I haven't been online since mid-afternoon, so I'm just now catching up.
I hope others paid more careful attention to my recent posts. There are serious consequences when one allows oneself to get trapped in a narrow corner. It is incumbent upon anyone attempting to speak for the whole to attempt to gather up the whole of knowledge and not just hide in a tiny corner.
With respect to philosophy, it is important to understand how fragmented philosophy has been for well over a century. The artificial attempt to overcome fragmentation within bourgeois philosophy in the Anglo-American world is based on the deceptive and false dichotomy of "analytical" and "continental" philosophy. Even those who recognize the spurious basis of this categorization have done little more than to defect to or incorporate the irrationalist wing of bourgeois philosophy (which also includes Wittgenstein, though classed among the analytical philosophers).
Later on I will have more to say about a book I'm reading, FUTURE PASTS: THE ANALYTIC TRADITION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. There is a tremendous amount of useful historical information here from people in the know. However, the attempts to accommodate the irrationalist tradition new and old are pitiful and really show up the duplicitous basis of liberal inclusiveness. Of course, Hegel and Marx are silenced in this story. And it should also be evident how tortured so much of the history of analytical philosophy is from the false phenomenalist premises on which it was built. There's a chapter on Mach as a pivotal figure inspiring this movement. And remember that Lenin took a hard lone against Mach, for which he deserves a lot of credit.
There is a lot entailed by writing Marxism back into the history it has been written out of. But this shows up not only the inadequacy of analytical and irrationalist philosophy, but the underdevelopment of Marxism in certain areas due to the fragmentation and segregation of intellectual traditions. Marxism will have something to say about all this, but not from hiding among the Marxist classics and their imitators.
Part of resurrecting the history of Eastern European (Marxist) philosophy is to look at how philosophers in those countries themselves attempted to negotiate the boundaries of intellectual traditions, not just in the USSR, but even more conspicuously in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. There are more sophisticated models to be found than one finds in the usual party literature.
Lenin made an honest attempt to deal with the situation he inherited as best he could, but he was helpless in combatting the inward-turning of "Marxism", which he partially abetted whatever his intentions. Lenin's conception of the unity of logic, epistemology, and ontology lacked the specificity to come to terms with contemporary developments of which neither he nor his successors were apprised. (Interestingly, I have a very obscure book from Czechoslovakia on the history of logic which takes up Lenin's perspective with the sophistication of a professional logician.) Just was the rest of the world refused to have anything to do with Marxism, so Marxism was not favorably positioned to integrate the newest developments in logic and mathematics.
It is essential, in order to complete the story, to recognize the distinction between objective and subjective dialectics. There is a whole history of Marxist philosophy of science (see, e.g. Helena Sheehan). If you read Sheehan carefully or other literature, you will find that the philosophical substance of dialectics of nature lies in emergentism, and that most Marxist scientists completely skirted around the issue of subjective dialectics (logic), preferring to reiterate vague assertions inherited form Engels and canonized by the Soviets. I will get into this in more detail another time.
The moral of the story: historical reconstruction of knowledge is a huge task. You don't want to leave it in the hands of bourgeois philosophy, do you?
At 09:05 PM 3/3/2005 +0100, Choppa Morph wrote:
Marxism isn't "Marxists", and definitely not Stalinists.
The ideas of Marxism are the only ideas that can save humanity from destruction and barbarism via the revolutionary transformation of society by the revolutionary working class.
It's not pathetic to know the power of the genie in your battered old lamp.
It's not a question of attitude ("pitiful", "puffed up", "pathetic") but of organization and determination.
Nice to know someone's against provincialism, sectarianism, ignorance and pettiness, though. So inspirational.
Yup, a veritable Moses to lead us out of our "pitiful little intellectual ghetto"...
Choppa
_______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
