LBird
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robbo203 wrote: “Therefore it is not possible to argue, and Marx himself certainly did not argue, that that consciousness and being are both necessary in any account of ‘origin’ of either.”
Here’s Marx’s words, again, in this thread, robbo. Do try and remember the points being made, or we’ll just go round in circles – or is that your method?
Marx wrote: “Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, ||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?” [my bold]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Social production – the scientific key to our mystery. Not ‘mind’ nor ‘matter’, but US. And we can change both.
Not unless you set about engaging in organised political and economic action and for all your claimed insights, you have offered no strategy or offered any participation or involvement in that process of change, have you?
You have no aspiration for any audience other than a handful on this forum who have repeatedly rejected your philosophical overtures towards them.
I await a sign of your own “activity”, LBird”
It’s still a surprise that you don’t read what I write, alan.
‘Us’. ‘We’.
Not the individualist (your ideology) ‘your own’.
I’m all for, and have often done, “set about engaging in organised political and economic action“. I rejected the SWP because it was not Democratic Communist nor Marxist, but was Engelsist and Leninist.
Imagine my surprise to discover that the SPGB follows as similar ideology to the SWP, materialism, to the same ends: ‘socialism’ meaning an elite of active ‘specialists’ and a mass of passive ‘generalists’.
But, the difference is, while the SWP makes no bones about its supposed specially conscious Central Committee, the SPGB claims to be democratic, which implies that it allows for ideological change within its ranks. Of course, you and the other materialists have ‘repeatedly rejected’ both my and Marx’s ‘philosophical overtures’. But, will youse all continue to do so?
Of course, being an ideological materialist, you define ‘activity’ as merely ‘doing stuff without thought’, or ‘practice’ without ‘theory’, so you can skip the necessary building of ideas and theory to inform our activity. So, you can skip the democratic stage, and press on with your supposed ‘own “activity” ‘ – but I can’t.
So, alan, you can carry on with blind practice, or come over to Marx, and start discussing the building of democratic socialism, which requires mass participation in our social theory and practice.
And active democracy in all social production – including consciousness, theory, concepts, logic, politics, philosophy, physics, maths, science, arts…
Just when were you thinking of becoming ‘active’, alan? Or are you sticking with passivist materialism? And leave it all, like robbo, to the elite experts?
robbo203 wrote: “It’s in effect saying human consciousness came into being as a result of human consciousness“.
Well, Marx argued that an ‘individual consciousness’ came into being as a result of ‘social consciousness’. ‘Social consciousness’ is a product of human ‘conscious activity’.
If we’re to talk about humans, we have to talk about both consciousness and being, and to separate them, and ask where either came from, in the absence of the other, is meaningless and impossible to resolve. I gave Marx’s statement on this earlier in the thread, so have a look at that.
To clarify, to ask ‘where did human consciousness come from?’ is to simultaneously ask ‘where did human being come from?’.
One can’t argue that ‘consciousness came from being’ (the materialist view) or that ‘being came from consciousness’ (the idealist view). Marx solved the philosophical debate by arguing that both are necessary in any account of ‘origin’ of either. Thus humanity produces humanity, both human consciousness and human being.
So, neither divine conscious activity, nor human biological passivity, but human conscious biological activity. Social production – the scientific key to our mystery. Not ‘mind’ nor ‘matter’, but US. And we can change both.
ALB wrote: “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.”
ALB, can I take it now that you’ve also ditched Marx’s concept of ‘social consciousness’, in favour of robbo’s ‘biological consciousness’?
ALB wrote “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.”Yes, both he and Marx, not only ‘implied’, but openly argued for, ‘human consciousness’. It is a fact.
ALB wrote: “Also, on Eugene Dietzgen’s apparent theory, a “false consciousness” is impossible.”
Well, it is impossible. Marx never claimed it was possible. Engels invented the concept of ‘false consciousness’, not Marx.
Once again, we have a further example of a materialist claiming that if Engels said something, it can be applied to Marx’s views. To do this, one needs, like Lenin, to employ the concept of a unified being, a certain ‘Marx-Engels’.
We’re getting to the nub of the issue here. Is ‘consciousness’ biological or social? Is ‘consciousness’ in ‘the brain’, or in ‘a society’? Where does our ‘consciousness’ come from? From each individual brain, as a biological product, or from a specific society, as a socio-historical product.
I’ll refer to Marx on this issue, rather than robbo or ALB, or indeed, Engels or Lenin.
Robbo, to help you with the philosophy, all that you’ve done is replace the concept ‘material’ with the concept ’emergent’. Both are social products.
And, so as save time, as synonyms of ‘material’, we also have ‘real’, ‘actual’, ‘objective’, ‘physical’, etc.Whatever name you give to your ‘stuff’, I’ll ask you ‘who produced it, and how?’.
This is basic post-Kantian German Idealism, and Marx followed that tradition.
All Marx did to p-KGI was to change the ‘subject’ to ‘humanity’, from the p-KGI ‘divine’. You seem to identify with Fichte, who regarded the ‘subject’ as ‘individual’.
It’s open to anyone, of course, to choose their subject, but Marx chose ‘social’, rather than ‘god’ or ‘biology’.
Sigh!
robbo203 wrote: “I’ve just explained to you that I’ve reject mechanical materialism in favour of emergence theory.”
Is the ’emergent’ outside of social production?
If so, how would humans know the ’emergent’?
If it isn’t, the ’emergent’ is our social product. Who produces and how?robbo203 wrote: “Subjectivity or consciousness requires a brain. A brain is an organ located in biological individuals (normally between the ears but elsewhere in the case of some people I can think of!). Society however does not possess a brain- unless you are talking figuratuively. Ergo, society does not possess, and is incapable of experiencing, consciousness”
The saddest part of this statement is that you really don’t recognise its philosophical and ideological content.
So, it’s not surprising that politics is a complete mystery to you.
Well, you stick with ‘brain equals mind’, which is as profound as ‘power equals muscle’. I know that you’re never going to read any explanation that I can give to you, which is historical and social, so I won’t bother.
Say hello to the ‘wet matter’ and dinosaurs for me, robbo.
“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.
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!
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.
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.
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: “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.
