[Marxism] Re: Enlightenment?

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Totten" <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "A-List" <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 11:31 PM
Subject: [A-List] Ideas: Beyond Good and Evil


The neo-cons' favourite philosophy had a distinctly seamy side
by John Gray
New Statesman (June 19 2006)
Bill Totten quotes John Gray:

"The Enlightenment also produced some great sceptical thinkers,
however. David Hume had no hopes of humanity ever being ruled by
reason. A genial and tolerant soul..."

I would continue:

... he attributed the 1641 native uprising against the Ulster
plantation of 1608 to the superstitious religion of the natives.

I wrote in *Deals and Ideals*:

"The deference to the passions, and the demotion of reason from its
former gubernatorial role to the ministerial one of suggesting means
to satisfying the passions, is characteristic of the bourgeois
Anglo-French enlightenment; Hume theorised that practice in the
defiant phrase "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the
passions". Hume's anti-Aristotelian empiricist concept of reason,
greatly influenced by his reading of Sextus Empiricus, leads him to
the conclusion that reason can see no (essential) difference between
on the one side parricide in the plant sphere (the sapling growing up
to kill the parent tree) and incest in the animal sphere, and on the
other parricide and incest among humans. Such a position is not just
"cold, strained and ridiculous," but insane. One might almost say that
it would not be wise to follow David Hume seen carrying an axe into
the woods, since he does not know the difference between a tree and a
human being."

While scepticism about reason in general is insane, there is of course
a healthy degree of scepticism about our "actually existing"
beliefs -- recognition of their relativity and fallibility. And about
no belief is this more true than the bourgeois Fukuyama-style belief
in bourgeois progress towards peaceful civilisation.

But I would question the liberalism behind John Gray's Isaiah
Berlin-style aetiology of the Jacobin "Terror" and "state terror in
the Soviet Union and Maoist China... produced by the utopian character
of communism...." They were produced by global and local class
conflict.


James Daly






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