February-April 2007 reading review
I have long delayed summarizing the books I read in all or part from February through April 2007, partly in hope of writing extensive reviews of some of them. For now, I will just list the books and some other materials, and I can always
return and delve into more detail at a future date.
“O, the jewmanity!” (Al Goldstein)
I purchased some remaindered Jewish books over the winter. Here are the two I delved into:
Traverso, Enzo. The Jews & Germany: From the "Judeo-German Symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz, translated by Daniel Weissbort. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Finkielkraut, Alain. The Imaginary Jew, translated by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff with an introduction by David Suchoff. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Finkielkraut deals with the vagaries of European Jewish identity . . . his own. Traverso analyzes the one-sidedness of the Jewish melding with German culture. His view of the Holocaust is arresting. While the Holocaust is the outcome of a long historical trajectory of racism and extermination (110-1), seemingly, the question remains, how did the "final solution" come about, and to what degree was it planned in advance? There are two schools of thought, the intentionalist and the functionalist (113ff). The latter school is the more intriguing, seeing the Nazi system as complex, and the finalization of the methods of extermination as a spontaneous development tied to the failure of the Nazis to conquer the USSR. Both interpretations have merits and lacunae. Several methods of mass murder were in operation until they were all put together in the death camp system, which is tied to the war against "Judaeo-Bolshevism" (122-3!). Marxists missed out on interpreting the Holocaust correctly (124-5). Contemporary West German historians have missed the specificity of the Shoah, and an economic interpretation doesn’t quite fit the situation (126-7).
Intercultural Philosophy: Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Russian (Soviet), African, environmental, et al
The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. v. 12. Intercultural Philosophy; editors, Stephen Dawson, Tomoko Iwasawa. Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2001.
The papers for this conference can be found at 20th WCP: Paideia Project On-Line. Note the table of contents and the introduction to vol. 12 online. Apparently, you must search the archive for individual papers.
Wittgenstein
". . . was a beery swine," says Monty Python. In February I progressed in documenting him in relation to Marxism, politics, et al, and produced some blog entries, including eventually on a book I read at this time:
Eagleton, Terry; Jarman, Derek; Butler, Ken. Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, the Derek Jarman Film. London: BFI Publishing, 1993.
One essay I read was this:
Crippen, Matthew. “The Totalitarianism of Therapeutic Philosophy: Reading Wittgenstein Through Critical Theory,” Essays in Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 1, January 2007.
You will find more in my Wittgenstein bibliographies.
Reason & irrationalism
Alexander, Jeffrey C. Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. London; New York: Verso, 1995.
I read this somewhere in the vicinity of 88-22 February. The book was more in line with my interests towards the beginning, before Alexander’s sociological self fully emerged. I became irritated at his anti-Marxism, but it seems he
has laid into Bourdieu rather convincingly, though he faults Bourdieu’s Marxism for all of his weaknesses. See the final chapter "The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu".
Lenin revisited
In the first half of February I read Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. Looking backward to 1901 is a very different matter from living history forward. Much of it is topical, Russia-specific discussion, but the general principles enunciated seem reasonable under the circumstances, though Bolshevism eventually came to a dire practice.
Marcuse revisited
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Part of a tribute written 28 February (a comprehensive review is somewhere in the queue):
Whenever I have ventured into the work of Marcuse, it has usually involved my sharpest criticism of some of his philosophical viewpoints, which sometimes occludes my great admiration for his intellectual interventions in the public sphere, i.e. his larger historical role. Reading Marcuse’s writings of the 1960s and his public dialogues on his views, I am simply stunned by how much has changed, and the incredible difference between living in a society where forward looking social movements are coming alive and one in which the whole society is moribund with no prospects for improvement. In many ways, theoretical activity has become more refined and sophisticated, but something has drained out of the discourse, something both universalistic and revolutionary in its thrust. Just as exciting is Marcuse’s ability to write in relatively plain English, breaking down esoteric concepts for a popular audience and connecting to phenomena that can easily be recognized in one’s social environment. In some ways, reading Marcuse, his work now removed by more than a generation from the context in which it was produced, is a far more intellectually revolutionary act than reading just about anything coming down the pike in recent years. Revisiting the work of this great man is a poignant reminder of just how much we’ve lost.
Atheism, naturalism, materialism
February witnessed a major surge in my writing on these topics. I copied the bulk of my posts originally written for my blog on the Freethought Forum to my new blog Reason & Society on Blogger as of 13 April. For my comments on news items and articles not mentioned below, search the Freethought Forum.
On 16 February I published a major piece which has been cited by others and can now be found at:
Note the bibliography, as well as the comments, where I list additional material read, such as T. H. Huxley‘s essays on agnosticism. I made significant use of essays of Roy Wood Sellars.
On 16 March I retooled my Emergence Blog. Note my major entry of March 25: Emergence: Theology or Materialism?.
The major book not previously mentioned that I read (approx. 18-22 February) during this period was:
Bhaskar, Roy. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979.
When I first read this a quarter century ago, I didn’t have the background for all of the argument to fully register. This time my eyes glazed over in several sections, but I understood much better Bhaskar’s twin assault on positivism and hermeneutics. Bhaskar attempts to resolve the dichotomy between positivism and hermeneutics and create a non-reductive naturalist alternative.
On 7 April, I wrote:
I will confine myself to the pre-Dialectics Bhaskar, by which time he lost his mind. There is much I object to even in this Bhaskar, such as his coinage of ridiculous, idiotic terms like "transcendental realism", his penchant for transcendental arguments generally, … I’ll stop here. Bhaskar was actually up to something interesting in The Possibility of Naturalism, though some of the avenues he pursues are murky to me. When I read this a quarter century ago I was first of all puzzled by the title—why "naturalism" and not " materialism" or even "realism" or his other nonsense term "critical realism"? But upon reading this a couple months ago I had learned enough in the interim to realize that Bhaskar was attempting to overcome a dichotomy a century and a half old between positivism (a misinterpretation of the natural sciences) and hermeneutics (the province of the geisteswissenschaften). "Naturalism" was precisely Bhaskar’s attempt to nullify the reductionism and empiricism imposed on the social sciences by a misapplication of the natural sciences, and to nullify the idealism and spiritualism of hermeneutics, and to transcend this dichotomy. The result of course is still only philosophy, and thus is limited as an underlaborer for science. Ontology is not science. It gives us a perspective with which to meaningfully integrate the results of scientific labors into a world view, and can provide mental therapy (in a manner different from the useless Wittgenstein) for misinterpretations of scientific endeavors, but it can promise no more.
I don’t recall Bhaskar mentioning dialectic at this stage, and in any case, he did not rise above the general level of philosophy of science and ontology of society to say a whole lot about how society is put together, i.e. in the language of political economy, sociology, etc. I’m forgetting what Bhaskar has to say about praxis, but he must say something about the implication of the social researcher, who is also a social actor, in the object of his study, that the object is fundamentally different from the object of natural scientific investigation. I vaguely recall only his transformational model of society, which may grant society undue objectivity, but that is how individuals first confront the social order that precedes them: it is in fact an independently existing reality to the babe born into it.
As for dialectics, maybe someone can explain to me what "absence" as an ontological category could possibly mean and what it could possibly explain. This phase marks Bhaskar’s descent into the abyss of mysticism.
I read two new books on atheism almost as soon as they appeared on the shelves:
Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007. See my blog entry (orig. written 16 March).
Onfray, Michel. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade Pub., distributed by Hackette Book Group, 2007. See my blog entry (review begun 20 March).
Some disappointing articles:
Rudolf J. Siebert, "Critical Religion in Antagonistic Civil Society: Towards Discourse and Cooperation among Civilizations (II)", paper prepared for Association for the Sociology of Religion, Montreal, Canada, August 2006. See my blog entry (originally written 22 March).
Paul Mattick, "Humanism and Socialism" (1965). See my blog entry for this & Novack (originally written 11 April 2007).
George Novack (William F. Warde, pseud.), "Socialism and Humanism" (1959)
On 25 April I skimmed selected stretches of this important new book, and the next day wrote what follows:
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. New York: Free Press, 2007.
Ali was a product of a religion and culture she sought to escape, so I assume she knows as much about it as anyone needs to. From what I gathered, her sympathies were on the left, but she grew disillusioned with the Dutch social democratic Labor Party that was into multiculturalism and refused to lift a finger to deal with the problem of Muslim abuse of women in the Netherlands. For that reason, she drifted into the Liberal Party. She admits to being a one-issue politician, and that was her issue. Her life was put in danger by her outspokenness, culminating in the assassination of her friend Theo Van Gogh. She also faced loss of Dutch citizenship for falsifying her immigration information, and she took a job with the American Enterprise Institute. Obviously, the AEI has its own agenda for taking her on, which hardly has anything to do with defense of the Enlightenment and progressive traditions. Since she and the AEI both hate Islam, presumably, the alliance is predicated on that basis. Leave it to the left to drive a person into the arms of the right.
Didn’t Adorno say something about having to part of a tradition to hate it properly? Certainly, Ali’s contempt for Islamic societies is justified by her own victimization. So the answer to brain-dead PhDs is, yeah, imperialism is not all bad, because it can also destroy repressive traditions and force the overthrow of all oppressive conditions. Anti-imperialism is never enough; the question is always: not who you are against, but what you are for? And if you can’t stand for something worth fighting for, you deserve the destruction that awaits you.
Then I wrote this on 24 May:
I skimmed & stopped to read parts of Infidel. I looked at her web site briefly and I’ve seen a couple of other pieces by Ali. As I recall, she was a single-issue candidate in the Netherlands. Her vehement rejection of her oppressive background has made her extremely pro-Western—which is understandable—but to the point where her single-minded goal to combat the barbarism of the Islamic world has made her an overenthusiastic ally of the other side, hence the AEI. I wonder how well she understands her new friends.
She was also brought up with a virulent anti-Semitism which she learned to reject, reevaluating everything she was taught when she discovered what the Holocaust really was. This seems to have given her a pro-Israel orientation as well, which is also understandable as a reaction to her early indoctrination.
I wonder when she will learn that the new power base she has chosen for herself is not about what she needs from it.
There are some lessons here, including the need for the soft-and-cuddly multiculti and romantic pro-third-world wings of the western left to straighten up and become uncompromising militants for Enlightenment values—an orientation which never disappeared but got diluted in the ’60s and afterward. Just leave it to the incompetence of the left to drive people into the arms of the right.
Pragmatism & Paremiology
If you click on the subject label "pragmatism", you will find a number of posts, with book references, e.g. to this recent entry:
Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
I commented on Glaude’s appearance on the Tavis Smiley show, and also on this other recent book I looked at months before:
Anderson Douglas R. Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.
In February I read:
Bauerlein, Mark. The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
I disliked the book, but can’t say anything more without digging up my notes. Peirce is the only one of these people that piques my interest; otherwise, I have a most un-American view of classic American philosophy, with the exception of my hero Roy Wood Sellars.
Pragmatism as ideology also makes an appearance in this book, which I started reading on 12 April. See my blog entry on Paremiology. This is an important book meriting close attention:
Manders, Dean Wolfe. The Hegemony of Common Sense: Wisdom and Mystification in Everyday Life introduction by David Norman Smith. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
On another front:
Weldon, Stephen. In Defense of Science: Secular Intellectuals and the Failure of Nerve Thesis , Religious Humanism, vol. 30, nos. 1 & 2, winter/spring 1996, p. 30-39.
On the history of the science-religion warfare thesis, with reference to Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and intellectual historian David Hollinger. See my Reason & Society post Failure of Nerve.
This book review (see my blog entry) shows up the harmful influence of Richard Rorty:
Judith M. Green, Fordham University, Achieving Our Country, Achieving Our World: Baldwin, Rorty, and Social Hope, [Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts, Chapter One.]
I started to cut Cornel West some slack the first week of June, when I read his word originally written in the late 1970s:
West, Cornel. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991.
In the ensuing week I began to review this book in detail. I find his overall preoccupation with anti-foundationalism unsound—with the unwholesome influence of Rorty in evidence—but West has some useful things to say about the development of the young Marx. More to come.
Critical theory & related
I probably read this in March:
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London; New York: Continuum, 2006.
I once thought him an interesting fellow for his unconventional research into intellectual history, but to me this book was just more metaphysical gibberish, an arbitrary manipulation of abstract concepts in relation to one another but not to empirical realities. And yet it seems that’s what all these (French) people do, the whole crop that emerged in the ’60s. It’s all bodies (vitalism) and semiosis—pointless distraction, hype, and bullshit. Or am I missing something?
Here is a review which does not bolster my esteem for the book:
Ben Davis, "Rancière, for Dummies", Artnet Magazine.
On 6 April I pulled out my copy of Antonio Negri’s Marx beyond Marx. See Harry Cleaver’s introduction online. I hated it. I will write a separate entry on Negri with further links to articles I read at this time.
The most important new volume on critical theory I acquired was:
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts). Contents,
Hullot-Kentor wrote some important essays in old, hard-to-find issues of Telos, which have been incorporated into this volume (with modifications), along with his translation of Adorno’s "The Idea of Natural History". I read a fair amount of this book in March and will discuss it at length separately.
I am a big fan of the work of Stephen Eric Bronner, who does so much more than regurgitate the critical theory of its European originators of an earlier era:
Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. .
Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.
I began reading the former on 20 March. It is superb and necessary in the current ideological climate.
I read the latter the first week of April. I began with the chapter on race, along with the intro to the section on new social movements. The chapter on the intellectual and political approaches to the black liberation movement is rather sketchy. I noted, however, the focus on Martin Luther King and the Poor People’s Campaign as the last universalist radical movement that mattered. Even more interesting is the alignment of MLK with Enlightenment goals. This is curious in light of King’s Baptist orientation, but not far-fetched. You can’t get any progressive political concepts out of the Bible, and clearly King was politically most influenced by the liberal and social democratic heritage, with socialistic leanings. Furthermore, King was an advocate of the separation of church and state and was anti-fundamentalist. Although his preaching partook of Biblical authority, he did not claim any divine authority or uncriticizability for himself and generally he relied on rational argumentation to make his points, at least outside of the church.
I then turned to the chapter on postmodernism. The vitalism inherited from Nietzsche is definitely key. I was quite stunned to see Bronner use a word that I thought I was the only to use applied to intellectual work: slumming (p 197: "phony intellectual slumming").
I am getting ahead of myself, but in June I turned to Bronner’s earlier work, Socialism Unbound.
Miscellany
Special issue of The Minnesota Review, nos. 50-51: Activism and the Academy. There are many articles of note. I earmarked this one:
Hurley, James S. "Marketing Transgression, or Capital Talks Shit", pp. 197-207.
In March I scanned several articles from the defunct journal Science & Nature. It doesn’t matter which, just see what looks interesting in the table of contents.
On 29 March I started an Esperanto blog,Ĝirafo (meaning "Giraffe", on Blogger). There you will learn what I’ve been reading or reviewing in Esperanto.
