Brecht on Reason

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Dennis C:
>so I have another question. maybe I'm misunderstanding but I get the
>impression you want to suggest that a whole bunch of writing you subsume
>under a postmodern umbrella can be harmful and stifling to effective
>opposition politics.  I agree that people evoke pomo/poststructural
>authorities to say a lot of stupid stuff, but does that discount the whole
>project (if that's the right word), and isn't that project less monolithic
>than you suggest?

Between Marxism and postmodernism there exists a common ground: both are
opposed to reification of facts, hypostatization of ideas, an ontic fallacy
(the idea that knowledge is compulsively determined by being), positivism,
etc.  Postmodernism, however, fails to sustain ontological realism &
judgmental rationalism (for more on these terms, see my posts on Roy
Bhaskar, or read Bhaskar himself, for that matter) in its philosophical
premises.  That's where they differ.  However, it's not that one needs to
be epistemologically correct, so to speak, to engage in effective politics
at all.  I agree with Brecht:

*****   from _Life of Galileo_, Scene 8

The Little Monk: But don't you think that the truth will get through
without us, so long as it's true?

Galileo: No, no, no.  The only truth that gets through will be what we
force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are
prepared to reason, nothing else.   *****

Yoshie