Ted Winslow wrote: > I'm not sure I understand this.
I'm not so sure that you don't. Your comments on Keynes and Marx were apropos to what I said. I would have to defer to your judgement of Keynes's ontological premises and their relationship to Kant's. My sense of Keynes comes only from the GT, several essays and a vague Bloomsburian impression of him as a "modernist". > This is also Marx: > > "free time, disposable time, is wealth itself.. It is indeed Marx, but it is Marx summarizing Dilke's "fine statement": "After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty -- liberty to seek recreation -- liberty to enjoy life -- liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more." > As in Marx, however, the move to a better world is > conceived as a move > to greater rationality including greater rationality > of "interests." - snip - > I wasn't addressing Benjamin's ideas. That must be the part of what I was saying that you don't understand. When I mentioned the tiger's leap into the open air of history, I was referring to a specific image in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." You replied with what I thought was a misinterpretation of what Benjamin meant. But if you weren't addressing Benjamin's ideas then it wasn't a misinterpretation because it wasn't any interpretation at all, simply a response to the phrase out of context. If by "greater rationality" you mean, for Marx, "all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse," then we're singing out of the same hymn book, namely the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines". We've got that greater rationality. But we've also got the persistance of the desire "to use labour time as the measuring rod" and "to maintain the already created value as value." To call the latter "irrational" would be to imply that the greater irrationality grows in proportion to the greater rationality, which I think would be a most pessimistic law of ethnodynamics. You said earlier that Keynes, like Marx was "overly optimistic." But I'm not sure if I could agree either that it was optimism or that it was excessive. It was, if you'll pardon the segue (and the recapitulation), poetry. What do I mean by "poetry"? I mean something close to the circle of narrated time and lived time by means of which we give cognitive coherence to our lives that Ricoeur discussed in the part 1, vol. 1 of Time and Narrative. The Sandwichman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
