Young Master Smeet
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No, please do explain how I can turn a table into cheese. Either:1) I'm radically misunderstanding your position.2) Inorganic nature is differentiated, real and our being in that world depends ono the relationship of our needs to that reality.
Seems supremely relevent to me, and one that's much more likely to engage the practical sidedness of your working type. It seems to cut to the chase, if we create the world, we can make a table into cheese, if inorganic nature really is undifferentiated. That is the consequence of your argument, and you need to be able to defend it, lest you'll never convinvce the workers to your cause.
LBird wrote:That's an arguable opinion, YMS, that Marx's 'inorganic nature' has an 'existence' outside of its 'ingredientness'.Not quite what I argued, I argued that inorganic nature has ingredientness, and that ingredientness is qualitative.The unity of subject and object is what creates our world, but both must bring something to the table, else we are dealing with unrefined idealism, you haven't shown that Marx thought inorganic nature to be undiffeentiated, and it's arguable that's not what Jordan says, neither.As I've already demonstratde, it isn't necessarily true that the workers' side must be on undifferentiated created nature, if your major premise that the world is only created, is falsified.
LBird wrote:You'll have to explain the relevance of your model to the revolutionary proletariat who wish to change their world and democratise all social production.In your dough analogy, how would you respond to the worker who asks "How can I make a table into cheese?"
LBird wrote:Unless you accept that Marx links subject and object by activity, then you won't understand the analogy, and will simply, as a 'materialist', wish to 'know' what 'dough' is, 'in-itself', outside of any baker, recipe and pie.I'm not a 'dough-in-itself-ist', and neither was Marx.Dough has properties, and qualities. But thse qualities are not dough in itself, but dough for us, we shape the dough by our approach to it, but can only do with it what we can do with dough.
LBird wrote:A conversation that YMS is participating in, but doesn't bother to read.I'm not participating in that conversation.
To take an old philosophcal saw: imagine a child blind from birth, who sees for the first time. She can only blink for a few seconds at a time. So, before her on the table is a can of coke. Some joker keeps turning the can of coke between each blink: she sees it from a new angle each time, all around the aysmmetrical sides, and each end.Now, this is usually used as an argument about the thing in itself, or how we construct our perceptual world. For an empiricist, this would be many different objects. As a matter of fact and record, we know that a cylinder of coke is throwing off light in a sphere, it is only our eyes and our evolved brain that trims it down to shape: change our eyes, and we change the way we see things (for instance, constructing holograms make photographic paper part of our eyes; or wearing glasses;telescopes, etc.).The point, as I understand Marx, is that collectively, it doesn't matter that there is an essential coke can, but just as we create it (in this instance, by lookoing at it). Doesn't mean it isn't there, but, per occam, why bother about it? Our mythical girl begins to understand the coke can is a singular object (partly because otehrs tell her it is so), and as she picks it up and drinks from it, or marvels in its aeshetics, she creates her object world. but the can still has mass, and is not reflecting light of all colours (but maybe some colours her retinas cannot register).I don't think Lbird's dough stands up, as it were. He needs an express citation from Marx to make that stand, because otherwise I think he is misreading Marx (and to an extent Jordan).
I don't read Robbo's posts or your replies to them.Anyway:
Quote:External objects are, as it were, the objectified centres of resistance in the environment encountered by the human drives striving for the satisfaction of needs.Things [possessing no quality could not be centres of resistance.Humans have alweays terraformed their world, and we live in a world "cut out from the chaotic mass of the pre-existing world as it persists by itself. "The method of looking first at humans in the world does not deny that there is a world, but means we start our science from assuming that we alter by investigating, and understanding our diexis.
LBird wrote:I should add, YMS, that the selections that you've quoted from Jordan, above, actually support my argument regarding Marx's views, of social theory and practice upon inorganic nature producing organic nature, and that organic nature is thus socio-historic, and so we can change it.But we do not change it ex-nihil. There might not be a thing in itself but there is a thing for us. As we've discussed before, if nature possesses no qualities, it does not exist, for there to be a real, there must be a real substance. We do not have access to the real, or to the thing in itself, and so, per Occam, we should not bother postulating it. Indeed, we can change our world, by acting in it, not by mere whim.Lets takelanguage, language is socially produced, but it would be absurd, hunmpty-dumpty like to vote on the meaning of words (any prescriptive efort will fall in the face of actual practice). We can only work with the socio-historical world as we find it and reproduce it: the change comes from changing ourselves and our being in the world. What we produce are thought objects, which have causitive effect on ourselves and others, and when we come to real objects the thought objects mediate, but as if they are real objects, they have substance and need to be shaped. As Jordan points out, this is a naturalist approach, in which humans are a part of the system, not outside or above free to act as they wish.I find it hard to see how the Marx's words ‘the priority of external nature unassailed’ can be squared at all with your reading. I'd be interested for you to explain. Also ‘sensuous external world' would suggest to me that the external world possesses quality. Yes, we only come to it through society, just as language means we exist first and foremost for others.
Lbird,I'm having a hard time squaring your reading of this text with passages such as:
Jordan wrote:By rejecting mechanistic materialism Marx did not adopt a dialectical but an anthropological conception of nature.[40] By the anthropological conception of nature should be understood the view which, in Marx’s words, leaves ‘the priority of external nature unassailed’ but abolishes the distinction between man and nature, for man’s ‘unceasing sensuous labour and creation’ is ‘the basis of the whole world as it now exists’.[41] If the concept of nature became for Marx a social and historical concept, he cannot be called a dialectical materialist, for the dialectical and the anthropological conception of nature are clearly mutually exclusive.And I think this is quite key
Jordan wrote:While according to Marx, man’s practical activity creates an objective world in the indicated sense, objectification should not be conceived as a spiritual but as a natural act and, therefore, as an act of production rather than that of creation in the proper sense, that is, of bringing something into being ex nihilo. Consequently, man’s capacity of objectifying what gratifies his needs and provides him with enjoyment presupposes the ‘sensuous external world’. This external world is the material on which man’s labour becomes manifest, from which and by means of which external objects are produced.[46]We do not produce our world ex nihil, but produce based on transforming the stuff as we encounter it: 10,000 years ago, stars were seen with eyes alone, then we invented telescopes, and then gravtic sensors, it is not a poassivce reception of data, but an active interference to produce thought oobjects. That doesn't mean we can produce such relationships to ordermion a Stanlinist fashion.It means we will, in all probability, never be able to change the spoeed of light in a vacuum, or change the wavelength of yellow[*]*Yes, we can change our eyes so that wavelength appears to be a different colour in mour minds, but that wavelength will continue to exist.
IN the context of this debate, Jordan's Distinction between "Naturalism" and "Materialism" sytrikes me as more than slightly jesuitical, and in the final analysis still delivers us Humans as part of a larger system which exists outside humanity and of which humanity is a part: whether we call this Nature or 'The material world/universe' doesn't make much odds. By any account, still, there is a physical world which we cannot re-order merely by voting. That nature is mediated through culture is unobjectionable.
I think the above quote just got caught up when I was contrasting what Jordan wrote with Marx' actual views on TRemaux and the relationship of nationality to the soil…
Ah, the below didn't display in my first post:
Jordan wrote:Marx also repudiated the materialist theories of history which reduced primary historical factors to some physical characteristics of man’s natural environment.Marx wrote:In the historical and political application, Trémaux is much more important and fruitful than Darwin. Here alone is found a natural basis for certain questions, as of nationality, etc.Marx wrote:Trémaux' basic idea of the influence of the soil, is, in my opinion, an idea which only needs to be announced to secure for itself once and for all the right of citizenship in science.(Letters, Marx-Engels, 1866).Anyway:
Jordan wrote:In general, Marx could not have accepted an observable part of physical reality as the absolute primary factor of social action and relations, because in his view nature cannot function as a condition determining human consciousness unless it is first defined in sociocultural terms, that is, unless it is a socially and culturally mediated entity. Consequently, Marx could not and actually did not accept any explanation of social activity in any other but social terms. ‘Everything which sets men in motion’, wrote Engels, ‘must go through their minds.’[125] Marx emphasized this fact in The German Ideology to justify the view that not only circumstances make men, as the ‘old materialism’ maintained, but men also make circumstances, as the ‘new materialism’ asserted.Lbird also didn't comment on my rebuttal of Jordan's note about historians.
Jordan wrote:What can be said about the Marxian conception with certainty concerns its naturalistic character. As Marx saw it, within an all-inclusive and self-sufficing nature there was no place for the operation of disembodied forces, of a mind, a soul, a spirit. Consequently, in Marx’s view of the physical world, man, society, and history, not the slightest trace of the supernatural was left. Man is a natural entity among others and does not hold a privileged position in the universe. Even when man struggles with and tries to secure his control over nature, he remains part of it.(My emphasis). I'd quite agree with the above.This I'd take issue with
Quote:Nor is the Marxian view justifiably described as materialism, because Marx explains the social activity of man and man’s history ‘by his needs and by the means and methods of satisfying these needs ‘.[128] No historian can avoid resorting to this kind of explanation and, consequently, all historians would be materialists.Plenty of historians have written ignoring such factors, looking at the history of pure ideas (and today this continues, for example, with ideologists who see Islamic radiclism as an idea that just falls from the sky on people's heads).
LBird wrote:One further point of clarification would be helpful, YMS. Does your 'point' represent the official 'point' of the SPGB? That is, does the SPGB consider Marx's philosophy to be helpful to workers today, or does it consider it, like you do, only a hindrance to workers' self-development?Nice straw man, there, I didn't say it was a hinderance. I said we don't need it. It is useful, but we can live and succeed without it.Marx had considerable achievements: he identified that wage labour is inehrently exploitative, and exploitation does not arise from underpayment of wages. Along with Engels he developed a method of analysing society which can help us very much (as outlined in the german Ideology), and along with Engels he identified the revolutionary poetential of the proletariat. Alongside all that he spent years in the service of the workers movement as an aorganiser, educator and propagandist. He also laid out an analysis on the need for the seizure of political pwer as the way for the workers to make their revolution. All that deserves respect, and we can put the fruits of that effort to the service of our cause today. But, understanding Marx' views on the object of philosophy and the inorganic subject, is not esential to the cause.
