Mathew Forstater wrote: >For some time I have wondered whatever happened to the movement to >develop a marxist phenomenology. Gurwitsch was a disciple of Schutz, and >attempts were even made to synthesize Marx and Schutz. But there were >other more obvious links. My gut feeling was that possibly many who >would have been attracted to working on such a project instead got >sidetracked into "postmodern" stuff, here used sloppily as a catch-all for >post-structuralism, deconstruction, etc. That's an interesting question. To tell you the honest truth, as soon as I dropped out of graduate school, I stopped paying attention to philosophy as such. Furthermore, the Trotskyist movement was fairly hostile to academic Marxist initiatives of this sort, so I didn't have any incentive to tracking something like this. Having said that, I find the notion of a phenomenology-Marxism synthesis sort of dubious. Phenomenology is a subject-driven methodology, while the historical materialist approach is just the opposite. The only incentive I have right now to dig into these matters is to find out more about Hans Jonas's book "The Imperative of Responsibility." As I mentioned in my last post, this book was highly influential on the deep ecologists. As one might suspect, Jonas became a lightning rod for anti-Greens. Luc Ferry's book "The New Ecological Order," which characterizes the gypsy-murdering Nazis, as pro-indigenous peoples, goes on at length defaming Jonas. Jonas's phenomenology, unlike Gurwitsch's, was infused with Kantian ethics. The big question for Jonas was not as much "what is real" as "how should we act." So perhaps his concern with ecology was tied more to ethics rather than epistemology. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
