Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Michael,

I've found this article a useful introduction to the Hook-Eastman debates:

Getting Hegel out of History: Max Eastman's Quarrel with Marxism
Author(s): John P. Diggins
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Feb., 1974), pp.
38-71
Published by: American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1868315

Personally I don't find pragmatist readings of Marx particularly helpful,
but his background with Dewey would have certainly helped Hook to recognize
the importance to Marx of knowledge being both acquired and tested in
practice. And personally I have sympathy with the view that on this issue
Marx was misinterprted by Engels and Lenin, even if such an interpretation
on Hook's part was a motivated one.

Martin

p.s. according to Diggins, Dewey began to write about Marxism around 1938


On 1/23/09 11:26 PM, "Michael Glassman" <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote:

> Maybe a little historical context would help in attempting to really flesh out
> what Hook was saying and why he was saying it.  At the time both Max Eastman
> and Sidney Hook were Pragmatists, and both had been students of John Dewey.
> Eastman was older than Hook and had discovered Marx earlier, but also had
> somewhat soured on him earlier as well.  Hook, who I think really was
> passionate about his ideas, whatever they might be at the moment, was
> entranced with Marx, but also still devoted to Pragmatism.  Hook actually
> believed the Marx's methodology was basically a Pragmatic methodology (if
> right it would certainly help untangle the whole knot concerning the
> relationship between Activity Theory methodology and Action Research
> methodology).  I think Eastman, while remaining a fan of Marx, also considered
> him something of a romantic idealist.  The debate between Eastman and Hook was
> actually about whether or not Marx could be considered a Pragmatist (with Hook
> taking the yes side).  Eastman tried to get Dewey to moderate the debate, but
> he refused because he had never read Marx and did not intend to (this has
> always struck me as a mystery.  I have read in a number of places that Dewey
> was not interested in reading Marx, but I have never read a reason for it).
>  
> Anyway the 1928 article that is quoted below actually strikes me as a
> reinvoicing of the argument that Dewey makes about reflection, and the
> foolishness of thinking thought can control nature, in Experience and Nature
> three years earlier (Hook definitely read this, and probably talked with Dewey
> about it).  The trouble with reflection of course is that it opens the door to
> dualism - Dewey was determined not to go inside the head and plant reified
> thought there, because it suggested we could think about nature without
> actually being involved with nature.  I am thinking when Hook wrote this
> article he was still trying to save Marx as a Pragmatist, but in order to do
> so he had to expose the dualist boogie men of communism.  Marx was good, it
> was just his interpreters who misinterpreted him.  People do much the same
> thing with Darwin and Huxley - claiming that it was Huxley's interpretation
> that brought heavy handed Malthusianism in to evolution.  So I think the
> quoted article was more about Hook trying to show that it was the Soviet's who
> was dragging Marx away from his Pragmatic base.
>  
> A few years later I believe that Hook turned on Marx proper and became a
> virulent anti-communist, along with other members of their group, including I
> believe Henry Luce who went on to become editor of Time.
>  
> Michael
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Martin Packer
> Sent: Fri 1/23/2009 5:23 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
> 
> 
> 
> At risk of actually killing the horse I'm flogging, I want to return one
> more time to the debate over 'reflection.' Mike asked me why I would be sad
> to hear that Vygotsky was significantly influenced by Lenin. I've been
> reading some of the work in the 1920s and 30s by Sidney Hook, on the topic
> of Marx and Hegel. I'm copying below a fairly long excerpt in which Hook
> takes to task both Engels and Lenin (in 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,'
> at least) for viewing ideas as "reflections" of reality - exactly in the
> sense of mirror images or copies. That Lenin did this was the sense I have
> got from reading other comments on Lenin, though I haven't read Lenin
> myself.
> 
> The problem, as Hook points out, is that the reflection view treats thinking
> as a passive process, that solipsism and skepticism cannot be avoided, that
> in this view knowledge cannot be creative, and consequently knowledge of the
> world cannot change the world. This, as he notes, is a long way from Marx.
> 
> Martin
> 
> The excerpt is from:
> Hook, S. (1928). The Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. II. The Journal
> of Philosophy, 25(6), 141-155.
> [ http://www.jstor.org/stable/2014691 ]
> 
> "He [Engels] presents the "dialectic" as the method which
> corrects the limited and ossified character of classificatory thinking
> and claims that it enables one to avoid the predicament of English
> empiricism which is peculiarly addicted to this way of thinking.
> But Engels failed to understand the real weakness of English
> empiricism. Otherwise he would have realized that his uncritical
> reference to ideas as reflections, pictures, or images (Abbilder,
> Spiegelbilder) of things made him fall into an epistemological trap
> whose mazes lead into the cul-de-sacs of solipsism and nominalism-
> the very positions he was anxious to avoid. Since sensations, accord-
> ing to Engels, gave immediate knowledge, the organizing activity of
> thought becomes purely ancillary to classifying and relating sensa-
> tions. Practice and experiment, which he later says must serve as
> the criteria of truth, are introduced by a double inconsistency. For
> if our sensations are copies, we can never know anything of the
> originals or even know that there are any, while if sensations give
> immediate knowledge there is no sense in trying to check up upon
> them by experiments which only give other sensations, just as im-
> mediate. The disastrous consequences of the belief in the cognitive
> character of sensations comes to light in Lenin's fanatical insistence
> upon accepting every word of Engels literally. According to Lenin,
> sensation is "a copy, photograph, and reflection of a reality existing
> independently of it." He takes Plekhanov to task for regarding
> sensations as "signs" or "symbols" of what things are, instead of
> adhering to the crude formula, "(sensations) are copies, photo-
> graphs, images, mirror-reflections of things" (p. 195). He adds
> further on, "the idea that knowledge can 'create' forms and change
> the primeval chaos into order, is an idealist notion. The world is
> a uniform world of matter in motion, and our cognition, being the
> highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this law."
> But if knowledge only "reflects" the laws of the world, how can it
> change the world? A mirror or a lake reflects the natural scene,
> but neither knows nor changes it. This is, indeed, a far cry from
> the functional and experimental theory expressed in Marx's gloss
> on Feurbach and strange words from one who believed that by "mass
> action" and the creation of new machines and forms of distribution,
> a better social system will be evolved." (p. 149-150)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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