Sorry, but dipping back into a couple threads that have tapered off because I see a couple of interesting, arguable comments that deserve a bit of further arguable comment.
First, ravi gadfly at exitleft.org wrote:
>there were multiple episodes of bohr and einstein's disagreements >regarding the conflict between the theory of relativity and quantum >physics; einstein being given to theory and elegant design and bohr >being more experimental and willing to accept the strange universe(s) >suggested by quantum physics.
My comment would be that neither of these guys would have much to say about materialist theory of political economy or other social realms of inquiry, such as history.
Next, there was this exchange that stemmed from the CounterPunch article and commentary, but also tied into the 'intuition' vs. 'empirical evidence' part of the previously cited thread:
(please note the quote within the quote)>>T Fast wrote:
>>Doug, do you hate literary prose?
>Not at all - nor poetry either - as long as it doesn't make
>analytical claims. The piece in question acts as if Jefferson Davis
>is responsible for the capitalist world system. A lot of the CP stuff
>seems, consciously or not, bent on exonerating the U.S. for its
>crimes: our foreign policy is the fault of Israel, and the global
>hierarchy can be traced to the Confederacy.
>Doug>>end of quote
The part that interests me is the completely arguable position on analytical claims and literature. Other positions are also quite possible. Forgive the hyperlink and hypertext hyperactivity, but let's look at this point relative to Emile Zola, Frank Norris, Marx and Engels, and then Chomsky. (BTW, to digress, outside of a core of good writers, CP stuff is usually pretty bad. Perhaps the print version is more limited and edited?)
Now about literature as rational inquiry on the social realm, and about intuition vs. inductivism. I'm assuming both in the dichotomy could be quite 'rational' but could also be quite 'irrational', depending on the practitioners. For example, academic careerism gives rise to a huge amount of largely irrational 'empirical' studies (or so I intuit), while great intuitive theorizers like Einstein and Wittgenstein would certainly be 'rationalists' (can't empirically prove that or anything like that).
1. Zola, an influential writer of 'naturalist' prose who identified his use of literature with science.
http://www.klarsyn.org/propaganda/html/authors/ezola.html
>>Inspired by Claude Bernard's Introduction a la medecine experimentale (1865) Zola tried to adjust scientific principles in the process of observing society and interpreting it in fiction. The treatise, LE ROMAN EXPERIMENTAL (1880) manifested Zola's faith in science and acceptance of scientific determinism.>>end of quote
http://www.classicreader.com/author.php/aut.203
>>"The Rougon-Macquart - the group, the family, whom I [Zola] propose to study - has as its prime characteristic the overflow of appetite, the broad upthrust of our age, which flings itself into enjoyments. Physiologically the members of this family are the slow working-out of accidents to the blood and nervous system which occur in a race after a first organic lesion, according to the environment determining in each of the individuals of this race sentiments, desires, passions, all the natural and instinctive human manifestations whose products take on the conventional names of virtues and vices." >>end of quote of quote
2. Frank Norris, a sorely under-rated 19th century American writer.
http://www.litdict.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3351
>>Frank Norris was one of a number of American novelists who, around the close of the nineteenth century, extended the scope of gserioush fiction to include social issues of sexuality, commodification, and economic class. Along with Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, Norris is regarded as one of the most important practitioners of gliterary naturalismh (q.v.). This contemporary term signalled the bringing together of realist description with an appeal to natural science, especially the theories of Darwin, Spencer and (especially in Norris's case), Berkeley professor Joseph Le Conte, to explain the social and commercial developments of the USA>>end of quote
3. Marx and Engels, whose approach to political economy influenced literary studies in the 20th century, who read and cited a lot of literary works, and who wrote in what many would consider a literary genre.
http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/karl_marx_and_friedrich_engels.html
>>Marxism, the result of the lifelong collaboration of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), has been variously described as an economic theory, a revolutionary theory, a philosophy of history, and a sociology of capitalism. In recent years, however, it has emerged through the influence of such twentieth-century "Western Marxists" as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton as an ambitious and comprehensive cultural theory, one that can account for literary creation or aesthetics in relation to capitalist production and consumption, understood always in relation to history. Indeed, insistence on history, on recognizing that social and cultural reality should always be regarded in process, has been one of the most enduring themes of Marxist theory.>>end of quote
plus
>>Stylistically, the very writings of Marx and Engels can be called "literary." Marx in particular was a brilliant German prose innovator, capable of exploiting that language's propensity for coining new noun forms to maximum effect. Moreover, Marx's writings are sprinkled with literary references and, often, lengthy passages quoted from such authors as Aeschylus, Sophocles, William Shakespeare, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a section of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 devoted to the alienating power of money, Marx reproduces a lengthy passage from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens to make his point. What is perhaps most significant, the writings of Marx and Engels defy conventional categorization, a fact of immediate interest in the critical climate that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, wherein even the notion of literature itself was increasingly subsumed within a more broadly conceived notion of writing>>end of quote
4. Finally, Chomsky, who takes an extremely skeptical position on the epistemological effectiveness of social and cognitive 'sciences' but who has also said that he finds novels more explanatory of humans than books of sociology and psychology (or something to that effect, I can't find the quote I was looking for). But see:
http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/pertinence.htm
>>Some of the insights are scientific, and Chomsky does presume that, barring knowledge that we simply seem intrinsically unable to discover, we shall some day know important things about this category. For the moment, we rely upon things like intuition and domains such as the arts. This is where literature become significant: 'I have, I'm sure, been powerfully influenced by fiction, including what I used to really immerse myself in when I had more time -- Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Eliot, Dickens, etc.' 'Powerfully influenced' is strong language for Chomsky when discussions of formative mediums or individuals arise. This makes it particularly significant in terms of its knowledge claims: 'Literature is an entirely different matter. We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes
reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope -- a product, I assume, of special properties of human cognitive structure.' So there is something outside of the social sciences-exact sciences spectrum, and sitting as it does on the margins of our understanding, and describing as it does the central element of our nature (creativity), it could in fact be deemed critically important. Indeed, if the minimalist programme postulations are true, then creative uses of language may be at the centre of our own humanity. So 'literature is not a social science. If literature is illuminating, that doesn't tell us anything about the power and value of social science.' Okay, but what about literary theory? And how should one characterize Bakhtin's work within these categories? Could his work have anything to say about human behaviour, as deviant as bombardment or as invigorating as dialogue?>>end of quote (please note the Chomsky quote within the larger quote.)
Oh, let me conclude with my own observation about intuition. Most people who do brilliant intuiting do their best before the age of 35. After that the brain seems to stop making the short-cut connections--i.e., rational but hard-to-explain leaps of logic. What's tragic is that so many people never really got to work intuitively at something before settling into the dull round of doing what they do 'best' with such automaticity. It also seems that people who pride themselves on their intuitive abilities long after 35 are very dangerous in novel situations. For example, George Bush and his self-described 'intuitive' leadership. Now the question there is, Did he intuit those weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda links and imminent threats, or did he know empirically all along that they were lies to be used to get what he wanted? Quite likely, having entertained both and other thoughts for so long while talking in that very strange Bush family private language, even he could not give you an answer.
Fugazy
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