Abraham Edel

Theory and Practice: An Unsteady Dichotomy?

The traditional problem of the relation of theory and practice runs strongly through Lewis Feuer’s work. It surfaces particularly in specific studies where he gives us striking explanatory revelations. Throughout the decades of the now receding ‘Age of Analysis’ he pursued genetic inquiry into ideas, coming, by repeated researched examples, to grips with the dominant isolation of philosophical ideas as if they could be dealt with purely in their own theoretical terms without reference to sources, functions and consequences in the circumambient life. Much of this work is intellectually liberating. For example, in his early dealing with Marxian theory, in the midst of efforts to locate determinisms of ideas, he offered instead the analysis that the economic is the problem-generating factor, leaving ample room for other influences to bend the ideas proposed to resolve the problems at issue. In the case of Freud, when the philosophical atmosphere was most oppressive, Feuer not only looked for an emotional decision-base of philosophic ideas but even tried to work out a sense in which a philosophic idea might be genetically explained away. In writing of Spinoza, the philosopher so often worshipped for intellectual purity, Feuer skillfully used historical evidence to pinpoint the events of Dutch political turmoil that were almost isomorphic with the structure of Spinoza’s free man and his intellectual love of God.