Re: BHA: Delivered up to the world

[Heikki Patomaki <user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1. Even if Adorno may lack explanation of occultism in
other times and places, his explanation about the tendency
towards occultism *in capitalism* may be entirely correct.
To think otherwise would be to commit ignorantia
elenchi fallacy.

2. There are internal connections between positivism and
capitalism, so there may be good reasons to think that in
capitalism -- with its tendentially positivist and skeptical
(in fact both in Humean and Nietzschean senses) modes
of thought -- occultism and spiritualism are especially
in need of explanation.

3. The points above of course presuppose that occultism
and spiritualism are explainable in social psychological
and social scientific terms. I think critical realists can
accept that not only false beliefs but also possibly
correct beliefs have geohistorical determinations,
so EVEN IF we thought occultism and spiritualism
have something to them, they should be seen as
explainable.


		Heikki


>>Mervyn wrote:
>>***
>>Theodor Adorno speaks of the tendency towards occultism or spiritualism
>>in late capitalism - a system with a 'veiled tendency ... towards
>>disaster' - as a symptom of a general 'regression in consciousness' and
>>as 'an unconscious projection of a subject decomposing historically if
>>not clinically'.
>
>How I wonder would Adorno have accounted for the tendency towards occultism
>in say the slave mode of production?  or feudalism? or mercantilism? or
>"non-late" capitalism?
>
>Deeply puzzled
>
>
>Gary



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