A Conversation Between Eugene McCarraher and David Bentley Hart 

agreed

Facts

And roasting Calvinists too.

Poets and propagandists not 'thinkers'.

Two sheep bleating.

@@piquant7103 Interesting analysis.

@@piquant7103 I'll be honest with you. I haven't played the more modern variations of Zelda, and even the first two I did play have been a good while back.

I was trying to make him feel dashing and debonair.

@@leavesinthewind7441 Mission: Accomplished. Spry, Sprightly, Dashing, Debonair. Could he too enchant Carmela Soprano and go toe-to-toe with HUAC? Put your mortgage on it. [Just as a fun side note: Last time I saw Prof Hauerwas in his office, front and center on his desk was a book the size of an old-timey dictionary. I asked him what it was and he said, "It's a wonderful book called The Enchantments of Mammon," and just a little later I walk upstairs to Prof Bretherton's office and he had just finished reading it as well. I'm pumped that a guy that can write a scholarly tome like that is also so gregarious and affable in conversation.]

Can I second this! I found the conversation quite difficult to listen to because of the audio issues. A good mic (needn't cost the earth) would fix this.

No, that’s not quite what I said.

@@leavesinthewind7441 I know. I was attempting to make a joke.

@@Jordan-hz1wr So was I, but badly.

@@leavesinthewind7441 Let's both just agree to never joke on the internet again.

@@Jordan-hz1wr Wise.

Flat flippancy is the limit of Christian 'humor'.

I use all sorts of terms for them, but I tried to confine myself to the non-obscene ones.

@@leavesinthewind7441 Neo-Scholastics fairly accurate, and I think a lot of them would actualy use it themselves.

😂

But isn't Marx's theory of value a form of economic objectivity? I've always read it as an attempt to instantiate (or "ontologozie") value in some discernible metaphysical unit. I got frustrated reading Marx because he definetly seems to inch towards an understanding of the absolute abstractness of value, but ends up with his convoluted labour-theory to preserve some objectivity to value.

Well, I think that Marx's point is precisely that what we call economic value is a relational property - it is the way social relations of interdependence appear as the reified quality of a commodity. So yes, it is objective (in contrast to, say, marginalist theory) in the sense that it is a theory of how interdependence is organised at the level of a social totality, rather than emergent from the contingent interaction of abstract/atomised individuals. But it is immaterial in the sense that it is, as I mentioned, a relational phenomenon. I like Diane Elson's formulation on this: more than being a 'labour theory of value', it is a value theory of (social) labour - in other words, a theory of how what we do for each other is organised under capitalism, with all the consequences we see around us. In this sense, what we call 'economic objectivity' (eg capital, value, profit, rent, etc) is nothing but our relations of mutual constitution, in negated form. I think this is an interesting way to read Marx productively.

Though if Dr Hart is hanging out with so-called Marxist who say things like "it's not what you're willing to die for, but what you're willing to kill for" who can blame him for having a confused view.

I don't think we can accuse the great American Marxists like Robeson, Winston, and Du Bois of being mechanistic determinists detached from the Beauty of Creation who view the humanity and the world as something to be exploited until sublation.

Apparently you didn’t follow the conversation very closely. The issue had to do with the current generation of Marxists in the academic world.

@@leavesinthewind7441 Apparently I didn't. Though I'm specifically responding to your Althusserian (if you will) characterization of Capital and the so-called late Marx. Perhaps I'm immaturely taking the criticism of an intellectual tradition personally - I'll meditate on that.

@@阳明子 I’m hardly the first to see Kapital III as just capitalism universalized and centralized. I acknowledge I may be wrong, but it certainly reads that way.

Stephen R. L. Clark, a favorite philosopher of Dr. Hart's, has two articles about fairies you may be interested in. 'How to Believe in Fairies' and 'Why We Believe in Fairies' are their titles. Dr. Hart has an article 'God, Gods, and Fairies' also.

All of that sounds bad to me.