[twc]

In case my point is not obvious…If this 2008 Keck Observatory near-infrared adaptive optics photograph doesn‘t refute TV presenter Delano’s claim that “no experimental evidence has ever been obtained that unequivocally proves Copernicanism to be true” then nothing will.On the other hand TV presenter Delano seems ready to swallow the line that near-ecliptic anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background implies that we humans are thereby special, presumably (without having seen the TV program) to God.

[twc]

Alan, your barely repressed anger reveals that it is you—not me—who may need to get a grip.You express anger at alternative consistently-socialist approaches that deviate from your own prescriptions and preconceptions. If they are consistently-socialist approaches, even if not yours, what consistently-socialist right have you to curtail them?Maybe, learn to accommodate them, and live and let live, without seething with hostile anger.  Vive la difference.You want socialism in your special emotional way—socialism of your “truly human” kind—and yet you feel justified in reverting to overt emotional blackmail to persuade others into it. Just re-read your mock-pathos “me culpa”.What sort of consistently-socialist approach is one that confers upon you alone—the emotional socialist—the special privilege to twist emotion to your immediate needs?  What consistently-socialist response do you have to opponents who resort to the same emotional ploy as yours but turn it against you?  It takes two to tango, with emotion.Unfortunately, the irresistible temptation to emotional duplicity is precisely what becomes so easily justified on emotional grounds. Take the expert emotional evangelicals. Appeal to emotion has always been the ploy of dishonest rogues, which a consistent socialist like you is the exact opposite of.Emotional suasion works for a while, but backfires catastrophically [e.g., the Bakkers and Swaggarts of the world].As you well know, violence is just around the street corner from “anger, emotion, etc.”  If the Party has learnt, and consistently taken to heart, one lesson of practical street politics, it is that violence is the enemy of cooperative Socialism in a world where the ruling class monopolizes the generation of “emotion, anger, etc.” and monopolizes the means of violence.One intellectual thing the Party has learnt, and held consistently, is that uncontrolled “anger, emotion, etc.” are enemies of rational thought and thought-out action—the very qualities on which the Party’s cooperative Socialist case and world crucially depends.On the other hand, it is the bourgeoisie who need to manipulate “anger, emotion, etc.” in support of its class rule precisely in order to annul rational thought and thought-out action.The Socialist Party will soon enough find more than enough “anger, emotion, etc.” in its support, involuntarily out of the nature of capitalism.  It has no need to foment it in order to create socialists.Rational conviction in socialism to cure the ills of capitalism will motivate socialist action and remain long after artificially drummed up “anger, emotion, etc.” has gone to bed, or to jail.But, above all, your “anger, emotion, etc.” trump card is that you want socialism the ethical way—now what scoundrel could dare argue against that?Well, you just argued against it several posts ago—that in order to achieve your conceived variety of socialism, by your conceived variety of propaganda, you stand ethically quite prepared to stoop to unethical practice, when you feel it’s justified by your variety of aroused “anger, emotion, etc,”—the very qualities of your variety of socialism.But to argue against ethics myself.  Ethics are the soporific of capitalism. They are its essential sham veneer. That’s the only ethical case we have under capitalism.For the rest, capitalism’s ethics are appropriate to and perfectly adequate to capitalism, and there’s little we can do about it that our capitalist politicians can’t, and they have the virtue of being in a position to legislate those necessary legal aspects that changing capitalism demands.For our part, ethics is a distraction.  More important than ethics is moral integrity.Integrity is the fount of the Socialist Party’s survival in the face of the enormous odds stacked against it.  The integrity of our rational case for socialism is our only rock-solid foundation.  Integrity, if one were needed, is our moral trump card.  Not insipid ethics.I now find it hard to see what specifically socialist essence remains in your Socialism of “anger, emotion, ethics, etc.” that distances it from any other political movement, since they all rely on it, and play this card like professional experts.We can only stand in awe of the nationalist regimes that played the “anger, emotion, ethics, etc,” card with overwhelmingly brutal genius.  Playing games with “anger, emotion, ethics, etc.” is not, and never has been, us.  Not for Socialism!  It doesn’t work!For the sake of rational discussion, accommodate the fact that all of us, who adhere to the Party Declaration of Principles and seek to realize its Object, contribute to socialism with integrity in our own limited but complementary ways.

[twc]

No, that was not the peeved miserable point Alan was making.He knows precisely what I mean, even if you don’t.

[twc]

Your forced confession of false engagement to maliciously “throw a spanner in the works” is childishly contemptible.  Henceforth no-one can trust the intent and integrity of your posts.When your “bad mood” mellows, calmly read over your last paragraph

wrote:

Socialism … is about passion, anger, righteous outrage …or it should be

and consider its implications.That’s not the socialist case as codified in the Declaration of Principles, which you openly agitate to change, hopefully not into “passion, anger, righteous outrage” and “might prevails”—“as it should be”.I have not sought to thrust my views on the Party, but I will always defend its avowed case against anyone, including cantankerous irrational you.Your gleeful fomenting of anti-socialist blood sport—you know exactly what I mean—is dangerous and foolish on a site that attracts it without your incitement, and has limited resources to defend itself against specialized attack. Your questionable actions sink you in my estimation.

[twc]

The relevance is that Claus Peter Ortlieb was formerly quoted to disprove the objectivity of “sensuous” practice in the name of Marx.  If what you are doing for Socialism is not objective, what’s its relevance?

[twc]

For Christ’s sake Alan, can’t you see that that’s the very view I’ve exploded.Except that your reference to Barnett is an even worse target than Ortlieb, and beneath contempt for scholarly consideration. Barnett was a popularizing dud like his contemporary Koestler.I should now follow your link…

[twc]

This TV special is not about Copernicanism at all.  It is about something quite distinct from Copernicus’s solar system, of which there is no scientific doubt.Instead this sensationally promoted TV special focuses on two working hypotheses of cosmology, one of which happens to be named after Copernicus:Copernican Principle—we are not in a special place in the universe,Cosmological Principle—the universe is isotropic, or the view from anywhere looks roughly the same.The apparent breakdown of (2) from the “evidence of our senses” [cosmic microwave background observations from the COBE and WMAP satellites] supposedly implies the breakdown of (1).So what if the Universe is anisotropic on the cosmic scale.  That’s “evidence of our senses” we are compelled to comprehend by Copernicus’s analysis–synthesis practice.The implication that (1) is false, and the Earth is a special place, has no Copernican analysis—synthesis practice to comprehend it.Instead it is immediately self-evident to ever-doubting religious hankerers after a cosmic sign of God’s hand to bolster lagging faith.  God apparently offers salvation through the anisotropy of the Universe!Notice the hysterical “experts” in the promo confidently informing us we are special.  This is intelligent-design “science”!The contrary “evidence of our senses” is overwhelming:The Murchison meteorite—a carbonaceous chondrite left over from the 4·5 billion-year old planetesimal dust that accreted to form Copernicus’s solar system—contains 12% water and at least 14,000 molecular compounds including 70 amino acids and 11 alcohols (just for measure).Our Milky Way contains probably 400 billion exoplanets, with almost every star having at least one planet.Copernican solar systems are everywhere throughout the Universe.  Here is the modern day equivalent of Galileo’s view of Jupiter’s attendants, except that we are looking at planets in Copernican orbit around the star HR 8799 129 light years away.We may be special, but we aren’t super-universe special.

[twc]

“The Evidence of Our Senses”An essay in historical materialism¹ 

C. P. Ortlieb (False Objectivity) wrote:

the evidence of our senses speaks in favor of the geocentric view.

For Copernicus, “the evidence of our senses” was both the start point and the end point of science.  And the “evidence of our senses” that vitally mattered to him was naked-eye observation of planetary astronomy.Copernicus’s scientific practice became the exemplar for future scientific researchHe analysed planetary astronomy into a general principle that reduced its complexity, but nonetheless managed to preserve its essential aspects.In modern terminology, he reverse-engineered it to arrive, by abstraction, at the mechanism that drove it—its essence—the general principle of heliocentrism that the planets revolve around the Sun [helios] and not around the Earth.He undertook to reproduce, by logical synthesis, the “evidence of our senses” as the necessary form of appearance of its heliocentric essence.²Copernicus saw his scientific role as comprehending the determinism that necessarily binds essence and appearance in order to comprehend the “evidence of our senses”.At the heart of Copernicus’s deterministic science lies a deep contradiction that energizes it:  its heliocentric essence contradicts the appearance it aims to comprehend.Consider the ContradictionThis contradiction between “sensuous” appearance and conceptual essence continues to disturb those of a philosophical mindset.  It became a cell-form for ensuing western skepticism, taking an extreme turn in Kant’s critical philosophy, where only essence, and its synthesis can be known.³ Latter-day Kantians of the Left remain affronted by this essential contradiction that drives one of them, Claus Peter Ortlieb, to consider Copernicus’s sheet-anchor—the “evidence of our senses”—as false objectivity.Renaissance thinker Copernicus would have been appalled.  If the familiar appearance of the planets isn’t objective then neither is its heliocentric essence nor the determinism of appearance by essence.  Astronomical science becomes utterly impossible.Copernicus, who anticipated most attacks, could scarcely prepare himself for this one.  In this essay I defend Copernicus’s analytic–synthetic scientific practice against the Left Kantian charge of its false objectivity, in Marxian terms:The heliocentrism of Aristarchus, Copernicus and Kepler was scientifically possible only because heliocentric essence is disclosed by astronomical appearance.  It could not have elicited their conviction otherwise.Consider the AppearanceFor nine months the brightest star in the sky, the evening star, trails the setting Sun along the zodiac.  During its course, it moves away from the setting Sun, turns about, moves back, and vanishes in the Sun’s glare for a further nine months.Meanwhile, out of the glare of the rising Sun, a morning star appears.  For the next nine months it leads the rising Sun along the zodiac, moves away, turns about, moves back, and vanishes in the Sun’s glare for nine months.Every 19 months this cycle repeats itself, over-and-over again, as certain as the Sun’s day or the Moon’s month, and just as obvious to watchers of the sky.⁴ This eternal round appeared to our neolithic ancestors,  just as it appears to those of us who are “familiar with the night”,⁵   and just as it will appear to our socialist descendants.Consider the Essence“Oh, East is East, and West is West”, wrote Kipling, but that didn’t prevent the wise men of the East—the astronomers of Babylon—from identifying the bright star of the East with the bright star of the West, as two aspects of a single planet Venus ♀ [their goddess Ishtar].In so doing, they bequeathed to the world a potent conception of ‘Venus’ as a unity-of-opposite motions about the Sun—a conception that was destined to became the cell-form of heliocentrism.⁶ It was only a matter of time and circumstance before Greek astronomers conceived Venus’s familiar East ⇄ West movement about the Sun as the appearance of a circular orbit, seen from side-on.Such an insight could arise, and carry conviction, only after industry and transportation had embraced the wheel, and “sensuous” experience of harmonic rotation had become socially commonplace, i.e. where:⁷potters made plates and bowls on turntables;spinners wound textile threads on spindles;artisans turned timber and stone on lathes;toolmakers cut gear trains.Aristarchus, whose 3rd century BCE writings vanished in the anti-scientific Christian era, conceived Venus’s harmonic oscillation about the Sun as what we’d expect of an orbiting planet glimpsed edge-on in the common plane of a solar system.So too did Copernicus in Renaissance times, with more powerful naked-eye observations and scientific resources at his disposal:  namely, the astronomy, physics and geometry that flourished in late pre-Christian antiquity, as rescued from oblivion and elaborated by Arab scientists.What else could Venus’s “sensuous” maypole-dance around the Sun signify?  Only heliocentrism makes sense.⁸ Consider the LogicVenus always appears within 45° of the Sun, and so is closer to it than we are.  Her year must be shorter than ours, because the closer the planet, the faster it travels [Aristotle De caelo, II.10]. But Venus has a long year of 19 months, as the Magi from the East knew.  That’s a physical impossibility!Explaining Venus’s impossibly long year is Copernicus’s Hic Rhodus⁹ Copernicus faces the reality that science is born out of the resolution of contradiction.  The appearance it seeks to explain, and the essence it explains that appearance by, necessarily interpenetrate but are not identical.Copernicus only establishes his science in actuality, once he can logically deduce ‘impossible’ appearance as necessarily flowing from his science’s heliocentric essence.  Here’s how he did it:Venus’s apparent 19 month synodic year is the time Venus takes to orbit the Sun—its actual year—plus the additional time it takes to catch up to the moving Earth.¹⁰ Copernicus derives the actual year by deflating the synodic year proportionate to planetary contributions:      365·25/(synodic year + 365·25) , (the derivation of this famous Copernican conversion factor should be obvious to mathematician Claus Peter Ortlieb).Venus actually has a short year.  It orbits the Sun in only 224 days.Consider the ConvictionReverse engineering a quantitative heliocentric year from Venus’s impossible “sensuous” year seems to have clinched qualitative heliocentrism for Copernicus, just as it did for his successor Kepler:¹¹ 

Kepler (Myst. Cosmo. Ch. 20) wrote:

every [astronomer] wants planets to proceed with a slower motion the further their distance from the centre.  For nothing is more reasonable, witness Aristotle, [De caelo] than that “the motions of the planets should be in proportion to their distances”, … In Copernicus’s cosmos such a ratio is quite apparent at first sight.

Copernicus’s deterministic explanation of the ‘impossible’ is the stuff of scientific conviction—of heliocentric-consciousness.  With this act, naked-eye astronomy falls into place, and the “evidence of our senses” becomes comprehensible.For the first time, a working scientist is openly conscious that the “evidence of our senses” is necessarily at odds with its analytical essence but is in harmony with its synthesized appearance.This disparity is what deceives the Left Kantians, but Copernicus has demonstrated in practice what it naturally is—simply the way we humans comprehend all things.At this triumphant moment, modern natural science is born, and Ishtar, she of dual aspect, is its progenitor.Consider the ScienceBlood-red Mars ♂ flares in the midnight sky 70 times brighter [in opposition to the Sun] than its feeble glimmer [in conjunction with the Sun], when Mars is lost amid the background stars.  This is the “evidence of our senses”.Watch heliocentric-conscious Copernicus now in full flight:

Copernicus (De Rev. Ch. 1) wrote:

Mars is brightest when it rises at sunset because it is on our side of the Sun, and so is close to us;  and it is faintest when it sets at sunset because it is on the other side of the Sun to us, and so is far away from us.

Mars’s extreme brilliance makes heliocentric sense, but is a geocentric impossibility.  That’s the “evidence of our senses”.Henceforth Mars supplants Venus as the generative cell-form of heliocentrism.  Within the appearance of Mars’s extreme brilliance, there lurks a cyclic anomaly that reflects Mars’s non-circular orbit.  This “sensuous” anomaly prompts Kepler into conceiving elliptical planetary orbits.Kepler’s quantitative reverse engineering of planetary motion is a staggering achievement on so many counts.  After Kepler, the cosmos becomes quantitatively heliocentric.  He shows us how to synthesize the precise appearance of the planets deterministically from their heliocentric essence.Heliocentrism, by the “evidence of our senses”, simply annihilates geocentrism.  And warlike Mars is executioner.Consider the FutureHenceforth the Earth becomes the potent cell-form for explaining the earthly charges brought against the heliocentric heavens, which astronomer Copernicus confidently abstracted from, content that one day they might be mopped up by a future heliocentric-conscious champion.  That champion was Newton, who proudly acknowledged that he stood on the shoulders of giants.If Left Kantians claim “the evidence of our senses” is false objectivity, I challenge them to make good their claim by showing us how they would have reasoned differently from the Babylonian astronomers, Copernicus and Kepler who somehow managed to find a decent working substitute for genuine objectivity, when they delivered us the world as we all now know it.How would they have unravelled the “evidence of our senses”, in their own Left Kantian way, and bequeathed to us a more philosophically perfect solar system than the Copernican?¹²  Notes⁽¹⁾ Written in response to “Unconscious objectivity—aspects of a critique of the mathematical natural sciences (excerpts)”,  Claus Peter Ortlieb. https://libcom.org/library/unconscious-objectivity-aspects-critique-mathematical-natural-sciences-excerpts-claus-pe⁽²⁾ Analysis of appearance into essence is variously described as “Phenomenology” by Hegel, “descent from the concrete to the abstract” by Marx, and “revolutionary science” by Thomas Kuhn.  Synthesis of appearance from essence is specifically called “Logic” by Hegel, “ascent from the abstract to the concrete” by Marx, and “normal science” by Thomas Kuhn.⁽³⁾ Marx [Thesis VIII] and Engels [Feuerbach] reply that such quibbles are solved by human practice, and the comprehension of that practice.  This essay aims to comprehend Copernicus’s practice for the benefit of his Left Kantian critics.⁽⁴⁾ The Aboriginal Yolngu imagine that the morning star is tethered to the Sun by a rope.  Amazingly, for pre-literate folks, they foretell its 19 monthly rebirth, and celebrate its advent in myth and ritual.⁽⁵⁾ Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night”.  Given our light-polluted cities, we now need to have “outwalked the furthest city light”.⁽⁶⁾ The Babylonian astronomers noticed that the evening star on entering the setting Sun conveys its Eastward motion to the morning star that emerges from the rising Sun;  and symmetrically for the Westward motion.  The “evidence of our senses” forced them to conceive the phenomenon—as Hegel proved we humans conceptualize all that we comprehend—as an instance of a more general category:  in this case, the conservation of movement that observational astronomers are intimately familiar with.  That is how the Babylonian astronomers discovered the planet Venus.  Incidentally, it is impossible not to see the star followed by the Magi [Matthew 2] as a vulgar nod to the pre-classical Eastern ‘wisdom’ that astonished the early Greeks.⁽⁷⁾ Ptolemy [Almagest] argued that celestial motions have just got to be circular because that’s the only form we [Greeks] are familiar with that keeps on repeating itself harmonically.⁽⁸⁾ Claus Peter Ortlieb claims “Galileo observed the movement of the moons of Jupiter around the planet, but this does not prove the truth of the Copernican system … by way of observation…”  However, Galileo and the astronomical Cardinals were attuned to the appearance of Venus [and Mercury] as the Sun’s attendants.  On watching Jupiter’s attendants, each was “pre-adapted” to involuntarily recognize the signature of the same phenomenon.  Make no mistake, the astronomical Cardinals instantly knew precisely what class of “sensuous” phenomenon they were observing.⁽⁹⁾ “Either put up, or shut up”, as famously used in modern times by Hegel and, following him, Marx.⁽¹⁰⁾ Just as a runner must first complete an orbit of the track to be able to lap a competitor.⁽¹¹⁾ Heliocentrism is “quite apparent” to Kepler because it makes sense of astronomical appearance.  Kepler joins Copernicus in refuting Claus Peter Ortlieb’s primary thesis.  Incidentally Kepler exploded any suggestion of strict proportionality, when he distilled the observational “evidence of our senses” for the planet Mars into his three “laws of planetary motion”.⁽¹²⁾ Left Kantians are more comfortable at delivering negativity or even nothing, as demonstrated by Peter Ortlieb, who takes humble pride in declaring himself impotent to realize his article’s own thesis.

[twc]

You understand my question.For the sixth time—how does an anti-objectivist know that he’s tied his shoes?

[twc]

LBird wrote:

And your posts, twc, are the cream on the cake of obfuscation:  no-one knows what you mean.  I certainly don’t and I’ve asked you numerous times to enter a discussion and explain.But you just continue to post incomprehensible, lengthy posts which achieve no purpose whatsoever.

 Let me hold your hand. “For the fifth time.” “Do you know how big the number five is?  How many fingers do you have on your hand?  Five, yes that’s very good.” “Now, listen carefully.  Are you ready?  …  Good.” “Can you tell me how you know when your shoe laces are tied?” “Do you understand the question?  …  You do.” “Do you think you can you answer it?  …   You think so.” “Now, please begin…”

[twc]

HumanityA socialist displays his credentials by adhering to our Object and Declaration of Principles.  He displays his humanity by his actions.The non-objectivity of “sensuous” practice is not a disposable principle of a subordinate Lakatosian research program, but is the vital cornerstone—the foundation principle—of your core “science”.  It is the pivot, or fulcrum, on which everything else, including your mentally-repressive socialism, rests.  It is not disposable.So answer my genuinely serious question about it carefully.  Your third dodge suggests the impractical impotence of your core “science”.  A fourth dodgy refusal, in its wake, can only demonstrate the utter vapidity of what your proudly dogmatic “proletarian science” always has been—crackpot pseudo-scientific claptrap.A Bootstrap Reminder “Just how do you carry out your mother’s transmitted instructions, and just how do you manage to verify that your laces are tied up, without having recourse to Marx’s objectivity of human ‘sensuous’ practice?”Come on, prove for us all that Marx’s contention of the objectivity of “sensuous” practice that your mother taught you through her own transmitted “sensuous” practice is actually wrong.

[twc]

“Sensuous” TraditionSo your mother transmitted down to you by “sensuous” practice the tradition of shoelace tying.Presumably you were taught that child-tricky algorithm by “sensuous” practice.Presumably you were already taught how to verify your laces were tied by the everyday “sensuous” practice of comparing concrete appearance against abstract theory.If so, you were taught, like the rest of us, unconscious respect for the objectivity of “sensuous” practice.That’s all Marx meant by objectivity.The tradition is what Marx [Hegel, Feuerbach] consider to be a historical social construct.The objectivity of “sensuous” practice is what Marx discovers in the Theses on Feuerbach, and distinguishes himself from Hegel and Feuerbach—and from you.  Hegel and Feuerbach were innocent of their omission, but you consciously flaunt it.Knotty ProblemSo the problem remains.  Just how do you carry out your mother’s transmitted instructions, and just how do you manage to verify that your laces are tied, without having recourse to Marx’s objectivity of human “sensuous” practice?Your whole theory of the non-objectivity of social and scientific “sensuous” practice depends on your plain answer to a plain question.Your whole integrity, and credibility as a socialist, depends on a direct answer—not one that hides behind 5000 year-old Aboriginal culture, which somehow your mother managed to avoid when she transmitted the objectivity of “sensuous” practice you now deny.Your entire intellectual and honourable humanity is at stake.  No devious shifts this time.

[twc]

“Sensuous” ShoesYou repudiate Marx—not Engels—by rejecting (1) “sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity”, and (2) “human practice itself as objective practice”.¹ You avoid explaining how an anti-objective social constructionist, like yourself, can carry out the practice of tying his “sensuous” shoelaces without appealing to the objectivity of “sensuous” practice.You vaguely imply that consciousness imposes its own socially-constructed substitute for objectivity—a non-“sensuous”, non-practical, cerebral [pseudo]objectivity—upon our “sensuous” practice.Even so, you still have some remarkable things to explain to the rest of us who agree with Marx that our mediated consciousness of the world is based upon the immediate objectivity of our “sensuous” practice in it.How does your anti-objective consciousness, which philosophically distrusts the objectivity of “sensuous” practice, convince a social constructionist that his “sensuous” shoelaces have been tied in actuality?By what criterion can a social constructionist confirm that his “sensuous” shoelaces have actually been tied, without having recourse to the objectivity of “sensuous” practice?Non-objective ExploitationUnless an anti-objective social constructionist can convince us that his criterion of anti-objective truth is meaningful, what hope does he have of being able to convince the working class of the desirability of anti-objective socialism run by anti-objective practice?What hope, if he then lectures the working-class that the pinnacle of anti-objective social-constructionist dogma is that its “sensuous” social subjection under capitalism is itself an objectivity “myth”.What hope indeed, if we are asked to accept the social-constructionist anti-objective truth that:There is nothing objective about the capitalist practice of exploitation!There is nothing objective about our “sensuous” experience of exploitation!If any of us “sensuously” conceive that capitalist exploitation is objective, we are to be mercilessly condemned as individualist ahistorical Leninists.Capitalist exploitation is simply not objective.Such is anti-objective social-constructionist wisdom.Standing on “Sensuous” FeetNow let us follow Marx instead of anti-objective social constructionism.Marx conceives the world of appearance [phenomena] as the immediate world of “sensuous” practice, and the world of consciousness as our meditated comprehension of the immediate world.Marx, like most of us, takes the world of immediate “sensuous” practice to be objective.  His materialism—as asserted in the Theses on Feuerbach—is nothing more than his implicit affirmation that the immediate mediates the mediated.His materialist conception of history is nothing more than his explicit affirmation that the immediate world of “sensuous” practice transfers its objectivity to the mediated world of consciousness.² The significant point to comprehend is that the mediation—i.e. the “sensuous” practice that mediates immediate consciousness—confers objectivity on mediated consciousness, but it cannot/does-not confer objective truth on it.Thesis II makes this unambiguously clear.  Mankind must prove the objective truth of his consciousness.How the mature Marx goes about proving the objective truth of consciousness is Marx’s scientific method—a forum topic that has been dogmatically debased in subservience to shallow anti-objective social constructionism.Marx’s actual scientific method is for a dedicated thread.  It requires actual practical knowledge of how he used the materialist conception of history throughout Capital.Notes ⁽¹⁾ Theses V and I. ⁽²⁾ “Social being determines consciousness.” [A Contribution towards a Critique of Political Economy, Preface].

[twc]

Re:  #830 and #831It was Marx—not Engels—who criticizes Feuerbach for failing to conceive “human practice itself as objective practice”¹  and “sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity”.² Nobody respects your duplicitous ploy of wriggling out of a fix, by swapping Engels—universally detested scapegoat for the Leninist Left’s miserable failings—in place of Marx.Marx has just said that social life depends on our universal apprehension of sensuous and practical objectivity.³ You, an anti-objective social constructionist, flatly deny Marx—not Engels.If you aren’t inclined to critique my exposure of the hitherto-unnoticed⁴  “objectivity-of-social-practice” thread running through Marx’s—not Engels’s—Theses on Feuerbach, then you might favour us by solving a much simpler problem that we ordinary folks can only accomplish daily by taking our apprehension of sensuous and practical activity as objective:Unlike the rest of us, you do not take our sensuously perceived shoes and shoelaces as objective sensuousness.Unlike the rest of us, you do not take our shoelace-tying practice as objective practice.How then, unlike the rest of us, do you—an anti-objective social constructionist—manage to anti-objectively tie anti-objective shoelaces on anti-objective shoes by anti-objective practice, unless your anti-objective conceptions of anti-shoes, anti-shoelaces, anti-shoelace-tying, and the anti-world in which this anti-objective mystery is anti-objectively acted out are actually objective in the first place—and are all actually conceived by you to be objective?And don’t you ever again presume to respond by playing that dirty switching game on us again.  You know precisely who wrote what.Notes ⁽¹⁾ Thesis I. ⁽²⁾ Thesis V. ⁽³⁾ Whether our comprehension of such objectivity is adequate to it is the subject of Thesis II. ⁽⁴⁾ Unnoticed,  because most Marx “scholarship”—whose quality I’ve occasionally exposed here as appalling—has been conducted by Leninist academics who support voluntarism, which is actually ambivalent on objectivity.

[twc]

What the Theses on Feuerbach are About The Theses on Feuerbach are Marx’s final severance, his parting of the ways, with subjective philosophical thought.They record Marx’s discovery of how society actually comes to comprehend objective truth. 1. The Inverted Consciousness of an Inverted WorldMarx’s road to the Theses from 1843 to 1845:1843.  Marx¹  farewells the criticism of religion “which has been essentially completed”, and embarks on the criticism of a society that needs religion.Marx develops the insight that an “inverted” society breeds an “inverted consciousness”.² Marx reduces all thought—not just religious thought—to expressions of social conditions.  He establishes himself as the arch materialist.1844.  Marx³  investigates the social production of “inverted consciousness” [or “false consciousness”]:  hence his fixation on “alienation” [mutual “self-estrangement”]. Marx recognizes that:all philosophy, including his own, succumbs to his materialist critique;materialism and philosophy are mutually incompatible—each, on its own terms, subverts the other.He seeks a non-philosophical criterion of truth.1845.  Marx⁴  makes the breakthrough.  He discovers the objectivity inherent in social practice.2.  The Objectivity of Social PracticeHere we follow Marx’s “objectivity-of-social-practice” trail throughout his Theses on Feuerbach:⁵ Thesis I.“Feuerbach does not conceive human activity as objective activity”.i.e. Marx does conceive human activity as objective activity.Thesis II.“whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is a practical question.”i.e. objective truth is not an attribute of thought but of practice;objective truth derives from practice, not from thought.consciousness, being subjective, derives its objectivity solely from social practice.“Man must prove the [objective] truth of his thinking in practice”i.e. man must translate his thought into practice in order to prove its objective truth.⁶ “The [objective] reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is purely scholastic”i.e. philosophical “reality” is imagined “reality” like all products of the imagination:  religion, myth, fiction;Thesis III.“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and [the changing] of human activity [= social practice], or self-change, can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”⁷ Thesis V.“Feuerbach does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.”i.e. Marx does conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity;social life depends on our treating “sensuous” phenomena practically [= objectively];we approach “sensuous” appearance practically [= objectively];we survive because we take “sensuous” appearance to be objective;we can objectively gather “sensuous” [= empirical] data about the world that is itself objective.⁸ Thesis VIII.“All social life is essentially practical.”⁹ i.e. thought is ultimately a superstructural aid to practice.“All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”i.e. thought can spin fantasies without objective [= practical] restraint;thought can ignore the constraints of objective reality without objective consequence;practice must comply with the constraints of objective reality, or else suffer objective consequences;i.e. objective thought can be nothing other than the comprehension of objective practice.Thesis XI.“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”In addition to its obvious revolutionary meaning and implications…philosophy is powerless to anchor socialism objectively;social life is essentially practical;(for the benefit of voluntarists) consciousness is superstructural to social practice;revolutionary Marx entered the search for objectivity as a thinking philosopher, and leaves it as a practicing scientist.3.  Notes ⁽¹⁾ Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1843–44], Introduction. ⁽²⁾ Joseph McCarney, in a parade of scholarly ineptitude, omitted to perform a thesaural expansion of his search term “false consciousness”, and so let slip through his leaky sieve the associated terms “inverted consciousness”, “self-estrangement” and “alienation”.  Consequently McCarney missed Marx’s classic reference to “inverted consciousness”¹  that everyone knows by heart.McCarney’s slipshod scholarship explodes his [anti]marx myth on (since L&W withdrew MECW) the [anti]Marx Internet Archive. ⁽³⁾ Marx: Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. ⁽⁴⁾ Marx: Theses on Feuerbach. ⁽⁵⁾ The terms objectivity and practice are italicized throughout to emphasize Marx’s key discovery of the “social objectivity of social practice”. ⁽⁶⁾ Engels paraphrases Thesis II in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, “human action [= social practice] solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity [= philosophical thought] invented it.  The proof of the pudding [= objective truth] is in the eating [= social practice].” ⁽⁷⁾ Thesis III states that, if circumstances determine men, men can only determine circumstances and so change themselves by changing circumstances through revolutionary [= not normal] practice [cf. Thomas Kuhn], ⁽⁸⁾ For the mature Marx of Capital, “sensuous” appearance is both objective and concrete.  It finds its abstract explanation in science, and provides science with its criterion of scientific objectivity. ⁽⁹⁾ The mature Marx, in his classic formulation of the materialist conception of history in his famous Preface to A Contribution towards a Critique of Political Economy, gets to the heart of the matter “social being determines consciousness”.

[Author]

Posts