Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (7)

My understanding of Notes from Underground and its context has developed since I finished reading it. There are a number of factors to consider, among them: (1) Dostoevsky's opposition to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and the radical, Westernizing Russian intelligentsia, (2) criticism of the "bookishness" and formulaic expressions of the intelligentsia in relation to real life, (3) the Underground Man's indictment of his social milieu and himself, (4) the Underground Man as unreliable narrator, (5) the divergence between the Underground Man and Dostoevsky, (6) the philosophy of the Underground Man (and of Dostoevsky) in part 1, (7) the relationship of the actions in part 2 to the philosophical position of part 1.

I had equated the Underground Man with Dostoevsky himself, whereas the relationship between the two, as well as the relationship between the stated philosophy and lived reality is more complex in the work. The Underground Man's rebellion against rationalism is a failure, though some self-awareness is achieved where his narrative is broken off, and the entire Russian intelligentsia stands accused along with his self-accusation. Dostoevsky himself has an agenda for attacking rationalism and the intelligentsia. Where does it lead? His alienation leads to authoritarianism, reaction, and Christian apologetics, his torment to the justification of torment.

The reception of Dostoevsky's work, not only in Russia and the Soviet Union but abroad in very different contexts, is also eye-opening.

From this rush of research I compiled the following bibliography, with web links where feasible:

Dostoevsky’s Underground, Ideology, Reception: A Very Select Bibliography

I note briefly the relevance of these references to my projects. Joseph Frank is especially useful for mapping the conceptual structure of the novel. Let me call attention to two other references, which branch out into the big picture:

Carroll, John. Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. 2^nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. (Orig. pub. 1974.)

I loathe anarchists, and I prefer Paul Thomas's Karl Marx and the Anarchists, but this book embarks upon a detailed analysis of Dostoevsky's irrationalism, his relationship to Stirner and Nietzsche, and the opposition to the rationalist "crystal palace" utopia celebrated in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.

Jacoby, Russell. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. See esp. Introduction.

Jacoby says nothing about Dostoevsky here, but his book is relevant to the issues, as Jacoby highlights the 'defeated' perspectives of dissident Marxists and reactionary thinkers who analyzed modernity’s underbelly obscured by the scientistic orientation of orthodox Marxism. The Introduction lays out his perspective.

All of this is to fit into the historical puzzle of the interlocking struggle and inseparability of the contradictions of the modern world, the capitalist world (which includes Stalinism), abstractly designated by positivism vs. irrationalism, or scientism vs Romanticism.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (6)

I shall have a lot more to say, plus add additional references. First, let me link to pages on my web site that engage Dostoevsky:

Georg Lukács on Dostoevsky & the future of the novel

Stavrogin’s Confession by Georg Lukács

C. P. Snow on the ‘Two Cultures’: Literary Modernism, Irrationalism & Reactionary Politics

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Notes for Discussion by R. Dumain

Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground": Annotated Bibliography by R. Dumain

Gary Saul Morson: Genre, Utopia, Sideshadowing, Tempics, Prosaics, Parody, Misanthropology, Philosophy, Literary Theory, Borges: Select Bibliography by R. Dumain

The Richard Wright connection is key to my future exploration of this topic.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (5)

I have finished Part 2 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), and so I have read the entire novel.

I completely disagree with the Underground Man's world view (which might be Dostoevsky's) presented in Part 1, but this work is characteristic of the 19th century obsession with the obstinacy of human irrationality in a modernizing world with a growing scientific, rationalistic world view. This is what "underground" consciousness was. It would not shock anyone now, but it ruptured the veneer of existing civilization at the time. As I suggested in other terms in my first post, there are several aspects to the thesis laid out that are jammed together, both the metaphysical and the historical/epochal (conjunctural).

In Part 1 the Underground Man is up against a stone wall.

What stone wall? Why of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact.

And this goes on. But ....

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

From a schema of unbridgeable dualism the Underground Man deduces the cussedness of human nature, though we cannot be sure if his orientation towards it is positive or negative. It seems that a mechanistic, logical, or dare I say positivistic interpretation of reality bars any role for self-propelled human volition.

Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation.

Man could not tolerate the tedium of a rationally ordered utopia. (Shades of Madách and Szathmári!)

There is more than one way to interpret this rebellion against '2 x 2 = 4', but given the Underground Man's hostility to putatively facile conceptions of rational progress, he lays down the reactionary basis of Dostoevsky's philosophy.

Part 2 is in its own way noteworthy, perhaps scandalous for the 19th century, and something new perhaps for Russia, which had only just freed its serfs. The Underground Man is passive-aggressive, deeply resentful of others, both challenging them and seeking acceptance of them, constantly humiliating himself with his impotent gestures, loathing himself as much as others, alternately hostile and ingratiating. He does this with a circle of acquaintances he imposes himself on (old school chums and their leading light Zverkov, all of whom he loathes), then with the prostitute Liza, then with his servant, then with Liza again, then he recognizes what a spiteful worm he is, finally the narrative breaks off unresolved with a comment from the fictional editor.

When he first wakes up with Liza in a brothel, he gives her a speech, projecting all sorts of feelings onto her, then acting like her savior. She tells him he sounds bookish, but she is finally convinced by the horrible future he lays out for her and is shaken into taking him seriously and accepting his invitation to his home, for which he hates her and pours scorn upon her when she shows up.

When he comes to the moment of self-realization at the end, he admits he is totally out of touch with real life, but because he is acutely self-conscious of this, he might be more in tune with reality since everyone else is just as "bookish" in the sense of being removed from real life. His final words, before the "editor" steps in and breaks off the narrative and concludes with a final note, are:

Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us—excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."

In order for me to render this proposition more believable, I have to translate it into my own social reality. If the Underground Man were merely socially awkward and out of step with a soulless society, I could make sense of his claim. Even the spitefulness and self-humiliation, if it were not carried to an extreme, might make sense. But this orgy of self-humiliation strikes me as too close to the mentality of the misanthropic Christian sinner for me to swallow. Furthermore, it seems itself to be entirely swallowed up by the decaying feudal society that it represents, but without actual historical consciousness.

(All of this, by the way, seems to confirm Trotsky's assessment, summarized in previous posts.)

Which brings me to the question: what does part 2 have to do with the philosophical disquisition of part 1? The argument in part 1 is laid out in absolute abstract terms, yielding a world without history or development. The stubbornness of human irrationality is deeply ingrained, it will prove to destroy us and all life on Earth, but it doesn't live on air. The world view presented is familiar (reminiscent of Kierkegaard, for example); it is the very metaphysical stuff of political reaction.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (4)

This installment is part 3 of Trotsky vs Dostoevsky, a unit of the larger project of analyzing the ideological structure of Dostoevsky's work. These references do not specifically address Notes from Underground, but the issues are the same.

I linked to the following essay without comment in a previous post:

A Special Supplement: The Other Dostoevsky by Philip Rahv, The New York Review of Books, April 20, 1972

Here is Rahv on Trotsky:

What exactly have we given in the area of philosophy or social science?” His answer: “Nothing, a round zero. Vladimir Solovyov, who is usually remembered only on the anniversary of his death? His foggy metaphysics has not entered the history of world-thought; even in Russia his ideas failed to produce anything like a philosophical movement.” Trotsky continues by holding up to scorn the philosophical small fry who are looking forward to the imminent appearance of “a Slavic Kant.” “Where is he? He does not exist. Where is our Hegel? Where is one of equal importance in the history of thought? In philosophy we have none but third-rate disciples and faceless epigoni.

The quotes from Trotsky come from this essay:

“Concerning the Intelligentsia,” by Leon Trotsky, translated from the Russian by Philip Rahv and Irwin Weil, footnotes by Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, Fall 1968, pp. 585-598. Written 1912, published in Kievskaya Mysl. The following quote, p. 592:

In the novel A Raw Youth Dostoyevsky’s Versilov looks at Europe, as Herzen dld, with an anguish not unmixed with contempt. “There,” he says, “the conservative is only struggling to protect his living, and the store-clerk pours out his kerosene only to earn his daily morsel of bread. Russia alone lives not for itself but for the sake of an idea. . . .It is now nearly a century since Russia [that is, Russia’s intelligentsia] has been living without any thought for itself but for Europe alone.” The same Versilov says, “Europe created the noble images of the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the German; but it still knows almost nothing of the nature of the future man. It would seem, however, that Europe still does not care to know. This is understandable, as they are not free, whereas we are free. In all of Europe, I, with my Russian anguish, was the only free man. . . .” Versilov cannot see that, unlike the European conservative or the clerk in the kerosene-store, he had freed himself not only from the fetters of his class traditions but also from the possibility of social creativity. The same faceless environment which had given him his subjective freedom also loomed before him as an objective barrier.

Trotsky had a keen sense for the ideological underpinnings of philosophy and literature as well as a capable sensibility far beyond the limitations of other leading Bolsheviks. Here Trotsky excoriates the vain self-aggrandizement of the Russian intelligentsia that finds itself uprooted from the past but has nothing to go on but its inflated sense of destiny. Trotsky finds the history of Russia a culturally impoverished one, not even being able to boast the glories of other feudal regimes. Whether Slavophiles, populists, or even partisans of modern ideas, the intelligentsia was compelled to fasten onto one or another grand ideology and to absorb hastily and superficially the products of centuries of cultural evolution that had transpired in the West, as an alternative to their own backward station and severance from their roots. Hence their illusions of being free spirits and sacrificing themselves for the people, encapsulated in the quote from Dostoevsky. Four paragraphs on, Trotsky travesties some lines from a poem just quoted: "Versilov's version of  'freedom' could have no other meaning than this freedom of our thought to wander without any work to do."

Then Trotsky ridicules Russian intellectual accomplishments and we come to the passage quoted by Rahv (first paragraph above.) Trotsky is less than impressed even by Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Lavrov, and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky. Bakunin gets grudging acknowledgment. Even Tolstoy yields political sterility. Belinski is found to be weak. Six more paragraphs and Trotsky has washed his hands of the Russian intelligentsia.

Evolutionary psychology, bourgeois reason, the management of duality & the erasure of history

Evolutionary psychologists should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

I was amazed to find Christopher Badcock, writing for Psychology Today, advocating Hungarian Esperantist Sándor Szathmári's utopian/dystopian novel Voyage to Kazohinia as a prescient anticipation of Badcock's model of the diametric mind:

 "Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia" by Christopher Badcock, Psychology Today, May 6, 2017

"The ABC of the Diametric Model, Twenty Years On" by Christopher Badcock, Psychology Today, July 5, 2017

I blogged about these two posts on another of my blogs:

• Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia (2)
• Voyage to Kazohinia: A Diametric Dystopia

In my work on Szathmári, I have emphasized that this novel embodies a basic cultural and ideological dichotomy of modern civilization in a unique fashion. Badcock in his other work manifests this awareness as well, as well as its relationship to C. P. Snow's "two cultures"--another relationship I have pursued--but he attributes the social configuration to genetic causes. Here are a couple more of Badcock's several contributions to the Psychology Today site:

Brain Imaging Reveals the Diametric Mind: Mentalizing brain areas inhibit mechanistic ones and vice versa. Posted Apr 11, 2014

Diametrically Beyond the Two Cultures: Conflict between science and humanities is rooted in cognition. Posted Aug 29, 2012

Here is a book-length continuation of his original book on the subject:

The Diametric Mind Insights into AI, IQ, the Self and Society: a sequel to The Imprinted Brain.

And here is a related essay referenced by Badcock:

Autism, Psychosis, and the “Two Cultures”: C. P. Snow Reconsidered in Light of Recent Theories about Mentalistic Cognition by Jiro Tanak

Now, the hypothesis that there is a certain structure to the human brain, if there is anything to this model, and that this would have a relationship with the historical development of human institutions, would be a major factor to take into account in understanding why certain modes of thought and behavior are so readily reinforced. But the charlatanism that constitutes a large part of evolutionary psychology obscures the mechanisms and structure of social organization in historical development and uncritically reads society directly off of genetic dispositions.

If you read Badcock's posts and other writings, you may smell something rotten as I do. Reading this sort of material is like reading a parody of the scientific method. The concrete relationship of multifactorial social complexes becomes reduced to the most simplistic schematisms built up on a naive ideological basis. Of course, the irreligionists who gobble up this fare fancy that they have found the master key to irrationality and the reason they think they embody. But this is also a symptom of social and ideological degeneration, bourgeois reason at the end of its rope.

Imagination, logic, & life

Here is an email I wrote for a group several years ago, just retrieved:

10 February 2005

Imagination & logic, the shape of life & the shape of thought

While scooting about town yesterday, I ran several complete narratives through my head. Typing, however, is much slower, and I've been burning all my candles at all ends, so I'll have to content myself with summarizing what I'm not going to say.

(1) A narrative tentatively titled "Street Life Monadology" is an autobiographical review of the summer and fall of 1979, illustrating the juxtaposition of philosophical reflection and everyday life, and sometimes the unplanned coincidences between the two.  However, except for the entertainment value, I see no advantage in posting it here, because there are no generalizable conclusions to be drawn from it. My aim would have been to show the close relation between philosophizing and everyday life and my own driving motivations of the time, but in fact this is not the story that will do it, and the appropriate stories to be told would require even greater effort to reconstruct.

(2) I wanted to write up my perceptions of the effects of the philosophical culture of analytical philosophy on people I've known, to illustrate its debilitating effect on imagination and creativity. Which is not to say that I disavow the specific products that issue from this work—as much of it is stuff that interested me in the past—but I'm interested in what could be called philosophical culture, or the milieu that molds minds in a particular way, which is where I see the problem. This is by no means to validate its dishonest and hypocritical competitor, irrationalism. In any event, each is indispensable to the other.

(3) One problem with the association of life and philosophy is the unavoidability of being held hostage to a limited set of available ideas which at some point in time are attractive because they resonate so well with what is going on in the times, and individually. Only with time, more knowledge, and good fortune, is it possible to see that the shapes of both life and thought at an earlier stage of development were contoured in different ways than one suspected at the time. This is one reason to be wary.

(4) While I thought I saw the handwriting on the wall in the late '70s, as I always think I do, I could not see the shape of thought from a sufficiently wide angle. I only met Aant Elzinga, who does historical science studies in Sweden, in the 1980s, in another stage of my existence, and he gave me a few of his papers. But I didn't absorb the lessons even then. I wish I had read the following paper back in 1978 when he wrote it, and when I had no clue about the perspective contained therein, but he only sent it to me two years ago:

The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: A Plea for a Two-Pronged Attack on Positivism and Irrationalism.

________________

"The hidden harmony is better than the visible." — Heraclitus

Science, Scientism, & Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism

Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
by Susan Haack,
Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 21.6, November / December 1997.

I once attended a lecture by Susan Haack on logic, in 1980. I subsequently read her book Philosophy of Logics (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Since then, she's written on broader issues.

Here she decries the corruption of standards in academia, particularly in philosophy. She sees it being corrupted by business imperatives, careerism, and the interdependent dynamic of scientism and anti-scientism. An example of the former is the lucrative area of cognitive science, eclipsing epistemology. As for anti-science, she roundly condemns, as she should, feminist philosophy, which she regards as a sham.

A key quote on the interdependence of scientism and anti-science:

"Now one begins to see why the revolutionary scientism encountered in contemporary philosophy often manifests a peculiar affinity with the anti-scientific attitudes which, as I conjecture, are prompted by resentment, as scientism is prompted by envy, of the sciences. Both parties have become disillusioned with the very idea of honest inquiry, of truth-seeking."

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy (2)

There have been numerous attacks on Paul Kurtz's organizations, all now falling on the singular Center for Free Inquiry, from several directions. One is from advocates of parapsychology, who have expressed numerous complaints. I'm not to deal with them now. Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy does not belong to parapsychology, but it is fringe science nonetheless. Here is the second article I've found attacking Martin Gardner, and now Kurtz, Corliss Lamont, and the Amazing Randi along with him:

CSICOP, Time Magazine, and Wilhelm Reich by John Wilder, Pulse of the Planet #5, 2002, pp. 55-67.

Wilder links Time magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in the scurrilous trashing of Reich's reputation. He reviews the attacks on Reich by the Freudians and the Stalinists.  Wilder accuses Einstein's secretary of sabotaging Reich's attempts to continue correspondence with Einstein. Historians of philosophy and ideas have not been kind to Reich, not Peter Gay, at least. Paul Edwards is claimed to have treated Reich favorably, except for his dismissing Reich's later orgonomy as crank pseudoscience. Edwards alleged Reich's American acolytes to be right-wingers:

Interestingly, Edwards now decries what he calls the ‘right-wing’ politics of [Elsworth] Baker and others of Reich’s students in America, as he believes they have missed the contributions of Reich’s ‘Marxist’ period. The reader should recall that Reich, himself, dismissed this part of his work as a ‘biological miscalculation,’ as immature, as being insufficiently aware of the of the extreme stubbornness of the Emotional Plague.

Wilder asserts that the Kurtz's skeptic organization is wedded to mind-body dualism:

Despite Edwards lukewarm admiration of Reich, CSICOP seems to be populated with men who adhere to modern civilization’s mind-body split, a split which underlies the mechanistic-mystical dichotomy that fuels CSICOP’s engines.

Wilder further complains:

The membership, organization, and style of CSICOP reveal its traditional patriarchal, ‘top-down’ authoritarian character. Its membership, according to Hansen, is 95% composed of ‘white’ males; and nearly 100% of its members are intellectuals, mostly drawn from the non-scientific disciplines, despite CSICOP claiming ‘science’ as its patron. Few active research scientists belong. The membership at large, the ‘Fellows,’ has little, if any, power to formulate or change policy.

Wilder likens Paul Kurtz to the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who faces irrationalism with a psychological regression:

Facing these unexpected outbreaks of apparently irrational behavior in the masses [in the late 1960s], facing what Reich had faced in the early 1930s (due to what Reich termed the biological miscalculation), Kurtz struggles to reforge his Marxist-Humanism into a weapon of control and repression. While Reich had turned away from politics to supporting changes in child rearing, to advocating sexual reform, and to studying biophysics, Kurtz, still at his core a political man, seeks elitist political and social solutions to suppress these uncontrolled, ‘unscientifically’ emotional horrors emanating from the masses.

Kurtz is painted as a control freak—espousing one-world government, praising the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, engaging in scurrilous character assassination of scientific claims he disdains.

I need to point out a streak of anti-communist paranoia that runs through the article, not all instances of which I cite here. Corliss Lamont is excoriated for his pro-Stalinist position, for example.

Wilder moves on to attack Kurtz's skeptical colleagues, among them Wilder's arch-villain Martin Gardner. Gardner was apparently in his youth a fundamentalist and a radical socialist, later became a magician and eventually "the foremost advocate of atheistic scientific orthodoxy, of the science of his patriarchy." Wilder outlines Gardner's five symptomatic criteria for judging pseudoscience: according to those criteria, Reich and Einstein would be judged alike. Wilder finds these demarcation criteria (citing Popper for the term) unusable in practice.

Wilder also finds the presence of erstwhile and practicing magicians in the skeptical movement suspect. He deems magicians to be "cynical, nasty people" as someone else puts it. An illustration of this is the Amazing Randi's participation in Alice Cooper's sadistic spectacles.

I now skip to the author's Postscript of August 1, 2010. Here is the most telling statement of Wilder's position:

I want to clarify that I see Communism as a particularly vicious head of the Emotional Plague, a social pathology described by Reich. This Plague is a hydra that has many heads, like the Inquisition, the KKK, the NAZIs, and Al Qaeda. Cutting off these heads has not and will not permanently end the Emotional Plague, anymore than removing cancerous tumors, while necessary and important, ends an underlying cancer biopathy. There are right wing and left wing variants of the Emotional Plague. There are even middle-of-the-road and non-political variants. Read the studies of pathological mass action and inaction.

In judging all this I am not going to address any of Wilder's factual claims. Nor will I address his evaluation of magicians. I question his analogy of Reich and Einstein, but I have always had a problem with Gardner's demarcation criteria myself, so I will refrain from taking apart Wilder's ridiculous argument. I also don't think there is an infallible formal criteriology for labeling someone a paranoid, and in any case, sometimes real paranoia and real persecution overlap in the same suffering individuals. It is not the mere eccentricity of Wilder's argument that I criticize. It is his underlying metaphysical perspective, and the characteristically paranoiac way in which his systematizing reasoning proceeds. His copious historical references notwithstanding, historical reasoning is excised from his world view, recapitulating the late Reich's retreat to metaphysics. If everything is a result of the Emotional Plague, which is an ahistorical psychobiological category, then the real historical development of society and its ideologies is eclipsed by a metaphysics, and one which bears all the characteristics of a right-wing world view, and hence of right-wing paranoia, regardless of Wilder's actual apolitical politics. This bizarre indiscriminate linkage of communism with Kurtz, a Time editor, Einstein's secretary, Lamont, and Gardner is characteristic of a paranaoic world view, however one might rationally analyze possible deficiencies of any of these individuals.

Finally I must mention the Editor James DeMeo’s 2002 Postscript. DeMeo wrote the article I analyzed in my previous blog post on this subject. Here DeMeo attempts to link Prometheus Books with pornography and pedophilia. If this is not the paranoid mind in action, what is?

I imagine some readers will think I'm overly generous in even bothering to analyze a manifestly crackpot view as seriously as I do. But this is not a randomly generated piece of craziness: there is a conceptual structure underlying it which needs to be analyzed. The more astute and acute our analytical capability becomes, the better will be be able to distinguish the merely eccentric and marginal from the fundamentally distorted framework of a wrongheaded world view, whether or not there are partial truths in it.

Descartes as a Moral Thinker

"'I think, therefore I am', said Descartes, and the world rejoiced at the perspective of the expansion of individual personality and human powers through the liberation of the intellect." — C.L.R. James et al

The watershed marked by the philosophy of Descartes has long been recognized. The dualism of Descartes' philosophy has often been linked to his historical and social position, e.g.:

Descartes' Dualism (Extract) by Albert William Levi

One can find such treatments also in the Marxist tradition (e.g. C.L.R. James & the Johnson-Forest Tendency, quoted above):

Descartes & Marxism: Selected Bibliography

There is, of course, the perennial favorite which deals not with Descartes specifically but with the contradictions of Enlightenment, unsatisfactorily in my view: Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. See also my web guide/bibliography:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Here is a book I just discovered which is alleged to challenge common wisdom about Descartes:

Steiner, Gary. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. See also at Prometheus Books.

There is one brief passage on Marx, and, surprisingly, Steiner finds an affinity between Descartes and Marx. Otherwise, the book appears to be innocent of Marxism. Looking through the bibliography, the one author I'm tempted to pursue is Hans Blumenberg (also known for a debate with Karl Löwith).

Here is the publisher's product description:

Although commentary on Descartes is extensive, the importance of morality in his thought has been all but overlooked in contemporary English-language scholarship. Considered to be the first modern philosopher, Descartes is often interpreted as a wholly secular thinker who acknowledged no authority above the human will. In this important reassessment of the great French philosopher, Gary Steiner shows the influence of Christian thought on the moral foundations of Descartes's philosophy.

Descartes's commitment to Christian piety and to the autonomy of human reason stand in an uneasy tension with one another. In DESCARTES AS A MORAL THINKER, Steiner examines this tension between the "angelic" aspirations in Descartes's Christian commitments and the "earthly" or technological aspirations reflected in his endeavor to use reason to ground scientific practice. Steiner provides a close analysis of all Descartes's texts and correspondence that bear on morality. By placing Descartes's work in historical context, Steiner demonstrates Descartes's indebtedness not only to Galileo and Bacon in developing his conception of autonomous human reason but also to Augustine and Aquinas in conceptualizing the human condition and the role of belief in God. Providing a detailed survey of German, French, and English scholarship on Descartes, Steiner concludes with an in-depth examination of contemporary debates about secularization, nihilism, and modernity in such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and Karl Lowith. Steiner shows how Descartes's own ambivalence about the relation between faith and reason can shed light on contemporary controversies regarding what Blumenberg calls "the legitimacy of the modern age."

This bears looking into. I think this will inadvertently confirm the incomparable greatness of Baruch Spinoza.

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy

"Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer" (1989)
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.; Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab; Ashland, Oregon, USA.

Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy was an object of attack in Gardner's (Fads and Fallacies) in the Name of Science. This is one illustration of the demarcation problem, i.e. distinguishing criteria between science and pseudoscience, a problem about which Gardner attempted to generalize, though I don't think that this can be adequately accomplished as a formal matter. As I recall, Gardner speculated whether the early Reich--the Marxist psychoanalyst and author of such notable works as The Mass Psychology of Fascism--was as discreditable as the later Reich who initiated orgonomy as a research programme. This particular twist is symptomatic of the inadequate treatment of the demarcation problem, as the field of psychoanalysis was doubly politicized as a putative science--in its orthodox Freudian and various heterodox incarnations. The earlier Reich was emphatically not a crackpot, but the criteria for judging the validity of his theories at that time may not be so straightforward as what is taken to be scientific method in the physical sciences. What constitutes deviant professional behavior in the cases of psychoanalysis and orgonomy may not be the same sort of thing. There are two dimensions to such evaluation: (1) how seriously the theory in question can be taken, given our background of scientific knowledge at some historical moment; (2) whether the pursuit of research outside accepted channels is an indicator of a pseudoscientific enterprise. We can attempt to formulate some general criteria as to what constitutes crank science, but actually, we have to approach specific cases from the standpoint not of formal criteria but of specific real-world knowledge.

For my own take on Reich, see my essay:

The Late Vitalism of Wilhelm Reich: Commentary

We may also ask now whether James DeMeo has a valid complaint or whether he is a crackpot. The author claims he rigorously follows the scientific method, and that the body of research he cites has been marginalized by the scientific community in a politicized context. DeMeo writes more or less in the style of a rational person, but whether he exhibits paranoia or a persecution complex (another reasonable interpretation) demands that we have a prior sense of both legitimate science and the scientific community.

DeMeo has a bone to pick with both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, later absorbed into the Center for Free Inquiry) and Martin Gardner. DeMeo complains about smear tactics and censorship for being denied a forum. He complains that CSICOP violates its own stated principles. He establishes that he has scientific credentials but emphasizes that Gardner has none. The immediate occasion for irritation with Gardner is Gardner's article:

"Reich the Rainmaker: the Orgone Obsession", Skeptical Inquirer, 13 (1): 26-30, Fall 1988.

There is a history that begins with Gardner's article:

"The Hermit Scientist", Antioch Review, Winter 1950-1951, pp. 447-457.

There is one charge that is more serious:

Gardner's first attack against Reich appeared in the Antioch Review of 1950, though he was then more restrained in his linguistic distortions and vituperation. In 1952 he attacked Reich, with similar clever wit and fervor, in a chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. His articles helped fuel the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) pseudo-investigation, which has since been demonstrated, through at least three different Freedom-Of-Information-Act searches of FDA files, to have been conducted in a most shabby, antiscientific "get Reich" manner.

One would have to look over the FDA files to ascertain whether in fact Gardner effectively contributed to the persecution of Reich, which led not only to his imprisonment but to an unprecedent government-instigated book-burning.

Whether or not Gardner in any way distorted Reich's claims, there are additional issues raised here. In addition to the nutty alternative science, there are philosophical arguments. DeMeo denies that orgonomy is a religion and reiterates Reich's war on all "mysticism," in which natural science as we know it is also implicated. DeMeo purports to find the root of Gardner's hostility in his own dualistic world view, in which Gardner affirms, sans attempt to justify himself rationally, his own theism. Now while this is indeed a noteworthy point upon which to dwell, DeMeo, following Reich, claims to have surmounted the dualism that plagues the modern world.

Here's a fragment of the metaphysical justification for Reichian science:

[. . .] Reich's functional, bioenergetic works stand in clear opposition to both a dead, machine-like universe, and a dualistic, "spirit-versus-flesh" anthropomorphic deity. Indeed, Reich argued persuasively that the mechanistic-mystical world view was the result of a perceptive splitting-off of organic sense functions, caused by the chronic damming-up of emotional-sexual energy within the body of the observer. For these reasons, he argued, animistic peoples, who lived a more vibrant and uninhibited emotional and sexual life, and who consequently remained relatively free of neuroses, could feel, with their sense organs, the tangible energetic forces which shaped and created the universe.

It gets worse. See for yourself.

Now before I add my own generalizations, I must point out that others have accused the orgonomy advocates themselves of falsifying Reich's legacy by altering his earlier Marxist psychoanalytical writings in accord with his later orgonomy.

A few conclusions of my own, some of which are explicated in my essay noted above:

(1) Taken all together, this is a nutcase alternate "scientific" world-picture, false not only in theoretical or empirical particulars but false as a total package in light of accumulated scientific knowledge, not to mention the tacit background assumptions of methodological naturalism and experimental replicability.

(2) Part of DeMeo's essay reads like scientific experimental empiricism, but if you read some of Reich's own reflections on experimental research, there is indeed a regression to animism in violation of the canons of experimental procedure. (I.e. a certain kind of personal vibe skews results.)

(3) Furthermore, in spite of the eschewing of "mysticism" and affirmation of naturalism, all of Reich's late writings are imbued with a metaphysics which indeed reads like mysticism. Reich's quest to overcome the alienated, fragmented experience of life in the modern world is derailed by a pseudoscientific, illegitimate holism.

(4) While accusing Gardner of harboring an implicit dualism, DeMeo himself vacillates between empiricism and metaphysics in his characterization of his own scientific claims and of the scientific community allegedly engaged in a conspiracy of silence against him.

Gardner, whether wearing the hat of methodological naturalist or theist-in-hiding, was simply not up to the philosophical task of analyzing the tragic turn in Reich's intellectual preoccupations. He was as incapable of profound analysis of ideology as the rest of the secular humanist/skeptical movement, which of course never sees itself as ideological. These folks can spot what's obviously pseudoscientific (unless it concerns memes, evolutionary economics, human sociobiology or some other pet non-paranormal pseudoscience of their own) in fringe science, but to delve beneath the surface, that's not their forte.

Descartes’ Bones (1)

Shorto, Russell. Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

There is a web site for this book: Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto.

This has got some important material on it, including an excerpt, a gallery of images, and a reader's guide. Some of the questions asked of the reader are more fruitful than others, and deeper questions could be added.

There is also a link to Shorto's YouTube video, or you can access the video at YouTube itself.

See also the publisher's page at Random House.

Naturally reviews can be found in innumerable places, but here's one from The New York Times Book Review:

Body of Knowledge By GARY ROSEN (October 31, 2008).

And behold: "Gary Rosen is the chief external affairs officer of the John Templeton Foundation." This speaks volumes about the integrity of the newspaper of record. Naturally, the gambit here is to dampen the conflict between science and religion by adopting a middle-of-the-road position that purports to make friends with everyone.

And this position is not far from Shorto's own:

LEAPING INTO THE POST-BUSH WORLD
By Julie Phillips. Amsterdam Weekly,6-12 November 2008.
"After eight years of warring fundamentalisms, Russell Shorto says in his new book,
Descartes Bones, it’s time for something new."

The bankruptcy of contemporary thought is multiply worse than the end-of-ideology ideology of the 1950s, predicated on liberal premises, for this manifestation of "moderation" is fundamentally right-wing. Calling people extremists for vehemently opposing extremists ultimately pulls everything to the right, and moderation becomes timidly mitigating the right-wing extremism while capitulating to it. To defame the "new atheists" (a fake journalistic moniker) as extremists, and also to claim that both Obama and McCain represent a move away from fundamentalism: how shamelessly idiotic can you be? This is what today's right-wing liberal pundits posit as a transcendence of dichotomies. It's too disgusting for words.

We learn also that Shorto is a lapsed Catholic, and that his rebellion against his upbringing is related to his preoccupation with the chasm between faith and reason. This issue also contains an excerpt from the book.

The book itself does not seem to be so vacuous, though one must be alert to spin. It can be classified in what seems to be a growing genre of popular philosophical biography, much of it produced by serious scholars. Examples of this genre are Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (my favorite), Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (another favorite) and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, Steven Nadler's The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil, and Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers and Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Such books take off from a relationship (often antagonistic) between two thinkers, or a specific incident or problem, or a particular thinker, perhaps with respect to a particular question.

This book begins with an account of Shorto's visit to the Musée de l‘homme, where he gets to see Descartes' skull. Then Shorto flash's back to the beginning of his quest. For him, as well as others, Descartes is the intellectual fount of modernity, which has recently come under attack from the right and the postmodern left. The conflict of faith and reason belongs to our time as well as Descartes'. The "new atheists" are cited here. (xviii) As the fate of Descartes' remains shows, Descartes has been appropriated by left and right. The basis for the right's interest is Cartesian mind-body dualism, the mind or soul being untouchable by materialistic science. Shorto follows Anglican cleric Colin Slee in positing a contemporary three-way split: fundamentalist religionists, fundamentalist secularists, and religious liberals. (xix)

Such is the preface and the shallow middle-of-the-road journalistic approach to ideas and politics. It's an unwitting piece of evidence for the contention that religious moderates pave the way for religious right-wing extremists, an argument that can be extended to politics in general, though today's atheist liberals would probably not understand this.

Chapter 1 gets down to the actual history. The story starts with Descartes on his deathbed. Descartes protests against proposed medical remedies for his soon-to-be-fatal condition. Here we find an interesting, underappreciated facet of the Enlightenment and scientific revolution: The new skeptical attitude was also applied to an inherited body of medical pseudoscience. Materialistic medicine, based on the soon-to-be-established mechanical world view, is something taken for granted (by its critics as well as by its other beneficiaries), but physical medicine was inseparable from religion in Descartes' day; prayer was an integral to treatment as medicaments. (8) Since this is by no means a relic of the past, Shorto wonders what makes the modern modern. He wonders whether the divide between the material and the spiritual is wrong. (9)

Again, the shallow editorializing. However, we shall see what we can learn from the historical account as the book proceeds.

Scientism of the Gaps & the ‘Two Cultures’

See also my original post on the Freethought Forum with a series of responses.

Written 1 January 2007:

It is essential to note that both pseudoscience under the aegis of legit science and pseudo-science or anti-science under the aegis of supernaturalism both rely on scientism and illicit projections based on gaps. Scientism is a disputed term, but here I am using it to mean a quasi-ritualistic aping of the methods of science in misapplication to an object of inquiry. Because there are always gaps in knowledge, these gaps are exploited to provide pseudo-explanations or denials of the scientific explicability of phenomena. The mirror-image of “Intelligent Design” is the pseudoscience of Dawkins’s memes. All of modern society is trapped in irreconcilable dualisms. A culture capable of generating the one in a scientific age invariably must generate its complement. Over a century and a half of philosophy and broader intellectual currents can be mapped as a competition and vacillation between the currents variously nameable as positivism (scientism) vs. irrationalism (Romanticism).

The religious Right represents one wing of reversion to irrationalism, its power in the USA derived from the decline of liberalism in the 1970s. The liberal wing of irrationalism (misconstrued by its opponents and many of its proponents as radicalism) is vaguely characterizable under the umbrella term of postmodernism, whose intellectual roots are derived from the political Right but have undergone political mutations in the course of their development. The ascendany of this tendency is concommitant with and derives from the same social conditions as the New Right. The attack of the postmodernist wing on rationality and science should be considered as much an assault on secularism and atheism as the attack of the religious Right, and in spite of the mutual cultural and political hostility of these two camps, the postmodernist assault on science serves the cause of the new fascism.

Meera Nanda has documented the problem in relation to India:

Meera Nanda Online

For those who can brave the waters of philosophy and intellectual history, my study guide provides a number of sources for exploring this dichotomy:

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

A more easily digestible approach to the problem can be found in C.P. Snow’s 1959 initiation of a debate on the “two cultures”:

The Two Cultures: C.P. Snow, Literature and Science

The ‘two cultures’ problem plagues us today: specialization and fragmentation allow educated people to remain ignorant of huge swaths of information needed to make sense of our world. Dennett, who is a professional philosopher, ought to know better, but philosophy is as divided as everything else, and Anglo-American philosophy is particularly narrow and provincial. Dawkins is an ignoramus outside of evolutionary theory, and he has impermissibly extended his knowledge by instigating the pseudoscience of memes, an illegitimate metaphorical extension of notions from genetics and natural selection to the cultural/social/ideological sphere. This is a repetition of the nonsense to which the new evolutionism was put in the second half of the 19th century.

Just as there is a god of the gaps, there is a pseudoscience of the gaps, which can be tailored to naturalistic and well as supernaturalistic world views. A naive conception of how science can be applied as a universal method, especially to social and cultural phenomena, constitutes scientism, or the fetishistic application of scientific methods and notions to an object of investigation without comprehension of how the two match up.

Sam Harris presents us with a somewhat different version of the problem. First, he presents a new twist, making ridiculous claims for Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, and similar New Age nonsense. Secondly, freaked out by 9–11, he purports to explain social behavior merely as an effect of belief, rendering an understanding of the springs of behavior in both the Islamic world and in our society impossible. Thirdly, he is so politically and sociologically naive that pernicious consequences flow from his public interventions. Harris himself amalgamates aspects of the two cultures, with the New Age gloss, but as he has no basis for explaining social, cultural, and ideological phenomena, he ends up doing as much harm as good.

Missing in all of this is a huge range of possible contributions from social theory, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, history, and the full range of philosophical traditions, along with the crucial concept of ideology. Where are the representatives of these domains of expertise in the secular humanist, atheist, freethought, and skeptical communities? How is that the two cultures are somehow segmented such that activist atheists and secular humanists seem to be conversant only with one of these two cultures, both on the production and consumption ends of the culture industry?