[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Sartre & Skinner

[Ralph Dumain]

There are certain points in this argument that strike me as conceptually 
dubious:

(1) Skinner was no materialist, but a pure positivist.  Even the author 
admits this: "he repeatedly rejected a realist stance on the 
epistemological question of how and what we know."

(2) "Skinner rejected, in the best postmodern spirit, the "double world" of 
subject and object, inner and outer, physical and psychological." This is 
pure piffle; there's nothing postmodern about Skinner.  It is true, that 
taken to an extreme, positivism can lead to a subjective idealist position, 
which is indeed shared by postmodernism, but the two divide on question of 
scientism, and share little else in common other than their non-materialist 
position.

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 12:16:08 -0500
From: Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Content-Type: text/plain
I don't know if this will be of any use to you or not,
but Martin Morf had an article "Sartre, Skinner, and the
Compatibilist Freedom To Be Authentically" in the
journal Behavior and Philosophy, 26 (1), 29-43.
(http://www.behavior.org/journals_BP/1998/Morf_abstract.cfm).
In that article he attempted to relate the two different psychologies
advanced by Sartre and B.F. Skinner, where Sartre
had advanced a psychology based on phenomenology
and which placed emphasis on free will, as opposed
to Skinner's attempt to develop a psychology that
was materialist and determinist.  Morf holds
that it is possible to assimilate many of Sartre's
insights into the framework of a Skinnerian psychology
without our having to embrace Sartre's notions concerning
free will.  He also addresses the issue the relations
of subject and object in the two psychologies.  Thus,
concerning Skinner, he writes:
"While Skinner generally adopted a realist stance on the
ontological questionof what there is (e. g., Kvale & Grenness,
1967), he repeatedly rejected a realist stance on the epistemological
question of how and what we know. He did not see
a "personal self or perceiving subject at the epistemological
center of events" (Woolfolk & Sass, 1988, p. 111). Much like
Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, p. xi), Skinner rejected the notion of
the "inner man," the homunculus who inspects the
patterns projected on the brain by the sensory organs perceiving
the external world. More generally, Skinner rejected, in the best
postmodern spirit, the "double world" of subject and object,
inner and outer, physical and psychological. He
made no distinction between the public and the private world,
other than to characterize the latter as less accessible because
the "verbal community" finds it more difficult to reinforce
"self-descriptive"
than overt responses (e. g., Kvale & Grenness, 1967, p. 144;
Skinner, 1963)."


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Sociobiology in the USSR

[Ralph Dumain]

It's a fascinating story, and it illustrates the incredible ideological 
naivete the intellectuals produced by class societies, whether of the 
capitalist or Stalinist sort.  Wilson and Skinner on the one hand, the 
Soviets on the other (except this Dubinin looks like a smart fellow)--what 
fools!

At 11:09 AM 3/25/2004 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:


Loren Graham in his 1987 book *Science, Philosophy,
and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union*, amongst
other things noted that E.O. Wilson's writings on
sociobiology received a rather surprisingly favorable
reception in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that
Wilson's theories concerning the biological roots
of human behavior seemed to go against some
basic tenets of Marxism.  ...


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Dave Dellinger obit

[Ralph Dumain]

A very interesting set of posts.  I've been too busy and too exhausted to 
respond to Justin and gilhyle on Quine, semantic holism, etc. with my usual 
promptness.  I've got an interesting article on Gramsci, Gouldner, and 
Habermas to review.  More on all this as time permits.

I recall the last time I saw Dave Dellinger, I think in DC, maybe a decade 
ago, more or less.  Another time I will analyze this more fully.  I
was struck at the time in contrary ways as I always am by 
pacifists.  Dellinger was far more intelligent than the usual pacifist, as 
he did not attempt to preach or sadomasochistically foist an unreal way of 
thinking on his audience.  He related his own personal experience and 
perspective without necessarily recommending it to anyone else as a 
model.  This I think is a rare honesty.  Also, it takes a real he-man to be 
that kind of pacifist; most would not have the endurance (nor should they) 
to go through the experience of solitary confinement, beatings, etc., on 
principle and not fight back in kind.  I think that pacifism as an ideology 
is inherently elitist and upper middle class, whereas nonviolence to the 
masses is just another tool to produce results.  It is admittedly 
preferable to the Maoist cult of violence which is also the ideology of a 
privileged, elite class gone guerilla.  I absolutely cannot stand Catholic 
pacifists, though.  I gagged the last time I saw Colman McCarthy.  There is 
something morbidly Irish Catholic--i.e. mentally ill--about the phenomenon 
as I have observed it.  It's all about guilt, penance, self-sacrifice, 
self-abasement, and the overweening ambition to be nailed to a cross as the 
ultimate orgasmic experience.  Catholic authoritarianism is nauseating even 
in its inverted forms.  But I do have an admiration for Dellinger's 
independence and courage.

At 06:11 AM 5/29/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
David Dellinger, of Chicago 7, Dies at 88
May 27, 2004
 By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
David Dellinger, whose commitment to nonviolent direct
action against the federal government placed him at the
forefront of American radical pacifism in the 20th century
and led, most famously, to a courtroom in Chicago where he
became a leading defendant in the raucous political
conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, died Tuesday in a
retirement home in Montpelier, Vt. He was 88.
His death was reported by Peggy Rocque, the administrator
of the home, Heaton Woods.
An avuncular figure among younger and more flamboyant
mavericks, Mr. Dellinger emerged in the 1960's as the
leading organizer of huge antiwar demonstrations, including
the encirclement of the Pentagon that was immortalized in
Norman Mailer's account "Armies of the Night." At the same
time, making use of his close contacts with the North
Vietnamese, he was able to organize the release of several
American airmen held as prisoners and to escort them back
from Hanoi.
In the often turbulent world of the American left, Mr.
Dellinger occupied a position of almost stolid consistency.
He belonged to no party, and insisted that American
capitalism had provoked racism, imperial adventures and
wars and should be resisted.
A child of patrician privilege, he had since his days at
Yale learned and practiced strategies of civil disobedience
in a variety of causes, steadfastly showing what he called
his concern for "the small, the variant, the unrepresented,
the weak," categories he cited from the writings of William
James.
In the federal courtroom in Chicago in 1969, when Judge
Julius J. Hoffman presided over the trial of opponents of
the Vietnam War charged with criminal conspiracy and
inciting to riot at the Democratic National Convention a
year earlier, Mr. Dellinger loomed over his co-defendants
in age, experience, heft and gravitas.
The next oldest of the defendants, Abbie Hoffman, was 20
years his junior. Mr. Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were Yippies
who mocked authority in star-spangled shirts; Mr. Dellinger
favored quiet business suits. Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis,
John R. Froines and Lee Weiner had led student movements;
Mr. Dellinger had not.
Within this radical bouquet of representatives from what
was called the New Left, Mr. Dellinger stood out as a link
to a homegrown pacifist strain that had its roots within
America's Old Left.
Paul Berman, who wrote about the radicals and
revolutionaries who rose to prominence in the years around
1968 in "Tale of Two Utopias," said that Mr. Dellinger
"came of age in one of the tiniest currents of the American
left - the Rev. A. J. Muste's movement for World War II
pacifism, a movement based on radical Christian values and
vaguely anarchist instincts. No rational person observing
that movement during the 1940's would have predicted any
success at all, and yet during the next two or three
decades, Mr. Dellinger and his pacifist allies transformed
whole areas of American life."
Mr. Berman said that they "did it by supplying crucial
leadership in the civil rights revolution and by playing a

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] What Next? - Marxist Discussion Journal

[Ralph Dumain]

The reviews are interesting, esp. that of Raya Dunayeskaya.  It breaks off 
though in mid-sentence.  Either there is something wrong with my Internet 
connection (which might well be the case) or this web page.  Anyway, the 
reviewer captures the essential problem with deciphering Raya.  Also, in 
view of Raya's chronic slandering of CLR James, a reading of James's NOTES 
ON DIALECTICS is in order.  Remember that the two once had a common 
perspective on workers' self-emancipation, which Raya later patented as her 
own creation along with her Hegelian accretions.

At 07:17 AM 5/29/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
The current edition of the on-line journal "What Next?"
features among other things Martin Sullivan on the
Respect Coalition, Barry Buitekant on Lindsey German and crime,
articles on Marxism and Anarchism, the United Front, and George
Orwell, plus Ian Birchall's review of Dave Renton's Dissident Marxism,
Mike Rooke on Raya Dunayevskaya.
http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext
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-
The C.L.R. James Institute:
 http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org
Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project":
 http://www.autodidactproject.org
"Nature has no outline but imagination has."
  -- William Blake
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Re:[Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Discussing Sudan #1

[Ralph Dumain]

It is always worthwhile to look beneath the surface and investigate the 
facts, but I don't trust Lil Joe's rhetoric.  There's something sectarian 
and dishonest about this.  Do you have any better sources that would help 
people unravel the situation?

At 06:34 PM 8/1/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
 SOUThern MILITIA ARMED and TRAINED BY ISRAELl, FINANCED BY u.s.
republican regime and supported politically by the congressional black
caucus, trans-africa, and most black american reactionary racialists.

Discussing Sudan #1
by Lil Joe
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fw: Discussing Sudan #1

[Ralph Dumain]

Said web site is very depressing.  Aside from the personal biography, the 
site seems to be a mixture of Afrocentrism and extreme left sectarianism. 
Some of it is literate, and some of it is stupid.  The article by tow other 
folks labeling Michael Moore as a white nationalist is enough to condemn 
the whole web site.  If I want to be subjected to this stupid shit, I might 
as well sit back and listen to Pacifica radio.

At 09:01 PM 8/1/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
Well Lil Joe had originally sent that piece directly to this
list but for various reasons it bounced to me as moderator
so I then forwarded it to the list. (BTW I found this political
biography of Lil Joe at  http://www.nathanielturner.com/liljoebio.htm.
Well over at Uncle Lou's Marxmail list, there has been some
discussion of Sudan, starting with the following piece
that was posted by Uncle Lou, himself.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Forward from PENL- Louis on China and socialism

[Ralph Dumain]

This shows you the despicable consequences and delusions of 
Stalinism.  Monthly Review would like to get itself off the hook but one 
must recall its despicable support for Maoism.  The very wording of this 
article implies that nothing was really wrong in the beginning except 
excessive centralization, and then the corruption of market socialism 
messed up the society.  Who in their right mind would ever make allowances 
for China, from Deng Xiaoping onward, or before, during the execrable 
Cultural Revolution?  How stupid, how naive can people be?  The answer of 
course, is that "socialism" is a hobby in the West of the middle class with 
time on its hands.  Slumming in the third world is all these people 
know.  Of course they will delude themselves and then pat themselves on the 
back for seeing the obvious when it finally becomes convenient to do so.

At 06:38 AM 8/2/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
In the next part, Marty and Paul take a close look at the economic
transformation of China in terms of the underlying logic of "market
socialism" rather than as a function of the greed or bad faith of people
at the top. In other words, once China committed itself to market solutions
to long-standing economic problems, all "the same old crap" was destined to
reappear.
At the close of the Mao era, China faced serious problems that stemmed
from
an overly centralized planning apparatus. There was underproduction in
one
sector and overproduction in the other. There were also investment
imbalances. Deng proposed that the country solve these problems by using
market mechanisms. This restructuring of the economy took several stages
to
implement.
..
Quoting from their conclusion, Marty and Paul make a point that is
crucial
for understanding the drawbacks of seeing China as some kind of
model--either socialist or as a nationalist development schema:

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Marxist analysis of the history of psychoanalysis

[Ralph Dumain]

It is rather difficult to know what to make of this book from the 
review.  In what way does Zaretsky purport to improve on Erich Fromm?

At 12:39 PM 9/5/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
NY Times Book Review, September 5, 2004
'Secrets of the Soul': Is Psychoanalysis Science or Is It Toast?
By DAPHNE MERKIN
SECRETS OF THE SOUL
A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis.
By Eli Zaretsky.
Illustrated. 429 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
September 5, 2004
 By DAPHNE MERKIN

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] "John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools" - Ed Luttwak

[Ralph Dumain]

It is essential not to have illusions.  It is also crucial to defeat Bush.
At 12:47 PM 10/24/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
Sunday Telegraph October 24, 2004
John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools
By Edward Luttwak

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] "John Kerry

[Ralph Dumain]

Living in Washington, I see all too well how far people will go in abasing 
themselves on behalf of the Democratic Party.   Supporters of the Democrats 
are in a hamstrung position, stuck in the logic of the downward spiral of 
the political system.  And I'm certain that the political crisis in the USA 
will intensify with the election of Kerry, in ways that go beyond the 
political degeneration that transpired while Clinton was getting his dick 
sucked in the Oval Office.  However, I don't think we will have a replay of 
Clinton.  Aside from what backbone Kerry will or will not summon, I think 
that the political system will become much more unstable than it was when 
Newt and the other white boys were trying to paralyze the federal 
government.  However, even a center-right government makes a big difference 
compared to a far-right government when one thinks of the damage Bush will 
do in every sphere of life if he is allowed to continue.  And there is the 
question of the balance of power, if we can call it that, among the 
electorate.  The franchise must be protected against jim crow practices, 
and this means a Democrat must be elected even though Gore was a spineless 
little shit in refusing to stick up for black voters in Florida.  This is a 
trivial election only for leftists with one hand stroking their putzes and 
their head up their ass.

At 01:43 PM 10/24/2004 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 13:07:30 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> It is essential not to have illusions.  It is also crucial to defeat
> Bush.
The problem is that's of Kerry supporters do have illusions concerning
him.
The fact is, he is a hawk concerning both Iraq and the so-called
"war on terrorism" and he has spent this campaign trying to
outflank Bush from the right on these issues (sort of like JFK's 1960
election strategy against Nixon).  I see no reason why he won't govern
this way, if he enters the Oval Office next year, given his political
record,
and the kinds of political forces that he would most likely be bumping
up against, if he becomes president.
Also, the record of liberals and progressives in regards to the
Clinton Administration is not very comforting here.  Under Clinton
we saw such things as the passage of NAFTA and GATT, the
abolition of AFDC, the passage of anti-terrorism legislation
following the Oklahoma City bombing (which presaged Bush's
Patriotic Act), the prosecution of a war against Yugolslavia
in 1999, and the brutal imposition of sanctions (backed up
by frequent aerial assaults) against Iraq.  In other words
stuff, that most progressives would never have tolerated
from a Republican president.  But after all, Clinton was
"our guy" who was himself under constant attacl by the
right, so all was forgiven.
I suspect that we would see much the same thing
under a Kerry Administration.  He too will come
under assault by the right-wing attack machine
and all manner of liberals and progressives will
be looking the other way, when Kerry pursues a
more aggressive foreign policy, or revives the
draft or attempts to
privatize social security, or does other things
that a Republican president cannot do, since
after all Kerry is "our guy."

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Empire v. Democracy: Interview with Michael Parenti

[Ralph Dumain]

Stalinist leanings aside, Parenti got to the heart of the issue of globalism:
Globalism is the elevation of the property
value above all democratic values, above all other social values. So any
kind of public service can be wiped out for interfering and creating lost
market opportunities for the private market. The private market is
elevated
above the law.
It's not just that NAFTA will cost us jobs or weaken our consumer
protections. It's that NAFTA is undermining democracy itself. It
undermines
our very right to question or to pass laws that can create public
services.
Today, under the new globalization, Canada has to pay millions of dollars
to
UPS because they have a public postal service that is taking away
potential
market opportunities from UPS. So here you have a country having to pay a
private corporation for the right to deliver its own mail to its own
people.
Every single public service today is potentially targeted.
I wish that some of our good progressive economists would take themselves
to
school on this issue and understand that there is a qualitatively new
development in globalism. Globalism does not just mean international
capital
investment and imperialism. It's the whole new subterfuge of so-called
free
trade, which is destroying substantive democracy rule itself.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Have a happy and merry December 25

[Ralph Dumain]

A-fucking-men!
But:
Born: 4 Jan 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
Died: 31 March 1727 in London, England
Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in 
Lincolnshire. Although by the calendar in use at the time of his birth he 
was born on Christmas Day 1642, we give the date of 4 January 1643 in this 
biography which is the "corrected" Gregorian calendar date bringing it into 
line with our present calendar. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in 
England until 1752.)

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Newton.html
At 05:47 AM 12/25/2004 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:

Today, as the world pauses on the birthday of one of history's greatest
men, whose teachings continue to benefit the entire human race,
let us join in toasting the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and of all
the giants on whose shoulders he stood.
Jim Farmelant

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

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]  Fri, 14 Jun
1996 05:10:59 -0500 (EST)
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

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

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

At 11:17 PM 2/19/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
What wonderful descriptions of an obviously wonderful person.  35 is way, 
way to soon to go, what a tragedy.  What was Lisa's full name?  Does she 
have a representative piece of writing on the internet or otherwise 
published?  Whether she does or not, she is clearly being remembered here, 
and that counts.
I do not know of any print publications of hers.  She contributed to the 
old spoons Marxism lists.  I don't know what is representative since I 
haven't read any of this stuff for years.  I haven't even been able to 
bring myself to re-read her personal correspondence to me.

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.
While I know of Needham generally, I haven't seen this work, which may be a 
significant connecting link historically.

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.
Yes, I've read some of this literature.  There's a book by Jolley on 
integrative levels I probably have somewhere.  In actual fact, the Dewey 
Decimal System itself was influenced by Hegel via W.T. Harris, the most 
influential of the St. Louis Hegelians.


 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 is the one I heard at the APA meeting I mentioned.  I told Lisa 
about this, but she was not sympathetic.


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."
This is a very useful reference.  Thanks.
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!
There is something happening in emergence, it seems, though it remains 
controversial.  I am very wary of the uses of Whitehead's process philosophy.

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.
You are correct, sir.  I wouldn't use the word "mechanical", but that's 
semantics.  Emergent materialism is not holist.  it is also important not 
to confuse theory reduction with reductionism.  There are two books on 
these questions from the Dialectics of Biology group.  This question is 
treated in at least one of the essays.

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.
I have my doubts about Bloch and Marcuse, but this looks to be a very 
interesting reference to explore.  Thanks.

Ralph, please tell me a little about Donna Haraway and Lucy Irigiray(sp), 
I don't know them.
Haraway, I think, wrote PRIMATE VISIONS.  I t

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

At 09:05 PM 2/22/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
Interesting comment on the Dewey Decimal System.  Now I am curious about 
how it was invented and constructed, and how Hegelianism was part of 
that.  The Library of Congress system also has a logic I haven't 
investigated but would like to understand.  Also, BTW, who were the "St. 
Louis Hegelians"?
There is exactly one journal article on Hegel's influence on the DDC.  I'll 
look up the reference.  I don't know where my copy of the article is, but 
if I find it, I should scan it.

The LC system is not very logical, but it works for classifying millions of 
documents.

I will also look up the reference to Jolley.  I think it is THE FABRIC OF 
KNOWLEDGE.  I think I have this buried deep.

St. Louis Hegelians--wow!  I'm lacking for time now, but here's my 
bibliography:

The American Hegelians
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/hegelus1.html
There's also a connection between the Ohio Hegelians and abolitionism.
Yes, I agree, that idealist form that emergence theorizing took in the 
1920's definitely contains hazardous material.  Vygotsky has a succinct 
remark about that trend I'll try to dig up.  I also want to mention an 
article or two by an activity theory influenced theoretician named Keith 
Sawyer (teaches at Washington Univ in St Louis, by coincidence) where he 
traces the history of emergence theory back to the 1870's - but in a 
later post, kinda short on time this week.
Please do look up these references.

I realize I am swimming against certain classical Marxist terminology 
trends by using the term mechanical in this particular way, but it somehow 
seems to feel right to me to use this as the core concept - the organizing 
concept - behind formal, Aristotelian, and other "non-dialectical" kinds 
of logic.  I would happily listen to an argument against this way of using 
"mechanical".
I'm probably swimming more against the tide than you are.  Perhaps some 
significant discussion will emerge later on.

What a terrific web site you have, Ralph!  I've used materials from it 
numerous times already and looking it over now am somewhat dizzied by the 
depth and breadth of the articles you have compiled.  Bravo!
Thanks!
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

References:
This is all there is on the subject:
Graziano, E.E.  "Hegel's Philosophy as Basis for the Dewey Classification 
Schedule", LIBRI, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 45-52.

Library science book, on integrative levels:
Jolley, J. L. The Fabric of Knowledge: A Study of the Relations Between 
Ideas.  London: Duckworth, 1973. 130 p. illus. 23 cm.

At 01:24 AM 2/23/2005 -0500, Ralph Dumain wrote:
At 09:05 PM 2/22/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
Interesting comment on the Dewey Decimal System.  Now I am curious about 
how it was invented and constructed, and how Hegelianism was part of 
that.  The Library of Congress system also has a logic I haven't 
investigated but would like to understand.  Also, BTW, who were the "St. 
Louis Hegelians"?
There is exactly one journal article on Hegel's influence on the 
DDC.  I'll look up the reference.  I don't know where my copy of the 
article is, but if I find it, I should scan it.

The LC system is not very logical, but it works for classifying millions 
of documents.

I will also look up the reference to Jolley.  I think it is THE FABRIC OF 
KNOWLEDGE.  I think I have this buried deep.

St. Louis Hegelians--wow!  I'm lacking for time now, but here's my 
bibliography:

The American Hegelians
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/hegelus1.html
There's also a connection between the Ohio Hegelians and abolitionism.
Yes, I agree, that idealist form that emergence theorizing took in the 
1920's definitely contains hazardous material.  Vygotsky has a succinct 
remark about that trend I'll try to dig up.  I also want to mention an 
article or two by an activity theory influenced theoretician named Keith 
Sawyer (teaches at Washington Univ in St Louis, by coincidence) where he 
traces the history of emergence theory back to the 1870's - but in a 
later post, kinda short on time this week.
Please do look up these references.

I realize I am swimming against certain classical Marxist terminology 
trends by using the term mechanical in this particular way, but it 
somehow seems to feel right to me to use this as the core concept - the 
organizing concept - behind formal, Aristotelian, and other 
"non-dialectical" kinds of logic.  I would happily listen to an argument 
against this way of using "mechanical".
I'm probably swimming more against the tide than you are.  Perhaps some 
significant discussion will emerge later on.

What a terrific web site you have, Ralph!  I've used materials from it 
numerous times already and looking it over now am somewhat dizzied by the 
depth and breadth of the articles you have compiled.  Bravo!
Thanks!

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

There's a treasure trove buried inside mountains of crap, but nevertheless 
there is a lot of important Soviet work, in the history of philosophy and 
philosophy of science.  Even some of the more general programmatic works 
are important, because the Soviets had some basic orientations, which were, 
at least generally speaking, better than ours, esp. in connection with 
critiques of neopositivism.  Hence you'll find some interesting stuff in 
Lektorsky, Naletov, and others, including some figures from our standpoint 
which are even more obscure (unknown).

For example, Bazhenov is wary of indiscriminate condemnations of 
mechanicism and reductionism, and defends what is valuable in reductionism:

"Matter and Motion" by L. Bazhenov
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/bazhenov.html
On the philosophic misuse of physics and biology as master metaphors, see:
"The Image of Science and Metaphysics" by Nina Yulina
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/sci-image.html
Lektorsky, among other things, incorporates a notion of subjectivity within 
a dialelectical materialist perspective differing from the comparable 
subjectivisms of the West:

Subject, Object, Cognition: Contents & Preface to the English edition by V. 
A. Lektorsky

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/lektorsky0.html
The Collective Subject. The Individual Subject by V. A. Lektorsky
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/lektorsky1.html
Now, on Engels.  In some ways Engels screwed up very badly.  Jean Van 
Heijenoort, Trotsky's erstwhile bodyguard and famous mathematical logician, 
enumerated Engels' intellectual misdeeds.  You might have missed this one, 
as I don't believe MIA has corrected the omission on its Van Heijenoort page:

Friedrich Engels And Mathematics
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/math.htm
The problem with "laws" is that others, following Engels' worst practice, 
tend to conflate logical with natural laws.  (There is what Lisa was 
stumbling over in her final months when reading Engels.)  But even as 
logical laws applied to real world processes there's a problem.  Richard 
Norman explains this very clearly in a debate with Sean Sayers, who takes 
the totally confused, sectarian diamat line.

A general problem, in my opinion, is that people preserve the worst of 
Engels while often overlooking his more perspicacious remarks.

There is an even more general trap to avoid, the trap of ensconcing oneself 
in a ghetto called "Marxism".  The intellectual goal of Marxism, especially 
as relates to the special sciences, is to take an overview of the totality 
of knowledge, recognizing that the totality of knowledge is not cornered 
and sequestered in one place, but fragmented in a million different 
specialized places under alienated social conditions of intellectual 
reproduction.  Hence, one has to have a foot in both worlds--the mainstream 
world where knowledge production takes place, and the "Marxist" world where 
criticism and sythesis is performed to repair the malformations of the big 
picture caused by bourgeois society.

Our local philosophy group covered some ground on the emergence 
question.  Early on, I raised the issue of materialist vs mystical 
conceptions of emergence, but I don't think anyone caught on.  One 
theoretical biologist is into Bradley and Whitehead, and also cited 
Teilhard de Chardin.  Suspicious.

Perhaps I should try to organize the e-mails I wrote into some coherent 
order so I can circulate them more widely.  I thought our in-person group 
discussion of emergence could serve as a focal point for transcending the 
split between positivist and irrationalist tendencies, and we even got some 
scientists interested, but only a few people had anything to say amidst a 
barrage of BS.

I think the emergence question is pivotal in a number of areas, e.g.: (1) 
diagnosing the fragmentation vs pseudo-unification (mysticism) of the world 
picture in bourgeois society, (2) bridging the gap between object and subject.

I have a few projects in progress addressing these questions, which also 
includes a novel interpretation of Marx's 1844 mss, and an analysis of 
mystification in popularization of cosmology.

Finally, there are some article from NST already online.  A couple are on 
my web site, but the MEP web site offers others:

Selected articles from Nature, Society, and Thought
http://webusers.physics.umn.edu/~marquit/selected.htm
If there's an article you really want to see, you might contact 
Marquit.  He might not have the time to do format conversions to put 
something online, but you never know.

At 11:15 AM 2/23/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
Steve Gabosch:
Hi, Charles.  Yes, treasure trove is a very good description.  Same with the
wealth of discoveries in complexity science etc. - there is a tremendous
field of knowledge now extant that dialectical materialism can help
generalize, and like you and Ralph, I think emergence theory can be a
terrific conceptual tool to help do th

[Marxism-Thaxis] [marxistphilosophy] matter & motion [fwd]

[Ralph Dumain]

This essay is now on my web site:
"Matter and Motion" by L. Bazhenov
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/bazhenov.html
While generally this kind of material has a tendency to get tedious, this
article sums up the issues very succinctly and is useful both to the
general reader and the miseducated specialist.  I've got to give credit to
the Soviets for pointing up the pitfalls of bourgeois philosophy.  This
article is particularly relevant to our recent discussion on emergence in
Washington, in which proponents of emergence turned out to be easy prey for
process philosophy and other speculative and mystical nonsense, whilst
opponents couldn't get the point of the concept.  The key points here are
probably familiar to all, some are anyway:
(1) energetism & the phenomenalist conceit that "matter has disappeared" at
the end of the 19th century, criticized by Lenin
(2) Lenin's notion of the philosophical as distinct from the scientific
conception of matter, and its importance
(3) the inseparability of matter and motion for the contemporary scientific
world-picture
(4) the question of the circular definition of matter
(5) from metaphysical substantialism (matter without motion) to pure
functionalism/behaviorism (motion without matter) in scientific philosophies
(6) the twin metaphysical errors:
1. Denial of the qualitative distinction of the higher form of motion and
"reduction" of the higher form to the lower one.
2. Absolutization of the qualitative distinction of the higher form of
motion and the latter's alienation from its associated lower forms of motion.
(7) critique of vitalism & qualified defense of mechanicism
(8) defense of reductionism against mystical anti-reductionism (Engels for
reduction & rehabilitation of reductionism in the USSR)

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Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

She's a co-author of EINSTEIN A-Z.  I saw both of them here in Washington, 
and both are foxes.  The book itself seems to be primarily of value to 
those not already well versed in Einstein lore.

At 09:33 PM 2/21/2005 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:
Science writer, Karen C. Fox, has posted on her website, a a paper
that she wrote back in school on the issue of emergentism
vs. reductionism in the philosophy of biology,
"Does Biology Reduce to Physics?
A Look at How the Question Has Been Answered Through Time."
(http://www.karenceliafox.com/Science/philosophy_brush.htm)

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[Marxism-Thaxis] integrative levels & library science on the web

[Ralph Dumain]

THE CLASSIFICATION RESEARCH GROUP AND THE THEORY OF INTEGRATIVE LEVELS
L OUISE F. S  PITERI
http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/review/summer1995/spiteri.pdf
or
http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/review/summer1995/spiteri.html
Integrative level classification
Research project
http://www-dimat.unipv.it/biblio/isko/ilc/
Summary of the Principles of Hierarchy Theory
http://www.harmeny.com/twiki/pub/Main/SaltheResearchOnline/HT_principles.pdf
or
http://www.nbi.dk/~natphil/salthe/hierarchy_th.html
also: hierarchy theory: bibliography
http://necsi.org:8100/Lists/complex-science/Message/4890.html
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Novack vs. Van Heijenoort on dialectics, 1943

[Ralph Dumain]

I have stumbled onto some long sought material in my files, i.e. my notes 
from 1991 on debates on dialectics conducted under pseudonyms, featuring 
William Warde (George Novack) and Marc Loris (Jean Van Heijenoort), with 
interventions by John G. Wright, J. Weber, George Sanders, Irwin Hyper & 
Buddy Lens, and Ben Maxson.  (I haven't checked my pseudonyms lists to 
determine who's who).  It turns out that I even have a text file of my 
notes.  I can't remember whether these e-mail lists allow attachments, but 
one way or another I could easily send my file.  The question is: would 
anyone be able to understand my fragmentary notes?

I had assumed that this material came from the very rare international 
bulletins of the 4th International (which I believe I also checked), but 
rather it's in the relatively (and I mean only relatively) more accessible 
SWP internal bulletins.  I guess I was too cheap to have all this stuff 
photocopied when I researched it in New York 14 years ago.

I was hoping to put the articles by Van Heijenoort online, but 
unfortunately I only have a photocopy of a relatively trivial piece:

SURPLUS VALUE AND EXCHANGE OF EQUIVALENTS (NOTE ON AN EXAMPLE IN WILLIAM F. 
WARDE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE LOGIC OF MARXISM)  by Marc Loris, SWP Internal 
Bulletin, vol. V, no. 5, Dec. 1943: p. 31-35.

I also have a photocopy of two pages by George Sanders on the dialectics of 
tonality in music (Vol. V, no. 4, Oct. 1943: p. 14-15). Why I don't know.

All of this discussion was a reaction to Novack's (Warde)  DIALECTICAL 
MATERIALISM, OUTLINE COURSE #3 (National Education Dept., SWP (1943), 52 pp.).

The debates that matter are found in:
SWP.  Internal Bulletin,
vol. 5, no. 2, July 1943. 28 pp.
Vol. V, no. 4, Oct. 1943. 15 pp.
vol. V, no. 5, Dec. 1943. 35 pp.
I don't have the wherewithal at the moment to track down this material (the 
repositories I know are in New York or Berkeley/S.F.) and get it 
photocopied, but if anyone else is game, let me know.

My general evaluation is that Van Heijenoort had something important to say 
about the distinction and evaluation of the notions of subjective and 
objective dialectics, and Novack had his finger up his ass as usual.  The 
other commentators took sides and there may be something interested in 
whoever backed Van Heijenoort.

Van Hiejenoort used antoerh pseudonym, Gerland, and there's at least one 
relevant article in THE NEW INTERNATIONAL.  It may have been "The Algebra 
of Revolution".  I thought I had a photocopy somewhere, but damned if I 
know where.

Anyway, this is Van Heijenoort's prehistory, which is why I would like to 
find the material.  As Irving Anellis reports, Van Heijenoort does not 
report discussing dialectics in WITH TROTSKY IN EXILE, probably because 
Trotsky was such a dogmatic prick Van Heijenoort didn't want to make 
trouble for himself.

I'll upload my notes if anyone's interested.
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Hegelian influence on library classification

[Ralph Dumain]

W.T. Harris, the most influential of the St. Louis Hegelians, is determined 
to be the decisive influence on the organization of the Dewey Decimal 
Classification system:

"Hegel's Philosophy as Basis for the Dewey Classification Schedule" by 
Eugene E. Graziano
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/hegelddc.html


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Old Thread: Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

I'll be interested in seeing what Soviet philosophical literature you 
have.  I have tons of it myself, more in book than in journal form, though 
I probably have articles buried somewhere too.  I know someone who wants to 
support a project to scan it all, but I don't know anyone who has the time 
for that.  It takes a whole lot of time just for me to do one article or 
book chapter.

I am ready to pass out right now, but I should also mention the need to 
list important secondary works.  There are some terrific books out there, 
from the insanely expensive to the insanely discounted, interestingly, 
published in the post-Soviet era.

BTW, I'm usually a qualified defender of Engels; i.e. I defend his basic 
project, if not the specific execution of same.

I also forgot to mention that the technical literature on emergence focuses 
on two issues known as supervenience and downward causation.

BTW, did Whitehead have any kind of social theory?
At 02:35 PM 2/25/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
Ralph Dumain:
There's a treasure trove buried inside mountains of crap,

CB: No doubt true. Maybe we can even use some of the crap as fertilizer for
fruitful endeavor :>), and then treasures of yore are surrounded by earthly
dirt.
Thanks for all these direct texts , Ralph ! I will be reading your list of
articles.
I actually have a fair number of hardcopy books and articles of Soviet philo
and philo of science, and they are not in computer texts. I'll gather some
to post.
I actually did come across  Jean Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels, and
arrogant non-pro mathematician that I am , I had a response to Van
Heijenoort. I can't remember it right off, but I'll reread Van Heijenoort
and see if I can remember what I thought of.
Comradely,
Charles

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Hegelian influence on library classification

[Ralph Dumain]

Glad I could be of service.  It took a hell of detective work to unearth 
it, and all night to edit it to some decent level of acceptability.  I 
think I discovered the article in 1980 in either a comprehensive Hegel 
bibliography or a library science literature search.  As far as I can 
determine, that's all there is on Hegel for librarians.

The St. Louis Hegelians comprise a huge topic, and the Ohio Hegelians, 
which included the abolitionist Moncure Conway and the revolutionary 
refugee August Willich, are also highly important.  There was a lot more 
going on in 19th century America than we realize.  For example, an indirect 
connection between Ludwig Feuerbach and Frederick Douglass:

Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach from Ottilie Assing about Frederick Douglass
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dougls1.html
At 05:44 PM 2/25/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
What a delightful article, Ralph!  Thanks!
~ Steve

At 09:00 AM 2/25/2005 -0500, you wrote:
W.T. Harris, the most influential of the St. Louis Hegelians, is 
determined to be the decisive influence on the organization of the Dewey 
Decimal Classification system:

"Hegel's Philosophy as Basis for the Dewey Classification Schedule" by 
Eugene E. Graziano
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/hegelddc.html

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Novack vs. Van Heijenoort on dialectics, 1943

[Ralph Dumain]

At 06:01 PM 2/25/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
Yes, that would be an interesting discussion to read.  Where does one get 
SWP internal bulletins from the 1940's?
In New York, the best place is Tamiment Library at NYU, where I did a great 
deal of research in the '90s.  Also Prometheus Research Library, a much 
more reasonable outfit than its parent organization the Spartacist 
League.  They were very helpful to me.

I think maybe the Center for Socialist History in Berkeley has this stuff 
too.  And there are probably other places.

I notice, Ralph, the occasional disparaging remark about Engels and the 
one below about Novack.  I think I can make a case that while one may 
disagree with their views, their writings and thinking emanated from world 
views that were based on a scientific methodology, not on idiosyncratic 
intellectual inventions, muddled thinking, or just plain subjectivism.  I 
think I can also make a case, even more controversial for some, that Marx 
and Engels were consistent, and, furthermore, Novack was reasonably 
consistent with them.  That last one is especially controversial, of 
course.  And as for the problem of "dialectical laws," I think Novack 
explains or defends the concept pretty well, along the lines that Engels 
used it.
Well, I'm not part of the anti-Engels Engels-betrayed-Marx 
industry.  However, these are not sacred texts, so we do have to read them 
critically.  Perhaps Novack was faithful in rendering Engels' confusion, I 
don't remember.  But Novack was terribly confused, as was Trotsky, on these 
matters.  However, confusion abounded in those days, e.g. that awful book 
by John Somerville.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Novack vs. Van Heijenoort on dialectics, 1943

[Ralph Dumain]

"The Philosophy of Marxism: An Exposition" is the book I had in mind.  It 
is often used as a standard textbook.  What a piece of crap!  But rather 
typical, esp. of the books that muck around with dialectical logic.  (The 
later Soviet textbooks became a bit shrewder, pretty much avoiding the 
topic of the relation between formal and dialectical logic and thus some 
embarrassment.)

I guess Somerville was not a CP member, but it seems he was a fellow 
traveller of some sort.  The problem is that the same deficiencies in this 
area accrue to a number of tribes--Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists--so no 
one tendency is responsible.

Once in a while, somebody tries something a little different in the area of 
marxist education.  Here's an interesting specimen:

"How to Think" (Sojourner Truth Organization)
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/howtothink.html
At 09:11 PM 2/26/2005 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> > BTW, what awful book and who was John Somerville?
>
> He was an American philosopher who wrote studies of
> Soviet philosophy, most particularly his book,
> * Soviet Philosophy: A Study of Theory and Practice*.
BTW in case you were interested, here is a later piece that I
found online by Somerville:
Somerville, J. (1967) "The Nature of Reality: Dialectical Materialism"
(pp. 3-32).
In The Philosophy of Marxism: An Exposition. Minneapolis: Marxist
Educational Press.
http://www.comnet.ca/~pballan/Somerville(1967).htm
>
> He was, I believe, one of the first American philosophers
> to investigate developments in Soviet philosophy.
>
>
> BTW, Sidney Hook's famous attack on Somerville,
> "Philosophy and the Police," is available online, providing
> that you are willing to shell out some bucks to The Nation.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Novack vs. Van Heijenoort on dialectics, 1943

[Ralph Dumain]

I've addressed the Somerville question elsewhere.  I always assumed he was 
Cp, judging by the company he kept.  But I don't think so; that's why I 
referred to him as a fellow traveller.

I've not visited CSH in Berkeley, which is based on Hal Draper's work, but 
I would assume it is comprehensive, as are the New York collections.

At 04:29 PM 2/26/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
At 02:42 AM 2/26/2005 -0500, you wrote:
At 06:01 PM 2/25/2005 -0800, Steve Gabosch wrote:
Yes, that would be an interesting discussion to read.  Where does one 
get SWP internal bulletins from the 1940's?
In New York, the best place is Tamiment Library at NYU, where I did a 
great deal of research in the '90s.  Also Prometheus Research Library, a 
much more reasonable outfit than its parent organization the Spartacist 
League.  They were very helpful to me.

I think maybe the Center for Socialist History in Berkeley has this stuff 
too.  And there are probably other places.
Thanks.  Are these collections fairly complete?

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[Marxism-Thaxis] emergence blog

[Ralph Dumain]

I decided that the easiest way to log my ongoing information-gathering and 
commentary on the philosophical, ideological, and social issues surrounding 
emergence (emergent properties) is to make a blog out of cleaned-up 
versions of my e-mails on the subject, written for various audiences.  So 
if you want to get a flavor of what I've been up to, see:

EMERGENCE BLOG
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/emergence-blog.html


"We're just a biological speculation, sittin' here vibratin',
and we don't know what we're vibratin' about."
  -- George Clinton

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Feuerbach-Frederick Douglass

[Ralph Dumain]

Pass out?--meaning got to get some sleep and can't hold out any longer.
There are a number of important connections between people that drop out of 
historical awareness.  One task of scholarship is to restore those 
connections.  The 1990s were a marvelous decade for historical research and 
publication in many areas.  Lost connections between different peoples and 
national intellectual traditions have been discovered not only for 
Douglass, but for Du Bois, Richard Wright, and many others.  It's 
inspiring, but unfortunately the news hasn't trickled down to the average 
person.

At 06:51 PM 2/27/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
Letter to Ludwig Feuerbach from Ottilie Assing about Frederick Douglass
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dougls1.html
^^^
CB: Feuerbach and Frederick Douglass: Now there's a Thaxis cite for Black
History Month  !

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Oscar

[Ralph Dumain]

I watched this speech and a few others.  But I have to confess to being one 
of these Northerners unwilling to accept the validity of Southern 
traditions in any respect--including the traditional notions of Southern 
blacks.  I find comments such as Jamie Foxx's depressing in the extreme, 
though I am used to hearing sentiments like that all the time. The notion 
of "Southern Gentleman" makes me physically ill.  The only thing worse I 
can think of is a singles ad from a woman that reads "I'm looking for a 
real man who loves the Lord and knows how to treat a lady."  That's a 
signal to turn and run as far away as fast as you can.

This kind of thinking is ill-adapted to the needs of the 21st 
century.  It's a cultural holding pattern that's bound to disintegrate no 
matter how many people swear by it.

This nation is going so far backwards so fast I've not seen anything like 
it in my lifetime.  I wonder if water swirling down a toilet bowl is an 
emergent property.

OK, that's it, I've said too much.
At 01:54 AM 2/28/2005 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ok . . . I watched the Oscar . . . all of it and knew that Jamie Foxx was up
to win the Oscar for best actor. His work on Ray was really good, as was the
director and editors and sound folks.
Jamie stated during his acceptance speech that he was glad his grandmother
raised him to be a Southern Gentlemen. A Southern Gentlemen. The Marxists 
in the
North are the last one to accept the reality and validity of the American
Union as a Union.

I of course was not raided to be a Southern Gentlemen but rather a Tan
Yankee. :-l
Strange days ahead.
Waistline

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

It's really sickening to have to read this sort of material, though I am 
interested in nonstandard analysis in China, about which I know 
nothing.  First of all, the ignorant and destructive Stalinist nonsense 
against abstract mathematics shows up the obscene degradation of Marxism in 
backward, modernizing 3rd world countries.

Secondly, that anyone would even need to resurrect Marx's math mss to 
justify abstract mathematics indicated just how bankrupt the 
authoritarianism institutionalized by Third International Marxism really was.

That name Yanovskaya sounds familiar.  I wonder if she is the one who 
strove to keep logic alive during the dark days of the Stalin years.  It's 
interesting in light of the history of resistance of the Russian 
intelligentsia to despotism.  The whole 19th century was a century of such 
resistance, of which the Bolsheviks were a product.  Once the Bolsheviks 
took power, and the regime degenerated towards the end of the 1920s, the 
intelligentsia had to figure out a way to survive _them_.   With this kind 
of ignorance lording over scientific work, we can only wonder that the USSR 
didn't collapse much sooner.  We can't wonder, though, that the Chinese 
Cultural Revolution self-destructed as quickly as it did, since Mao and his 
friends seem to be even dumber than Stalin was.  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Several attempts have been made to inflate Marx's mss for various 
purposes.  I wonder about that fellow from Mozambique, Paulus Gerdus, 
author of MARX DEMYSTIFIES CALCULUS, who is now into ethnomathematics.  I 
smelled a rat from the beginning, but I haven't looked into this in depth.

Overcoming the provincialism of intellectual traditions is not an easy 
task.  With friends like these pissing in the sciences, who needs enemies?

At 01:52 PM 3/3/2005 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:
Below is an interesting abstract I found concerning the
reactions of Chinese mathematicians, during the
period of the Cultural Revolution, to publication of
Marx's mathematical manuscripts.
-

DOCUMENTA MATHEMATICA, Extra Volume ICM III (1998), 799-809
Joseph W. Dauben
Title: Marx, Mao and Mathematics: The Politics of Infinitesimals
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/documenta/xvol-icm/19/Dauben.MAN.html
The ``Mathematical Manuscripts'' of Karl Marx were first published (in
part) in Russian in 1933, along with an analysis by S.~A. Yanovskaya.
Friedrich Engels was the first to call attention to the existence of
these manuscripts in the preface to his Anti-D\"uhring [1885]. A more
definitive edition of the ``Manuscripts'' was eventually published, under
the direction of Yanovskaya, in 1968, and subsequently numerous
translations have also appeared. Marx was interested in mathematics
primarily because of its relation to his ideas on political economy, but
he also saw the idea of variable magnitude as directly related to
dialectical processes in nature. He regarded questions about the
foundations of the differential calculus as a ``touchstone of the
application of the method of materialist dialectics to mathematics.''
Nearly a century later, Chinese mathematicians explicitly linked Marxist
ideology and the foundations of mathematics through a new program
interpreting calculus in terms of nonstandard analysis. During the
Cultural Revolution (1966--1976), mathematics was suspect for being too
abstract, aloof from the concerns of the common man and the struggle to
meet the basic needs of daily life in a still largely agrarian society.
But during the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese mathematicians
discovered the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx, these seemed to
offer fresh grounds for justifying abstract mathematics, especially
concern for foundations and critical evaluation of the calculus. At least
one study group in the Department of Mathematics at Chekiang Teachers
College issued its own account of ``The Brilliant Victory of Dialectics -
Notes on Studying Marx's `Mathematical Manuscripts'.'' Inspired by
nonstandard analysis, introduced by Abraham Robinson only a few years
previously, some Chinese mathematicians adapted the model Marx had laid
down a century earlier in analyzing the calculus, and especially the
nature of infinitesimals in mathematics, from a Marxist perspective. But
they did so with new technical tools available thanks to Robinson but
unknown to Marx when he began to study the calculus in the 1860s. As a
result, considerable interest in nonstandard analysis has developed
subsequently in China, and almost immediately after the Cultural
Revolution was officially over in 1976, the first all-China conference on
nonstandard analysis was held in Xinxiang, Henan Province, in 1978

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

We should find out more about what the Chinese have done.  It would also be 
interesting to know if in some way, Marx's attempts to think through the 
problem based on outdated math books anticipated future 
developments.  However, the account below looks silly to me.

The existence of multiple models for number systems is the product of 
advances in axiomatization which were just underway in the late 19th 
century.  It was not possible before then to create a consistent conception 
of infinitesimals.  Hence dogma is not an issue.  The development of the 
theory of limits by Weierstrauss (et al) provided a rigorous foundation for 
calculus for the first time.  I do not know whether Someone like Robinson 
could have accomplished nonstandard analysis several decades earlier, but I 
don't think it could have been done in the 19th century.  It does seem odd, 
as Goedel says, that things developed as they did, but on the other hand, 
foundations always come last, not first.

Marx missed out on all this, but he could be said to have made an honorable 
effort at analyzing the old math textbooks he was using.  Van Heijenoort 
has no beef with Marx, but he is unhappy with Engels' dogmatism as well as 
his lack of knowledge.  Engels, though, seems to be an innocent victim of 
working in an intellectual vacuum in a hostile environment.  However, as 
time goes one, the excuses decrease.

As for the philosophical meaning of axiomatic systems--which is quite a 
different matter from the nonsense about flux and static--and which version 
of analysis is more intuitive, I once posed the question to Saunders 
MacLane.  He was rather puzzled by my question, and could only recite the 
usefulness of various axiomatic systems.  In any case, the relationship of 
axiomatic systems to one another, to "intuition", and to the material 
world, is a much more dynamic and complex relationship--well worth 
investigating!--than the childish level of "Marxism" is prepared to engage.

Perhaps this is one reason Van Heijenoort got so disgusted with Marxists in 
the 1940s and decided to try his luck elsewhere.  The notion that Marxists 
have a right to be provincial, sectarian, and ignorant has got to be 
stopped.  Marxists should take as their province the totality of human 
knowledge, not a pitiful little intellectual ghetto called Marxism.  When 
you have a police state to back you up, you can puff out your chest, but 
when you're a tiny marginalized subculture, you're just pathetic.

At 12:21 PM 3/3/2005 -0700, Hans G. Ehrbar wrote:
Abraham Robinson's nonstandard analysis adds more numbers,
infinite numbers and infinitesimal numbers, to the numbers
line.  Just as Margaret Thatcher says that society does not
exist, modern mainstream mathematics is based on the dogma
that infinitesimals do not exist.  Robinson showed, by
contrast, that one can use infinitesimals without getting
into mathematical contradictions.  He demonstrated that
mathematics becomes much more intuitive this way, not only
its elementary proofs, but especially the deeper results.  I
understand that the so-called "renormalization problem" in
physics, according to which certain physically relevant
integrals become infinite and somehow have to be made finite
again, has a much more satisfactory solution in nonstandard
analysis than in standard analysis.
The well-know logician Kurt Goedel said about Robinson's
work: ``I think, in coming years it will be considered a
great oddity in the history of mathematics that the first
exact theory of infinitesimals was developed 300 years after
the invention of the differential calculus.''
When I looked at Robinson I had the impression that he
shares the following error with the ``standard''
mathematicians whom he criticizes: they consider numbers
only in a static way, without allowing them to move.  It
would be beneficial to expand on the intuition of the
inventors of differential calculus, who talked about
``fluxions,'' i.e., quantities in flux, in motion.  Modern
mathematicians even use arrows in their symbol for limits,
but they are not calculating with moving quantities, only
with static quantities.  Robinson does not explicitly use
moving quantities, he uses more static quantities, and many
mathematicians criticize nonstandard mathematics because it
simply has too many numbers.
The Chinese manuscript you just sent to the list seems to
have a much more dialectical view of nonstandard analysis
than Robinson himself, and in addition it makes a bridge
between Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts and nonstandard
Analysis.  This is very exciting News to me.  Can we find
out more about this?
Hans.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

I've got to run now, so briefly: At some point, a modus vivendi was worked 
out, which allowed the propaganda apparatus to do its thing while leaving 
scientists and mathematicians alone to do theirs.  This has roots towards 
the end of the Stalin era, in the late 1940s, when formal logic was once 
again taught as a subject.  Perhaps by this time Stalin had stopped sending 
scientists and mathematicians to the Gulag.  But obviously, he and his 
henchmen realized that the USSR could not compete in the dawning atomic and 
computer age without serious investment in physics, logic, math, 
cybernetics.  So of course they were encouraged.  In this respect, Stalin 
proved to be smarter than the dumbass Maoists who looked to peasant society.

At 02:37 PM 3/3/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
I'm not sure that abstract mathematics was altogether "destroyed" in the
Soviet Union's academics, because of some anecdotal evidence I have.
When I was an undergraduate in 1968, the honors math majors ( the best math
students) _had_ to take Russian language courses, because so much of the
world's advanced math and physics was being done by Soviets.
Charles

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

I haven't been online since mid-afternoon, so I'm just now catching up.
I hope others paid more careful attention to my recent posts.  There are 
serious consequences when one allows oneself to get trapped in a narrow 
corner.  It is incumbent upon anyone attempting to speak for the whole to 
attempt to gather up the whole of knowledge and not just hide in a tiny corner.

With respect to philosophy, it is important to understand how fragmented 
philosophy has been for well over a century.  The artificial attempt to 
overcome fragmentation within bourgeois philosophy in the Anglo-American 
world is based on the deceptive and false dichotomy of "analytical" and 
"continental" philosophy.  Even those who recognize the spurious basis of 
this categorization have done little more than to defect to or incorporate 
the irrationalist wing of bourgeois philosophy (which also includes 
Wittgenstein, though classed among the analytical philosophers).

Later on I will have more to say about a book I'm reading, FUTURE PASTS: 
THE ANALYTIC TRADITION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY.  There is a 
tremendous amount of useful historical information here from people in the 
know.  However, the attempts to accommodate the irrationalist tradition new 
and old are pitiful and really show up the duplicitous basis of liberal 
inclusiveness.  Of course, Hegel and Marx are silenced in this story.  And 
it should also be evident how tortured so much of the history of analytical 
philosophy is from the false phenomenalist premises on which it was 
built.  There's a chapter on Mach as a pivotal figure inspiring this 
movement.  And remember that Lenin took a hard lone against Mach, for which 
he deserves a lot of credit.

There is a lot entailed by writing Marxism back into the history it has 
been written out of.  But this shows up not only the inadequacy of 
analytical and irrationalist philosophy, but the underdevelopment of 
Marxism in certain areas due to the fragmentation and segregation of 
intellectual traditions.  Marxism will have something to say about all 
this, but not from hiding among the Marxist classics and their imitators.

Part of resurrecting the history of Eastern European (Marxist) philosophy 
is to look at how philosophers in those countries themselves attempted to 
negotiate the boundaries of intellectual traditions, not just in the USSR, 
but even more conspicuously in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and 
elsewhere.  There are more sophisticated models to be found than one finds 
in the usual party literature.

Lenin made an honest attempt to deal with the situation he inherited as 
best he could, but he was helpless in combatting the inward-turning of 
"Marxism", which he partially abetted whatever his intentions.  Lenin's 
conception of the unity of logic, epistemology, and ontology lacked the 
specificity to come to terms with contemporary developments of which 
neither he nor his successors were apprised.  (Interestingly, I have a very 
obscure book from Czechoslovakia on the history of logic which takes up 
Lenin's perspective with the sophistication of a professional 
logician.)  Just was the rest of the world refused to have anything to do 
with Marxism, so Marxism was not favorably positioned to integrate the 
newest developments in logic and mathematics.

It is essential, in order to complete the story, to recognize the 
distinction between objective and subjective dialectics.  There is a whole 
history of Marxist philosophy of science (see, e.g. Helena Sheehan). If you 
read Sheehan carefully or other literature, you will find that the 
philosophical substance of dialectics of nature lies in emergentism, and 
that most Marxist scientists completely skirted around the issue of 
subjective dialectics (logic), preferring to reiterate vague assertions 
inherited form Engels and canonized by the Soviets.  I will get into this 
in more detail another time.

The moral of the story: historical reconstruction of knowledge is a huge 
task.  You don't want to leave it in the hands of bourgeois philosophy, do you?

At 09:05 PM 3/3/2005 +0100, Choppa Morph wrote:
Marxism isn't "Marxists", and definitely not Stalinists.
The ideas of Marxism are the only ideas that can save humanity from 
destruction and barbarism via the revolutionary transformation of society 
by the revolutionary working class.

It's not pathetic to know the power of the genie in your battered old lamp.
It's not a question of attitude ("pitiful", "puffed up", "pathetic") but 
of organization and determination.

Nice to know someone's against provincialism, sectarianism, ignorance and 
pettiness, though. So inspirational.

Yup, a veritable Moses to lead us out of our "pitiful little intellectual 
ghetto"...

Choppa

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

You are correct about Lenin as well as Marx and Engels.  Lenin was careful 
about communists' overstepping their bounds of competence.  However, even 
during the 1920s, when activity in all areas was quite creative before 
Stalin's clampdown, certain bad habits got established.

I don't recall exactly when interference in the sciences began.  There was 
of course the notorious meddling in Soviet genetics, which resulted in 
Lysenkoism and severe consequences for Soviet agriculture.  But the theory 
of relativity was also denounced as not conforming to principles of 
dialectical materialism, which occasioned some mockery from 
Einstein.  (After the Post-Stalin thaw, Einstein was held up as an exemplar 
of dialectical materialist thought.)  Mathematicians also suffered during 
this period.  Kolman testifies to the ineptitude imposed on a number of areas.

No, there was no lack of scientific enterprise in the USSR, but it's a 
miracle that the incompetence and despotism of the leadership didn't sink 
the whole country completely, ironic in view of the crash program of 
industrialization which was dubbed "building socialism."

It is also important to recognize that the ideological rhetoric used was 
similar to yours:

This aspect is also interesting because Engels' theory and philosophy of
mathematics is exactly materialist, of course,  in contrast with that of
what is probably the theory of most abstract mathematicians, i.e. idealist,
emphasis on derivation outside of practical activities. Business is the
_most_ practical activity. Even physics is less practical.  Business is the
most highly math practical activity, in a sense.
And yet how impractical the repression of theoretical thought proved to 
be.  Even Bukharin was naive in this area.  Some talk he gave to the effect 
that there was no future for "pure" research got Michael Polanyi so 
perturbed, he proceeded to develop his own ideas about science.

There's a new book on the strange career of Soviet cybernetics I need to get.
I know I had some correspondence with Rosser in the '90s, but I can't 
remember what about.  The first of his essays most pertinent to our 
discussion seems to be;

Aspects of Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics
http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb/DIANONL.DYN.doc
At 04:45 PM 3/3/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
They were probably doing good physics and math all along. Don't think they
suddenly changed course and caught up and passed the rest of the world.
Crude scientists would not have been able to pick up on the atom bomb so
quickly.  You know Sputnik and all that.
Afterall, Marx, Engels and Lenin put a lot of emphasis on science.  Stalin
and Stalinists did a lot of following those three to the tee. M,E and L did
not teach establishing an intellectual ghetto, but rather exactly
participating in the "totality of human knowledge."
The problem with the Soviet Union was _not_ lack of scientific work and
culture.
However,on cybernetics the word seems to be that they missed the boat on
that , contra what you say below.
Charles

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm substantially in agreement with you here.  Now, if one wants to unify 
the marxist and natural-scientific perspectives, in place of relegating 
them to separate perspectives, then one has to rise to that level of 
abstraction to construct a unified account of both.  This ridiculous meme 
theory is a noteworthy example of the failure of natural scientists to 
encompass the social.  They've still learned nothing.  And Marxists also 
have their work to do.  (I just ran into Sohn-Rethel's first blunder: his 
account of Galileo's concept of inertia.)

BTW, what do you think of this biosemiotics business.  The one theoretical 
biologist I know who is into this is full of crackpot ideas.  I"m very 
distrustful:

Claus Emmeche
Taking the semiotic turn,
or how significant philosophy of biology should be done
http://mitdenker.at/life/life09.htm
Also at this url:
http://www.nbi.dk/~emmeche/cePubl/2002b.Wit.Sats.html
Note this key passage:
>More and more biologists are beginning to understand that the essence of
>life is to mean something, to mediate significance, to interpret signs.
>This already seems to be implicitly present even in orthodox Neo-Darwinism
>and its recurrent use of terms like "code", "messenger", "genetic
>information", and so on. These concepts substitute the final causes
>Darwinists believed to have discarded 150 years ago, they have become
>firmly established in molecular biology with specific scientific meanings;
>and yet they the semiotic content or connotations are rarely taken serious
>by the scientists to the extant that there is a tendency to devaluate
>their status as being "merely metaphors" when confronted with the question
>about their implied intentionality or semioticity (cf. Emmeche 1999). This
>secret language, where "code" seems to be a code for final cause, points
>to the fact that it might be more honest and productive to attack the
>problem head-on and to formulate an explicit biological theory taking
>these recurrent semiotics metaphors serious and discuss them as pointing
>to real scientific problems. This means that a principal task of biology
>will be to study signs and sign processes in living systems. This is
>biosemiotics -- the scientific study of biosemiosis. Semiotics, the
>general science of signs, thus becomes a reservoir of concepts and
>principles when it is recognized that biology, being about living systems,
>at the same time is about sign systems. Moreover, semiotics will probably
>not remain the same after this encounter with biology: both sciences will
>be transformed fundamentally while gradually being melded into one more
>comprehensive field.
While many of the ideas adumbrated in this review seem to be quite
fruitful, this paragraph is the tipoff that something is rotten in the
state of Denmark.
At 05:28 PM 3/4/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
 Have been following your discussion with considerable interest.  Sorry
to lurk so long, but I was occupied in finishing up a paper.
 I was particularly interested in your earlier discussion on emergence.
I agree strongly with Jay Gould that dialectics; Hegelian and Marxist alike,
describe what I suppose would now be called "emergent functions".  I have
many reservations about Engel's representation of the dialectic and his
three so-called "laws" appear to me to be a snobbish attempt to present
"Dialectics for the Working Class".  Certainly Llyod Spencer and Andrzej
Krauze's  Hegel for Beginners and Andy Blunden's Getting to Know Hegel are
much more successful representations of dialectical theory.  A search for
emergentism in Marxism would be better served by reinvestigating the methods
of Hegel (his Logics) and of Marx (Practice, or, better, labour practice)
for the mechanics and process whereby they derive emergent complex moments
from simpler prior conditions.  I suspect that the concretisation of
abstraction through successive negation, unity of labour practice and extant
condition in the productive process, and sublation of prior syntheses in
extant dialectical moments will have more significance for understanding
emergence in human history than the hierarchy theories of Salthe, Swenson,
and O'Neil, the emergent semiotics of Hoffmeyer and so on. That is not to
say that systems, even cybernetic systems, are not relevant to the
investigation, but, we must remember that despite Engel's (sometimes
brilliant and sometimes embarrassing) adventures in the dialectics of
Nature, that Hegel and Marx theoretical interests were exclusively focussed
on human activity and human history and were only interested in Nature as a
derived function of human inteaction with material conditions.   Even
Hegel's dialectics on Nature concerned the Natural Sciences and not Nature
as such (as the subject of human contemplation).
Which bring us to the problem of Natural science and Marxism.
Certainly the Natural sciences are a component of modern history.  They
more or less emerge in late Mediaeval Europe together with the dev

[Marxism-Thaxis] Alternatives to Positivism

[Ralph Dumain]

I've put up the table of contents to this book:
Alternatives to Positivism
Igor Naletov
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/naletov0.html
I already had section 1 of chapter one on my web site:
Metaphysics and Anti-Metaphysics of Positivism
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/naletov11.html
If I had time to scan all this stuff, I would definitely get the rest of 
chapter 1 and chapter 2 up at least.  I couldn't make much sense of chatper 
3.  As you can see, the first two chapters alone come to 244 pp.

This book would be my first priority from Progress Publishers to get onto 
the web.


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Problem of the ideal (Dubrovsky)

[Ralph Dumain]

A couple new items on my web site:
The Problem of the Ideal: Contents
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dubrov-c.html
and:
The Problem of the Ideal: Introduction
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dubrov0.html
Some years ago I put up a couple extracts from this book:
The Problem of the Ideal (Extracts) by David Dubrovsky
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/dubrov1.html
This book is on my top five list of Soviet philosophy books to see online.
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

This is very interesting, but I still do not understand biosemiology.
To me the following is complete nonsense:
 the suggestion that symbolic
representation is at very least coterminous with the emergence of life forms
and that its initial functional relation to material conditions is
self-replication suggests an interesting potential avenue of development of
Marx's basic theory of human labour.  Rocha's work suggests that it is
possible to build a dialectic of the material foundations of symbolic
representation that  is closely connected (at the initial stage even
identical) to the self-perpetuating activity by which Marx defines life
forms and which serves as the fundamental material foundation of his
dialectical representation of the development of human labour activity.
I see no semiotic meaning in the genetic code or connection to human 
labor.  Is there anything more to this than the shoddiest reasoning by 
analogy, akin to the mystical medieval systems of correspondences?  I see 
nothing here but empty verbiage.  What am I missing?

At 07:23 PM 3/6/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
Memics and Lysenkian dialectical "theories" of organic development are both
examples of the forced appropriation of objectives (hence means) to issues
very alien to the subjects of theory.
The memecists employ the priniciple of Natural Selection of Species,
invented and developed to represent the impact of a concrete universal, i.e.
Nature, on extant organic forms in order to explicate the principle of the
emergence of particularities in organic life.  While evolutionary theory has
been very useful for explaining the diversification of life forms, but it is
a very simple concept and barely explains, if at all, the the principles
that govern the formal developments of life. Combined with genetic theory,
the theory of Natural Selection has made great advances in explaining the
mechanisms of species divergence and of the mechanical relations between
population structures and the differential distribution and magnitudes of
genetically defined populations.  The key word here is of course, mechanism.
Population genetics (the parent of memism) is a theory only of the relation
between independent parts.  Virtually all determinates of form, selection,
mutation, cross-over etc. are regarded as fundamentally indeterminate, their
only contribution to the evolutionary process being the selection,
introduction, and combination of new forms.
 Population genetics is fine for Lego breeding and cloning , for producing
geneologies of extant life forms,
and for searching for fittest solutions to determined problems among a
population of known diversities.  Ecologically oriented biologists such as
Stu Kauffman, D. J. Futuyama, and Emmeche find Population genetics woefully
inadequate and even misleading regarding their own objectives of which not a
few involve the determination of principles of organic form.  Their
objectives are much more similar, though not at all identical, to ours, than
those of the Population geneticist.  They are more interested in finding
those essential relations that restrict the kinds of interactions life forms
may enact with their environment and how these essential relations,
processes, limit the forms and activities of organisms and, finally, how
these produce conditions relevant to the future state of these forms and
their relations to their environment. The result is the production of a
chain of exciting ideas (some of which appear to be identical to those of
historical science, but are surely not) such as hierarchy theory, emergence,
autopoiesis, coevolution, and biosemiology (we'll get back to that shortly).
The inability Population genetics to provide useful tools for ecology, a
sister biological science which shares the same subject if not the same
concerns, should strongly suggest the inadequacy of Population Genetics
models for the science of human history. One need not be a Marxist or even
an Objective Idealist to realize that the objectives of the
social-historical sciences are to influence the development of the forms of
human conscious activity, and that this is at very least a matter of process
rather than mechanics.  Whatever the mechanics involved in the development
of human conscious activity, they are so deeply sublated in process that an
appeal to mechanism to explain historical matters is an exercise in
trivialities as is well demonstrated in Pinker's superficial products and
the so called "reverse engineering" of evolutionary development of such
greats as M Harris (ecological anthropology) and Dan Dennett (bioorganic
evolution).
Lysenko's dialectical representation of organic development is a crude but
instructive example of how the goal of transforming conscious activity, the
formation of a new social order, is conflated with issues of productive
process to the detriment ultimately of both.  The invention of Lysenkoism
was preceded by some 15 years of contention between the Geneticists (called
Morgan

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

It depresses me that we still have to have these discussions in 2005.  But 
once more into the breach . . .

First, I'd suggest looking at Engels' motives for doing what he did, which 
was not to present a finished ontology for all time but to combat the 
half-assed philosophical vulgarities of his day which were also interfering 
with a proper theoretical perspective on social organization.  Duhring was 
only one example of the mismosh that occupied so much of the intellectual 
energy of the second half of the 19th century--second-rate metaphorical 
extensions of physics and biology into the social sciences, vulgar 
evolutionism, etc.

Secondly, I am reminded of a now-defunct journal of Marxist philosophy of 
science called SCIENCE & NATURE.  See the table of contents on my web site:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/sncont.html
This journal illustrates the ups and downs of the subject, from attempts at 
refined thinking to the usual intellectual sloppiness and dogmatism, 
unfortunately practiced by the journal's editor.

There was at least one article by a Soviet scientist illustrating how 
dialectical thinking helped him.  I can't be certain, but this might be the 
one, in issue #1:

NIKOLAI N. SEMYENOV: A study in creativity
On Intuition Versus Dialectical Logic
As I recall, it really is an example of Holton's themata, as Jim has 
described it.  In cases like this--theoretical problems in physical 
sciences--I think that's the only way the dialectical concept makes any 
sense.  The conception of emergent properties, which ties into 
diamat--matters in certain types of cases, i.e. with the emergent 
properties of organisms, and ultimately with human existence--consciousness 
and social organization.  There may also be some importance in physics or 
others areas--but in a much more subtle form than the generally crude 
conceptions of dialectic repeated ad nauseam.

The real question is which has done more harm--botched notions of 
subjective dialectic (logic) or of objective dialectic (dialectics of 
nature)? The two issues are linked though distinct.  This reminds me that I 
need to write up my analysis of a British Marxist book from the '30s, 
ASPECTS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, is which the usual sloppy notions of 
dialectical logic were debated.  When I acquired this recently, I was 
surprised to find how dogmatic and fuzzy-minded J.D. Bernal in response to 
reasonable objections.  Allegiance to Soviet Marxism did a lot of harm, 
which obviously has yet to be undone.

I also have some more info for later on how party interference in science 
as well as other areas such as philosophy set the USSR back 
considerably.  The record is disgraceful, esp. from 1929 on.

At 01:51 PM 3/8/2005 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
I have always wondered about the fruitfulness of
abstract consideration of "dialectics," particularly
where they are (it is?) discussed as a "method."  Here
Jim F seems to suggest the SJG thought that dialectics
was a "method" or at least a heuristic for producing
hypotheses. I have never seen any evidence that there
was ever any method for producing hypotheses,
dialectical or other.
To use SJG's contrast of Soviet (dialectical)-Western
(not dialectical -- mechanical? gradualist?
evolutionary?) scientific training, one would expect
to be able to test whether this supposed difference in
training made any difference in the kind of hypotheses
scientists from Soviet and non-Soviet backgrounds put
forward.
I have not done any such study, but I am very
skeptical that it would turn up any systematic
differences in the way science was done in the USSR vs
the US, or in the kinds of hypotheses created by
Soviet and American scientists. I expect that this is
so in part because scientists (in my experience) don't
pay a lot of mind of methodological broughaha that is
not immediately relevant to work they are doing. The
"transformation of quantity into quality" (for
example),a t that level of abstraction, is not
something with obvious application to just about
anything in practical scientific wirk, so is likely to
be ignored by practicing scientists.
This is what we would expect if we buy into the
broadly Kuhnian picture of science as involving
periods of "normal" science punctauted by episodic
"revolutionary" transformations that give scientists a
new "paradigm" to work out by "normal" scientific
methods. This picture of scientific activity -- which,
incidentally, sounds dialectical even though it was
developed by a nice liberal in Cold-War America (first
ed. of Kuhn's Structure of Sciebtofic Revolutions
published in 1960) -- suggests that most science is
going to be normal, incremental, evolutionary working
out of accepted big hypotheses until the general
framework cracks -- and this does not depend on the
particular training of scientists in doalectics (or
not).
In fact all the standard examples of scientific
revolutions come from science done by
non-dialectically trained thinkers -- Lavoisier's

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm still waiting for your account of biosemiotics.  From what I've found 
on the web, it looks like crackpot mystical pseudoscience to me.

Once again, my EMERGENCE BLOG:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/emergence-blog.html
As for current objectives, one ought to consider refining one's tools 
rather than repeating the same old crap from a century 
ago.  Marxism-Leninism continues to wreak its harm from beyond the 
grave--what a shame.

At 01:18 PM 3/9/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
As I, hopefully with some success, indicated above, method cannot be
divorced from the objectives.  The theory of Natural Selection certainly
works.  Combined with population genetics it has become the foundation of
some of the most dramatic and disturbing social and cultural changes yet
encountered by man (including even the effect of Newtonian physics and 18th
and 19th century chemistry on industrial process in the early 19th century).
Yet it is a very simple (and very abstract) theory that is almost entirely
restricted to explaining the fact of change without any value for
understanding the formal changes in the development of organisms. It is the
very modesty of the objectives of Darwin's theory that lies at the heart of
its gradualism.  If you wish to explain how the relative distribution of
populations of species changes over time, Natural Selection is a more than
adequate model.  In Natural Selection theory everything having to do with
formal changes or even in adaptive interaction of life forms with their
environment is relegated to absolute chance and therefore totally outside
the ken of serious investigation.  Even the integration of evolutionary
theory with genetics does no more than explain the changes in the relative
distribution of known genes and genetic combinations.  The actual
development of anatomical and behavioural formations is regarded as the
function of improbable mutations and of equally fortuitous environmental
conditions completely external to the useful interaction of statistically
measureable inputs and outputs of the selective process.
I doubt whether punctuated equilibrium alone is an adequate basis for
introducing the dialectic into evolutionary theory.  By and large it is
based on the same kind of statistical considerations that are important to
standard evolutionary theory.  Dan Dennett in his Darwin's Dangerous Idea
does a fairly thorough job on Punctuated Evolution (see chapter 11, 3,
Punctuated Equilibrium: A hopeful Monster pp. 282 -298 and 4, Tinker to
Evers to Chance: The Burgess Shale Double-Play Mystery pp 299-312.  Rather I
see the potential for a dialectical understanding of evolutionary process in
the research on the mechanisms of adaptation, coevolution, and organic
symmetry (both in anatomical form and in activity).  Stuart Kauffman is the
most prominent of theoreticians in this field, but far from being the only
one. Others, including Varela and Maturana (Maturana uses some dialectics -
Marxist dialectics in his formulations) on autopoiesis, Salthe's (also much
influenced by Hegel) on hierarchies of being and emergent systems, and Mark
Bedau who formulates conditions for artificial life.  Despite the nearly
frantic exploration for the theoretical formulation that will unite the
disparate and far-ranging investigations on the development of life forms,
we have yet to see a thinker in this area on the level of Marx who can
produce a satisfactory general paradigm for the development of life forms. I
suspect that the philosopher of science who will effect such a synthesis has
already been born and may be even well on his way to producing such a
theory.
 Dennett, always the champion of evolutionary theory, argues that Stuart's
ideas do not really contradict "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", since the object
of his work concerns the restrictions on the development of organic design
rather than the changes in the  relative distribution of genetically defined
populations over time.  Just as the gradualist model of the transformation
of liquid to gas doesn't contradict the negation of Magnitude by Quantity,
nor should the gradualist theory of Natural Selection contradict a
dialectical theory of the development of organic form, the practical
objectives of these theories (and the circumstances involved in the
realization of these objects) are entirely different. Lenin's idea of a
unified, universal science is engendered by his failure to realize that
adherence to an uncompromising theory of the material nature of being was in
fact in direct contradiction with Marx and Engel's view that labour, the
unity of thought and activity, is the paradigm for the understanding of the
development of human activity, collective and individual, in human history.
To argue that all practice must be based on dialectical method is much like
asserting that one needs to adopt the same factory system for boiling a pot
of tea for guests as for the production of teapots for marketing purposes.

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lenin on Dialectics

[Ralph Dumain]

These quotes are all fine, and show these authors at their best.  The issue 
is, however, developing the logical precision to analyze specific 
phenomena.  As expressed, these are all general thematic principles, which 
do not function well merely as being quoted chapter and verse.

A large historical problem, though, is how the entity "Marxism" became 
congealed, not only stabilizing its political-ideological existence but 
putting a brake on its conceptual development and interaction with the 
whole world of knowledge.

At 09:53 AM 3/9/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
Dialectics, as understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel,
includes what is now called the theory of knowledge, or epistemology,
studying and generalizing the original and development of knowledge, the
transition from non-knowledge to knowledge.
In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely
penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through
Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on
the basis of Hegels' philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in
content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats,
as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a
different way, on a higher basis ("the negation of the negation"), a
development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line;
a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; "breaks in
continuity"; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses
towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the
various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given
phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the closest
and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history
constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a
uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite
laws-these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of
development that is richer than the conventional one. (Cf. Marx's letter to
Engels of January 8, 1868, in which he ridicules Stein's "wooden
trichotomies," which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist
dialectics.)

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dialectics of Nature

[Ralph Dumain]

Engels gives an impressive historical overview.  Of great interest is the 
relationship between the advances in science and the overall legitimating 
philosophy--deism or French materialism.  This illustrates a subtlety often 
lacking in such discussions.

At 09:36 AM 3/9/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
But what especially characterises this period is the elaboration of a
peculiar general outlook, in which the central point is the view of the
absolute immutability of nature. In whatever way nature itself might have
come into being, once present it remained as it was as long as it continued
to exist. The planets and their satellites, once set in motion by the
mysterious "first impulse", circled on and on in their predestined ellipses
for all eternity, or at any rate until the end of all things. The stars
remained for ever fixed and immovable in their places, keeping one another
therein by "universal gravitation". The earth had persisted without
alteration from all eternity, or, alternatively, from the first day of its
creation. The "five continents" of the present day had always existed, and
they had always had the same mountains, valleys, and rivers, the same
climate, and the same flora and fauna, except in so far as change or
cultivation had taken place at the hand of man. The species of plants and
animals had been established once for all when they came into existence;
like continually produced like, and it was already a good deal for Linnaus
to have conceded that possibly here and there new species could have arisen
by crossing. In contrast to the history of mankind, which develops in time,
there was ascribed to the history of nature only an unfolding in space. All
change, all development in nature, was denied. Natural science, so
revolutionary at the outset, suddenly found itself confronted by an
out-and-out conservative nature in which even to-day everything was as it
had been at the beginning and in which - to the end of the world or for all
eternity - everything would remain as it had been since the beginning.
High as the natural science of the first half of the eighteenth century
stood above Greek antiquity in knowledge and even in the sifting of its
material, it stood just as deeply below Greek antiquity in the theoretical
mastery of this material, in the general outlook on nature. For the Greek
philosophers the world was essentially something that had emerged from
chaos, something that had developed, that had come into being. For the
natural scientists of the period that we are dealing with it was something
ossified, something immutable, and for most of them something that had been
created at one stroke. Science was still deeply enmeshed in theology.
Everywhere it sought and found its ultimate resort in an impulse from
outside that was not to be explained from nature itself. Even if attraction,
by Newton pompously baptised as "universal gravitation", was conceived as an
essential property of matter, whence comes the unexplained tangential force
which first gives rise to the orbits of the planets? How did the innumerable
varieties of animals and plants arise? And how, above all, did man arise,
since after all it was certain that he was not present from all eternity? To
such questions natural science only too frequently answered by making the
creator of all things responsible. Copernicus, at the beginning of the
period, writes a letter renouncing theology; Newton closes the period with
the postulate of a divine first impulse. The highest general idea to which
this natural science attained was that of the purposiveness of the
arrangements of nature, the shallow teleology of Wolff, according to which
cats were created to eat mice, mice to he eaten by cats, and the whole of
nature to testify to the wisdom of the creator. It is to the highest credit
of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by
the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that - from
Spinoza right to the great French materialists - it insisted on explaining
the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the
natural science of the future.
I include the materialists of the eighteenth century in this period because
no natural scientific material was available to them other than that above
described. Kant's epoch- making work remained a secret to them, and Laplace
came long after them. We should not forget that this obsolete outlook on
nature, although riddled through and through by the progress of science,
dominated the entire first half of the nineteenth century, and in substance
is even now still taught in all schools. 1

The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made not by a
natural scientist but by a philosopher. In 1755 appeared Kant's Allgemeine
Naturgesehichte und Theorie des Himmels [General Natural History and Theory
of the Heavens]. 

___

[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

I can't speak to THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST, as I haven't read it, though it 
is gathering dust somewhere.  The Dialectics of Biology group produced a 
couple of interesting books, mostly without mumbo jumbo, as I recall.  I 
assume you meant 100% not 10% external.

As for dialectics and emergence, I think there is an essential distinction 
to be made between emergent materialism and idealist/vitalist 
notions.  Here a different sort of "dialectical" perspective will be 
useful.  If you look at my emergence blog, you will see a criticism of an 
effort to use process philosophy in a theory of emergence, with respect to 
quantum physics.  I've been reading some nonsense about 
biosemiotics. There's a lot of metaphysical junk going on--at the 
scientific as well as the popular level, apparently--mucking up synthetic 
perspectives of cosmic evolution and biological evolution.  The upshot is 
that there is something categorically wrong with much of this material, and 
here dialectics--by which I'm referring to the relationships between 
philosophical categories--may serve to demystify rather than remystify the 
issues.

Indeed, the half-assed vulgarities of our day are different.
I'm not sure what you mean that the concept of emergence was developed by 
analytical philosophers.  A lot of different people were in on this from a 
variety of perspectives.

Soviet tampering with the various sciences and disciplines is not news.  I 
just happened to read an interesting article in a festschrift to Robert 
Cohen that sums them up historically.  Not surprisingly, philosophy itself 
was hit the first and hardest of all disciplines.  All the idealist 
philosophers were shipped out of the country.  Having read Berdyaev, I'd 
say that was no loss.  The problem is, lacking any institutional experience 
of methodological pluralism, the Soviets made a mess by bureaucratically 
imposing an immature philosophy as mandatory for everyone, especially prior 
to the stage of synthesizing existing results from a variety of traditions, 
including, of course, innovations in logic.  This was of course tied into 
the Soviets' dilemma with respect to "red vs. expert."  They felt the 
imperative to institute their own hegemony, in a situation in which the 
inherited intelligentsia was not trusted.  But in the process of so doing, 
they induced certain institutional and intellectual bad habits which 
already created problems in the relatively loose 1920s, even before the 
horrors of the Stalin period.  Perhaps though another thing to look at is 
the dominant schools of bourgeois philosophy in the teens and '20s--what 
was the competition doing?

On dogmatism and stagnancy: the examples are legion.  The allegiance to the 
Soviets, Trotsky, Mao--the whole pattern of adherence to authority--has 
wreaked untold damage.  Where sympathetic critics try to refine the 
concepts, they are constantly beaten back by intellectual ineptitude and 
dogmatism, whether it is Bernal against Macmurray, Novack against Van 
Heijenoort, Sayers against Norman  The record is dismal.

At 11:03 PM 3/8/2005 -0800, Justin Schwartz wrote:
--- Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It depresses me that we still have to have these
> discussions in 2005.
It depresses me that intelligent people are still
wearing down their shoes talking about dialectics in
this way. We have had over 100 years without moving
forward an inch out of the murk and without the
slightest reason to believe that such talk is anything
more than a post hoc way of fitting ideas into an
arbitarry and unenlightening scheme.
 But
> once more into the breach . . .
>
> First, I'd suggest looking at Engels' motives for
> doing what he did, which
> was not to present a finished ontology for all time
Wrong target. I wasn't talking about Engels and wasn't
ascribing to anyone the hope of presenting a finished
ontology.
> but to combat the
> half-assed philosophical vulgarities of his day
And why think that thsi way of talking is useful in
combating the half-assed philosophical vulgarities of
our day, which are quite different.
> which were also interfering
> with a proper theoretical perspective on social
> organization.  Duhring was
> only one example of the mismosh that occupied so
> much of the intellectual
> energy of the second half of the 19th
> century--second-rate metaphorical
> extensions of physics and biology into the social
> sciences, vulgar
> evolutionism, etc.
And why do we need dialectical doubletalk to zap this
stuff? I have been inspired by this discussion and the
interest of a friend ins ociolobiology to reread
Lewontin, Kamin & Rose, The Dialectical Biologist. The
dialectical talk is 10% external to the scientific
criticism and even to the historucally based
ideologiekritik.
>
> Secondly, I am reminded of a now-defun

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

At 10:28 AM 3/9/2005 -0800, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
--- Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I can't speak to THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST, as I
> haven't read it, though it
> is gathering dust somewhere.  The Dialectics of
> Biology group produced a
> couple of interesting books, mostly without mumbo
> jumbo, as I recall.  I
> assume you meant 100% not 10% external.
Lewontin, Kamin, and Rose are all first rate scholars,
and the book is quite good in its substantive parts.
But the so-called dialectics is some sort of ritual
chant, and the history is potted and not altogether
accurate.
>
> As for dialectics and emergence, I think there is an
> essential distinction
> to be made between emergent materialism and
> idealist/vitalist
> notions.
Vitalism of any sort has been dead dead dead since the
mid-late 19th century.  Certainly no serious biologist
has maintained any such notion in this century.
Everyone agrees that there are no special vital
properties that explain why organisms are alive.  The
dispute has been between crude reductionism and
variants of sophisticated reductionism and emergent
antireductionism.  It is very hard to tell these
positions apart when they are suitably qualified.
Well, there was Driesch in the '20s, but I suppose that wasn't 
serious.  But some of this stuff--biosemiotics--is highly suspect, and I'm 
suspicious of process philosophy as well.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If
dialectics can help, I'm in favor of it, though i have
not seen any evidence that dialectics itself is more
than an emergent property of a certain sort of
usefully holistic thinking.  I mean, it's a real
enough phenomenon. Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Gramsci are
crealy dialectical thinkers.  But I don't think they
came to their subject matters with an antecedent
dialectical method they could apply to those subject
matters. They thought about things in a manner that
was dialectical. Better to try to follow their example
in their concrete analyses than to extract a method
from their procedures.
Yes, I agree.  I was trying to get at the same thing.  And of course for 
Marx, Lukacs, and Gramsci, dialectics of natural processes was irrelevant.

Fair enough. But analytical philosophers certainly
developed versions, e.g. Moore's theory of
supervenient properties -- the good being (he thought)
a non-natural property that supervened on natural
ones, such that two actions/people could not be alike
in all natural properties but differ in whether they
were good or not.
>
> Soviet tampering with the various sciences and
> disciplines is not news. . . .  Perhaps though
> another thing to look at is
> the dominant schools of bourgeois philosophy in the
> teens and '20s--what
> was the competition doing
Well, there is what it looks like now and what it
looked like then. And what it to liked to them as
opposed to what it looked like, e.g., to Russell or
Dewey or even to Gramsci or Lukacs or Weber.

I'm not sure what you mean, but of course there's a different perspective 
at that moment and retrospectively.  Perhaps the historical research being 
done now will help.  I think for example of THE PARTING OF THE WAYS, which 
is about Canrap, Heidegger, and Cassirer.

Where sympathetic critics
> try to refine the
> concepts, they are constantly beaten back by
> intellectual ineptitude and
> dogmatism, whether it is Bernal against Macmurray,
> Novack against Van
> Heijenoort, Sayers against Norman  The record is
> dismal.
I don't know MacMurray, but the other examples are
like the Jones Junior High vs. the Green bay Packers,
just in terms of sheer candlepower. Bernal was no
second-rater, though, at least in hsi biology and
history.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

Justin has already spoken for himself.  However, I'll remind you that our 
current discussion (originating on the marxism-thaxis list) involves solely 
diamat as a general ontology and its applications to the natural 
world.  Justin sees no use for this and you don't either, though from 
different orientations.  What Justin thinks beyond that, and with respect 
to Hegel, I'm not certain, but I've not known Justin to be interested in 
the stuff that interests you.  So in a way your critique doesn't apply 
except insofar as you disagree with whatever Justin has to say about 
natural science and scientific method.  Further comments below . . .

At 08:14 PM 3/10/2005 -0500, chris wright wrote:
Justin, as I have no idea what you mean by dialectic, this is difficult
to make heads or tails of.  Are you looking for a methodology?  I know
this is not popular, but dialectic is NOT a method.  A method has at its
base an assumed separation of first order and second order reasoning,
i.e. empirical fact and its theorization.  A methodology involves having
a 'theory of' something, something external to whomever does the
theorizing.  As is clear from the very opening Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel opposes this, and so too does Marx, as is
self-evident to a careful reading of his works.
I'm not sure what this means, though I recognize the Hegelian 
reference.  All three of us would probably agree there is no general 
(dialectical) method external to the subject matter and applied from 
outside.  This is especially so with respect to the history of inept 
dialectical interpretations of nature, which usually proceed in just this 
manner.

However, I'm disturbed by your wording:
"something external to whomever does the theorizing."  All science--all 
attempts at objective thought--aim at being external to the whomever who 
does the theorizing.  Without the separation of knower and known we are 
back to pre-Enlightenment divine right of kings and popes.

Modern natural science begins with astronomy and physics, the mathematical 
description of nature and a rethinking of the nature of forces.  Aside from 
the theological and political disturbances this created, there was also a 
disturbance in philosophy, which necessitated a realignment, for example of 
subject and object, material and mental substances.  However, this is a 
change outside science proper.  Philosophy is a different animal from 
science--and the philosophical image of science is different from its 
content.  This was already true of Newtonianism, which spread as an 
intellectual phenomenon in ways outside of its manifest scientific content, 
analogous to ideas about cosmology, quantum mechanics, evolutionism, 
computing, chaos, etc. spread in the culture today.

Without the subject-object distinction, there is no science, only 
superstition, and to the extent that Hegelianism denies this, it is 
unscientific, pace the efforts of Hegelians to whine about Kantianism, 
dualism, etc.

The real problem comes when the scientific world-picture evolves to 
reinsert the human being and ultimately the cognizing subject back into 
it.  This is what we now call the social or human sciences, though there is 
no hard and fast separation in the cognitive realm.  This is precisely the 
point at which the young Marx (1844) intervenes.  Remember, the division of 
the universe into primary and secondary qualities (which replaces the old 
distinction between essence and appearance or whatever the complementary 
concept is), enables a separation between the structure of matter in se and 
its processing by our particular sensory apparatus, the brain, and finally 
its subjective experiencing.  This, not Goethe's crapola, was the route to 
progress in science.

However, in what Marx would call the reconstruction of the concrete (what 
the Poznan School refers to as scientific idealization), we come to the 
point where the conscious subject re-enters the scientific world picture, 
and here is where everything becomes a mass of confusion.  Now once some of 
the Soviet philosophers who survived several decades of misdeeds tackled 
this problem again (from the 1960s on), they came up with more 
sophisticated formulations than earlier.  (It would be interesting to know 
what the survivors of these survivors say a decade and a half after the end 
of the Eastern European Stalinist regimes.  I should e-mail Lektorsky and 
ask him.)

This is also where emergent materialism comes in.  Most of the stuff I've 
read, while conservative in most matters of reductionism, draw the line at 
the problem of consciousness (and one would have to add social 
institutions, which are manifestly incomprehensible in physicalist terms, 
pace Neurath), and concede that here is where the concept of emergence is 
likely indispensable.

You seem unaware that that split is implicit when you say what one needs
is "to know the subject matter in detail and have imagination."  Either
you are engaging 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Scientists in America make concessions to Religious Right

[Ralph Dumain]

The United States is a nation of ignorant dumbfucks who have lost all right 
to respect.  People who don't know how to respect themselves deserve the 
disrespect of others.

As for this squabbling over "standards", anti-science, i.e. religion, 
should be entirely excluded from the proceedings.  Competing _scientific_ 
conceptions are worthy of discussion, as well as fuller discussion of what 
constitutes evidence, scientific knowledge, etc.  But here what is being 
fought over is not scientific standards per se, but the role of scientific 
standards under attack by religious dumbfucks.  Hence compromise is a bad 
idea, especially under the gun.

The situation is really bad.  I recently attended a plenary session of the 
meeting of the AAAS in DC, and was really appalled at the terrible pressure 
science is under now from the Right and the ways in which it is 
philosophically buckling under.

At 08:23 PM 3/10/2005 -0800, Lil Joe wrote:
--Alt-Boundary-192.389890171
Science standards debated
Thursday, March 10, 2005 12:00 am
Committee members spar over evolution's place in
state's science standards
  By MICHAEL STRAND
 Salina Journal
...

--Alt-Boundary-4507.390118031
Teens & creation/evolution: Most see God's
handiwork
Mar 9, 2005
By Michael Foust
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--America's public schools
may be teaching evolution, but a significant number
of teenagers aren't buying it, and an overwhelming
majority of them believe that God one way or
another was involved in the creation of humanity,
according to a new Gallup poll..

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

Afterthought: "something external to whomever does the theorizing." Aren't 
you missing out on the notion that Hegel deems philosophy as scientific, 
i.e. systematic, reproducible, and detachable from the empirical 
knower?  Wasn't this the crux of his quarrel with Schlegel?  The unity of 
subject and object is still a theoretical construct, or we'd be held 
hostage to the personal authority of thinker as some kind of guru.

With this in mind, see the latest addition to my web site:
After the 'System': Philosophy in the Age of the Sciences (Extract) by 
Gyorgy Markus
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/markus1.html

The question of knowledge vs knower modes of legitimation is dealt with by 
Karl Maton, e.g.:

"Popes, Kings & Cultural Studies: Placing the commitment to 
non-disciplinarity in historical context" by Karl Maton
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/PKCS.html

At 08:14 PM 3/10/2005 -0500, chris wright wrote:
Justin, as I have no idea what you mean by dialectic, this is difficult
to make heads or tails of.  Are you looking for a methodology?  I know
this is not popular, but dialectic is NOT a method.  A method has at its
base an assumed separation of first order and second order reasoning,
i.e. empirical fact and its theorization.  A methodology involves having
a 'theory of' something, something external to whomever does the
theorizing.  As is clear from the very opening Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel opposes this, and so too does Marx, as is
self-evident to a careful reading of his works.

  In the latter, you assume a stance outside
the object which is theorized, as if there was nothing involved in it
becoming an object for you.  In asking after the truth of the statement
"A rose is red", you would assume the distance of the asker from the
question.  And indeed the "scientific method" seems predicated on this
separation.

This is what is referred to as "reflexivity", akin I think to what Hegel
called the positing of presuppositions.  The fact and the theorization
of the fact must be simultaneously interrogating each other.  The theory
must be open to factual contradiction and the facts must be opened up as
containing theoretical presuppositions in regarding them as facts.

It is exactly scientific
methodology which hates ad hominem, as if there are were a purely
external, objective reality that could be reached by adequate knowledge
of the subject matter and imagination.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

Wow!  Thanks for the synopsis.  I don't understand how biosemiotics is 
Neo-Kantian, though.  If you are referring to Soviet philosopher David 
Dubrovsky, I'd appreciate some expansion on this topic as well.

Do you know whether Whitehead had a social theory?  The lack of social 
theory in the biosemiotcs schema is as telling as the failure to 
distinguish between the "semiosis" of unicellular organisms and human beings.

I saw Sebeok back in the '70s.  He didn't talk about this, but he did say 
something suspicious.  He said something about overeating as a craving for 
information.  This is a cute metaphor, but it also reveals the idealism of 
interpreting the material universe as information.

This picture shows up what I'm trying to get it in the distinction between 
mystical and materialist emergentism.  There is a "dialectical" lesson 
here.  Note that the linchpin of all these bad biosemiotic arguments comes 
from the metaphysical ordering of empirical data and the manipulation of 
the relationships between philosophical categories.  This is where 
dialectics is important, not in the direct intervention into empirical science.

I think I need to repeat this last paragraph a few hundred times and then 
explain it.  For now, though, just note the categorial relationships 
between matter, information, meaning, mind, society ... that form the basis 
of this idealist discipline.

At 12:26 PM 3/12/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:
Ralph,
1.You should be distrustful of this biosemiotics business.  In essence,
it's just a new twist on the kind of Neo-Kantian Ideas, Western and Russian,
that Lenin (1908) warned us about in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
 2.   I don't know just how much you want to know about it so I'll just
provide a quick sketch of the origins, history and family ties of
biosemiotics and a general description and criticism of two of its more
important theoretical developments (Western: Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, Russian:
Alexei Sharov).
ORIGINS, HISTORY, AND GENEOLOGY OF BIOSEMIOTICS:
3. Biosemiotics shares with Ethology and Biosociology a common ancestor
in Jakob v. Uexküll of umweltforschung fame.  Umwelt can be understood to
mean the world of significant experience of any specified, individual life
form.
 4.Here's how it's put in the encyclopedia of the free dictionary.com
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Umwelt
Umwelt (from the German umwelt, "environment") is the "biological
foundations that lie at the very epicentre of the study of both
communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal." The
term is usually translated as "subjective universe". Uexküll theorized that
organisms can have different Umwelten, even though they share the same
environment.
Each component of a Umwelt has a meaning which is functional for a
particular organism. Thus it can be water, food, shelter, potential threats,
or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates its own Umwelt
when it interacts with the world, and at the same time the organism reshapes
it. This is termed a 'functional circle'. The Umwelt theory states that the
mind
and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that interprets the
world for the organism.
5.As you can gather from this description, umwelt is a very Kantian
concept.  That is to say that umwelt describes the world of the life form as
the "product" of its subjective consciousness.  Uexküll (1864-1944) along
with Dilthey and Popper in historical studies and Levy-Bruhl and Franz Boas
in anthropology and Mach and Avenarius in the philosophy of science is among
the considerable number of European and Russian intellectuals who developed
the distinctive Neo-Kantianism that still dominates much of the so-called
advanced thinking of modern science, even today.
6. Thomas Sebeok (1920-2001), the Hungarian-American semioticist,
combined v. Uexküll's ideas with the theories of language of de Sassure and
Jakobsen thereby inventing the discipline of biosemiotics.  Sebeok's
biosemiotics is based on the following three principles: See
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/biosemiotics  for more on this.
1. The signification, communication and habit formation of living processes
2. Semiosis (changing sign relations) in living nature
3. The biological basis of all signs and sign interpretation
Biosemiotics is "biology interpreted as sign systems".  It certainly is a
revolutionary approach when compared with the almost exclusive focus of
orthodox biological theorizing on the mechanical properties of life systems.
Biosemiology represents a new focus on life process (rather than mechanism)
as the conveyance of signs and  and their interpretation by other living
signs in a variety of ways, including by means of molecules.  While
biosemiotics takes for granted and respects the complexity of living
processes as revealed by the existing fields of biology - from molecular
biology to brain science and behavioural studies - its object is to bring
to

[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: Van Heijenoort's critique of Engels

[Ralph Dumain]

There's a fundamental miscommunication gong on here.  But first . . .
At 07:02 PM 3/11/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:
Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons from Complexity Science
by Edwin E. Olson, Glenda H. Eoyang, Richard Beckhard, Peter Vaill.
Notice the E. O. Wilson of sociobiology fame is not an adviser on
organization (as in social organization) change, ie corporate
restructuring, via complexity science in biology.  So much for the
objectivity of the natural sciences in their methods.  Sociobiology is
finally being even more open about the idea that it thinks that
natural science is social science.  What crap.
This sounds even worse than sociobiology proper.  Positivism + metaphysics 
= social obscurantism


A Nice Derangement of Epistemes : Post-positivism in the Study of
Science from Quine to Latour
by John H. Zammito
Since the 1950s, many philosophers of science have attacked
positivism--the theory that scientific knowledge is grounded in
objective reality. Reconstructing the history of these critiques, John
H. Zammito argues that while so-called postpositivist theories of
science are very often invoked, they actually provide little support
for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies.
Possibly true, though Rorty came out of this tradition, too, as I think 
Feyerabend(?).  Its very weaknesses enable irrationalism as the fallout.

At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and
Complexity
by Stuart Kauffman

(Please note, that much of Kauffman's work is highly lauded, including
by Richard Lewontin, so he is not a neo-con wank but a highly
respected biologist)
I've heard of this guy, but don't know what else to say.

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox : Mending the Gap
Between Science and the Humanities
by STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Meditations on science and philosophy.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
by Stephen Jay Gould
1400 pages of evolutionary goodness.  And you thought the man could
only write articles.
3 books of possible interest for the emergence discussion… though
Kauffman may belong here as well in some of his work.
From Brains to Consciousness? Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind
by Steven Rose
The Making of Intelligence
by Ken Richardson, Steven Rose
Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Helix Books)
by John H. Holland
Holland might be one of these people I found suspect.
""Emergence" is the notion that the whole is more than the sum of its
parts."  So Ralph, is that what you have in mind?
I distinguish between mystical and materialist emergentism, a distinction 
not always reflected in lists of readings on the subject.  The subject is 
important, as it also relates to various notions of "reductionism".  One's 
notions of one reciprocally determines notions of the other.  The fact that 
the rebellion against "reductionism" so often leads to mysticism--as in 
cosmology, biosemiotics, complexity theory, etc., and especially science 
popularization--is an ideological problem of great import.  "Dialectical" 
thinking is much more important on this level of interpretation than it is 
mucking about with the boiling point of water.

So I didn't see how it was solely about Diamat as a general ontology.
 That was your point, and I truly still do not quite grasp your take
on this, so I refrained from saying anything much about it.  In fact,
I am still not sure what is so interesting about it.  What is the real
opposition to materialism in science, even so-called bourgeois
science?  Idealism cannot be present in the attention to the material
world, but more likely in the "explanations" of phenomena that science
works with, in the idea that mathematics can adequately grasp
phenomena, etc.  Why is emergence in your mind more materialistic than
non-emergence?  What is the ontological value beyond swatting the
stupidities of creationists and spiritually-minded physicists who
import clearly unscientific nonsense into their "explanations" of
phenomena they must nonetheless examine materialistically?
See my response above.  There is an essential distinction to be made 
between emergent materialism and mystical emergentism.  If emergence 
matters at all--if the "reductive" approach to the material/ideal 
society/mind/body problem doesn't work, then what are the 
alternatives?  The growing trend toward mysticism and irrationalism 
suggests the importance of the topic.


> "something external to whomever does the theorizing."  All science--all
> attempts at objective thought--aim at being external to the whomever
who
> does the theorizing.  Without the separation of knower and known we are
> back to pre-Enlightenment divine right of kings and popes.
Ralph, if you think this is what I mean, then we have a problem.  Do
you think that there is some magical separation the scientist can
achieve from that which she studies?  Do methods, priorities,
questions asked, general technological level, etc. not intervene?
What's more to the point, do you think that

[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Article on Goedel and Einstein

[Ralph Dumain]

This is as good a way as any to celebrate Einstein's birthday.  Cheers.
I read the first 50 pages of Rebecca Goldstein's new book on Goedel, 
INCOMPLETENESS.  A good read read.  I loved Goldstein's first novel THE 
MIND-BODY PROBLEM.  I saw here about the time she was hawking her third or 
fourth book.

Anyway, I just read a couple articles about Frege.
You can also read my 2001 tribute to Einstein:
A Personal Tribute to Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955)
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/einstein.html
At 03:40 PM 3/14/2005 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?050228crat_atlarge

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does Gödel Matter?

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm not aware that he was a social critic, but according to Rebecca Goldstein, 
he was a first class metaphysical control freak, leaving nothing to ambiguity 
or contingency.  I don't know whether Godel would say anything about law, but 
surely it hardly holds up to the standards of formal mathematics, and no one 
would be follish enough to think it does.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 15, 2005 4:30 PM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does Gödel Matter?



>
> %%
> CB: I think Hegel mentions math and jurisprudence as prime areas of the
> operation of formal logic.
>
> VFR: True enough, but I've a strong feeling that there's more to the
lawlessness of laws and constitutions than formal logic.
>

^^
CB: I'm curious to hear your discussion of the more there is to it.

 I was just thinking that _Goedel_ was likely to find logical problems with
the consistency or completeness of jurisprudential laws and constitutions.
Or was he a social critic that I don't know about ?



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Les Shaffer on Kurt Gödel

[Ralph Dumain]

I don't quite understand the remark about the mixing od semnatic and syntactic 
arguments by Godel.  Also, what is the relation to physics?

-Original Message-
From: Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 16, 2005 1:40 PM
To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Les Shaffer on  Kurt Gödel



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Les Shaffer on Kurt Gödel

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm skeptical of many of these analogies of formal systems and dialectics.  
However,
it could be said that the inexhaustibility and incompleteness of the process of 
axiomatization, along wth other seminal discoveries of the 20th century, accords
with the Marxist perspective as well as with a yet unnamed modern scientific 
perspective
(i.e. as opposed to the mystifications of popularization).

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 17, 2005 9:24 AM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Les Shaffer on Kurt Gödel



On Marxmail, there was also the following post on this thread. In it, Carlos
suggests Goedel's work as an expression of Leninist epistemology in
mathematics.  So, perhaps "incompleteness" is an expression of Engels 
and
Lenin's dialectic of absolute and relative truth, and their metaphor of the
mathematical asymptotic curve; relative truth as a curve progesses toward
the "line" that it absolute truth but never reaches it, is _incomplete_.
As
finite beings our knowledge of the infinite universe is always incomplete.
Materialist mathematics should reflect that. 

Charles



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] More Godel

[Ralph Dumain]

My opinion is that this sort of analogical reasoning doesn't work well here, 
i.e. when we are talking about formal mathematical systems.  Now, if the topic 
were a priori philosophical reasoning in general, I might be inclined to agree. 
 In fact, I used a similar argument last year when arguing with critical 
rationalists (Popperians) about falsifiability and objective knowledge, or the 
notion that objective knowledge is what survives tests (negative criteria).  I 
don't recall the details, but my argument had something to do with the 
limitations of the aprioristic mode of reasoning of philosophy.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 17, 2005 10:29 AM
To: 'PEN-L list' , 
'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
and the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] More Godel

Michael Perelman:
 
Mirowski says that Godel's proof rattled both Turing & Van Neuman,
making them turn from formalizing to matters such as game theory &
computers.

-clip-


CB: As Carlos on Marxmail suggested might be pertinent to this:

"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is
not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the
truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of
his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of
thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."
2nd Thesis on Feuerbach


Carlos said over there on Marxmail:
>
> "... Godel, in this paper which established his two great theorems by
> methods which are constructive in a precise sense, on the one hand
> showed the essential limitations imposed upon constructivist formal
> systems (which include all systems basing a calculus for arithmetic upon
> "mathematical induction"), and on the other hand displayed the power of
> constructivist methods for establishing metamathematical truths."

Carlos: Behind the jargon, isn't this Thesis II?



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does Gödel Matter?

[Ralph Dumain]

I've heard conflicting things about Heisenberg's politics.  His behavior during 
the war was ambiguous, as was the case with many other German scientists.

After Einstein emigrated to the USA, he was so pissed off at his german 
colleagues he requested his greetings to be forwarded to only one German 
physicist--it might have been Laue.  But he was pretty fed up.  I'm not aware 
that Einstein would generally make political affiliation a criterion for 
discussion of professional issues.

According to Goldstein, Einstein and Godel were an odd couple even 
philosophically, but there was some intellectual interest that bound them 
together.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 17, 2005 11:18 AM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Does Gödel Matter?




Oudeyis victor 

> > CB: I think Hegel mentions math and jurisprudence as prime areas of the
> > operation of formal logic.
> >
> > VFR: True enough, but I've a strong feeling that there's more to the
> lawlessness of laws and constitutions than formal logic.
> >
>
> ^^
> CB: I'm curious to hear your discussion of the more there is to it.
>
>  I was just thinking that _Goedel_ was likely to find logical problems
with
> the consistency or completeness of jurisprudential laws and constitutions.
> Or was he a social critic that I don't know about ?
>
> VFR Was thinking of Hegel, not Gödel. From his biography, Gödel sounds
like he belongs to the same cloud-9, right-wing, mathematician category as
Nash.


^

CB: Heisenberg was on good terms with the Nazis. 

>From what I can tell, Goedel was not progressive , but sort of apolitical. I
think the article I posted here on Goedel and Einstein as buddies at
Princeton said that some Nazis beatup Goedel at one point. Also, for what
its worth, would Einstein hangout with a rightwinger ?




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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] More Godel

[Ralph Dumain]

First of all, the theories of knowledge of Engels and Lenin lack the 
specificity to grapple with axiomatic systems as we've come to understand them. 
 Secondly, the philosophical extrapolations and analogies presented here are 
not very good interpretations of Godel.  Putting these two components together, 
much of the reasoning we see here is nebulous and vague verbiage about 
"dialectics", communicating very little.

I can't claim to be an expert in Popper, but I had a specific argument as to 
why philosophical reasoning is inadequate as a model for the gaining of 
knowledge through practical engagement with the world.  This is becasue 
reasoning about empirical matters is inherntly fallible, hence no definitive 
proof is possible.  This led Hume to skepticism, Kant to his Cpernican 
revolution, and Popper to deducing certain consequences from the problem of 
induction.  However, this is a very different problem from formal mathematical 
deductive inference.

For a whole different approach to these issues, see:

"On the Dialectics of Metamathematics" (Excerpts) by Peter Vardy 
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/vardy2.html

Some Italian mathematicians also have something interesting to say on the 
subject.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 17, 2005 11:33 AM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] More Godel

My opinion is that this sort of analogical reasoning doesn't work well here,
i.e. when we are talking about formal mathematical systems. 


CB: Why , would you say, formal mathematical systems don't "fit" this ?

What's "special" about mathematical systems that makes them an exception to
the Marx-Engels-Lenin theory of knowledge, from your analysis and experience
with these ?





 Now, if the topic were a priori philosophical reasoning in general, I might
be inclined to agree.  In fact, I used a similar argument last year when
arguing with critical rationalists (Popperians) about falsifiability and
objective knowledge, or the notion that objective knowledge is what survives
tests (negative criteria).  I don't recall the details, but my argument had
something to do with the limitations of the aprioristic mode of reasoning of
philosophy.


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Pragmatism bibliography, annotations & reviews

[Ralph Dumain]

In view of an upcoming local discussion of pragmatism, I've organized some
of my material on the subject:
Pragmatism and Its Discontents: Selected Bibliography (sans annotations)
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/pragmabib.html
Pragmatism and Its Discontents: Annotated Selected Bibliography
http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/pragmabib-a.html
The Ins and Outs of Lloyd's 'Left Out'
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/leftout.html
Note that the bibliography is not an attempt to cover the subject.  It is
an assemblage of interesting sources on pragmatism, consisting mostly of
contemporary reviews and revivals of pragmatism, historical critiques, and
newer and older Marxist critiques.
The bibliography exists in two versions--plain and annotated, with
cross-linkages between the two.
My web page on 'Left Out" consists of:
(a) R. Dumain's review of (a) Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the
Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922 by Brian Lloyd,
(b) R. Dumain's review of John Ryder's book review
(c) additional remarks on pragmatism in reaction to Ryder.
I have an additional electronic pile of unorganized scribblings on
pragmatism I should attempt to organize.  This last item (c) gives a
foretaste of why I consider "pragmatism" an unsatisfactory allegiance for
scientific realists and materialists.   While some friends of mine who also
claim to be pragmatists adhere also to a realist position, I have never
been able to understand the justification for this.  So perhaps some
scientific realist minded individuals could assemble some ideas on what is
distinctive in pragmatism that matters to them that is not already
presupposed in the realist/materialist perspective.
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A. Mani : Re: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 17, Issue 19

[Ralph Dumain]

More like backwardness and ignorance.
At 03:01 AM 3/20/2005 +0530, A. Mani wrote:
Re: 1. They're back! Church Bulletins: (Charles Brown)
It is the result of Hegelian Dialectics.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book

[Ralph Dumain]

This is a usefu reference, thanks.  I;ll add this to my emergence blog tonight.

It's not clear to me what if necessary for consciousness if not brains. Perhpas 
he's still leaving open the possibility of artificial intelligence?

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 21, 2005 10:10 AM
To: 'PEN-L list' , 
'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
and the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book 

Searle uses and emergence concept ?

"Searle has put the point another way by describing consciousness as an
emergent property of brain processes in the same sense that water's
liquidity is an emergent property of the behavior of H2O molecules."

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/searle.html



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book

[Ralph Dumain]

INteresting.  I thought Hofstadter's _Goedel, Escher, Bach was  apiece of crap, 
though.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 21, 2005 11:04 AM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book

 
 
Ralph: This is a useful reference, thanks.  I'll add this to my emergence
blog tonight.

It's not clear to me what if necessary for consciousness if not brains.
Perhpas he's still leaving open the possibility of artificial intelligence?
 


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Emergence, Pierce & pragmatism

[Ralph Dumain]

Just stumbled onto this paper:

CHARBEL NIÑO EL-HANI and SAMI PIHLSTRÖM 
 "Emergence Theories and Pragmatic Realism" (Draft version, February 2002. 
Comments welcome. Please do not quote.) 


http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/emergentism.pdf

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paper on emergence

[Ralph Dumain]

I don't recognize it.  Thanks.  I've been too exhuated to update my blog, but 
I'll incorporate these references when I can.

-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mar 23, 2005 6:42 PM
To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and
the thinkers he inspired' 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paper on emergence

I don't remember whether this was posted here before.

 

Charles

 

"The Search for Ontological Emergence"

 

 
http://www2.etown.edu/philosophy/PDF/PQarticle.pdf

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

ists who embraced diamat were rendered 
incapable of rendering their notions sufficiently precise.  They understood 
the general sensibility, but stuck with the authority assumed by the USSR, 
they traded off of ambiguity while tailing dogmatism.


In Frank's opinion a rapproachment between
diamat and logical empiricism was possible
to the extent that dialectical materialists
would be willing to deemphasize the
three laws of dialectics and to the extent
that they would be willing to avoid describing
matter as something that exists objectively,
as opposed to instead of speaking in terms
of intersubjective propositions.
But this is all wrong.  Dialectical laws aside, the Marxist position on 
matter is the correct one, and Frank is full of beans.


 Likewise, logical empiricists, in Frank's view ought to be willing to
admit the usefulness of dialectical thinking.
Meaning what, though?
Both dialectical materialists and logical
empiricists should, for Frank, be willing
to endorse what he called the "doctrine
of concrete truth," in which the truth of
propositions is judged in terms of the
practical conclusions that follow from them,
with their validity being assessed in terms
of their consequences for practical life.
I don't think this is a valid conception of concreteness.  I recognize an 
implicit reference to Lenin, but even there the analogy is naive.

Frank noted the similarities of the "doctrine of
concrete truth" to the doctrines of the
American pragmatists, and so he suggested
that logical empiricism, pragmatism, and
dialectical materialism ought to be regarded
as allied philosophies.
What nonsense.  Of course, we have a one-man example of the alliance of the 
latter two in young Sidney Hook.

Of course it should be noted that there was
a history between Frank and Lenin.  When
Frank was only about 24 years old, Lenin singled
him out for criticism in his *Materialism
and Empiriocriticism*, when he attacked
him as a Kantian, for having embraced Poincare's
conventionalism.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/three3.htm
(There is a story, that decades later during the McCarthy
period, when Frank came under investigation by the FBI
for his support for progressive causes, Frank pointed
out this passage to the special agents who were assigned
to speak with him, and that seemed to leave them satisfied).
---
On the other hand, it seems to me that the dialectical
materialist tradition addressed certain issues that
were not necessarily dealt with in the most satisfactory
manner in the logical empiricist and analytical philosophy
traditions: for example the issue of emergentism versus
reductionism.  I remember Ralph Dumain pointing out
on his marxistphilosophy list, that most of the anglophone
literature on this issue neglects the contributions of
Hegel, Engels and indeed of the Soviets, while focusing
most of its attention to the British emergentists.
Right, and I also said the standard reference works fail to distinguish 
between materialist and idealist emergentism.  We have representative of 
both in our group.  I will add that our main Popperian, following Popper, 
rejects "materialism" as a label for his position based on the very limited 
way the term is usually applied in this neck of the woods.

The overall point is that all wings of bourgeois philosophy are inadequate 
for fulfilling the synthetic functions of philosophy.  The Soviets had 
their limits and were severely held back by dogmatism and repression, but 
the very fact that they had to show themselves superior to the dominant 
ideologies of the west meant that they could at least criticize the 
assumptions, structures, and dynamics of the various schools of bourgeois 
philosophy.  Immersed in the bourgeois capital of the world, and coming 
into contact with the type of intellectuals I do, I can testify to their 
bankruptcy on all profound issues.  And I'll add I've never met a 
pragmatist who was capable of stringing two coherent thoughts together.



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Re: marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Some comments interleaved:
At 12:16 PM 5/20/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
Charles: The demonstration that Mach is an idealist in general is the main
thesis of Lenin's book _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_. I don't know
whether a reiteration of the main arguments is worthwhile here.
.
^^
CB: One thinks of Marx's comments about the need for abstraction to make up
for inability to directly observe in certain aspects of science.  Marx was
talking about political economy, but it applies to natural sciences. Just as
the fact that we cannot as individuals directly observe the _whole_ of
economic life doesn't thwart a science of it, neither does the indirect
inference of the existence of atoms mean that they are metaphysical
concepts. Much of astronomy involves indirect observation and inference.
Basically anytime instruments such as microscopes and telescopes are used,
there is an inference, not a direct observation.
I don't think it was just the existence of atoms at stake.  Mach was stuck 
in the rut of phenomenalism.  Dodging the materialist position, Mach 
attempted to redefine matter as permanent possibilities of sensation.

CB: Einstein essentially has the same  position as
 Lenin on the philosophical dispute Lenin takes up
 in _Materialism  and Empirio-Criticism_
..
Charles: Our terminology is that Einstein is a "materialist", with respect
to atoms. As Jim points out below, upholding the absoluteness of space and
time are not part of what defines a materialist position. Lenin defines
materlialism as belief in objective reality outside of our thoughts, not
belief in absolute space and time.
I believe you are correct here.
Charles: Never said Einstein had a preconceived ideology. In fact, the point
to be made here is that Einstein's arriving at a materialist ( your
"realist") position based on, as you say, the dictation of science, is
pretty powerful independent corroboration of the Engels-Lenin philosophy of
science positions. Without starting out thinking as Engels and Lenin, the
great thinker and scientist ,Einstein ,arrives at the same conclusions as
Engels and Lenin, and based on actual scientific work, very high quality
scientific experience.
I would word this differently.  First, scientific conclusions and 
philosophical conclusions are not identical.  Einstein in many respects 
converged with the (Marxist) materialist position in rejecting empiricism 
and inductivism.  His early interest in Mach was based on the 
operationalization of basic concepts, hence a rethinking of the empirical 
meaning of time.  Beyond that, Einstein rejected Mach's positivist 
philosophy.  Einstein himself said that scientists are philosophical 
opportunists, taking from various philosophies what is useful to them.  But 
yes, generically he can certainly be classified as a materialist.  Einstein 
was a physicist, let's not forget, and while he wrote about economics and 
social affairs, and occasionally commented on the mind-body problem, he 
never worked out a position and thus never had anything to say about 
emergentism that I'm aware of.  Engels & Lenin corroborate Einstein in the 
generic sense that both realized early on that scientific developments were 
going to force a new conception of science.  This has happened in a variety 
of ways.  See for example Milic Capek's (1961?) book on the philosophical 
impact of contemporary physics, as only one example.  Now physics and 
cosmology are in a turmoil, and physicists are openly admitting the need 
for a revolutionary new theory to account for dark matter/energy.  They 
seem to be tremendously naive philosophically, but the beauty of even the 
most confused science are the mechanisms of accountability for making 
empirical data cohere with mathematical formalisms, constructing some kind 
of physical models, however bizarre, so that science can progress even when 
people don't really know what they're talking about.

.
CB: What scientific theory does Lenin dismiss on philosophical grounds in
M&EC ?  None. He criticizes empirio-criticism, a philosophical theory. He
doesn't criticize any physical theories, Mach's or others, in M&EC. He only
says the new physical theories of that period are not a basis for ditching
materialism ( your realism), as Mach does.
I believe you are correct here.

Justin: As for
> Einstein's "realims" it was case by case. Einstein
> took no position on "materialism," the idea that
> everything in the world is in some sense material.
Charles: Lenin's definition of materialism in M&EC is belief in the
existence of objective reality. Einstein believes in the objective reality
of atoms, which he specifically disputed with Mach, who coincidently was the
main target of Lenin's book on the general issue that the atoms issue is a
specific example of.
Einstein made some statements that evince belief in God. That would be
non-materialism.
Lenin terms Mach a Kantian , i.e. dualist, shamefaced materialis

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Any of these in turn: false, trivial, elementary.  The silliest examples 
are those which make little sense: the seed is the negation of the 
negation; imaginary numbers are the negation of the negation.  There are 
better examples which never get beyond the elementary: water -> steam = 
quantitative -> qualitative change.  I'm not bothered by this, though 
Sartre has an interesting counter-argument in his 1946 essay "Materialism 
and Revolution."  The problem is, what use is it to prove the truth of a 
dialectical law by means of such isolated examples?  There has to be some 
overall systematic way in which an analysis makes a difference to adopt a 
dialectical conception.  Most of these examples taken from natural 
phenomena are either logically flawed or fairly trivial or both.  Hence 
"silly".


A more productive approach would be to criticize the logical structure of 
an interlocking system of concepts as being an inadequate characterization 
of a complex whole.  But this has nothing to do with putting some real 
world event in one-to-one correspondence with some dialectical law.


The second consideration is the type of phenomenon under 
investigation.  Engels' unfortunate formulation of a unified system of 
dialectical laws governing nature, society, and thought obscures the issues 
and vitiates whatever virtues can be found in his version of emergent 
materialism, which was historically important in delineating qualitative 
distinctions that would show how historical materialism--the analysis of 
social organization and its development--functioned as opposed to the 
confused logical structure of the vulgar biologism and ersatz evolutionism 
that ran rampant in the second half of the 19th century.  Biologism and 
evolution became master metaphors at that time as mechanics had become 
earlier, and thus the formation of a proper unified scientific perspective 
as biology was added to the scientific revolutions in physics and 
chemistry, and social theory/science (beyond political economy) was in its 
embryonic stages.


A pure dialectic of nature sans society and mind (which is where emergent 
materialism becomes most crucial and remains so) may serve some function, 
as a counter to mystification and philosophical confusion, but the generic 
issues involved are not so easily formulated in concrete terms, and the 
non-sociological (i.e. theological, metaphysical, epistemological) 
mystifications matter in a more general world-view sense.  For example, the 
late 19th century saw a more unified picture of forms of energy (though I 
can't recall whether electromagnetism and kinetic energy fit into a 
consistent unified system at the time--I've lost the relevant brain cells), 
a unity which Engels for reasons I don't recall felt the need to 
address.  And this was before the crisis in physics that led to the 
revolutionary developments of the 20th century kicked in, though a 
questioning of basic concepts was afoot.  In what sense can we say that 
Engels latched onto the key philosophical dilemmas embedded in the physical 
world picture? What mystifications did he address and what conceptual 
developments did he anticipate (that involve only physics and 
chemistry--for the purpose of argument)?


Let's fast-forward to Lenin's MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM.  Lenin 
attacks the mystifications surrounding of recent philosophies of science 
and the nascent mystifications of brand-new developments.  He claims that a 
conceptual revolution is under way that will radically change our picture 
of the physical world and understanding of its basic elements and their 
interrelations.  These conceptual difficulties show that a dialectical 
world picture of the physical world must emerge.  In a vague, generic sense 
his prediction was correct--the interconvertibility of mass and energy, the 
intimate relation of space and time and ultimately matter/energy, 
wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, the principle of 
complementarity.  Paradox upon paradox builds up as physics evolves in the 
next century.


My point here is: to analyze the structure of whole systems of concepts and 
physical interrelationships is a far more sophisticated endeavor that to 
take isolated examples of specific entities and transformations as 
validating instances of a dialectical law.  The problem is then to match up 
in a systematic and sufficiently delineated manner the logical 
relationships implicit from a dialectical perspective with the specific 
logical structures of scientific theories.  This is customarily not done, 
because the customary practice is to match up nebulous philosophical 
sloganeering with empirical or theoretical scientific examples.  Hence 
dialectics never has more than an intuitive feel, or, alternatively, bogs 
down in crudely delineated logical arguments.


And remember that so far I am restricting the discussion to physics and 
chemistry.  "Marxism" has a world-view interest in what goes on here, ev

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Often my syntax loses its way en route to its destination.  To wit:

"Biologism and evolution became master metaphors at that time as mechanics 
had become earlier, and thus the formation of a proper unified scientific 
perspective as biology was added to the scientific revolutions in physics 
and chemistry, and social theory/science (beyond political economy) was in 
its embryonic stages."


I forgot to complete my thought: thus spurious, confused "unified" 
pseudo-scientific biologistic/evolutionary schemas on top of spurious 
social physics abounded at the time.  This was the problem Engels had to 
address, rather than fussing over seeds and the square root of minus one.




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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: O, Dialectics! (and spleen)

[Ralph Dumain]

Justin has lost his mind, but I am no more pleased by the rest of the 
debate on the marxistphilosophy and thaxis lists.  I have to occupy my mind 
with writing a eulogy over the next three days, so perhaps you'll excuse my 
spotty participation.


Just a note on the article in FIRST THINGS (a reactionary Catholic mag, 
right?).  The article is remarkably lucid, but I want to call attention to 
a couple of paragraphs:


"You might think that the left would welcome the inclusion of altruism and 
cooperation in the Darwinian scheme. But sociobiologists had framed the 
argument in terms of genes, which seemed too deterministic. How could a New 
Society be built if our tiny masters, lurking inside every cell, hold us 
(as Wilson said) “on a leash”? Such a vision could only discourage the 
advocates of revolutionary change."


This misrepresents the intrinsic logic of the problem, though it may well 
represent the actual leftist response.


"The left–wing animus against sociobiology becomes understandable once we 
look at its major defect in a political light. Sociobiology “explains” (in 
a very weak sense of that word) whatever exists. But as Marx said, the left 
wants to change the world, not explain it. The world that exists, filled as 
it is with injustice, must be replaced by something better; a world without 
inequality, for example. Existing qualities of human nature—the dissimilar 
attitudes of men and women toward sexual intercourse, for example—can be 
explained by the usual, unvarying, and unfalsifiable formula. The trait 
arose by accident, then was selected for. But the raison d’être of the left 
is to champion states, conditions, and attitudes that do not exist—gender 
egalitarianism, say. The sociobiologists’ retort that these things don’t 
exist either because the requisite genes never did exist, or (fatal flaw) 
were not selected for, puts the left on the defensive. So the whole field 
of sociobiology suffers from a bias against the potential and in favor of 
the actual, and in that sense it’s true that it does have a “conservative” 
bias."


While part of this argument is sound, there's a fatal flaw: that the reason 
for objection to sociobiology is one solely of political will, not 
scientific method itself, though this is part of the argument as well.  I 
strongly object to this statement: "But as Marx said, the left wants to 
change the world, not explain it."  It's wrong about Marx, and it's wrong 
about the issue.  As to the "left", well, we need to get down to cases.


The article shows its Catholic bias by fingering materialism as the 
weakness of the leftist scientists who would endanger Darwinism itself by 
attacking sociobiology, and thus they must weaken their own 
case.  (Lewontin taught a class on heritability and scientific racism I 
attended in 1975.  I have at least one of his books, but I'm not up to date 
on him.)  Otherwise, the article is quite good, though the conclusion as to 
the coexistence of religion and science is deceptive.


Now, if you put together the analysis in this article with the conceptually 
confused debates on "dialectics" here, perhaps, with luck, you will see 
what the issues really are.  As a side benefit, the article shows up the 
strengths and weaknesses of Popper, and also implicitly demonstrates the 
relationship between testability and the structure of theoretical 
concepts.  Hegel, Marx, and Engels addressed the structuring of theories, 
outstripping the naive empiricist conceits of the time.  Marx addressed the 
theoretical deficiencies of German idealism and political economy.  Engels 
furthermore had to combat the pseudo-evolutionary concoctions of the latter 
third of the 19th century in order to defend a coherent historical 
materialist sociological conception.  Sad to say, the fragmented 
development of philosophy in the past 150 years, replicating the 
fragmentation of the social world itself, has not fostered a situation in 
which the accumulated history of conceptual confusion could be straightened 
out once and for all.


At 02:14 PM 5/25/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:

Long-winded?  I am hurt!

And I do not want to have anybody by the balls.  This is not a cock
fight or an ego trip.  That is just unnecessary provocation and
'starting shit.'

In biology it is quite clear that sociobiology is self-consciously
materialist ontologically.  What is funny is that some religious types
perceive sociobiology as 'more' materialist than Gould, Lewontin, et
al because of their biological determinism (greater or weaker), while
seeing it simultaneously as deeply religious.

For interesting articles, see

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0101/articles/bethell.html
http://itest.slu.edu/articles/90s/blackwell2.html

Cheers,
Chris



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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: O, Dialectics! (and spleen)

[Ralph Dumain]

On the second article referenced:

SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW RELIGION
http://itest.slu.edu/articles/90s/blackwell2.html

The author lucidly outlines the dilemmas involved in Wilson's position, but 
I find his argument conclusive.  Scientific materialism is not a religion, 
and if a certain brand of scientist can only assert it as a form of faith, 
I conclude that the scientist as well as the religionist has failed to 
transcend the philosophical antinomies of bourgeois society, which come to 
a head at the point at which natural science meets the subject-object 
relation. Marx addressed this issue philosophically (though not in a 
full-blown scientific manner) in the 1844 manuscripts.  Engels was 
essentially engaged in trying to formulate a non-mystical materialist 
emergentism combatting the pseudo-scientific evolutionary confusionisms of 
the late 19th century.  The author of this article breaks off just at the 
point where he needs to begin to analyze why Wilson's attempt to analyze 
religion as a branch of genetics cannot succeed.


At 01:39 PM 5/25/2005 -0400, Ralph Dumain wrote:


At 02:14 PM 5/25/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:
>Long-winded?  I am hurt!
>
>And I do not want to have anybody by the balls.  This is not a cock
>fight or an ego trip.  That is just unnecessary provocation and
>'starting shit.'
>
>In biology it is quite clear that sociobiology is self-consciously
>materialist ontologically.  What is funny is that some religious types
>perceive sociobiology as 'more' materialist than Gould, Lewontin, et
>al because of their biological determinism (greater or weaker), while
>seeing it simultaneously as deeply religious.
>
>For interesting articles, see
>
>http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0101/articles/bethell.html
>http://itest.slu.edu/articles/90s/blackwell2.html
>
>Cheers,
>Chris



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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: O, Dialectics! (and spleen)

[Ralph Dumain]

Typo!  I meant to write: "I find his argument INconclusive."

At 01:57 PM 5/25/2005 -0400, Ralph Dumain wrote:

On the second article referenced:

SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW RELIGION
http://itest.slu.edu/articles/90s/blackwell2.html

The author lucidly outlines the dilemmas involved in Wilson's position, but
I find his argument conclusive.  Scientific materialism is not a religion,
and if a certain brand of scientist can only assert it as a form of faith,
I conclude that the scientist as well as the religionist has failed to
transcend the philosophical antinomies of bourgeois society, which come to
a head at the point at which natural science meets the subject-object
relation. Marx addressed this issue philosophically (though not in a
full-blown scientific manner) in the 1844 manuscripts.  Engels was
essentially engaged in trying to formulate a non-mystical materialist
emergentism combatting the pseudo-scientific evolutionary confusionisms of
the late 19th century.  The author of this article breaks off just at the
point where he needs to begin to analyze why Wilson's attempt to analyze
religion as a branch of genetics cannot succeed.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I don't think anyone has paid attention to a word I've said, but I am 
intrigued by this intervention, particularly the key assertion:


"NOTE, THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN HISTORY
IS NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH THE
WORLD."

I am puzzled by the conclusion, though:

" In general, where we find irreconcilable (in
practice) dialectical arguments we have entered into a debate over ethics or
ethos  rather than over a scientific issue.  Dialectical arguments of this
sort are properly the realm of religion and traditional philosophy, classic
materialism being an example of the latter."

I don't get it.

At 04:08 PM 5/25/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

It appears that we've regressed once more back to the issue of the ontology
of nature, i.e. the question of what IS nature.

First let me bore you with a brief bit of history:
After nearly centuries of ferocious dialogue between those who argued that
the world is essentially ideal and those who asserted that the real world is
that of the spirit, Descartes proposed that the subject matter of philosophy
be changed from the nature of being to the nature of knowing.  Descartes by
his argument that the world is essentially material, but is given essence by
the spirit of intellect is more or less a precursor of Kant.  Over against
Descartes, Spinoza (drawing from his intimate acquaintance of Muslim and
Jewish philosophy) rejected the typically Western European differentiation
of body and soul and presented the view that the world unites both materia
(i.e extension) and intellect as two united dimensions of the same universe.
 At the turn of the century (18th and 19th that is) Kant once again changes
the rules of thinking about things.  Instead of examining the relationship
of abstract  knowledge to the world (there virtually being none in the
purviews of Berkeley and Hume) he proposed to examine the relation of the
activity of knowing, i.e. the use of the essential tool of knowledge
formation, logic, to man's sensual perception of the world.  Not
surprisingly he found virtually no relation at all so he proposed that
universal knowledge (the intersubjective transcendental ideas) is a function
of the universality of the organ of knowledge, the human brain and its
products.  Hegel's objection to Kant's formulation is based on Kant's almost
mathematical abstraction of logic, hence of human thought from concrete
experience.  Yes, Hegel for all his idealism did regard sensual experience
as the critical test for the practical value of ideals!  For Hegel human
thought should include the entire realm of human science and could not be
examined by examining the operations of a single human mind.  For Hegel the
dialectic was the process; intellectual, practical, and social whereby men
acquired and developed their knowledge of the real world.

Now, to the guts of the issue:
For those who have read Marx and Engel's Ad Feuerbach, the 11 short
theses whereby Karl and Friedrich declare their rejection of ontological
materialism; the materialism of Holbach, of Diderot and of Feuerbach, in
favour of a revision of Hegelian Objective Idealism will or should realize
that Marx and Engel's were not going back to the tired (Lenin called them,
silly) arguments of mechanical materialism.  In essence Marx and Engel's
(and Lenin after 1914) adopted the Kantian and Hegelian revisionist views of
the object of philosophy as the study of how men interact with their world
rather than in trying to determine the real nature of that world or the
relation of that world to human thought.  Their basic disagreement with Kant
and Hegel rests on the latters' determination that human interaction, indeed
that human knowledge is purely a function of ideation. To correct Hegel's
basically correct view of the science of history as a study of the
intellectual, practical and social process by which men acquired and
developed their knowledge of the real world, they presented arguments
showing that logic (i.e. dialectics) extends to all aspects of human
interaction with nature; physical, sensual, and intellectual.  Describing
their accomplishment in a dialectical form, the materialism of Marx, Engels
and Lenin is not a statement about the world but about the unity of logical
and physical and sensual activity in human labour (practice).
NOTE, THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN HISTORY
IS NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH THE
WORLD.

As regards the universality of the laws of dialectics:
The abstract laws of dialectics are universalities.  We may like
McTaggart  find them less than perfect, but whatever the modifications,
revisions and so on we may make on dialectics is a matter of dealing with
universals.  That dialectic processes may produce divergent truths is a
different issue from the universality of the logical process itself.  To
understand the emergence of divergent dialectic

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I am finding this discussion most frustrating.  I wish I could easily 
collocate all the posts I've written in the past dozen years on this 
subject.  Sigh. . . .


Briefly:

(1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and argued in 
this manner: these examples are empty verbiage.  Engels was indeed in 
pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a 
number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing, which was 
later taken as gospel.


(2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is a basic 
conflation between natural law and logical law.  Engels seems to have 
finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though 
there have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman).  Formal logical 
laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters such as stasis, 
motion, change, etc.  The real issue is the relationship of logic to 
ontology.  These problems arise in the fusion of logic with ontology, as 
occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and dialectical 
logic.  But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent 
inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of 
assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of logic 
and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis.  If it turns out that 
we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being without 
eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then 
dialectical logic has something to do.  But physical processes have nothing 
to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such 
exist, are logical abstractions describing the categorial relationships of 
concepts (which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.


(3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical problem with 
diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial 
statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know since 
Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories & 
examples of natural phenomena).  To wit, your examples:



CB: I don't recall if I said it here, but his formulation "there is only
matter and its mode of existence is motion" seems a quite exact forumuation
of the philosophical-physics issue that was addressed experimentally by
Michelson and Morley in discovering no absolute rest/ether and used
theoretically by Einstein in the relativity of all motion ( no absolute
rest). Change is absolute. Rest is relative. It's quite a remarkable
philosophical anticipation of the events in actual physics.

Also, the way Engels emphasizes in _The Dialectic of Nature_ the
transformations of one form of matter into another makes me think about E =
MC squared which is a formula for the transformation of mass into energy and
vica versa. I haven't thought this one through as much, but there might be
something there.


Note that general ontological statements about matter, motion, energy, etc. 
lack the specificity to be translated into special relativity or any other 
scientific theory.  There is no substance here to the argument that Engels 
anticipates relativity.  A better developed argument would look for more 
substantive remarks by Engels and show that the world-picture delineated 
therein has some substantive relationship to the conceptual reorganization 
mandated by revolutionary developments in scientific theories.


You may be right about heuristics, but in context of this discussion, I 
would again bring up Gerald Holton's notion of themata.


At 11:17 AM 5/24/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

Ralph Dumain

Any of these in turn: false, trivial, elementary.


CB: Taking these in turn gives a kind of silly result. False is the opposite
of elementary, elementary meaning a basic _truth_. Trivial means true too.

^

The silliest examples
are those which make little sense: the seed is the negation of the
negation;

^
CB: The seed ? Do you mean the flower is the negation of the negation of the
seed ? Make little sense ? Makes perfect sense. You start out with some
_thing_ a seed, and you end up with it gone, negated. But clearly something
_else_ now existing  came out of something that no longer exists. And there
is the stage of the plant inbetween the seed and the flower, so there is a
place for "double negation".

This is such a lovely and , yes, elementary, natural, fundamental example, I
can't imagine why any dialectician would want to discard it.



imaginary numbers are the negation of the negation.

^
CB: Again, elementary. As math goes through defining its basic sets of
numbers, it's not hard to conceive of the category imaginary numbers as some
"double not" of the previously established sets. Natural, whole, integers,
rational, irrational, real, imaginary. Irrationals are _not_ expressible as
the ratio of t

[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: O, Dialectics! (and spleen)

[Ralph Dumain]

While I have some idea of what I don't like about the other arguments 
presented so far, I am baffled by this one.  What exactly are you asserting 
about the relation of philosophy and politics?


What do you think about the assertion made by Chris (and others over the 
past century) that Lenin was only using the philosophical disagreement with 
Bogdanov and others for pragmatic political purposes and was not serious 
about the intrinsic philosophical issues in their own right?  I don't buy 
it, myself, but I haven't the time for a detailed historical 
exploration.  What does Dasvid Joravsky have to say about this, for 
example?  I read somewhere that he shows that Lenin was trying to separate 
out the political from the philosophical issues, and to combat  the 
_partisan_ use of empiriocriticism with party sanction.


BTW, as you may know, Lenin recognized that Engels had vastly 
oversimplified matters for purposes of popularization, but this was, I 
believe, in later writings (crica 1914?) and not in MAEC.  I don't think 
that either Engels or Lenin was engaged in a trivial enterprise.  However, 
a century (and more) later we ought to be able to express ourselves with 
greater depth and clarity in light of our historical perspective and the 
tools of analysis at our disposal now.  The Marxist-Leninist tradition 
ingrained a number of very harmful habits.  Instead of acting like parrots 
on our deathbeds, we can still think, can't we?  We aren't required to be 
the zombies of Marxism-Leninism or council communism.  Why rehash all these 
dead issues unless we are prepared for more incisive thinking?


At 04:47 PM 5/25/2005 +, gilhyle wrote:

Let me get this right:

If you are involved in building a political party and someone advocates a
philosophy which influences people in that party so as to weaken the
commitment of party members to political positions you advocate, you are not
permitted to enter the lists to debate with that person until you have worked
out all the problems of philosophy.

It is - apparently - not permitted to draw out the implications of realism 
and the
opposing point of view in abstraction from the related philosophical 
questions

in order to achieve an important POLITICAL result...seems quite the
opposite to obvious to me !

Polemic has an urgent political purpose, you do your best now with the tools
available. Later when there is a world war on that means you are shut up in
Switzerland, you might take some time to go off and study some Hegel.

What is wrong with that?

(By the way, I dont recall Lenin significantly misquoted Kant - any examples?)

Apparently it isn't permitted, either, to point out the obvious (as Engels 
did)
since to do so involves making a banal point.  That is not obvious to me 
either,

but maybe I'm being banal in saying that.

Then lets look at the draft Dialectics of Nature - did Engels rely on banal
'dialectical laws' to draw profound conclusions without regard to the 
detail of

the science concerned. I don't see it there.

It never ceases to amaze me that people can rely on the difficulty (undoubted
difficulty) in articulating a coherent and comprehensive statement about
realism and ontology  to suggest that Lenin and Engels were incredibly
negligent or incoherent. SInce neither man was practising philosophy, it is
hardly surprising that they didn't produce it.

All this means is that Marxism then had not and maybe did not need to have
resolved all the problems of philosophy. Of course Pannokoek might (falsely)
have though otherwise.

Now, if you want to leave Engels and Lenin alone and try to talk about 
realism

and ontology,  I will await with interest and growing impatience your
articulation of what Engels and Lenin should have said...I haven't 
heard it

so far.



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Re: Levins & Lewontin (was Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!)

[Ralph Dumain]

A couple of caveats:

"Marx, through his studies of Greek natural philosophy—in particular 
Epicurus—and the development of the natural sciences, arrived at a 
materialist conception of nature to which his materialist conception of 
history was organically and inextricably linked."


I don't like this sentence at all.

"These British scientists—Hyman Levy, Lancelot Hogben, J. D. Bernal, Joseph 
Needham, J. B. S. Haldane, and historian/philosopher of science Benjamin 
Farrington—struggled to retain within the emerging natural sciences the 
possibility of dialectical uncertainty, and within the ecological sciences 
a materialism that yet allowed for human action. Much of their work served 
as a critique of and challenge to the renewed idealism in the form of a 
vitalism that (while godless) was immersed in notions of a predetermined 
direction in natural and social evolution. While change was part of this 
vitalistic holism, the unfolding of the universe was seen by many as being 
guided by an inner purpose or teleology."


I've read of late that Needham was in fact influenced by holist, 
organicist, and vitalist philosophies at some point, such as Whitehead, 
Teilhard de Chardin, Taoism . . .


"Bourgeois ideology, with its opposite poles of vitalism and mechanism, 
sought to justify existing social hierarchies, in terms of domination that 
was biologically derived and teleologically predetermined—whether in terms 
of racism, sexism, or some other form. The Marxist scientists in Britain 
fought against these distorted developments, and particularly against 
vitalistic views, advancing an approach that combined materialism with 
dialectics, scientific critique with radical worker education. Their focus 
on the dialectics of nature, though undeveloped and still at times 
insufficiently dialectical, was thus not a strange, deviant tangent of 
science as often alleged. It was central to many of the major scientific 
discoveries of the time and a source of critique of social dogmas."


We should learn more about how dialectics was central, and how it was 
underdeveloped.  I'm not sure the proper term for the opposite of 
"vitalism" is "mechanism", but it's certainly the case that this polarity 
undergirds much of bourgeois ideology.  The first issue is one of 
mystification, whether or not specific instances of either justify existing 
social hierarchies.


Otherwise, I enjoyed the article, at least as an introduction to its 
subject matter.




At 08:48 PM 5/25/2005 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:


http://www.monthlyreview.org/0505clarkyork.htm



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Interesting post!  But I don't understand all of it.  Comments interleaved 
. . .


At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:


In regards to this thread on emergence and dialectics:
Your discussion (the whole thread) on dialectics and emergence conflates
several contradictory objectives: the dialectics of dialectics, i.e. the
essence of emergence in Marxist theory; the determination of the
substantiality of emergence in nature as such, and the broader question of
the relation of dialectics to nature.


Well, I do jump from topic to topic depending on the focus of the moment, 
but I'm not sure I conflate objectives.  The whole thread is, however, rife 
with conflation.



Several points:

1. The essence of emergence in Marxist theory is the logical process whereby
any judgement (for Marx and Hegel alike) regarding the particularities of
any universal inevitably sets that particularity against the universal. The
negation is that totality of the universal that is "left out" by the
particular judgement.  The emergent or what is called by Engels the negation
of the negation is the determination of another particularity that includes
the original judgement within an action that incorporates that part of the
universal that negates the original judgement.  All this logical activity is
at least for Marx and Engels is what practice; physical/sensual and
intellectual is all about.


I don't understand the above.


When we discuss the emergent properties of the
dialectic we are discussing labour or man's interaction with nature as a
force of nature and not nature as such.


OK, but I don't get the meaning of the phrase "emergent properties of the
dialectic".


2. Marx and Engel's argument against Feuerbach's (and the classical
Materialists in general) was both substantial and practical.  Feuerbach,
following Holbach and the French materialists interpreted materialism as a
description or determination of the essence of nature as such, as its being
or state.  This is a strictly contemplative representation of nature, that
is, nature without human intervention.


I don't see this.  I see the problem this way: that stage of the 
development of materialism is inadequate to grasp the nature of human 
activity, both practical and cognitive.  Labels such as 'nature as such' or 
'contemplative' don't work for me without such clarification, though it 
does seem that your characterization here is consistent with me though 
apparently not synonymous.  The old materialism, as well as the course of 
development of modern natural science, is such that it begins with the 
study of the lowest levels of the organization of matter and works its way 
up.  But once it works its way up to the human species itself as an object 
of study, its intellectual limitations become manifest.  And I think this 
is where Marx intervenes.



Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's activist determination of nature as a 
product of the interaction of man with

nature (human purposive intervention in nature) , but revised it to include
that human intervention as a force of nature rather than just an exercise of
intellect.


OK.



For Marx, Engels, and Lenin the objective, materialist
determination of the nature of nature must be regarded as strictly a
dialectical product of the unity of human practical activity with the
natural conditions that are the subject of that activity, i.e. as a function
of human labour.


OK.



The difference between the contemplative and the activist
concepts of the nature of nature is critical.   The contemplative view is
fundamentally a statement of faith, a revelation of the nature of the world,
while the activist concept has its origins and its proof in world changing
(Lenin and Ilyenkov call it "revolutionary") activity.


The wording of your argument is not sufficiently precise to me to be 
compelling, but vaguely I could agree.



Since we are dealing
here with the philosophy of science and not theology, and Marxist philosophy
of science at that, we interpret the affirmation of the truth of the
material nature of nature of classical materialism as having its origins in
ethical (ethos) activity rather than in some revelation from on high.


I don't quite get this.


3. The classic substantiation of the dialectical method ( emergent logic if
you so wish it) is of course Marx's Capital.  Here and there Marx and Marx
and Engels played around with more general substantiations of the method,
particularly in the German Ideology, the Grundrisse, and Engel's rather
disastrous investigations of the dialectics of the family, but they never
actually came out with a "Logic", a theory about theorizing.


I'm not sure why Engels' analysis of the family is disastrous.  Marx of 
course never write his promised little treatise on dialectical method.  So 
you don[t consider Engels' voluminous writings about dialectic a logic or 
theory about theorizing?


Lenin certainly felt there was a need for such a logic, and Evald 
Ilyenkov's cumulated w

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Some clarifications are in order:

(1)  "I agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical." Marx and 
Engels did not make exactly the same claims about nature.


(2)  "this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological 
statement about the nature of reality": historically, historical 
materialism came first, albeit as an outgrowth of engagement with Hegelian 
philosophy.  What was later called 'dialectical materialism' came 
later.  Still later, histomat was declared an application of diamat.  So 
the question is: what is the reality whose nature was characterized by Marx 
and Engels (prior to his independent work we've been debating)?  The 
reality was society, and not the domain of natural science.  True, Marx 
wrote about Epicurus, but he was really dealing with philosophical, not 
natural-scientific concepts.


(3) "the logical development of the materialist dialectic itself flows from 
nature to society to thought."  Well, reality, as we understand it 
scientifically, flows historically and hence ontologically from nature to 
society to thought.  But such an assertion about the 'logical development 
of the materialist dialectic' lacks conceptual clarity for all the reasons 
I've been arguing.  Your argument seems to be based on something like this: 
if thought issues out of society which issues out of nature, then for 
thought to be dialectical, society must be dialectical, and for that nature 
must be dialectical.  Here of course I'm using "nature" to mean "Nature" 
minus the human or other self-conscious intelligent species.  Well, if 
nature can issue forth more developed, "dialectical" entities, then this 
must be accounted for in nature.  The problem though is what we mean by 
claiming physio-chemical processes in and by themselves to be dialectical 
or to follow dialectical laws.


(4) sociopolitical conditions for emergence of dialectical materialist 
world view: there are indeed social preconditions for the emergence of this 
world view.  Marx adumbrates them for example in the 1844 mss.  It helps to 
be clear about the relation between the 'dialectical materialist' and 
'proletarian communist' world view. The relationship is not merely a 
partisan one; it has to do with the role of intellectuals in the division 
of labor, and thus the division of society--and the self--into two 
non-communicating but interdependent components.  This is where Marx starts 
in 1844, which is somewhat different from where the 'dialectics of nature' 
starts.  Praxis, the subject-object relation, social theory--this is where 
the old materialism fails.  (Marx makes some remarks which, based on the 
specific text alone, don't seem terribly clear--his association of the old 
materialism with individualism.  By this does he imply French 
materialism?  Another topic for discussion.)


ADDENDUM: I also want to point out that a critical social analysis of 
Soviet philosophy has to explain more than it usually does.  I need to 
review Pannekoek's critique here, not because I completely buy into it but 
because I think we need to account for what Soviet philosophy could and 
could not accomplish and why.  The way that Marxism was configured in 
underdeveloped countries has a lot to do with the nonsense promulgated by 
Stalinists and Maoists in third world countries, with the caveat that the 
same ideas were promulgated in the developed world and among Trotskyists as 
well.  However, as Soviet philosophy became more professionalized in the 
post-Stalin era, it had some things to say that could not be said in the 
capitalist philosophical world, though these accomplishments themselves 
were marred by the dogmatic despotically imposed on the 
intelligentsia.  Still, we need to ask how such despotism could 
necessitate, foster, or permit the formulation and discussion of certain 
questions in certain ways not happening elsewhere.  Take Lektorsky's 
SUBJECT OBJECT COGNITION as an example.



At 06:26 PM 5/24/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

On 5/23/2005 Ralph Dumain wrote:
The basic flaw in the kindergarten arguments to which we are accustomed 
lies in a simple minded triangulation of formal logic, 'dialectical 
logic', and empirical examples.  But, I argue, what makes dialectics 
'dialectical' is a categorial overview of conceptual structures on a 
systemic scale--the structural interrelationships of systems of concepts 
and their interpretation.


I appreciate Ralph's recent thoughts, and Charles's responses.  For my 
part, I agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical.  As I see 
it, this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological 
statement about the nature of reality, and must be seen in terms of a 
*materialist* dialectical worldview.  From this foundational worldview, 
the epistemological proble

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

First see my reply to Steve Gabosch.  I would also suggest that your 
conclusion requires clarification:



Of course, this unifrom worldview as
an  epistemological claim has something to do with class ineterests.
Therefore, it  is not surprising that Marxism is subject distortions. But 
how far can

this  distortion can go? If the laws of dialectics are objective, then it is
not wrong  to suppose that they bring themselves permanently to the fore. In
other words,  there are limits to this distortion.


In my previous response I related the class interests and epistemological 
claims to the socialization of intellectuals in the division of labor.  I 
would say that class interests most often get expressed indirectly, and the 
'class interests' of intellectuals in the realm of their intellectual work 
that is not explicitly about class interests has to do with their mode of 
socialization and self-preservation.  Otherwise I am reluctant to equate 
class interests with epistemology in a directly partisan way, since most 
intellectuals are actually unaware and completely clueless about their 
presuppositions, and are themselves in most cases helpless victims rather 
than perpetrators of their tacit assumptions.  You know, I deal with these 
people in Washington and I can't stand them, but the majority of them are 
too clueless to be held culpable; it would be like holding soap opera 
addicts culpable for their substandard tastes and lack of critical 
acumen.  I mean, you can get mad at them for being stupid, but they don't 
know any better.


I don't understand your claims about the objectivity of dialectical laws 
asserting themselves in the end.  Greater clarity is needed here.


At 01:53 AM 5/25/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Steve Gabosch wrote:


"I appreciate  Ralph's recent thoughts, and Charles's responses.  For my
part, I  agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical.  As I see
it, this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological
statement about the nature of reality, and must be seen in terms of a
*materialist* dialectical worldview.  From this foundational  worldview, the
epistemological problem of how to develop dialectical  knowledge (concepts,
etc.) follows, and in turn, dialectical logic and  other forms of conscious
dialectical knowledge become possible to discover  and analyze.  In other
words, the logical development of the  materialist dialectic itself flows
from nature to society to  thought.  Historically, humanity and its known
thinkers have  discovered important wisdoms about our dialectical material
world, society  and minds, here and there, many times over, but it was not
until Marx,  Engels, the modern proletarian communist movement and the
modern  proletariat entered history - and the end of class society could
become a  possibility - that dialectical materialism could emerge as a
worldview.  This worldview has certainly been dogmatized and reduced  to
trivialities in the hands of some, especially those who wielded  so-called
"Marxist" governments as weapons of  repression and purge,  greatly heating
up personal and political tension around these  philosophical questions to
this day.  Even just Marxist terminology  can evoke strong feelings, such as
my (for some, provocative) association  of "dialectical materialism" with
"proletarian communism."  And of  course, bourgeois society has heaped
enormous distortional derision on  Marxist ideas of all types since the
beginning of Marxian communism.   It takes serious effort to navigate these
obstacles and learn and  comprehend Marxist theory at all, let alone form an
intelligent opinion  about whether nature is "dialectical" or what being
dialectical at all  means.  I think the point is well taken - but still
possible to  overstate - that even the most advanced philosophical and
scientific work  on the materialist dialectic is still rudimentary.  So much
work lies  ahead.  My take on emergentism is that it has great potential to
enhance and advance the effort to unify philosophy and science on
dialectical, materialist and socialist principles.  To reiterate my  basic
take on dialectics: I think beginning with the concept that nature  is
dialectical, as Marx and Engels did, is the right place to start,  because
it places one squarely in the dialectical materialist and  proletarian
communist worldview."

I agree with every single sentence. I think without this ontological claim
that the laws of dialectics are universal, working in different forms in
nature,  society and thought there can hardly any uniform worldview. One 
needs just

to  consider all the difficulties of Barkely, Kant and Hegel to come to this
conclusion. B had to bring en external force called god into play to be able
to  suppose that there is an order in nature. K left out the idea of 
uniformity

in  nature. H equated nature to thought. Of course, this unifrom worldview as
an  epistemological claim has something to do with class ineter

Re: [marxistphilosophy] marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Very interesting.  It is difficult to judge Korsch, Pennekoek, or Lenin 
from these fragments alone.  A more detailed study of all three is 
indicated, I see.  Just a few hurried notes on the Korsch piece.


He never conceived of the difference between the "historical materialism" 
of Marx and the "previous forms of materialism" as an unbreachable 
opposition arising from a real conflict of classes. He conceived it rather 
as a more or less radical expression of one continuous revolutionary 
movement. Thus Lenin's "materialistic" criticism of Mach and the Machians, 
according to Pannekoek, failed even in its purely theoretical purpose 
mainly because Lenin attacked the later attempts of bourgeois naturalistic 
materialism not from the viewpoint of the historical materialism of the 
fully developed proletarian class, but from a proceeding and 
scientifically less developed phase of bourgeois materialism.


There is an obscurity here in delineating the precise relationship between 
the development of materialism and class conflict.


He fully acknowledges the tactical necessity, under the conditions in 
pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia, of Lenin's relentless fight against the 
left bolshevik, Bogdanov, and other more or less outspoken followers of 
Mach's ideas who in spite of their good revolutionary intentions actually 
jeopardised the unity and weakened the proven revolutionary energy of the 
Marxist party by a revision of its "monolithic" materialistic ideology.


Korsch cites Pannekoek's view, which seems from an intellectual standpoint 
lacking in integrity, and then disagrees with it politically:


In fact, Pannekoek goes somewhat further in his positive appreciation of 
Lenin's philosophical tactics of 1908 than seems justified to this writer 
even in a retrospective analysis of the past. If he had investigated, in 
his critical revision of Lenin's anti-Machist fight, the tendencies 
represented by the Russian Machists as well as those of their German 
rnasters he might have been warned against the unimpeachable correctness 
of Lenin's attitude in the ideological struggles of 1908 by a later 
occurrence. When Lenin, after 1908, was through with the Machist 
opposition which had arisen within the central committee of the Bolshevik 
party itself, he regarded that whole incident as closed.


Then a recitation of the sins perpetrated later by other Leninists in 
comdemning Bogdanov, which are redolent of Stalinist rhetoric.  The 
description of Bogdanov's philosophical position is no more 
edifying.  Korsch laments Lenin's attack against positivism as a 
development of materialism.  Furthermore, he judges it to be opportunistic:


This fallacy is that the militant character of a revolutionary materialist 
theory can and must be maintained against the weakening influences of 
other apparently hostile theoretical tendencies by any means to the 
exclusion of modifications made imperative by further scientific criticism 
and research. This fallacious conception caused Lenin to evade discussion 
on their merits of such new scientific concepts and theories that in his 
judgement jeopardised the proved fighting value of that revolutionary 
(though not necessarily proletarian revolutionary) materialist philosophy 
that his Marxist party had adopted, less from Marx and Engels than from 
their philosophical teachers, the bourgeois materialists from Holbach to 
Feuerbach and their idealistic antagonist, the dialectical philosopher 
Hegel. Rather he stuck to his guns, preferring the immediate practical 
utility of a given ideology to its theoretical truth in a changing world. 
This doctrinaire attitude, by the way, runs parallel to Lenin's political 
practice.


Indeed, such instrumentalism is fallacious, but is this a correct portrayal 
of Lenin's attitude towards scientific developments?  I would add that one 
of the problems with the Marxist tradition is the general problem of the 
uneven development of science with respect to philosophy.  A person that 
knows only one of these is generally ill-equipped to tackle the other.  The 
moment Marxism was established institutionally as a body of thought, 
largely in the hands of the German Social Democrats, this problem was 
created, not by them specifically, but by the overall social fragmentation 
responsible for the fragmentation of intellectual trends.  Further, the 
problem of uneven development was exacerbated by the importation of Marxism 
into backward Russia.


I am puzzled by the following argument:

It is a long way from Lenin's violent philosophical attack on Mach and 
Avenarius's "idealistic" positivism and empiriocriticism to that refined 
scientific criticism of the latest developments within the positivist camp 
which was published in 1938 in the extremely cultured periodical of the 
English Communist party.[8] Yet there is underlying this critical attack 
on the most progressive form of modern positivistic thought the same old 
Leninist fallacy. The cri

Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Hegel, Marx, and dialectic : a debate / Richard Norman and Sean Sayers.
Brighton, Sussex : Harvester Press ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities 
Press, 1980.

viii, 188 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.

Sayers took the classical Stalinist (then Maoist) diamat party line, which 
I detest.  Norman took the position I support: upholding the spirit of 
Engels while criticizing the letter.  I reviewed this debate at length on 
the old marxism lists in the mod-90s.  It's quite instructive for those 
caught up in those old debates.


At 08:07 PM 5/26/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:

This is quite clear.  I think the second point is particularly well
put.  What is the Richard Norman work you are referring to?

Chris


> (1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and
argued in
> this manner: these examples are empty verbiage.  Engels was indeed in
> pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a
> number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing,
which was
> later taken as gospel.
>
> (2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is
a basic
> conflation between natural law and logical law.  Engels seems to have
> finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though
> there have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman).  Formal logical
> laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters such as
stasis,
> motion, change, etc.  The real issue is the relationship of logic to
> ontology.  These problems arise in the fusion of logic with
ontology, as
> occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and dialectical
> logic.  But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent
> inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of
> assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of
logic
> and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis.  If it turns
out that
> we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being
without
> eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then
> dialectical logic has something to do.  But physical processes have
nothing
> to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such
> exist, are logical abstractions describing the categorial
relationships of
> concepts (which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.
>
> (3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical
problem with
> diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial
> statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know
since
> Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories &
> examples of natural phenomena).  To wit, your examples:



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is 
an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether 
nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is 
dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science 
as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically, 
we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't 
speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical 
possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of 
action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics 
just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more 
generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from intelligent 
life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious 
beings?  Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?  Again, 
here's the ambiguity.  Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the 
natural world independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this 
independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the 
dialectics of science?


More to come.

At 12:14 PM 5/27/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything that
can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply 
adjust

itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
conscioulsy by labour?

NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN HISTORY
IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH  THE
WORLD



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

See comments interleaved below.

At 11:19 AM 5/27/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

 Ralph Dumain
 .

Briefly:

(1) Seed, imaginary numbers as negation of negation: stated and argued in
this manner: these examples are empty verbiage.


^
CB: As stated here, this assertion is unsupported,i.e. it itself is empty
verbiage.




RALPH:

Well, specifically, how does the progression plant-seed-plant constitute 
the negation of negation?  How does the physiology of plant reproduction 
correlate to a logical relationship?  Is not the burden of proof on a 
person making a positive assertion to indicate why it makes sense?  What 
could the concept of negation mean in this instance but some kind of loose 
metaphor?


Imaginary numbers belong to the realm of pure mathematics, yet this example 
too seems senseless.  Is -1 the negation of 1?  (Are there in fact two 
notions of negation at work in such discussions?)  How then does creating a 
logical entity that when squared yields -1 constitute a negation of a 
negation?  Even as a metaphor I don't get it.



 Engels was indeed in
pursuit of something much ore serious, but along the way he dropped a
number of ill-thought-out examples in his _unpublished_ writing, which was
later taken as gospel.


^^
CB: Claim that Engels' example of imaginary numbers is "taken as gospel" is
strawman argument. Important thing here is _I_ don't take it as "gospel" but
an interesting suggestion from a teacher of dialectics. You haven't
demonstrated, that I see, that it is ill-thought out. You just make an
unsupported assertion.

Yes, I think the unpublished aspect is important to consider. A big reason
why it is not "gospel". It's like an email discussion with Engels on the
list.

^^



RALPH:

I've indicated above how it's ill-thought out.  But precisely because it 
comes from a manuscript not offered for publication, we shouldn't be too 
harsh on Engels for trying out various ideas that he might have not stuck 
with after further deliberation.





(2) Confirmation of dialectical laws (or of formal logic): there is a basic
conflation between natural law and logical law.  Engels seems to have
finessed the distinction, and the garbling was never corrected, though there
have been attempts to do so (cf. Richard Norman).

^^
CB: Where exactly does Engels do this ?

^



RALPH:

For starters, see

Jean van Heijenoort
Friedrich Engels And Mathematics
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/math.htm




 Formal logical laws make no direct assertions about ontological matters
such as stasis, motion, change, etc.  The real issue is the relationship of
logic to ontology.  These problems arise in the fusion of logic with
ontology, as occurs historically with interpretations of both formal and
dialectical
logic.  But if logic is conceived as a mode of valid and consistent
inference of statements one from another, and not as a direct set of
assertions about being, then the relationship between conceptions of logic
and ontology can evolve into a more mature analysis.  If it turns out that
we cannot adequately formulate a system of assertions about being without
eliminating the contradictory relationships between categories, then
dialectical logic has something to do.  But physical processes have nothing
to do with dialectical laws per se; rather, dialectical laws, if such exist,
are logical abstractions describing the categorial relationships of concepts
(which in turn reference empirical realities) one to another.

^^
CB: This seems worth thinking over.

^^^



RALPH:

This is the crux of the matter.



(3) Confirmation of dialectical laws/processes: the historical problem with
diamat rhetoric is the positing of correlations of abstract categorial
statements (which cannot deduce empirical matters, as we should know since
Hume and Kant) with specific empirical contents (scientific theories &
examples of natural phenomena).  To wit, your examples:


CB: Problem is you assert that there is a "problem" but you don't make an
argument supporting your assertion. Pronoucements are not rebuttals.



RALPH:

The very fact that we are having this old discussion indicates a continuing 
problem.  If one follows the literature over the past century, one will 
find the problem recurrent.  Do I need to compile a bibliography of every 
bad piece of Marxist argumentation I've ever read?  If you take a look at 
Sean Sayers' side of the argument with Richard Norman, you will find that 
Sayers commits every blunder associated with the entire history of 
Marxist-Leninist philosophy.




Are you saying there is never a step of correlating abstract categorical
statements with specific empirical contents ? If so, your claim here seems
invalid.

^^^



RALPH:

The problem is that a logical relationship is not prima facie the same 
thing as a physical process.  A phys

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I am putting off the discussion of Oudeyis' subtle argument for last.  But 
already here we find ourselves confronted with a basic dialectical 
paradox.  It is a tautology that we can't make any assertions about any 
independently existing physical reality with which we do not interact in 
some fashion.  Consider even that most basic ontological-epistemological 
old saw: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a 
sound?  Discounting the complexities of the meaning of 'sound' for the 
moment, note the other presuppositions in the question.  Of course the 
materialist/realist answer is 'yes', but the ability to even formulate the 
question is chock-full of presuppositions.  Suppose we were a species that 
knew the existence of neither trees nor sound.  Suppose we generalized the 
statement to "if an entity creates an effect not perceived by another 
entity, does it really create that effect?"  Note that there is an 
ineluctable circularity even in positing hypotheticals of this sort.  We 
are already entering into a conceptual relationship with the hypothetical 
by positing it, even though its reality may be totally independent of our 
existence.


Now when Marx makes the statement, the reality or non-reality of thought 
independent of practice is a purely scholastic question, he rejects the 
skeptical argument outright, just as he rejects the old apriori 
argumentation of 'first philosophy'.  Marx also argues that certain 
questions themselves have to be questioned, as they are products of 
abstraction.  He states that it is illogical to imagine away the whole 
universe but not yourself (making such conjectures) in the process.


I'm convinced there is a subtlety here that distinguishes Marx's view from 
pragmatism.  (It also addresses, I suspect, my unease with Popper.)  Marx 
is a materialist, but he's onto something different from the old 
metaphysical concerns.  But the next step in my argument is to engage Oudeyis.


At 12:35 AM 5/29/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
If I am reading Oudeyis correctly, he is saying that nature is determined 
by human interaction with it; that nature is strictly a product of the 
unity of human purposive activity and natural conditions; and that nature 
is a function of human labour.  If by "nature" we are only referring to 
that portion of reality that humanity consciously observes and/or acts 
upon, then Oudeyis successfully makes that point.  But this conception of 
reality restricts nature to human experience, which can only be a subset 
of nature.  Nature must also include that which is beyond the observed and 
acted upon. The "unknown" - the not yet experienced - must also be taken 
into account in the creation of a materialist ontology.


It is certainly true that humans only consciously experience that portion 
of nature they observe and/or act on through the lens of culture and the 
plethora of human activity, a key idea in Ilyenkov's concept of the 
ideal.But how humanity, through its social relations, activities, 
languages, etc. *subjectively* experiences nature (individually or 
collectively) is a different question than the *objective* nature of 
nature itself.  I can see little room for doubt that all these Marxists 
insisted upon making this fundamental distinction.  They maintained that 
nature exists prior to and independently of humankind, holding the 
ontological view that nature also includes that which humankind has not 
yet - and may never - experience.  I am aware of no evidence to support 
Oudeyis's claim that the conception of nature held by these classical 
Marxists was restricted to only that which humans have interacted with 
and/or laboured on.


- Steve


At 07:09 AM 5/26/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's activist determination of nature as
a product of the interaction of man with
nature (human purposive intervention in nature) , but revised it to include
that human intervention as a force of nature rather than just an exercise of
intellect.  For Marx, Engels, and Lenin the objective, materialist
determination of the nature of nature must be regarded as strictly a
dialectical product of the unity of human practical activity with the
natural conditions that are the subject of that activity, i.e. as a function
of human labour.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm taking  some time to catch up with the flurry of posts, as I've been 
preoccupied with a memorial service for my nearest and dearest. . . .


At 02:26 PM 5/27/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:
I appreciate the way Ralph separates out some of the vital questions.  I 
also found myself once again really appreciating the work he does on his 
website.  I googled for an article by Ilyenkov - and there Ralph's site 
popped up with just what I was looking for!


Thanks for your appreciation of my work.

On the ontology question - whether nature is dialectical, etc. - let me 
just begin with something from Marx and Engels.


I took a peek at German Ideology (1846), the earliest joint work of Marx 
and Engels and probably the first mature statement of Marxist ideology, as 
we have come to look at their work.  I would interpret the following 
passage from GI as supporting one part of my suggested position - that 
classical Marxism starts with nature - and humankind's interaction with 
it.  I certainly find myself resonating with this passage.  But Ralph may 
have a different take on what M&E were trying to get at, so I thought I'd 
just start with a major quote, which has the heading "First Premises of 
Materialist Method."


I could analyze the passage from M&E for purposes of a different 
discussion.  Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate 
historical analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this 
point.  Two conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category 
for Marx as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to 
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as 
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of 
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn't practical interaction include natural scientific 
research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, but note that Marx 
is onto the direct, practical transformation of nature as it applies to 
material production and not that aspect of it that deals with specialized 
scientific activity. Note the plural references to physical 
preconditions--nature in general and human physiology in particular--that 
are acknowledged as preconditions and then set aside.  Do you see the 
distinction here?



BTW, I don't think quotes settle questions, just help clarify them.  So 
this is just a place to start.


- Steve


Ralph points out:
(1)  "I agree with Engels (and Marx) that nature is dialectical." Marx 
and Engels did not make exactly the same claims about nature.


(2)  "this classical Marxist claim is first and foremost an ontological 
statement about the nature of reality": historically, historical 
materialism came first, albeit as an outgrowth of engagement with 
Hegelian philosophy.  What was later called 'dialectical materialism' 
came later.  Still later, histomat was declared an application of 
diamat.  So the question is: what is the reality whose nature was 
characterized by Marx and Engels (prior to his independent work we've 
been debating)?  The reality was society, and not the domain of natural 
science.  True, Marx wrote about Epicurus, but he was really dealing with 
philosophical, not natural-scientific concepts.



from German Ideology ( page 42 in my 1970 International Publishers edition).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2


First Premises of Materialist Method

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but 
real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. 
They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions 
under which they live, both those which they find already existing and 
those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a 
purely empirical way.


The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of 
living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the 
physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation 
to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual 
physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds 
himself ­ geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of 
history must always set out from these natural bases and their 
modification in the course of history through the action of men.


Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or 
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves 
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, 
a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing 
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual 
material life.


The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of 
all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in 
existence and hav

Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Let me isolate your point that addresses the crux of the debate:


That said, there are comments within Marxism that involve the claim that
dialectics exists in thought because change exists in nature.  On this model
science must be dialectical because it seeks to describe a reality in flux.
Heraclitus not Parmenides.This is slightly interesting. Particularly 
because it
suggests that the term 'Dialectics of Nature' is a conceptual confusion, 
while
also allowing us to affirm that dialectics is grounded in nature.  But its 
not
quite clear to me what this kind of claim is for. It works as some sort of 
rule of

thumb model for critque, I guess.  Maybe we cannot hold to the understanding
that all science tends to a dialectical form if we don't also hold that 
nature is a

flux.


You've pinpointed why the usual assertions about dialectics of nature are 
so unproductive.  The relationship between objective and subjective 
dialectics is fudged, with the presumption that they are characterized by a 
unified system of dialectical laws.  But in fact one cannot show the 
interdependent relationship of one thing to another without also analyzing 
their distinction.  Hence also my remarks on the conflation of logic with 
ontology.  Yes, nature in flux has implications for our conceptual grasp of 
it.  However, the nature of making abstractions and relating them to the 
object of discourse is key.


Sartre was ensconced in a dualism which harms his critique of materialism, 
but his 1946 critique of diamat contains some shrewd analysis.


At 04:31 PM 5/29/2005 +, gilhyle wrote:

I would have thought that the issue arises only for someone who sought to
claim that there is nothing in nature that requires our thinking to be 
dialectical
and, thus, that all dialectical features of scientific thinking must 
reflect social

factors or methodological error or some such thing. Is that where Sartre is -
no, but only because he was located firnly within the phenomenological
tradition that refused the question.

It seems to me an impossible thesis to defend.

If THAT thesis is not defended (and I can't see it being a helpful 
thesis), then

what is the point/purpose of the question?

The issue is not really why thinking or science is dialectical, but simply 
that it
is and how we need to engage in its critique within these social relations 
and

political struggles, given that it is.

It might even be argued (I'm tempted) that the question involves a conceptual
confusion. For what it seeks is a material explanation of the occurence of a
very vague, formal characteristic across a range of activity (of thinking) 
that is
not sufficiently homogenous to allow a single explanation of the 
recurrence of

the formal feature (of dialectical character).

Nor,just because dialectics is a general feature of science need it be
universal. Far from it. Some (even much?) thinking may be entirely
undialectical in its internal construction.

The point is that science struggles with grasping particulars and 
universals in
a single theory, of differentiating qualities from quantities etc. That 
fact is just a

part of the context of the critique of science. The phenomenon of being
dialectical may not be of the essence of science (whatever that might be), 
but

rather be something it shares with much other thinking.

That said, there are comments within Marxism that involve the claim that
dialectics exists in thought because change exists in nature.  On this model
science must be dialectical because it seeks to describe a reality in flux.
Heraclitus not Parmenides.This is slightly interesting. Particularly 
because it
suggests that the term 'Dialectics of Nature' is a conceptual confusion, 
while
also allowing us to affirm that dialectics is grounded in nature.  But its 
not
quite clear to me what this kind of claim is for. It works as some sort of 
rule of

thumb model for critque, I guess.  Maybe we cannot hold to the understanding
that all science tends to a dialectical form if we don't also hold that 
nature is a

flux. Back to the Tao, I guess.

 --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science
> as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically,
> we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't
> speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical
> possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or d

[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: O, Dialectics! (and spleen)

[Ralph Dumain]

I certainly agree on the matter of intellectual ethics, which is why I am 
puzzled by gilhyle's formulations.  A couple of other points, though.


(1) I disagree that Lenin's characterization of materialism is 
indistinguishable from objective idealism.  The independently existing 
reality has to be material, accessible via perception, and not an ideal 
realm of forms.  Perception itself is a mode of the existence of 
matter.  E.g. Electromagnetic wavelengths -> perception of visible color 
spectrum.


(2) "Lenin's limitations in that work were not merely philosophical but 
reflected the bourgeois radical aspect of the Bolsheviks as a political 
entity."


This is an interesting argument, which arguably turns out to be true of the 
Bolsheviks in power, from Deborin to Stalin.  That is, the role that 
dialectical materialism played in their overall ideology.  However, this 
claim really depends on the extent of the range of claims made by Lenin, or 
any of the others.  And, after all, we are still fighting the bourgeois 
revolution in combatting creationism, the Christian right, and so on, an 
entirely legitimate enterprise.  The problem with the Bolsheviks, though, 
is not with promulgating "bourgeois materialism" (which they themselves go 
beyond in certain respects) as a general ontological position, but its 
contextualization within a larger world view and political ideological 
position which supposedly incorporates human activity and social 
organization.  (The Johnson-Forest Tendency makes this pretty clear.) 
Stalinism has to strive to transcend bourgeois materialism, in fact, while 
requiring its own status to be grounded in historical laws as a 
manifestation of the natural order.  That is its pretended mode of 
transcendence, which necessitates the sleight of hand that is 
Marxist-Leninist philosophy.  (Cf. the whole pack of lies about the 
'Leninist stage of philosophy'.)  However, this very need also generates an 
ideality that motors the Soviet Marxist critique of bourgeois philosophy, 
and via its dissidents, of Stalinist philosophy itself.


(3) The question of Lenin's mistreatment of Mach and the science" requires 
research I have no time for at present, but if someone else wishes to 
undertake this, do it.


At 07:38 PM 5/26/2005 +, redtwister666 wrote:

--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "gilhyle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Let me get this right:
>
> If you are involved in building a political party and someone
advocates a
> philosophy which influences people in that party so as to weaken the
> commitment of party members to political positions you advocate, you
are not
> permitted to enter the lists to debate with that person until you
have worked
> out all the problems of philosophy.

I didn't say Lenin was wrong to address himself to a political concern
within the party, but to do so one ought to still adhere to certain
intellectual standards, unles you are proposing that it is, in such a
situation, "anything goes" and rules of scholarship and correct
arguments no longer matter.

> Polemic has an urgent political purpose, you do your best now with
the tools
> available. Later when there is a world war on that means you are
shut up in
> Switzerland, you might take some time to go off and study some Hegel.

More importantly, there is no small confusion here on two key points:
1.  Why should we make a virtue out of Lenin's necessity?  The best
Lenin could do in 1908 does not mean we have to start from there in
2005.  Isn't that obvious?
2.  Urgent purpose or not, correct as an intervention or not, the
issue for Pannekoek was that Lenin's limitations in that work were not
merely philosophical but reflected the bourgeois radical aspect of the
Bolsheviks as a political entity.

> (By the way, I dont recall Lenin significantly misquoted Kant - any
examples?)

Pannekoek cites a few instances somewhere and I have to try and find
it, but another work I am familiar with cites some things.  Mostly,
Lenin appears to basically made up ideas that he then ascribed to Kant
or, being generous, made unfounded extrapolations of what he thought
Kant might have meant.

> Apparently it isn't permitted, either, to point out the obvious (as
Engels did)
> since to do so involves making a banal point.  That is not obvious
to me either,
> but maybe I'm being banal in saying that.

Well, in a discussion of materialism, to claim what Lenin claimed as
materialism is not very sufficient, as any objective idealist could
claim it.  Not merely was it banal, but it was insufficient.

> Then lets look at the draft Dialectics of Nature - did Engels rely
on banal
> 'dialectical laws' to draw profound conclusions without regard to
the detail of
> the science concerned. I don't see it there.

I never mentioned Engels nor made any such claim.

> It never ceases to amaze me that people can rely on the difficulty
(undoubted
> difficulty) in articulating a coherent and comprehensive statement
about
> realism and ontology  to suggest

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Well, if you got my point (2), the rest shouldn't be so mysterious.  M&E 
openly admit they're not going to tackle directly either the natural 
sciences as an intellectual enterprise or their objects of study (laws of 
nature).  At the same time they admit that's part of the picture, though 
they are specifically beginning their studies from the standpoint of 
historical materialism.  That's a pretty damn important point, esp. for 
those who would make claims about Marx's attitude to science.


As I recall, at that stage, Marx only really considers science as something 
that plays a role in industry--man's advanced interchange with 
nature.  Science as an intellectual activity in itself, as theorizing, 
method, or research, is not part of the picture at this time.  Hence, M&E 
do not turn their attention to the philosophy of the natural sciences.


I'll add to that: when Marx makes remarks criticizing prior materialism, 
this belongs to the history of philosophy, not actual modern 
science.  Discussing Epicurus and Democritus or the French materialists is 
not engaging with science.  I'll add also, that a philosophy of nature is 
not a philosophy of science, if a perspective on scientific methodology as 
a means of understanding nature is not included in it.


BTW, Marx's early writings (vol. 1) includes some outline of Hegel's 
philosophy of nature.  But I don't really know how Marx may have used 
Hegel's PN.  Does anyone know something I don't?


At 12:06 AM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

Steve responds to a post from Ralph:

Ralph:
on 5/29/2005 at 12:48 PM Ralph explained, referring to the passage from 
M&E copied below:
... Note that M&E state that natural preconditions antedate historical 
analysis, but they are not going to delve into them at this point.  Two 
conclusions follow: (1) Nature is not merely a social category for Marx 
as some claim; (2) Marx doesn't take the trouble at this point to 
investigate natural science and especially not its objective correlate as 
an activity in itself, since the question at hand is the organization of 
man's practical interaction with nature in conjunction with social 
organization.  But doesn"t practical interaction include natural 
scientific research, methodology, and theory?  It must, of course, ...


Steve:
I am with Ralph so far, but I am puzzled by where Ralph goes next:

Ralph:
... but note that Marx is onto the direct, practical transformation of 
nature as it applies to material production and not that aspect of it 
that deals with specialized scientific activity. Note the plural 
references to physical preconditions--nature in general and human 
physiology in particular--that are acknowledged as preconditions and then 
set aside.  Do you see the distinction here?


Steve:
To be honest, I don't get what point Ralph is trying to make yet, so I 
guess I have to answer:  no - I don't yet see the distinction being made 
here - sorry!  Ralph, if you would be so kind as to explain this 
distinction ...


- Steve



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I do not understand the meaning of the three quotes from Ilyenkov.

At 02:03 PM 5/30/2005 -0700, Steve Gabosch wrote:

...
from my 1977 Progress edition, which I was lucky to get through the 
internet last year.  I corrected a couple scanning errors from the MIA version.


Copied from:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm

from page 283:
"A consistently materialist conception of thought, of course, alters the 
approach to the key problems of logic in a cardinal way, in particular to 
interpretation of the nature of logical categories.  Marx and Engels 
established above all that [the] external world was not given to the 
individual as it was in itself simply and directly in his contemplation, 
but only in the course of its being altered by man: and that both the 
contemplating man himself and the world contemplated were products of history."


from page 285:
"Psychological analysis of the act of reflexion of the external world in 
the individual head therefore cannot be the means of developing logic. The 
individual thinks only insofar as he has already mastered the general 
(logical) determinations historically moulded before him and completely 
independently of him. And psychology as a science does not investigate the 
development of human culture or civilisation, rightly considering it a 
premise independent of the individual."


from page 286-287:
"In labour (production) man makes one object of nature act on another 
object of the same nature in accordance with their own properties and laws 
of existence. Marx and Engels showed that the logical forms of man's 
action were the consequences (reflection) of real laws of human actions on 
objects, i.e. of practice in all its scope and development, laws that are 
independent of any thinking. Practice understood materialistically, 
appeared as a process in whose movement each object involved in it 
functioned (behaved) in accordance with its own laws, bringing its own 
form and measure to light in the changes taking place in it."



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm several steps behind in this thread.  But beginning from the beginning 
. . .


The initial "problem" here is the lack of specificity of the assertion, but 
it's more of a problem when people don't pay careful attention to the wording.


Note the double-assertion here:

(1) People distinguish themselves from animals by means of labor (the 
essential defining characteristic)


(2) This distinction is "conditioned by their physical organisation."

So actually, labor is not the defining characteristic as a bare 
abstraction.  The qualification about physiology implies all the old stuff: 
Man is distinguished by language, brain capacity, opposable thumbs, upright 
gait, menstrual cycle, etc.  Indeed, labor for humans as opposed to beavers 
is an impossibility without the requisite physiology, which is a problem 
for evolutionary biology to solve.


So Charles begins with a correction:


What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and
methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next.


This is the essential point.  The question about subsistence/foraging is a 
subsidiary though important issue.  If one uses the concept of labor 
loosely, then it legitimately becomes the starting point for the conception 
of _historical materialism_, which ultimately has to be united with 
evolutionary theory (Marx wrote this before Darwin hit the bookstands, 
let's remember), but which stands on its own as a methodology of social 
scientific explanation.  The "one science" Marx cryptically alludes to in 
the 1944 mss is still not here, and it will not be the science of history 
as we know 'history'.  All we have so far is the simple-minded conceptions 
of sociobiology, which oversimplifies a systems approach to the interaction 
of nature and culture.  It also elides the mediating factor of conscious 
activity, and its historicity, in the relation of man and nature.


This is the issue I was fighting with Lisa about around the time of her 
death.  As you may recall, Lisa was an evolutionary biologist.  She was in 
the process of sussing out Engels' murky dialectics of nature, which she 
did not see as terribly productive--correctly--but she was also resistant 
to the importance of consciousness as a distinguishing characteristic of 
the human species.  I pointed out to her "activity theory" as a perspective 
(I had recently heard Ethel Tobach speak about it at an APA meeting), but 
she was unsympathetic to the idea.  Her speciality, BTW, was foraging 
(hunting and gathering) societies.  Anyway, this was one of the last topics 
we discussed before her sudden death.  Her efforts toward synthesis were, I 
think, inhibited by the philosophical naivete of evolutionary biologists 
and the scientific naivete of Marxists.


A few remarks now about emergent materialism.  Note that Marx does not 
develop an ontology in the way that Engels does later on.  Marx engages the 
mind-body problem and social organization as an emergent phenomenon to the 
extent he needs to do so to explain human activity and the nature of the 
money economy, in distinction to physical objects--artifacts which 
participate in a system of social relations, which cannot be grasped via 
the physical properties of the objects alone).  Functionally, physicalism 
would be entirely useless as an ontological foundation of historical 
materialism and the analysis of political economy.  This didn't stop Otto 
Neurath from adopting physicalism as the basis of his Marxism, which he 
attempts to justify in an essay on sociology anthologized in Ayer's LOGICAL 
POSITIVISM.  I think it's a load of shit myself.  I've not read Neurath's 
book on the subject.  But to reiterate, Marx doesn't get to a technical 
analysis of the mind-body problem; he begins from the observation that man 
is a conscious physical organism and proceeds from a conception of the 
nature of human activity historically conditioned by the social 
organization necessary to produce and reproduce his material existence.


Remember, by the time Engels' Anti-Duhring rolls around, the intelligentsia 
is filled up with pseudo-evolutionist muck-a-muck oozing out of all its 
orifices.  This is what he has to contend with, and thus he has to tackle a 
set of problems that Marx didn't have to worry much about in the 1840s and 
1850s.


Let us also remember that the positivist tendencies of the late 19th 
century yielded a variety of rebellions, including those of irrationalism 
(Nietzsche and lebensphilosophie), phenomenology (Husserl), and a backlash 
from the Catholic Church (ultimately Neo-Thomism).  Only Marxism--with all 
of its defects under the 2nd International--held the line against both 
positivism and irrationalism.  But 'Marxism', an artifact of German social 
democracy, in staking out and defending its territory, was no more 
positioned to engage in a total synthesis of human knowledge any more than 
mainstream bourgeois thought was capable of accommodating Marxism

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O! Dialectics

[Ralph Dumain]

Don't forget the extensive discussion of materialism in THE HOLY FAMILY.

Of course, what distinguishes home sapiens from the other monkeys is not 
"labor" as an abstraction, but the brain difference, which means the 
genetic capacity for language and hence cultural transmission of 
information, plus the other distinguishing features such as upright gait, 
opposable thumbs.  Your point about "imagination" signals Marx's 
recognition of the cognitive difference.


At 10:12 AM 6/6/2005 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

RE Lil Joe joe_radical

Lil Joe: Here, Charles, I think we have a major disagreement as far as
Marxian materialism is concerned. Marx never wrote of 'materialism' and
'idealism' as a discussion outside the context of the materialist conception
of history.

^
CB: He discusses materialism in "The Theses on Feuerbach".  Engels discusses
materialism beyond the materialist conception of history. See especially
_The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ for this
discussion.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Note my interleaved comments on a fragment of a key post of yours

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
> I don't see this.  I see the problem this way: that stage of the
> development of materialism is inadequate to grasp the nature of human
> activity, both practical and cognitive.  Labels such as 'nature as such'
or
> 'contemplative' don't work for me without such clarification, though it
> does seem that your characterization here is consistent with me though
> apparently not synonymous.  The old materialism, as well as the course of
> development of modern natural science, is such that it begins with the
> study of the lowest levels of the organization of matter and works its way
> up.  But once it works its way up to the human species itself as an object
> of study, its intellectual limitations become manifest.  And I think this
> is where Marx intervenes.

 If I understand you correctly, you argue that so long as the natural
sciences dealt with phenomena that was simple enough to contemplate without
our needing to be aware o the activity of the contemplating subject, the old
materialism served as a sufficient paradigm for explanations of the
observed.  It is only when we deal with men, i.e. ourselves that we must
take into account our own subjectivity to understand what's going on.

 I prefer to stand your argument on its head.  As long as human needs could
(and given the available technology, only could) be satisfied by
manipulation of his world on a purely mechanical level, the contemplative
and mechanical paradigms of classical materialism was a viable system for
explaining the effectiveness of human practice.


In turn, I could stand your argument on its head.  What is the vantage 
point: objective reality with the relation of human practice as a 
reflection of it, or the justification of practice by its ability to 
fulfill needs?  Either vantage point could be considered a question of 
perspective from one angle or the other.  They could be equivalent.  Yet I 
see my argument as basic as yours as derivative, though that perspective is 
also valid, i.e. explaining the effectiveness of human practice under 
defined conditions.




With the development of new
technologies and new needs, (like the development of machinery and
instruments powered by electricity). One of the earliest examples of this
development in Physics was the birth (emergence?) Heisenberg principle in
Quantum physics.  Newtonian physics dealt with big things that could be
measured with instruments that  had no apparent effect whatsoever on the
measure itself, thus the measurement itself could be factored out of the
explanation of the activities of the things measured.  Small particle, high
energy physics deals with things so small and so sensitive to the effects
even of light that physicists must at very least take into account the
effect of their measuring activities on the subjects of their research.

As I suggest below the big revolution in modern natural science, the
revolution that is giving birth to concepts such as autopoiesis, emergence
and non-linear causality (attractors and Feigenbaum trees) is mostly, (if
not mistaken the attractor was first formally described by Lorenz in 1963 a
weatherman and the term "strange attractor was first used in 1971 by
Ruelle and Takens to describe fluid dynamics) connected to the investigation
of systems that are ever more sensitive to our handling of their components;
such as weather, the behaviour of ecosystems, animal ethology and so on.
This is of course a function of the kinds of needs that our once largely
mechanical handling of the conditions of our existence has produced.  Thus,
for example, the development of air transport has created an urgent demand
for extremely accurate weather prediction, much more accurate than the
simple Newtonian based physics of atmospherics and energetics (the
meteorology we learned in Highschool) can provide. The modern aircraft which
is still, perhaps only barely, a mechanical instrument has compelled the
development of meteorology into a science in which mechanism is entirely
sublated into a system that cannot be regarded as mechanical by any
definition.


But note it's not just our needs, but the objectivity of the realities 
under investigation, for whatever reason we needed to engage them, that 
force methodological and philosophical revisions.  One could easily argue 
for a dialectics of nature on this basis and not just a dialectic of 
science.  Your perspective is interesting because it begins from the 
vantage point of practice.  But do you really prove anything different from 
my perspective?



It is not enough to explain the increasing dominance of processual and
teleological explanations in natural science as a function of the subjects
of scientific investigation.  This is obvious.  The real issue is the effect
of the development of human needs (mostly as a consequence of the
transformations men have ma

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Interleaved comments on further fragments of your post:

At 03:08 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

..
I see your not going to let me deal with the dogmatics of classical
materialism briefly.

The kernel of my argument is that in general, discourse segregated from
practice can only be theological, i.e. concerning articles of faith rather
than descriptions of demonstrable practice. I say in general, since
scientists usually discuss their findings with only minimal reference to the
practicalities that are the origins and ultimate objects of their work. This
is mostly a manifestation of the extreme division of labour that isolates
professional researchers from all but the immediate subjects of their work.
In any case, I've yet to see a monograph or article of a natural scientist
that presents his work as having universal significance. There are
exceptions to this rule such as Hawkins in physics and Dawkins in population
genetics, and the result is invariably utter nonsense. I'm referring here to
Hawkins conviction that unified field theory will provide an ultimate theory
of the physical world and to Dawkin's projection of the mechanics of
population genetics to the science of culture (memics and all that).

Science as the theory of practice is implicitly restricted in relevance to
the conditions of the moment (even when the problems it is designed to treat
are projected into the near or far future). The discoveries of this kind of
science are inevitably relevant only to the particular circumstances of
their production, and to the specific subjects of their focus and have no
claim as eternal truths.  Einstein, Newton and Galileo will never acquire
the sainthood of the revealers of final truths.  On the contrary, their
ideas will only remain significant so long as they are relevant to the
practices and technologies that we men need to perpetuate ourselves,
"ourselves" here meaning the entire complex of organic and inorganic
components of our individual and collective life activities.  Thus, science
as the theory of practice is an inherently revolutionary activity.


This is interesting as a vantage point, i.e. beginning from the scope of 
praxis and explaining why scientists can be blockheads when they venture 
beyond the specific praxis that enabled them to achieve what they did.  But 
I find this approach more credible when it is re-routed back to objectivity.




Discussion on the nature of being, on the substance of nature, and so on is
from the point of view of historical materialism no less restricted to the
conditions of its production than is practical science.  However, the
inherent object of such discussions is the determination of the absolute and
final nature of things at all places and in all times.  The ostensible
object of the advocates of such metaphysical finalities is the expression of
ultimate truths regarding the universe and its parts, the absolute
contradiction to the objects of practice and the science of practice.

Anyway, it is one thing to develop theories concerning particularities of
that grand everything we call nature, it's quite another to present
particular results as universals about the universe.  The former can be
demonstrated, proved if you will, the latter extends beyond all
possibilities of human experience, hence it can only be a product either of
divine revelation or of normative practice, i.e. ethos. I prefer ethos to
divine revelation.


I'm afraid I don't quite grasp this.  You are suggesting, I think, that 
general ontological pronouncements not tied to some current concerns of 
praxis become fruitless or even retrograde metaphysics.  I don't quite 
agree with this, but I do agree that these traditional philosophical 
concerns become more dynamic and fruitful when connected to specific 
problems of the present.



..
> I think you're right.  The question then is--how to put this?--the line of
> demarcation between nature in itself and . . . nature for us . . . and
> science.  I've been cautious about making claims about the 'dialectics of
> nature' in se, i.e. apart from our methods of analysis (which I guess you
> might call 'contemplative'.  This is the old problem, as traditional
> terminology puts it, of the relation between (or very existence of)
> subjective (dialectical logic as subject of debate) and objective
> dialectics (which, with respect to nature, is the focus of positive and
> negative engagements with dialectical thought).  It's not clear to me
> whether you would go along with my various analyses of this problematic
> over the past dozen years, or even accept such a conceptual
> distinction.  But I think that the mess we've inherited shows up its
> historical importance.  While I agree we need an overarching conception
> that somehow interrelates "nature, society, and thought", the direct
> identification of all of these components with the same dialectical laws
> is, I think, a logically blurred mistake.  I believe this implicit p

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Well, my reaction here re-invokes my sense of the tautology of all such 
arguments.  That is, there can be no meaningful claims about the universe 
apart from our interaction with the universe since we can't make any claims 
about anything without interacting with the phenomena about which we are 
making claims.  Your claim that all our knowledge claims about the universe 
from the Big Bang on, are expressions of human need, is tautologically 
true, and hence not very interesting or revealing.


At 11:51 AM 5/28/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:


- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


>
> but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
adjust
> itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> conscioulsy by labour?
>
> NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> WORLD

Whether or not nature has a history is a question for nature, of little
relevance for the practical realization of human needs.

Man, in order to better determine his needs and the means necessary to
realize them investigates through reason and practice (experimentation and
informed search) the development of the relevant (essential) incohoate
features of the natural world, including those of his own activities.  The
result is the objective determinations of past events in the natural world
and of their relevance to the form and substance of our current needs and to
the realization of these in practical activity. The laws and principles as
well as the developmental schemas produced by our research into what is
called Natural History are a product of and the means for realization of
strictly human objectives. Is this a history of nature?  Well, we are
ourselves an integral part and force of the natural world and the massive
array of objects we depend on for perpetuation of our life activity have
their ultimate origin in nature, but that's a far cry from arguing that
human beings and their essential equipage is identical with the totality of
nature or that our activity in nature involves nature as a whole.
Regards,
Oudeyis



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Your reasoning is fine up until the braking point I note below.

At 03:10 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Steve,
Well, now I know what comes after the .

First paragraph:
Oudeyis is saying nothing about what nature is, but rather is writing that
whatever understandings man has of nature are a function primarily of his
active interaction (his labour) with the natural conditions of his
existence.  The difference between knowing what nature is (i.e. its
essential being or "nature" if you will) and having a working knowledge of
world conditions is all the difference between the treatment of nature in
Marxist and classical materialist theory.  Now then, the only part of nature
humanity can  know is that part of it with which he has some sort of
contact, and at least for Marxism, the only part of nature about which man
can develop theories of practice is that which he can or has changed in some
fashion.  When it comes to explaining the practical foundation scientific
cosmology we argue that the theories regarding the behaviour of huge masses
of material over barely conceivable periods of time and spatial dimensions
are projections based more often as not on experimentation with some of the
very smallest of the universe's components; atoms, quarks, and so on).
Anyway, its hard to imagine how men would know things about which they have
absolutely no experience and how they would know how things work without a
working experience with them or with things like them. Divine revelation
perhaps?  Finally, there is no doubt that nature must also include that
which is beyond the observed and acted upon and that its existence is
important for the creation of a materialist ideology. There are three ways
the "unknown" makes itself felt in material human experience:

1.The fact that human practice and the science that represents it in thought
is open ended or, better yet, appears to have no outward limits is a clear
indication of the existence of more to nature than that which is treated by
our current state of knowledge and practice.

2. The classic observations by Marx in the first chapter of German Ideology
(1845) and the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1844) that the physical and
sensual interface between man a nature in human labour is far more concrete
than can ever be represented by even the most developed dialectics.  The
rational representation of men's activity in the world is then an inherently
uncompletable task.

3.  Hegel in his discussion of being makes the point that the logical
formula A = A has no demonstrable correspondence with actual experience;
diversity is an inherent property of identity (Andy B. presents a pretty
thorough discussion on this in his The Meaning of Hegel, Chapter iv section,
" Diversity(essential Identity )" ).  The whole basis of all rational
activity, all dialectics, conscious and unconscious, deliberated and
automatic, is the unity between the essential transitoriness of experienced
moments and the determination of identities; qualities, quantities, measure
and all the other things we have to "know" to develop a working model of the
world.  It's the unity of logical categorization and the essential
temporality of immediate experience that fuels the dialectic and makes it so
important a tool for exploration of the unknown.

Second paragraph:
The clarification of what exactly is the significance of the *objective*
nature of nature is probably Ilyenkov's most important contributions to
Scientific Marxism. Indeed for orthodox Marxists, including Lenin in his
earlier writings (prior at very least to his readings in Hegel in 1914 and
possibly as early as his article on Emprio-positivism), did indeed inherit
the classical materialist concept of the objectivity of nature in the
metaphysical sense of the essential being of nature; known, unknown,
whatever.   Ilyenkov in the last paragraphs of chapter 8 of Dialectical
Logic summarizes the reasoning that is the basis of the concept of nature as
prior to and independently of humankind.


So far so good.


Here he distinguishes between Marx
and Engel's theories of human activity and Hegel's idealism by
recapitulating their description of man as a product and force of nature
that transforms nature into the instruments of his activity in appropriating
nature's goods and producing from them the means for the perpetuation of his
body organic and inorganic.


Fine, except that with the diversification of human expertise, the 
self-reproduction of society's cognitive and practical interests means that 
some investigations by some individuals may not necessarily be directed 
towards the ends of instrumental self-preservation, though of course 
indirectly every human activity--play being the most universal 
example--develops skills that are always instrumentally useful in the end.




Nothing could more clearly describe the
independence of abstract nature from the emergence of human activity in the
world.   After all, if man has his origins in the d

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

A question on one of your assertions:


 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.


How can dialectics be a property of all life no matter how primitive when 
you deny a dialectics of nature apart from praxis, which assumes cognitive 
activity?  Is an amoeba a being-for-itself in addition to a being-in-itself?


At 03:47 PM 5/29/2005 +0200, Oudeyis wrote:

Nicely put.

Several tentative responses:
The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings? Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?

Following Hegel's schema of the development of logic, I would argue that
just as there is objective logic (i.e. logical activity that can only be
"known reflectively" as an object of reflection) there is an objective
dialectic.  The basic kernel of both logic and dialectic (they are after all
the same) is purposive activity.  It matters not that the agents of
purposive activity are fully or even at all conscious of their cognitive
activity, the very prosecution of intentional activity implies
logic/dialectics.

 Note that this is not the same as saying that nature is dialectical, but
rather is an assertion that dialectics is a universal property of all life
activity no matter how primitive.

> Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the natural world
independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?

I think I gave a partial answer to this question in my response to Steve's
last message.  The products of human activity should never be regarded as
the issue of pure logic or of the unfettered human imagination.  Even Hegel
would not accept this proposal.

Science no less then the material products of human labour represent a unity
of human activity in an independent external world that has existed prior to
man's emergence and confronts men's ambitions with conditions to which he
must accommodate his activity if they are to realize their goals.  Labour is
a cooperative activity in which men work with nature as their partner.

Oudeyis

- Original Message -
From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!


> I will need to address subsequent posts on this topic, but first: there is
> an interesting implicit subtlety here.  If the question is not whether
> nature is dialectical but whether science (the study of nature) is
> dialectical, then even though nature exists independently of man, science
> as a form of human activity and cognition does not, since, tautologically,
> we only know what exists via interaction with the rest of nature and can't
> speak of anything else except as a hypothetical metaphysical
> possibility.  The question remains, though, even within our sphere of
> action, discovering nature's properties independent of us, is dialectics
> just a matter of cognition, or the structure of social activity more
> generally, or does it begin in the natural processes apart from
intelligent
> life activity that, after all, have ultimately generated conscious
> beings?  Is there an objective dialectics in this latter sense?  Again,
> here's the ambiguity.  Science, let us say, correctly characterizes the
> natural world independently of us. But is dialectics pertaining to this
> independent external world the dialectics of nature itself or the
> dialectics of science?
>
> More to come.
>
> At 12:14 PM 5/27/2005 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >but what about history of nature? I mean before there  wasn't  anything
that
> >can be qualified as man's interaction withthe  world. does in your view
> >dialectics start with the appearance of a species that  does not simply
> >adjust
> >itself to nature like other animals but starts changibng  it more or less
> >conscioulsy by labour?
> >
> >NOTE,  THAT THE ISSUE OF THE RELEVANCE OF LOGIC (DIALECTICS) TO HUMAN
HISTORY
> >IS  NOT A MATTER OF THE NATURE OF THE WORLD BUT OF MAN'S INTERACTION WITH
THE
> >WORLD



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Yes, I have this book somewhere.  So are you going to forward your review 
to this list?


At 03:31 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
Unfortunately, the mainstay of Western interpretations of

Ilyenkov's works is the absolutely wierd product of a Brit academic who
represents them as a sort of sociologically oriented form of Neo-positivism
(itself a contradiction!).  I wrote a first draft on his work that was
totally unsatisfactory (too lacking in focus), and am now finishing up the
outline of a revision which hopefully will be the basis of a more accurate
presentation than was my first effort.


I don't quite get this.  But my first question is: who is this Brit 
neo-positivist academic?


Dave Bakhurst of Queens College Ontario and author of Consciousness and 
Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. 1991



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!

[Ralph Dumain]

Very interesting post.  Just a few isolated comments to begin . . .

At 03:10 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

..

The fact that life forms activities are directed to concrete future 
states, they are, no matter how simple or mechanical, exercises in 
reason.  This why, if you will permit a reference to an earlier thread, I 
regard the investigation into biosemiology to be a vitally important 
exploration of the roots of reason.  The most primitive forms of self 
reproduction are a totally mechanical process yet

they are at the very root of the rational process.

We are not here proposing that nature has a rational aspect, a la Spinoza.
As I wrote earlier I really have no idea what nature or Nature is. What I am
proposing is that the roots of rationality are in the mechanical purposive
activity of life forms and that whatever life forms "know" [including
ourselves of course] is a function of our practical activities in nature
FROM THE VERY ORIGINS OF THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE in whatever form it
may be acquired, stored, recovered etc.




But biosemiology itself seems to be rather obscurantist, more akin to 
Whitehead's philosophy of organism than to Marx.




2.  Objectivity:  In its essence objectivity refers to conscious reflection
on something rather than the reflection of something in consciousness.  That
is to say that objectivity is the function of a activity and not something
we passively assimilate as we confront the daily world.  Some of the things
or, better, activities we objectify (very few in my opinion) are those of
our own subjective consciousness.  Most are not.  Most of our objectifying
involves activities that are the preconditions for our own subjectivities,
either the activities that emerge out of the collective subjective activities
of men learned or developed in the course of collaborative activities while
others involve activities that are preconditions for consciousness in all
its aspects.  Hegel, for example, divides his system of logic into two
parts, objective logic and subjective logic or notional logic where the
former is that logic which we enact without subjective reflection. Objective
logic is objective because the only way we can deal with it intellectually
in any other fashion than just doing it is as an object of reflection [I
expect AB to come down on me like a ton of bricks on this one].

In its many concrete manifestations in human activity, intellectual and
material, the principle of self-perpetuation, at least for men, is as
subjective an issue as is the concept of self; the idea of property, of
individual interests and even of "family values" are directly related to the
activity of  primitive self-perpetuation, though highly charged with many
concrete connections to the complexities of human social existence.  These
slogans of  superficial individualism  of  Social Darwinism and its
inheritors, the bio-sociologists and others like them, only scratch the
surface of things.  Regarded objectively, the self-perpetuating activity of
life forms is sublated in virtually all forms of human activity from eating
and intercourse to social labour, wage slavery, and social revolution.


Sounds like some version of Lenin's (or the Soviets' in general) theory of 
reflection.  Life activity is a form of reflection.  However, the 'roots of 
reason' strike me as no more than roots, not reason.



...
The natural sciences reflect exactly this relation between intellect and
practice.  There are no real ontological truths in science.  Nothing is holy
or beyond question and the only real proof is a sort of abstracted form of
practice, experimentation.  Whatever ontologising scientists do, and some
do, is tolerated by the scientific community only insofar as it remains
speculation and does not interfere with the scientific process.  Great
scientists have had "ideas";  Newton philosophized that the world was a
clock wound up by the creator and then left to its own devices,  Einstein
was sure that "God does not play dice", and Hawkins was until a few years
ago sure that unified field theory would answer all the questions of
physics.  Most of these and many more are, fortunately, either forgotten or
on the way to being forgotten, though the scientific contributions of their
makers remain important, even vital, components of the giant artefactual
system men have built to enable their persistence in the world.


The Royal Society started this practice, to keep metaphysics and theology 
out of empirical science.



Finally, the natural science of human activity and history, and this is what
Historical Materialism, should be and sometimes is, can least afford the
ontologising  forays that occasionally crop up in fields such as physics,
chemistry and organic sciences.  The very abstractness of the subjects of
these sciences renders the prononciamentos of important scientists fairly
harmless in the long run.  The natural science of human a

[Marxism-Thaxis] Marxist Internet Archive snafu?

[Ralph Dumain]

Is anyone else finding that the MIA search engine doesn't work properly 
now?  I get the number of results for a search, but not the results themselves.



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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxist Internet Archive snafu?

[Ralph Dumain]

The search engine is functioning now.

Can someone remind me where to find the passage by Marx where he criticizes 
the spectator view of knowledge, as if the thinker is crouching outside the 
universe looking at it from outside?  I know I've seen this a thousand 
times but I can't place it.


At 12:49 PM 6/8/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:

Positive.
They appear to be fooling around with the organization of the site.  So 
far they've mostly succeeded in making searches more difficult.

Oudeyis
- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Dumain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: 
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 9:24
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxist Internet Archive snafu?


Is anyone else finding that the MIA search engine doesn't work properly 
now?  I get the number of results for a search, but not the results themselves.



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[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx & Engels on Skepticism & Praxis

[Ralph Dumain]

I'm assembling some key quotes relevant to recent discussions on these 
lists and also to projects I'm working on.  I would appreciate suggestions 
for additional quotes surrounding this theme:


Marx & Engels on Skepticism & Praxis
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/marx-skeptic.html

I'm sure I'm forgetting something.  There is some quote in young Marx's 
works about the spectator theory of knowledge (crouching outside the 
universe looking in), but I can't place it.  I thought there was something 
else from Engels on the nature of deductive, axiomatic reasoning (proofs 
stemming from axioms), but I haven't found what I was looking for, and I 
may have misremembered quotes I've already found.




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