Morgenstern
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Are there actually two of you having a parallel conversation on this board? If so, you're both whacko. If, as seems more likely, you're one person with two sock puppets, well … It sort of compounds itself. i really must write a blog and interview myself on it. That would make me a proper intellectual.
So, you're saying that your words are the language of the actual world? Really, I couldn't make it up. The best and brightest of the Wittgenstein-Trotskyist movement, a self-confessed naive realist. As DJP remarked in posts passim, I believe.
It's hardly uncomradely if you're not my comrade. So yes, you did miss the point about how by taking up a "commonsensical" stance you are actually representing the ruling ideas of capital, because the whole point about ruling ideas is that they are the ones that you hold uncritically, take at face value. In representing capital you are on the wrong side of the class struggle, even if you wish to battle certain groups of capitalists. You want to purify those ruling ideas and make them *work*. The ideology of the civil servant. The world as it presents itself is all that there is – now if we could just rid it of capitalists who distort capital for their private ends, it will be as good as it can be. The End. Its hardly "all that is solid melts into air". Not, of course, that this happens to all civil servants. Naming no names
The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Ruling ideas means pretty much all ideas hitherto. It does not mean that there are your ideas which are obviously right, stand-to-reason ideas, and ideas-which stupid proles-think-instead-of-them-after-school-and-watching-the-news-ideas. It means that *your* ideas, your painfully artful, I-don't-think-like-those-fools ideas, are also ruling class ideas. Revolutionaries are critical of all ideas. Those ideas that you accept, dictate what kind of ruling class scenario you support – or put another way, what version of capital you support. In particular, one could note that the ideas of private property, of *having* rather than *being*, pervade our consciousness and are only noticeable by either a) comparing with societies that have developed differently or b) the proletarian criticism of our on temporary lot. (Hence hippies). The reification of thought into a world that can be had rather than a world of experience – private property, the bourgeois philistine at their most philosophical – finds it's acme in saying that all properties are external to the will of the thinker and there is nothing to be thought at all. What was a numinous, animated world of the 'savage' is now the dusty museum of the bourgeois. in other words, the rejection of our power of thinking over the things that we think, this quotidian objectivity, is actually the bottled quintessence of capital. Our ideas spring from our heads to form an Eden, but we are lifeless husks within it. But then, as we've always maintained, Trotskyists merely represent capital against the capitalists, state capitalism. Wittgensteinian or no. Simon W.
All this cod philosophy reminds me of a Fish Called Wanda: Wanda: To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you! I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you ape? Otto West: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself". And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.
This is where we diverge. We don't need to open the box labelled bourgeois philosophy. Much. We do, however, if we want to understand what we're doing when we change the system, need to understand the system that we're trying to change. We need to be confident, as democratic revolutionaries, that our class are capable of the intellectual labour of understanding the contradictions of our society and thus how to transform it into a new society – or rather, how to abolish the old. If not that, we are still engaged in an intellectual exercise – but we are executing the last will and testament of a 19th century intellectual without any understanding of what we're doing. So this is not in any way a call to intellectual endeavour for its own sake – it's a call to be actors in our own lives, rather than bystanders. Simon W.
Fortunately I think DjP has made my points for me – do I really need to do round 2? Philosophy is only what we call a particular part of brain work. Marx, in hoping for "one, true science" was, I would argue, making the dialectical point that philosophy, science, doing the football pools, are all parts of one activity that we separate out into arbitrary categories. By saying you reject all philosophy you presumably think to say that you do not think in a fanciful way – that you think in terms of what is real. But, again as DJP and ALB have pointed out, this is not only naive realism, but considered nonsense now by just about everyone. Its still philosophy though. It's just the philosophy of the philistine. In any event, people who encourage workers to reject more developed thinking are equally dangerous, whether they presume to do workers' thinking for them or whether they assert that there is nothing to be thought. The answer is that the modern proletariat does all of society's thinking also and is sufficiently intellectually mature to handle the occasional more abstract question. Simon W.
Dear all esp Rosa, Not a particularly attractive offer. But I'll be back to this in a couple of days when wage slavery allows. all the best, Simon W.
Dear JonWhite, read the first half or so of the Lichenstein. suffers from the same problem as Johnson centuries earlier who on hearing Berkeley's theories, said "I refute him thus" and kicked a rock. She thinks that her common sense is reality and that philosophy and, in general, thought is presumably vanishingly subordinate. But her common sense is just a construct. If you say that what you see is what there is then you have just insulated yourself from further thought. … Why was she considered of any value, anyway? I wasted 10 minutes of my life reading that. Simon W.
Hi Adam, (Hurriedly complies with the "ignore" instruction from the other post …) Firstly, I'm saying that I'm not saying. Thoughts are their own thing, they're not about something else. There's no we apart from our experience of we. Secondly, from this, I'd say that the question is wrong headed. It's asking to jump to one of three, or more, known points outside of ourselves, and define us in terms of that outside. I'm saying there is only the inside. Rather than ask that we be defined in terms of an external framework, the framework must be defined in terms of we – or rather, the framework *is* we. We're like an eddy in the ocean. We are not different from the rest of the ocean – all matter – by a separate nature but the fact that we eddy. So the categories from the question don't apply. As I said, we are our entire world and that world is simply what we talk about. In the broadest sense, including all the objects of our civilisation(s) with which we live and communicate. This is getting way too hippy. Was looking at skepticism on Wikipedia and Zen is looking pretty good
Comradely regards, Simon W.Dear all, I was actually saying something stronger: that we *are* those experiences. Or rather, perhaps, something weaker; that there is no need to postulate a separate thinking entity over and above the thoughts themselves. No knitting needles, no Cosmic Knitter. Just wool. all the best, Simon W.
Dear all, i think ithat the easiest thing is to first establish as a tautology that you don't know anything over and above received sense data. You don't know anything more than you could know, in other words.otherwise you are religious – you are saying that God, or a numinous world, plants information in your head unbidden. sound reasonable? Comradely regards, Simon W.
Dear LBird, I think it might make things clearer if I added two things to my hypothesis:1) I used the word 'have' with respect to our ideas. This was a liberty, loose talk. What I mean is not that thoughts are something we *have* but something that we *are*. That was implied in the rest of what I wrote, I think.2) Individual identity, our sense of self, is one more thought passing through our heads rather than the sine qua non of existence that it is in private property society, We are all moments within a communicating whole.so,3) what we say about the world, we say about ourselves. this isn't saying anything idealistic – it is saying something *less*. Whereas in our current model we believe in the solidity of our thoughts as objects in space, and consider our existence within it as a divine mystery, instead I am saying that we start from what we are, and step no further than we are able – in our case, beyond the nervous system (though of course we have so arranged the world beyond the senses to reflect our thoughts, to make our environment a medium of communication). There is no divine – what we know, we know, and what we don't is simply beyond our purview. So your notion of going further in our knowledge of the world than empirical experience just won't wash here, because we are the world and the world *is* empirical experience. There's no magic US to which the empirical experience attaches. Our identity is in the experiences themselves. Comradely regards, Simon Wigley.
De r all esp. Adam,I agree with the notion that Engels' error was to take a theory of mental contradictions and apply them to physical processes.Unless he was being *extremely* subtle. But I doubt it.Marx adopted the skeptical approach. I have been thinking long and hard on how to explain this, because I want to write an article that might be of some use to the Party, in the near future. Hence also, Adam, why I've been so useless over the Anthropology issue – sorry, I wanted to squeeze my own article in.Look at it this way. When we talk about the world, what do we mean? We mean *our impressions of it*. That is all that we have. We are simply not talking about a world out there beyond the senses: we are talking about our shared experiences.That means that when we say "water turns into steam" we are not talking about a qualitative change in this extra sensory world. We are talking about a change in the way we perceive it. The world is not a bouncy castle: but our minds certainly are. We as a community have started using a different concept to refer to our experiences in this area.The creepy bit is where you realise that you are not standing outside of yourself while you are thinking. You can't analyse your thinking and get to a true, as opposed to false, consciousness. There are no external facts to cling onto – the stars are cold and silent, and without mercy. The world beyond the senses is without form – Without even the notion of formlessness, which you probably just conjured as grey and cloudy.Input from this world beyond the senses is entirely negative, and Darwinian in the widest sense. Humans build square pyramids in certain ways across the continents, not because of Atlanteans or some universal Fourness, but because when you stack bricks that's how they happen to fall, whether you're Egyptian, Sumerian, or Maya. And ultimately, the development of ideas comes not from reaching towards greater universal Truths but because holding stupid ideas gets you killed. We stand on top not of good ideas but bad ones, just as we are descended from those animals that a) survived basic physics and then b) died the least and reproduced the most. (OK, it's a bit more complicated than that). This also means that just as Darwin spoke not of evolution but descent with modification, so we should see our cultural development as a secular process in no way guided by time's arrow.this is irreligious criticism at its root – that we are the only gods that we no, and entirely finite. All the doings of gods are our doings, and where the world seems magic it imply means that we have not yet developed the concepts to explain a phenomenon. In other words, there is no meaning outside of the community of human minds, whether inherent in the environment or in the mind of a Creator. Meaning is a thing that we *manufacture* – and of which we are made.Oh, dialectics? Right. Where was I. Since what we are talking about is our concepts, that allows them to interact in a way they would not if they were of fixed, solid matter. There is no factory without the experience of labour inside it: a ship may be inert sat in the harbour but on a stormy night sea it becomes a fickle She: and so forth. A castle, set beside a house, makes that house a hut, not because we live in a bouncy castle but because our concepts of residences and of status are inextricably interlinked.This, of course, renders crude materialism obsolete. Control of the means of life is essential; but this is not just control of big and heavy things, and the relegation of light and flighty things to the philosopher's tower. So, while taking it all back from the capitalists is a good idea – you can't go wrong if you grab it all – it may be that more subtle approaches to revolution may pay dividends. In particular, disrupting the value that is socially attached to the objects of capitalist society. A society almost self-sufficient in values, not just a starving survivalist band, is possible within capitalism: the technology that has rendered our value exchange so malleable, information technology, is key to this. It is telling that capitalism has tried to minimise the intrusion of this new technology by treating its products *as if they were heavy* – charging a rate per item as if it was a physical product from a factory, a car or pat of butter; selling rights to a product only on purchase of a physical equivalent item (the academic publishing model): and so forth.That's about as far as I'd got, but expect an article at some point. Comradely regards, Simon W.
