Lebensphilosophie (was: Summary...)

[j laari]

Greetings

Ralph, I've tried to answer your post a little snappier, but there's
so much stuff in your posts that it takes time to ruminate over it.
The April discussion (on science and method & al.) is still at a
standstill because of the Easter time and of my slow responses.
Perhaps it could be integrated into these issues...

1. I think I've managed to grasp the standpoint of Farber, and I won't
get into it. That would require studying him. Let's say I'm a bit
doubtful when someone says he accepts, say, Husserl's method but not
his philosophy. Husserl was a mathematician by training, not a
philosopher (though he surely have studied it like all intellectuals
in those days in German speaking central Europe). In several issues he
wasn't very up-to-date, though quite clearly he was willing to learn.
What is called 'phenomenological philosophy' in reference to Husserl
isn't anything new - there wasn't any revolution or somesuch with it.
It was just his understanding and interpretation of what philosophy
was and about what it was. This all is very serious. Because it's only
after realising how Husserl fits into bigger picture of turn of the
century philosophy dominated many-sided neokantianism, but coloured
also by efforts to get rid of it - like Lebensphilosophie - and
certain kind of positivism.

'Naturalism' isn't a weasel word, me thinks. It has strict
philosophical uses in demarcating between different kinds of emphasis
in thinking. (The most uncompromising view is, I guess, that
naturalist thinking isn't philosophical at all because of certain
prejudices it makes. That applies at least to reductive materialism, I
believe.) 100 years ago positivism was the naturalist alternative to
transcendental philosophy in which 'husserlian method' was already in
use before Husserl 'invented' it. I wouldn't state phenomenology as
the most sophisticated form of philosophy of that time (early 20th
century). Neokantians usually pointed the problems of it as soon as
Husserl published a book or paper... Main reason for me to appreciate
him is in his theory of Lebenswelt. For some reason the philosophical
significance of the social world for philosophical thinking (and for
standpoint of it) 'grew dimmer' at that time, but in Husserl's
thinking it just became clearer. it was as if 100 years of work on the
self-understanding of philosophy itself somehow crystallized in his
work on 'Lebenswelt' - all the way from Kant and Hegel to Feuerbach
and Marx down to Dilthey, Nietzsche and Simmel...

2. I refuse to take the different 'schools' or 'traditions' in the
spirit of religious or political dogmatism (mine good, yours bad). The
broader view must be kept in mind all the time. And that is: the
development of human thinking. Different schools have developed
concepts pertaining to different problems. That's my kind of sociology
of knowledge.

Calling Lebensphilosophie 'reactionary' means to subjugate philosophy
to administrative machineries, to politics, or even to religion. My
question was and is: what reactionary is in clarifying the problems

3. I don't care how thivk Lukacs' book was. His "Eigenart des
Aesthetisches" surely was thicker because it had to be splitted into
two volumes. But that's not an argument concerning the intellectual
value of it. I think I can appreciate the achievements of "young
Lukacs" if there was any. Unfortunately, later he seemed to submit
himself to the stalinist machinery. I don't mind if he was a
conservative as an aesthetic. Lukacs' repudiation of his early work is
understandable - is there anyone who dares to claim he had understood
all the nuances and problems of science in his twenties? His style and
polemics - well... I don't know. Honestly. Probably it is as you say,
that is "what matters most, i.e. that is intellectually compromising."

The long quotation you provided us -

"The abandonment of the old downright idealism had been anticipated
even in the middle of the last century by petty-bourgeois asceticism.
Ever since Nietzsche, the body (Leib) has played a leading role in
bourgeois philosophy. The new philosophy needs formulae which
recognize the primary reality of the body and the joys and dangers of
bodily existence, without, however, making any concessions to
materialism. For at the same time materialism was becoming the world
view of the revolutionary proletariat. That made a position such as
Gassendi and Hobbes look impossible for bourgeois thinkers. Although
the method of idealism had been discredited by the realities of the
time, its conclusions were held indispensable. This explains the need
for the "third way" in the bourgeois world of the imperialist period."

- clearly shows the limitations of Lukacs' grasp of the problems of
modern philosophy and the development of it. There is no philosophical
content in that. Just empty stalinoid rhetorics.

4. "As for the living human body, this is what fascist intellectuals
love to remind us of as they grovel before naked power."

Well, Ralph, the point was philosophical.

Sincerely, Jukka L