Tamayo wrote:
I have quibbles, of course.
Perhaps not as many as you may think you have. I actually think we agree by and large.
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If the dialectical material analysis fails to provide a correct prediction of societal changes and a useful prescription for societal construction, then it fails. No "almost". The dialectic in general is a good mechanic for constructing a fictional story, but it's pointless as a mechanic for analysis.
Marx may have started out intending to create a scientific philosophy (as, of course, did Freud), but today their work is much more useful in a non-scientific context - i.e. as a method of expressing or describing certain mechanisms via their psychological(*) and social impact. Thus, the predictive power of Marxian analysis is not as important as it would be in an actual science. (Also, I'd like to point out that Marx never said
when capitalism would progress towards a stateless utopia - he just said that it would, eventually, happen. He wasn't even necessarily for hastening the process along -- he just thought that, someday, the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system would eventually lead to its own downfall.)
(*) - The the broader sense of the word - i.e. in the same sense Nietzsche, Plato or Freud can be considered "psychological".
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Freud was a medical doctor. He wrote about ways to heal people who had mental problems.
Freud may have intended his work to be recieved as science originally, but today it works much better within the context of the humanities. Even in his own time, and despite his own pretensions to science, Freud himself never really employed anything approaching the scientific method. If one reads his writing, particularly his later works, one sees a highly gifted poet and mythologist at work. Take
Totem and Taboo, for instance, in which he describes a prehistoric event at the dawn of civilization (involving cannibalism and patricide) that he himself freely admits probably never happened. Or take
The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he claims that dream-logic is inherently metaphorical and thus dreams can only be interpreted through understanding symbolism. What is he doing here? Essentially, he's creating a modern mythology, trying to convey the forces of our psyche symbolically and metaphorically.
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Anyone who doesn't read Aristotle is insufficiently educated. Aristotle was the smartest human being to have left a record of his or her existence. That his ideas on whatever subject were in general totally mistaken is irrelevant -- they were powerful, powerfully presented, and required thousands of years of other geniuses to refute.
Ptolemy's cosmology was mistaken, but his mathematics in general were brilliant, and they are subsumed in Euclid's Elements, which any good mathematician will have read. A medical doctor had better have read Galen and Hippocrates.
Imagine perhaps a society a thousand years hence. The people then, if they are at all wise, will still be reading Aristotle and Euclid and Hippocrates, but they will also be reading Newton and Semmelweiss and Pauling as historical documents. Does the fact that a great idea is old make it more valuable to you?
I expressed myself poorly in my previous post. I didn't mean to say that most scientists have not read, or should not read, these older writings; rather, my point was that reading them is not required to perform the work of a scientist -- if you take Physics 101, you won't spend most of your time talking about Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Galileo, and you'll (most likely) be reading a modern textbook, not the primary source material. Reading Aristotle is quite an enriching experience, but a modern scientist would not employ a work of Aristotle in her or his theoretical - much less experimental - work.
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If a psychological theory is more useful for healing sick people than Freud's, or if an economic theory is more effective for predicting markets than Marx's, then it seems pragmatic to adopt these later theories. Adhering to older ones in the belief that they are "greater, more abstract and over-arching" is on the face of it an error.
I never said I disapprove of the movement of these disciplines toward a more scientific perspective -- I'm just justifying my claim that Freud and Marx fit better within the context of literature and philosophy than they do within the context of
modern psychology and economics.
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Besides, Marx wrote Das Kapital, the driest and most unpoetic Great Book ever.
Dry as it is, it describes a method of analysis that ultimately brings up some interesting ideas and points of debate when applied and developed.
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Yes, Freud and Marx are important! They are important in exactly the same way that Aristotle is important.
Though I would most likely formulate it differently, I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of this statement. As a matter of fact, it's essentially
exactly what I'm arguing in this thread.
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Sometimes I wish this forum had more lit-majors. Ah well.
Sometimes I wish people would listen to themselves.
I didn't mean for that to sound arrogant, and I'm sorry if it came out that way. I must admit, though, that I do have a bit of an inferiority complex as part of a field of study whose members are often denigrated as having chosen their field because they weren't "smart" enough to go into mathematics or the sciences. I actually wanted to start a thread on this very topic (i.e. the two academic cultures) eventually. For now, I'll simply say this:
[WARNING: The following is a bit of a rant. Please don't take any of this personally.]
Society in general, and internet/nerd culture in particular, is often biased towards the sciences and the scientific method (or mathematical, analytic reasoning), seeing it as the sole way of thinking about the world. Scientists (such as Alan Sokal) criticize postmodern philosophers for misusing and misunderstanding complicated scientific ideas because they have not read up on the mathematics behind them; however, I often find that the more scientific/mathematical-minded members of this board (as well as many scientists themselves, Sokal included) make the same error by dismissing ideas at the higher levels of the humanities as ludicrous without actually doing the extensive reading required to understand said ideas. ("Postmodernism" is NOT an organized, monolithic movement, but rather a whole bunch of unrelated (and sometimes opposing) ideas within the humanities that those outside the humanities, as well as more conservative forces within it, lump together via gross and unjustified generalizations. I don't care what Sokal says, there's not a single reputable thinker in the fields of Continental philosophy or literary theory who
actually advocates pure epistemological relativism.)
I feel that there are other ways of investigating our lives that can lead to insights just as profound, and ideas just as complicated, as those found in the "hard" sciences. Ideally, scientists and mathematicians should respect metaphoric, poetic, and abstract thinking as excercised within the humanities, just as poets and artists should respect the scientific method or mathematical reasoning as used in these fields. Applying one method of thinking to the other area is ridiculous and only results in misunderstanding. [/rant]