>Yet this advocate of scientific methods is also a devout Marxist who
>has published essays questioning whether today's pell-mell market
>reforms are steering China off the true path of Marx and socialism.
>((((((((
>CB: A bit of confusion in this NYT reporter's thinking. There is no
>contradiction between advocating scientific methods and advocating
>Marxism. In fact, they sort of go together, especially in
>relationship to religion.
I thought so, too, & I still do. In practice, though, the relation among Marxism, science, & religion unfortunately has not been so simple. Lysenkoism & the Cultural Revolution show that science may very well become sacrificed at the alter of politics, in the name of Marxism, class struggles, etc. And in socialist nations, parties & states, more often than not, have accommodated churches, with a view toward pacifying citizens and/or garnering diplomatic points. Dissidents, too, have often turned to a religious view or institution of one kind or another. So, on the both side of the stunted dialectic (the State & Its Other), religion has exercised its negative influence.
Also, disturbingly, there appears to be a turn toward religion amongst self-identified Marxists & other leftists; recall religion threads on the marxmail list; Roy Bhaskar's turn to God; Negri, Zizek, & the like.
This from the Bhaskar list:
+++++ Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:06:55 +0000 To: bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk> Subject: BHA: Delivered up to the world
Hi all,
Reading Simon Jarvis on *Adorno*, I had occasion to re-read the 'Finale' of Adorno's masterpiece, *Minima Moralia*, on 'the standpoint of redemption', written in 1947, and was struck by how pertinent this psalm to philosophy seems to Bhaskar's religious turn in our own dark times. (Adorno is Bhaskar's favourite marxist thinker). I think Bhaskar has pretty well marched to its tune right up to the point where 'thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional', i.e. the absolute, and so is 'delivered up to the world' (in his case, bluntly stated, the dominant political and religious outlooks of the day - liberalism and New Age.) But what a marvellously reconciliatory last sentence for us critical realists at this time!
Here is the text of the 'Finale', broken up into 'verses', and with 'poor' substituted for 'indigent' in the translation by Jephcott.
***** The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as poor and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects - this alone is the task of thought.
It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its oppositve.
But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and poverty which it seeks to escape.
The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unsconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world.
Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible.
But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.
****
So: get on with it!!
Mervyn
-- Mervyn Hartwig 13 Spenser Road Herne Hill London SE24 ONS United Kingdom Tel: 020 7 737 2892 Email: mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk
--- from list bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu --- +++++
+++++ Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 21:57:27 +0000 To: bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: BHA: Delivered up to the world
Dear Jan,
Many thanks for you comments. I wish I could read Dutch!
>- what's your opinion on his "Thesis against Occultism" (MM:151)
>related to Bhaskar's current (partial) exotic realism.
I think it's profound. I used it in my critique of *From East to West* in my paper at the Lancaster conference, a revised version of which I have submitted to the JTSB (not with any great optimism, because it is possibly too much in the nature of a review article.) Here is a relevant excerpt:
*** Theodor Adorno speaks of the tendency towards occultism or spiritualism in late capitalism - a system with a 'veiled tendency ... towards disaster' - as a symptom of a general 'regression in consciousness' and as 'an unconscious projection of a subject decomposing historically if not clinically'. The agent of any conceivable historical transformation decomposes, and the subject decenters, possibly into madness - so in our decenteredness, powerlessness, and possible madness, we turn to the spiritual to re-empower us and make us whole, thereby 'den[ying] the alienation of which [occultism] is itself proof and product'. For the occultist 'draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities' as 'menacingly objectified labour assails him on all sides from demonically grinning objects' and 'the social quality' that animates them is 'split off and misremembered as being-in-itself' (1974: 238-40). ****
It is what I take to be pandering to this regresssive aspect of New Age that I think is really problematic in *FEW*, not the turn to religion as such. I think there is a progressive, as well as regressive, strand within New Age which *FEW* also draws on (and which my paper touches on), and should say I am by no means anti-religion as such, any more than Adorno was.
Mervyn
Jan Straathof <janstr at chan.nl> writes
>Dear Mervyn, thanks for the beautiful Adorno lines,
>
>you wrote i.a.:
>
>>Here is the text of the 'Finale', broken up into 'verses',
>
>indeed, it's very appropriate to edit this text the poetical way you did,
>I believe Max Horkheimer praised Minima Moralia as Adorno's true
>magnum opus, not only because of its philosophical (and analytical)
>merites but moreso because it examplified the artistic, poetic and
>playful but deeply tragic style typical of Adorno's personallity and
>thinking.
>
>i remember the story of the first translation of the Moralia in dutch
>in the late 60, the publisher had offered the german manuscript to
>several renowned translaters, but none of them accepted the task,
>after a long search they finally found a poet -Maurits Mok- who was
>willing to do the translation, and he did a wonderful job, however
>some critics then found he had allowed himself too much poetical
>freedom, esp. because Mok had smuggled in some own neologism.
>
>- what's your opinion on his "Thesis against Occultism" (MM:151)
>related to Bhaskar's current (partial) exotic realism.
>
>yours,
>Jan
>
>
>
>
> --- from list bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu ---
-- Mervyn Hartwig 13 Spenser Road Herne Hill London SE24 ONS United Kingdom Tel: 020 7 737 2892 Email: mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk
--- from list bhaskar at lists.village.virginia.edu --- +++++
In contrast, I find Professor He Zuoxiu's commitment to political & scientific clarity most refreshing, in his fearless criticism of both occultism & the party's turn to the market. I hope that Chinese youths are listening to the good professor.
The turn to the market in China, I believe, has increased the attraction to occultism perhaps in the manner Adorno explains in "Thesis against Occultism." The same has been happening elsewhere in the late capitalist world, too.
Yoshie