Materialism, Determinism, Free Will

I suggest people here read Cornelius  Castoriadis’ brilliant demolition job  on the crude reductionist materialism of some Marxists  in his short work History as Creation.  Its enough to give our so called “scientific materialists” pause to hopefully rethink …. Check it out here (it comes in 3 parts)http://eagainst.com/articles/cornelius-castoriadis-history-as-creation-part-i/ Ive got the original pamphlet  but the translation above is a bit iffy  so make allowances for that

 Is there a link to this Steve? I would be interested in reading this.  Who is Vin Marratty BTW?

I wish you wouldn’t throw out these jibes. It risks poisoning the atmosphere on this thread as happened on the other one. Everybody participating in this discussion, including yourself, will be a “materialist” in one sense or another and also adopt a scientific approach to things however defined. Ok, if you don’t like the word “materialism”, try “non-idealist”. Members of the SPGB are not committed to any particular kind of materialism. In other words, there is no “Party line” on this, to be attacked and demolished. Just a discussion amongst socialists with possibly differing approaches.This said, Castoriadis’s criticism of Marx’s theory of history (not of “matter”) which you recommend, which was translated and published by the ex-Trotskyist group Solidarity in the 1960s under his then pseudonym of “Paul Cardan”, didn’t cause us to rethink at the time. In fact, we saw it as a criticism of something we didn’t recognise as “the materialist conception of history”. He accused Marx of being a technological determinist, of implicitly assuming a fixed human nature, of holding that classes are a reflection of economic forces, of explaining past societies in terms of bourgeois categories, of not relying on empirical evidence and research, etc, etc (the usual stuff). Maybe this was a valid criticism of what passed for the MCH in the Leninist and Trotskyist circles from which he came.What we said at the time about Castoriadis’s and Solidarity’s views on Marx and Socialism can be found in this article in the archive section of our website:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1969/no-774-february-1969/%E2%80%98solidarity%E2%80%99-group-not-so-solidIt was written by David Steele. Ironically, both him and Castoriadis ended up accepting the market economy.Another of Casroriadis’s claims that proved to be wrong was the view expressed in another article that Solidarity translated and published as a pamphlet, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, was that, contrary to what Marx analysed, capitalism had found a way of avoiding booms and slumps and of maintaining more or less full employment.

ALB I dont have to accept Castoriadis’s political ideas  – some of which I think were bollocks   –   in order to recognise that History as Creation is a brilliant demolition job – say what you like  – of  the crude  reductionism  and determinism of some  people who call themselves “scientific materialists” which even you must recognise is the case and indeed seem to implicitly acceptStop being so hyper-sensitive about things.  You suggested I come over to this thread . Well,  here I am

 Yeah but then you are only assuming what you need to prove – that there is only one kind of  “stuff”. Im saying this with my devil’s advocate cap on but how would go about  proving that  ” mind is  matter” – as opposed to, say, mind is influenced by matter?Incidentally, would the converse be true  – is matter , mind?    This seems to be the position held by Peter Russell who I mentioned on the religion thread and who holds that consciousness is immanent in the universe (see the “Observer Effect” proof) and is not dependent on the brain but is , rather  “amplified”  by the brain

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 confindence  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 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)