Alt Text

HomeTimelineSearch
Show parent replies
willow
i'm more pissed the more attention i pay to each citation aaaaaaa
Ideology and suffering: What is realistic about critical theory? Amadeus Ulrich Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ga24rc5elx4dz6jdk6ztsc3w/post/3lsj5vo5cxc27 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14748851251351782
1quote
willow
i've made it clear in the past i don't really like williams, and the more williams-inspo the realist, the worse off they are for it
willowDec 13, 2024
like he usually has something somewhat valuable (and novel for the time even ?) that can be wrenched from his work but god its such a slog and there's so much nonsense to clear out of the way
willow
so yea, i actually think a critique of the new radical realists, in conversation with adorno and guess, is a great idea (sorry enzo, you are kind of a positivist sometimes). unfortunately it's not that, because he tries to lump geuss in with the new guys.
willow
gonna start with the messiest thing that doesn't support my thesis because i'm swag like that and its stuck in my teeth.
ulrich, pg 4 It should be mentioned at this juncture that Adorno’s moral scepticism is also tied to the claim that capitalist patterns of production and exchange infiltrate our lives in such a way that moral thought and practice are precarious. It is, as he famously said, impossible to live rightly in the wrong life. However, for him, the blockage of correct moral thought and practice, this epistemic uncertainty is itself a moral wrong since it makes suffering and human coldness persist (see Adorno, 1998a [1966]; Freyenhagen, 2013: 65, 94, 168). Radical realists come close to saying this and yet they cannot say it. But if correct moral reflection is currently impossible or at least hazardous, what they might really be asking for is the emergence of conditions under which it would finally become possible, thereby conceding that morality matters.
willow
i generally actually really like this train of thought, and buy the central negative premise. however, i think it's a bit too optimistic about what morality can do for us "after the revolution", as it were.
fabian freyenhagen, adorno's practical philosophy: living less wrongly, pg 92 What is clear from these considerations is that Adorno is not claiming that there are no longer moral demands, but, rather, that many of these demands cannot be realised any more by individuals. In fact, the explanation of why the individuals cannot live a moral life any more relies on the discrepancy between what is morally demanded (changing the social world) and what the individuals are capable of (limited forms of resistance to it). To change our current social conditions of unfreedom is a moral demand first of all because this unfreedom undermines individual autonomy and morality, so that a change of society is in fact the necessary condition for morality to become actual.71 In this sense, the demand for social change is a moral demand to put in place the conditions of morality, and it is the first and foremost moral demand. For without it, there can be no others. Moreover, changing our social world is not only a moral demand because this would realise the conditions for morality, but also because the current state of unfreedom is characterised by other fundamental evils (see Chapters 1–2). In particular, the modern social world produced Auschwitz. More generally, the current social world produces evil continuously, by undermining our freedom, by relying on depersonalisation and exploitation, by neglecting our material needs, and by causing physical and psychological suffering as well as by leading to political and economic crises with their knock-on effects such as war and racism. In this sense, we can see now why we live in conditions of a moral catastrophe (and why, hence, socially acceptable behaviour is both insufficient and to some extent countermoral). We live in such conditions in the double way just indicated. Firstly, it is presumably morally extremely problematic to live under conditions where morality itself is blocked, when it would be a real possibility to actualise it …
willowDec 3, 2024
adorno, 167-168, problems of moral philosophy differently phrased.' On the question of whether moral philosophy is possible today, the only thing I would be able to say is that essentially it would consist in the attempt to make conscious the critique of moral philosophy, the critique of its options and an awareness of its antinomies. In these lectures I have tried to provide you with something like a model with which to do this. More than this, I believe, cannot in all decency be promised. Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest. I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness - rather than covering it up with sticking plaster - will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good lite today would consist in resistance to the forms 168 of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged. I may add that, negative though this assertion is, it can hardly be much more formal than the Kantian injunction that we have been discussing during this semester. So what I have in mind is the determinate negation of everything that has been seen through, and thus the ability to focus upon the power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us to a vastly greater degree. Little else remains …
show 1 reply
willow
if it is a moral wrong that morality is not possible today, that is the least of our worries. i want the emergence of conditions where morality is possible, so that we can finally realize it is not necessary (or rather, that it is no longer necessary :). also, obligatory:
willowOct 5, 2024
freyenhagen is correct if you don't interpret him incredibly stupidly.
willow
now for the juicy stuff: these geuss citations are criminal! i'll show off my favorites.
willow
how is this possibly your read! "without any coercion"?? "work out freely"?? why are u like this sob. within your own cited passage he refutes your attribution. like cmon bro we've all read foucault how are you still on this shit
amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 12 This brings me to a third challenge. It again begins with the question of why it matters that people can work out freely how to structure their social and political lives without getting, as Geuss (2010) frames it, ‘caught up in the web of powerful fantasies which our society spins around us’ (x). Human beings should not be subjected, as this seems to imply, to fabricated realities, but should be lifted to a position from which they can make up their minds, without any coercion, about how society does and can work.
raymond geuss, politics and the imagination, preface, x Most of the beliefs, attitudes, desires, and values we hold, after all, we have acquired in social contexts in response to individual and institutional forces and pressures of various kinds. There is every reason to believe that I (and we) share the illusions of our epoch as much as the men of the Roman republic or medieval nuns or sixteenth-century Calvinist preachers shared those of their respective times and places. If the Cartesian project of setting aside everything we know and value, and starting ab nihilo to build up our views about the world on a certain and incontrovertible base that owes nothing to social conventions, is unworkable, to what extent is it possible for us to free ourselves from our own illusions and work our way to a realistic, or at least a more realistic, worldview? Effective engagement in the political sphere requires not merely that we see how things really stand, but also that we understand, and perhaps even to some extent sympathize with, the way in which others see them, even if they are deluded, and we know that they are deluded. How is it possible to be realistic without getting caught up in the web of powerful fantasies which our society spins around us? How can one get the appropriate imaginative distance from one’s own society, its practices, norms, and conceptions? What is the “appropriate” distance? “Appropriate” in what sense; for what? What are the possibilities, and what the limits of criticism?
raymond geuss, who needs a world view, preface, xv-xvi Whatever unity our drives, impulses, projects, beliefs, and commitments have is one that we have constructed. This construction is one to which we have a strong tendency and perhaps a deep commitment—a commitment so deep that it generates an illusion of necessity and, perhaps, even of the ontological preexistence of what it seeks—but to what extent it can succeed is always an open question, subject to the vagaries of the world and the accidents of history. So the question should be how the construction should proceed, which constructions are possible and desirable, at what cost, and under what social and individual circumstances. Human life is the story of this recurrent need to orient ourselves toward some imagined unity, and the recurrent failure of our attempts to achieve it by construction. Seeing through this cycle no more prevents the illusion from recurring than eating breakfast prevents the recurrence of hunger in the evening.
willow
similar thing here, like this is a good point to make against new realists but its framed as an internal contradiction for rad realism in general, not like a reminder that geuss got it right the first time.
amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 12 Such pre-epistemic premises might indeed drive the social analysis of radical realists without being made explicit. The criteria of selection and relevance that shape the lens through which they look at practices of self-justification and epistemic disruption in capitalist, racist and patriarchal contexts remain somewhat unclear. Take their endorsement of prefigurative politics, which is supposed to be ‘less likely to be subject to ideological distortions’ (Rossi, 2019: 647), since prefigurative agents withdraw from the belief structures of societies and create situations in which pervasive forms of distortion are no longer present. Even if this is true, and it might be, a problem with this affirmative stance towards prefigurative strategies is that it does not take sufficient heed of the moral commitments that inspire them. In 1994, when NAFTA was enacted, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico framed their fight to overcome capitalist oppression as an uprising of dignity, calling it a struggle against ‘la falta de respeto’ that Indigenous people had to endure for centuries and for a right to live as equals in a pluralistic world (see Dussel, 2007; Mignolo, 2002). Or take the Occupy movement, which sprang from widespread outrage over the anti-democratic effects of extreme economic inequality and was motivated by the desire, as John Hammond (2015) puts it, to ‘transform social values to favor human relations over financial transactions’ (289). Radical realists surely believe that such movements fight laudably for important causes. Why not acknowledge this? Otherwise, they contribute only partially to the self-clarification of the prefigurative struggles of our age, neglecting their real motivations and the very point of their practice of resistance. This omission matters since a central ambition of the realist countermovement is to take into account ‘what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances’ (Geuss, 2008…
show 1 reply
willow
this is a side thing but i do think it's cute how the only other time guess uses "powerful fantasies" is when he's talking about rorty's murderous father in the same work. i'd like to think this was intentional
raymond geuss, politics and the imagination, richard rorty at princeton, 159 As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick’s turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Constructing Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, cruelty, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion. On the other hand, I found that he also enjoyed a spot of jokey leftist-baiting when he thought I was adopting knee-jerk positions which he held to be ill-founded. That was all fair enough. I tried not to rise to the bait, and usually succeeded, but this did not contribute to making our relation easier or more comfortable for me. The high (or low, depending on one’s perspective) point of this sort of thing occurred sometime in the 1980s when Dick sent me a postcard from Israel telling me he had just been talking with the Israeli official responsible for organizing targeted assassinations of Arab mayors on the West Bank. He closed by saying he thought this was just what the situation required. I often wondered whether in acting in this provocative way he was treating me as he would have liked to have treated his father, a well-known poet and man of the (relatively) hard Left, who eventually, as Dick put it, “became prey to very powerful fantasies on which he was perfectly willing to act”; Dick had to have him institutionalized after some potentially murderous outbreak. Probably by wondering about this I was trying to convince myself that I had an importance in Dick’s imagination that I surely did not have.