Others who know more about French philosophy may correct me if I get it wrong, but I think the French - Foucault, Derrida in particular - and then after them people like Judith Butler, have been very successful in a method of uncovering and denouncing dichotomies, even making a big moral question out of it: it's become a moral outrage to use a dichotomy! In political practice it has been very successful mostly by *blurring the boundary*. So for example, if you thought people could be divided into male and female, this turns out to be a social construct with very blurred edges. If you thought people were either straight or homosexual, it turns out that there are dozens of kinds of sexuality. These strategies have been, IMHO, stunningly successful and need to be respected.
My quandry has been this: People like Judith Butler agree with Wm James that thinking in dichotomies is a fixed habit of thought, and add that it is oppressive and discriminatory. Does it make sense to say it is "wrong"? What I mean is, if I describe the world, I need to use some dichotomy, precisely because the manufacture of dichotomies is a fixed habit and objectified social practice which is productive of the rotten world we live in.
One approach is to denounce dichotmies and try to avoid them with categories which have blurred boundaries and multiplicity. Another approach is to use Marx and Hegel's approach which allows for a dynamic and productive monism, and out of this, we can derive and explain dichotomies and therefore see them as relative and come to the same critical attitude that for example Foucault of Butler come from.
So I think it is a very interesting problem, but I tend to react against gestures of denuniciation. I actually think that Hegel is the only one who really solved this problem by moving away from ontological solutions (there are many kinds of sexuaity, there are many not two kinds) to logical and methodological solutions - mediation, unit of analysis, trichotomy, etc.
Andy Mike Cole wrote:
The rich discourse is washing over me and I am glad for the archive which will allow me to return for proper study. Meantime, for other pressing purposes I have come across the following from William James which may not be considered correct because it talks of a me-you dualism, but might be considered useful to the current conversation on units, microcosms, etc. mike ---------------- ....One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass against which his own me stands cut in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place. (Lotze is author of *Mikrocosmos, *among other writings). _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden: http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca