[lbo-talk] My Aristotle rant, was: Re: Glenn Beck breaks down in tears, blubbers on-air AGAIN

[Philip Pilkington]

>
> Alan writes, appealing to Bertell Ollman and Derek Sayer:
>
> I've been only half following all that has gone one here but I've kept on
> thinking about Ollman's chapter, in Alienation, titled "Words Like Bats"
> and, rereading a couple chapters of Derek Sayer's book, The Violence of
> Abstraction, I found this:
>
> "An important corollary of Ollman’s argument — but a thesis which can also
> be independently defended on other grounds — is that Marx’s general,
> transhistorical categories (like those of the 1859 Preface) acquire
> substantive definition from, and only from, the particular historical
> contexts to which they are applied. They are not applicable without change
> across space and time, because their content changes with the reality they
> seek to comprehend. This means that they cannot be substantively defined
> transhistorically; as general categories, they are necessarily empirically
> open-ended. We cannot offer a universally applicable definition, of an
> empirical sort, of what for instance productive forces or production
> relations are. Conversely, in so far as Marx’s concepts are substantive
> categories the concepts of concrete empirical phenomena — they are
> necessarily historical categories: a feudal force, a capitalist relation,
> and so on. Their content is historically specific, and their validity
> historically circumscribed."
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>

I did mention this, perhaps without reverence to Marx:

"Personally I think that any notion of essence is far more problematic and
difficult to grasp than anything Marx or Aristotle could have said. Why
refer to them for contemporary problems anyway? The notion of essence, which
I wouldn't abandon,

 is surely historically mediated and so we,

or at least more contemporary philosophers, should be in a better position
to articulate it than Marx and Aristotle... Its certainly, in my opinion,
not correlative with "happiness"!"

But this comes back to the impossible problem of so-called "concrete
thought" without abstraction. First of all, many of the concepts you allude
to (capitalism, feudalism, universal etc.) are already abstractions.
Secondly, to base a theory without taking into account certain aspects which
are immutable (emotions, aspirations etc.) is a little reductionist. I could
probably fish around some of Marx's writings and find criticisms in both
these directions but I couldn't be bothered...