At 14:22 13/10/97 -0400, Paul Zarembka wrote:
>On Mon, 13 Oct 1997, Ajit Sinha wrote:
>
>> I think 'historical materialism' can be read as an implicit critique of the
>> notion of 'absolute' or 'objective' truth.
>
>On what BASIS are you claiming that 'historical materialism' is an
>implicit critique of notions of 'absolute' or 'objective' truth?
>
>> I think Althusser's position is much better on this issue. There is always
>> an unbridgable gap between the 'real' and the 'object of knowledge'. Since
>> we can have the 'knowledge' of only the 'object of knowledge', all truth
>> claims of the 'knowledge' has meaning only within the context of the
>> theoretical object only.
>
>How do I EVALUATE your claim the Althusser's position is better than (or
>even different from) Lenin's position?
>
>In fact (or am I not permitted to use the word 'fact'?), and not trying to
>be nasty, what criteria do you offer to ask any of us to pay any attention
>to you or to what anyone else says about anything?
__________________
I'll take up the last point first, because I think this is the most
important point. The question is: can one make 'sense' without making a
claim to 'absolute truth' or 'objective truth'. I do not pretend to have a
definitive answer to this question. However, I think there is a prima facie
case for the claim that one can. I think, uptil now whatever I have said
seems to have made some 'sense', eventhough it is a claim about the
noexistence of 'truth'. If Descartes could doubt his own existence, why
couldn't existence of 'objective truth' be doubted? And if nothing makes
sense without a claim to 'objective truth', then this very doubt about its
existence must logically become meaningless; and so the whole basis of
critical thinking would come to an end here. Moreover, if we think that the
whole idea of 'absolute truth' or 'objective truth' came up in a historical
context, say in Europe during the period of Enlightenment, then the
question arises whether Europeans before Enlightenment and people in other
cultures communicated or not. If they communicated and made 'sense' to each
other, then obviously the Enlightenment's idea of 'objective truth' cannot
be the basis for making sense in a non-Enlightenment world. Otherwise one
will have to make a much stronger claim that the idea of 'objective truth'
or the criterion of 'objective truth' as the basis of making sense has been
there since the first humans arrived on this planet. I suspect that this
strong claim would not hold water if put to the test of its own criterion
of 'objective truth'. Now, if what I just said made some sense, then what
criterion did you use to make 'sense' of it? I think coherence and internal
consistency of an argument is good enough to make 'sense' without any claim
to 'objective truth'.
Now, my answer to the question of the BASIS for making the claim that
'historical materialism' is an implicit critique of the notion of
'objective truth' is that according to 'historical materialism' an event
can/should be understood in its 'historical' context, where the historical
contextualization itself is a theoretical practice based on theoretical
concepts such as mode of production or social formation etc. Now, if you
accept that the idea of 'objective truth' as the basis of 'making sense' is
an historical event, then it loses its 'objectivity', in the sense that it
cannot stand as a transhistorical standard against which everything else
must be judged. That's why 'historical materialism' is a strategy of
radical critique. But it cannot escape it's own critique, in the sense that
it itself cannot stand as the transhistorical basis of judgement, as Lenin
tries to do.
On the question of Althusser and Lenin: My point is that Lenin's position
is inherently quite week. The whole idea that one could approach truth
eventhough one could never know it, requires some kind of accepted scale on
which one could measure the distance from truth in a relative sense (i.e.
closer or farther). But Lenin could not construct any such scale. He simply
asserts that historical (and dialectical) materialism is the right path to
truth. Popper tried to construct such a scale, within his own context, but
failed. Althusser, on the other hand, takes a philosophically much more
sophisticated position. In my interpretation, which could be different from
yours and others, Althusser's theory neither accepts nor denies the
existence of the 'real' (which you could call 'objective truth'). He argues
that the very act of knowing the 'real' necessarily creates an object which
is logically not the 'real'. Thus 'objective' knowledge is always distanced
from the 'real'. Once he establishes this theoretical point that the
'objective' (i.e. scientific) knowledge cannot capture the 'real', the
'real' loses any operative role in the theory. The real could either exist
or may be fictional we would never know. This is much more coherent and
internally sound position than Lenin's. Althusser does not have a theory or
even a notion of approaching closer and closer to the 'real'. He is more
interested in distinguishing 'scientific knowledge' from 'ideology', where
this distinction itself is theoretical and is not based on or argued on the
basis of somekind of 'objective truth'.
Cheers, ajit sinha
