Young Master Smeet
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LBird,I may have been over-reading Pannekoek, it's page 445 in the 1961print:
Panekoek wrote:It can be remarked that the addition of decimals fundamentally changed the charcter of 'magntitude' [of a star — YMS] From a quality, a class, an ordinal number, it has turned into a quantity, a measure, an amount that can be divide by fractions, a basis of measure. We cannot speak of a star of the 2,87th magnitude; but we can say it's magnitude is 2.78.Maybe it was just because I knew he had also written on philosophy, but it does read like the application of dialectic (ish) by a practical scientist. I have to say the idea that being able to measure numerically seems to be a commonplace of defining the advance of a science.
LBird wrote:I'm not sure I get your meaning, here. 'Quantify' is a human judgement. 'Quantitative change leading to qualitative change' is a supposed 'law of dialectics', according to Engels; that 'law' is what I'm objecting to, not humans making judgements.I suspect we're all in agreement about said law: saving (moving into the philsoophy of mathematics) whether one exists or not (are numbers real or human constructs, etc.)?
LBird,the books at home. I'll try and get a ref tonight. My reading of Pannekoek was that quantity/quality wasn't in nature, but the development of the human understanding of nature. So, the quality of overwhelming military force transforms into the military science when we can analyse and quantify military capacity (and thus understand it better).
LBird,Would you include Pannekoek in critical realism. ISTR finding his version of the quality/quantity thing (in his history of astronomy) interesting, not least because it kind of chimes with the now widespread view that the advance of a science can be compared to it's capacity to quantify it's object of study (for him it was the quality of brightness).
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:since the reading I suggest absolves Marx of making a crass error.Take your pick: Marx was either an ignoramus or my reading is correct.I know which alternative I prefer.Choosing a reading based on saving a writer from being an ignoramous or committing a crass error is a fundamentally bankrupt and intellectually fraudulant approach. I weigh the evidence without prejudice or the exclusion of the very real possiblity that Marx was wrong (as he was about so many things). Ockham's razor often suggests error is the most likely reading.
Indeed, we can keep working with the postface as the primary source, but if we look here again at this sentence:
Marx wrote:The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.Hegel's dialectic is referred to without article, which usually is suggestive of a definite article. So, here with have an identity between Hegel's dialectic and dialectic. I have to say you're putting a lot of weight on an endorsement of another critic. The statuis of being published is strong and sugegstive, but it is not iron clad and definitive. If Marx wrote in the secret diary of Charlie Marx age 43 3/4s "My dialectic has nothing to do with hegel, and really, I've never read him, I'm just conning people" you would want to ram that down people's throats, and ask the valid question, how does it relate to his published statements (It would make Charlie a fraud, is the basic answer).
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:I agree, but where the unpublished source contradicts the published source, the latter must take precedence.Like the punchline of the joke, Frayed Knot. Where the two contradict, we need to look at why they conradict, and why the author chose to make their public view different, we cannot take the public as read, though.
Young mistress Luxemburg,I'm afraid I haven't (and nor am i going to) read every post in this long running discussion. however, the post you link to does not, I'm afraid, definitively deal with the matter. You simply state that you disagree with Marx' asserveration "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner" Marx could simply have been wrong, or, as you suggest may be being Ironic. But that sentence is equally capable of being read with the stress being on 'comprehensive' Many thinkers had a crack at steam engines before Boulton and Watt, but they produced the definitive design that make the buggers workable. The point remains, though, that Chucky-bum's dialectic cannot be that distinct from hegels, since they share elementary form, per my football anaology.
ISTR Kautsky argued that Charlie never used the phrase DoP in a published work (tangent, I know, but it is thus a good example of the time when we need to weight published/unpublished). Now,
Charlie wrote:Hegel’s dialectic is the basic form of all dialecticThis could be a translation problem, this can be read in two subtly different ways:Hegel discovered/created/found the basic dialectic, his is the standard.His dialectic was the one that pre-existed him, he used the basic method.Given as he says in the postface
Carlos wrote:The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.it's the former. It's a bit like saying that a footballers style of play is the basic form, when stripped of her pre-match rituals (crossing herself, folding her kit, etc.). It's still football if Marx plays the same game without the mystical trappings.I explicitly explained how my quote from Fred could give us an insight into Charlie's thunks.
Quote:However now Mr Cobb may now be unable to meet the racial purity benchmark he set to settle in his own town after the tests showed he was 14 per cent sub-Saharan African.Bwahahahaah!
Quote:Same with my suggested rule (which isn't mine, anyway; it is used in the Arts all the time) that published work takes precedence over unpublished material when it comes to ascertaining an author's views.It's not an unreasonable rule of thumb, a published work can be presumed to be more carefully worded. However, where there is a lack of clarity in the published works, private corresponendence can provide supplementary evidence (or can be used to show how the published version was arrived at). In this case, the private work might well say cover slightly different ground.
1) I'm not sure that published sources should always take precedence over unpublished, except in assessing what the author's public position was (as in discussion of the question of 'Dictatorship of the proletariat' which pretty much only occurs in letters). In this case we're looking at what Charlie might have actually thunked about Hegel and his relationship to his methodology. Thuswise, we can, like good historians take a look at Freddie's letter of 1891:
Fred wrote:If you just compare the development of the commodity into capital in Marx with the development from Being to Essence in Hegel, you will get quite a good parallel for the concrete development which results from facts; there you have the abstract construction, in which the most brilliant ideas and often very important transmutations, like that of quality into quantity and vice versa, are reduced to the apparent self-development of one concept from another – one could have manufactured a dozen more of the same kind.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_11_01.htmAnd we're entitled to ask what might have prompted Fred's choice of that example. We can ask (and go no further than asking) whether maybe when Charlie had talked the book over with him that he had made the same point to illustrate the ideas that we know from other correspondence Fred was having a hard time getting a handle on. Now, of course, the choice chould be Fred's on it's own, but we are entitled to put it into the hearsay column.2) The letter was still written after Capital was published, and so does shed some light on Charlie's thinking about it.3)
Young Mistress Luxemburg wrote:In this summary, there is no trace of Hegel whatsoever, and yet he still calls it 'my method' and 'the dialectic method'.Dialectical method. Indeed.
I suggest we take Uncle Charlie at face value:
Chucky wrote:He knows full well that my method of exposition is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist, and Hegel an idealist. Hegel’s dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only after being stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_03_06.htmWhich suggests to anyone who dabbles in English that whilst Chaz was certainly not Hegelian, he clearly understood his method to contain something dialectic.
RL,I'm waiting on that chance that the electrons in my brain will jump into precisely the correct configuration for me to comprehend quantum mechanics without needing to do any work.The method of trying to enter the room by vibrating my molecules through the wall can be refuted, since if it isn't possible it isn't even impractical. A method of truth finding either finds an answer or it doesn't. An impractical method may well produce a true result (we could explode the moon into pure computronium and use it's atom as nanocomputers to do advanced quantum mathematics, that's impractical but possible). I think the word we are both struggling towards is valid.
