--- 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. > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
