Actually, no, I wasn't saying any such thing. I was making a very quick quip based on a few posts about communication not being an issue and something about human beings and protozoa. I was accusing you guys of tending to believe that people are steam boat whistles (thanks to Ian for the quote from William James, was it?).
There is a tendency among people who want to think of themselves as "materialists" to dismiss issues of language, symbolization and thought with a big bat inscribed with the word "idealism" (i.e., to think Habermas is an "idealist" when the problems with his ethics really lie elsewhere). The "real" essence of the matter is "action," or "material reality", which "determines" consciousness (except, supposedly, the consciousness of the materialist). The relationship is never reversable (language and symbolization affect action).
I'm not a dualist. I think Descartes was a moron.
Peter Kosenko
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Alec Ramsdell <aramsdell at yahoo.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 08:34:11 -0700 (PDT)
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> In other words, Peter is saying that _either_ mental
>> events exist in a
>> world of their own, prior to and independently of
>> all physical activity,
>> _or_ they are nothing. If we are not angels we are
>> merely automatons. I
>> think this is usually called dualism. Damasio points
>> out that while
>> Descartes's separation of "mind" and "brain" has
>> been rejected by most,
>> most still do cling to a crude separation of brain
>> and body.
>
>This made me think of Baudelaire, and the dear
>automatons in Lowell's translation, "The Voyage." As
>a quintessential modernist, does Baudelaire represent
>a historical shift in dualism, where the
>purposelessness of the dandy/flaneur confirms the
>modern individualist ethos (think of Baudelaire's
>interest in shop fronts, or his "chimeras" as mental
>events)? "There can be no progress (real, that is,
>moral) except in the individual and by the individual
>himself." (from Mon Coeur Mis À Nu, 1897)
>
>This is quite different from the so-called
>metaphysical poets, where the body/mind dualism could
>still be subsumed in a single moral sensibility and a
>different social network. It was more a motif for a
>fusion of thought and feeling--before the
>"dissociation of sensibility" Eliot speaks of in
>Milton and Dryden.
>
>As the change shows, "dualism" itself is subject to
>history and not as simple a metaphysical
>categorization as it seems.
>
>Alec
>
>
>
>
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