Reich & the Frankfurt School

[j laari]

Well,

it's quite late so I'm going to be snappy. Perhaps someone will
explain what it means today (in North America) to address someone in
the third person singular. What is the social significance of it? I
mean that, say, five years ago it wasn't that popular as it is today.

First of all, we all have a personal intellectual hero. He's the one
whom the others have misunderstood, who is deeper than his rivals.
The reason is quite simple, I think. We have deepened our
understanding of N.N. while working on his texts, therefore we can
easily see how shallow is the typical theory-book description of his
thinking. So in a sense I do understand mr. McLaughlin's post (the
resentment), provided Fromm is his intellectual hero. If isn't - well,
we tend to develop certain positive stance towards those we study.
(None of the Frankfurt theorists is my hero, I stick to Spinoza,
Simmel and Husserl.) I don't have time to read McLaughlin's paper
right now, but I'm eager to learn more so I write down the webpage.

>From my viewpoint Fromm is quite far from being an interesting
philosopher. As far as i can tell, he had nothing to say about the
basic philosophical issues. For some reason Fromm and Marcuse were the
popular representatives of Frankfurt School here in Finland in late
1960's and early 1970's. Their books were, unfortunately, quite
selectively translated. Fromm's major works were translated unlike
Marcuse's (except the "One Dimensional Man", though not everyone will
call it as major work by Marcuse). Yet even on that account we were
able to understand which one of them managed the philosophical issues.
Despite that Marcuse probably was sillier or more naive than most of
the frankfurters... It was Marcuse, after all, who was the first one
to spell out what (psychoanalytic) metapsychology theoretically
actually is: it aimed to 'determine the essence of the being itself'
(i.e. metapsychology is metaphysics). However, I'd suggest McLaughlin
to find out what 'Dialektik' meant in German philosophy of
Wilhelminian and Weimar periods. When I wrote of Fromm as
'anti-dialectician' I truly meant it. He was a smooth writer, and I
have respected him a lot as a social psychologist. But, he made no
contributions whatsoever for the development of dialectical
philosophy. (Is it because of the heritage of Freud's hostility
towards philosophy? Because of something else? I don't know, but
psychoanalysts and psychologists tend to psychologize genuinely
philosophical problems, e.g. to naturalize the transcendental
perspective in order to study it 'empirically'.)

Mr. Rovira already noted that at least I made a suggestion, so I won't
explain how to read sentences that end with question mark.

I'm still wondering what 'transferring' exactly means in the
theoretical context of the individual-social -relations. Ralph already
used it in his original post.

Sincerely, Jukka L


On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Neil McLaughlin wrote:

> Fromm had many faults as a thinker, and there is much that is useful in
> Wiggerhaus, but Fromm certainly did not maintain that
> individual psychology could be smoothly transferred to social
>  theory. How could anyone maintain such a silly position. What exactly
> would it mean to take this position. One can quote things Fromm wrote that
> were questionable, or silly, but this is just a simplistic critique,
> without specifics.  And Fromm as Mr. Anti-Dialectics?  Well, that is
> just a silly clich, rooted in the origin myths of the Frankfurt School.
> For a discussion of the conflict between Adorno and Fromm, and the origin
> myths...