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maury garvey
2 Posts |
 Posted - 06/04/2005 : 17:17:08
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Has anyone else read it? It took me a few years to find a copy of this little booklet. If you are interested a copy so we could discuss it,
e mail me at moandjack@sbcglobal.net
thanks,
Maury
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ivan sayer
2 Posts |
Posted - 08/05/2005 : 20:27:37
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Hi All,
For anybody interested, I replied to Maury thus:-
I'd like to know why this particular paper interests you.
On the one hand, I think he has a point; on the other, I
don't believe a crusade against idealism will bring us
out of our errors.
I'll give you my overall reaction in a para or two,
if you want to proceed to details, we can.
What MacMurray means by 'Idealism' is close to what
Marxists call 'false consciousness' and philosophers
'false apperception'. Unfortunately, since absolutely
all of us are born totally ignorant, 'false consciousness'
is not a simply curable disease. MacMurray tends to talk
here, however, as though 'Idealism' or 'false
consciousness' were, in fact, a curable condition, just
as his Marxist mates talked as though 'capitalism' were
a curable condition. Neither has proved true yet.
The idea that those conditions are curable may itself
be attributable to 'false consciousness' or 'Idealism'.
We have moved far enough down the road to see that his
expectations of Russia were wide of the mark. (Those
who crow about that should remember that it was a
capitalist war that put the Bolsheviks in power in the
first place.) To realize that one is infected with false
consciousness is one thing. To approach doing something
about it is quite another, and he doesn't really discuss
that.
As I said, we have moved further down the road. Our job
isn't so much to build a new world as to stop the guys
who run this one ruining the one we've got. We may not
succeed.
Gilbert Ryle said that MacMurray wrote and spoke too
simply. I think that criticism certainly applies to
this essay. I would also hazard a guess that there
is a fair bit of self-analysis in it - there usually
is in philosophy. Believe it or not 'Cogito ergo
sum' is a licit way of talking about number one.
That'll do me for the moment - if you think I'm raving
you are invited to say so heartily. When it comes to
verbal discussion, I'm a cheerfully 'no-holds-barred'
man.
Regards
Ivan
IKS |
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maury garvey
2 Posts |
Posted - 12/05/2005 : 19:36:53
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Hi Ivan,
What interested me most was this;
"The essence of idealism whether in its popular or in its philosophical form, lies in an emotional attachment to ideas rather than to things. Since the emotional life contains the springs of action, this means that those activities of human life which are concerned with ideas are preferred over those which are concerned with material objects, and are undertaken, encouraged and valued for their own sake. From this root idealism spreads its branches through every department of individual and social life ; and in accepting it, religion confirms and sanctifies it." p.8.IAR
A few weeks after I read this I wrote some of my own reflections that I will share with you in a bit. First, I want to address
'Idealism' or 'false consciousness' as, in fact, a curable condition.
I think Macmurray would say that it is curable, and that it must be cured. I believe Macmurrays' respect for Marx was in Marx's uniting of theory and practice. Any theory or idea that is divorced from practical life is at best practically, or least presently, useless and at worst dangerous.
When Macmurray speaks of "an emotional attachment to ideas rather than to things" I find a place to begin treating the disease for my self. As far as 'Macmurray being simple' maybe he is. As far as 'self-analysis' I think this is true also.
So here is my simple ditty! It came to me in reflecting on this statement : " We will feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but we will not be slaves to them."
Fire, I touch it and I feel pain. I move my hand away. The pain did not take my hand out of the fire, an emotion, one that probably valued less pain more than being burned, provided the motive for my motion away from the fire.
To be a slave to my emotions means to me that my emotions have control over my movements, or my behavior. My emotion might even motivate me to keep my hand in the fire. My emotion might place more value in me being burned and experiencing a great deal of pain. My emotion shows me what is valuable to me -- to burn or not to burn.
My emotions need an education as much as my thoughts. Reflecting on why I value one thing over another; -- because of an advertisement, because mom or dad said so, because culture or religion said so. Reflecting on my emotions can help me learn what is really valuable to me.
Now here is where things get really tricky for me. When I reflect on the difficult times of my life I generally find that -- when I move from anger to rage, when I tend to take it out on someone else, -- there is some 'Idea' about myself, or some 'Idea' about another, or some 'Idea' about our relationship that I insist on defending. I want my 'Idea' to be true and I want to force my 'Idea' to become real and it is not working. I can find myself angry, pissed off, enraged that the way it is supposed to be it is not. Then I find that my 'Idea' of what reality is, or should be, is not matching up with 'Reality'. My 'idea' is not grounded in 'Reality'. It is practically useless.
My trouble comes in when I find myself valuing my 'idea of reality' greater than I value 'the way things really are'.* How long did I stay in a really bad relationship: based on my idea that if I couldn't make it work I would be a failure, that I would be at fault, that I was just stubborn and would not give in enough?
My emotion was attached to the idea of not being a failure -- not that the relationship had already failed. My emotion was attached to the idea that I should not be at fault, that I would be worthless if I was at fault. In reality, whose fault it was was not the problem. As far as not giving in enough my emotion was attached to reality. I would not give in enough to lose myself in the relationship.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well that is my ditty. It is a reflection on my personal life. What I like about Macmurray's philosophy is that it is personal, and that it helps me reflect on how I live my own life and how I interact with others.
I started rereading Macmurray after 9/11. Soon after I read "The Clue to History", and I became fascinated with him all over again. The 'idealism' in the Mideast - pres. bush? I do want to know what is being defended.
I have also been reading all of Thomas L Friedman's books and I believe he is on the same wavelength as Macmurray in his crusade against idealism.
Here is a link to pie in the sky religious idealism that Friedman put me onto from MEMRI.
http://stream.realimpact.net/rihurl.ram?file=realimpact/memri/memri_10-30-02_02.rm
if you are interested in some scary stuff.
* Macmurray said that here is where "The real life of a man becomes the life of the mind, the life of thought and contemplation." p.9. I suppose we could say that this would be the ideal real life of an idealist. But, I think Macmurray would say that this is the root problem of the world; that is, rooting out idealism in ourselves.
maury
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ivansayer
20 Posts |
Posted - 29/06/2005 : 19:18:01
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Hi Maury,
My reactions, for what they are worth, which may be mlle Adams.
>What interested me most was this;
>"The essence of idealism whether in its popular or in its philosophical
>form, lies in an emotional attachment to ideas rather than to things.
>Since the emotional life contains the springs of action, this means that
>those activities of human life which are concerned with ideas are
>preferred over those which are concerned with material objects, and are
>undertaken, encouraged and valued for their own sake. From this root
>idealism spreads its branches through every department of individual
>and social life; and in accepting it, religion confirms and sanctifies
>it." p.8.IAR
Yes, I picked out that sentence too, for several reasons. And, let's
be clear; if it helps you to diagnose your difficulties as is, I'm
not going to tear it to shreds just to prove that I'm king of the
argument hill. If it brings you a clear message which is true and useful,
use it and ignore the logic-choppers.
>A few weeks after I read this I wrote some of my own reflections that
>I will share with you in a bit. First, I want to address 'Idealism' or
>'false consciousness' as, in fact, a curable condition.
>I think Macmurray would say that it is curable, and that it must be cured.
Perhaps I was a little too dogmatic about that - but I did initially say
'not simply curable'. We are talking about serious personal problems,
and, yes, I've had a few. (I spent 40 or so years fighting an anxiety
neurosis that I believe was the result of a near fatal illness I suffered
at the age of 19 months.) And you find that even when you've managed
to kill a few of your own illusions that doesn't necessarily help you
to do anything for anybody else. Curing Idealism may be possible and
necessary - but it's not a piece of cake.
>I believe Macmurrays' respect for Marx was in Marx's uniting of theory
>and practice. Any theory or idea that is divorced from practical life
>is at best practically, or least presently, useless and at worst
>dangerous.
Well, I believe, up to a point, in the unity of theory and practice, but
I'm not prepared to be quite as forthright as that for several reasons.
I notice that Marx himself was one of the least practical men who ever
lived, and that his wife paid a heavy price for marrying so dreamy a
man. She would have paid an even heavier price if Engels hadn't agreed
to subsidize. The principle is so much easier to talk about than live.
MacMurray also talks so much about the relation between theory and
practice that you have to ask, why did he enter and stay with the least
practical profession in the world? (He was tempted, in the '30s, to
give it away, and I actually think that that would have done him good.)
Also, one of my own interests that has survived even my own neuroses is
a passion for simple detail of logic and math. Thinking about
things abstract has often been a way of holding myself on course
when things were going bad. Moreover, it can turn out, by accident, as
it were, to be useful. I once coded a program that a very good teacher
used to bring literacy to an almost totally impotent victim of cerebral
palsy. Sometimes life repays your efforts far more than you deserve.
(And, I should add, one man's theory is another's practicality. The
distinction turns out to have shadows. Like so many grand distinctions
it's perpetually in danger of becoming a mask for 'the stuff I like v
the stuff I don't like'.)
>When Macmurray speaks of "an emotional attachment to ideas rather than
>to things" I find a place to begin treating the disease for my self.
>As far as 'Macmurray being simple' maybe he is. As far as 'self-analysis'
>I think this is true also.
OK, but let's look at the detail.
>So here is my simple ditty! It came to me in reflecting on this statement:
>" We will feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but we
>will not be slaves to them."
>Fire, I touch it and I feel pain. I move my hand away. The pain did not
>take my hand out of the fire, an emotion, one that probably valued less
>pain more than being burned, provided the motive for my motion away from
>the fire.
>To be a slave to my emotions means to me that my emotions have control
>over my movements, or my behavior. My emotion might even motivate me to
>keep my hand in the fire. My emotion might place more value in me being
>burned and experiencing a great deal of pain. My emotion shows me what
>is valuable to me -- to burn or not to burn.
>My emotions need an education as much as my thoughts. Reflecting on why
>I value one thing over another; -- because of an advertisement, because
>mom or dad said so, because culture or religion said so. Reflecting on
>my emotions can help me learn what is really valuable to me.
>Now here is where things get really tricky for me. When I reflect on
>the difficult times of my life I generally find that -- when I move
>from anger to rage, when I tend to take it out on someone else, --
>there is some 'Idea' about myself, or some 'Idea' about another, or
>some 'Idea' about our relationship that I insist on defending. I want
>my 'Idea' to be true and I want to force my 'Idea' to become real and
>it is not working. I can find myself angry, pissed off, enraged that
>the way it is supposed to be it is not. Then I find that my 'Idea' of
>what reality is, or should be, is not matching up with 'Reality'. My
>'idea' is not grounded in 'Reality'. It is practically useless.
>My trouble comes in when I find myself valuing my 'idea of reality'
>greater than I value 'the way things really are'.* How long did I stay
>in a really bad relationship: based on my idea that if I couldn't make
>it work I would be a failure, that I would be at fault, that I was just
>stubborn and would not give in enough?
>My emotion was attached to the idea of not being a failure -- not that
>the relationship had already failed. My emotion was attached to the
>idea that I should not be at fault, that I would be worthless if I was
>at fault. In reality, whose fault it was was not the problem. As far as
>not giving in enough my emotion was attached to reality. I would not
>give in enough to lose myself in the relationship.
I notice that you say your problem was not only that your emotion was
attached to an idea, but also that a) you were enslaved to it and b)
the idea was not in touch with reality. I've no doubt MacMurray had
something like this in mind. However, he doesn't, and nor do you,
discuss the fact that this state has real causes - in my case an early
n.d.e., in your case who knows ? How much does understanding, and where
possible removing, the real causes help ? They may be very different in
different cases. For that reason, there is no 'one size fits all'
cure.
As for losing onesself in a relationship - well, one does that simply
by being born - and then you have to find yourself too. I've seen
people in a mess try to lose themselves and end up in a worse mess.
After all, if you really do lose yourself, it isn't a relationship,
is it ? It takes two selves who know who they are to make a real
relationship. I haven't seen many, but I have seen some. Whether
you can sensibly - and temporarily - lose yourself in a relationship
depends very much on who the other person is and their motives for
wanting you to do that doesn't it ? (We are here talking about
one-one relationships, I take it.) You are not discussing the fact
that idealism can be shared, i.e. can infect relationships.
You can't exactly count MacMurray as an expert on this. On the one
hand his relationship to Betty was the most stable of both their
lives, on the other, he found being a husband to her very difficult
as she found being a wife to him. Exactly how much of the difficulty
was medical and how much personal we will never know. I am inclined
to believe that, tough as he was, and outwardly successful as a
professional, the Great War left him with trauma that lasted a
lifetime. It did the same to Lawrence who didn't even fight.
I may be way off target here, but I never think of John and Betty
in a personal way without remembering Robert Colquohoun - a
character out of L. G. Gibbon's trilogy 'A Scot's Quair'.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Well that is my ditty. It is a reflection on my personal life. What I
>like about Macmurray's philosophy is that it is personal, and that it
>helps me reflect on how I live my own life and how I interact with
>others.
>I started rereading Macmurray after 9/11. Soon after I read "The
>Clue to History", and I became fascinated with him all over again. The
>'idealism' in the Mideast - pres. bush? I do want to know what is
>being defended.
Amen! Bush probably couldn't tell you. If he could, which I doubt, he
would not. And remember - if somebody shoots Bush tomorrow there are
plenty where he came from. You are now taking up arms against a whole
culture which may even have some hooks in you. (My own reaction to
9/11 was, How come it has taken this long ? It was almost as though I
were expecting it. Babel II ?)
>I have also been reading all of Thomas L Friedman's books and I believe
>he is on the same wavelength as Macmurray in his crusade against
>idealism.
>Here is a link to pie in the sky religious idealism that Friedman put
>me onto from MEMRI.
>http://stream.realimpact.net/rihurl.ram?file
>=realimpact/memri/memri_10-30-02_02.rm
>if you are interested in some scary stuff.
Haven't met Friedman yet but I'll look him up. I may also revisit
John Barth's 'Floating Opera'. Scary stuff? - I
was brought up among the pies-in-the-skies. The really scary
stuff is that some of them were lovely people inside the fence,
but the mere thought that the fence might fall put the wind up
them. In the end, of course, I bored my own hole and escaped
and found that fences (fences of ideas) were remarkably popular
- they don't have to be attached to a religion.
>* Macmurray said that here is where "The real life of a man becomes
>the life of the mind, the life of thought and contemplation." p.9. I
>suppose we could say that this would be the ideal real life of an
>idealist. But, I think Macmurray would say that this is the root
>problem of the world; that is, rooting out idealism in ourselves.
He does indeed.
"This, then, is what I mean by idealism, and what I count as the
radical error of our civilization. " (same p.9)
But there is a certain naivete here. To try and tackle a radical
error of our civilization in one lecture is, to say it gently, a
little brash. To do so without qualifications listing the main
issues you won't have time for is lax. This lecture is well worth
a MacMurray reader's time - but it would be idle to pretend that
it was beyond criticism.
There are places where he takes the practical difficulties more
seriously in a less purely intellectual spirit.
"Unfortunately we have our own crooked idea of what human nature
is and of how it ought to shape as it develops. This idea has its
roots in our own experience and in what we are. As a result we
quite sincerely try to make children grow up in our own image; or,
at least in the image of what we ourselves would crookedly like
to be and think we ought to be. But our ideas are hardly less
crooked than ourselves. Matthias Alexander tells a story of a
little girl who was permanently lopsided and who was brought to
him for treatment. After working with her for some time he
managed to get her to walk quite straight. Then he asked her to
walk across to her mother. She walked perfectly straight for the
first time in her life and then, bursting into tears, threw herself
into her mother's arms, crying: 'Oh, Mummy, I'm all crooked!' In
much the same manner we feel straight not when we really are
straight, but when we have become thoroughly accustomed to our own
crookedness; and in the name of uprightness we impose our
crookedness on the children for their own good. "
JM 'Reason And Emotion' Faber & Faber pp. 85,86
Here, JM too realizes that curing idealism is not a piece of cake,
there is no 'one size fits all' solution. Moreover he alludes to
the fact that it can be transmitted.
If you really want a crusade against idealism, you must, in the
end, choose which variety, and go looking for causes - and decide
how much of yourself you want to put into that search.
Cheers
Ivan
You cannot give what you do not have |
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ivansayer
20 Posts |
Posted - 04/07/2005 : 20:52:59
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hi all,
For anyone interested in this essay, if anyone still is, I have a
further observation. MacMurray makes much of the distinction
between ideas and things. Roughly, idealists get hung up on ideas,
while real people worry about things. As a man who spent his life
in the ideas trade, our philosopher should know that that
distinction bites.
The situation I faced say ten years ago, and the promises and
commitments I made may have seemed deeply real at the time
but look now like vague idea, a 'stage I was going through'.
While I am deciding that it's time to be realistic, forget
those ideas and 'move on', somebody else may feel I'm
being disloyal to commitments that they took as real.
There is something odd about a philosopher who professes to
perceive a deep flaw in our civilization through such simply
constructed spectacles.
Ivan
You cannot give what you do not have |
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"Idealism against religion", J. Macmurray
