are bundles of quanta blinking in and out of existence. i could go on and on with this, but what i&#39;m getting at is that reality is, as burroughs said, a scanning pattern. it isn&#39;t merely &#39;out there&#39; in cold dead space. it&#39;s a function of the angle our senses take on it. (you are correct to say we don&#39;t construct the world per se, if only because we are the result of those constructions too. i can&#39;t subjectively will myself a third arm - i am confined by physical laws, for example. but this means that social construction is deeper than mere wishing.)

r : "I hope you now see why I allege that "most traditional philosophical problems are nothing more than linguistic confusions created by philosophers who use ordinary vocabularies out of context", although I would not put it that way. You are doing just that." ... that &#39;ordinary language&#39;-criticism isn&#39;t a license to sling mud at all complex thinking. it isn&#39;t an excuse for simplistic rejectionism. and you are doing just that.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gauchisme:


speaking of self-destructive tasks, i&#39;m not sure how it&#39;s possible to be anti-philosophy outside of philosophy. either one reads these texts and provides reasons why they&#39;re ill-informed (that is, engages in philosophy) or one doesn&#39;t and is guilty of irrational dismissiveness (e.g., person a: &#39;i don&#39;t like the beatles&#39; / person b: &#39;well have you heard all their songs?&#39; / person a: &#39;i&#39;ve heard enough&#39;). in the latter instance, one&#39;s argument has as much value as a matter of taste, in which case your hatred of all &#39;philosophy&#39; (whatever that means) should be taken as seriously by anyone reading as if you&#39;d written of your hatred for red wine.

Well, it is just as easy to be anti-philosophy &#39;outside&#39; philosophy as it is to be anti-capitalist and not be a capitalist.


so, three questions you&#39;ll need to answer: (1) what is philosophy?, (2) if you want to make rational arguments about why the underpinnings of this thing called philosophy are flawed, aren&#39;t you doing philosophy?, (3) shouldn&#39;t you be a bit more reticent to over-generalize about an entire <insert whatever you think philosophy is> when at least some of its branches pursue some of the same lines of inquiry as yourself?

Answers:

1) Ruling class ideology.

2) No.

3) I deny this.


not real-ly. =) ... we&#39;re using reality in two senses: the first sense is the actual world, the second sense is a true proposition. i can say, it&#39;s a truth that the actual world has died, which wouldn&#39;t be correctly translated as, &#39;the reality is reality has died&#39;, unless you take into account the distinction i just mentioned.

In that case, are you trying to inform us of a real distinction?

If so, your question self-destructs once more.


it&#39;s hard for me not to immediately disqualify what you&#39;ve got to say when you say things like this. &#39;french philosophy&#39; is huge, on-going historical development, about which it&#39;s impossible to say anything that&#39;s both all-encompassing and profound. if there&#39;s a tinge of anti-french american nationalism there, i reject that as well, along with the ad hom.

What you choose to waste your time on is your own affair.


we construct how we relate to the world, and that relation is all we know. the coffee mug in front of me has an independent existence. if i leave the room, it&#39;s still &#39;there&#39;. but the ability to recognize &#39;a coffee mug&#39; isn&#39;t there alongside it. someone who has never seen a coffee mug will still see an object, but they won&#39;t know what it is. they might describe it, but they won&#39;t know which aspects of their description are needed to stand out and define the object. or if this someone isn&#39;t just a normal human, but what we&#39;d define as abnormal, or an alien intelligence, they might not be too skilled at object recognition in the first place, that is, they&#39;d have trouble making out where the thing begins and the background ends. in &#39;reality&#39;, there isn&#39;t a definite cut-off -- by &#39;reality&#39; here i mean at the atomic/subatomic levels, what we&#39;ve see are bundles of quanta blinking in and out of existence. i could go on and on with this, but what i&#39;m getting at is that reality is, as burroughs said, a scanning pattern. it isn&#39;t merely &#39;out there&#39; in cold dead space. it&#39;s a function of the angle our senses take on it. (you are correct to say we don&#39;t construct the world per se, if only because we are the result of those constructions too. i can&#39;t subjectively will myself a third arm - i am confined by physical laws, for example. but this means that social construction is deeper than mere wishing.)

Thanks for all that, but it just underlines how far into this bogus thought-form your own ideas have sunk. You can only do this by systematically misusing words, which means that all of the above is nonsensical.


that &#39;ordinary language&#39;-criticism isn&#39;t a license to sling mud at all complex thinking. it isn&#39;t an excuse for simplistic rejectionism. and you are doing just that.

Once more, if you think that reading and writing pages and pages of nonsense is a wise use of your time, then don&#39;t let me stop you.

We have had 2500 years of this b*llocks (with nothing to show for it), and that is enough by now, I think.

It certainly is for me.

[gilhyle]

QUOTE
so, three questions you&#39;ll need to answer: (1) what is philosophy?, (2) if you want to make rational arguments about why the underpinnings of this thing called philosophy are flawed, aren&#39;t you doing philosophy?, (3) shouldn&#39;t you be a bit more reticent to over-generalize about an entire <insert whatever you think philosophy is> when at least some of its branches pursue some of the same lines of inquiry as yourself?



Answers:

1) Ruling class ideology.

2) No.

3) I deny this.


I dont agree with Rosa&#39;s answers.

1. Yes philosophy is ruling class ideology, but to say that does not sufficiently characterise it. Philosophy is the attempt to bring closure to ruling class ideologies. It seeks to tranform arguments for morality into an ethics, it seeks to transform methods for developing understanding into validating epistemologies, it seeks to tranform ontological claims into views of the nature of reality, it seeks to define beauty, it seeks to situate individual life...etc. in effect it seeks to hypostatize, reify, transitory perspectives.

2. Probably but not necessarily. The way to avoid doing philosophy is to make ratinal arguments without hypostatizing reasoning as reason. Thus you point out the internal contradictions in an opponents arguments, you point to conflict between claims made and accepted understandings (usually science). But what you do not do is think that the difference between revolutionaries and defenders of the dominant relations can be conclusively debated within a single rational framework. The differences between the two is beyond rational reconciliation. they are ultimately a matter of material conflict which can be resolved only by material conflict.

3. Yes, i would be slow to confine myself to the rejection of philosophy. Notwithstanding the lack of scientific method or (often) empirical verifiability, philosophy has made significant contributions to the self-consciousness of society. Most notably, the Enlightenment mediated the progressive bourgeois revolution and continues to express ideals of the bourgeoisie with clarity, ideals from which capitalism repeatedly resiles. However, the insights of writers like Deleuze and Guattari are so partial and inflected that they have primarily curiosity value.....same, unfortuantely, is true of Wittgenstein who practised far more philosophy than he admitted.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


1. Yes philosophy is ruling class ideology, but to say that does not sufficiently characterise it. Philosophy is the attempt to bring closure to ruling class ideologies. It seeks to tranform arguments for morality into an ethics, it seeks to transform methods for developing understanding into validating epistemologies, it seeks to tranform ontological claims into views of the nature of reality, it seeks to define beauty, it seeks to situate individual life...etc. in effect it seeks to hypostatize, reify, transitory perspectives.

As I said, ruling-class ideology.


2. Probably but not necessarily. The way to avoid doing philosophy is to make ratinal arguments without hypostatizing reasoning as reason. Thus you point out the internal contradictions in an opponents arguments, you point to conflict between claims made and accepted understandings (usually science). But what you do not do is think that the difference between revolutionaries and defenders of the dominant relations can be conclusively debated within a single rational framework. The differences between the two is beyond rational reconciliation. they are ultimately a matter of material conflict which can be resolved only by material conflict.

There is much here I agree with, but why is this &#39;philosophy&#39;?


3. Yes, i would be slow to confine myself to the rejection of philosophy. Notwithstanding the lack of scientific method or (often) empirical verifiability, philosophy has made significant contributions to the self-consciousness of society. Most notably, the Enlightenment mediated the progressive bourgeois revolution and continues to express ideals of the bourgeoisie with clarity, ideals from which capitalism repeatedly resiles. However, the insights of writers like Deleuze and Guattari are so partial and inflected that they have primarily curiosity value.....same, unfortuantely, is true of Wittgenstein who practised far more philosophy than he admitted.

So some claim, but when they are challenged to substantiate these allegations, they go rather quiet.

Even so, whatever W got up to, I intend to push his anti-philosophical method to its limit.

[gilhyle]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 01, 2007 07:38 pm

There is much here I agree with, but why is this &#39;philosophy&#39;?


Its not, but neither is proper to consider it nameless. It is, I believe, &#39;critique&#39; - class struggle at the level of ideas, which proceeds not by dissuading the ideologists from their &#39;illusions&#39; but by arming the revolutionaries with arguments appropriate to their struggle.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Its not, but neither is proper to consider it nameless. It is, I believe, &#39;critique&#39; - class struggle at the level of ideas, which proceeds not by dissuading the ideologists from their &#39;illusions&#39; but by arming the revolutionaries with arguments appropriate to their struggle.

Yes, I can live with that.

[gauchisme]

ugh, so much to disagree with...

r: "it is just as easy to be anti-philosophy &#39;outside&#39; philosophy as it is to be anti-capitalist and not be a capitalist."

you think it&#39;s easy to be anti-capitalist in a capitalist country?... most everyone who isn&#39;t living on a commune somewhere is complicit. we work for capitalists. we buy capitalist goods. we pay taxes to capitalist governments. the critique of capitalism is *internal* to capitalism, as any decent marxist should admit.

philosophy = ruling class ideology, eh?... but certainly it&#39;s a specific kind of ruling class ideology. i mean, i&#39;d certainly agree that alan greenspan is a ruling class ideologue, but is he therefore a philosopher? i think not. so what&#39;re the specific characteristics of this branch of ruling class ideology? and if someone uses philosophy to critique ruling class ideology, what do we call them?

and since you seem to appreciate critique (of which marx provided the finest example), what&#39;s your opinion of michel foucault? his whole project was historical critique. was he just another ruling class ideologue?

[gauchisme]

as for self-refuting claims, you realize you&#39;re in a forum room called &#39;philosophy&#39;. why did you choose to come here as opposed to all the other rooms you could reply in? you are *literally* rejecting philosophy within Philosophy.

[mikus]

Saying that criticizing philosophy in the philosophy section of this messageboard makes about as much sense as saying that criticizing theology on a theology messageboard makes one a theologist.

Try a new approach.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gauchisme:


you think it&#39;s easy to be anti-capitalist in a capitalist country?... most everyone who isn&#39;t living on a commune somewhere is complicit. we work for capitalists. we buy capitalist goods. we pay taxes to capitalist governments. the critique of capitalism is *internal* to capitalism, as any decent marxist should admit.

Please re-read what I said, only this time more carefully:


Well, it is just as easy to be anti-philosophy &#39;outside&#39; philosophy as it is to be anti-capitalist and not be a capitalist.

Nothing there about being in, or not being in, a "capitalist country".


philosophy = ruling class ideology, eh?... but certainly it&#39;s a specific kind of ruling class ideology. i mean, i&#39;d certainly agree that alan greenspan is a ruling class ideologue, but is he therefore a philosopher? i think not. so what&#39;re the specific characteristics of this branch of ruling class ideology? and if someone uses philosophy to critique ruling class ideology, what do we call them?

I&#39;d call them self-deluded, as Marx noted:


"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an &#39;eternal law.&#39;" [Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1970), pp.64-65.]

More details here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-12.htm


and since you seem to appreciate critique (of which marx provided the finest example), what&#39;s your opinion of michel foucault? his whole project was historical critique.

Foucault&#39;s work?

A total waste of paper.

I told you what I thought of French &#39;thinkers&#39;.


was he just another ruling class ideologue?

In that he spouted ruling class nonsense, yes.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mikus:


Saying that criticizing philosophy in the philosophy section of this messageboard makes about as much sense as saying that criticizing theology on a theology messageboard makes one a theologist.

Try a new approach.

No more than criticisng capitalism in a capitalist society makes one a capitalist.

Try a better argument...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

G:


as for self-refuting claims, you realize you&#39;re in a forum room called &#39;philosophy&#39;. why did you choose to come here as opposed to all the other rooms you could reply in? you are *literally* rejecting philosophy within Philosophy.

I told you why: to publicise my Essays, first and foremost --, but second to try to win comrades away from ruling-class ideology: Philosophy.

You can&#39;t do that on board that contains no comrades; and where else is better than here, the largest lefty board on the planet?

And your &#39;within&#39; here is clearly metaphorical. I can live with that.

You are new here; I have actually been over this scores of times.

[mikus]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 01, 2007 09:16 pm
Mikus:


Saying that criticizing philosophy in the philosophy section of this messageboard makes about as much sense as saying that criticizing theology on a theology messageboard makes one a theologist.

Try a new approach.

No more than criticisng capitalism in a capitalist society makes one a capitalist.

Try a better argument...
Oops&#33; There was a major typo in my original post. It should read

"Saying that criticizing philosophy in the philosophy section of this messageboard makes one a philosopher makes about as much sense as saying that criticizing theology on a theology messageboard makes one a theologist."

Directed at gauchisme, not Rosa.

[gauchisme]

rosa, you dodged my questions about what specifically characterizes the branch of ruling class ideology called philosophy. perhaps you&#39;ve said it before. still i think putting you in charge of this forum is like putting ariel sharon in charge of palestinian liberation.

your stance on foucault is unwarranted and ignorant. &#39;discipline and punish&#39; connects us to reality in a profound way: how we&#39;ve gone from retributive to rehabilitative &#39;justice&#39;, how we&#39;re wracked by normalization. what marx did for the factory, foucault did for the prison. here&#39;s also a man who protested shoulder-to-shoulder with his students in may 1968. but i guess that&#39;s just something which happened in france, and shouldn&#39;t concern u.s.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gauchisme:


rosa, you dodged my questions about what specifically characterizes the branch of ruling class ideology called philosophy. perhaps you&#39;ve said it before. still i think putting you in charge of this forum is like putting ariel sharon in charge of palestinian liberation.

I thought I had.

And, I do not stop people wasting their time here discussing philosophy, so it&#39;s not like what you said.

The important thing is, after all, to change the world, not spend hours debating unanswerable questions.


your stance on foucault is unwarranted and ignorant. &#39;discipline and punish&#39; connects us to reality in a profound way: how we&#39;ve gone from retributive to rehabilitative &#39;justice&#39;, how we&#39;re wracked by normalization. what marx did for the factory, foucault did for the prison. here&#39;s also a man who protested shoulder-to-shoulder with his students in may 1968. but i guess that&#39;s just something which happened in france, and shouldn&#39;t concern u.s.

I am sorry if you think I was being ignorant, but I have yet to find in Foucault anything of worth, that is, over and above the page numbering. [But even then, I had to check to see if it was correct.]

And apart from Rousseau, the same goes for all of French Philosophy (that I have read) since Descartes (including him).

If that makes me ignorant, let&#39;s hope I stay that way.

[gilhyle]

I also have a very low opinion of Foucault. this is not the place to go into Foucault in detail, but he was essentially an analyst of power. He stnds in the libertarian tradition in which history is either a process towards freedom or a a process/cycle failing to progress towards freedom. He is thus a perfect example of philosophy as bourgeois ideology. Libertarianism - in all its forms - stands in the Bourgeois revolutionary tradition seek to introduce democracy and freedom against the constraints of exercise of power. For Marxism that whole tradition is suffused with bourgeois ideological concepts. By contrast Marxism does not believe in the struggle between the agents of freedom and power but between the classes - Marxism thus strips away to empty slogans hiding class interests which otherwise permeate thinking, facilitating false generalisations and false rationalisations which only weaken the revolutionary movement, except in its childish phase.

As to your more general point about communism being internal to capitalism - yes, quite correct. But because capitalism is a single society which encloses us all (with intensifying effectiveness) does not mean that capitalism has a single coherent rationality. Meaning, communication, logic...these are phenomena which are not assured to us within capitalist society phenomena which we attain episodically and unstably. So it does not follow from the fact that we are part of capitalist society that our reasoning is part of a single rational debate available within this society across its space about its future - no more than the history of philosophy is a history of single debate across time.

By the way, being pedantic for a moment, there is no problem with participating and even moderating a philosophy forum and not being committed to the practice of philosphy, no more than one would have to be religious to moderate a forum on religion.

the question of what philosophy is is more difficult. The nature of philosophy changes, depening on where the key ideological fissures open up. ...... but why do you need to define it ? The reason you feel the need to is to test those who argue that what Marxists do in critique is not philosophy. Of course, you can always just redefine &#39;philosophy&#39; to include critique. But that is to loose a significant category. I could spend great effort trying to list everything in that category. I could sruggle to define it - but that would be to make the mistake of thinking that it is itself a rational category....not necessarily, and probably not, actually. Wht is far more useful than defining philosophy is defining, or at least describing critique. and that is the question this thread really raised.

[JimFar]

Concerning Foucault&#39;s politics, in another forum I wrote:

He was all over the map politically. At the École Normale Supérieure he studied under the Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser. In his youth, Foucault was for a short time a member of the French Communist Party, and during that period he wrote a thesis, in which among other things, celebrated the work of Ivan Pavlov and his school in Soviet physiology/psychology, which I believe was published under the title Mental Illness and Personality. In that book he also talked about psychoanalysis and existentialist analysis as "mythical explanations" that needed to be replaced by more scientific, Marxist categories.

Not long after writing that book, Foucault turned against Marxism in favor of Nietzsche. His politics shifted rightwards, so that by the early 1960s he was a kind of Gaullist. And he served de Gaulle&#39;s government in various capacities as a member of advisory boards concerning educational matters.

However, by the mid-1960s his politics began to shift sharply leftwards. During a teaching stint in Tunisia, he found that many of his best students to be communists and he became very close to them as they battled repression by the Tunisian government. After the May-June events of 1968 he became increasingly drawn to the young Maoists. During his Maoist years, Foucault was active in struggles for the rights of mental patients and the rights of prisoners. After the mid 1970s he drifted away from Maoist politics (as did most of his erstwhile Maoist friends) but he supported the Iranian Revolution.

During his last years he began to take an interest inF.A. Hayek and Austrian economics.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim -- but his zig-zags had nothing to do with my incpacity to see anything of worth in his work (not that you were suggesting otherwise).

[JimFar]

I think that to the extent that there was anything valuable in Foucault&#39;s work, it was the analysis of power as represented by his studies of prisons. mental institutions and medical clinics. A lot of this, to me, seems rather reminiscent of Max Weber, and Foucault, indeed, seems to have shared a lot of Weber&#39;s pessimism. He proclaimed himself to be a Nietzschean, but there was always a good deal of Marxism in his social analysis. He, of course, thought that he was somehow going beyond or transcending Marxism, but in reality, I think that what did was to provide some useful supplements to Marxist analysis in certain areas. As for Foucault as philosopher. Well, ROFL&#33;&#33;

[gilhyle]

there is a little book of interviews about Marx with him, (which Im supposed to own a copy of but of course cant find just when I want to look at it &#33;&#33;)

Interestingly Foucault was interested in ordinary language philosophy and took it as showing that utterances did not need to be understand only in terms of what he might call the linguistic structure of the utterance. Rather, he saw that school as showing that meaning is also contextual - this, in part, justified to him - in his later works - the analysis of utterances not within a logic of epistemic coherence, but situating them as elements of a logic of strategies. Discourse is seen as a location of struggle and consequently knowledge is seen as an instrument of struggle., where struggle is something that occurs between all subjects and there is no clear understanding of the primary significance of class struggle.

His 1976 lectures Society Must Be Defended are a clear expression of his view, worht a look to understand his late view.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Interestingly Foucault was interested in ordinary language philosophy and took it as showing that utterances did not need to be understand only in terms of what he might call the linguistic structure of the utterance. Rather, he saw that school as showing that meaning is also contextual - this, in part, justified to him - in his later works - the analysis of utterances not within a logic of epistemic coherence, but situating them as elements of a logic of strategies. Discourse is seen as a location of struggle and consequently knowledge is seen as an instrument of struggle., where struggle is something that occurs between all subjects and there is no clear understanding of the primary significance of class struggle

Ah, he fell into the old &#39;meaning is context dependent&#39; trap, eh?

That explains why he thought his sort of a priori nonsense was meaningful.

[gauchisme]

"By contrast Marxism does not believe in the struggle between the agents of freedom and power but between the classes - Marxism thus strips away to empty slogans hiding class interests which otherwise permeate thinking, facilitating false generalisations and false rationalisations which only weaken the revolutionary movement, except in its childish phase."

actually, this was one of foucault&#39;s main points of contention with chomsky (who i think we might agree falls into the trap of libertarianism) -- chomsky simply couldn&#39;t bring himself to agree with statements like these from foucault...

"...the proletariat doesn&#39;t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class it considers such a war to be just. ... When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can&#39;t see what objection one could make to this." (http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm)

the marxist praxis of exposing class interests in allegedly noble slogans is central to foucauldian &#39;unmasking&#39; (see below). [i&#39;d contend that it&#39;s also (ostensibly) central to nietzschean genealogy.]

obviously every thinker goes through changes in their beliefs and practices; i almost wouldn&#39;t trust someone who didn&#39;t. still foucault is a candidate for the most important philosopher of the last century -- he reconceptualized the nature of philosophy as the history of systems of thought, he upended the way we might pose many of the crucial political questions in societies like ours. of course, it&#39;s more than fine to disagree with him, or to conclude that his work is counter-productive and/or wrong-headed, but you have to read him first and thoughtfully consider what he actually says. of course, we should welcome disagreement, and nietzschean tendencies are a key spot to locate such disagreements with foucault. what i will not tolerate is dismissiveness without a single shred of intellectual rigor. if someone is intent on simplistic rejection, it&#39;s my feeling we should quite simply return the favor.

___


"When you asked me why I was interested in politics, I refused to answer because it seemed evident to me, but perhaps your question was: How am I interested in it?

And had you asked me that question, and in a certain sense I could say you have, I would say to you that I am much less advanced in my way; I go much less far than Mr. Chomsky. That is to say that I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society.

On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it.

What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in European society, to consider that power is localized in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state. One knows that all these institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who don&#39;t obey. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.

One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help to support the political power. It&#39;s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: firstly, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn&#39;t expect it. Probably it&#39;s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of CLASS POWER, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process."

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gauchisme:


what i will not tolerate is dismissiveness without a single shred of intellectual rigor. if someone is intent on simplistic rejection, it&#39;s my feeling we should quite simply return the favor.

Fine, don&#39;t tolerate it.

As I said, you can waste your time on this stuff -- only a gun held to my head will induce me to do the same.

If others want to debate Foucault with you that&#39;s Ok too. Only you will need to start another thread.

[gilhyle]

I&#39;m happy to take part in another thread....Foucault&#39;s different with Chomsky was a different point from mine. You have conflated the two. The two men are united as libertarians, divided about what libertarianism can be and united in their opposition to Marxism.


only a gun held to my head will induce me to do the same Foucault would have loved that comment, I can hear him say &#39;precisement&#39;

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Foucault would have loved that comment, I can hear him say &#39;precisement&#39;

Indeed, as he would have heard me say "piss off"...