[LBird]

I'm still not convinced that Vin and DJP have got the hang of this sort of 'idealist-materialist' (or 'realist') thinking, yet. I've tried to think of a test which will bring to the foreground our differences. If they agree with what I'm about to say, then clearly I'm mistaken, and Vin and DJP are 'realists' ('idealist-materialists') and not 'physicalists' or 'materialists'. Here goes!God is real.I think a 'materialist' will disagree with that statement, but a 'realist' will agree with it.The materialist, using a 'perceptual' theory of existence, will say that 'god' can't be 'touched/seen' as so does not exist. So, god is not real.The realist, using a 'causal' theory of existence, will say that 'god' causes humans to take various actions, and so does exist. So, god is real.For a critical realist, humans create god, because humans are active, creative beings and have the power to bring new entities into existence. But once they create entities, often for the best of motives, these entities have powers which can dominate humans, often to the detriment of humans. This is the case with god and value, and is best captured in the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, or Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice.For 'idealist-materialists', as the name suggests, there is no longer a hard-and-fast divide between the so-called 'material' and 'ideal'. Marx was aware of the difficulty of maintaining this divide, in the 'real' world, in which we live.

Marx wrote:

…theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htmWhen the human-created theory of 'god' 'grips the masses', it has become a 'material force'. Thus 'god is real'.Marx was what we would now call a critical realist (or, in 19th century terms, an 'idealist-materialist'), not a simple, mechanical 'materialist', or a bourgeois 'physicalist'.Over to Vin and DJP.

[LBird]

I take it Vin now accepts that he's not a 'materialist'? Or a 'physicalist'?

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

I think this whole dichotomy between ideas and matter is a false dichotomy, anyway. Im not too sure if I would go quite as far as L Bird in talking of "idealist materialism" if by "idealist" is meant the primacy of ideas over material conditions. But I think what he is getting at, and which I support, is really the inseparability of ideas and material conditions.

Just to confirm that we agree on these points, robbo.You're right, 'idealism-materialism' doesn't mean the 'primacy of ideas over material conditions'. As you say, it's 'a false dichotomy'. We could just as easily say 'materialism-idealism', again with the same caveat, that this is not 'the primacy of material conditions over ideas'.I'm merely using the phrase 'idealism-materialism' to polemically counter the myth of Marx's 'materialism'. I do this because it fits better with Marx's proper views, of 'theory and practice', or 'men make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing', etc. That is, the 'human' is the creative element (theory), and the 'conditions' are limiting or enabling factors (practice). So, 'idealism-materialism', with no 'primacy', just necessary interaction. Or, as you say, 'the inseparability of ideas and material conditions'.[edit]

robbo203 wrote:

Ironically , the mechanical or crass materialists join hands with the pure idealists in this regard . Mechanical materialism is in fact a species of idealism in my book.

Yes, this has been said by all thinkers who've addressed this issue. And the Leninist Party provides the necessary 'idealism' which, for humans, is the inescapable counterpart to 'materialism'.They just pretend it isn't. But if workers don't do the thinking for themselves, someone has to do it. Step forward Lenin! Or the 'central committee'.

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

If it was a physical entity it would share the same quality as individual human beings and thus be empirically apprehensible via sense perception along with human beings.

Yes, for reductionists/physicalists/materialists being "empirically apprehensible via sense perception" is what constitutes 'existence'.This is what the Critical Realist Margaret Archer calls "the perceptual criterion of existence".She opposes to this "the causal criterion of existence", which allows humans access to imperceptible reality.Ref: M. Archer (1995) Realist social theory, p. 23Observation cannot be the criterion of existence, because this is empiricism, a copy theory of knowledge, naive realism, Humean 'constant conjunctions'.For Marx, 'value' is not directly observable, only its effects. But it is the cause of those effects, it really exists, it's not just 'in the grey matter of individuals', as some comrades have argued.Much of 'nature' (or 'the real') cannot be empirically observed. Unless we employ a 'causal criterion of existence', which gives us theoretical access to reality, then we can't understand much of the workings of nature.Further, many of these philosophical problems go back to Aristotle, whose work influenced Marx.According to Bhaskar, 'mechanisms' exist at the level of 'reality', which humans access through theory, not at the levels of the actual or the empirical.Ref: Roy Bhaskar (2008) A Realist Theory of Science, p. 13

[LBird]

Ed wrote:

You're nothing but consistent L Bird, I'll give you that.

Thanks, Ed! That's because I've thought Marx's ideas through, not because of any personal quality I have.

Ed wrote:

This comes back to the other thread where you say that ideas are the primary motivating factor in societal progression. As opposed to ideas being the consequence of material necessity. I seem to remember calling you out for being an idealist in that thread. You've admitted it in this thread.

Yes, humans are the 'primary motivating factor in societal progression'. Marx thought this, too. Neither Marx nor I think that the 'rocks' are the 'primary motivating factor'.But, neither of us are 'idealists', or 'materialists', we're 'idealist-materialists', as Marx argued in the Theses on Feuerbach. The third, unified stance, from both earlier trends, the unity of 'theory and practice'. Rocks neither 'think'  nor 'practice'.

Ed wrote:

In a nut shell idealism vs materialism. Idealism = ideas being the primacy of ideas over any other driving forces at work. In this sense it is antithetical to materialism.

Why do you oppose 'idealism' to 'materialism', Ed? Marx didn't. He unified them into something new. The thinker who opposed them was Engels, not Marx.The 'need' for 'light for longer days in factories' was 'present', but it didn't create any form of 'light', never mind 'the light bulb'. Humans did that. Humans are creative. Humans have ideas. The application of new ideas (which don't exist in the 'material conditions') to human-defined problems in nature, where the human practice changes nature, is not some version of 'materialism'. Marx condemned the 'mechanical materialists', like Feuerbach, precisely because they ignored the 'active side' of human creativity, ie. ideas.

Ed wrote:

Is it physical? No. But can ideas manifest into physical reactions. Yes. Ideas or as I prefer and think makes it clearer knowledge (knowledge=ideas) are in themselves material conditions. Perhaps this is L Bird and I agreeing…. Perhaps what I am saying is his idealist-materialism.

Yes, 'idealism-materialism' is Marxism. 'Materialism' is Engelsism.

Ed wrote:

However where he is severely mistaken and what makes him an idealist is his belief that ideas alone create conditions rather than the other way around.

But you've reverted of Engelsian Materialism here, Ed. 'Material conditions' don't create ideas. Humans create ideas. When those ideas are put into practice in the real world, humans find out the correctness or not of those ideas, through their active practice.This is the method of 'theory and practice'.To argue otherwise, as the human race realised during the 20th century, is to argue that 'rocks talk', and tell us what to do. If you've heard a 'material condition' talk, Ed, you've had experiences I haven't!In fact, workers don't hear rocks, and thus need someone 'special' to translate their imperceptible whispers. That is the role of 'The Leninist Party'.

Ed wrote:

Necessity is the mother of invention comrades……Not individualist geniuses.

So there must be a 'father', too? If 'need' is the 'mother', then 'active humans' (both in thinking and practice) are the 'father', in this schema.And this is nothing to do with 'individual geniuses', which is yet another 'materialist' red herring. Humans are social, science is social, ideas are social, practice is social.But the rocks aren't…

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

If you can't touch , see smell taste or hear capitalism then it seems by your logic capitalism doesnt exist and we are back to Mrs Thatchers aphorism.

Yeah, anytime anyone talked of 'society' and pointed to a group of people, Thatcher just said, 'that is just a group of individuals!'.We say 'football team', she says 'eleven individuals'; we say 'workforce', she says '1,000 individuals'.The problem with this way of looking at things, is that the structural relationships are lost.A 'football team' isn't just any old 'eleven individuals'; it's a single goalkeeper, four defenders, four midfielders and two attackers. They have different roles, powers and needs within the structure: fast sprinting is not needed of the keeper, as it is of the wingers; the goalkeeper can touch the ball with their hands, but the other ten can't; etc.The physical presence of components (eleven individuals) does not necessarily make a 'team'. Anyone who knows about football understands this. The selecting, blending and training of the individuals shapes 'the team'.Again, to take my earlier 'fist' example. If I make a fist, the reductionist can pooh-pooh this and say, 'it's just five fingers', and ask me to touch the 'fist'. Of course, anytime I touch the 'fist' I am also touching a finger, and so the reductionist can say, 'Ah-hah, that's just a finger you're touching!'. Of course, they are correct.But what they are missing is that the relationships between the fingers is crucial. Holding the fingers spread out is not a 'fist'; but to the reductionist there is no difference because, like Thatcher, they don't recognise 'structures'.Five fingers are five entities; but a fist is six entities (five fingers and a fist). But there is nothing more 'physical' present than there is with five entities. Using the notion of the 'physical', it seems strange that five entities can become six, without any added 'physicality'. And conversely, six can become five, without any loss of 'physicality'. So 'physicality' alone is not enough to understand structures: something else is important.That 'something else' is relationships. And Marx was keen on relationships, and argued that 'value' was a relationship.

[LBird]

Vin Maratty wrote:

I am beginning to think it is the definition of 'material' that we differ on.

Well, I'm not a 'materialist', and neither is Marx.I think that by 'materialism', you mean 'physicalism'. But many entities are not 'physical', but are nevertheless 'real'. Like 'value', for example. 'Real' doesn't mean 'tangible'. Many real things are intangible.I think Marx was a Critical Realist, as we would call it now, but in the terms you'll understand, he's an 'idealist-materialist'. So, for Marx, he's dealing with the 'ideal-material', not simply the 'material'.The unity of 'theory and practice' requires the unity of the 'ideal-material'. So, 'value' is 'ideal-material': it's 'ideal' as a social relationship, but 'material' as a commodity (tin of beans, for example).Perhaps my examples are not working, but I'm trying. Marx makes this 'duality' clear from the start of Capital, where he talks about the two factors of the commodity.If you don't agree with my fumbling explanation, how do you account for these two factors, from a 'physicalist/materialist' perspective? Especially as Marx makes it plain that 'value' does not contain 'matter'.

[LBird]

Vin Maratty wrote:

I have noticed that a lot of posts are clogged up with apparent insults so for this example It is not a sufficient argument to refer to us laymen as 'reductionist' or 'bourgeois phylosophers' as we are laymen and need our arguments addressed.

I'm not insulting you and DJP, Vin. I'm trying to expose your ideology, which you have but won't address or reveal.We're all 'laymen', here.As for 'addressing your arguements', I have, constantly, but you ignore the weaknesses in yours, which I point out, and refuse to consider mine, which I've tried to explain, using simple metaphors, which you don't seemingly understand.And my 'fist' is not 'in my brain', even if yours is!You still haven't explained how 'value' is in the brain. Your naive materialism means you can't understand Marx. He says 'value' is not 'material', but a relationship. I don't know how to simplify my arguments any further, because you ignore the 'meaning' and jump on the 'simplification'!

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

Well I get what you are saying, L Bird, and to me it makes solid sense even if it doesnt to others.

Thanks for the much needed words of support, robbo. You've lifted my spirits, a little.But I can't say that I'm not downhearted at my failure to explain to DJP and Vin (and others, it seems).Using the theories that they've adopted, one can't make sense of Capital or 'value', or Marx's ideas in the wider sense of history and society.I'm baffled as to why Communists would look to ideas from non-Communist philosophers, theoreticians and scientists to help them to try and understand this world of ours, both physical and social.Well, you know what they say about 'ruling class ideas', eh? Even for us.

[LBird]

Vin Maratty wrote:

You will never convince any worker that you can create 'entities' independent of the physical world by clenching and unclenching your fist.

But I didn't say that a 'fist' was independent of 'the physical world', Vin. I said that 'the fingers are physical'. I was using it to show how a 'structure' can be created by humans, and then destroyed.And then I tried to show how this applies to 'value', which is 'independent of the physical world' (if physical means material), because Marx tells us that, quite clearly. He says that there is no 'matter' in value. It's a relationship between things.I don't know to how explain any better; I've tried, but sadly failed.'Physicalism and reductionism' it is then. But no Marx, no value, no Capital, no Communism, no creative workers.Just the rocks.

[LBird]

But this ‘materialist’ assumption of yours is wrong, DJP: ‘theory’ is not ‘physical’. ‘Critical Realism’ is not ‘a physicalist theory’.I’m trying desperately to explain this to you, DJP. This is not your fault for not understanding, but my fault (and the fault of those other communists who claim to understand Marx’s ideas on ‘value’) for not explaining properly.This lack of explanation has, in my opinion, been the root cause of the failure of Communists to persuade other workers that we have a better method for understanding the world, than the one that workers are taught by bourgeois society: that is, individuals and their worth as money, explains the origins of society and its present workings. Telling workers to ‘read Capital’ has never worked, isn’t working now, and never will work. It’s the task of Communists (ie. class conscious workers) to explain, through propaganda and education, how the world works. Simple ‘experience’ of that world will not simply produce ‘class’ consciousness. Workers have to work at it, both to learn and to teach, which is a two-way street: the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the class itself. Rocks won’t emancipate us, nor ‘material’ conditions. Humans are the active factor, not ‘matter’ (sic).I’m trying to explain why the ideology of ‘physicalism’ and ‘reductionism’, which you presently use to try to understand the world, is of no use for us Communists. Using bourgeois science theories to understand reality is like using neo-classical economics to understand the market. The underpinning ideology of the links you’ve provided seems to be Anglo-American analytical thinking, logical positivism, and thinkers like Carnap, Hempel (the pre-war Vienna school), and further back, David Hume. On the contrary, Marx’s thinking is influenced by Hegel, Kant and Aristotle.Now, an attempt at an explanation of the differences.Physicalism holds that everything can be reduced to its ‘physical components’. But for Critical Realists, ‘structures’ (made of components) have emergent properties that don’t exist at the ‘physical’ or component level. Perhaps an example.I have five fingers on my hand. These are ‘physical’. There are five physical entities. But, if I clench my hand, I form a fist. To the physicalist/reductionist, this remains five entities. But to a Critical Realist, I’ve formed a sixth entity. A human, by an act of thinking and will, has created a new entity, that didn’t exist before. If I unclench my hand, a real structure has disappeared! Back to only five entities! So, clench, release, clench, release, sees, in the real world, creation, destruction, creation, destruction.This model applies also to entities that we can’t see, like ‘value’. As Einstein says, ‘it’s the theory which determines what we can observe’. So, ‘physicalism’ can’t explain value, other than by pointing to ‘physical things’, like tins of beans. Any worker can understand this: they can see a tin of beans, and the price label upon it! It’s obvious, innit? But that worker would be wrong, because ‘value’ can’t be ‘seen’, it can’t be ‘read off a label’.

Marx, Capital, wrote:

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1Value can only be understood as a social relationship, which can’t be seen or touched, because as Marx says, ‘there is no matter in value’. Once we understand that we create value, like clenching a hand creates a fist, so we can understand the mechanism, and stop creating value or clenching our fists.If this doesn’t help at all, DJP, I apologise, and I’ll have to leave it henceforth to another comrade who has better communicative and teaching gifts than I possess. Perhaps that fact that it’s me explaining, is part of the problem, given the many difficult threads that have passed. Perhaps twc can help.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird Why on earth do you think theory is idealist?

I'm afraid it's the 'materialists' who think 'theory is idealist', DJP!For example:

DJP wrote:

Do you think the mental floats about in a different realm to the physical world?Unless you believe in some kind of spirit world or think that everything is in the mind you will be a physicalist or materialist (which is pretty much the same thing)http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism

I'm not a 'physicalist or materialist'. Are you? If so, 'why do think theory is idealist?'You haven't got the hang of Marx's critical realism, yet, have you? His 'idealism-materialism'.

[LBird]

mcolome1 wrote:

In some way Engels had the same stand of Lenin who did not move away from the 18th Century Philosophy of their time.

Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 14 wrote:

…ideas and sensations are copies or images of these objects…

Popper condemned this as the 'bucket theory of mind'. That 'nature' simply 'pours itself' into the passive receptacle known as humanity.Compare Lenin's unhistorical, naive realism with Marx's rich account of 'social senses', of the historical development of our human, social senses:

Marx, EPM, wrote:

On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense.> For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htmClearly, 'sensations' are not simple 'copies' of reality, for Marx. Different societies experience the same things differently.

[LBird]

twc wrote:

My limited aim, for the moment, is to establish that the mature Marx of Capital explicitly adopted the materialist stance, and explicitly repudiated the idealist stance. In other words he remained a materialist despite — and in full unswerving cognizance of — his devastating Hegel-inspired critique of “all hitherto existing materialism”.Marx [and Engels] operated in life-long opposition to Hegel’s idealist conception of history. As materialists they always opposed the primacy of ideas over social being throughout their entire intellectual and practical lives.

[my bold]Marx was not a 'materialist'; he was an 'idealist-materialist'. Marx argued for theory and practice.

Marx, Capital, Chapter 7, wrote:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htmThe stance that Marx was a 'materialist' stems from Engels, who was an amateur and did not understand philosophy.This is clear from the Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx praises (parts of) idealism and condemns (parts of) materialism. He produced a theory that combined the insights of idealism with the insights of materialism, which was a philosphy of theory and practice.

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach wrote:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

[my bold]The 'active side' of humanity is thinking, human ideas and creativity.The stance that we are 'materialists' is a regression to Feuerbach, and is an idea that was created by Engels, under the enormous pressure of 19th century positivist science, and its apparent successes.Einstein and relativity in physics shows us that it was only an 'apparent success'.Humans have known this for 100 years now, and yet some Communists are still trying to pursuade the human race that we should stick our heads in the sand, and return to 'materialism'.Marx knew better, and so should we.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

Yes but to say minds supervene on or emerge from brains doesn't answer the question of how that can be so. What is it about a particular configuration of physical stuff that enables it to be a mind?

This is the same as asking, "Yes but to say water supervenes on or emerges from hydrogen/oxygen doesn't answer the question of how that can be so. What is it about a particular configuration of physical stuff that enables it to be water?".In the ideology of Critical Realism, things that don't exist at the component level emerge at the structural level.So, water emerges from elements that are dry, and mind emerges from brains that are material. It's what nature does, according to the theory.

DJP wrote:

All aproaches in philosophy of mind have problems and like I said I am holding off making a judgement for the time being. But my preference is to try to go for an explanation that does not involve the kind of property dualism that emergence seems to entail. All that you are doing is pushing the problem one step back rather than explaining it.

Well, you're 'not holding off making a judgement'. You're making tentative judgement based on the philosophy and ideology that you're using to understand these issues. We all have an ideology; it is inescapable for humans. The good news is, being conscious, we can reason and choose our ideology! But we can't be without one.If you want to continue to employ 'reductionism', that's fair enough, but at least accept (and preferably be open about) the fact that you are using a theory of reductionism. There is no 'objective point of observation' in the universe, according to physics. We all have a standpoint, in physics and in society.As to 'property dualism', I know a man who starts a book with a section entitled 'The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-value and Value'. Perhaps you know the book, comrade?

DJP wrote:

Emergence seems to work very well when describing the structure of concepts and properties created by minds but not so well as an explanation of how minds can be in the first place…

Being and consciousness, now eh? You are delving deep today, DJP! But I think we'll leave that alone for now, eh? We've got enough to digest about what's been said on this thread already!

[Author]

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