Marxist Animalism
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Other animals pass down knowledge, as we have said.
The scale of tool-making is irrelevant. Others have not needed to.
By forever “dick-measuring” with other species, you show you misunderstand descent through modification, i.e evolution, which you see as a ladder, through the eyes of 19th century bourgeois progressivists.
Yes, human society has developed from our tool-making and informed the scale of it. No one is denying that. But you make human technological activity into a score-card to flatter your speciesist ego, instead of accepting it as something the animal named human happens to do.
A visitor from another planet – by which I assume you are thinking hominid, which would be an impossible coincidence of evolutionary processes (Gould) – would see every species as unique, and at the same time interspecially fluid, I am sure. I’m also sure you would be deaf and blind to their language and their thoughts, and wrongly be expecting them to be uniquely interested in you.So now, ALB, your tactic is to drive a wedge between me and Bijou, who agree with each other. I believe YOU were the one to speak of visitors.
Stalinist-style debate tactics? 😉
Now he’s calling humans bacteria. He criticises the view that humans are superior to other animals (which nobody here has argued) and says that the correct attitude it that humans are just different as are all species (which is true) but his language reveals that he actually thinks that humans are inferior.
Talking about visitors. From June 1967.
Firstly, I am speculating how a visitor would perceive us.
Secondly, you have said humans are superior in the past, and to deny it is another of your tactics.
Thirdly, I am not saying humans are inferior. You are deducing that because you ascribe inferiority to bacteria, whereas I do not.I think that key points I was trying to make are possibly being missed.
I used the idea of a visitor from another planet concept as a thought experiment about what contribution an outside observer could make with regard to the debate about the “difference between human animals and non human animals”. I did not assume anything about the visitor, I was trying to take an outsider view into that debate. I did not assume any characterics of the visitor, because the visitor hasn’t got any, I made the visitor up. What thoughts the visitor would have about “surface bacteria, or any other aspect of life on earth” are irrelevant, because the visitor is a fiction, made up purely for the purpose of this debate. I am sorry to disappoint readers of the forum, but the sad truth is that the visitor is not real.
As to what I was saying about language, I was not saying the use of language to communicate with others, which animals do have in certain aspects, is the difference between human and non human thought. it is the use of language in our own thoughts, our communication with ourselves, which is the element of human cognition which doesn’t appear to be present in non human animal cognition. This means that as a human animal I can remember and alter my thought pattern as a result of inner dialogue I had at a time previous.
Lev Vygotsky’s work in this area, especially his collection of essays, “Thought and Speech” is very interesting. Vygotsky was working on the concept of develping a Marxist theory of the psychology of development when he died. Although his work was hit upon by some of the American psychologists who air brushed out the Marxian nature of his work, this is fortunately now being revisited and the Stalinist and “Westernised” alterations to his work are slowly being filtered out.
If he wasn’t using the word “bacteria” as a term of abuse, why did he use it to describe humans? I never did biology in school but I think that biologists divide life-forms into kingdoms, one of which is animals and another bacteria. So it is inaccurate to describe humans, as animals, as bacteria. But in this case it is more than a error of taxonomy (for which Bijou’s observer from another planet might be excused). It was clearly to intimate that humans were just as “lowly” as bacteria, an appeal to the popular ascription of inferiority to bacteria.
There can be no doubt that fellow animals process information conveyed via their species’ mode of language so they can act upon it. They do not think in human language any more than they speak it, but so what? What you do and how you think is what you as a member of your species does. That’s it. Why are humans so zealous in contrasting, measuring, drawing self-congratulatory comparisons? I know you are not, Bijou, but ALB will doubtless try to pit you against me by pretending I am attacking you.
Never use “high” and “low” said Darwin. It is you who share the prejudice about bacteria being low. In fact, they are either animal or plant beings, depending on one’s definition. They are also, be it known to those of you who think in terms of mastery, the actual masters on Earth! (Since you think in such terms!)
Here is how the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek put it in his 1944 Anthropogenesis.
Seems ok to me (except not saying that humans are animals too) and the points I have been trying to make.
”There are thee main characteristics which differentiate between man and animal. Firstly, there is abstract thinking. Although animals do show a certain measure of intelligence, and though mental processes do take place with them which have their seat in highly developed brains, the capacity for abstract thought is only found in man. This is the thinking in concepts which has elevated him to so high a level of theoretical knowledge and science. Secondly there is speech, there is the use of language. Although animals do produce sounds intended for mutual information, with man alone these sounds have significance as names, and thus are the basis of a high spiritual culture. Thirdly there is the use of tools made by himself. Even though animals do make use of dead things from their natural surroundings as aids to their own support, with man this has become an habitual use of implements specially made for a purpose and according to a preconceived plan. These implements are the basis of an ever growing technique, and therefore of our entire material civilization.”
But in this case it is more than a error of taxonomy (for which Bijou’s observer from another planet might be excused).
I’ve already said the observer isn’t bloody real, I made him up. He or she cannot be excused anything, he’s a fiction!
Good advice when you are in a hole: stop digging !
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