robbo203

#89750
Anonymous
Inactive
robbo203 wrote:
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:
How can mind be anything other than matter? What is wrong with determinism? The case for socialism depends on it? Without ‘crude determinism’ there  is no science. In fact without ‘crude determinism’ we wouldn’t have the confidence  to move or get up out of bed. The attack on ‘determinism’ is a defence of capitalism. 

 Well no  – I would have thought it was exactly the other way round. It is the belief that our future is not  predetermined that give us hope that there can be an alternative to capitalism. Otherwise what you are advocating is teleology and this is specifically what Marx rejected.  Thus  he welcomed Darwin’s Origin of the Species  precisely because “it deals a death blow to teleology in the natural sciences” (Marx’s letter to Engels , January 16, 1861 Selected Correspondence Moscow 1975).  In The German Ideology he dismissed the notion that “later history is…the goal of earlier history” as a “speculative distortion”.Of course things are “determined” in the sense that something  happens because of something that happened before.  But “crude” determinism purports to explain the total picture and not just individual events. This is why I recommended Castoriadis’ text – because it has some rather useful things to say about determinism and its scope.  A rejection of teleology does not mean a rejection of causality as such and this is perhaps where the confusion arises. ThusContrary to what the idealist philosophers said , history is the area par excellence where causality makes sense to us for it assumes there at the very outset, the form of motivation.  We can  therefore understand the “causal concatenation” in it, something we can never do in the case of natural phenomena.  An electric current makes the bulb glow.  The law of gravity causes the moon to be in such and such a place in the sky at such and such a time.  These are, and for us, will always remain , external connexions: necessary, predictable , but incomprehensible.  But if A treads on B’s toes, B swears at him, and A responds with blows, we understand the necessity of the links even if we consider them contingent”  (History as Creation p.14-5)However when comes to consider history in general terms, unpredictability or indeterminacy expresses itself as  “an emergence or creation of which cannot be deduced  from what was there before, as a conclusion which exceeds the premisses or  positing of new premisses” (ibid p.17).  Hence , my  suggestion that we need to think instead in terms of emergence theory.  David Graeber, in summing up the broad outlines of Roy Bhaskar’s “critical realist” approach, alludes to emergence theory thus:Reality can be divided  into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be reduced to physics so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology.  Different sorts of mechanisms are operating on each. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below: it would be impossible to even talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical and biological processes.(Graeber D, 2001,  Towards and Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave p.52-3)You might want to ask yourself – if our actions were simply determined by chemical  and biological processes what then would become of the Marxian claim that “men make their own history” albeit under conditions not of their own making.  Is it rather that chemical and biological processes make history and human beings are just means by which they do so?The point is not only that different sorts of mechanisms operate at each stratum of reality but  also most and especially in the case of society, within society.  There is not just one “master mechanism” that  determines how we think and pushes society in a given directionThere is a great quote from Carolyn Merchant  which kind of sums up rather well how I see the relationship between the ideas people hold and the nature of the society they live in.  Note that at the individual level the ideas are not strictly predetermined by society – “crude determinism”  – as a whole but rather it is  that  at the aggregate level a that a “determined” pattern begins to emerge:An array of ideas exists available to a given age: some of these for unarticulated  or even unconscious reasons seem plausible to individuals or social groups; others do not.  Some ideas spread; others die out.  But the direction and accumulation of social changes begin to differentiate between  among the spectrum of possibilities so that some ideas assume a more central role in the array, while others move to the periphery.  Out of this differential appeal of ideas that seem most plausible under particular social conditions, cultural transformations develop (The Death of Nature: Women , Ecology and the Scientific Revolution,  Harper and Row 1980 p.xviii)

Replace ‘crude determinism’ which no one can seriously argue, with ‘determinism’.  I wrote that after a full bottle of Merlot, Lol