At 12:43 PM 11/6/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Sandra Harding ... refers to what she calls a "curious coincidence"
>between some feminist and "African-centered" analyses. Apparently
>independently, two groups of scholars both identified Cartesian
>epistemology and rationality and Baconian notions of "science" as on the
>one hand part of sexist ideology and the other hand part of racist
>ideology.... we can add a third area -- domination of nature and
>ecological destruction. See Carolyn Merchant's THE DEATH OF NATURE, for
>(one of many) example(s), and it's Descartes and Bacon again.
I'd add that Cartesian epistemology and rationality and Baconian visions of
science-as-domination also apply in class relations. According to
Braverman's gloss on Marx, capitalism's inherent Taylorist tendency is to
divide conception from execution and to totally dominate labor. (Of course,
Braverman ignores opposition from the working class, which complicates
matters.)
In general, I'd say that it's the actual eurocentric male-dominated
rape-nature development of capitalism that encouraged the rise of those
kinds of ideologies, including Descartes and Bacon.
Rajani Kanth has a recent (1997) book on this stuff, _Breaking with the
Enlightenment: The Twilight of History and the Rediscovery of Utopia_
(Humanities Press). Unfortunately for me, at least, his alternative is
anarchist and old-fashioned "third worldist."
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
