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June 29, 2004
Gary,
you can call me an ‘analytic philosopher’ if you like. I’m just not going to take any notice of it. One of the things I dislike the most about the Heideggerian stuff is that it’s always holier than thou. It’s like the Wagnerian who remarks, ‘What? You can’t recognise the combination of the such-and-such motif with the something-or-other motif?’ It’s like asking, ‘When are you going to mature?’
I think we need to distinguish between the philosophical baggage, the techniques, the dogmas, that a philosopher drags along with him, and what it is that he’s actually saying. This is what I was trying to say about Medlin. I completely agree with what he said and he values he proclaimed. Materialism is the truth about philosophy. There are no universals. Transcendence is to be found only in the particular and the ephemeral.
The philosophical concepts and ideas in which Medlin tried to express these views led him into contradiction. I’ll give you one anecdotal example:
Medlin was a consistent critic of romanticism, always from an outspokenly rationalist perspective, yet one night when I was going into the Capri Cinema on Goodwood Road Medlin was coming out with one of his sons. I was going to see Babette’s Feast, which was on in continuous session, so he’d just seen the film. He was keen to talk about it. He’d been to see it for the seventh time. It was one of the greatest films he had ever seen. I can’t remember his exact words but that was the substance. Medlin was a person who could become enthusiastic about things. The strange thing about his enthusiasm was that it was for one of the great works of 20th century romanticism and by the greatest romantic writer of the century. It tells the story of transformation through art, a messianic happening and also something in which Medlin believed to his very core.
This is the point, isn’t it? Who gives a stuff about the analytic baggage? Medlin preferred his contradictions than to ever deny the nature of art, to ever deny transcendence or materialism. It’s this basic set of ideas that I share with him. Now if you want to call me an analytic philosopher you can but I think that’s just something to bang me over the head with. Let’s talk about the issues of materialism and nominalism and transcendence that I just raised, and the we’ll see whose who with Heidegger and Adorno?
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Trevor,
I'm not calling you an analytic philosopher. Medlin was one. I see you as a continental philosopher who digs reductive materialism.
It is not an amalgam that I understand, but I acknolwedge that it is not unusual.Richard Rorty is another example.
As for the analytic baggage you say should be dumped in favour of issues, well aren't playing the old game?
You say that materialism is the truth of philosophy. I indicated the way that I crawled out of the analytic flybottle through an account of the encultured body and gave links. You ignore this re-working of materialism in favour of your presupposition of the biological body of reductive materalism.