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On the Relationship between the Spiritual and the Material: The Lessons of Underdevelopment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Messay Kebede

Extract

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The purpose of this essay is to show that the issue of “underdevelopment” not only raises one of the most basic and oldest problems of philosophy, namely the relationship between the spiritual and the material, but also helps positively to reformulate it. For, on closer examination, it will appear that the striking aspect of underdevelopment is that it constitutes a glaring symptom of a characteristic disturbance or maladjustment. By its strangeness and distortion, it displays a unique and unexpected tension between the spiritual and the material. Indeed, we cannot discard the possibility that the link between the spiritual and the material is likely to be better exposed in a situation of maladjustment than in one of fusion. Besides, this method of studying tension in order to observe the connection between the mental and the physical is not something new in philosophy. Bergson, Freud, and James, to mention but a few, had recourse to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 41 , Issue 162 , June 1993 , pp. 111 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. J.E. Goldthorpe, The Sociology of the Third World. Cambridge University Press, London/New York, 1977, p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Everett E. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change. The Dorsey Press, Homewood, Ill., 1962, p. 56.

4. Joseph R. Gusfield, "Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change," Political Development and Social Change, ed. Jason L. Frinkle and Richard W. Gable. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1971, p. 15.

5. Bert F. Hoselitz, Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth. Vakils, Feffer and Simons Private Ltd., Bombay, 1960, p. 19.

6. David C. McClelland, "The Achievement Motive in Economic Growth," in Political Development and Social Change, p. 89.

7. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press, New York and London, 1969, p. 3.

8. Ibid., p. 94.

9. Ibid., p. 3.

10. R. Ulyanovsky, The Non Capitalist Way. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 16.

11. Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Collins, The Fontana Library, 1971, p. 53.

12. Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 175.

13. David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1981, p. 54.

14. Gusfield, Political Development and Social Change, p. 22.

15. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Dynamics of Cultural Change. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1958.

16. Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology. Pantheon Books, New York, 1970, p. 162.

17. Johannes Hirschmeier, The Origins of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan. Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 204.

18. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1975, p. 274.

19. Ibid., p. 61.

20. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Frederick A. Praeger, 1965, p. 6.

21. Bergson, op. cit., p. 9.

22. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind. Philosophical Library, New York, 1946, p. 180.

23. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Everyman's Library, London, New York, 1969, p. 12.

24. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 27.

25. Ibid.

26. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Cultural Dynamics and Values," Approaches to the Science of Socio-Economic Development. Unesco, Paris, 1971, p. 263.