ZOMBIE FORUMS

It's a stinking, shambling corpse grotesquely parodying life.
It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 11:50 am

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]




Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 26 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next
Author Message
 Post subject: Marx and Freud
PostPosted: Sat Jun 10, 2006 1:02 am 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
To what extent, if any, are these two relevant today?

You might object that this is really two seperate debates, since we're dealing with very different thinkers. However, they share a fairly similar intellectual status today in that the harder sciences (psychology, economics) have essentially dismissed them as misguided crackpots, whereas they are both still very real and strong presences in the humanities, and in the more humanities-inclined strains of philosophy (e.g. most 20th-century French and German thinkers).

Perhaps this is because, though the specific approaches and ideas that both advocated have been superseded by newer, more accurate (psychological/economic) models, in a broader, more general sense their ideas have irrevocably shaped the way every modern Western individual looks at the world, whether he or she realizes it or not.

How often do we speak of the alienation of everyday life, or the effect that one's social position can have on one's point of view, or even the idea that history is shaped more by abstract social forces than by particular individuals (i.e. the idea that if Hitler had never been born, someone else would have wound up fulfilling his historical role anyway)? All of these ideas find their origin in Marx. Hell, even the word "capitalism" is a Marxian invention, and our current understanding of how it operates comes just as much from Marx as it does from, say, Adam Smith, who talks of a "free market" in much more abstract terms than we would today.

Freud's big contribution is, of course, the idea of the subconscious. And while one can argue over the validity of the strict division between the subconscious and the conscious as areas of thinking, most people today nevertheless assume that there are aspects of their mind that they themselves are not aware of - forces which influences them but which they are not inherently in control of. This may seem to be common sense today, but all of this is a far cry from, say, Descartes' unified, rational ego-subject.

Perhaps its so hard to acknowledge the continued importance of these thinkers because we've assimilated their ideas so completely, and unconsciously *ahem*, that we don't even realize the revolutionary nature of their thinking -- we assume people have always thought about themselves the way we do now.

And what is the difference between our conception of ourselves and, say, the pre-Marxian, pre-Freudian (say, 18th-century) conception of the individual? Well, I hinted at it earlier when I spoke of the Cartesian concept of a rational, coherent, thinking subject. Even Descartes' philosophical rivals, the Empiricists, through their conception of the mind as a blank slate, presupposed the existence of some sort of homogenous and unified mind who eventually organized its own conscious perceptions into logical order.

What Marx and Freud did, then, was destroy the very assumptions which underlied the Rationalist-Empiricist debate that had been the main divide in the philosophies that preceded them. They did this by revealing the reality of a conscious subject who, far from being coherent and in control, was essentially created and influenced by outside forces (economics, the subconscious) that he or she could not even be fully aware of. They carried the secular materialism of their enlightenment forebears to its logical conclusion by showing that we ourselves cannot be seperated from the influence and manipulation of the same rational forces that we observe in the world, thus undermining the very position as rational subject-observer which allows us to make those observations. There's a fundamental conflict or contradiction in the previous statement, and it's one various philosophers are still attempting to address today in their various ways, whether it be the existentialist, with their attempt to reclaim the supremacy of the subject in a world of forces beyond his or her control, or certain postmodern thinkers, with their acceptance of our inability to maintain an objective, coherent, and "rational" subject-position.

At any rate, this still doesn't answer the question of why Freud and Marx play such a big role in the humanities and not the sciences, and I think that formulating a developed and coherent answer to this question - something I'm not prepared to do at the moment - would in turn help explain just what the humanities and the sciences are, and what it is that makes them fundamentally different. What I will say at the moment - as a way of creating a starting point with which to develop the answer to this problem - is that it probably has something to do with the tendency of the humanities to deal with the legacies of individual thinkers and artists, versus the tendency of the sciences to deal with the specific details of "objective" models.

I apologize for the rambliness of the above rant, which I present to you totally unedited. I also apologize for using the word "rambliness" in the previous sentence, as I'm pretty sure it's not a real word.

I think someone needs sleep.

At any rate, what are your thoughts? Do we still need Marx and Freud today? Is it still useful to study them for their insights?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 8:29 am 
Offline
Native
User avatar

Joined: Wed Mar 01, 2006 7:17 am
Posts: 871
Location: New York City
I kinda skimmed quickly through to the end

It is good to read what they wrote in the chance that someone may either expand or dispute it, but either way it gives them a launching point to go from.

Blue Sun Missile
"those who forget the pasta and destined to reheat it."

_________________
Image
Pintsize wrote:
"If Aliens ever really tried to contact us, it'd be through the internet, then 4CHAN would probably scare them off"


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 7:26 am 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Mon Nov 25, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 1276
Location: Hanging in the endless void with nothing but entropy and fluff for company.
Freud is still relevant today because of the startling messages he sent humming through the Victorian age about what people were doing to their children. We no longer think that childhood is a time to pile on as much abuse as possible because it's the only time they won't remember (childhood amnesia). Instead we now know that childhood is in many ways to most critical time in a person's development, whether or not Freud was right about <i>how</i> they are critical.

_________________
~ Wrin
Labrat wrote:
As screwed up as the world is, it has to have been designed by comittee. Diskworld-style.

Jin wrote:
...I cursed at the computer screen for an hour and a half while striking it with my genitals.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:09 am 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
Wrin wrote:
Freud is still relevant today because of the startling messages he sent humming through the Victorian age about what people were doing to their children. We no longer think that childhood is a time to pile on as much abuse as possible because it's the only time they won't remember (childhood amnesia). Instead we now know that childhood is in many ways to most critical time in a person's development, whether or not Freud was right about <i>how</i> they are critical.


I'm not sure whether I would blame that all on Freud, but it is true that our modern idea of childhood-as-qualitatively-different-than adulthood basically arose around the Victorian period. Before that, children were basically thought of as miniature adults. The concept of preserving the innocence of childhood hardly existed.

[digression]I sometimes kind of wish we still thought that way, what with all the horrible crimes that are being perpetrated in the name of "protecting the children"... I think that the myth of childhood-as-special has had an unbelievably bad impact on our society, and, if anything, is a bad thing for our children, as it is implicitly demeaning to them (in much the same way that, say, chivalry is implicitly sexist).[/digression]

However, this sort of thinking had already appeared by the time Freud started his career, so if anything, his ideas reflected that change rather than causing it.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 5:27 pm 
Offline
Local
User avatar

Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 6:41 pm
Posts: 333
Location: Terre Haute, IN
I don't think any system of philosphy that demands stronger adherence to itself and to philosophy in general than to human realities and biologic and psychologic necessities deserves any attention paid to it. Marx is still used, if unwittingly (I'd say witlessly), to justify all manner of Collectivist masturbatory fantasies, like Socialized medicine and green politics. Freud is still used to justify belittling women with cigar references and claims of penis envy.

Isaac Newton said of science that we see further today because we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's basicly true, because science is an addative as well as an evolutionary discipline. Today's discoveries do not necessarily invalidate yesterday's, just elucidate more and explain the fomerly unexmplainable.

Social science and the humanities are much more revolutionary, replacement disciplines. What we decide to believe today can obliterate what we beleived yesterday, as if we had never believed it at all. Public policy and philosophy can turn on a dime for no reason at all asside from popular belief. Lenin did not evolve Marx. Yung did not evolve Freud. They subsumed or replaced them.

We do not stand on the shoulders of Marx/Freud. Marx/Freud merely paved the road we walked on about 100 miles behind us. Understanding of them does not help us pave the road before us. It merely helps us stay on course and not turn back on our own path.

--
Cathy

_________________
I don't just have issues. I have entire subscriptions.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 6:57 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2003 1:30 pm
Posts: 4330
Location: Not a hellish, Onionian future...
The concept of childhood has screwed up oh-so many generations of people.

You give a child toys and tell him that they are all that are his. These pathetic trinkets of plastic and metal. Work and all things of value are forbidden them. They are told that they are only children, subhuman creatures incapable of thought or meaningful action. These words may not be used, but they are implied nonetheless. And then we wonder why children act out or go mad...

In the old days, for all the hardships and an eon's worth of accumulated stupid crap, they got one thing right. A child was taught skills to help around the house and later skills to aid in whatever the family occupation is. Be it farming, herding, carpentry, or some other skill. They knew damn well that they actually mattered and were not simply dogs being trained to leap through meaningless hoops.

When I entered college, I came to realize that I had utterly wasted about a fifth of my life... even if I lived to a hundred. Oh, I'm not bitter. I just have a repressed desire to beat five different humors out of certain people, and society in general, with a baseball bat and then go looking for a sixth.

_________________
actor_au wrote:
Labrat's friends can't run away, as they are only the skins of the people he's drowned in his own semen, carefully stitched together and stuffed with cooking chocolate.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 8:03 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
Cathy344 wrote:
I don't think any system of philosphy that demands stronger adherence to itself and to philosophy in general than to human realities and biologic and psychologic necessities deserves any attention paid to it.


But Marxism's greatest strength today is as a tool for analyzing our social reality. Let's not forget that Marx wrote much, much more regarding the structure of Capitalism than he ever did about any system that should replace it. The fact that Communism doesn't work almost doesn't affect the effectiveness of Marxism as a general philosophy -- i.e. the dialectical materialist analysis of the social/economic effects of capitalism.

Quote:
Freud is still used to justify belittling women with cigar references and claims of penis envy.


This is true, and Freud himself was certainly a chauvinist. However, there's nothing inherently sexist about Freudianism at its core; the sexism is merely incidental, on the surface. Many feminist psychoanalysts have adapted Freud to their ends, reorienting Freudian psychoanlysis by, for example, re-defining "phallus" as simply "power". (This isn't actually too far away from the ideas of Freud himself. "Phallus" has never meant "penis", and confusing the two leads to a large part of the misunderstanding of Freud by the general public. A lot of Freud's symbolism is metaphorical, and not meant to be taken literally.)

Quote:
Isaac Newton said of science that we see further today because we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's basically true, because science is an additive as well as an evolutionary discipline. Today's discoveries do not necessarily invalidate yesterday's, just elucidate more and explain the fomerly unexplainable.


Totally wrong, and Newton's model is actually a good example of why this is wrong. Einstein did not expand upon Newton's model, filling in the gaps and making minor changes; he completely replaced it with something different, just as quantum physicists attempted (with partial success, on the small scale) to replace Einstein's model several years later, and just as Newton and his predecessors (Galileo etc.) had replaced the Aristotelian/Ptolemeian model of the universe. If we look closely at the history of science, we see not slow progressions, but a series of paradigm shifts.

Quote:
Social science and the humanities are much more revolutionary, replacement disciplines. What we decide to believe today can obliterate what we beleived yesterday, as if we had never believed it at all. Public policy and philosophy can turn on a dime for no reason at all aside from popular belief. Lenin did not evolve Marx. Jung did not evolve Freud. They subsumed or replaced them.


Completely wrong. Writers, poets, and philosophers still read the Greeks today; and yet, very few scientists have read Ptolemy or Aristotle. The fact is that your average humanities major is expected to have basic knowledge of everything from the Greeks and Romans up to today, while a Scientist can get by mostly with theories and equations developed within the last few centuries. This is because the Humanities are much more social - much more history-centered - since their study is the human condition itself. (And Jung has a lot more to do with Freud than Einstein has to do with Newton - he's still working within the same intellectual "space" in which the human psyche is shaped by an underlying, symbolic, unconscious realm. Besides, Jung is much less relevant to the humanities today than, say, Lacan -- whose system resembles Freud's much more closely, and who in fact considered himself a Freudian.)

Quote:
We do not stand on the shoulders of Marx/Freud. Marx/Freud merely paved the road we walked on about 100 miles behind us. Understanding of them does not help us pave the road before us. It merely helps us stay on course and not turn back on our own path.


No... And anyone who has any knowledge of what's happening in the humanities today could tell you this. Keep in mind that when I say "humanities", I'm talking mostly about literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, "Continental" philosophy, and related fields here, which employ Marx much more frequently than modern "economists", and employ Freud much more frequently than modern "psychologists". (Both these disciplines have moved towards a much more "scientific" methodology/perspective. Also, both disciplines are now more oriented towards making those who study them better eligible for a career aiding businesses to make money, or dealing with the patients who are their clients; thus the emphasis moves away from analyzing the greater, more abstract, and over-arching superstructures that underly (on the one hand) the human mind, and (on the other hand) our economic system.)


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 9:31 pm 
Offline
Local
User avatar

Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 6:41 pm
Posts: 333
Location: Terre Haute, IN
IcyMonkey wrote:
Cathy344 wrote:
Isaac Newton said of science that we see further today because we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that's basically true, because science is an additive as well as an evolutionary discipline. Today's discoveries do not necessarily invalidate yesterday's, just elucidate more and explain the fomerly unexplainable.


Totally wrong, and Newton's model is actually a good example of why this is wrong. Einstein did not expand upon Newton's model, filling in the gaps and making minor changes; he completely replaced it with something different, just as quantum physicists attempted (with partial success, on the small scale) to replace Einstein's model several years later, and just as Newton and his predecessors (Galileo etc.) had replaced the Aristotelian/Ptolemeian model of the universe. If we look closely at the history of science, we see not slow progressions, but a series of paradigm shifts.


Newtonian, quantum, and relativistic physics do not replace one another. they are each completely relavent at the same time. The question is one of scale. Newton reigns on the human scale. the scale of apples and trees. Newton is entirely competent to explain the path of a missile or a planet... except Mercury.

Once you are dealing with gravitational magnitudes that close to the sun, Newton makes errors in attempting to predict mercury's path, errors which relativity neatly corrects. Likewise, on the scale of the very small, gravity must compete with electro-magnetism and the storng and weak nuclear forces, and so we enter the realm of quantum. Each entirely competent to describe how the universe works at their own particular scales.

And I did not mean to say science is utterly devoid of its revolutions. By modern standards Copernicus was an idiot, scientificly, and Galileo a genius, but in his time and place, Copernicus was still a brilliant scientist, doing the best with what he had. Today, we have people working on stuff like M theory and string theory and still trying beat on the corpse of the grand unified theory. If they succeed, that will be a revolution. but are these scientific revolutions true paradigm shifts?

I'm not so sure.Galileo's heliocentric universe took decades if not centuries to be accepted. Did it radicly alter the daily life of any human being? Maybe a couple of religious officials, but that's a theological paradigm shift, not a scientific one. If string theory discovers an equation that subsumes a dozen other equations from Netonian, quantum, and relativistic physics tomorrow, will that mean we stop teaching those equations in schools and universities? Probably not. Physics students will always have to learn F = m a and x = v t + 1/2 a t^2. and F = 1/2 G m M / r^2. We'll just have better theoretic underpinnings for why those equations work as well as they do.

BTW, E = M c^2 is a lie. there are second and third order terms to that quation everyone ignores that are at least as important. And even that equation wasn't so revolutionary as evolutionary. Basicly, Einstein showed why that particular equation for energy didn't need a factor of 1/2.

--
Cathy

_________________
I don't just have issues. I have entire subscriptions.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:07 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
First of all, Newtonian Physics is used today for the sake of convenience - no scientist actually conceives of the universe as being, in truth, Newtonian, even on the mid-range scale where such equations are most effective. (I realize that many, myself included, would contend that science isn't about "objective truth" per se so much as making effective models - i.e. models that can predict quantitative outcomes. However, even in this case, Relativity completely supersedes Newtonian physics -- it's just that we're too lazy to use the more accurate model simply because the difference is negligible and the mathematics more complicated.)

Also, keep in mind that the model that we use to understand physical reality today - a patchwork of Relativity on the large scale and quantum physics on the smaller scale - is less than a century old. In fact, once we start examining specific disciplines like chemistry or biology, we realize that the reigning paradigms do tend to shift once every century or two, with the rate of change accelerating the closer we come to the present. A great analysis of this occurs in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, whom I'm taking a lot of my ideas regarding scientific progress from.

Anyway, I notice you failed to address anything else I said (i.e. my comments on Marx and Freud and on the legacy-centric nature of the humanities). Are you conceding my other points?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:17 pm 
Offline
Local
User avatar

Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 6:41 pm
Posts: 333
Location: Terre Haute, IN
I'm conceding that you know far more about the humanities than I do, and that if I wanted to truely debate these topics, I'd be up all night writing about them, but I don't, so I won't.

--
Cathy

_________________
I don't just have issues. I have entire subscriptions.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:44 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
Sometimes I wish this forum had more lit-majors. Ah well.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:48 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Sun Dec 14, 2003 1:34 am
Posts: 2715
Location: Podunk, MI
I'd join in the mess, but I'm busy with physics. So don't expect much more than babble until after the 23rd. And even though, don't keep your hopes high.

I'll post my own two cents later, honest.

_________________
"Oh, look who it is / It's my supportive wife/ And she thinks she's going to squeal/ Hey where do you think you're going?/ Don't you walk away from me/ You put down that telephone /You're not calling anyone"


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Jun 15, 2006 12:20 pm 
Offline
Native
User avatar

Joined: Wed Dec 11, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 869
I have quibbles, of course.

IcyMonkey wrote:
The fact that Communism doesn't work almost doesn't affect the effectiveness of Marxism as a general philosophy -- i.e. the dialectical materialist analysis of the social/economic effects of capitalism.


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.

Quote:
A lot of Freud's symbolism is metaphorical, and not meant to be taken literally.


Freud was a medical doctor. He wrote about ways to heal people who had mental problems. Necessarily, as he was inventing his own discipline, and as he was an uptight Teutonic chauvinist, he had to invent appropriate jargon in which to speak of his ideas, but he was not writing poetry.

Quote:
Completely wrong. Writers, poets, and philosophers still read the Greeks today; and yet, very few scientists have read Ptolemy or Aristotle. The fact is that your average humanities major is expected to have basic knowledge of everything from the Greeks and Romans up to today, while a Scientist can get by mostly with theories and equations developed within the last few centuries.


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?

You say, with regards psychology and economics:

Quote:
Both these disciplines have moved towards a much more "scientific" methodology/perspective. Also, both disciplines are now more oriented towards making those who study them better eligible for a career aiding businesses to make money, or dealing with the patients who are their clients; thus the emphasis moves away from analyzing the greater, more abstract, and over-arching superstructures that underly (on the one hand) the human mind, and (on the other hand) our economic system.


(I'm sorry for the large inclusion, but I could not make my point without having it all available.)

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.

You might say, it's because Freud wrote using mythic language and modern psychologists are more interested in the language of organic chemistry, and organic chemistry is very complicated and hard to understand; well, that's pure laziness. Besides, Marx wrote Das Kapital, the driest and most unpoetic Great Book ever.

Yes, Freud and Marx are important! They are important in exactly the same way that Aristotle is important. Now, in his very stupidest moment, Aristotle called slaves "meat machines"; in modern times, though, slavery is known to be abhorrent. We can point to that great man's error, and we can show how we have corrected it, and we have learned something.

Quote:
Sometimes I wish this forum had more lit-majors. Ah well.


Sometimes I wish people would listen to themselves.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Jun 15, 2006 2:59 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Mon Oct 04, 2004 12:31 am
Posts: 1587
Location: Bay Area
Cathy344 wrote:
BTW, E = M c^2 is a lie. there are second and third order terms to that quation everyone ignores that are at least as important. And even that equation wasn't so revolutionary as evolutionary. Basicly, Einstein showed why that particular equation for energy didn't need a factor of 1/2.


Um, what? Are you talking about the relativistic considerations for bodies in motion? Because for systems at rest that formula is precise.

_________________
<img src="http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f340/Tossrock/sigreducedjx2-1.jpg">


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Thu Jun 15, 2006 6:19 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
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.

Quote:
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".

Quote:
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.

Quote:
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.

Quote:
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.

Quote:
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.

Quote:
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.

Quote:
Quote:
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]


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 6:26 pm 
Offline
Native
User avatar

Joined: Wed Dec 11, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 869
With respect to your rant, is it about the following particular position?

Alan Sokal wrote:
What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.

In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.


I'm very, very hard pressed to disagree with anything Sokal says in the above paragraphs. ;-)

With respect to the relevance of Marx and Freud, though, in that you seem to agree that they were essentially mistaken, why then should literature and philosophy concern themselves deeply with their ideas beyond refuting them? Freud thought, for example, that dreams held deep significance that revealed much about a person's nature and health, while modern psychologists consider dreams to mean rather little if anything. Now, much literature concerns itself with dreams also, in metaphorical and literal terms, but in so doing, it runs the danger of losing its audience if that audience knows that the metaphors in use are on weak Freudian foundation. I refer immediately to the movie Flatliners, which was supposed to be scary, but through which I groaned and laughed.

Similarly, yes, Marx described the structure of a pure capitalist society with accuracy and insight, but his understanding of the generation of such a society and of such a society's further evolution was prima facie totally out to lunch. The Hegelian concept of social dialectic is nonsense. Hegel and Marx showed where they believed they saw that previous societies obeyed the mechanic of the dialectic, but in that they were both wrong about the further operation of that dialectic, we who come after them can see that they were projecting not trends but hopes.

IcyMonkey wrote:
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.


Sophistry. He believed, for example, that revolution would happen reasonably soon in the United States of America. Furthermore, in that I can believe, "humankind will find sophont life on other planets eventually", I'm not wrong -- yet. It will very likely be a long time before I'm proven either right or wrong, and until I'm proven right it's practically the case that I am wrong. You may say, "but you might be right!" And I will reply, "yes, and the present king of France is bald".


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 1:10 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
Tamayo wrote:
With respect to your rant, is it about the following particular position?

Alan Sokal wrote:
What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.

In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.


I'm very, very hard pressed to disagree with anything Sokal says in the above paragraphs. ;-)


IcyMonkey wrote:
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.


As I said in my rant, if people are going to dismiss an entire set of philosophical ideas, they should at least know what it is that they are dismissing. To do otherwise would be like me dismissing quantum physics because I think it's epistemelogical relativism (as which it is often misrepresented), and without understanding the mathematics behind it at all. (I mean, even logical positivism - perhaps the most "scientifically-minded" philosophy and the one most scientists would implicitly or explicitly (e.g. Stephen Hawking) operate - could be misrepresented as rejecting objective reality.)

Quote:
With respect to the relevance of Marx and Freud, though, in that you seem to agree that they were essentially mistaken, why then should literature and philosophy concern themselves deeply with their ideas beyond refuting them?


They may be mistaken if we're talking about their theory's predictive power (though dismissing their ideas as totally mistaken even in this sense is, in my opinion, misguided) - but again, we're not dealing with science. As I said earlier, literature, art, and certain types of philosophy(*1) operate differently than science. These disciplines are more concerned with the human condition per se, as we experience it, rather than theories about "objective reality" that can predict future observations. In other words, they're concerned with "psychology" -- not in the sense of a scientific practice aimed at alleviating mental disorders, but rather, in an older sense of the word: an examination of our own subjectivity.

Marx and Freud are useful to the humanities in two ways: first, as a potent source of modern mythology to draw upon(*2), and secondly, because they do provide us with interesting and effective ways of thinking about how we fit into the world around us. Since their strength for these disciplines lies in their ability to create methods of interpretation, "ways of thinking", perspectives, etc. rather than their scientific models, their effectiveness as scientific models is besides the point.




(*1)The sort of predominantly-European philosophy that has greater affinities with the humanities, rather than the mostly-anglophone strain of philosophy which models itself very closely after the sciences and tries to employ the scientific method. In so doing, this sort of philosophy moves away from general questions of meaning and the nature of the subjective human condition.

(*2) The philosophy and cosmology of the Bible or Greco-Roman myth is extremely innacurate, but I doubt anyone would claim that Shakespeare's use of these two mythologies detracts from his work.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 1:16 pm 
Offline
n00b

Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 9:41 am
Posts: 19
Im still strung up that you consider psychology and economics "hard sciences" when they really are soft sciences. They are based upon unproven assumptions and theory, pschology is what I call the "skip ahead" science. A science that would be valid in a hundred years or so after we know how the brain operates and what is REALLY going on from the ground up. While psychology is starting to finally deal with the mechanics of the brain, its not really psychology anymore at this point, as its dealing with anatomy really.

The point of my long rant, is that as soft sciences it is entirely possible to dismiss minds which were crucial to the current development, because soft sciences are able to change their founding principles so easily.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 9:46 pm 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Mon Oct 04, 2004 12:31 am
Posts: 1587
Location: Bay Area
Zzarchov wrote:
The point of my long rant


WI writes introductions longer than that, boy.

_________________
<img src="http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f340/Tossrock/sigreducedjx2-1.jpg">


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 9:21 am 
Offline
Addict
User avatar

Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 5:00 pm
Posts: 3447
Location: New York
Zzarchov wrote:
Im still strung up that you consider psychology and economics "hard sciences" when they really are soft sciences.


I never said they were "hard" sciences, I said they model their approach after the hard sciences -- more so than, say, sociology or anthropology does.


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 26 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 22 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group