Good News: And No Religion, Too
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(Continued)
But a man has self-consciousness. We are aware [inside ourselves] of endless debates, resolutions and inhibitions, a constant stream of endless processes. We get a subjective view of the whole process, and because we consciously decide a certain way it seems that we voluntarily choose that way.
But when another person looks at you he sees you objectively. He knows that your conceit of free will won’t hold water, for he can try a few experiments and be sure of his results.
If he starts early enough, he can make you a Catholic or a Buddhist, a Nazi or a Communist.[Paragraph on theology follows]
But there is something more, of greater importance to workingmen.
The chains that bind the modern wage slave to the wheel of capital are not iron, but of more subtle stuff. They take hold upon the mind. The dominance of the few rests on the potency of deceptions, and not the least of these is the myth of “freedom.” The very breath of capitalism is freedom. Freedom to buy and sell wage labour. Freedom to contract. Freedom to pillage and destroy, and to exploit the weak. [The worker] is free to do all sorts of wonderful things – in theory. And in this catalog of catchphrases, half truths and lies, the mystery of free will is no less potent than the rest.
But the most vital argument that the socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science. Bourgeois sociology, hampered as it is in scope and application, is sterilized by its attempt to combine popular myth with scientific method.
The Marxist alone is free to uncover social laws and explain class relations without pandering to power and privilege. He is the advance agent of the future. He alone has an incentive to uproot the old decrepit illusions that block the path to mental and economic liberation. Not the least obstructive of these is the fallacy of free will, a theological conception devoid of scientific merit, destined at last to the museum of philosophic curiosities.Thanks, TS, but can you give which issue of the Western Socialist that article occurred.
Not that, from the extracts you quote, it is taking a “necessitarian” position. It is denying that humans have a “free and absolute choice” as to what they do, on the grounds that “from conception to the crematorium the human animal continues to adjust itself to the compulsions acting on it from within and without” (and not that everything was already determined at the Big Bang).
The woman whose video I posted here is unknown to me. I was just scrolling through Youtube videos for arguments against free will and picked it. She is not my mentor.
The word is necessarian, btw.
I have stated my position and I do not consider myself a fatalist. Why would I have joined the party if I were? Also, why would a fatalist bother to argue, about anything?
I don’t see Marx as having exploded pre-marxian materialism. I see him as having built upon it.
The issue is number 3, 1972, and the article is there introduced as a classic.
Apologies Thomas. Actually I don’t think you are a fatalist just a bit inconsistent.
I have found that article. Nothing wrong with it. Just a straightforward article refuting the theological argument that humans have Free Will (so as to decide whether or not to obey god) and making the point that what we decide to do depends on material circumstances.
Wikipedia has “necessitarian”. “Necessarian” seems to be an earlier (and more elegant) form. If it just means that human behaviour is subject to the social and material environment then all materialists are necessarians. I am too. So is the Party.
I think Currey was a pre-ww2 member of the Socialist Party of Canada and wrote other articles on materialism and philosophy. I will try and track them down.
I have found that William Child Currey left a long document called “Thoughts on Thinking” that was published in the Western Socialist in 14 instalments from the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1952. It deals the views of Marx, Hegel and Dietzgen.
Currey makes the following criticism of 18th century materialism as expounded by Voltaire, Holbach and Godwin that you refer to.
“The 18th Century materialists ascribed all change to the movement of physical events, the psychic condition of man glowing passively as an ideal reflection of them. This conception left them quite at a loss to account for why, if human consciousness only followed changes in the material world, they themselves could be in advance of their time and agitating for a new social order. It is an inconsistent kind of materialism that sweeps the gods out of an invisible sky only to enthrone them in corporeal matter.”
(Or, like Sabine H., in the Big Bang. Even so, it was still a big step forward to eliminate god as a superior being).
Currey goes on:
“On the one hand were the idealists contending that mind, an emanation of the divine intelligence, was the ultimate reality; on the other, the early materialists, bent on their investigation of things, declaring that mind was a condition of matter, reducible to mechanical laws, the dependent child of its creator the physical universe. Out of the conflict of these contrary opinions Marx discovered the median principle of social evolution. The solution lay in recognizing the true nature of mind. Thought was discovered not to be passive as the materialists had claimed, but active. ‘It is the whole man who thinks,” says Marx. Thought is a function of living, it comes into existence by doing something, it manifests itself in action. The existence of social institutions generates certain human needs, the effort aroused to satisfy these needs produces an altered form of consciousness; there is a conflict between the mind of man, expressed in action, and the opposed conditions. Out of the contest ensue changed conditions and a different consciousness expressing itself in further action.” (WS July-August 1951).
Earlier he had written:
“Marx refused to divide social experience into two mutually exclusive compartments and classify one, the external world, “cause,” and the other, consciousness, “effect.” On the contrary he showed that social change resulted from the interactions of nature, society and human intelligence. That the conventionally accepted “effect,” consciousness, was itself as much a cause as the laws of nature and society, and that vice versa, the assigned causes were in turn effects.” (WS March-April 1950).
These last two points seem better, as an answer to the claim that the future is already determined, than your introduction of competing “motives”. “Motive” is a philosophical, not a scientific concept. It suggests different sets of neurons fighting each other to see which is the “mightiest”, which I am not sure that neurology says.
So, I suppose we could say that, while there is no such thing as Free Will, there is still an active will but not one that is completely “free”. Humans make history but only out of the cloth available as Marx once put it.
“Thought was discovered not to be passive as the materialists had claimed, but active. ‘It is the whole man who thinks,” says Marx. Thought is a function of living, it comes into existence by doing something, it manifests itself in action. The existence of social institutions generates certain human needs, the effort aroused to satisfy these needs produces an altered form of consciousness; there is a conflict between the mind of man, expressed in action, and the opposed conditions. Out of the contest ensue changed conditions and a different consciousness expressing itself in further action.” (WS July-August 1951).”
I agree with that 100%.
““Marx refused to divide social experience into two mutually exclusive compartments and classify one, the external world, “cause,” and the other, consciousness, “effect.” On the contrary he showed that social change resulted from the interactions of nature, society and human intelligence. That the conventionally accepted “effect,” consciousness, was itself as much a cause as the laws of nature and society, and that vice versa, the assigned causes were in turn effects.” (WS March-April 1950).”
I go along with that too. Human will (consciousness) is both an effect and a following cause. Thoughts and feelings are both results, but also doers and causers. This is what I mean by chain of causation, not only the factors external to us.
I have never denied Will itself. If my language is archaic, it is because I am versed in it, from the writings of the Encyclopedistes. So we have been at cross purposes.
‘As far as love is concerned, suffice to say that to experience it is more than sufficient.’
Lizzie would seem to be unaware that cultural conditioning has a profound effect on how we ‘experience’ and interpret the world (as explored in some depth above). The cultural evolution of ‘romantic love’ is well understood from its medieval aristocratic origins (chivalry etc.) through to the remnants of Romanticism within cheesy movies and novels of today. We can only ‘experience’ what our culture has created for us.‘And yet, Wez, we will cease to be humans in less than a split-second of cosmic time, and the species will have ceased to be, forever.’
TM – Again, like size, I don’t see why brevity should diminish significance. Time is one of the most mysterious of phenomena. Having existed as a species might mean that we will always exist. I think the physicist you mention above has produced a video entitled ‘Does the past still exist?’ I haven’t watched it yet but perhaps she can add something to the time paradox?We measure significance according to what impacts our own existence and the things we care about. It is subjective.
Columbo. Addressing the question of “if.”
Peter Falk: “If we hadn’t pulled it off, would you have killed him?”
Rod Steiger: “Why are you asking stupid questions? We did pull it off.”
Which is the episode of Colombo where the murderer says : “You can’t blame me. I was just a link in a chain of causation. I couldn’t help doing what I did”.
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