I came across this insightful passage in Herbert McCabe’s Law, Love & Language (thanks Halden!). For some reason I had never connected the fact/value split with production before:
Very roughly the bourgeois industrialised society is one in which men come into relationship, form a community, hence come to agreement and thus to ‘truth’, only in terms of production. What lies outside of this sphere is free, is not a matter of agreement, is ’subjective’. The world of hard facts is the world in which the factories are working, wages are being paid, goods are being distributed; this is the are of necessary agreement in the bourgeois society. Such a society does not require agreement in matters of aesthetics, religion, or ‘private morals’; these belong to the sphere of comment and are relegated first to private judgement (sic) and then, as their social irrelevance becomes clearer, to the subjective world of ‘values’.
I’d be curious to hear people’s comments on this: Is McCabe too simplistic in his appraisal?
