Re: Mahler #6


<david7gable@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1137345866.693262.224020@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Ian is indeed an "idealist" to the extent that he believes that you can
> START with an idealist concept like "capitalism" or "fascism" -- with
> an "idea" like capitalism or fascism -- and THEN seek empirical
> evidence for what it is.

No, it's a model (like all political or economic or philosophical terms)
that seeks to explain empirically observable phenomena.

> (That is precisely the program that Ian has
> summarized in this very thread. "I start with 'fascism' and then I
> seek empirical evidence for it.")

You are totally unable to read - the definition I gave was an empirical one.
But you rarely listen to anything, stuck as you are in your own blind
prejudices and paranoia.

And I'm still waiting for your definition.

> Believing in the reality of such
> "ideas," "reifying" such concepts, is the defining basis of what, in
> philosophy, is referred to as idealism..

You evidently don't know the first thing about idealism.
>
> Such an approach is very different from taking even something so broad
> as "German culture and society under Hitler" and then exploring the
> evidence that will allow us to understand aspects of German culture and
> society under Hitler. "German culture and society under Hitler" is not
> an "idea." "Fascism" as Ian uses the term is.
>
> Ian could counter that "society" and "culture" are concepts, too, and
> indeed they are. Virtually every name or noun stands for a concept,
> represents an "idea."

So why is the use of "fascism" so different and so much worse in this
respect?

How about explicit political ideologies (which is not the way I'm defining
"fascism") - those are 'ideas', are they therefore not to be spoken of?

> Both an "idealist" like the critic Walter
> Benjamin and Tag Gallagher have made the same observation. The word
> "tree" is an "idea." We have a notion that there is a particular type
> of plant growth out there and we label it "tree." The word represents
> an abstraction, can be applied to a whole range of different particular
> trees of different species, but we all know what trees are.

We categorise them together under a collective term, 'trees'. I would
imagine in some other cultures and languages they might not have a singular
term for them (rather as other cultures/languages divide up the colour
spectrum in different ways).

> We also
> know that there are "societies," numbers of people living in the same
> place and sharing much of the same space (e.g., living rooms at one
> level, streets, buses, shopping malls, churches, art galleries, or "the
> work place" at others). Societies are characterized by such
> interactive social phenomena as families, groups of friends, political
> parties, people doing various kinds of jobs, governing bodies, etc. In
> short, we have a very clear and concrete notion of what the label
> "society" refers to, and the word "society" is a convenient label for
> it.

And then we can start to look at macroscopic processes of collective
behaviour in that society, thus deriving notions of 'social process'. And
maybe we can have a stab at looking at how such things might manifest
themselves in the future (people in all sorts of fields do this, not least
in the world of advertising).
>
> As for "culture," we know that people have wall paper in their living
> rooms, various styles of furniture, plates with patterns on them,
> religious beliefs, private and public rituals, polite forms of address,
> music, cuisines, notions about and conceptions of a vast range of
> subjects of all kinds, and so forth, that they read books, watch
> television, play football or poker, etc. "Culture" is a convenient
> label enabling us to refer collectively to phenomena of this kind,
> phenomena characteristic of individuals, groups, and societies.

It can be described much more simply, culture is the whole field of human
activity. Culture with a capital 'C' might be used to refer to something
more specific, though.
>
> Words remain at the level of convenient labels -- you can't talk about
> what there are no words for -- until we "reify" them, turn them into
> idealist concepts or "ideas."
>
Look up reification in a dictionary or something - you'll find that it's
actually the process by which a mere concept becomes transformed into the
status of an immutable object, and is thus seen as 'inevitable'. Such a
statement as 'women's natural place is in the home' is a perfect example -
transforming a historical observation into a statement of essence. Empirical
thought is most susceptible to reification, as it tends to disbelieve in the
possibility anything that has not yet been experienced, and thus reifies
empirically observed reality into an essential state of affairs.

To reify capitalism is to believe it is the only possible state of society
(which is not the same as saying it is the best one - some pro-capitalists
accept that it is a particular system amongst other possibilities) and will
always be in place. To reify fascism is to believe that attributes of
fascist society will always be with us. I don't accept either such thing.
Marx was careful not to create a reified conception of socialism (the term
emerged after his death, though he dealt with similar concepts), believing
it was impossible to describe in detail a future society after capitalism
other than in its essentials (the ways in which it would not be beholden to
the interests of capital). To attempt more would almost certainly be
circumscribed by the mindset and categories that are inherited by an
individual living under capitalism. In the sense that Marx believed that
mankind could develop further, towards a more sophisticated and equitable
system, he was an idealist, but in a historical rather than purely abstract
manner. Hegel, on the contrary, thought society had already reached its apex
in the Prussian state.

Ian


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