Gnostic Marxist
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Our feathered friend’s brief hibernation hasn’t improved his behaviour or his logic. He has the gall to accuse us of trashing Dietzgen when we were the ones that kept his conception of materialism alive (basically that both matter and mind are equally real) in face of criticism from CP hacks who kept up Lenin’s trashing of him in his book on empiriocriticism.
We not only did that but we were instrumental in introducing his ideas into academia in 1975 and so indirectly for the publication of the article he refers you to, Alan. See pages 215 to 217 of the article.
ALB wrote: “…both matter and mind are equally real…”
You’ve lied about this before, many times.
You don’t consider ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ as ‘equal’.
You consider ‘matter’ as the source of ‘mind’. That’s why you’re a materialist.
Marx considers humanity the source of both matter and mind. Dietzgen agreed with Marx. You don’t.Looks as if our feathered friend is ignorant in one or other sense of the term. Someone should tell him to read the section on “Mind and Matter” in this article from the Spring 1975 number of Radical Philosophy. I’m not going to.
Adam Buick wrote: “Dietzgen was a thoroughgoing empiricist and materialist. For him all knowledge was derived from
sense-perception; and what human beings perceived
had a real existence independent of their perception of it.”This is a complete travesty of Dietzgen’s views.
Dietzgen, like Marx, ‘reconciled’ idealism with materialism.
This means, not ’empiricism’, but ‘theory and practice’.
Human knowledge is not ‘derived from sense perception’, but from ‘social production’.
Nothing can have a ‘real existence independent’ of humanity, because humans couldn’t know it.
The key is that ’empiricism’ and ‘sense perception’ require passivity in humanity, so that the ‘thing-in-itself’ is the ‘active side’.
Marx and Dietzgen both argued for active humanity, which produces its knowledge. Humanity produces its ’empirical’ and its ‘sense perception’, both by social theory and practice. Humanity can change its ’empirical’ and its ‘sense perception’. Nothing is ‘independent’ of human production.
Adam Buick, if he ever understood this, seems to have forgotten. Perhaps he’s never understood Marx.
Materialism: matter produces mind.
Idealism: mind produces matter.
Marx and Dietzgen: humanity produces matter and mind.When Adam Buick writes “what human beings perceived had a real existence independent of their perception of it“, what AB means is that this ‘what’ is ‘independent’ of AB’s brain. And thus this ‘what’ is outside of every individual’s brain.
This opinion is based upon AB’s materialism (for which ‘matter’ is independent of ‘mind’, and ‘mind’ is equated to individual ‘brain’). For Marx, ‘mind’ is a social product, not a property of ‘individual brain’.
Of course, Marx argued that we externalise (Entausserung) our nature. So, we produce what’s external to our brains. This ‘what’ is a social product, and thus can be changed.
But… this ‘what’ is not ‘independent’ of humanity’s conscious activity – otherwise, we couldn’t ‘perceive it’. Nothing, not even ‘nature’ or ‘universe’, is ‘independent’ of us. We socially produce ‘nature for us’. It’s our product, and since products are external to their producer, these products are outside of individual brains.
But these products are not ‘independent’ of us as producers.
This is the key to understanding Marx and Dietzgen – we can only know what we socially produce.
This is completely different to AB’s analysis, in his 1975 article. AB is a materialist, not a Marxist.
Adam Buick wrote: “Included in the Kerr edition of Dietzgen’s
Philosophical Essays is an essay on Max stirner by
Eugene wherein we read that ‘whatever does not
partake of the psycho-physical nature of the
universe, cannot exist for us’ and that ‘phenomena
outside of us … exist independently of individual
man, although they cannot exist for mankind
independently of human consciousness. [my bold]”AB quotes Dietzgen. It’s the same argument I made in my previous post.
‘Phenomena’ exist independently of biological brain, but not independently of conscious social activity.
Humans produce their universe.
“Nothing is ‘independent’ of human production…Marx and Dietzgen: humanity produces matter and mind.”
This is misleading. Humanity produces the idea of matter but not literally matter itself. The dinosaurs went extinct some 66 million years- millions of years before human beings roamed the earth and were capable of conceptualizing the notion of “dinosaurs”. Or is LBird seriously trying to tell us that they didn’t exist before human beings “produced” them. Is he saying the fossil record is false?
What human beings produce is the idea of dinosaurs and, certainly, ideas are not independent of “human production” in the Kantian sense. But sensory perception has to operate on something independent of itself otherwise the very term makes no sense.
We cannot apprehend “dinosaurs” independently of our mind, our cognitive apparatus, but the idea of “dinosaurs” doesn’t come from nowhere which is what LBird seems to be suggesting. If he had said humanity produces “matter” in the phenomenal sense that would kind of make sense. But that’s not what he is suggesting. He is suggesting, albeit probably unintentionally because of the clumsy way he formulates his argument, that human beings produce matter in the noumenal sense as things in itself. But we don’t and can’t.
Even if we cannot apprehend dinosaurs apart from our minds we use our minds to infer that dinosaurs must have existed independently of us since they clearly predate us by millions of years
Also, since we cannot directly apprehend what goes on in the minds of other human beings, we cannot directly experience what they are thinking, Their minds are unknowable in the same way that dinosaurs are unknowable outside of our minds, according to LBird’s logic
If so, what then are we to make of LBird’s notion of the social production of ideas. Since the social production of ideas entails other people who cannot exist outside of our minds and which we “produce” in the same way as we produce dinosaurs according to LBird, then we cannot posit that these ideas are “socially produced”. To say that ideas are socially produced is to say that other people exist apart from us and independently of us – like dinosaurs
This is why LBird’s idealist way of approaching the question of “matter” fundamentally contradicts everything he has to say about the social production of knowledge. So it turns out that LBird is the ultra-individualist here since reality for him is entirely subjectively constituted. Subjectivity is a function of the individual alone since “society” is not some entity capable of “thinking”
Yet again LBird has shot himself in the foot!
robbo203 wrote: “But sensory perception has to operate on something independent of itself otherwise the very term makes no sense.”
This ideological statement just shows your ignorance of Marx and Dietzgen.
Your ‘subject’ is the biological individual, and so you assume ‘something independent of itself’. This is dealt with by Dietzgen earlier.
Having started from this political assumption, you then assume that the biological individual brain is passive, so that ‘something independent’ actively impinges upon the brain. You make the ‘independent’ into the ‘active side’, to quote Marx.
As Marx and Dietzgen made clear, the ‘subject’ is humanity (not individuals), and so is a social subject. This subject is the active side, which socially produces what it knows.
So, since you’re not a Marxist or social productionist, you conclude that ‘the very term makes no sense’. It doesn’t ‘operate on’, it ‘produces it’. Nothing ‘exists for us’ until we produce it.
Stick to your passive, individualist, biological, understanding of ‘something independent’, and remain in the 18th century.
robbo203 wrote: “Also, since we cannot directly apprehend what goes on in the minds of other human beings, we cannot directly experience what they are thinking, Their minds are unknowable”
Spoken like a true bourgeois individual, robbo! Society is a mystery to you! So is its production of your world.
robbo203 wrote: “Subjectivity is a function of the individual alone since “society” is not some entity capable of “thinking”
Yet again LBird has shot himself in the foot!” [my bold]
LOL! Ironic!
Your ‘subject’ is the biological individual, and so you assume ‘something independent of itself’. This is dealt with by Dietzgen earlier. Having started from this political assumption, you then assume that the biological individual brain is passive, so that ‘something independent’ actively impinges upon the brain. You make the ‘independent’ into the ‘active side’, to quote Marx. Your ‘subject’ is the biological individual, and so you assume ‘something independent of itself’.
I said nothing of the sort. I wish you would learn to read. I said “Humanity produces the idea of matter but not literally matter itself”. What do you think “produces the idea of matter” denotes if not a human subject that actively structures their view of the world around them.
So my subject is not as you say the biological individual but the creative and active individual except that unlike you I do believe that dinosaurs existed many millions of years before human beings did and therefore existed independently of human consciousness. But by all means
if you wish to argue, along with the reverend Bishop Ussher, that the world was created intact with dinosaurs and humans alike on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, please feel free to argue this point here.The “idea” of dinosaurs is a product of human minds but the reality of dinosaurs predating human beings is an objective fact demonstrable by the fossil record. Do you agree with what the fossil record suggests or are you a creationist? Do tell us
So, since you’re not a Marxist or social productionist, you conclude that ‘the very term makes no sense’. It doesn’t ‘operate on’, it ‘produces it’. Nothing ‘exists for us’ until we produce it.
That nothing exists “for us” doesn’t mean it doesn’t or didn’t exist. Did dinosaurs exist many millions of year before human beings existed? Yes or no LBird? Please answer the question!!!
No, you are not a Marxist and the logic of your whole argument shows that you are not a “social productionist” either. You are what I would call a bourgeois idealist. You think the world is wholly created out of the human mind which spontaneously generates ideas about the world and that there exists nothing out there for the mind to interact with or actively “operate on” to use your expression. Your worldview has got nothing to do with Marxism. Its pure idealism
Also since we cannot directly access other people’s mind only our own this flatly contradicts your whole claim to be a social productionist since nothing exists for you outside the human mind which can only be YOUR mind as an individual. Everything you see around you is the product of your mind and according to your logic other minds cannot exist for you in the same way that dinosaurs cannot exist for you. On the contrary, you produce both of them. Therefore according to you, there can be no such thing as social production
Marxists on the other hand – unlike you – would take the view that other minds exist despite being objective or external to us and can influence our own mind and that ideas are social in origin.
robbo203 wrote: “Subjectivity is a function of the individual alone since “society” is not some entity capable of “thinking”
Yet again LBird has shot himself in the foot!” [my bold]
LOL! Ironic!
How is it ironic? If you object to the statement could you explain how society is something that “thinks”? Do you or do you not agree that thinking is a function of the human brain which is what the individual happens to have?
“robbo203 wrote: “Subjectivity is a function of the individual alone…”
Read the post.
If you shooting yourself in the foot isn’t ironic, I don’t know what is!
You’re an ideological individualist. I’m a Marxist social productionist.
Why can’t you see that our ideologies differ? End of.
Adam Buick wrote: “Included in the Kerr edition of Dietzgen’s
Philosophical Essays is an essay on Max stirner by
Eugene wherein we read that ‘whatever does not
partake of the psycho-physical nature of the
universe, cannot exist for us’ and that ‘phenomena
outside of us … exist independently of individual
man, although they cannot exist for mankind
independently of human consciousness.”That was the view and terminology (“psycho-physical nature of the universe”) expresed by Joseph Dietzgen’s son, Eugene (more here on him), and are not Dietzgen’s own words. He was making a different point. From the same article:
Mind and Matter
Dietzgen, as we saw, called himself a materialist. There are however various kinds of materialism and Dietzgen was careful to differentiate his dialectical materialism from what he called ‘one-sided,’ ‘narrow’ and ‘mechanical’ materialism. This was the view (indeed the traditional materialist view going back to the philosophers of Ancient Greece) that the world is composed of tiny particles of tangible ‘matter’ and that the mind and thinking are simply the effects of the movement of these atoms. Writes Dietzgen:
“The distinguishing mark between the mechanical materialists of the 18th century and the Social-Democratic materialists trained in German idealism consists in that that the latter have extended the former’s narrow conception of matter as consisting exclusively of the Tangible to all phenomena that occur in the world.”
Every phenomenon, everything that occurs, exists, as part of the entire world of phenomena. Since non-tangible phenomena, e.g. ideas, thoughts etc., also occur, they are just as real or, if you like, just as ‘material’ as tangible phenomena:
“In the endless Universe matter in the sense of old and antiquated materialists, that is, of tangible matter, does not possess the slightest preferential right to be more substantial, i.e. more immediate, more distinct and more certain than any other phenomena of nature.”
Dietzgen had no objection to the classification of the world of phenomena into two general categories, one consisting of tangible phenomena and called ‘matter’ and the other consisting of mental phenomena and called ‘mind.’ He had no objection either to explanations of mental phenomena in terms of tangible phenomena. What he was concerned to point out was that, in this sense, both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ were abstractions, even if very general ones, from the real world of phenomena. The rigid distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ was a mental distinction that did not exist in the world of phenomena which, despite this mental operation, remained an undivided whole:
“The mind is a collective name for the mental phenomena, as matter is a collective name for the material phenomena, and the two together figure under the idea and name of the phenomena of Nature.
This was the basis of Dietzgen’s statement, which, as we shall see, so upset Lenin, that ‘our materialism is distinguished by its special knowledge of the common nature of mind and matter’.By this he simply meant that both mind and matter were parts of the world of observable phenomena.
Those Dietzgen called the ‘narrow’ materialists made the mistake of not thinking dialectically, that is, of not realising that the parts of the world of phenomena do not exist independently but only as interconnected parts of that world. In taking one part of the world of phenomena and making it the basis of all the other parts, they were falsely ascribing a real, independent existence to what was in fact only an abstraction:
“This materialism is so enamoured of mechanics, that it, as it were, idolizes it, does not regard it as part of the world, but as the sole substance of which the universe is made up.”
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