An interesting link between emergence theories from the late 19th and early 20th Century and Marxism is Joseph Needham and his concept of "integrative levels". He wrote a book on this in the 1930's I haven't found yet. A little internet googling reveals that this concept had an interesting journey via library science in the 1950's - as a way of conceptualizing how reality is constructed - and was considered by some as a possible replacement to the Dewey Decimal system. Ethel Tobach and colleagues did some interesting work in biology using the concept of integrative levels in the 1970's, another line of research I have not gotten my hands on yet. Ethel, who I notice is an associate editor of NST, wrote a really interesting article on integrative levels in a 1999 book of essays about activity theory edited by Yrjo Engestrom et al, Perspectives in Activity Theory.
Tobach's article is entitled "Activity theory and the concept of integrative levels." She points out (pg 134) "The concept of integrative levels has a long history. I am constrained to cite its more modern beginnings: first, the work of Joseph Needham, a biochemist, who formulated the basic premises of the concept in the 1920's; second, the article by Alex Novikoff, also a biochemist, in 1945 in *Science* that was the first clear statement of the concept; and finally, the writings of T.C. Schneirla (1971), a comparative psychologist who specialized in the study of the behavior of ants."
In explaining integrative levels, Tobach says page 135 "The causal relationship between and among levels is derived first from the contradictions within each level and then from the contradictions between the inner contradictions of any one level and its contradictions with preceding and succeeding levels. The causal relationship between and among levels is dialectical and multidirectional."
Emergence theory and dialectics have many lineages and deep interconnections. My general sense is these concepts are experiencing a kind of zeitgeist. Were Engels alive today!
Another line of discussion this opens up - one of hundreds that are possible - is the problem of reductionism (which seemed to be what was slowing Lisa down) on one hand, and the problem of holism, on the other. Both are products of mechanical thinking.
An associate of Christian Fuchs, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, also coming from a general dialectical materialist perspective, wrote a provocative paper that took up reductionism and holism, entitled "Emergence and the Logic of Explanation: An Argument for the Unity of Science"
In: Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, Mathematics, Computing and Management in Engineering Series 91 (1998), 23-30
http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/igw/Menschen/hofkirchner/papers/InfoScience/Emergence_Logic_Expl/echo.html
Fuchs has a strong leaning toward Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, BTW. Of course, all the traditional debates in Marxism will realign themselves on a higher and sharper level, so to speak, as the ideas of emergence become integrated into dialectical materialism.
Ralph, please tell me a little about Donna Haraway and Lucy Irigiray(sp), I don't know them.
Also, I am interested in your inquiries into activity theory, which I have been studying the last couple years.
Best, ~ Steve
At 06:13 PM 2/19/2005 -0500, you wrote:
I made a comparable argument as part of a recent discussion in a local philosophy group. The topic was emergence. I made a pitch for Engels as a pioneer of this concept. Curiously, much of the literature on the subject--including encyclopedia articles--is heavily biased in citing its history. Usually there is a focus on the British emergentists, and no mention at all of Hegel, Engels, or any Soviet work. Part of this I think is due to the provincialism of Anglo-American philosophy. Another failure of the literature is to make a clear distinction between the mystical idealist versions of emergentism and emergent materialism. In fact, we have a theoretical biologist in our midst who is a devotee of Whitehead and Bradley's internal relations. He has been ambiguous about what exactly he is committed to, but I smell a rat.
I've also been using the emergentist concept in some of my thinking in progress on Marx, particularly Marx's curious statements on science in the 1844 manuscripts. I find some interesting ideological turns going on these days in cosmology at one end and cognitive science on the other, and I relate these to a fundamental contradiction of bourgeois consciousness that Marx point to, but my project is to elaborate the idea in ways Marx did not likely intend in those texts.
Lisa would have been rather resistant to emergentist claims, from what I remember. I called her attention to some work on activity theory, which was presented at an APA meeting in New York--it must have been at the end of 1995. Lisa was not impressed. As an evolutionary biologist she used statistical models to study foraging behavior and did not believe that 'consciousness' mattered. I got rather short-tempered with her in some of the discussions we had, and we never had a chance to hammer out our differences. Beginning with my suspicions about sociobiology, I was very skeptical of the intellectual irresponsibility of biologists who overstep their limitations in making claims about society. Lisa was committed to natural science, was adamantly opposed to the social constructivism which had poisoned the left by this time, but was interested in Donna Haraway and curiously tolerant of Lucy Irigiray[sp?]. Besides being an environmentalist, Lisa was also a feminist and gay rights activist.
Curiously, my shameless political incorrectness attracted rather than repelled Lisa. She considered me a kindred spirit, I suppose to the consternation of her many PC male feminist admirers in the left. I recall at least one other fellow who became infatuated with her. We used to talk about this as well as the craziness in the New York left and on the Marxism lists. She was a total e-mail addict: she couldn't enough of this stuff. Aside from biology, she was studying economics and philosophy on the side. She was insatiable in intellectual matters as in every other respect. She was a piranha in her passion for intellectual input and synthesis. She was also a very, emotional, sensitive person--she had a special look in her eyes, that haunts me to this very day. She had a variety of interests and talents in addition to science--she was into folk-dancing, and she made clothing. She had it all, she did it all. She was only beginning to realize her potential when she died shortly after her 35th birthday. How it pains me to write these lines.
At 01:28 PM 2/19/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:I took a peek at some of the posts on Engels and Dialectics of Nature. Sorry about the loss of Lisa, she was clearly a very able thinker and writer. Thank you, Ralph, for sharing your fond memory of her.
My own take on dialectics fits very closely with Engels, along the lines George Novack argues. I do agree that the dialectical laws of nature can be generalized, as Engels attempted in his studies. But what Engels did was just a beginning.
Christian Fuchs has an article in a 2003 issue of Nature Society and Thought (Vol 16 No 3) entitled The Self-Organization of Matter that continues the discussion of finding parallels between dialectics and what I tend to call emergence theory (aka hierarchy theory, self-organization theory, complexity science, and many other terms coming out of general systems theory from the 1960's and earlier). I think Engels, and for that matter, Novack, would find this exploration very fruitful. I am beginning to become aware of some of the work Soviet scientists have done in earlier decades along these lines - B.M. Kedrov, for example.
The concept of the transformation of quantity into quality, thought of merely as mechanical cause and effect, is commonplace - apply enough heat and water boils. But in Dialectics of Nature, among other things, Engels was exploring something much more general about this concept - the transformation of energy from one form to another, such as from mechanical to electrical. A liquid changing to a gas is just one of countless examples of quantitative transformations of energy and with qualitative effects.
The advent of scientific measuring instruments and computer processing since WWII has created an explosion of information about how things work - how things change. A more sophisticated concept of the transformation of energy forms largely unavailable to 19th century scientists has been gaining ground - the concept of what I tend to call "emergent levels" to help me organize my own thoughts about this. Quantitative changes in one level of organization of matter and energy generate changes in "higher" levels that in turn transform the overall system. Fuchs summarizes many of the principles of self-organization with many terms familiar from Prigogine, chaos theory, complexity science and so forth; terms like feedback loops, bifurcation points, complexity, hierarchy, synergism, historicity, etc. etc.
Perhaps the most important application of this concept of "emergence" - (using this term this way is my layperson's (autodidactic) attempt at finding a generalizing term) - is the Marxist concept of "base and superstructure" summarized by Marx in that oft-quoted passage in Critique of Political Economy. Leaving aside the many instances of mechanical vulgarizations of this terminology of base or foundation and superstructure, the essential "dialectical" explanation Marx and Engels offered with this concept - conceptualizing "emergent levels" (there I go, using that term again) in history between economic systems, classes and legal-political systems - between the forces of production and the relations of production - has become one of the most important scientific concepts of all time. It has become the scientific basis of working class revolution and the possibility of abolishing capitalism in our time.
If Fuchs and others who are exploring this relationship between dialectics and what I am calling "emergence" - (Fuchs calls it "self-organization," maybe that is a better term) - are on the right track, then we could see Engels' efforts in Dialectics of Nature as a remarkable anticipation of scientific concepts that could only develop decades later when the capacity to measure nature and process data about it has come much farther along. But more remarkably, the scientific approach to analysis and generalization that Engels and his cothinker Marx developed with the materialist dialectic is applicable to all sciences - not just to the latest discoveries of molecular biology and cosmic theory - but also to the science of social revolution, the greatest task facing humanity. And that is a powerful method, indeed.
Thinking of Ralph's admiring comments and the handful of her posts that I looked at, I wonder what Lisa would think about this line of argument about dialectics, what questions she would ask, what evidence she would demand to back up such concepts and claims ....
Best, - Steve Gabosch
At 12:15 PM 2/19/2005 -0500, you wrote:Reading this old thread of my late beloved Lisa brings back a lot of memories. I do not, remember, however, how this discussion proceeded from there. I do remember that it was an unfinished discussion, and that I had it in the back of my mind to engage Lisa once again attempting to divert her attention from dead-end leads and toward another direction. She was engaged and committed to the study of this material,. and to engagement with the marxists on the lists she moderated, perhaps much more than it or them deserved. Lisa had a voracious, unquenchable passion for knowledge and synthesis, and she studied a variety of subjects in addition to her professional scientific competence.
I still think my interventions were sound. I did have to deal with the consequences of using a word without checking its meaning in the dictionary--"prevarication." Occasionally in our private discussions we would step on one another's toes, but she couldn't get enough of them.
I remember that I had it in mind to discuss with Lisa something that was confusing her at the time, still struggling with Engels. It was on the question of dialectical "laws", which she tacitly assumed, as do sloppy Marxist thinkers on the subject (i.e. most of them), that these "laws" are something like laws of nature. Engels himself is responsible for this half-assed thinking, which is why I don't think it is useful to invest oneself in what Engels literally says. I meant to broaden the discussion to get Lisa out of struggling with an arguing against what is essentially a dead-end position. But then Lisa died suddenly, and this conversation, like many other conversations between us, was cruelly ended by circumstance. Sigh.
At 06:09 PM 2/18/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:Dialectics of Nature
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:ROSSERJB%40jmu.edu> Fri, 14 Jun 1996 05:10:59 -0500 (EST)
* Previous message: Labor Party platform
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/001068.html>
* Next message: Dialectics of Nature
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/001067.html>
* Messages sorted by: [ date ]
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/date.html#106>6> [ thread ]
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/thread.html#1>066> [ subject ]
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/subject.html#>1066> [ author ]
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1996-June/author.html#1>066>
_______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
_______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
_______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
