Is the case for socialism, one of morality, cold logic or long term survival of our species?
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At least, what I just said for the natural sciences. For the social sciences, the attempt to do likewise ends up in absurdity. So for that, go for the best story telling – the ones that seem true and pay respect to the richness and diversity of life.
Who knows? What makes a flower beautiful?I didn't make this up, as I'm sure you know. It's physicists and mathematicians who like a theory to be "beautiful".
DJP wrote:What is it that makes something seem true?This would be a very interesting discussion, DJP, as I've recently been doing some reading around this topic.But I think it would be better being addressed on a fresh thread.
Who says flowers are beautiful?
I was just trying to tease something out of you..FWIW worth these are a few things that I'm running with
Alan Sokal – Defense of a Modest Scientific Realism wrote:Since no existing theory purports to be a final theory, there is no reason to consider it as literally true or to worry too much about whenether the entities it postualtes "really exist". Or rarther, when worrying about whether the unobservable entities of a given theory "really exist", it is important to distinguish existence as a fundamental constituent of the universe for existence in some course-grained sense. It is a reasonable guess that none of the theoretical entities in our present-day theories are truly fundamental, and that all of the theoretical entities in our present-day well-confirmed theories will maintain some status as dervied entities in future theories.Simon Blackburn – Truth wrote:..once we have an issue to decide, it comes with its own norms. Once the issue is the issue, relativism becomes a distractionDJP wrote:What makes a theory beautiful?What is it that makes something seem true?Since we all survive because we can comprehend objective truth, however imperfectly, and because we can detect its opposite objective falsity, however imperfectly, the answer must be thoroughly prosaic.Setting aside our evolutionary heritage, the deepest, and unassailable, assessment was made by two well-known folks: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 of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.Human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception.If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves [≡ objective truth]. …In both materialist assessments, human practice is the ultimate arbiter. Theory is our necessary intermediary for comprehending
(1) “objective truth” ≡ (2) “reality outside of ourselves”.
All else is sophisticated blather.¹Beauty, in the context of theory, is a driving force, but ultimately practical, because theoretical beauty is a human construction designed to reduce the complexity of the form theory takes.Formal beauty is awe at our own creation when it turns out, by abstract excision of formal complexity, to reveal a hitherto undreamed of objective truth [≡ reality outside of ourselves]. It is the power of formal abstraction applied to formal abstraction [= theory] itself.There is nothing of deeper substance to add.If there is, prove it to me! ¹ Marx and Engels, like Hegel before them, treat “objective truth” and “reality outside ourselves” as historical social categories of thought.Engels, in Socialism Utopian and Scientific, wrote:But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves.[my bold]http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htmAs usual with Engels, he's confused, and thus confuses others who look to him for guidance. He's worth reading, but critically.If 'proof' is 'positive', how can it only be 'so far'?Is 'so far' 0.0001% 'far' towards the truth? Or is 'so far' 99.9999% 'far' towards truth?The use of the conditional 'so far' completely undermines the accepted meaning of 'proof positive'.In fact, 'practice' doesn't furnish 'proof positive' of any external 'object': successful 'practice' merely 'proves' that the 'theory' works for human purposes. Thus, 'truth' is social, cultural and has a history.This is a million miles from 'proof' of the true correspondence of 'our perceptions' and 'nature', as naive realists would have it.
By the way, it is your illusion that Engels is a naive realist. That is your Leninist-inspired prejudice.It is you who hold a direct correspondence “theory” of class/group/authority 100% determines “ideology”.
It is historical social proof, the only one we know.No-one can historically know its ultimate status. Human practice, despite your carping, has no choice but to take it on trust as 100%. You and I act practically that way all the time, or else we would be practically paralytic before the possibility of uncertainty.Engels knows very well that he risks your variety of carping, but he is here prepared to challenge the dualists, like yourself, who stress the exact opposite of 0·000% proof, i.e. that we can never know, your very own defeatist slant, which he, as active agent of socialism, will have none of.If you were to apply your logic to the impossibility, and therefore the meaninglessness of Marxian proof by practice, I can just imagine you attempting to tie your own shoelace, assuming they exist with < 100% proof; < 100% certain they can be tied; < 100% confident they will hold your < 100% existing shoe in your < 100% actual foot, before you even < 100% walk out your < 100% door, never 100% certain of anything!Well, not everything. According to your crude economic determinism, you hold 100% irrefutable certainty that
wrote:any owner of socially productive property is a thief, a liar, and doesn’t have a clue about what they are really doing, and know nothing about the history of capitalism. That includes the queen, all religious leaders, The War Criminal Tony Blair, and The British, amongst others.Come on. Forget about psyching yourself up 24/7 [= 100%] to be an 100% ideological freak. Join the real world where people manage the possible with normal certainty. That’s ultimately what science is for. Science’s intellectual pleasure is a welcome byproduct.
Relevant to our long and varied discussion here…On EP Thompson from historian John Rule (Or: what we can learn from Thompson (and David Graeber)): "Socialist humanism would, Thompson hoped, provide the liberating approach around which a new left movement could emerge. In simple terms it would restore to the Marxist tradition (after 1956 Thompson tended to describe himself as a historian working in the Marxist tradition), the dimension which had been partly lost by Marx himself as he moved on from the writings of his youth to the economic certainties of Capital. It had certainly been lost from the Soviet version of communism. Later Thompson recalled his sense of a ‘real silence’ in Marx, lying in the ‘area that anthropologists would call value systems’. The ‘degeneration of the theoretical vocabulary of mainstream Marxism’ had led to a desensitization of human qualities such as imagination and passion. Marx may have replaced the classical economists' economic man with ‘revolutionary economic man’, but the injury lay in defining man as essentially economic in the first place." H/T Lynn
LBird, you’ve never once acknowledged Marx’s reference to objective truth, nor the countless times Pannekoek affirms his materialism, as I’ve just been reminded of upon rereading his “Lenin as Philosopher”.Surely such waywardness of erstwhile heroes deserves a snarl or bite from you.
"Sorry Stuart, but that is utter nonsense."Oh dear, I thought it might be! Utter nonsense? Nothing in it at all? "For genuine respect for human values, reread Engels’s wonderful “Origin of the Family”, which is genuine anthropology. Don’t fall for the consciously anti-marxian vulgarities that parade under the name of anthropology—see the Chris Knight reference I gave earlier. [Anthroplogy became deliberately anti-marxian in exactly the same way that economics did.]"I have read Engels, I studied under Chris Knight for years, I have read Graeber, who knows his Marx inside out, and discusses Morgan wonderfully in his book Debt, and I have read a fair chunk of Thompson, including his wonderful biography of Morris. I have also read Marx and Engels. I have to say, I've not found "utter nonsense" in any of these writers, or in very many at all. There's something to learn in them all."E. P. Thompson, great and all as he was, and superb as his biography of William Morris remains, was tainted by Leninism."You say that EP Thompson was "tainted by Leninism", and then in the very next sentence say that I should "Take heart from the fact that the socialist party is the only bearer of socialism" – pure Leninism! Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that in thine own eye?! You have a very aggressive and defensive style, twc, which will inevitably make people ask what it is you are defending. You give your own answer: you're "defending our standard theory". I can assure you, it's not worth defending. It's a bit like my favourite piece of wisdom about an organisation's leadership: "If the leadership is indispensible, then the organisation is dispensible." Same with your theory. If it needs defending, it's dead.
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