The uses and disadvantages of philosophy for life
Since I discovered that there have been philosophical developments since Hume, I’ve tended to be a bit dismissive of analytic philosophy. Compared to philosophy on continental Europe since Hegel (or, which amounts to the same thing, since Napoleon; and the fact that an analogous claim wouldn’t work with anglophone philosophy is, I think, telling), analytic philosophy seems frustratingly and sometimes stupidly remote from political concerns.
But perhaps I’ve been too hasty. It turns out a de re/de dicto confusion can get people killed. Nick Cohen (quoted here by Norman Geras) writes:
Traditional Left-wingers would have regarded Saddam’s totalitarianism and the Taliban’s terror regime as their worst nightmare. They would have shown solidarity with its victims.
Cohen’s right, of course, that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were anathemas to the left (although ‘totalitarianism’ and, even more so, ‘terror regime’ are ideological bullshit). That’s why I seem to recall spending a fair amount of time in the late nineties with my incipient leftist school-friends, despairing at the state of Afghanistan and the way America’s allies had clusterfucked it (respect to Lenin for the use of ‘clusterfuck’ as a verb, BTW), or why so many of my student comrades in CASI and Voices in the Wilderness spent so much time thinking about ways Iraq could be freed of Saddam Hussein.
So it’s odd that Cohen implies that the anti-war left did not show solidarity with the victims of these regimes. Of course we did: what differentiates us from Cohen and Geras is that we didn’t stop showing solidarity with them when they ceased to fall under that description and instead became victims of America or the UK.
Original article (including comments)
No comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.