On Sun, 31 Oct 1999 08:15:40 -0800 (PST) Miles Jackson
<cqmv at odin.cc.pdx.edu> writes:
>
>
>On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, James Farmelant wrote:
>
>> It is also interesting to note how postmodernism has at times
>> been explicitly used for reactionary purposes as Meera Nanda
>> has shown in the case of India. There pomo was originally
>> introduced into the country by leftist intellectuals but it
>> then found favor among rightwing Hindu nationalists who found
>> it convenient a convenient device for bashing left for promoting
>> Enlightenment ideals which could be stigmatized as "colonialist"
>> and the like. It was especially appealing since it could be used
>> to place a "progressive" veneer on leftist bashing.
I would add to my previous remarks that this development is hardly surprising to anyone acquainted with the history of philosophy. Radical skepticism has throughout history been more often an ally of conservatism rather than radicalism. Radicals have usually atttempted to undermine estalished orders in the name of reason or justice or as in Marx's case in the name of a scientific understanding of the movement of history and of the dynamics of capitalism. Radical skepticism by denying the possibility of claims to knowledge necessarily undercuts the possibility of making a rational critique of existing social orders. In other words radical skepticism undercuts radicalism. That is why so many of the leading skeptics both ancient and modern have tended more often than not to be conservatives of some kind. Since the kinds of knowledge claims that radical critiques require are ruled as being out of order it is easy for the skeptic to opt for tradition or convention as the basis for political legitimacy.
>>
>
>So when Trent Lott says that socialist activists in the U. S. are
>"out of touch with reality", we can clearly see how realist
>philosophical assumptions are a political tool of the right.
I suspect that Lott's realism is more rhetorical than philosophical. Senator Lott is not exactly known for his philosophical reflectiveness. If he was really a philosophical realist then he ought to be willing to subject his own assumptions about the nature of American society and of society in general to critical scrutiny. If he was intellectually honest enough then such a searching examination and critique of his own fundamental assumptions (in terms of whether or not they actually correspond to reality or are "out of touch with reality" then Lott would have to accept that many of his ideas are merely ideological in character not sustainable truth claims. Somehow, I suspect that the honarable gentleman won't be doing this anytime soon.
> In
>fact, if you want to play this "what is the philosophical
>position of left bashers" game, far more of them are naive realists
>than pomo fans.
Naive realism in my view also lends itself to reactionary politics too because it doesn't recognize or at the least give due recognition to the distinction between reality and appearence. Recognition of this distinction is as Bhaskar contends fundamental both to science and to the possibility of rational crtique. In fact concerning both naive realism and pomo both fall into the same error of underminding the crucial distinction between reality and appearences. If you read Marx you will find that this distinction is crucial to understanding how he went about formulating his critiques of bourgeois thought. Marx for example in *Capital* crticized the political economists precisely on the grounds that they failed to take sufficient account of this distinction so that they made the error of taking phenomena at the level of appearences such as prices, interest rates, rents and the like as their basic subject matter and not penetrating to the underlying essences such as value, surplus value and the social relations of production which together can provide more satisfactory explanations of the manifest phenomena of economic life.
>
>But the game's silly in the first place: any philosophical position
>can be tied to any political position. You just have to be clever
>enough.
The history of thought shows, however, that certain philosophical positions are more likely to be associated with particular types of political outlooks. Engels was not completely off the rails hen he argued that the history of philosophy can be characterized as a struggle between "two camps" - idealism versus materialism and that idealism has been more often than not been associated with reactionary political positions and materialism with progressive politics. No doubt Engels' thesis require some qualification, some idealists have after all been progressives and some materialists been reactionaries but even here we can discern certain relationships between philosophical positions and politics. Progressive idealists tend on the whole to place a strong emphasis on dialectics while reactionary materialists often tend to be staunch reductionists. (I think that Lenin in his notebooks on Hegel even went as far as to suggest that perhaps Engels' thesis needed to be ammended to draw the crucial distinction between dialectical and non-dialectical modes of thought).
Jim Farmelant
>
>Miles Jackson
>cqmv at odin.cc.pdx.edu
>
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