This is truly remarkable puzzlement for a professional philosopher.
At 08:22 AM 1/11/2006 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
Well, "spirit" and "nature" are not transparent terms either, not is "primacy," so it's not much help to say that idealists make spirit primary to nature and materialists vice versa. This is a Hegelian-flavored formula that is highly specific to a narrow philosophical tradition.
Maybe so, but there are generic as well as specific characteristics. When Adorno and Horkheimer talk about 'spirit', they have Hegel in mind. But they are materialists, albeit of a peculiar sort, and their opposition to idealism references the entire tradition from Parmenides to Hegel. Why is primacy not transparent?
Moreover, Engels mixes things up by dragging in the afterlife in the longer quote in the previous post, which is quite irrelevant to whether objective reality exists independent of us, whatever that means. Someone could deny the latter proposition in some sense and still reject the idea of an afterlife; someone might believe in an aferlife and insist that objective material reality exists independently of us -- Newton certainly thought this!
Well, objective idealism and materialism both adhere to the primacy of the external world. The question is the relation between material and spiritual or supersensible entities. It's not that difficult to figure out, except in the case of Spinoza. Secondly, many philosophical positions are not 'pure', in that there are conflicting tendencies within them, as Engels also recognizes.
I think here Engels is actually invoking the notion of (mind-body) materialism vs dualism, the notion that we/our minds are identical with our bodies and so die with them -- a point which would not impress the early Christians, btw who believed in bodily resurrection, so for them that the afterlife itself was a part of material reality. But anyway mind-body materialism is quite distinct from realist materialism, whatever exactly that is.
Mind-body materialism is the only kind generally authorized in the constricted world of anglophone philosophy. I see this provincialism all the time. But the wider sense of 'materialism' is proscribed for political reasons. For example, for decades Marvin Farber used the more acceptable indigenous term 'naturalism' and finally admitted that for him it's the same 'materialism' everybody's scared to name.
The fact is there is no particularly clear notion of what is materialism as a sort of realism, apart from the proposition, now known to be false, that matter (mass-energy, actually) exists independently of mind.
Actually, your contention is false. The 'observer' in quantum mechanics is an impersonal measuring instrument that has nothing to do with mind. Of course, without mind--whatever that is--science nor any other cognitive activity would exist, but that's not what's in question here.
There is not much in the way of a clear notion of realism at all, since mind-independence won't work as a criterion tout cout. What concrete content there is to talking about the objective existence of independent reality is unclear, really, it sounds like table-pounding. Reality is really real! Dammit! Nature is primary over spirit! I mean, we agree that we don't make up atoms or chairs just by thinking or talking or writing about them the way we make up stories like Hmalet and we cannot change their properties by thinking or wishing they were otherwise. And we can have true or false ideas of what there is and things are like that may help further or frustrate our purposes, and the truth and falsity of our ideas doesn't depend on the theories we have about these things. And no one thinks any more that all there is is ideas in the mind (though I guess some pmos do sort of advocate a linguistic version of this, saying that all there is is texts). And those things and talk about them are not collections of ideas or perceptions or signifiers.
Correct up to this point.
Anyway, none of these sorts of mind-independence alters the deep observer-dependence of the quantum world
Wrong. Observer-dependence is physical, not mental.
or the wholesale dependence of the social world on thoughts, wishes, ideas, desires, aspirations, and language, not withstanding that we also cannot make it as we please just by talking or thinking about it differently.
You've contradicted yourself again.
So I am still not answered, what is materialism? Why should we care?
A century of irrationalist mystification, which ultimately serves reactionary ends. Where have you been? And you know what emergent materialism is.
_______________________________________________ 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
