I just began listening to Jim Farmelant's posted radio link that opened with a quote from CLR James. It was a wonderful quote from 1958 and ties in with what's below. To paraphase James, he begins with the idea that Descartes had the revolutionary idea that rationalism, the use of reason would liberate human society from the authoritarian control of church and state domination. James notes Capitalism and its near simultaneous birth within this period. He continues, that rationalism was taken up by the elites of power, learned, and used to enslave the masses of society rather than liberate them, but that was resisted through a series of struggles that culminated in the French Revolution, which as it turned out only deepened the control of capital through the rationalization of the means of production and the industrial revolution. (Mostly my words in the latter.) Without going into the problems with the Russian Revolution which James was explicitly aware (How Stalin killed the Revolution), James brings us up to his day in 1958 to declare the rational project is dead.
I couldn't find the quote to read it all in context to find out why he thought it died, but he was right whatever reason he gave.
Now I want to speed switch gears. In the history of ideas, the facade of cartesian rationalism as a mode of understanding the world and human society was struck with complex series of sieges and assaults somewhere in the early to mid-19thC and came from the unlikely realm of mathematics and physics, but the implications were too sophisticated and abstract for them to gain much attention. Some of these assaults also had related art and literary expressions during the same period, and did manage to prepare the ground for a deep shift. Both currents became revolutionary in a public way around the turn of the 20thC through popularization of works in mathematics and physics, collectively known as relativity and atomic theory. In art and cultural media there were near simultaneous developments which included Cubist painting, Dada concept and situational arts, film, and steam of conscious writings of James Joyce and the Surrealists. These combined to decenter the reader and viewer from their preferred Castesian point of view. Or tried. As John Searle pointed out, the Cartesian frame (and its dualism) is still the popularly perferred stand, mind v. body, individualism, single point of view, etc.
The events of WWI, the Russian Revolution, Weimar, the Third Reich plus the rise of dominance of mass media pretty much finished off rationalism and a Cartesian-Newtonian universe.
the CLR James quote which was great, appeared about the time that the message of all of the above reached the masses, like me about three years later in college in the early sixties, provided you took the right courses from the right professors...or watched Marshall McLuhan on television.
I'd like a full citation of James's quote so I can read the whole thing, because he was just about ready to say what the next step in human liberation had to be. I would certainly like to hear that.
Nevermind for now. Below is a sketch of how I learned about the fall and replacement of the Cartesian-Newtonian world. The short form is that you find the answer in Ernst Cassirer which retakes the humanism behind the original intentions of rationalism and the enlightenment, without its mechanics of totalitarianism by political-economic means. We live in an era of a captialist tyranny which should be no surprise and our task is certainly to break that hold down. It may not be the end of capital, but it better be the end of it as the dominant force of human society---well or we are all dead a lot sooner than expected.
Now switch gears, because I was just writing this, this morning.
There is a recent intellectual biography of Cassirer by Edward Skidelsky called The Symbolic Construction of Reality. I'll order and read it, but already have several objections. Below are two reviews. The second one is better but slightly longer.
http://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=821
http://hudsonreview.com/new/issues/149/the-humanism-of-ernst-cassir
My basic objection. Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was the beginning on which to build a philosophy of culture and begged adaptation to cultural anthropology and just about any study of modern culture most of which came much later.
I was introduced to cultural anthropology influenced by Cassirer. My maverick anthro prof, Edmond Carpenter also had Jean Piaget and McLuhan on the suggested reading list. He sketched out all three, but spent most of his time on McLuhan. This was in spring 1963. The combination was like an explosion in my head.
Here is a Tom Wolfe presentation of McLuhan and a survey of reactions from the early 1980s, just after he died...You have to tune out Wolfe for the most part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y99YI9_n9A
I think Skidelshy will overstate the hierarchical progress from myth to science. In Cassirer it was not as strong as SK makes it sound. Although SK did mention a tree like structure rather than a linear ascent. Maybe you can read Cassirer both ways. Perhaps its Cassirer's method of presentation. He was in McLuhan's terminology, a man of the book, as in book culture, which means a linear medium. If you can't transform your intellectual powers into a sense of a multilinear flow or something like an impressionist painting which only gets clearer with more exposure, you will not be able to see Cassirer's work as a de-centered work that was on-going and built around several `deeper' themes. He was not a systematic or system building philosopher. The `center' of his work was a study in theories of knowledge, the modes of epstimology, or modes of understanding the human and natural world. The ontological level was the origin and/or structures of mythological thinking, that are the processes of thought itself. In German philosophy of Kant, Hegel, et al. the ontic has the word substitution of being, geist, spirit, sein...
Levi-Strauss and others of the structuralist and post-structuralist heirs got way off track trying to systematize or rationalize these conceptualization into structures and they failed. The natural modes in language terms (should have been) are metaphor, analogy, simile, metanomy.
1. simile - similarity 2. metaphor - substitution 3. metonymy - association
Now Cassirer's true depth is seen by understanding the above language terms as LIKE as in analogous to their mathematical forms, which are classifications of groups of transformations, plus several that are not easy to render in language terms like inversion and inside-out. Analogy itself is a language term for what are called morphisms in mathematics. A similarity transform is called a homeomorphism. At a more abstract level are topological groups, called homology groups. This is way too abstract, nevermind.
Just know that these kinds of mathematical ideas emerged in advanced mathematics all at about the same time, 1870--1920s during Cassirer's life and researches into science and art. He was fully conversant in the mathematics and physics of his day, which means he was exposed to the above early developments in modern mathematics.
But Skidlsky is right about the deep sense of humanism in Cassirer. He embodied that enlightenment theme as a classical modernity. It is also impossible for me to reconstruct Cassirer without the later ideas like those of Jean Piaget and Levi-Strauss (with additions by other profs) and their concepts of mind and culture. I read them all within a year or so and they together with McLuhan created my concept of a mythological world, which is ours, with its materialization as all the electronic media that surrounds us.
When you combine them with Marx you really get dynamite. That's why I'd like the citation for the James quote.
Why call it a mythologial envelop? Because it is a collective art form or something like an art form. It's a dynamically constructed representation and has a manipulated aspect which is seen and ignored like the frame around a painting. While this circus or spectacle form flows on and on, it does not have a center in the sense of a plane or painting. It has a cinemagraphic center. It has a forever shifting point of view that oscillates or gravitates about a center of mass. That center is roughly speaking the combined activities, policies, and intented directions of C.Wright Mills Power Elite. The concept of elite is itself a multinodal phenomenon that roughly corresponds to the geographically distributed centers of power.
That kind of global distribution has always been with us in some form or other going back into the `deep' history of human culture. In material terms, it's been locked up with the evolution and distribution of human societies over great periods of time. The difference is that today, through global high speed media these focal nodes of power can interact with each other within minutes rather than millenia. In that sense McLuhan's sound bites, like global village and tribalism have become much more manifest than they were back in the 1960s. And certainly it is more manifest than Cassirer's ideas about the linkage or continuity of mythological worlds and worldviews.
The above are very dated and sound like common sense or common place observations of no stunning effect at all. Which is true but also indicative of the transformation that this envelop has been normalized---recalibrated to seem natural. And yet we are also conscious of its manipulations, especially if we are opposed to its canons of truth and power.
That's as far as I got today. It was headed for my journal or delete, until Jim Farmelant gave me the flimsy excuse to post it.
I have to say I had no interest in listening to anything to do with atheism. It is a subject as deadly boring as the standard lectures on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind picking over the minutiae of linguistics and neuroscience. Last night I tried to listen to John Searle's lectures on The Philosophy of Language here, if you are interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk5pIzCNOzU
and Philosophy of Mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko
If for some reason you imagine that your world is not intentionally manipulated to prove capitalism is the only universe in the cosmos, try this from Salon. And even if you do know and understand that, try the link below anyway because it is a fun short read.
It's based on Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, which like McLuhan and C.Wright Mills was `in the air' of my youth.
http://www.salon.com/1999/09/27/persuaders/
``A growing number of CEOs have become convinced that they cannot sell their brand of deodorant, or deli meat, or automobile until they first explore the Jungian substrata of four-wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna...''
Jungian substrata...?
In their hypnotism focus group where they derived the idea that Shell Oil needed to reach three year olds they obviously hadn't done their analytic homework. Like their shark brain told them, they merely followed their olfactory stimulus to the money.
A three year old mind is the mythological mind at near its foundations. If you can reach that, you score in our world, maybe any world. On the dark side the same techniques in extreme mode are used in war and oppression.
Cassirer's Myth of State was originally directed at the fabrications of National Socialism and its panoply of Carl Schmitt and Joseph Goebbels. What Cassirer didn't do was go further to see all states have a founding mythological system and an all emcompassing universe of collective identities and the forces they must struggle with. (My Strauss project is to understand him and how he constructed ... even why he constructed such a mythological system that has been transformed into the neoliberal and neoconservative propaganda, mantra, and mythos of state and capital.)
The Salon article continues:
`` 'My own degree is in critical theory and literature. The theory base we use comes from the French, from Saussure and Levi-Strauss, with a healthy dose of Levinson, British cultural studies, and Russian formalists, who were of course the great theorists of carnival ...' Her voice drifts off knowingly. `We're very proud of what we've been able to do here. We have, I believe, taken the whole body of semiotic theory and adapted it to consumer brands. We've fit the semiotic project within the commercial process without losing the rigor, without losing the systematic approach, and still staying true to the theoretical principles.'
Valentine explains how this works in practice. `It's all about how brands make meaning,' she says. `And how meaning is literally deconstructed and reconstructed. It's quite fascinating, actually. We've worked on a number of retail projects. And what we've found is that everything signifies. Everything. Whether it's sanitary protection or the interior design of a supermarket or the viscosity of a product, it will all signify. And advertising is only going to work if it taps into a ready-made coding system in the consumer's head.'
I ask Valentine if she is troubled by the fact that many of her favorite theorists developed their theories as a weapon against capitalism; that the interpretive tools on which she relies were originally intended to expose the structure of advertising as a system of power and oppression. `It's an interesting point,' she says. `It's certainly true that my understanding of brands is essentially a Marxist understanding. It has angered some academics that this theory, which was originally presented as revealing the strategies behind advertising and marketing, is now being used in the service of advertising and marketing.' ''
(Back in 1970s art criticism, Rossline Krauss used to write on the discourse of epistomological ready-mades. That was some fun stuff)
The important point for cultural anthro is that in a totalistic sense whatever is touched on above constitutes a part of the mythological world of our society...and that includes most of neoclassical economics.
It is not just restricted to the most obvious media methods of advertizing. Another obvious example is all the constellation of ideas and perceptions, pictures, the mysterious dramatic sense and so forth of our conceptualization of state. All of these constitute a system of values, norms, conduct, custom and dominion of power, not to mention Law. The other interesting point is that if you were an art major, lit critter, cultural anthro, or in sociology you can probably find a job in PR and or ad agencies... And cheer up, they even have openings in the Marines so you can militarize you knowledge base.
The three year old mythic mind noted above has never disappeared, only trained, transformed and matured into a world view, which is no less susceptible to influence and only mediated by various rational and other sorts of processes. The whole point to the recent election campaigns was to get out the three year olds and rough'm up.
On the other hand three to four year olds are pretty sophisticated. Look up CDC milestones where you find almost all the basics of language, social, and imaginary life. One of the milestones is the ability to form sentences, which is considered the key leap between humans and animals... Another milestone is the ability to make-up characters or pretend in some way, or engage in imaginative play. And the other is an interest in other children to some degree. When you think on it, these are pretty universal characteristics of societies. I would add an interest in animals, bugs, and so forth. In our parental duties, there is reading the story aloud which seems to be our understanding of how they understand. What emerges, I would argue is the ground plane of a mythological understanding of the world.
CG