Whorf Lives (re: Whorf Hoax, etc.)

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Wed Dec 20 13:40:58 PST 2000



>>> manders at midway.uchicago.edu 12/20/00 03:42PM >>>

-clip-

Note that these main emphases -- levels of conscious awareness, stress on pragmatics, on linkages between meaning and indexicality -- coincide nicely with some longstanding Marxist concerns. Many involved in the foregoing projects draw heavily upon Marxian reflection on practical consciousness, its stress on concrete social relations at play all-the-way-down (as opposed, say, to Saussurean-inspired semiology), and similar stuff that Marx for one thought it important to think about.

__________

Hello Maureen,

When you say longstanding Marxist concerns , do you mean like ?

Karl Marx THESES ON FEUERBACH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism - that of Feuerbach included - is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in "Das Wesen des Christenthums", he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary", of "practical-critical", activity.

II The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth -- i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

XI The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Charles



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list