[twc]

What my Post Intended to Achieve

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

So, I’m far from sure what your post has achieved, or was intended to achieve.

My sole intent was to present a counter interpretation to your “it is quite clear that Dietzgen had studied Hegel” before 1868.But then you floored me!

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

ALB wrote:

The other thing you need to explain is why Marx (in the year before his death) described Dietzgen as a “phenomenalist”

Anyway, it depends on what you mean by ‘Phenomenalism’ — there are far more varieties than even Wikipedia acknowledges.

Your conflation of phenomenalism with the Phänomenologie des Geistes [the only phenomenology Marx and Engels recognized, and “the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy”: Marx, 1844], explains your puzzlement over the intent of Marx's Phänomenologie quote in establishing Dietzgen’s independence of Hegel.

[twc]

Context of 1868(1) Engels–Marx Correspondence

(1) Engels, 6 Nov 1868, wrote:

It is difficult to come to an absolutely definite judgment about the thing [Dietzgen’s manuscript].  As a philosopher the man is no child of nature, and added to that is only half self-taught.Some of his sources (e.g., Feuerbach, your book [Capital], and various rubbishy popular works on natural science) can be immediately recognised from his terminology, but one cannot tell what else he has read.His terminology is of course still very confused–hence there is a lack of sharpness and frequent repetition in new terms.There is also some dialectic in it, but appearing more in flashes than as a connected whole.The account of the thing-in-itself as Gedankending [thing made of thought] would be very nice and even brilliant if one could be sure that he had discovered it for himself. …On the whole, a remarkable instinct for arguing out so much correctly with such deficient preliminary training.As I said, the repetitions are the result partly of the deficient terminology and partly of unfamiliarity with the discipline of logic. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Engels_Correspondence.pdf#page30]Alternatively …The repetitions are, as I said, partly a result of the shortcomings in terminology, partly due to his lack of logical schooling. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_11_06.htm]

[Emphases and mid-paragraph breaks added.]The only logic that Engels would ever endorse in correspondence with Marx is Hegel’s Science of Logic.  Marx and Engels, as fellow refugees from youthful Hegelianism, know each other intimately enough to interpret each other’s direct reference to logic as indirect reference to Hegel.It is precisely Engels’s reference to logic that motivates Marx, in merely endorsing Engels (2), to refer directly to what Engels referred to indirectly — Dietzgen lacked a study of Hegelian logic.Contrary to popular conception, it was Engels who did his level best to wean Hegelian-terminologist Marx from the fond illusion that Capital’s Hegelian-inspired development should remain explicit.  We owe much of Capital’s accessible [hybridized] form, such as it is, to Engels’s insistence that Marx directly excise his Hegelian inspiration from the text.Note, that it is Engels who is the implicit referrer to Hegel, and that it is Marx who is the explicit referrer to Hegel.  [Marx may well be the disproof of RL’s Max Eastman banner.](2) Marx–Engels Correspondence

(2) Marx, 7 Nov 1868, wrote:

I regard Dietzgen’s development, in so far as Feuerbach, etc. — in short, his sources — are not obvious, as entirely his own independent achievement.For the rest, I agree with everything you say.  I will say something to him about the repetitions [i.e., in agreement with Engels-to-Marx of 10 Oct 1878].It is bad luck for him that it is precisely Hegel that he has not studied.

(3) Marx—Kugelmann Correspondence

(3) Marx, 5 Dec 1868, wrote:

Have you got Dietzgen’s address?  Quite a while ago he sent me a fragment of a manuscript on ‘intellectual capacity’, which, despite a certain confusion and too frequent repetitions, contained much that was excellent, and — em>as the independent product of a worker — even admirable.I did not reply immediately after reading it through, since I wanted to hear Engels’s opinion, and so I sent him the manuscript.  A long time passed before I got it back.

(4) Marx—Kugelmann Correspondence

(4) Marx, 12 Dec 1868 wrote:

I am also returning Dietzgen’s portrait.  The story of his life is not quite what I had imagined it to be, although I always had a feeling that he was “not a worker like [Marx’s fellow refugee, the tailor] Eccarius”.It is true that the sort of philosophic outlook which he has worked out for himself requires a certain amount of peace and leisure which the everyday workman does not enjoy.

[Emphases and mid-paragraph breaks added.]RL, you assert “it is quite clear that Dietzgen had studied Hegel.”  But that was not clear to Marx and Engels in their 1868 correspondence.Marx and Engels agree on estimating the worth of Dietzgen’s manuscript (2).  They regarded much of it as “entirely his own independent achievement” (where not obviously dependent on Feuerbach or Capital).They both concluded that it was an achievement, probably independent of Hegel, whose characteristic signature was for these fellow Hegelian students quite unmistakable, since they both considered themselves proficient in Hegel to be able detect the source of any Hegelian borrowings, and apparently neither of them could.That’s what impressed them!Context of 1882(5) Marx—Engels Correspondence

(5) Marx, 5 Jan 1882, wrote:

You will see from the enclosed letter from Dietzgen that the unhappy fellow has ‘progressed’ backward and ‘safely’ arrived at Phänomenologie.  I regard the case as an incurable one.

For Marx, the Phänomenologie was “the true birthplace and secret of the Hegelian philosophy” [Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844], and Dietzgen had finally arrived where Marx departed 40 years ago.This, of course, fully justified to Marx’s satisfaction his earlier assessment of Dietzgen, and confirmed his caution over bestowing upon Dietzgen’s works the intellectual enthusiasm he bestowed upon Sieber’s précis [Rosa Lichtenstein #135] or that Engels was soon to bestow upon Morgan’s Ancient Society.

[twc]

That first tag should read “quote” and not “qvote”.

[twc]

Rosa, here’s how to indent quotations of TEXT for NAME:  [qvote=NAME]       TEXT [/quote] That produces

NAME wrote:

TEXT

[twc]

Reinstating Omitted References(1) Marx–Engels Correspondence

(1) Marx, 7 Nov 1868, wrote:

I regard Dietzgen’s development, in so far as Feuerbach, etc. — in short, his sources — are not obvious, as entirely his own independent achievement.  For the rest, I agree with everything you say.  I will say something to him about the repetitions [i.e., in agreement with Engels-to-Marx of 10 Oct 1878].It is bad luck for him that it is precisely Hegel that he has not studied.

(2) Capital Vol. 1 — Afterword to the Second German Edition

(2) Marx, 24 Jan 1873, wrote:

The fact that the movement of capitalist society is full of contradictions impresses itself most strikingly on the practical bourgeois in the changes of the periodic cycle through which modern industry passes, the summit of which is the general crisis.That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet it is only in its preliminary stages, and by the universality of its field of action and the intensity of its impact it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the upstarts in charge of the new Holy Prussian–German Empire.

[Emphases and mid-paragraph breaks added.]

[twc]

System of Idealised Entities

(1) Wikipedia, on Sorel, wrote:

Sorel dismissed science as “a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like — fictions compounded out of observed uniformities … deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and … control parts of it.”

Correct, but incomplete.Pannekoek embraces this methodology

Quote:

of building abstract deterministic scientific theory by abstract categorization of concrete processes.For him, abstract determinism redeems scientific theory from “fiction” and turns it into the only reliable means we have of comprehending the concrete world.DeterminismMarx is the first scientist to build a base–superstructure science that consciously sets out to demonstrate the concrete reality of abstract determinism.Marx undertakes to comprehend our conceptions of conceptions.He seeks to comprehend the social world, in which both concrete reality and our conceptions of it have social origins, whereas physicists seek to comprehend the physical world, in which only our conceptions of concrete reality have social origins.For Marx, the materialist conception of history is the abstract foundation of a concrete determinism.  The Socialist Party’s Object is a consequence of that determinism.Abstract Social EntitiesTo clarify Sorel’s dismissive claim

Quote:

, let’s modify it to describe, not theoretical physics, but Marx’s Capital:Marx’s Capital is “a system of idealized entities — commodity, value, money, capital, exploitation, interest, rent, profit and the like — fictions compounded out of observed uniformities … deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and … control parts of it”.Add marxian determinism of the materialist conception of history, and we can live with this Sorellian synopsis.We defer further consideration of Capital, except to reiterate that Marx sought to discover the concrete social basis of such Sorellian “idealised entities” as money and capital, that are socially born and socially conceived.Concrete DeterminismSorel knows abstract determinism, but feigns ignorance of concrete determinism.Yet, as civil engineer, Sorel must have relied on his comprehension of abstract theoretical-physics determinism for the concrete determinism of his structures.  How competent then was his civil engineering?For Sorel, abstract determinism is a “fiction”, while concrete determinism is philosophical nonsense.How does one counter that?  Not philosophically.Sorel lived through the invention of wireless, aircraft, X-radiography, automobiles, movies, phonograph, and the electric light bulb, and the social change that trailed deterministically in the wake of these astonishing socially-disruptive technologies.He must have recognized that all these inventions relied, like his civil engineering structures, on the concrete determinism of those abstract “idealised entities” of his quote (1):  atoms, electric charges, mass m and energy E.Could he have ever imagined the implications of the determinism lurking in those innocuous “idealised entities” E and m, as expressed in 1905,       E = mc² that unifies two of them?

[twc]

I intend to give an account of dialectics here. What I just inadvertently posted was a working draft that I merely wanted to test out for presentation purposes to see if it would lay out sensibly.The final content will come when the draft is complete, and no sooner.So those who treat dialectics with utter, often violent, contempt are warned.

[twc]

Then practice it.You proclaim to show scientists how to conduct their science through the unity of Schaffian knowledge and Schaffian interaction.You joined this forum to demonstrate how.  You now have the opportunity.Scientists learn by studying paradigm examples [Kuhn], or problems whose solution is worthy of emulation.  This is just the exemplary process you need to fulfill your task.Scientists, like all of us, learn by emulating and contemplating the practice of a skilled craftsperson at work on a difficult task we deem important.For scientists, such training resolves into solving the discipline’s seminal scientific problems of the past, through concrete practice [e.g., by repeating key experiments] and through abstract practice [e.g., by deriving fundamental theoretical results].You have discovered the seminal problem of scientific cognition — how do we unify theory and practice or, in your Schaffian terminolgy, how do we unify knowledge and interaction?At the moment this seminal problem confronts you as a crisis of confidence in Schaffianism itself.You acknowledge that crisis to be:  Schaffian knowledge determines interaction, but Schaffian interaction determines knowledge.Suddenly  —  the genesis of dialectical thought.  Perhaps the resolution of cognitive opposition involves handling cognitive contradiction.Suddenly opposites appear no longer diametrical — they aren’t either black or white.Perhaps Spinoza spoke truly when he observed — all affirmation is [simultaneously] negation.  Maybe opposites interpenetrate [Hegel].I can appreciate this being painfully abhorrent for someone like yourself who was reared on Communist casuistry, and is now admirably determined to free himself from its clutches.But take heart.  Science, as process, grows through crisis [or as Marx and Hegel put it, develops through opposition or contradiction — technically, similar cognitive categories].For Marx, society, the simultaneous subject/process/object of cognition, develops through struggle — class struggle — also a similar cognitive category.All modern scientists — physicists most especially — know unreservedly that science grows through crisis and the resolution of crisis [Hegel’s Aufheben].  Those who work day-in day-out across the interface of theory and practice know this in their scientific bones.Relativity rose out of crisis — velocities added, except that light’s didn’t.Quantum mechanics rose out of crisis — energy [that Pannekoekian ‘human construct’ that fuels your equally one-sided idealistic emphasis] changed smoothly [continuously] except that thermal-radiant energy appeared to come in tiny packets. What is your approach to transcending your own constructed theoretical crisis?  Don’t disappoint.Resolve your “socially constructed ” crisis, or your theory of cognition remains forever incoherent.  Forever contradictory.The scientific community, you would educate, awaits.

[twc]

Unity of Theory and PracticeIn #372, you acknowledge a dilemma for your theory of cognition.In Schaffian terminology, the dilemma is:knowledge [theory] determines interaction [practice],interaction [practice] determines knowledge [theory].You now recognize your cognitive process operates both ways: (1) and (2).I addressed this cognitive issue in #244:  “both (1) and (2) hold in different phases of the same social process.” — Marx’s descent from the concrete to the abstract, and his ascent from the abstract to the concrete.Marx acknowledged his indebtedness precisely here to Hegel.That makes neither Marx nor me a Hegelian — quite the contrary.Just as your labour on behalf of a capitalist public service department — whose IT implementation you esteemed so highly as to choose it to exemplify the essentials of the topic under discussion, human cognition — makes you a supporter of capitalist public service department.Your Schaffian SolutionSo how do you plan to resolve your Schaffian unity of knowledge [theory] and interaction [practice]?Or don’t you plan to resolve it?Are you content to leave your Schaffian “unity of knowledge and interaction” unresolved — pleased for it to remain an empty phrase that mesmerizes all, because you squib explaining it, or because you are incapable of comprehending it?Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

[twc]

Intellectual cowardice!Resolve your dilemma in your own non-dialectical fashion.  But resolve it to save your credibility.[Your insult to Marx is ignorant and contemptible.  You are no marxist.]

[twc]

LBird Repudiates his “No Brainer”Pannekoek’s Science and Society demolition job forces you to admit that your “no brainer” theory-precedes-practice thesis is only partially true, because its antithesis is also true.DialecticsThis is a signature Hegelian problem.Are you capable of resolving thesis and antithesis into a synthesis?Reveal what sort of a dialectician you are.Unity of Theory and PracticeMy challenge to you is to make good in practice what you now posture in theory — the unity of theory and practice.That should not be too difficult for someone intent on dictating to scientists how they should “correctly ” conduct their own scientific theory and practice.Show us how good a scientist you really are.Scientific EducatorHere’s your great chance to demonstrate your scientific educational skills.Hic Rhodus.  Hic Saltus.

[twc]

LBird Disowns his own “No Brainer”

(1) LBird wrote:

This is an incorrect assertion.  I haven't 'expressed the view' that ‘social thought determines social practice’.

Nonsense.  You’ve insisted “a thousand times” that theory precedes practice.

(2) LBird wrote:

The issue of whether ‘theory precedes practice’ or 'practice precedes theory' surely has already been settled to most comrades minds, given the quotes which support the 'theory' position, and the absence of any justification for the 'practice precedes theory' argument?It's a no-brainer, comrades.  Theory precedes practice.  Even the bourgeois thinkers, catching up with Communists, have got that far.

In (1) you disown your own “no brainer” (2).  On your own estimation, you fall behind “even the bourgeois thinkers ”.If you don’t consider social thought determines social practice and theory precedes practice as equivalents, then you must holdtheory isn’t social thoughtpractice isn’t social practiceprecedes isn’t deterministic [in the sense of cause preceding effect], i.e., theory precedes practice for no apparent reason.Which is it?Pannekoek’s Aim is to Refute LBird’s “No Brainer”

(3) LBird wrote:

Selective quoting is no answer.

Selective quoting?  Pannekoek’s entire article for Science and Society was written precisely to refute your idealistic conception of history that “explains the events of history, as caused by the ideas of men” — a determined demolition of your central idealistic thesis that theory precedes practice.Pannekoek’s sole aim was to destroy the idealistic foundation of science (1) that you seek to impose upon the Socialist Party as a “no brainer” — a conception of science you share with “even the bourgeois scientists” (2).Confirmation Bias

(4) LBird wrote:

We can all find parts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dietzgen, Untermann or Pannekoek to support our case.

You must realize I set a trap for you.  You homed in on the gorilla you were looking for, and leapt to the conclusion that the author must be anti-Pannekoek.When you discovered that the author was in fact Pannekoek, your motivated reasoning hunted out any “supportive” quote that settled the case to the satisfaction of your confirmation bias.Disagreeing with Marx and Pannekoek

(5) LBird wrote:

I can even find parts of all of those thinkers that I disagree with.

You sure can.  Most of the time.In #236, you openly rejected the central tenet of Marx’s theory of cognition — the materialist conception of history — by quoting, as you assumed, Marx against his own central cognitive claim.Little did you realize that Pannekoek deliberately wrote his Science and Society article to assert that his own theory of cognition was not invented by him, but was the materialist conception of history — Marx’s theory of cognition.The sole question of agreement is:  Do you agree or disagree with the historical materialist case Pannekoek makes against your idealistic claim that theory precedes practice?That’s what matters. Pannekoek’s Theory of Cognition is the Materialist Conception of History

(5) LBird wrote:

What are your views of the process of cognition of science, in the light of the 20th century advances in human thinking and knowledge?

In so far as 20th century “advances” in human thinking appear to “advance” beyond the materialist conception of history, they actually retreat backwards from it.Twentieth-century critics reject the materialist conception of history as totally discredited on a variety of grounds — as grossly inadequate, as scientifically reductive, as crudely deterministic, as crassly anti-intellectual, and so rightly superseded.Since the materialist conception of history is the foundation of historical materialism, any overhauling of it in the light of 20th century “advances” is ipso facto not historical materialism, but is ipso facto an alternative conception of history that is not Marx’s.Consequently, LBird, who lacks conviction in the materialist conception of history, is not describing Marx’s and Pannekoek’s common theory of cognition.It is important to reiterate that Pannekoek’s article for the peer-reviewed journal Science and Society is the expression of his conviction in the 19th century materialist conception of history as the scientific foundation for comprehending human consciousness.And, if a theory of human consciousness isn’t a theory of human cognition, then the term “cognition” has no comprehensible meaning at all.AnswersHow Many Entities are there in the Process of Cognition?In the deepest cognitive sense, only one — society.  Society is simultaneously subject, process and object.The so-called “interaction” between subject and object is nothing other than the necessary process of social reproduction — the nature-imposed inescapable compulsion for society to continually reproduce itself.Is the Subject an Active Social Entity?In the deepest cognitive sense, the subject is society.In a derived sense, the effective subject, under capitalism, morphs into man’s alienated creation — capital — an abstract [theoretical] social construction that is just as materially real and palpable as Pannekoek’s abstract [theoretical] social construction — energy.Neither capital nor energy is a concrete being.  They are both abstractions from concrete processes, one social and the other physical.Processes and relationships are not concrete.  They are abstractions, and as such form the elements of our abstract cognition.  Abstraction is what cognition does.Our abstract cognition tells the socialist that the abstraction capital truly dominates us and not the concrete objects that temporarily store it, just as surely as it tells the physicist that the abstraction energy dominates physical processes.The possibility of such non-Schaffian comprehension follows directly from Marx’s theory of cognition — the materialist conception of history.  Stunning.Twentieth century thought, try and improve on that 19th century thought, if you can!Does the Object pre-exist the Cognitive Process?Yes, but it also co-exists with it and is created by it.From the this-sidedness of our comprehension [in young Marx’s terminology], concrete objects are mere forms of appearance of our real and palpable abstractions.  They are transitory repositories of our permanent abstractions of social and physical processes: e.g., of capital and energy.We cognize the world by universalizing the individual.  Abstract theory is universal and essential, but the concrete actuality it seeks to comprehend is individual and accidental.Hence the this-sided illusion that theory precedes action because theory has relative independence and autonomy, but is nevertheless ultimately subservient to the world it comprehends.  That is Marx turning Hegel upside down, or right side up.It is not truth that changes but theory.Does twc Agree with Lenin?No.  Like many world socialists, we never ever came under his influence.But you can see from how the materialist conception of history comprehends the world by abstraction [as does science] that naive or sophisticated comprehension of concrete objects, á la Lenin or Schaff, plays a minor role in cognition.Has twc 'Personalised' the Issue of Cognition?You personalized this thread from its inception.  You came here on a crusade to educate the Party into adopting democratic control of scientific thought.Since, for you, cognition is scientific thought, you sought the Party to endorse monitoring and controlling human cognition per se.I let you continue, without intervention, for over 100 posts through many weeks, because your target idea seemed totally inconceivable to other posters, and so remained innocuous enough.But when Party members started signing up, unconsciously, to your target scheme, I immediately stated my opposition to it by calling a spade a spade, and denouncing your target scheme as socialist thought policing.You took personal umbrage, and refused point blank to talk to me.Since then you’ve written hundreds of posts trying to lure people into endorsing your, apparently innocuous, target scheme.Thought policing is far more dangerous for socialism than Bakunin’s smash the state, Bernstein’s reformist revisionism, Lenin’s Bolshevism, Pannekoek’s council communism and Sraffa’s physicalism.  These only tell us how to achieve socialism.You tell us how to run it!It is naive not to expect resistance to a policy of determined censorship and shackling of human thought.Thought is marxian superstructure.  Thought is subversive, and will burst all censorship imposed upon it and all shackles that conflict with the marxian base.That is marxian negation of the negation.If a socialist base can only be defended by shackling human thought, it is not worth human defending.  That is, and always has been, for over a century, the Party’s unique position on achieving and maintaining socialism!

[twc]

LBird wrote:

I can't find any link within your post, twc.

http://libcom.org/library/society-mind-marxian-philosophy-anton-pannekoek

[twc]

This pre-War article, written before Schaff and Lakatos, explains the social content of cognition.  Its author takes the view that social practice determines social thought in direct opposition to the view you express here that social thought determines social practice.  This article [abridged and slightly modified] is relevant to the current thread.Do you have any comment to make on it?What determines the activity of mankind?The idealistic conception of history explains the events of history, as caused by the ideas of men.  This is wrong, in that it confuses the general abstract formula with a special concrete meaning.  It omits the real problem, the origin of these ideas.The materialist conception of history explains these ideas as caused by the social needs arising from the conditions of the existing system of production.The manner in which mankind earns its living, i.e., the economic organization of production, places each individual in determinate relations with every other, so determining his/her thinking and feeling.Mankind, like any living organism, has needs that must be satisfied as conditional to its existence, and is surrounded by nature that provides the means to satisfy those needs.Our needs and the impressions of the surrounding world are the impulses, the stimuli, to which our actions are the responses.  Needs, as directly felt, and the surrounding world, as observed through the senses, work upon the mind, produce thoughts, ideas and aims, stimulate the will and put the body in action.We demonstrate the actual historical truth of these principles by showing the chain of cause and effect of past events which proceeds from economic needs to new ideas, from new ideas to social action, from social action to new institutions, and from new institutions to new economic systems.Both original cause and final effect are economic, and so we may reduce the actual process to a short formula by omitting the intermediate terms which involve the activity of the human mind.The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world, which is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable.New ideas thus appear to arise from two sources: present reality; and the system of ideas transmitted from the past, which also have their origin in the real world under social conditions — what may be termed the social memory, the perpetuation of collective ideas, systematized in the form of prevailing beliefs, and transferred to future generations in oral communications, in books, in literature, in art and in education.As forces in modern social development, these traditional ideas persist after their material roots have disappeared, and hamper the spread of new ideas that express new necessities — they lag behind the development of society.These necessities when too strongly in contradiction with the old institutions, lead to explosions, to revolutionary transformations, by which lagging minds are drawn along and are themselves revolutionized.

[twc]

Just looked up Burt in Wikipedia.  His defenders continue to dispute deliberate fraud, thereby disproving my claim that Burt's outing-as-a-fraud delivered a fatal blow to his ideas on the heritability of IQ — a perennial topic of perpetual fascination to the bourgeois mind, since they can rely on it to 'scientifically' legitimize their natural superiority.The wider implications of the Burt Affair appear in the Wikipedia article's conclusion:"In the broader sense, science, in general, and behavior genetics, in particular, were profoundly harmed by the Burt Affair, leading to an unjustified general rejection of genetic studies of intelligence and a drying up of funding for such studies."The whiff of scientific fraud is disastrous to the scientific enterprise that conducts it.  If only it were equally disastrous to those political enterprises that conduct it.

[Author]

Posts