“The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”
A little while back, k-punk argued against my advocacy of what we might call something like a Marxist hospitality towards religion, or a construal of the Marxist critque of religion which doesn’t amount to a rejection of religion as false. I think our point of disagreement is summed up in Mark’s comment:
If the Marxist critique of religion is not premised on its falsity, it certainly assumes that falsity. The falsity of religion consists precisely in its denial of the claim that it arises from specific material conditions, surely.
It seems to me that Mark’s position here implies a very particular conception of truth, one which I doubt Mark actually holds, but one which it would clarify my position on ideology to think about more thoroughly. To say that Marxism conflicts with religion, and that religion’s basis in particular material conditions thereby demonstrates the falsity of religion, both seem to depend on the idea that there is a singular truth which can be understood as a relation between statements and the world without considering the (various, contingent, historical) frameworks that mediate that relationship. This is the kind of correspondance theory of truth employed by particularly naïve forms of scientific realism. But I think this account of truth is the wrong one for us to use here, for two reasons.
First, I’m not at all sure that religions need to depend on this understanding of truth, in other words that they need to deny that they arise from specific material conditions. Actually, I think it’s pretty much a necessary feature of religions that they don’t; while it’s true that contemporary American Christianity buys into this scientistic account of truth (and some Islamic fundamentalism may do as well, I don’t know enough about contemporary Islam say), that’s precisely not because it’s an essential feature of religion, but because American evangelism is radically confused about the whole concept of religion (and probably heretical, too). Besides, if we interpret Christianity in the sort of truth-functional terms which are natural to modernity, Christianity is just trivially false. It’s not even worth arguing about whether God exists or Jesus rose from the dead if these are meant in the same sense as we would say a chair or table exists; of course religion isn’t true in that sense. If religion is worth critiquing at all, that must involve figuring out how it can make assertions which function in some other way. This is something I’ve never figured out (I’m an atheist more out of bemusement than anything else), but starting with hyperstitial effectiveness seems promising.
Leaving that aside, we clearly cannot accept as Marxists that demonstrating the social basis of a belief thereby demonstrates that it is false. This reminds me of the sad fate of Foucault in American universities, where self-proclaimed Foucauldians spend their time “critiquing” claims by showing that they are outcomes of power relations and thereby false. Of course Foucault said just the opposite, that it is precisely being the result of power relations that makes a statement true; and just as well he did, because otherwise his theory would be self-undermining. Likewise, as far as I can see, Marxism gives us no room to suppose that any belief is not the outcome of particular social relations, and so cannot coherently (or even usefully) hold that identifying the social basis of a belief makes it untrue. Again, hyperstitial effectiveness seems like a better reference than truth. If the truth of Marxism has any special value, it is because Marxism is the ideological side of revolutionary practice. But that doesn’t imply anything either way about the truth of religion; that, instead, will depend on whether or not religious ways of thinking can inform revolutionary struggle.
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I’m really puzzled by what you’re saying here, and having real difficulty distinguishing it from Rortian pragmatism or Wittgensteinian language games or, at best, Nietzscheanism. I must be wrong, but I can’t see any other way of interpreting your line of argument here - help me out..
Not sure you’re taking my central point either…
The problem is not whether or not I accept the correspondence theory of truth, but that believers DO. Now, there are a few, i.e. a very small minority of Don Cupitt-type individuals who accept the social construction of religion, but surely it is uncontroversial to claim that most religious believers really do think that at least some of the things recounted in their holy book really did happen (in the trad correspondence sense). That is not to say that ALL believers accept EVERYTHING in scripture as literally true (yr right that only Fundamentalists would be that positivistic). But redescribing religion’s truth as ‘hyperstitional effectivity’ IS describing it as false in ITS terms.
I’m not fully satisfied with your account of truth either, which does sound more Foucauldian/Nietzschean than Marxian/Marxist. Perhaps this is something that we could take up at more length?
Comment by mark k-p @ 4/5/2006 12:53 am
The point is, the fact that you can set aside the question of whether Jesus really rose from the dead as trivial already means that you have rejected religion.
Comment by mark k-p @ 4/5/2006 12:59 am
Thanks Mark. Your reference to Rorty makes me realize I’ve been phrasing myself in a way which implies that religion and Marxism are necessarily not incompatible. You’re right that that’s not what I really want to say. I don’t particularly object to being somewhat Wittgensteinien or Nietzschien, but not if that means that each language game or perspective is immune to criticism from another.
What I do want to say, though, is that we shouldn’t be certain that Marxism is incompatible with religion without more investigation of how religion operates. It’s probably true that many religious people nowadays would begin by saying they are making truth-claims of a correspondance sort, but I don’t know how much that is due to correspondance being the dominant contemporary theory of truth, and how much it is a necessary feature of religion. At least, from discussions I’ve had with religious people who I respect, they’re reasonably open to considering other ways of accounting for the truth of religious claims, while still wanting to say that their claims really are true, and not just one language game among others. That makes the religious claims at least potentially incompatible with Marxism, of course.
Admittedly, my faith in the broadly reasonable character of most religious people has been somewhat shaken by the American media’s current obsession with some idiot who has “proved” that Jesus could have walked on water due to the salt in the Sea of Gallilee altering its freezing point.
Simon Blackburn tells quite a funny joke: There’s a religious studies conference, and first of all Don Cuppitt gets up to talk, he explains his postmodern theory of religion, social constructivism, and so on. When he finishes speaking, everyone claps and says, “hey, if that’s what works for you, great.” Then they have the Dalai Lama explain how buddhism claims that the world is just appearance, belief in which leads to suffering. Again, everyone claps and says, “hey, if that works for you, great.” Jonathon Sacks comes along and talks about Judaism, talmudic scholarship and so on, everyone claps and says, “hey, if that works for you, great.” The final speaker is Ian Paisley, who goes into great detail about revealed truth, the perfidy of the pope, and so on; everyone claps and says, “hey, if that works for you, great.” At which point Paisley gets very angry and starts shouting, “no, this doesn’t just work for me, it’s the truth, revealed by God to us miserable sinners, and if you don’t believe this, you will burn for ever in hell-fire.” At which point, everyone claps and says, “hey, if that works for you, great.”
Endorsement of Simon Blackburn’s joke should not be taken to imply endorsement of his philosophical positions, particularly not quasi-realism, which always struck me as a bit silly.
Comment by Tim @ 4/7/2006 8:58 am
OK, this has really clarified things, it has been really helpful in getting my thoughts together. I will respond with a full post at k-p.
Comment by mark k-p @ 4/10/2006 8:20 am