I am afraid I completely failed to make clear the point of
my little story about looking into investing in rental real
estate. The comments indicate that it
was read as an account of a personal moral struggle about what to do with some
extra money, but that was not at all what I was writing about. I was trying to illustrate and explain, by a
homely unassuming example, Marx’s deep insight into the ideological
mystifications of capitalism, and thereby to explain why the neo-Ricardian physical
quantities model of a capitalist economy is inadequate. I could have ascended into the philosophical stratosphere
and talked impressively about false consciousness and rationalization and
objectification and a class for itself as opposed to a class in itself, which
would have made everyone feel that something of high seriousness was being
interrogated but would have left everyone as ignorant as before. Instead, I told a story about an experience
in which I was drawn slowly to give up my normal human response to a house or
apartment building and instead began to think as a capitalist.
Oh well. One can but
try.
Not to worry. Some people got the point, which is very well taken. Can't please everyone.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting it and making it public.
BTW, I posted the installments as they appeared at Mike Norman Economics.
BTW, See this post by Robert Vienneau on different readings of Sraffa.
You have succeeded! Thank you for these very astute and engaging posts.
ReplyDeleteI understood the point that you were making and I'd wager that the others who commented did too. Instead of responding to your main point, we started a tangential discussion. This is a blog, not a classroom: none of us feel obliged to answer your principle point in order to get a better grade.
ReplyDeleteFYI:
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to understand how Columbus, his crew, and subsequent European invaders straight on through to empire building following the adoption of the US Constitution and on into current US imperialism could flow from a search for gold and metaphorically today as a search for gold. I had cut and pasted the 3 implications into a collection of ideas related to this. Under this entry I wrote the note, "RPW - "the encoding of culture."
The philosophical stratosphere .. that's a long way to ascend.
ReplyDeleteI was just reading, for example, about the experience of ethical responsibility, which is initiated by the encounter with the face of the other. And I suppose one can be serious, up there in the philosophical stratosphere, about the non-phenomenal invasion of the infinite beyond history into the finite field of ontology and politics. Then it is good, I suppose, that Levinas provides a phenomenological description of vision in which he explains that light illuminates a physical space before our eyes and reveals to us the plurality of objects in the world. “Light conditions,” he says, “the relations between data; it makes possible the signification of objects that border one another.” But also, there is a “connection between vision and touch, between representation and labor,” from which “Vision moves into grasp.” And furthermore, “Vision opens upon a perspective, upon a horizon, and describes a traversable distance, invites the hand to movement and to contact, and ensures them,” but “Vision is not transcendence. It ascribes a signification by the relation it makes possible. It opens nothing that, beyond the same, would be absolutely other, that is, in itself.” Well, okay, but how does the epiphany as a face determine a relationship different from that which characterizes all our sensible experience? I'm kidding, but take it as you will. Maybe the reply is that the face is a moment of the infinite, a manifestation of transcendence, which is identified by the manifestation of language or speech and which exceeds the finitude of ontological totality. But this is not in Levinas words. “The harsh law of war, breaks up not against an impotent subjectivism cut off from being, but against the infinite, more objective than objectivity.” Maybe I'm confused about the harsh law of war -- is this the historical cycle of ontology? I'm kidding, but take it as you will. Maybe the answer, then, is 'yes', and also, from the infinite, which exists outside totality and thus beyond and independent of ontology, language ruptures the ontological plane and radically interrupts the subject’s phenomenological experience of the plane of being which light has illuminated. But this is not Levinas words. “Language is perhaps to be defined as the very power to break the continuity of being in history,” since “discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent.” Or as Levinas argues in “Ethics and Spirit,” “Speaking and hearing become one rather than succeed one another. Speaking therefore institutes the moral relationship of equality and consequently recognizes justice. Even when one speaks to a slave, one speaks to an equal.” And do I get it? Objects do not speak – people do. It is thus from the infinite that language and ethics manifest themselves within ontology. Do I get it? Sure -- language and ethics, those metaphysical Siamese twins. I'm kidding, but take it as you will. My goal isn't to get it, my goal is to be young again.