Marx and Keynes in Berlin
Michael Roberts
The Conversation
Karl Marx: ten things to read if you want to understand him
James Muldoon, Lecturer in Political Science, University of Exeter
and Robert Jackson, Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University
Bloomberg
Remember Marx for How Much He Got Wrong
and Robert Jackson, Lecturer in Politics, Manchester Metropolitan University
Negative.
Remember Marx for How Much He Got Wrong
Noah Smith, Contributor
Understanding Karl Marx
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley
Neutral
From Marx to Marxism: Histories of an Idea
An Interview with Gregory Claeys by Ophélie Siméon
4 comments:
Brad DeLong blames Hegel for Marx getting wrapped up in metaphysics. Carl Jung had scintillating intelligence but he couldn't get to grips with Hegel. Hegel went over most academics heads and some even accused Hegel of being a bluffer, or a bullshitter. By wrapping up his philosophy in such intellectualism which no one could understand he could get away with being considered one of the world's most leading philosophers, they said, but it was a bluff. Fortunately, there were those who did understand his writings and they said Hegel was truly a genius.
Hegel went over most academics heads and some even accused Hegel of being a bluffer, or a bullshitter. By wrapping up his philosophy in such intellectualism which no one could understand he could get away with being considered one of the world's most leading philosophers, they said, but it was a bluff.
That's the Anglo-American POV. But those familiar with the German and French intellectual traditions realize that the intellectual capacity of the Anglo-Americans is puny by comparison.
For instance, In Germany, the curriculum comparable to US high school induced learning calculus and reading Kant in the original. Or at least it used to be. I don't know about now. But that was seldom the case in the US.
When Anglos complain about putative European "intellectualism," they betray their own biases and lack of accomplishment.
This is true even of Noam Chomsky, who belittled Derrida for French "intellectualism" that was incoherent to him.
What got me was how much Carl Jung hated Hegel. Professor Sean Kelly said he had trouble understanding it. Sean Kelly wrote the brilliant book, Individuation and the Absolute, Hegel, Jung, and the path to wholeness, where he outlined the similarities between Jungian thought and Hegel.
When I read the book I was in the Quakers who are post Christian. I had spent a year in an evangelical Church and I really didn't like that. I used to also go to my local Buddhist centre for yoga and meditation but I found Buddhism to be cold, empty, and sterile. It didn't help much that I was very young and fancied some of the Buddhist women, who looked like hippy girls but they were really celibate nuns.
At the Quakers I discovered Jungian psychology and I was enchanted by it. Carl Jung had reservations about Christianity and Buddhism too, but nowadays I'm much more open towards Buddhism. A lot of the problem was translation, apparently. Dispassionate emptiness, nothingness, blowing out desire and the flame for life, etc, translated badly into English. It isn't as bad as it sounds.
The problem with understanding is approaching everything from the perspective of one's own frame instead of getting into the other's frame and understanding it from that perspective. Then one can critique the other frame from one's own frame.
I learned how to do this as a grad student in philosophy in a program that specialized in the history of philosophy, which meant reading a lot of the greats. I soon learned that the profs were experts in the that area and approached the works in terms of the context in which they were written. If one did not learn how to do that fast, one would get a low mark or even flunk the course.
Most people never learned this and many don't even know it exists, so they assume that everyone is using the same frame, theirs. That leads to a lot of misunderstanding, straw man arguments, and nonsense that results from cognitive-affective bias and leads to more of the same. Then an echo chamber develops and false memes get created and propagated.
Much negative criticism of Marx is on this level for example, and few people have taken the trouble to understand the context in which Hegel was writing. Much more so with Eastern systems such as Buddhism, especially where Westerners don't have the language skills, the historical background and have never practiced Buddhism.
It's sort of like trying to understand quantum mechanics without the math. Now when one sees "quantum" this or "quantum" that, one can be pretty sure its BS. On the other hand, there are differences of opinion and debates among quantum physicists about QM. There is a big difference between the two.
Same with other fields among various experts and schools, for instance. That's why there are ultimate appeals to authority, e.g., SCOTUS in US law, the pope in Roman Catholicism, etc. But these are authorities by stipulation regardless of the rationale.
It's ok to disagree where there is no final authority or in areas where the final authority has not spoken. But one also needs to be qualified.
Reading claims or debates where the parties are not qualified is a waste of time unless one is interested in the breadth of a subject for its own sake.
For example, I put up links to some things that lack merit because of lack of qualification but that is in the interest of understand a context, like that in which MMT is embedded, where it is helpful to understand the objections and their insufficiency.
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