Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics, and Spooky Materialism | Salva☭e
China Miéville’s prose is a specific kind of joy: dense, academic, fascinating, and incredibly enriching. But if you're not in the mood for it and -- like me -- need to be willing to do some look-ups while reading, I can see it being off-putting. No shame ... I found myself looking up tout court, au fond, au fait as I was reading -- not to mention the actual philosophical terms. (Could he have just used the word "simply" instead of tout court? Maybe. Probably? But some measure of richness and nuance would've been lost.)
So, if you aren't eager to read Miéville's prose to begin with, why read his essay and the responses to it at all? What are the stakes here? I'm not convinced they're as high as all involved seem to think, but I was intrigued enough to do the reading anyways.
The concluding paragraphs read:
[O]ne thing is undeniable. Once you’ve argued your way out of an ontologically materialist universe, of the many varieties of metaphysical idealism on offer, theism is probably not the most unlikely.
Of course, it also raises its own manifold problems, not least that of theodicy – evil. But of all Richard’s ‘alarming things’ perhaps the most so is that theism also, in fact, solves an awful lot of problems ...
are you going to figure if that's where all this is going, why bother? Because theism is a dead-end and no amount of poking at materialist, dualist, and idealist answers to questions about what consciousness even is are going lead us to appeal to the divine. Asserted undeniability of theism's greater than least unlikeliness notwithstanding.
My hot take: Miéville isn't trying to sneak spirituality or a "ghost in the machine" back into left-wing thought -- but I do think he's being a bit of a provocateur and deliberately inviting speculation that this feint towards theism is a precursor to a reactionary turn. What I haven't got a bead on is how that move advances his diagnosing of a profound theoretical failure that directly leads to deep political frustrations.
I was looking for Miéville while dismantling the watery weak emergence metaphor as sufficient basis for understanding consciousness to theorize some kind Weird Emergence strong enough give Marxists an actionable understanding of consciousness. Not a project I'm capable of taking on. Just a blogger here who took some 100s and 200s level philosophy classes decades ago. Fluss and Frim have an informed, thoughtful response that advances the discussion in ways I'm not equipped to, so I recommend taking in both sides of the exchange of ideas as well as Breht and Alyson's discussion on Rev Left / Red Menace. (Finding the youtube link for this post and letting it start playing, I realize what I called "my hot take," may actually have been implanted by Alyson in her prefatory remarks when I first listened and decided to check out the essay. Ah well, everything's a remix anyways.)
