> >
> > 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.
>
....SNIP ...
>
>
> 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...
> ___________________________________
>
Sadly, perhaps, I was raised by a Geertzian anthropologist. This is Geertz' expression of, I believe, the contemporary anthropological position on immutables:
"My point, which should be clear and I hope will become even clearer in a moment, is not that there are no generalizations that can be made about man as man, save that he is a most various animal, or that the study of culture has nothing to contribute toward the uncovering of such generalizations. My point is that such generalizations are not to be discovered through a … search for cultural universals, a kind of public-opinion polling of the world’s peoples in search of a consensus gentium that does not in fact exist, and, further, that the attempt to do so leads to precisely the sort of relativism the whole approach was expressly designed to avoid. … What, after all, does it avail us to say, with Herskovits, that “morality is a universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty, and some standard for truth,” if we are forced in the very next sentence, as he is, to add that “the many forms these concepts take are but products of the particular historical experience of the societies that manifest them”?7 Once one abandons uniformitarianism, even if, like the consensus gentium theorists, only partially and uncertainly, relativism is a genuine danger; but it can be warded off only by facing directly and fully the diversities of human culture, … and embracing them within the body of one’s concept of man, not by gliding past them with vague tautologies and forceless banalities."
There's more on my mind but it'll have to wait for tomorrow.