Ralph Dumain
There is an earlier posting of an extensive article on Du Bois' intellectual background--you were the one who posted it, maybe? This is very useful info. There is a lot more info on this sort of thing published, since, circa 1990, including considerations of DuBois; relation to Hegel. ^^^^^ CB: Yes, I was going through the Thaxis archives and found the article on Dubois by Monteiro that I had posted back in 1999. Dubois is dubbed a philosopher by some. Given he was a student of James, he probably had some technical understanding. ^^^^ RD: Just a couple of points and questions, below: ................... The Science of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois By Dr. Anthony Monteiro MONTEIRO: ........Pragmatism as articulated by James and later John Dewey held that human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience. As such the possibilities for changing the world were restricted to the limitations of human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, make due with minor reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism and colonialism, in this rendering, were, therefore, immutable and even expressions of human nature. This was the reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a consequence, no revolutionary alternatives to poverty, exploitation and racism. RALPH: For a popular exposition of the politics of pragmatism, see Louis Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB. While Monteiro is not wrong, exactly, the actual genesis of pragmatism involved a class as well as philosophical compromise. I think, though, the opposition to revolution came a bit later. CHARLES: Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the pragmatic philosophers were sort of Social Democrats, politically. But then, as with Kautskyist opportunism, Social Dems can compromise with imperialism. I recall someone saying that in the U.S. pragmatism is a gloss for opportunism. I'm not speaking of any of pragmatists specific political activities, though, I don't recall any references to their being very active in the workers' movements of their day. Something certainly differentiates their politics from those of their rough contemporaries, Marx and Engels, and then Lenin. I can see James as a left liberal, but a liberal, a social dem. By the way, I took the "human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience" comment to refer to the Robinsonade in the pragmatist-positivist-empiricist perspective. "Immediate experience" being "empirical experience of the individual", but I could be wrong. I'm not so much pushing Monteiro's thoughts on philo ( not rejecting them either) as using his essay to give a philosophical look at Dubois. ^^^^^ MONTEIRO: Pragmatism's roots must be traced to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its subjective idealist substance shares a similar philosophical zone with logical positivism. Both positivism and pragmatism were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to dialectical and historical materialism. RALPH: I don't think this is quite so, at first. Of course, once Marxism is seen as serious competition, such things are bound to happen. The logical positivists' history is a bit more complex; cf. e.g. Phillip Frank, but basically, the L.P. position would have been that diamat is metaphysics, hence useless, however politically sympathetic L.P.-ers amy have been to socialism. As for the philosophical roots of pragmatism, see: Ryder, John. Interpreting America: Russian and Soviet Studies of the History of American Thought. Foreword by Nikita Pokrovsky, Moscow State University. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. This inter alia gives an excellent overview of the development of trends in American philosophy. See also my bibliographies: Pragmatism and Its Discontents: Annotated Selected Bibliography http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/pragmabib-a.html Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Frankfurt School, Marxism, McCarthyism & American Philosophy: Selected Bibliography http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/vienna1.html ^^^^^^ CHARLES: Thanks for these. Monteiro is speaking at a very general and rough level. I kinda think there is some roots of pragmatism and logical positivism in British skepticism and empiricism. See for example, Cornforth's comment in the article on your site" "This idea that the task of philosophy is rather to make an analysis of the meaning or reference of empirical knowledge than to establish transcendental truths by a priori reasoning was not in itself anything very new. Already Mach's Analysis of Sensations, published in 1885, had set out to make clear the meaning of all scientific propositions by showing how every science was in truth concerned with the order and arrangement of sensations or sense data and with nothing else. And, indeed, the same thing had been put forward more than a century earlier in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710. Russell, therefore, was only restating something which had been common ground amongst empiricists for over two centuries. What he claimed as specifically new was the discovery of a logical technique for restating and refining the traditional method of empiricist philosophy. Thus in his latest work, A History of Western Philosophy, Russell says: "Modern analytic empiricism . . . differs from that of Locke, Berkeley and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage," he continues, "as compared with the philosophies of the system‑builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science." [3]" ^^^^^^^ MONTEIRO: For the young DuBois pragmatist's limitations on knowledge and transforming the world were intellectually unacceptable, but more rang untrue. In his paper DuBois proposed an elemental materialist alternative to pragmatism. In fact, he proposed answers to pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were not unlike the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by Marx in Capital and Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature. What DuBois essentially argued was that the ethical and moral imperative was determined on the basis of what actions they led to. While it cannot be said that DuBois at this stage of his intellectual development had discovered a consistent philosophical position, his instincts were certainly in the right direction. In this regard, his term paper for William James was a harbinger of his future intellectual and ideological materialism. At the root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics rather than being issues of pure reflection, as Kant and following him much of Western philosophy, were to the contrary matters decided in life and through practice. RALPH: Very interesting! Do you have a bibliographical reference for this paper? ^^^^^^ CHARLES; Wish I did. Monteiro was at Temple University in Philly. Maybe we can google him down. Although Dubois didn't use the technical lingo of philsophy, I wonder if he dealt with some of the issues in his own way. RALPH: I agree that it is important to be accurate in one's criticisms. 'Pragmatism' became a generic whipping boy--one I love to whip, too--torn loose from the specifics of the specific ideas of specific philosophers. This was the problem with Harry Wells' 1954 book called (I think) PRAGMATISM, PHILOSOPHY OF IMPERIALISM. While I can relate to the venom with which Wells attacked his subject, intellectually the book is useless--you can't really understand the ideas under attack from reading Wells' account. I'm puzzled on one count, though: I'm pretty sure that the LP-ers--Carnap surely, and even Neurath--would object to diamat on the basis that it is metaphysics, thus cognitively meaningless. Various Marxists of the time--e.g. British scientists such as Bernal, Haldane, Needham, etc.--defended diamat. They didn't see it as useless. However, given the dogmatic acculturation of Communists at that time to Soviet Marxism, they also were intolerant--I'm thinking of Bernal, specifically--of constructive criticisms aimed at clarification and refinement of the ambiguities and flaws of diamat as it was expressed in that time. As tortuously boring as it is re-reading all that literature, there is still an historical purpose to be served in examining the intellectual dynamics of these arguments. I would say that the diamat perspective proved most useful in criticizing bourgeois philosophy and social theory, not so much in coming up with constructive ideas. You can see that for example in Cornforth's works. The criticisms of positivism and pragmatism are incisive, but the positive exposition of diamat is horrendous. ^^^^^^^ CB: I don't know if this addresses your thought, but don't forget, Engels announced the winding up of Old Philosophy in _Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy_, classical German philosophy being the high point of the history of all philosophy. After Marx, there is only dialectics, formal logic and the positive sciences. Contrary to any claims that diamat is a metaphysics, it ends metaphysics before the logical positivists ended it. Anyway, the positive productions in diamat are not from "philosophy" , but from the positive sciences. Anthropology is one of the sciences. It covers a lot of the old philosophy's subjects. _______________________________________________ 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
