02.04.08
Oedipus effects
I should add to the previous post, Loopholes, some remarks on one of the basic confusions of the left (or Marxist version, I wouldn’t bother to criticize if it didn’t still have something relevant to say). This confusion (the Oedipus paradox of theories) is most visible in Darwinism, but arises in any attempt to apply theory to action. It is not unrelated to Kant’s distinction of theoretical and practical reason (in and of itself, before the ethical implications of that distinction).
There is a lot of material on this from history-and-evolution.com: Oedipus effects.
Compare (with issues of ideology) the founders of the American Republic with the Marxist left at the turn of the twentieth century.
The former group used ‘practical reason’ to construct a definite program according to a set of intuitively palpable principles. The latter had a theory of history claiming to be science (but with latent considerations of Hegelian dialectic to further confuse the issue) to be applied to the future, in a hopeless confusion of causal and teleological implications.
Does the glaring difference not suddenly stand out?
The application of theories to projects of future action results in multiple Oedipus effects in both Marxism and Darwinism (with its Social Darwinist curse).
Facebook » Oedipus effects said,
February 5, 2008 at 12:26 am
[...] http://darwiniana.com wrote an interesting post today on Oedipus effectsHere’s a quick excerpt I should add to the previous post, Loopholes, some remarks on one of the basic confusions of the left (or Marxist version, I wouldn’t bother to criticize if it didn’t still have something relevant to say). This confusion (the Oedipus paradox of theories) is most visible in Darwinism, but arises in any attempt to apply theory to action. It is not unrelated to Kant’s distinction of theoretical and practical reason (in and of itself, before the ethical implications of that distinction). There is [...]
Link to ‘Oedipus effects’ said,
February 6, 2008 at 9:38 pm
[...] Darwiniana links to the site with a google search on ‘Oedipus effects’ [...]