>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 10/14/99 08:55PM >>>
Engels on the Enlightenment generally:
'It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind had so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants - giants in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and learning. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations.' Dialectics of Nature, p21
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Charles: I'm from Philadelphia. I read some Benjamin Franklin. In _Capital_ Marx says the "celebrated Franklin" got the labor theory of value correct ( As I recall beyond Ricardo to Marx's view). Franklin was a natural science experimenter in electricity; and he united theory and practice as a successful bourgeois revolutionist. Franklin owned presses too. He founded the Philosophical Society that still exists in Philadelphia.
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Engels on Kant:
'Kant's epoch-making work' p 25 'The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a natural scientist, but byu a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels ... Kant's discovery [historicality of the Earth] contained the point of departure of all further progress.' p26
Immanuel Kant's 'Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent' (1784) raised the standard not just of civil rights within European nations, but extended that principle to 'a great federation of peoples' in which 'every nation, even the smallest, can expect to have security and rights' (Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Indiana: Hackett, 1988, p34).
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Charles: We can read Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence (1776) too. It had a similar contradiction to Kant's in that it declared all men to be created equal, in the midst of factual slavery and male supremacy. It is a unity of theory and practice more than Kant, in that it was part of a revolutionary process.
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Kenan Malik on the Enlightenment and Race:
'the Enlightenment, and the emerging capitalist society that accompanied it, established for the first time in history the possibility of human equality but did so in social circumstances that constrained its expression. The tension between a profound belief in equality and the social limits on its articulation ... has been central to the modern discourse of race.' (The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, London: Macmillan, 1996, p40)
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Charles: The above might more correctly be for the first time in European history. There were many egalitarian systems around the world before this period, including in the Western Hemisphere, which influenced the U.S. system.
Yes, liberal discourse on race goes in circles. It is circular, illusory progress on achieving equality. It is talk, and little or weak action , as with the Declaration of Independence. It is reforms erased by counter-reforms, vacillation. Vacillation that becomes effectively diversion from real change.
No doubt, Kant didn't even initiate the discourse for equality. Rather that originated among women, peasants, slaves , and colonized.
Charles Brown
In message <s805beab.083 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>But isn't a better negative critique of the national-juridical foundations of
>capitalist society found in Marx and Engels than Kant, as well as the positive
>critique ? And it seems strange that the area of Kant's weakness ,
>racism/nationalism (see Yoshie's posts on PEN-L on this) is what Spivak uses
>him for. Kant's questions of the national-juridical foundations of capitalism
>are exactly weakest in relation to the relationship between colonizer and
>colonized nations. It would seem likely that Kantian based critiques of the
>abstract "nation-state" are defective in trying to understand some kind of
>"proto-national structures" , which are significantly derived from
>colonizer/colony, white/colored struggles. In other words, international-state
>issues are Kant's glaring weakness, why turn to him for foundation of an
>analysis of international dynamics 1999 ? Whether for a negative or positive
>critique ?
>
>Kant was the quintessential liberal philosopher in the era of origin of
>Liberalism. To paraphrase Dennis, Neo-liberalism is the Neo-Kantianism per se (
>the thing-in-itself) today. We need an anti-neo-Kantian analysis in the era of
>neo-Liberalism.
>
>Perhaps Spivak is just undercover for our side inside the neo-liberal bubble,
>because she must know this. She may be using Kantian irony againt neo-
>Kantianism, especially since there is no tenure for Marxism-Leninism.
>
>
>Charles Brown
>
>>>> Dennis R Redmond <dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> 10/13/99 07:52PM >>>
>On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Charles Brown wrote:
>
>> But was Spivak using "Kant" in that way ? I got the impression from
>> your post that Spivak was referring to Kant himself. So, how does she
>> read Kant from below ? The philosophical problem with Kant is not only
>> racism but dualism and agnosticism. Does she address these ?
>
>For one thing, Kant is the first philosopher to really wrestle with
>the notion of human rights and the national-juridical foundations of such
>in capitalist society; he's not a rationalist building a system, like
>Descartes or Spinoza, but is already, on a certain level, beginning to
>question that system. His answers are inadequate, but he at least asks the
>right questions. This is a big deal for Spivak, because her own position
>as an Indian expatriate means that she has to deal with Kantian
>contradictions all the time -- 1st world human rights activisms vs. 3rd
>world peasant struggles, transnationalism vs. allegiance to local
>nationalisms, etc. Kant's categories, properly historicized, are a useful
>tool for critiquing the moral claims of such proto-national structures
>(though not for building alternatives to such; then you need Hegel, Marx,
>20th century Marxism, etc.).
>
>I'd argue that neoliberalism is really an applied neo-Kantianism,
>actually. There's no movement in the neolib utopia: just the eternal
>recurrence of the Wall Street Bubble, the categorical imperative of
>a rentier past made future, over and over again. It fears the march of
>history. Hopefully, after Seattle, it'll start fearing much more than
>that.
>
>-- Dennis
>
>
-- Jim heartfield