>
>^^^^^
>CB: I'm trying to think whether the academic powers that be in the West
>don't use fiat quite a bit in deciding who gets to be a paid philosopher.
>How many Dialecticians get tenure in the U.S. philosophy departments.
I wondered how long it would take Charles to get around to his tu qoque defense. As by way of establishing my bona fides, I remind Charles that I was fired from an analytical philosophy department for being a red, though not a dialectician. I couldn't get a job (granted it is a tough market) despite stellar credentials and lots of publications. I was told a number of times that this was because "we already have a Marxist." (That was in the days when I thought I was one.) Obviously there is a very strong ideological bias in US academia, and Marxists, socialists, and radicals of all kinds have a hard time making a career in the academy.
That said, it's not comparable, and I do not say this to justify the AMerican bias against left wing scholarship. But it is worth pointing out that whatever the tough row Amerucan academic radicals have to hoe, they do not face exile to Siberia, enforced stays in psychiatric hospitals, prison, forced emigration, or execution--things that even Marxist thinkers in the USSR faced through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. In fairness, the executions stopped after Stalin died. But Kagarlistky was imprisoned under Brezhnev. And you had to pay far more lip service to orthodoxy, narrowly defined by political authority, to be published or keep a job. I cannot understand why you do not understrand how thoroughly the repression discredited Marxism among the intellectuals.
>It would seem the rational kernel in much postmod discussion is to point
>out that there is arbitrary power shaping Western philosophy too. Stalin's
>methods were more violent, but as far as the ultimate result if one can't
>get a job or get published , the debate is settled by fiat.
But one can get jobs--I did--though it is hard to keep one; and often they are not as good as those available to toe the line. And you can publish: I published critical defenses of Marxian ideas in the main philosophy and law journals in America and England. In addition. leftists here can publish their own journals, and sometimes, as in York Univ., take over a department. Finally, it does make a difference if your choices are that you have to hang it up and go to law school--not the worst thing, eh, counsel?--rather than facing a bullet in the back of the head or imprisonment.
>
>CB: There's some significant irony on this. Marx and Engels had to develop
>their philosophy in exile and underground.
Underground? Did the British police chase them, did they have to flee in the night? Marx was sort of an exile, but Engels settled in Manchester to run the family business, and Marx chose to live in middle-class respectability in London. Both of them pursued their radical activities after 1848 without any harassment.
>Lenin studied philosophy while in exile in Siberia ,
Under the autocracy; you can't blame liberal democracy for Czarism.
>Note, that situation does not necessarily prevent doing philosophical work.
Yeah, so? It's not ideal to have to do philosophy on the run from the secret police.
>M y point on this thread is , not that it is ok to do what Stalin did, but
>that the Justin's claim that nobody with a brain was doing philo in the SU
>"after Stalin" is not true.
Charles, I renounce this overstatement, which I have already retracted, and which I qualified as soonm as I made it. I said, and I will capitalize this so you will see it: THERE WAS GOOD SOVIET PHILOSOPHY, ESPECIALLY LOGIC, UNDER AND AFTER STALIN. But there hardly any creative Marxist philosophy of any note under or after Stalin, and the official Diamat was deadly and is only of interest as a chapterof culturala nd political history.
>
>Carrol might have a comment on "originality ". Orginality and creativity
>are highly valued in the academy, especially in the bourgeois situation
>with publish ORIGINAL STUFF or perish. But was originality what philosophy
>needed in the Marxist tradition ?
Well, Charles, if your view is that Marx, Engels, and Lenin discovered all the truths that need to be said,a nd that all that is left is for this truth to be popularized, we have very different standards of quality.
>There is a definite sense from Engels that closure to the old philosophical
>lines was what was needed. Engels' saw old philosophy as the queen of the
>other sciences coming to an end , and formal logic and dialectics remaining
>with the various sciences. In other words, this would imply no "creative "
>development of the old philosophical traditions, rather their study as
>historical elements in the development of dialectical materialism.
Evema ssuming that you are correct here, what was needed was creative development of a new philosophy. Although I comment that MArx thought that philosophy was over altogether.
>
>Marxism is unapologetically non-pluralist and non-eclectic in this regard.
Says you. There is no one "Marxism." Marxism is a vast and varigated tradition with many tendencies. Of course, each thinker thinks he or he is correct, but that does not mean that one is not pluralist or eclectic, that uis, tolerant of other approaches (thoughof course critical of them) and willing to learn from them. Most of Marxism has been like that. Lukacs learned from Weber as well as Lenin, Gramsci from Croce, Althusser from Saussure, Sartre from Heidegger, Sidney Hook from Dewey, G.A. Cohen from Gilbert Ryle. Soviet Marxism porclaimed itself to be the only truth, and had the KGB to back that claim up. But that is not a desirable way to settle a philosophical argument. ("'Shuddup,' he explained." --Daymon Runyon)
>This issue is a PHILOSOPHICAL difference between bourgeois philosophy and
>Marxist philosophy. It becomes a circular argument to say Soviet philosophy
>was not pluralist in terms of all the historical philosophical traditions.
Not the point. The point is rather that Soviet philosophy expressed its claim to dominance with the backing of the police, and that lead, inevitably, to its intellectual death.
> Marxism' position is against philosophy for philosophy's sake,
Who appointed you to speak for Marxism? What is "philosophy for philosophy's sake"? Marxists have had many positions on philosophy. Marx bought Feuerbach's line that philosophy was already over,a nd he didn't do it after 1844, at least officially. Engels didn't; he was happy to do metaphysics for its own sake because he thought it was fun and true. Lots of other Marxists have had different views of all sorts of nuanced natures on the matter.
>so the standards and values of the western academy such as creativity and
>pluralism are explicitly critiqued by the philsophy itself . All of this
>must be taken into account in judging Soviet philosophy by these very
>Western standards
A simple question, Charles: do you think that philosophical orthodoxy should be determined by a central political authority and enforced by the police?
. . . >
>CB: Note the Western philosophers do not know Soviet philo and dialectical
>materialism, but the Soviets studied the Western schools.
Some Western philosophers know Soviet philosophy, like my OSU predecessor
Jim Scanlan, Jim F., and me. And the fact is that it's jsut less interesting
because most of it isn't very good. There's less reason to know it.
>
>By the way, there are Cuban, Chinese, Viet Namese etc. philosophers who are
>just as smart as the Western crews today.
Such as? I don't doubt that the brains are there, the question is, what sort of work are they doing with them?
jks
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