ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Herr Vogel
I am grateful to you for taking an interest in my work. However I am unable to accept your editing of what I wrote. If I had meant to avoid using the word “materiel” I would have done so but that would not have conveyed the meaning I intended.
I am therefore obliged to respectfully request that you refrain from altering the wording of my articles.
Yours for the Revolution
Karl Marx
Yes, Robbo, quite irrelevant. Marx was arguing there against a creationist and used the philosophical argument that if you say “man and nature” need to be created you are implying that they are “non-being” (don’t exist in their own right), adding that this means that you are too. Marx doesn’t seem to think that his opponent found this rather Hegelian argument convincing as he has him come back to say: “I do not want to posit the nothingness of nature. I ask you about its genesis.” So Marx changes tack, to argue that humans’ sense experience shows that they created themselves through labour in nature and that this shows that “man and nature” exist independently, by themselves.
All very Hegelian, too Hegelian in my view. “Human consciousness” in the sense that has been used here is a Hegelian concept. As far as I can understand Hegel (and I don’t claim to understand too much as his language is impenetrable), for him it is a manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, or God. So he was a creationist. The Young Hegelians, of which Marx was one for a while, threw out God and gave “human consciousness” the status of being the creator of the world.
If you take this position then you argue that the way to change the world is to change consciousness. Marx disagreed and broke with the Young Hegelians to argue that the way to change the world was to change the material conditions of life that gave rise to content of the consciousness.
If what human consciousness creates is by definition “true” then there can be no “false consciousness”. The trouble is that there is no uniform human consciousness (as what all humans think). Which means that there will be all sorts of “truths”. So, as twc has pointed out, if you take this road you end up in the dead-end of post-modernism.
One way to avoid this to decide by a majority vote of all humans what “the truth” is. The problem here is that those who voted against what is carried are then the carriers of a “false consciousness”. But unless you say they should be forced to accept “the truth” (I am not sure anyone has) then the vote changes nothing. So what’s the point, as you’ve asked many times, Robbo? Democratic social post-modernism is also a dead-end.
You are right, Robbo, to point out that only an individual human can have “consciousness” in the sense of being “conscious” and so that to talk of humanity having consciousness in that sense can be misleading. For instance when Eugene (not Joseph) Dietzgen writes:
“phenomena outside of us … exist independently of individual man, although they cannot exist for mankind independently of human consciousness”, what did he mean? He would indeed seem to be implying that there is such a thing as “human consciousness” apart from the consciousness of individual humans. Which, as you point out, doesn’t work either as a fact or as an analogy.There is, however, another sense of “consciousness” — as the content of what people think as, e.g., in “class consciousness” as a common view held by a group of people. But this sense won’t work either for Eugene Dietzgen as there is not a human consciousness in the sense of a view held by all humans.
Consciousness in this sense is of course a social phenomenon if only because it is expressed in language which itself is social. But what conditions what views a group of people hold? Marx’s famous answer setting out “the materialist conception” of history (and society) seems clear enough:
“The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,their social being that determines their consciousnesses.”
Also, on Eugene Dietzgen’s apparent theory, a “false consciousness” is impossible.
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.”
Another example of a movement for some measure of political democracy being crushed by a powerful state. Did the pro-democracy activists really think they could win against the Chinese central government if they took them head on? Who decided to make the mistake of storming and trashing the legislative assembly building and other provocations? A less confrontational approach may have been able to save something but it looks as if they have now lost everything.
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.
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.
That old press cutting (found no doubt by using digital technology) shows precisely why the possibility taken up by the Louvre will never be fully used under capitalism and won’t be able to be till we get socialism when, of course, there will no longer be ownership rights over books and other works of art.
Incidentally, nobody here (and as far as I know noboy anywhere) has suggested that physical books should disappear. I don’t think that’s going to happen even under capitalism. They talk of paperless offices but that will be the case in socialism too, even if for a different reason — most of the paperwork today has to do with money in one way or another and that won’t exist.
Looks as if the military has won and that there’s no point in trying to resist further at the moment. As long as the armed forces remained loyal to their leaders this was inevitable. It was worth a try to test the balance of forces but now seems the time for sullen acceptance that the military junta have the upper hand for the time being.
“I must say that I don’t think you ever loved books or saw them as anything other than text.
“Just couldn’t resist a put down, could you?”
“I find myself rushed all the time, constantly apologising for harsh words sent in a hurry.”Apology accepted, comrade.
You have completely missed my point. Which was not that digital books are better than paper ones but that digital devices could allow millions of people access to exact copies in all details of editions of books that they can’t in that form in any other way. The same applies to paintings.
I’d have thought you’d would have welcomed a technological advance that enabled more widespread access to things you consider aesthetic in a form that reproduced not just the text but the way it was presented.
I prefer to read books in paper form but my preferences are as irrelevant and as boring as yours.
In socialism you will be able to have a smartphone or other device with a screen the size of a book on which you can read exact copies of the Book of Kells and Morris’s edition of Thomas More’s Utopia as you sit in a cafe in Paris. Everybody will be, not just scholars in some specialist library and having to wear white gloves.
You should listen to the talk and discussion when it eventually appears on the site here. Pre-digital printing did involve a lot of skills which have now disappeared but it seems that, for mass printing, digital printing is better in that it avoids the use of solvents and heavy manual work. Of course, as you say, it was developed to make more profits and involved smashing the print unions first.
I think we can be sure that in socialism there will be artisanal printing. In fact even under capitalism these has been an expansion of this, to cater for a niche market made up, dare I say it, of aesthetes.
If you were able to take part in these discussions (as I think you can since, despite your digitalophobia, you seem to have a smartphone) you might alter you view that other members have been dumbed down or are in favour of this.
I don’t object to the word “aesthete” as such. Apparently there is even a Marxist theory of aesthetics (not sure what it is, though). But anyone who describes themself as one runs the risk of being considered an intellectual snob. There may also be some confusion with the word “effete”.
Incidentally yesterday evening’s talk on Discord about changes in the printing industry did lead to a discussion on printing books in socialism. There will no need for all books to be printed digitally (though it will make sense to print up textbooks and manuals in this way) and plenty of scope for artisanal printing of books à la William Morris. The question of the dangers involved in pre-digital printing of having to use solvents to clean the ink off the plates did come up. Nobody suggested abolishing printing books in favour of ebooks.
