Ethical foundations of the left

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sun Jul 29 22:46:24 PDT 2001



>
>
>Right, we aren't motivated by the ideals. Habermas isn't saying that we
>are. We're motivating by reasons -or- the attempt to understand something
>with someone.

No, I think we are motivated by ideals, aspirations, hopes, outrage, fear, interest, anything but reasons. Rawls is better than Habermas on this. He thinks we are moral, when we are, because we were brought up right, not because we reasoned something out.


>You're exaggerating. This is more to be learned - in terms of knowledge -
>from a comprehensive collaborative research project on the ER than anything
>Milton can poeticize. Really. Poetry may have inspired the trip to the
>moon, but it didn't make the technical aspects of it possible. I have no
>doubt that we learn about ourselves and others from poetry, but if I equate
>poetic insight with science, then we have a real problem.

Poetic insight isn't science, but you can have your collaberative research project, so long as you leave me my Milton. This attitude strikes me as an echo of one of Hegel's worst ideas, the notion that only conceptual reason (in his sense of the term, rather technical), really counts as knowledge, and art and religion are watered down stuff for dummies who can't understand the Logic, but need consolation anyway. The supposed counterexample that we can't takea trip to the moon on the gossamer wings of poetry (though I am sure Cole Porter was NOT talking about space travel) shows nothing about whether poetry can give us knowledge and understanding. You can't justify the ways of God to man with engineering either.


>>>
>>And not with hostorical materialism?
>
>Habermas's theory of social evolution is historical materialism that takes
>account of the struggle for recognition along with all that Marxian stuff.

I thought you said that H ditched historical materialism in 70s. From what you are saying, if you represent his views accurately, he did.


>>
>Nah. We can deal with [literature] in the same way we deal with truth and
>and
>rightness, through dialogue, we formalize the discourse and call it art
>criticism.

Gaaak. Charlie Parker said that art needs aethetics like birds need ornithology. Sounds about right to me. Your approach to what we can learn from literature is to say "literary criticism." Yukko (Sorry, Yoshie.) Me, I never touch the stuff. I think the right response to Milton is more art, Blake for instance, and on the other hand, history--Carol mention Christopher Hill. But especially more art.

This is just it. If I say, "I like Brecht" and you ask
>why, and
>I say, "Just cause." This doesn't give us any insight. It's pathetic.

Of course. But if I say:

And did those feetIn ancient time Walk on England's mountains greem And was the Holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen (Blake, Preface to "Milton")

I've said a lot more than any library full of literary criticism, and a lot more than "just because."


>>But if we've learned anything from Marx, we will realize that if I am a
>>capitalist and you area worker, we are not going to agree about the
>>division of the social product, eh?
>
>Right, because power distorts our relations on a communicative level as
>well as a strategic level... the only redress for this is to coordinate our
>plans in such a way that such relations cease to exist.

You seem to think that the problem with the worker's disagreement with the boss is, as Cool Hand Luke puts it, that we have a failure to communicate. This atrikes me as just wierd. The problem is that the boss is exploiting and oppressing the worker. This, incidentally, leads to failures of communication that would not exist under conditions of nonexploitation. But it's not a desire to communicate that underpins this. It's a desire not to be oppressed and exploited.

--jks

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