>>> catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au 06/11/01 10:33AM >>
I'll just pick these last few points to do again (!). 'Man' is a problem -- subjectivity as defined by those discourses he has been tracking through the order of things like economy and anatomy, but also as something that comes before them -- that Enlightenment truth of Man you seem (sometimes) to want. I simply do not get why for a Marxist *now* there are not evident problems with this.
> I just don't see where 'there is no
> truth' can
> help.
Because there is none. Why lie about it?
((((((((((
CB: Hello Catherine. I wonder if the classical, explicit Marxist discussion of these issues in Engels' _Anti-Duhring_ and Lenin's _Materialism and Empiro-Criticism_ is not conscious of the problems of the Enlightenment concept of truth; and don't they seek to cope with the problems with the notion of the dialectic of relative and absolute truth ? Engels says the truth is infinite and we are finite beings. Lenin uses the mathematical image of an asymptotic curve, ever approaching but never reaching absolute truth. In other words, Marxism has "always" been well aware of the problem being discussed here, and offers very helpful approaches to it. This approach allows us to recognize that the "truths" we have are limited, but that they are not entirely empty or useless. Total relativism puts us in a condition of a kind of necessarily , profoundly ignorant paralysis.
Also, the notion that there is no "truth" , but only regimes of knowledge established through a social process that is not at all determined by an objective reality outside of society is still a form of "idealism" in Engels sense of the two great camps of philo. This is why to me, postmod's relativism itself is philosophically "plus ca change, plus la meme chose" .