Ethical foundations of the left

Kenneth MacKendrick kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Fri Jul 27 13:00:37 PDT 2001


At 02:05 PM 7/27/01 +0000, you wrote:

> Really, do reread the relevant parts of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. --jks

I've recently reread one of his books, CIS - as far as I can see, Rorty does not at all dispute the ultimate privacy of *some* of our experiences - regardless of how mediated they are (ie. our experiences are mediated by language, but they are *our* experiences). In any event - the stuff that goes on inside our heads, however socially constructed, still goes on inside our heads in a way that is not immediately and transparently apparent to other people. I truly don't understand what the problem is with this. Yes, as Lacan says, the only think we can know about the unconscious we know about through language (the uncs is structured like a language) - but this does not mean we don't have a nonlinguistic substratum of 'happenings' apart from language. Am I missing your point, or are you missing mine? Or do we just disagree, or is this just a matter of reformulating something that is significant?

ken



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