Re: Mead and Vygotsky from a teacher

From: Ben Reshef family (victor@kfar-hanassi.org.il)
Date: Sat Oct 18 2003 - 22:48:09 PDT


Horkheimer, "Materialism and Metaphysics" and "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (chapters 3 and 6 respectively of the 1972 translation of Kritisch Theorie '68 titled Critical Theory: Selected Essays) is relevant here.
Victor
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Andy Blunden
  To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
  Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 2:14 AM
  Subject: Re: Mead and Vygotsky from a teacher

  Again Steve, I seem to be guilty of exaggeration. It is a few years since I read Novack on pragmatism, and I got this impression that he thought that pragmatism was the antechamber to Marxism. I have just one chapter of the book scanned here, but it is the relevant chapter, and I now see that your excerpts fairly well characterise his view. He sums up on Dewey:

    "The modifications introduced by pragmatism did not succeed in eradicating the inherent and insuperable defects of empiricism but rather reaffirmed them in its own way. The dualism between materialism and idealism discernible in Locke flowered into eclecticism with Dewey. As an illustration, take his treatment of, the relations between the social system and the philosopher himself.
    "Dewey did not hesitate to apply the principle of historical materialism that a thinker's views are fundamentally shaped by his social situation and class outlook to explain the special features and errors of Aristotle's metaphysics and politics. Yet he claimed that his own philosophy was totally exempt from class conditioning and that he spoke for the general interests of all men. The coexistence of two such incompatible types of interpretation did not disconcert him; he used either one as he pleased.
    "Dewey was the most radical consummator of the pragmatic tendency. He did for pragmatism what pragmatism helped to do for the empirical tradition. His instrumentalism pressed its ideas to the farthest limits and thereby disclosed their basic insufficiency. Empiricism cannot go beyond Deweyism without annulling its basic premises and either passing over into materialism to its left or towards logical positivism or linguistic analysis to its right." [George Novack, Empiricism and Its Evolution - A Marxist View: Chapter IX]

  But on the other hand, Novack's own understanding of Marxism is hardly definitive!

  Andy
  At 11:46 AM 18/10/2003 -0700, you wrote:

    Hi Andy,

    Andy says:
    "Certainly, my reading of Novack on pragmatism could be summarised as "pragmatism is only an inch short of Marxism." While I think Pragmatism a la Peirce or Dewey or Bridgman was certainly a great achievement, I have always regarded both Marx and Vygotsky as qualitatively different from Pragmatism."

    I completely agree with you, Andy, that Marxism and Pragmatism are qualitatively different. Is the metaphor of one being "an inch short" of the other from Novack? Novack seemed to assess Dewey himself as on occasion coming within an inch of materialism - Novack was careful to attribute to Dewey his many scientific insights - but I am not so sure Novack said Pragmatism as a philosophy was that close to dialectical materialism. Perhaps my reading is off?

    Speaking of George Novack, in Pragmatism Vs Marxism: An Appraisal of John Dewey's philosophy, he quotes an amusing story and commentary on Mead told by T.V. Smith in his 1962 book A Non-Existent Man: An Autobiography. In the chapter The Instrumentalist Theory of Knowledge, Novack critiques Dewey's approach to epistemology, the "all-important" question of "what is the basis of knowledge," as one that "wobbled all over the lot, unable to stay permanently in a single place." He says about Mead:

    "Mead, Dewey's cothinker at Chicago, was no less equivocal on this prime question. T.V. Smith writes: "Long after I had become a colleague of Mead, I asked him one day at lunch, for instance, whether he thought that there was anything existing before life came upon the scene. This seemed to me to be a question to be answered plainly Yes or No, depending upon one's drift toward Realism of Idealism. Mead answered the question at great length. Or at least he seemed to think he did. I repeated the question for a Yes-or-No answer. He answered it at greater length. I then asked him plaintively to answer it so that I could understand his answer. He seemed as puzzled at my perturbation as I at his 'equivocation.' I never did understand; and naturally enough, I came to doubt whether he did.

    [Novack is still quoting from Smith] "I took it that he was confused, having left Idealism (Hegelianism) and not having arrived firmly at anything else. This type of confusion, between the knower, or the knowing, and the known, seemed so to dog the steps of the Pragmatists that I decided they were all what I came to call 'basement-Idealists' rather than, with Hegel, the 'attic' kind. They all seemed to me doubt - what I could not doubt - that anything existed apart from some experience, and yet they seemed unwilling to face the consequences of such a position. They wanted to be Idealists without giving up the fruits of Realism. It made them unhappy to be thus accused, but so they seemed to me" (A Non-Existent Man, p48)."

    Best,
    - Steve



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