>>> catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au 06/12/01 07:35AM >>>
Hello Charles,
> ...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.
I don't disagree that Marx and marxism have things to say about 'relative truth' -- there's 'ideology' after all. My insistence on there being no Truth was addressed to Rob's repeated invocation of it, rather than to Marx. However, clearly Marx does treat some things as universally true. Yoshie will surely be able to come up with a quote... And yes I think this is a problem; unhelpful.
(((((((((
Just getting back to these posts, Catherine.
I don't want to be jerky and picky about it, but I was responding to a phrase in your post that was something like " how can Marxist now not see this issue " ( not your exact words). My limited understanding of Foucault and others is that they think that we Leninists are not aware of these philosophical subtleties; we are "vulgar" and all that.
It would still be petty for me to mention it except that if , as I claim, "Marxism" has been struggling with this issue since Engels ( and Marx) , then Foucault and others are claiming an advance over Marxism that is not really there, post-modernists can come on home to Marxism, we can have a more united intellectual left, etc.
On Marx treating somethings as universally true, my guess is it is always with a dialectical understanding of that, that is a unity and struggle of the opposites, absolute and relative.
Here's the way Engels says it in _Ludwig Feuerbach_:
"...Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute -- the only absolute dialectical philosophy!
admits. "
Do you see what I mean that he is agreeing with your "relativity" ? The only absolute for Marxism is change ( the revolutionary side is absolute).
Charles