Chris asks:
"You acknowledge that who you are as a person is very much shaped by, in the
traditional Marxist sense, the socio-economic and historical location of your
birth. That you would not be RPW if you had been born in a middle age monastery, and the
development of your psycho-dynamic processes would take on new forms and
directions in different historical moments. But, it seems to me that Kant is
making an alternative argument that no matter where you were born you would have
the same forms of intuition, categories of thought, and in general the same
mental apparatus with the same 'understanding' as someone in the past, present,
and future. How do you philosophically walk the line, so to speak, between
Kantian transcendental subjectivity, and Marxist socio-subjectivity, i.e., it is
not the consciousness of men that determines their social life, but their social
life that determines their consciousness?"
Ah, well you may ask, grasshopper. As it happens, I was crafting a portion of one of my Mannheim lectures in my head as I walked this morning in freezing temperatures, and the subject was precisely this question that Chris raises!
My simple answer is that although I will, to my dying day, feel a deep connection with Kant, nevertheless I think Marx is right -- not about the basic forms of sensibility and understanding as they are employed by physicists in their study of the physical universe, but about the forms of sensibility all of us [physicists included] use as we interpret and strive to comprehend the social world. The focus of my little lecture-in-my-head was the ideological encoding of our experience of space and time themselves. In my third lecture [probably] I shall expound Mannheim's brilliant explication of the ideological structure of time-consciousness [as opposed to what is in time], followed by my [rather less brilliant] attempt to extend the analysis to space-consciousness as well. I have not yet attempted an ideological analysis of the Categories [Kant's Pure Concepts of Understanding] in their social application, but that would indeed be a challenging undertaking.
So, my short answer to Chris is, Wait for it!
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1 comment:
Cool looking forward. I don't have time to do your whole class, but I'll 'attend' that portion.
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