--- Ralph Dumain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
All this is rather superficial, however. I think
Ernest Gellner nailed the
essentially conservative nature of Wittgenstein's
philosophy.
Oh, agreed. W thought that philosophy done right
leaves everything as it is. That is a quote or at
least a translation of one. But just because he
thought that is what philosophy could do doesn't mean
he couldn't had radical politics.
Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy is hardly a
notch above Carnap's
dismissal of metaphysics as bad poetry or
Neurath's
metaphysicophobia.
This is totally different. Carnap and Neurath did not
see philosophy as conservative but as radical, they
wanted to put on a scientific basis in the service of
a modernist project of social reconstruction of a
rational society -- see Carnap's autobiography in the
Schlipp Library of Living Philosophers volume. (A
fascinating document in many ways, has a hilarious and
scathing portrait of the Univ. of Chicago Phil Dept in
general and Mortimer Adler in particular.)
Given an initially plausibly notion of cognitive
content (the verification theory of meaning) and a
scientific model of what counts as knowledge, it's
hard to know what to make of traditional metaphysics.
It's not scientific knowledge, whatever it is. And
it's not, for the most part, good poetry. Besides,
like people since Kant 9a big influence on the LPs),
the LP were annoyed that metaphysics wasn't making
progress in the sense that sciences seemed to, so it
wasn't crazy or conservative of them to try to shitcan
it.
The notion of philosophy as
language on holiday or as
bewitchment by language is infantile.
Well, when you out it that way, but there's more to
it.
Such a view
is itself a metaphysical
abstraction and bewitchment by language, divorced
from history or any
extralinguistic investigation of human cognition.
Compared to Adorno's
socio-historical conception of philosophy,
Wittgenstein is a piss-ant.
W's philosophy actually calls out for following up
with such investigation. If you want to go beyond
philosophy, you have to go _somewhere_ -- maybe to
political economy and political sociology, like Marx,
maybe to Ideologiekritik like Adorno and the early
Frankfurters (Adorno also did flat out scientific
sociology or social psychology, see The Authoritarian
Personality), maybe to genealogical critic and
psychology like Nietzsche, maybe to mystical
pragmatism like Heidegger or scientific-sociological
pragmatism like Dewey -- there are a lot of
possibilities. But some people, and W was one of
them, are like Moses at the Jordan, they point the way
to the land of Canaan but cannot cross the river.
Quine was another: he wanted to naturalize
epistemology, but that meant actually doing cognitive
psychology, and he wasn't suited for or able to do
that.
Nor does Wittgenstein have anything in common with
Marx, whom you
consistently misrepresent. For Marx, philosophy was
not a linguistic
disease,
I never said he said it was. He says it's ideology, a
mystification arising from the conditions of social
life that reflects and promotes the ruling interests
in certain ways, making the social seem natural, the
changeable permanent, the existing order inevitable,
and it does so by virtue of overgeneralizing and
inverting certain truths. This is not W at all, but
a sociological analysis of why philosophy is
pointless.
nor did he limit himself to Feuerbach's
framework,
Given what I just said, obviously I agree with this
too. M;'s theory is novel and powerfully original.
though
Feuerbach did take the decisive historical step of
analyzing idealism as
inverted consciousness. For Marx philosophy as
practiced his milieu was
the dream history of Germany, not to be summarily
dismissed but to be
analyzed in its structure and related to its social
genesis.
Agreed.
The task of doing this for our time is infinitely
more complicated, for the
interrelationships of science, mathematics, logic,
philosophical systems
and their connection to alienated, inverted
consciousness and social being
are not simple and obvious, at least not until one
develops a framework in
which to place them, and even then there remains the
long, hard labor of
the negative.
Now you are waxing Adornian. Marx was not really
interested in this. I think he thought that
philosophy wasn't worth the bother as a target, given
his aims.
But Rosa knows nothing of this,
No comment, haven't read the posts.
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