[Marxism-Thaxis] O! Dialectics
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. 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. It was in this sense that M-E in German Ideology critiqued Idealism, which is a conception of humanity in contrast to their materialist philosophy of humanity, where they wrote: 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. What the bourgeois ideologists masquerading as cultural anthropologists and sociologists call culture, Charles, is what Hegel called 'the Idea' objectified in politics, religion and philosophy manifested in civil society's systems of production and appropriation (exchange). The Idea -- whether you call it Culture, Self-Consciousness, Substance qua God, Man qua Subject, or Absolute as not just Substance but Subject as well -- it is Consciousness that is determinate, and that is what makes it Idealism. ^ CB: How about imagination , as Marx calls it in discussing labor in _Captial_ We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm This is what Marx and Engels critiqued of both the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians: The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation. while the other extols it as legitimate. / Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly world-shattering statements, are the staunchest conservatives. It was in opposition to the Idealist conception of history, that is of humanity, that Marx and Engels famous pronouncements concerning 'materialism' were stated in opposition to the Idealism both to the Old and the Young Hegelian dialecticians. ^^ CB: The matter of what distinguishes humans from animals is not the definition of what a materialist is vs an idealist. None of these Germans, Marx and Engels included, had scientific and
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O! Dialectics
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. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
Victor victor Of course objectivity reality exists, but we have to realize that what Marx, Lenin and other intelligent Marxists like Ilyenkov meant by objective reality is not reality contemplated by some totally uninvolved philosophical being. Just the reverse is true objective reality is only known through what Lenin calls revolutionary practice, the transformation of one object into another through labour. It is only when we know how and under what conditions (including of course our own activities) an object becomes something else that we cognize its real character. This is as true of the child knocking about a gewgaw hanging over his crib as it is for the physicist smashing atoms. There is virtually no aspect of human knowledge (not human activity) that is truly a priori. Oudeyis ^^ CB: Yes,in saying that objective reality exists, I did indicate any break with The Theses on Feuerbach ,esp. 1, 2 and 11 here. Marx distinguishes his materialism from all those hitherto existing by by making the subject active not contemplative, like Feuerbach. Practice is the test of theory, otherwise it's scholastic. Philosophers have interpreted the world, the thing is to change it. Lenin's _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ is thoroughly infused with Engels' elaboration of these principles in _Anti-Duhring_. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
to CB Right, I hear the same language. Oudeyis - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx andthe thinkers he inspired' marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 16:25 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! Victor victor Of course objectivity reality exists, but we have to realize that what Marx, Lenin and other intelligent Marxists like Ilyenkov meant by objective reality is not reality contemplated by some totally uninvolved philosophical being. Just the reverse is true objective reality is only known through what Lenin calls revolutionary practice, the transformation of one object into another through labour. It is only when we know how and under what conditions (including of course our own activities) an object becomes something else that we cognize its real character. This is as true of the child knocking about a gewgaw hanging over his crib as it is for the physicist smashing atoms. There is virtually no aspect of human knowledge (not human activity) that is truly a priori. Oudeyis ^^ CB: Yes,in saying that objective reality exists, I did indicate any break with The Theses on Feuerbach ,esp. 1, 2 and 11 here. Marx distinguishes his materialism from all those hitherto existing by by making the subject active not contemplative, like Feuerbach. Practice is the test of theory, otherwise it's scholastic. Philosophers have interpreted the world, the thing is to change it. Lenin's _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ is thoroughly infused with Engels' elaboration of these principles in _Anti-Duhring_. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Class struggle in Zimbabwe
The class struggle in Zimbabwe is moving from the Black bourgeoisie of that country mobilizing the workers and landless peasants in that African country in its own class interests against White settler- colonists into a struggle in which the Zimbabwean worker's and peasants have come to be and think as a 'mind and will' of their own, class consciousness as opposed to bourgeois nationalist race consciousness. The ZANU-PF, while it is to be defended in the earlier stages of land expropriations of settler- capitalists by landless peasants, it has always been clear that this is a bourgeois-democratic extension of the liberation movement into the economics of the country-side, but the ZANU-PF socialist rhetoric has always been a sham. Land reform or land redistribution has always been a component of the bourgeois democratic revolutions, whether the English Revolution in 1840, the Great French Revolution in its radical stages represented by the Committee of Public Safety Jacobins government, the Russian Revolution in 1917, 1921-8, or even the Chinese Revolution in the 1930-40s, and the Zapata factions in Southern Mexico in the Mexican Revolution in the early to mid-20th century. This kind of radical land redistribution in Zimbabwe was put on hold by the Lancaster Agreements in which the ZANU-PF shifted its alliance with the poor peasants and workers of Zimbabwe to the settler-capitalists, and subsequently with IMF. The Zimbabwe landless peasants led by the war veterans took matters into their own hands in the latter part of the 1990s, and continue to do so today. In need of their political support against the imperialist supported Movement for Democratic Change (MDF) the ZANU-PF government supported rather than opposed the land expropriations. Britain, Amnesty International, the American government (both the Clinton and the Bush administrations) and the Congressional Black Caucus and Trans-Africa and Black Radical Congress all came out in opposition to the land expropriations ostensibly in opposition to Mugabe the individual. While it is the duty of workers to defend the peasant's land expropriation, it is never to be with illusions that it has anything to do with socialism which is based in the proletariat in the agribusinesses as well as industries and mines themselves expropriating these productive forces not as individuals for private wealth but as collective class property for social wealth of the people of Zimbabwe, both these expropriations and management of expropriated bourgeois wealth must occur without regard to the race, tribe, religion or color of the capitalists being expropriated or of the workers doing the expropriating! The article below shows that the ZANU-PF is as it has always been: the political party of the dominate factions of Zimbabwa's Black urban bourgeois (the peasants are nothing but the rural bourgeois) now that the poorest of the peasants, following their class interests are now expropriating Black bourgeois property and are being chased from those properties by the ZANU-PF government's state. It is becoming clearer to African workers and even the poorer peasants that racial nationalism is nothing but the ideology of the African Black bourgeoisie, mobilizing African workers and peasants to pursue the interests of the African bourgeoisie in the liberation movements and wars. Since for the past several decades the Black bourgeoisie has been in power, and have wrecked African civil societies, and wars of competition has broken out between the competiting factions of this bourgeoisie on the basis of supposed tribal interests, including ethnic wars, it is clear in Zimbabwe where the class content of these social wars is most advanced in consequence of the peasants risings (expropriations) -- now that these poorest peasants are expropriating the lands of the African bourgeoisie and being repealed by the ZANU-PF state -- that the bourgeois democratic revolutions by the poor peasants land expropriations have to throw-off racial ideology and disassociate themselves from the bourgeois party in power (in this case in Zimbabwe ZANU-PF). Only by forming an alliance with the wageworkers in the factories, and mines, and yes, the wageworkers on the farms - the expropriation of all the bourgeois property in Zimbabwe, including the Black bourgeoisie - can the peasants and workers of Zimbabwe advance the permanent revolution! Lil Joe === Mail Guardian (SA), 4 June Mugabe comes to crony's aid Godwin Gandu Harare - The Zimbabwean government has cracked the whip on an errant deputy minister for violating government policy and has ordered the minister of anti-corruption and anti-monopolies to launch an investigation into his activities. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matongo has been personally instructed by President Robert Mugabe to vacate land owned
[Marxism-Thaxis] Labor Theory of Human Origins was:O, Dialectics!
Yes, I have Reed's books on these issues. The International edition of _The Origin of the Family_ has an updating intro by anthropologist Eleanor Leacock. The Manifesto of the Communist Party has one modification of its famous first line, done by Engels later in life. There is a footnote modifying the proposition History is a history of class struggles such that history as class struggle begins at the breaking up of the primitive commune. In this Engels makes the same correction of _The German Ideology_ statement about production being the origin of humanly distinct society that I did at the beginning of this thread. Again , I'd say the critical difference between human labor and animals' labor is that humans have ideas. This allows the labor to be more social than animals' labor, both in social connections with living members of the species, for example in hunting parties, or with dead members of the species , as in ancestor worship. Charles Steve Gabosch bebop101 at comcast.net This particular discussion has moved in a different direction from investigating dialectics per se, and could be considered in part to be about the labor theory of the origins of humanity. In a way, we having been using the terms production and labor synonymously in our recent dialogues. But the concept of labor - and how it is different from animal activity - is in my opinion the key that unlocks the puzzle of how humanity originated and what it means to be human. I think Charles is entirely correct in going back to Marx, especially his most advanced work, _Capital_, to look for a dialectical materialist analysis of labor. I also basically agree with his insistence that it is the *social* dimension of labor that differentiates what humans do from all other species. However, since most animals are also social, a deeper inquiry is needed. More very good discussion of these issues can be found in George Novack's essay The Labor Theory of the Origins of Humanity, contained in his collection _Humanism and Socialism_ (1973). Novack is what I would call a Marxist continuist, meaning, he consciously continues in the tradition of Marx and Engels, and advocates a continuation of the fundamental concepts of Marxist doctrine. He returns to this labor theory theme many times in his writings, such as in his Long View of History contained in his collection _Understanding History_ (1972). Another Marxist continuist relevant to this issue of the origins of humanity is Evelyn Reed, who wrote numerous essays and books on Marxist anthropology in the '50's, '60's and '70's that also relied heavily on Marx and Engels. Her collection _Sexism and Science_ (1978) includes several of these essays. She also wrote a good introduction to _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ by Engels in a 1972 Pathfinder Press edition. This edition also contains the Engels essay The Part Played By Labor in the Transition from Ape to Human, written in 1876 but not published until 1896, a year after his death. All of these books are in print and available from Pathfinder Press. BTW, for those unfamiliar with these writers, both were leaders of the US Socialist Workers Party and were longtime partners until Reed's death in 1979. I encourage Charles to incorporate these writings in his studies about the origins of humanity. - Steve ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: [marxistphilosophy] Re: Deep Grammar
On Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:31:34 - redtwister666 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Gil, I am very leery of the tendency to not make a distinguishing line between humans and animals. By and large, while it is biologically true, there is no obvious argument that would allow us to say that animals reason, have agency or subjectivity, and more importantly that animals develop unique socio-cultural forms of social organization independent of the physical conditions of nature, by which I mean that the same geographic regions with relatively stable physical conditions of nature, have given rise to and sustained many, many diverse socio-cultural formations that are the product of human practice. I think that Lewontin's point that culture is the negation of nature (Biology as Ideology) is pretty apropos. Kenan Malik, a British biologist and Marxist, has some interesting material. I am listing only two essays below. http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/fallacy.html http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/singer_debate.html I would largely agree with Malik's first essay concerning evolutionary psychology, which is largely a repackaging of the sociobiology of the 1970s and 1980s. Concerning the debate between Singer and Malik, I cannot help thinking that Singer had the better of the argument, since his point is that any argument that would justify the denial of rights or basic protections to the great apes, would if taken to its logical conclusion, justify the denial of rights or protections to significant number of human beings. Malik's strongest point was his argument that human rights inhere to us by virtue of our membership in a moral community and so do not necessary depend on us individually possessing specific characteristics A, B, or C. Thus, even those humans who are severely retarded or handicapped and so may be lacking in the abilities required for exercising rationality or moral agency, would still be entitled to rights by virtue of their membership in the human moral community. I suspect that Singer might reply that the boundaries of the moral community may be more flexible than Malik imagines, and that it may well in the future be able to encompass non-human creatures like the great apes, as well as members of homo sapiens. Steven Rose also had a good essay some years ago in International Socialism on Animal Rights along these lines. For me personally, this reduction of humans to mere animals is the line of thought running from Nietzsche to the dominant anti-humanisms of today and is a very reactionary trend. Reactionary thought is contradictory on this point. On the one hand we have those reactionaries who under the influence of traditional religion regard humans as supernatural beings, created in God's image and endowed with immortal souls. The achievement of freedom and equality in this world is not so important because the really important thing is to achieve salvation in the next life. At the same time there are other reactionaries, who apparently rejecting supernaturalism, regard humans as nothing more than animals, and so are not inherently entitled to treatment any better than what we given to members of other species. These two varieties of reactionary thought stem from different and contradictory premises, yet in practice they reach similar conclusions concerning how people ought to be treated. Presumably, we progressives want to assert that human beings are a part of nature, who evolved from non-human ancestry by natural selection. We would want to make the argument, that while humans are animals, they are distinguished from other species by virtue of our development of culture, and following Engels, we would want to argue that the key to the development of distinctively human culture is labor. That indeed it is labor that made it possible for non-human primates to eventually become human. On learning language, there is an extensive debate. IMO, Greg is not on strong ground here in that Chomsky's argument for a UG that is a part of the human brain structurally is not exactly undisputed, to put it mildly, either within linguistics or within neuroscience. For example, from a neurobiological point of view, where is this module (Fodor's work in neurobiology on the idea that the brain is modular is considered by many people, including Chomsky, the science backing the theory)? Brains are funny things and one of the things we know from brain trauma victims is that when one area of the brain is damaged, in many cases, other areas of the brain take over the functions. There is also the problem that the brain does not function in such a compartmentalized fashion, as far as we can tell. There certainly seem to be areas that are normally associated with a certain function, but even in those instances, those areas work with other parts of the brain to produce the whole function. Taken together, this is a genuine problem for a
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
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 made on the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
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 problem comes up
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
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: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu 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 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
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 snip. 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
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
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: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu 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 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
