If I wanted to be really Heideggerian and stuff, I could argue that mediation can be obfuscation as much as it can be clarification.
--- On Sun, 3/29/09, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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...
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