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I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (p

I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. But I admit to being poorly read in the field, and won't come to a judgement on the basis of a summary. From another angle, I enjoy (if don't quite know what to make of) David Abram's critique of the Enlightenment in his Becoming Animal and (more particularly) The Spell of the Sensuous. His target is really disembodied/symbolic thinking as such, but the Enlightenment might be considered a (proclaimed) victory of that line of human cognitive history.

claudiawerner 8y ago
The point of contention here is whether a beautiful ideal of aiming for pure truth as separate from psychological and social-cultural influence is sufficient to talk about real-world projects carried out by real people and the movements formed by those individual projects which developed through bitter and personal disagreements. The three people who helped us understand the effects of society on our thought are highly respected for their insights in helping see through this ideology: Marx, Nietzche and Freud. Each has helped us understand the genealogy of modernist consciousness. I say it's ideological because at heart it is: our motivations don't come from nowhere, even if they are pure. When we look at projects like the Enlightenment we have to step back and use critical tools (read: all the social sciences), rather than take what we see read from authors at face value. An example you might like more is Bertrand Russell's assessment of Aquinas, in which Russell dismisses Aquinas as a philosopher because he claims Aquinas actually started at his conclusion - to prove God exists. But Aquinas, of course, claimed to start from where he should have, with the rational investigation of the world. We can say a very similar thing about Descartes - how did Descartes establish the existence of God within two paragraphs (I'm not joking) of establishing the existence of his own mind even after throwing out all preconceived notions?
- crispinb 8y ago
  Weaving motivational tales though seems to be entirely undecidable, a process without end or means of resolving disagreement. Much like the sloppier end of evolutionary 'just so' stories. The strand of the Enlightenment with the better defense against this type of critique isn't the Cartesian (philosophy), but the Encyclopedist (science). Abrams is interesting on this - instead of focusing on biases introduced by science's historicity, he addresses the lacunae central to the very project of severing symbolic cognition from its embodied origins.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    I should have been more clear: the point here isn't to guess intentions, it's to examine the actual results of the project and its reasons for being (e.g distrust in religious authority which Russell situates in the formation of Protestantism) and to identify the same ideology in thinking today. Tracing the relationship between myth and enlightenment is done in the same way we trace the relationship between the Ancient Greek epics and their philosophy, or the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.
    - crispinb 8y ago
      Yes I understand (though I suspect the distinction between psychological & textual/ideological exegesis might be more ambiguous than you suggest). Nonetheless, it's just weaving stories and comparing interpretations, and there's no objective way to do this (or, put more psychologically, there's no route to generating agreement on the best story). Cf science, which attempts (step by step) to find methodological/algorithmic ways to expunge subjectivities (ask nature, rather than ask yourself). My (undercooked) suggestion is that an Abrams-like analysis may do a better job of showing what is lacking in the science tributary of the Enlightenment. It's not a methodological issue (rooting out ideology), it's a representational one (symbol systems yanked out of their living backdrop miss too much of the real world).
- PixyMisa 8y ago
  As Jeremy Wolfe said in his Introduction to Psychology lectures on MIT OCW: There's two things to know about Freud - he's wrong and he's dead. The same goes for Marx and Nietzsche.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    The fact that Freud's hypotheses and theories as he performed them don't stand up to modern scientific scrutiny does not mean he is otherwise useless as in the field of psychoanalysis[0], which has mainstream appeal and respect in the humanities and has largely moved on from Freud himself[1]. Likewise for Marx, who is both popular among heterodox economists and sociologists (since he's a founder of that discipline), not to mention political economy, all three of these fields are huge and produce a mass of scholarship every year - along with the discipline of critical theory which can be credited to the authors I mentioned in my top level post in this thread. There is no feminist scholarship which does not at least take into account critical theory, just as there is no aesthetics which does not either. Nietzche is one of the most influential philosophers of modernity, I'm not sure what's supposed to be so wrong about him. You could even reject all of their substantive propositions and still respect them and the culture they helped inspire[2], which is the culture of suspicion - not taking things for granted or at face value, repudiating all notions of "common sense" and as Marx put it, "ruthless criticism of all that exists". [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/78mtvl/why_psychoanalysis_still_matters/dovfnjj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/78mtvl/why_p... [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1728717 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1728717 [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691002 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691002
    - garmaine 8y ago
      "Having mainstream appeal" does not mean legitimacy as a scientific discipline. Psychoanalysis is about as useful as alcoholic anonymous' 12 step program: it's a terrific placebo. Mainstream theories are largely discredited by neuroscience and psychiatry, but it turns out having people just sit on a couch and self-reflect is usually beneficial regardless. But if you want to understand the how's and why's of the human mind with scientific rigor, then do not look to anything in the field of psychoanalysis.
coldtea 8y ago
>I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. We not only lie to others (e.g. saying we want X for justice and truth, but instead we only care of being elected, and we might even harm X with out actions). We also lie to ourselves all the time. And we also have delusions we consider as truths (based on psychological & social-cultural motivation). Those lynching black people, for example, didn't consider themselves bad, but as people doing the good thing, and punishing people that are bad for their community. Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer's starting point is 40 years of carnage (WWI and WWII, plus USSR gulags and the holocaust, Hiroshima, Dresden, etc.) from supposed Enlightened states, and where even those against enlightenment ideas made use of enlightenment methods (e.g. the Nazis building their technical industries, creating rockets and novel weaponry, engineering the elimination of Jews on industrial scale --even using IBM tabulating machines--, and so on). Plus, it's not like Adorno and Hork. propose some bizarro alternative fake-truth universe on the other hand. They don't say truth doesn't matter, or it's all stories etc (that would be later post-modernists, and even for them it's a gross oversimplification). In fact they critique this (e.g. the use of "alternate facts" and erasing of history in the USSR trials, etc). Their emphasis on psychological & social-cultural motivation is precisely to show the hidden actual truth (e.g. profit motives, social conditioning, etc) behind many actions that pretend to be themselves the "truth".
- crispinb 8y ago
  > Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. But I suppose you consider your critique of truth to be true? Forgive the seeming snark. It's not meant unkindly. This kind of thing is not easy to talk about, as philosophy's historical mess shows. OK so its the case (or 'true'!) that most arguments are post hoc rationalisations for positions actually determined by a complex chain of psychological and social-historical causes. I agree. This is not an insight unique to European philosophy. Many disciplines and lines of argument get to that position. The issue becomes how to mitigate such bias effects. My contentions are that (1) the empirical-scientific strand of the Enlightenment does a far better and more historically significant job of this than the philosophical, so your (or Adorno et als) target is already a relatively inconsequential one, and that (2) science does this by contraining its ontology within an etiolated language that mis- or under- represents the real world. What's 'wrong' with the most important heir of the Enlightenment (science), if conceived as an inclusive framework from which to view the world, isn't that it's as myth-infused as pre-Enlightenment thought, but rather that the world it attempts to describe isn't where we actually live.

claudiawerner 8y ago

The point of contention here is whether a beautiful ideal of aiming for pure truth as separate from psychological and social-cultural influence is sufficient to talk about real-world projects carried out by real people and the movements formed by those individual projects which developed through bitter and personal disagreements. The three people who helped us understand the effects of society on our thought are highly respected for their insights in helping see through this ideology: Marx, Nietzche and Freud. Each has helped us understand the genealogy of modernist consciousness. I say it's ideological because at heart it is: our motivations don't come from nowhere, even if they are pure. When we look at projects like the Enlightenment we have to step back and use critical tools (read: all the social sciences), rather than take what we see read from authors at face value. An example you might like more is Bertrand Russell's assessment of Aquinas, in which Russell dismisses Aquinas as a philosopher because he claims Aquinas actually started at his conclusion - to prove God exists. But Aquinas, of course, claimed to start from where he should have, with the rational investigation of the world. We can say a very similar thing about Descartes - how did Descartes establish the existence of God within two paragraphs (I'm not joking) of establishing the existence of his own mind even after throwing out all preconceived notions?

crispinb 8y ago
Weaving motivational tales though seems to be entirely undecidable, a process without end or means of resolving disagreement. Much like the sloppier end of evolutionary 'just so' stories. The strand of the Enlightenment with the better defense against this type of critique isn't the Cartesian (philosophy), but the Encyclopedist (science). Abrams is interesting on this - instead of focusing on biases introduced by science's historicity, he addresses the lacunae central to the very project of severing symbolic cognition from its embodied origins.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  I should have been more clear: the point here isn't to guess intentions, it's to examine the actual results of the project and its reasons for being (e.g distrust in religious authority which Russell situates in the formation of Protestantism) and to identify the same ideology in thinking today. Tracing the relationship between myth and enlightenment is done in the same way we trace the relationship between the Ancient Greek epics and their philosophy, or the Protestant work ethic and capitalism.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    Yes I understand (though I suspect the distinction between psychological & textual/ideological exegesis might be more ambiguous than you suggest). Nonetheless, it's just weaving stories and comparing interpretations, and there's no objective way to do this (or, put more psychologically, there's no route to generating agreement on the best story). Cf science, which attempts (step by step) to find methodological/algorithmic ways to expunge subjectivities (ask nature, rather than ask yourself). My (undercooked) suggestion is that an Abrams-like analysis may do a better job of showing what is lacking in the science tributary of the Enlightenment. It's not a methodological issue (rooting out ideology), it's a representational one (symbol systems yanked out of their living backdrop miss too much of the real world).
PixyMisa 8y ago
As Jeremy Wolfe said in his Introduction to Psychology lectures on MIT OCW: There's two things to know about Freud - he's wrong and he's dead. The same goes for Marx and Nietzsche.
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  The fact that Freud's hypotheses and theories as he performed them don't stand up to modern scientific scrutiny does not mean he is otherwise useless as in the field of psychoanalysis[0], which has mainstream appeal and respect in the humanities and has largely moved on from Freud himself[1]. Likewise for Marx, who is both popular among heterodox economists and sociologists (since he's a founder of that discipline), not to mention political economy, all three of these fields are huge and produce a mass of scholarship every year - along with the discipline of critical theory which can be credited to the authors I mentioned in my top level post in this thread. There is no feminist scholarship which does not at least take into account critical theory, just as there is no aesthetics which does not either. Nietzche is one of the most influential philosophers of modernity, I'm not sure what's supposed to be so wrong about him. You could even reject all of their substantive propositions and still respect them and the culture they helped inspire[2], which is the culture of suspicion - not taking things for granted or at face value, repudiating all notions of "common sense" and as Marx put it, "ruthless criticism of all that exists". [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/78mtvl/why_psychoanalysis_still_matters/dovfnjj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/78mtvl/why_p... [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1728717 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1728717 [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691002 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691002
  - garmaine 8y ago
    "Having mainstream appeal" does not mean legitimacy as a scientific discipline. Psychoanalysis is about as useful as alcoholic anonymous' 12 step program: it's a terrific placebo. Mainstream theories are largely discredited by neuroscience and psychiatry, but it turns out having people just sit on a couch and self-reflect is usually beneficial regardless. But if you want to understand the how's and why's of the human mind with scientific rigor, then do not look to anything in the field of psychoanalysis.

coldtea 8y ago

>I don't find the summary particularly promising. So much 20th century European philosophy seems to dodge issues of truth in favour of constructing stories of (psychological & social-cultural) motivation. Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. We not only lie to others (e.g. saying we want X for justice and truth, but instead we only care of being elected, and we might even harm X with out actions). We also lie to ourselves all the time. And we also have delusions we consider as truths (based on psychological & social-cultural motivation). Those lynching black people, for example, didn't consider themselves bad, but as people doing the good thing, and punishing people that are bad for their community. Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer's starting point is 40 years of carnage (WWI and WWII, plus USSR gulags and the holocaust, Hiroshima, Dresden, etc.) from supposed Enlightened states, and where even those against enlightenment ideas made use of enlightenment methods (e.g. the Nazis building their technical industries, creating rockets and novel weaponry, engineering the elimination of Jews on industrial scale --even using IBM tabulating machines--, and so on). Plus, it's not like Adorno and Hork. propose some bizarro alternative fake-truth universe on the other hand. They don't say truth doesn't matter, or it's all stories etc (that would be later post-modernists, and even for them it's a gross oversimplification). In fact they critique this (e.g. the use of "alternate facts" and erasing of history in the USSR trials, etc). Their emphasis on psychological & social-cultural motivation is precisely to show the hidden actual truth (e.g. profit motives, social conditioning, etc) behind many actions that pretend to be themselves the "truth".

crispinb 8y ago
> Humans don't operate on truth, they operate on psychological & social-cultural motivation, and use "truth" as a pretext. But I suppose you consider your critique of truth to be true? Forgive the seeming snark. It's not meant unkindly. This kind of thing is not easy to talk about, as philosophy's historical mess shows. OK so its the case (or 'true'!) that most arguments are post hoc rationalisations for positions actually determined by a complex chain of psychological and social-historical causes. I agree. This is not an insight unique to European philosophy. Many disciplines and lines of argument get to that position. The issue becomes how to mitigate such bias effects. My contentions are that (1) the empirical-scientific strand of the Enlightenment does a far better and more historically significant job of this than the philosophical, so your (or Adorno et als) target is already a relatively inconsequential one, and that (2) science does this by contraining its ontology within an etiolated language that mis- or under- represents the real world. What's 'wrong' with the most important heir of the Enlightenment (science), if conceived as an inclusive framework from which to view the world, isn't that it's as myth-infused as pre-Enlightenment thought, but rather that the world it attempts to describe isn't where we actually live.