Young Master Smeet
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Just another quick point. We also need to address value. So, peopel accept there is high cultyure and low culture: Is the Mona Lisa better or equal with beavis and Butthead? Both are cultural products, and some might be equally awed by either. An absolute relativist would say they are equal and we cannot assign a higher artistic/cultural value to one than the other. But if we say one is 'better' than the other, and we start to compile an ordinal value to the products of culture, we create a 'cannon' that can exclude or include different groups (and possibly different cultures). One way out is humanism, and appeal to a common humanity and (yes, again) aesthetic reaction, how does it make us feel, are all humans awed by Shakespeare (even in translation)?Below is a well known (and possibly controversial passage from Marx on this theme:
Charlie M wrote:Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
Culture is what we do, including creating ourselves, and creating difference. That is our creative nature. It's nonsense to talk of distorted knowledge if its the only knowledge we have. Differentiating between culture and ideology is making a useful distinction because it is the differentiation between the effect of power and the effect of our own self activity. Saying we all are always within ideology is merely as banal as saying humans have consciousness.Anyway, we have to include the theory of alienation here as well. If our products become alien to us us, and relations between people become relations between things, we are estranged from our nature and from our culture. The end of commodity relations thus becomes the flowering of culture, as we focus on growing humans not things.
I don't think it is 'conservatism' so much as the big artillary of the bourgeoisie being directed at them. We'll put up prices. We'll make you poor. We'll make you unemployed. This is an object demonstration of how property society makes democracy impossible. If we were coming at them armed with a clear rebuttal: we're going to expropropriate you, then I think we'd be better protected.
Right, got space to do this now. So, Raymond Williams, credited with being the founder of cultural materialism (his book was 'Culture and materialism', which was a blast against mechanical materialism and the official Marxism of the 1950's). He describes culture4 as a 'whole way of life' including 'structures of feeling'. He later amended that to 'whole ways of life'. Now, I'd be a lot happier (per he science debate) if people used 'culture' where 'ideology' is often used. To say that knowledge is cultural, and that we have inevitable cultural biases, to my mind, avoids the perjorative sense of ideology, and in fact emphasisies the entirely antural state of culture (culture, as Williams points out, is a term derived from 'Agriculture', growing things). I think it perfectly fair and right to talk about a socialist culture (indeed, it becomes useful, because that becomes the doorway to a study and understanding of that culture).In socialism, it may well be there will be different cultures across the planet. Take one example, there may not be full agreement on what constitutes democratic behaviour. In the Nineteenth century, in the United States, it was common for large gangs to gather around voting stations (there weren't official ballot papers, so rival groups would print their own, and distribute them at the station). Judges ruled it was only intimidation if a man of average physical courage would be detered. So, theat is, only intimidation if more than half the voters would be put off. Yet, in a very physical culture, that was deemed fair and democratic. This isn't relativism, per se, but a recognition that in different conditions, people may apprehend and feel differently about different ways of doing things.
Considering I've discussed science in socialism at length, I think you'll fidn that is exactly what I think this thread is about.
Well, the truth sucks, don't it? I don't exist, the meatbot does. The good news is the meatbot itself is the epiphenomenon of nuclear fusion reaction in a star. That's pretty cool, I reckon.
Perception is physical and sensuous (unlike, say, apprehension). An individual is an indivisible scomponent part of something bigger, and so, yes, the process of perception is social, as we phsyically and humanly relate to one another (usually through the illusion that we have minds, which are just the retroactive justification for the actions of the meatbots, born out of our capacity for language).
That hardly warrants a correction, the significant point remains it is about senses, and sensation, and the way we feel/sense/perceive ourselves into the world: like that earthy sensation in your guts when you're enjoying a really good novel, or are struck by something sublimely beautiful (after all, the sublime destroys the mind). Through our electron microscopes, radio telescopes, ink jet printers, laboratories and particle accelerators, we are extending our senses into the world, and with them our physical appreciation of it.
From Wikipedia:
Quote:The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos, meaning "esthetic, sensitive, sentient"), which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthanomai, meaning "I perceive, feel, sense").[7] The term "aesthetics" was appropriated and coined with new meaning in the German form Æsthetik (modern spelling Ästhetik) by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics#EtymologyIt is the relation os the senses, and by extension, the human body, to the world (this is important, because it puts the human at the centre of aesthetics)(p.s. Sorry for a bit of unclarity in previous post, "I don't read theory and practice as theory" is what I should have written).
I don't keep reading it as theory and practice at all, I don't understand your point or how you could arrive at such a question.Which claim are you stating is stupid (you quote a block paragraph with at least three or four claims in it)?As for trusting workers, you'll recall I criticised your one sided view of democracy as being voting, I'm arguing for democracy against you.
Aesthetics is vary real and very physical, not ideal at all. It is about human sensual relationship to their world. It's not one-sided contrasted with two sided, but incomplete with complete (many sided, rich). Yes, Charlie stands for philsophical monism (as has been mentioned before here), and 'new materialism' not abstract contemplative materialism (per These on Feurbach). Human criticism is matter. thought is material, culture is material, it is all part of one world. You can't get less ideal than Aesthetics.(I'd add you don't get much more positivist than Thesis II:
Quote:The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.)
LBird wrote:Whilst we, as a society, venerate scientists as having a 'special method', not comprehensible by the rest of society, we'll remain in their power.No one does that, least of all the scientists, they make their method and data very widely open, it's just that it takes time and effort to follow in detail. I'll agree that some media outlets (ruling class ideologists) do venerate the words of scientists, because they want to encourage obediance rather than critical thinking. On this board you'll probably find more scientific reading than among the average lay-person.
Lbird wrote:We’re clearly seeing the separation here on this thread into the two opposed ideological strands, represented by Engels and Marx.I'm not sure we're seeing that at all, this seems to be another instance of you interpollating your schematic construction of the debate onto it, rather than looking at the actual text. I'm also wary of the Engels bad Marx good alibi, it often strikes me as a single transferable get out of gaol free card. Charlie was fallible too, he had to major cockamamy views on evolution. Anyway, from Charlie hissel':
Charlie wrote:Fourier starts directly from the doctrines of French materialism. The Babouvistes were raw, uncivilised materialists,but also the more advanced Communism is based on French materialism. The latter, in the French garb, returned to its native country. Godwin and Bentham established their systems on the ethical philosophy of Helvetius, and Owen took it from Bentham and based upon it English Communism. Etienne Corbet, banished to England, brought those ideas back to France and became here the most commonplace representative of Communism. But also the more advanced of French Communists, such as Dezamy, Gay, & c., developed, like Robert Owen, the materialist doctrine into real humanism and the logical basis of Communism.(My bold)(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/english-materialism.htm)What Marx criticises is mechanical or one sided materialism, that doesn't account for aesthetics.
Those of us who dabble in English will note that Charlie does not call materialism idealism. The Subject of the sentence is 'natural science' and the use of 'rather' suggests 'idealistic' is an alternative. We can see this by inserting 'that is to say' in the place of 'rather'. 'That is to say' would suggest an equation and refinement between the two words, but the use of 'rather' suggests a difference and alternative status, a correction. We can also note that he does not use the word 'materialism' but the noun phrase 'abstractly material', and 'abstractly' belongs in the cognitive field of ideas already. Also note the use of the word 'tendency', that is to say, the states he describes are not always the case, but some times natural science veers off into idealism.The wider paragraph is, of course, referring to the estrangement of philosophy from natural science (which has had such a profound practical success in transforming life).I'd suggest the import of the passage is that the arrival of unalienated labour, under conscious human control, then the mental appreciation (or, rather, philosophy) of humans will catch up with and join their practical achievements.
SP,Ideology, to my mind, is the process of using ideas in order to establish minority rule by a class, so by definition, socialism, in which there is no ruling class, there is no ideology. Also, implicit in the above definition of ideology, is that it exists to obfuscate or distort the lived experience of the subordinate class, which means ideology is contrasted directly with truth.
I think the below by Roger Penrose is interesting:
Penrose wrote:The agreement between theory and experiment here has been extraordinary. Astronomers have, for example, been monitoring the orbits of one double neutron star system – known as PSR 1913+16 – for around 40 years. The emission of Einstein's predicted gravitational waves from this system has been confirmed through a very gradual shortening of the stars' orbital period, and there has been an agreement between the signals received from space and the overall predictions of Einstein's theory to an astonishing 14 decimal places. At the other end of the size scale, there are multitudes of very precise observations that give innumerable confirmations of the accuracy of quantum theory and also of its generalisation to the quantum theory of relativistic fields, which gives us quantum electrodynamics. The magnetic moment of an electron, for example, has been precisely measured to some 11 decimal places, and the observed figures are matched precisely by the theoretical predictions of quantum electrodynamics.[…]Take, for another example, that most universal of physical influences, gravitation. It operates across the greatest reaches of space, but as early as the 17th century Newton had discovered that it was subject to a beautifully simple mathematical description. This was later found to remain accurate to a degree that is tens of thousands of times greater than the observational precision available to Newton. In the 20th century, Einstein gave us general relativity, providing insights at a yet deeper level. This theory involved considerably more mathematical sophistication than Newton's: Newton had needed to introduce the procedures of calculus in order to formulate his gravitational theory, but Einstein added the sophistication of differential geometry – and increased the agreement between theory and observation by a factor of around 10 million. It should be made clear that, in each case, the increased accuracy was not the result of a new theory being introduced only to make sense of vast amounts of new data. The extra precision was seen only after each theory had been produced, revealing accord between physical behaviour at its deepest level and a beautiful, sophisticated mathematical scheme.New Scientist [0262-4079] Weinberg Year: 2006 Volume: 192 Issue: 2578 Page: 32 -38Although you can see the Theorists Union in action there, after all, the feat of being able to measure to 14 decimal places is also astounding. Here, though, we have the distortion inherent in the system. They haven't confirmed Einstein to 15 decimal places (and that could mean millions of miles, in real terms).
