I do not see Fromm's psychoanalysis as idealist at all, no matter what
Marcuse says. However, Fromm's specific assessments of people and
ideas, e.g. Pope John XXIII or D.T. Suzuki, smack of a lack of
groundedness.
Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno spent the 1930s turning idealism on its
head, but that doesn't mean their avowed materialism was always
materialist. Marcuse seems the most influenced by Romantic thought.
But none of these classifications can be applied in a hard and fast manner.
On 06/02/2010 06:22 PM, Domhnall Ó Cobhthaigh wrote:
Thanks everyone for all the help.
cb - I take your point. I ventured somewhere with the Lenin stuff that I did
not want to. I obviously have misunderstood the little I've read...more
reading there remains.
Ralph - thanks for your summary it helped a lot. Am looking forward to those
links.
One question is how you see Fromm as idealist.
At least as far as I understand him he doesn't seem idealist to me - he is
always at pains to identify the determining medium of repression (which
conditions ideology) to the social reality in which humans live. So the roots
for this feedback loop are material. But I know that Marcuse accused him of
being idealist in Eros and Civilization. However, I think that his attack on
Marcuse is more substantial as all the Hegelians certainly appear to have a
weakness when it comes to grounding their dialectics in empirical fact - it
seems to me as if Marcuse earned the accusation of idealism much easier than
Fromm.
Obviously Fromm's Marxism was certainly early period stuff focussing on the
concepts of the Philosophical notebooks era but I still don't see that as
leading inexorably to idealism.
One way in which idealism could creep back is perhaps that by seeing
repression as reflecting inherent perhaps platonic 'human' drives that cannot
find expression in concrete society. But I think he would reply by saying
that they are objective, scientifically verifiable drives having their own
roots in material reality - albeit the reality inherent in the human
condition. So at base both drives and the cause of their repression are
material and that these constitute factors which provide a mechanism for the
development of an ideological superstructure corresponding to any given base.
Perhaps you can shed light on this as this is pretty much the issue I was
wanting some insight on. It's actually a similar question in regard to
Bourdieu's approach.
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