Victor,
Thanks for the refresher course on Rosenburg, which becomes a history of
the Nazi party from 1921. It is always good to be reminded of what
happened in Germany.
Your comments on Dubrovsky are very interesting, as is your analysis of
Bakhurst. I also read your descriptions of ideality with great interest.
It would help me if, to start out, (when you have a chance), you would
locate some specific quotes from David Bakhurst that illustrate these
observations that you make:
"Bakhurst argues that the material objects themselves are ideal."
"Bakhurst's identification of the ideal with the material goes beyond
idealist hypostasy and takes idealist reification to ridiculous extremes ..."
Thanks,
- Steve
At 07:08 PM 6/14/2005 +0200, you wrote:
Steve
On Alfred Rosenberg: (Born January 12, 1893- Executed October 16, 1946)
Alfred Rosenberg was a Nazi ideologist and politician.
Rosenberg was one of the earliest members of the German Workers Party
(later better known as the NSDAP or the Nazi Party), joining in January
1919; Hitler did not join until October 1919
Rosenberg became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (National
Observer),
the Nazi party newspaper, in 1921. In 1923 after the failed Beer Hall
Putsch, Hitler appointed Rosenberg leader of the Nazi Party, a position the
latter occupied until Hitler was released from prison.
In 1929, Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He
became
a Reichstag deputy in 1930 and published his book on racial theory The Myth
of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts). He was named
leader of the foreign political office of the NSDAP in 1933 but played
little actual part in office. In January 1934 he was deputized by Hitler
with responsibility for the spiritual and philosophical education of the
NSDAP and all related organizations.
In 1940 he was made head of the Hohe Schule (literally "high school"),
the
Centre of National Socialistic Ideological and Educational Research.
Following the invasion of the USSR Rosenberg was appointed head of the Reich
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Alfred Meyer was his deputy
and represented him at the Wannsee conference.
Rosenberg was captured by Allied troops at the end of the war. He was
tried
at Nuremberg and found guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace;
planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes
against humanity. He was sentenced to death and executed with other guilty
co-defendants at Nuremberg on the morning of October 16, 1946. He is
considered the main author of key Nazi ideological screeds, including its
racial theory, Lebensraum, abolition of the Versailles Treaty, and
persecution of the Jews and of Christian churches. This article is about
race as an intraspecies classification.
Just another intellectual grotesque become monster.
--------------------------------------------------------To separate the
beasts from the confused.
About Bakhurst:
Bakhurst is not only a liberal social-democrat, he's also is a
representative of exactly the kind of Logical Positivism, Neo-Kantianism,
Neo-positivism, Machism, Empirio-criticism or what have you (the precise
name of the movement is more a function of the provenience of the theorist
than of his ideas) that motivated Lenin to write Materialism and
Emperio-criticism (1908). The irony of Bakhurst's current stature as the
interpreter of Ilyenkov is that his kind of thinking is receives more
criticism from Ilyenkov than even the objective idealism of Plato and Hegel.
Bakhurst, like D. Dubrovsky who Bakhurst wrongly calls a mechanist, just
cannot comprehend the essence of dialectical synthesis. Where Ilyenkov
describes the essence of ideality as the unity of consciousness (the
subjectively imaged object of labour) and material formations (the material
symbolic representations that embody and thereby enable transmission of
ideal objects), Bakhurst argues that the material objects themselves are
ideal. Material objects certainly acquire significance from their
resemblance (perhaps correspondence is a better word) to the ideal, but
material objects, i.e. physically and sensually perceived objects, as
concrete objects are far to diversified to be regarded as ideal forms.
After all, diversity is a basic property of being for both Hegelian and
Marxist theories of knowledge [check out Hegel's criticism of the identity
of A = A for this].
Dubrovsky, like Bakhurst, does not know how to handle dialectical synthesis,
and his solution of the ideal/material antinomy is to identify the ideal as
pure subjective consciousness. While Bakhurst's identification of the ideal
with the material goes beyond idealist hypostasy and takes idealist
reification to ridiculous extremes, Dubrovsky's restriction of the ideal to
pure subjectivity compels him to regard all conceptualisation as a product
of some internal transcendental features common to all human thought
processes, i.e. a purely subjectivist non-social theory of thought. Both
Bakhurst and Dubrovsky's work are only the most recent examples of the
sheer incapacity of non-dialectical methods of analysis to provide a
rational and practical foundation for a natural science of culture and history.
Dubrovsky's theories are more or less a continuation of Machist
"Marxism" after Bogdanov (See Ilyenkov's Leninist Dialectics and the
Metaphysics of Postivism (1979)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/index.htm for a
digestible summary and analysis of Lenin's interminable work Materialism
and Emperio-criticism) and Bakhunin. Bakhurst's product is simply a
mistake, a wierd and obfuscated representation of one of the most
profound and brilliant of Historical Materialist theoreticians. Too bad.
Oudeyis
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