Hi Charles Below is a rather hastily written reply to you last contribution. Sorry for the delay I have been otherwise engaged.
Expressing a point of view is not the definition of idealism. To have posited language as opposed to point of view would have proven a better starting point. It is language rather than point of view which demarcates us from beasts. The point of view perspective is a rather narrow conception of epistemology. It effectively reduces epistemology to the abstract level of mere point of view. Scientific inquiry cannot be simply reduced to point of view. To do so is to reduce science to that of doxa. It means that Marx's Capital can have no more status than the point of view of any randomly chosen capitalist or worker. It means that the point of view of a fascist who claims that Hitler was right has necessaily the same status of a communist who describes Hitler as an extreme reactionary. As a point of view there is nothing to guarantee that your point of view offers any description of being. To guarantee this, what you call your point of view would have to possess more properties than that of point of view. It may have been a point of view that the sun orbits the earth because of the way in which reality can appear (sun's rising and setting) or that the earth is flat. However that does not give these claims the equale weight to Galileo's conclusions on the subject. This is just the point I have been arguing against. The basis for what is understood as human progress or development cannot be validly based on an unestablished subjective notion (looking out for ourselves.) It must be based on a logically epistemologically and ontologically consistent premise bearing an inherently objective character. It must be falsfiable. Equallly to qualify as scientific Marxism must be falsifiable. It must endlessly seeking to prove its hypotheses wrong. However in general marxism does not do this. Instead it tends to present itself as proven true. Many scientists entertain an opposite position Significantly the force driving these events has been both meaningless and unconscious. Consciousness is a result and not a sui generis of the course of nature. What produces consciousness cannot be produced by it. Consequently to suggest that a modest unestablished notion of humans 'obliged to look out for themselves' can serve as a driving force of the future being of man is not a valid assumption. Mere opinion cannot legitimately claim that consciousness must be used to decide what progress is. Since yours is a mere opinion it can carry no more status than the opinion of a fascist or a Buddhist. Everything for you is reduced to mere opinion --mere subjectivity. Since for you "point of view" is all that anyone can express there exists no basis for truth or even validity. Each of us is then our own opinion. Consequently logically there can exist an endless multiplicity of individual worlds constitued by personal opinion. All opinions are equally valid so all correspondingly equally exist. The fascist, the Buddhist, the Roman Catholic and the communist are equally valid universes. This viewpoint constitutes an unestablished form of naive idealism. It is this problem that is also at the heart of the problems and ambiguities of marxism. It is these matters that need to be thrashed out and settled. Darwin's dangerous idea is that it irrefutably demonstrated that consciousness, and thereby god, is an unnecessary element in any objective outline of naturaldevelopment. Instead nature explains itself by just being --by evolving. It does not logically require you, me or Marx to explain it. In so far as consciousness exists it is a product of evolution. Therefore consciousness exists within nature. It cannot exist outside nature. There is no radical bifurcation between nature and consciousness. No matter how consciousness develops it is circumscribed within it. Consciousness can never transcend nature. To do so is to become god. The vast majority of species that possess consciousness have been still constrained by the laws of nature. Evolution by natural selection entailing the fittest of the survival persisted. Of course consciousness has affected our relationship with nature. This is because it is a product of evolution --a feature of evolution by natural selection. Consciousness must affect our relationship with nature because it is itself nature -a complex form of nature. And this is just the matter which I have been raising but which is may be escaping people. The matter is the character of the relationship of society to nature. The nature of this relationship has to be identified and outlined. If Darwin is correct then this raises certain problems for marxism. One of which I have just mentioned. For Darwin the evolution of consciousness is a product of a meaningless unconscious evolutionary process. Nature is a spontaneous production process that lacks intelligent design. This is proof that production is not necessarily conscious. This is proof that blind meaningless nature is intelligent capable of increasing complexity. The lack of purposive is purposive. The absence of intelligent design is the best form of design. After Darwin we cannot now claim for consciousness the status it formerly held. Its relationship with nature is now seen as a much closer and less divergent one. The qualitative distinction between nature and consiousness is now much weaker. Consequently we cannot present the two features of being as if there is a diremption between them. There is no dualism; no ghost in a machine. Indeed Freud further undermined this traditional conception with his doctrine of the unconscious. Farming was not a product of a purposive activity. Farming was a product of evolution. Even scientific discovery is not a product of purposive action. Many of the greatest scientific discoveries are not a product of simple purposive action. It is questionable how conscious scientific discovery is just as it is questionable how purposively conscious much of human activity in general is. Much of what is consodered human development is the product of unintended consequences. Even rationally designed plans can have unintended consequences. Rationalism is an untenable philosophy.Yet many marxists view themselves as rationalism. Homo sapiens if a result of the ongoing process of evolution by natural selection. This means that the brain and its consciousness is inherently an evolutionary product of a universal production process. Production is not necessarily a consciously driven process as is mistakenly believed by some leftists. Charles talks about what we do with consciousness after its evolution. Obviously he sees a radical discontinuity between the evolution of consciosness and post this evolution. It is not clear upon what basis this distintion is made. He seems to be suggesting that there are two forms of human consciousness that are qualitatively different. The evolutionary process that led to evolved consciousness cannot be divorced from now existing consciousness. They both form a inseparable part of the one story. Problem solving is the primal activity and the primal problem is survival. All organisms are constantly, day and night, engaged in problem solving. In organisms and animals below the human level trial solutions to problems exhibit themselves in the form of new reactions, new expectations, new expectations, new modes of behaviour which if they persistently triumph over the trials ton which they are subjected may eventually modify the creature itself in one of its organs or one of its forms and thus become by selection incorporated into its anatomy. Error elimination may consist in so called natural selection or in development within the organism of controls which modify or suppress inappropriate changes. In the biological process of evolution, seen as the history of problem solivng the development of language is of central importance. Animals make noises with expressive and signalling functions. Human language goes beyond by evolving descriptive and the argumentative function. Language makes possible the formulations of descriptions of the world and thus made understanding possible. In conclusion the last paragraphs are a result of the influence of Karl Popper on my thought. His discussion of the relationship between evolution and knowledge is an interesting one that may of use in the development of communist theory. Needless to say I dont have the fundamental answers to the question of the relationship between communism and evolution. However it would appear that it has received insufficient attention. Marx, it would appear, had little interest in Darwinian thought. Perhaps even less so than Engels. Stephen Jay Gould in little article on Marx's funeral seems to have thought that. And I dont see any reason, as of yet, to disagree. Paddy _______________________________________________ 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
