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David M's Reviews > For Marx
For Marx (Radical Thinkers)
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Gadamer was not claiming hermeneutics as a science. Just the opposite, he was affirming that it's profoundly misguided to ever expect to find a 'science' of human meaning along the lines of the physical sciences.
By contrast, Althusser is extremely insistent that Marxism is a science. What exactly does he mean by that? At least in this collection he has rather little to say about the actual content of Marxism - history, the economy, the workers' movement, etc. He seems to define 'science' in totally formal, non-empirical terms. Somewhat like Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; but then Kuhn's great book did serious damage to the prestige of science, for suggesting science was more a series of semi-random mutations than cumulative progress towards the truth. Althusser appears to have a similar conception. However, he then wants to have it both ways by insisting on the absolute sanctity of the precious 'epistemological break' in Marx's writing; that is, the point at which Marx passed from ideology to science.
Anyway, my own feeling is that Marxism doesn't stand or fall with being a science. If you do claim it as a science you're setting yourself up to have it called a pseudo-science or one that's already been falsified. Obviously much that Marx wrote did not come to pass in exactly the manner he thought it would. And yet he was probably the greatest western thinker to ever attempt a global critique of capitalism. Given that capitalism surely remains the chief adversary of humanity in the 21st century, his continued relevance should be obvious.
However, I'm not sure the same can be said of Althusser. I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it to other philosophy nerds, but that's about it. Althusser's concerns seem quite remote from our present situation.
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'Each science, as science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.' - Gadamer, Truth and Method
'If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feels like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling that there was a time when this "solution" had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too.'- Wittgenstein, stray remarks
Gadamer was not claiming hermeneutics as a science. Just the opposite, he was affirming that it's profoundly misguided to ever expect to find a 'science' of human meaning along the lines of the physical sciences.
By contrast, Althusser is extremely insistent that Marxism is a science. What exactly does he mean by that? At least in this collection he has rather little to say about the actual content of Marxism - history, the economy, the workers' movement, etc. He seems to define 'science' in totally formal, non-empirical terms. Somewhat like Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; but then Kuhn's great book did serious damage to the prestige of science, for suggesting science was more a series of semi-random mutations than cumulative progress towards the truth. Althusser appears to have a similar conception. However, he then wants to have it both ways by insisting on the absolute sanctity of the precious 'epistemological break' in Marx's writing; that is, the point at which Marx passed from ideology to science.
Anyway, my own feeling is that Marxism doesn't stand or fall with being a science. If you do claim it as a science you're setting yourself up to have it called a pseudo-science or one that's already been falsified. Obviously much that Marx wrote did not come to pass in exactly the manner he thought it would. And yet he was probably the greatest western thinker to ever attempt a global critique of capitalism. Given that capitalism surely remains the chief adversary of humanity in the 21st century, his continued relevance should be obvious.
However, I'm not sure the same can be said of Althusser. I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it to other philosophy nerds, but that's about it. Althusser's concerns seem quite remote from our present situation.
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January 26, 2017
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January 26, 2017
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January 26, 2017
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I think we desperately need to redistribute the wealth of our species. Potentially, if we get our act together, this could mean a few fairly modest reforms.