CB: The main directly philosophical book we have from Marx and Engels is _Anti-Duhring_, a critique or "negation" of a philosophical writer.
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I haven't read it, but I think I get the general idea, which roughly put is that the best ideas arise from the experience of action in the world. A kind of anti-idealism.
So, this brings up multiple questions and their tangents. First, I think of the various works since the 60s, called postmodernism are mostly over as a broadly conceived movement, in the sense of breaking new ground. Well, they will probably continue on as some academic machine thought, papers, conference etc. Low grade noise. What remains more meaningful are applications and studies following some of these ideas, encapsulated as postmodernism.
I am thinking of Foucault for example and some movements and studies about public institutions like prisons, hospitals and schools. My part time work as a student hospital orderly and attendant in 69-71 immediately jumped off the page when I finally got around to reading Discipline and Punish, and Madness and Civilization in the mid-90s. The small student hospital were I worked had constant problems with sex and drugs going on the upper floor wards where the disabled students were housed, and there was a low grade war by the hospital administration over security. We used to laugh about their incompetence in controlling us with buzzer doors, id badges, and so forth. We made the concrete connections between all these institutions, that Foucault did about the same time. The funny thing is the school, hospital, prison all converged in our particular and actual building. The other interesting thing was that these particular students, some of them, ended up as early leaders in the disability rights movements.
In any event, I think it is time for an obituary and general appraisal. By that I mean, what do people think in general terms of these intellectual movements. And further, did they have much effect on their primary target, the life of the mind and its relation to the human world. What was changed and what hasn't?
What I am thinking about is what seems to me a stunning contrast with such historical figures as Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. All of the latter seem to me to have changed the world and the world of the mind, and the human world in significant ways. Let me put it this way. They created the way I think about these matters.
I can say that hard core modern analytic tradition did little since they mostly refined mathematical and physical thought. But in these realms, it was the practice in math and science that did the most work to change the way I thought about the world and not the philosophies these fields inspired.
And then lastly, as I look back at postmodern work, it was supposed to represent an expression of what people of my generation experienced and thought important to develop into thought and method about our world. I have to say, I had great expectations that out of the wild malay and later struggles, something truly worth it would come out of all the smoke and roar. It evidently didn't. On the other hand while I can't really define it, that decade and its events did change my world at least. I was not the same before and after and neither was the general climate of the times. I still can't put my finger on it. Maybe the motto to hell with the rules was about it. That scofflaw mentality can have as deep a consequence as you can force your imaginative skills to discover. Matt's tag line from John Coltrane got me to thinking about that ....
I can frankly say that most of the post-60s, postmodern work on the whole failed completely on two counts. Did it change the world, and did it change the mind? While it was interesting to play with, most of what I've read is remarkably banal, when compared to the challenges the world presented us at the time and since. Fiddling while Rome burns seems appropriate.
The one thing that postmodern philosophies managed to do was to attack the bastions of established thought and methods at so many points, that the powers that be were for awhile slightly destabilized.
Now to change the subject a little. I certainly do believe that knowledge that arises from action in the world is exactly the kind of knowledge that changes the world. So when I look back at the philosophies I've studied, I look for their living connection with the world of the people who created them. I can usually identify something in their biography, their circumstance that must have put them in the world in such a way that grounds their philosophy in experience. The single most glaring exception that I can think of at the moment is Kant. He was a professor who never seemed to have left the academy---ever. On the other hand, when I thing about the overhaul of the institutions of science and the humanities undertaken in the French Revolution and the nationalization and reorganization of these fields, then I can see Kant's philosophy as grounded in the world.
Now a rift ... the academy and philosophy were at the start one and the same. So then if you divide knowledge and alter its interconnections, the divisions within the physical academy change, into the departments of knowledge, and therefore the structures of thought and therefore the actions. It is a form of the dialectic of thought and action, theory and practice.
Hegel who is also accused of living in the ivory tower did have one key event that must have grounded him in the world of human events. Again, the French Revolution. The morning he was getting ready to take his first major manuscript, the Phenomenology of Mind to the printer, Napoleon's army opened the battle of Jena, with a massive cannon barrage a mile or two away from where Hegel was to take a carriage out of Jena to the printer in a nearby town. There is another circumstance, involving poetry and his roomate Hoelderlin, involving a dialectic poetry v. philosophy, but it is too rarified to go into at the moment.
With Spinoza it wss more obvious and direct. He was kicked out of the only synagog in town and the Jewish business community where his family business was for not believing in God and disputing the Torah. He had to find work in the new craft industry of lens grinding which was part of the scientific applications stemming from the mathematical works of Spinoza's intellectual mentor, Rene Descartes. Hume was a judge. That seems to explain it all. The idea that the jutxaposition of two events does not imply causation ... well think of the murder suspect who says, I was there, but I didn't do it.
Also more obvious and direct was the case of Marx, kicked out of university, then hounded out of Germany and finally working with workers trying to organize the working men's societies. Getting kicked in the head, tends to question idealism. In other words, he had direct contact with the economic production process and system he analyzed and critiqued. From my experience there is nothing like working at a meanial job to focus the attention on the processes of capitalism. I think the real purpose of Mao's Cultural Revolution was a meat axe approach to the same idea. Get the intellectual classes grounded in where their world comes from. Nice idea, bad way of going about it.
What I am suggesting is that the way you come to your philosophy depends on some likely set of circumstance of life. Not a very novel idea. In fact it has been systematize as the forensic profile cop use. Through a certain twist of concept, you can turn a forensic profile around, and see the police as the zen masters of how to commit armed robbery. Think traffic stop and the crime of DWB. The FBI become the zen masters of committing white collar crime, etc.
With Cassirer, my favorite, it was a combination of things. He was Jewish and discriminated against in the early years of his career, and then after he achieved better status he was put in charge of managing and developing an institute for the Warburg library of many books and other materials of ancient and non-western works. The combination made him acutely aware of the vast differences between cultures and practices and ways of living, acting and thinking about the world. There were quite a few philosophers, physical scientists, and social scientists who experiences similar cultural-intellectual dislocations during Weimar that grounded their work in the world, and many went on to make contributions to the mind and action in the world.
When Chris Doss characterized Heidegger as Luther looking into Augustine, I though about the dialectic between the City of Man and the City of God. Augustine died as his city of man was sacked by the barbarian heretic armies. Little wonder he sought the quietism of the netherworld. Luther's tracts which were really just reform demands over church services and bibles, blew up into peasant wars that destablized the German states locked into the Feudal order of popes, nobility and monarchs. Somehow land reform and printing presses, worked in historical dialectical consort to produce Protestantism, well the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Many hours studying Durer, his theories of space, and how these were connected to his involvement with both Protestantism and the printing press, put these ideas together in completely unexpected ways. No wonder art history is a wash.
So these reflections and studies have led me to the idea of what I call pathological profiles of philosophers, more or less as a joke. On the other hand the idea is also based on my own experiences in the world of human action and events and why I think as I do about them. This idea of theory and practice is very familiar to me, from practicing art, and comes from many art history classes where it was obvious a lot of the material had nothing to do with art or life or history.
This has led me to the theory that the reason most postmodern thought has had so little impact is because most of it is not well grounded in the world of human action. It doesn't seem to naturally arise from action in the world and it doesn't seem to address it either.
In my opinion this lack of grounding explains the quietism that many of us complain about, from Heidegger to Derrida. There are exceptions, like Foucault, but with Foucault, I think I can identify the elements in his pathological profile that make him an exception, namely his contacts with the mentally ill, his work in psychology, public institutions, and his experience as a homosexual.
I can cite more specific examples of quietism v. action and meaning, from the disability rights movement. The first generation of political activists came from struggles against public institutions where they were trapped. When they got out, they turned their guns on their jailers and knew who and where and how to break down the system that put them in such hospitality industries as the back wards of county hospitals, sanatoriums, and the student hospital were I worked. They were very successful. Since I started as a hospital orderly and attendant with this group, I had the same knowledge from action. As the years went by I watched a movement change of guard, the old leadership moved on to other careers. Their replacements most of whom had not struggled directly, were much less effective. Finally the new professionals moved in, who knew nothing at all but the principles of the idea, which had now become a bloodless routine and absolutely nothing was accomplished after that.
So that is the concrete example, and it grounds what I am trying to describe as my pathological profiling of philosophers. This general approach to re-thinking philosophy came from trying to discover why Strauss was a reactionary and Arendt was a left leaning liberal and Marxist fellow traveller. Strauss was burned early by political activism in the Zionist movements of the 1920s and never actively engaged political and social movements after that. He retreated to the academy and developed both a theoretical and psychological loathing of the Activa Vita, as Arendt called it. Arendt stayed engaged most of her life in some fashion or other. Her work is far more grounded in the world than his was as a result. And I find her work far more useful to understanding the world and how to change it.
Then by extension, following through the indirect consequences of Strauss's work and its general applications to government policy through its bastardization in the neoconservative movements, we can trace out the result of this loathing of active social engagement, this social pathology. The necon conception of the world is pathological and its idealism leads to delusions, paranoia, and violent acting out. Their answers to the active problems of state, society, and the social economy are all to be found in the world of Piranesi prints, I Carcere. Piranesi was an architectural designer during the Enlightenment, of course. Abu Ghraib is the neoconservative ideal state. A Piranesi nightmare if there ever was one.
But these systems of thought are not restricted solely to the dement neoconservatives. In the more broadly conceived understanding of the freedom of action, practice and thought, you can find the interconnections between institutions of power and their oppression systems, just by looking at the architectural similarities in the buildings, their physical designs. Since I was a construction worker, mechanic, art major, a scofflaw and a malcontent, I have tried to study these matters as practice and theory.
They all follow the Bauhaus prescription of form follows function. The spatial function of architecture is to control and manage movement and action within and without of buildings. Look at the ubiquitous security systems and the designs of the interiors of buildings. They are all prisons, modeled on prisons, designed just like prisons. The whole purpose of the architecture of business and industry is to control, manage and run their work forces. So there is an ever evolving dialectic in the class wars carried out in the very physical space within which we live and work. You become critically aware of street layout and design when you do street battles.
This hierarchical system of space and its wars are unimaginably detailed down to the nth degree of the material. Who gets rosewood and who gets formica as their desk top? In the shop my desk workbench was covered in the lowest of the low, drilled, hammered and work worn masonite on steel, the materials of the industrial proletariat work space. My workspace was deliberately designed to minimize conversation and social interaction between shop mechanics, i.e isolation cells. The architectural designs and materials for managing, controlling and constructing the workers at this class level are just as refined and nuanced to perform their function as those of the management and elites all the way up the feudal tiers of these cathedrals. They are cathedrals for capital and empire complete with their dungeons and workshops in the catacombs below.
My ability to see and understand living space through the lens of control came from work but also experience with architectural codes and accessibility rights related to independent living issues in the disability movements. It is a concrete and practical sort of knowledge that directly intersects space, law, politics, economics and ultimately philosophy in the sense of an examined life.
In more plain terms the reactionary forces of the US and power elite develop ever more efficient and more refined systems to control and convert the entire society and all of its activities into one vast prison industrial machine, that is devoted only to serving their interests, promoting their value schemes, and convincing everyone that this is all a natural and correct way to run society and literally Be in the world.
I just think of it as one vast dungeon society and imagine Piranesi as its architect.
(This was sure fun to write. Thanks Charles.)
CG