Young Master Smeet
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buggerit I'll provide my own citations:
Chucksie Bums wrote:Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.And
Charlie Mouse wrote:Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects – because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.Man doesn't create the objects, he transforms nature into his objects. Quite a fundamental misreading, I think.
Lbird, I do read your comments, and when I ask for genuine questions and clarifications I'm met with accusation or obstruction. The problem is when i read what Marx wrote, and what you say he said, i see a variance. "A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being" is pretty plain for Chucky.A relationship for necesarily implies properties (we've been over this several tiems) which your view would deny, since you cannot admit without your whole argument crashign down) that inogranic nature brings anything to the party.
Lbird wrote:For Marx, 'object' is produced by (ie. comes into 'existence-for') a 'subject'.Citation needed.
Can I pitch in, if there is any party work worthy of a video/whiteboard it should be Socialism as a Practical Alternative? (I don't mean, necessarily verbatim, but as the underlying basis for something). What grabs the Zeitgeist crowd is the notion of a plan, and since we're in the business of putting the positive case for socialism, I thinkt hat is where a video is based placed. I'll see about asking my branch to put something to conference to this end, but I'll float it here too.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative
Kind of relevent to this discussion:http://existentialcomics.com/comic/164I think the basic problem with Lbird's misreading of Marx is that essentially Lbird abolishes the thing for us. I'm rather reminded of an old Ropyal Insitution Christmas lecture, I think it was trying to demonstrate how smell works, using a "handedness" metaphor, imagine a wall of right hands, and some lefts hands, and some paws and some tentacles and other weirdly shaped appendages. Now, each hand/appendage, can only shake with a like and opposite hand/appendage. Although we define, through our senses and our being in the world, the thing for us, there has to be some thing there for us to grasp: and that includes abstractions and hought objects like numbers.I'd like Lbird to contemplate this:
Marx wrote:Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.It is difficult to square this notin of objects without the self, and the sun being the object of the plant, with the notion that all objects are humanly created.
It's a pretty simple question: if the world is undifferentiated, when we acheive socialism, can we voe tables into cheese? What is stopping us? History?
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.
