[marxistphilosophy] Re: any result, lacanians -

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm completely exhausted from a long and tiring day, but maybe I can write 
something without lapsing into a coma.

At 10:50 AM 4/12/2003 -0700, steve heeren wrote:
>Ralph and Jukka:
>
>"the division of labour is, first and foremost, the prevention of access to
>the totality." --Agnes Heller.

Great quote.  Source?

>If we take this seriously, it requires us to see that even the objects of
>study of the sciences (social and natural) are "determined" by the larger
>set of social relations and not given intuitively. The various objects of
>study form the basis of the division of labour in the scientific (and
>academic!) world.

True enough.  Two things to think about to refine this perspective:

(1) This scenario only recognizes the social organization in which 
knowledge is produced.  There is nothing about the content of 
knowledge.  Since this is the Frankfurt list, a littl4e name-dropping is in 
order: Adorno criticized the "sociology of knowledge" as a completely 
formal investigation external to any subject matter, but that there can be 
no real critique without a view of truth content.  So the question would 
be, how has the direction and content of scientific knowledge been skewed 
by said social relations?

(2) The picture outlined above is excessively holistic (expressive 
totality?) without qualification.  Aside from the unevenness of what goes 
on in the world of knowledge, there remains the issue I brought up before, 
that every scientist, as every other member of society, has to be 
socialized into a given framework, so then the question is, what happens in 
this give and take?  Is the individual entirely swallowed up in this 
process or is there a struggle, with the possibility of 
innovation?  Obviously more specificity is needed to pin down what actually 
happens.

>And if we want to study the totality, as the basis of
>"science" (one of the most difficult words in the english language,
>according to Raymond Williams), then that has to be done historically,
>because the totality is not only the truth (the Truth is the Whole --Hegel)
>but also emerges only in the stream of history, both cognitively and
>existentially, one might say. Marx and Engels say that they recognize only
>one science: the science of history.

I think it was Marx; it was in his Young Hegelian period; and to unpack 
this quote opens up a whole new line of discussion.  But since you mention 
it, Marx's remarks are most apropos, because Marx recognized the tension 
that would give birth to the diremption in philosophy between positivism 
and lebensphilosophie.  Another quote from Marx's 1844 mss once beloved of 
Raya Dunayevskaya: "One basis for science and another for life is a priori 
a lie."

>Rickert's distinctions form one of
>those "either-or" dichotomies that Hegel fulminates against in his Logic.
>After all, the distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic
>sciences arises, under particular historical circumstances, and is itself
>the product of what Marx called "abstract" empiricism --abstract because it
>leaves history, which engenders our very categories, out of account.

This reminds me that I need to answer another query put to me on this 
subject.  Very briefly: "my" distinction between the natural and social 
sciences is not dualistic in this manner.  I'm not interested in dividing 
them off from one another, each to be shuffled off into a separate 
realm.  That is in fact what's wrong with the compartmentalization that 
creates a separate philosophy of the subject apart from physical 
science.  The trick here is to recognize both the unity of the world and 
its differentiation at the same time.  Recalling what was happening in the 
last third of the 19th century with the dominance of scientism, Social 
Darwinism, etc., one can understand the battle that Engels fought, albeit 
imperfectly, to restore qualitative specificity to the domain of social 
investigation without severing it entirely from the physical world.  Later 
on, other people came up with ideas about emergent properties, integrative 
levels, etc.  So perhaps one should say the proper world-picture is neither 
dualistic nor excessively monistic.

>As an academic psychologist (now retired) I used to study the phil. of
>science a lot, of which most such psychologists had not a clue, attaching
>themselves usually to a naive kind of "empiricism" (read Williams'
>strictures against the use of the word "positivism" as a kind of swear
>word). Now that I've left academe these kinds of concerns have receded onto
>the back burner for me.  I remember once calling Marx a "historical
>empiricist", not too dissimilar from Historical Materialism, the foundation
>of his science.

Marx was empirical up to his eyeballs.  He wasn't just a Hegelian 
philosopher; he absorbed empirical data up the wazoo.  The word 
"empiricist" I suppose could be an ambiguous one.  It's the "ist" part 
that's the problem.

>P.S. the work of the obscure but brilliant Alfred Sohn-Rethel, an associate
>of the Frankfurters, still is absolutely important in understanding science
>and its first emergence among the early Greek civilizations. There is also
>the work of Edgar Zilsel, a Marxist sociologist of science. Both of them are
>totally neglected nowadays, but never refuted because they were simply
>ignored, due to the Cold War.

Sohn-Rethel: very important.  I haven't studied him as I should but he's 
high on my list.  George Thomson wrote about the emergence of philosophy in 
Greece along similar lines.  I have reservations, but that's another 
story.  But please tell me more about Edgar Zilsel.

PS: Please forgive my cross-posting, but this is the most efficient way for 
me to get this out.