CB: This seems the opposite of your position in the thread on
> >Russian/Soviet philosophy struggles.
Justin Schwartz:
> Not at all. Democratic politics needs no philosophical justification, is
> what I am saying here. There I was saying that if you want to know why
> Soviet philosophy was was bad and boring, you need only look to the fact
> that in undemocrtaic conditions there prevailing, philosophers were
> required by authoritarian constraint to say things they didn't believe in,
> or worse, that they did. The two points are connected by the thought that
> democratic politicsd also makes for better philosiohy, although it does not
> deoend on philosophy.
--
Gordon:
>>>> In the universe as I observe it, theory and
>>>> practice are two sides of willful activity which continually
>>>> feed into one another.
Justin Schwartz:
> >> Who denied this? This is theABC of pragmatism and Marxism too.
Gordon:
> >You did: "Democracy is prior to philosophy and other sorts
> >of theory."
Justin Schwartz:
> You misunderstand me, wilfully, I think. I do not deny that theorizing
> about democracy is valuable and worthwhile, and may help us elaborate and
> improve the practice of democracy. What I deny--you might read the excerpt
> from the paper that I poste recently on this topic--is that there any
> argiments that would make us give up democracy for something else, or that
> the failure of any professred arguments fordemocracyw ould make us rethink
> our commitment to it. I expreslly, explicitly, formally, am on record as
> sayingt that we may revise our conceptions of democracy in response to
> theoretical arguments. You know perfectly well that this is what I mean.
I don't understand where your argument is grounded -- what definition you're using, for example. Since a democracy can't be pointed out in the physical world as an immediate experience, something understood sensually or intuitively, it must refer to something abstract, _theoretical_, and a belief in it must have been inculcated through rhetorical acts and other symbolic performances such as formal indoctrination, media propaganda, philosophical discourse, rituals, etc. If so, it seems only reasonable to believe that other passages of rhetoric might dissuade democratic believers of their faith. Absent an ongoing religious experience, some event or argument could undo the previous events or arguments because they constructed an _abstraction_.
So when you say that democracy is an incontrovertible belief, like the belief that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, I have to think that you're really talking about something else, some kind of experience which is not particularly the exercise of political power by the alleged _demos_, which _can_ be analyzed, criticized, and disputed. As it's prior to philosophy, that is, such acts as analysis and definition, it's an impregnable mystery, like _Blut_und_Boden_ or Divine Right. I don't know where anyone can go from there.
-- Gordon