Young Master Smeet
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Young mistress Luxemburg,I'm afraid I haven't (and nor am i going to) read every post in this long running discussion. however, the post you link to does not, I'm afraid, definitively deal with the matter. You simply state that you disagree with Marx' asserveration "The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner" Marx could simply have been wrong, or, as you suggest may be being Ironic. But that sentence is equally capable of being read with the stress being on 'comprehensive' Many thinkers had a crack at steam engines before Boulton and Watt, but they produced the definitive design that make the buggers workable. The point remains, though, that Chucky-bum's dialectic cannot be that distinct from hegels, since they share elementary form, per my football anaology.
ISTR Kautsky argued that Charlie never used the phrase DoP in a published work (tangent, I know, but it is thus a good example of the time when we need to weight published/unpublished). Now,
Charlie wrote:Hegel’s dialectic is the basic form of all dialecticThis could be a translation problem, this can be read in two subtly different ways:Hegel discovered/created/found the basic dialectic, his is the standard.His dialectic was the one that pre-existed him, he used the basic method.Given as he says in the postface
Carlos wrote:The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.it's the former. It's a bit like saying that a footballers style of play is the basic form, when stripped of her pre-match rituals (crossing herself, folding her kit, etc.). It's still football if Marx plays the same game without the mystical trappings.I explicitly explained how my quote from Fred could give us an insight into Charlie's thunks.
Quote:However now Mr Cobb may now be unable to meet the racial purity benchmark he set to settle in his own town after the tests showed he was 14 per cent sub-Saharan African.Bwahahahaah!
Quote:Same with my suggested rule (which isn't mine, anyway; it is used in the Arts all the time) that published work takes precedence over unpublished material when it comes to ascertaining an author's views.It's not an unreasonable rule of thumb, a published work can be presumed to be more carefully worded. However, where there is a lack of clarity in the published works, private corresponendence can provide supplementary evidence (or can be used to show how the published version was arrived at). In this case, the private work might well say cover slightly different ground.
1) I'm not sure that published sources should always take precedence over unpublished, except in assessing what the author's public position was (as in discussion of the question of 'Dictatorship of the proletariat' which pretty much only occurs in letters). In this case we're looking at what Charlie might have actually thunked about Hegel and his relationship to his methodology. Thuswise, we can, like good historians take a look at Freddie's letter of 1891:
Fred wrote:If you just compare the development of the commodity into capital in Marx with the development from Being to Essence in Hegel, you will get quite a good parallel for the concrete development which results from facts; there you have the abstract construction, in which the most brilliant ideas and often very important transmutations, like that of quality into quantity and vice versa, are reduced to the apparent self-development of one concept from another – one could have manufactured a dozen more of the same kind.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_11_01.htmAnd we're entitled to ask what might have prompted Fred's choice of that example. We can ask (and go no further than asking) whether maybe when Charlie had talked the book over with him that he had made the same point to illustrate the ideas that we know from other correspondence Fred was having a hard time getting a handle on. Now, of course, the choice chould be Fred's on it's own, but we are entitled to put it into the hearsay column.2) The letter was still written after Capital was published, and so does shed some light on Charlie's thinking about it.3)
Young Mistress Luxemburg wrote:In this summary, there is no trace of Hegel whatsoever, and yet he still calls it 'my method' and 'the dialectic method'.Dialectical method. Indeed.
I suggest we take Uncle Charlie at face value:
Chucky wrote:He knows full well that my method of exposition is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist, and Hegel an idealist. Hegel’s dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only after being stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_03_06.htmWhich suggests to anyone who dabbles in English that whilst Chaz was certainly not Hegelian, he clearly understood his method to contain something dialectic.
RL,I'm waiting on that chance that the electrons in my brain will jump into precisely the correct configuration for me to comprehend quantum mechanics without needing to do any work.The method of trying to enter the room by vibrating my molecules through the wall can be refuted, since if it isn't possible it isn't even impractical. A method of truth finding either finds an answer or it doesn't. An impractical method may well produce a true result (we could explode the moon into pure computronium and use it's atom as nanocomputers to do advanced quantum mathematics, that's impractical but possible). I think the word we are both struggling towards is valid.
RL:I could do Quantum mechanics in one minute. Probably.I note, though, that you don't provide any refutation for the dialectical method of two people disagreeing based on experience reconciling their knowledge through discussion.I'm sorry if you feel you've wasted thirty years of your life.
Where we were last time:Rosa accepts the dialecticI quoted:
Schopenhauer wrote:Dialectic, on the other hand, would treat of the intercourse between two rational beings who, because they are rational, ought to think in common, but who, as soon as they cease to agree like two clocks keeping exactly the same time, create a disputation, or intellectual contest. Regarded as purely rational beings, the individuals would, I say, necessarily be in agreement, and their variation springs from the difference essential to individuality; in other words, it is drawn from experience.To which Rosa said:
Lichtenstein wrote:I'm OK with the classical definition of 'dialectic' (connected with argument), although I prefer to avoid it since it creates confusion when I say such things; what I am not Ok with is the metaphysical version of the dialectic many of you seem to have accepted.Now, accepting the dialectical approach described by Schopenhauer means accepting that knowledge is contingent and emergent as part of an ongoing process, which is precisely what the "metaphysical" approach says in it's entirety. Rosa Lichtenstein may have spent 30 years of study on this, but I've spent five minutes in my coffee break this morning, and I get that. This post contains everything you need to know about dialectic. All else is detail.
Arrrrr!!
Quote:I think that's just playing with words, but I understand what you are saying. To draw an analogy, the difference between 'male' and 'female' is essentialist. What you are arguing here is that, while there are differences between different regional groups, those differences are not of fundamental importance.Yes. And no. What I am saying is that the packages that constitute different "regional groups" are not integral. Now, a ham sandwich must contain bread and ham to be a ham sandwich. But whether there is lettuce, the bread is brown or white, whether you use mayonaise or margerine or butter, or (indeed) the type of Ham involved is entirely incidental, it remains a ham sandwich. Just so the historical traits that mark apparent races. They are features that fit together more or less accidentally, with at most the glue of history putting them together.
Quote:I would add that tribal identification is a human impulse and any attempt to integrate different peoples together on a large scale can only be harmful and result in strife.Peasants were turned into Frenchmen, as the book put it, quite well.
Quote:That's just a reference to the scaleability of the methodology and doesn't refute the notion there are races (or meta-groupings) among human beings. The general point that comes out of the study is that tiny genetic differences are not a refutation of racial categorisation (a point you are now honest enough to acknowledge – good) and that regional and continental differences can be patterned into the genome.It's not about the scaleability of the method, but that increasing interbreeding between formerly distinct geographic areas can jigger it. A similar study, btw, can be done of radioactive isotopes found in bones of the dead: we can trace quite accurately where a human being grew up many thousands of years ago: that doesn't mean that we can categorise people according to radioactvie isotopes. The association is accidental, not essential.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution
Quote:Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?…
Quote:Billy [Connolly] eyed us both, with kindly disapprobation. “I’d like to be a nuisance,” he said. “I want to be a troublemaker, there in the gallery in parliament shouting RUBBISH and PROVE IT.” Who am I to argue with The Great Trickster Connolly? I will never vote and I don’t think you should, either.While he did support 'Humanitarian intervention' in Iraq, he did later regret the decision when the reports of half a million dead started coming in. He struck me as a pretty humane writer.
This seems like a good start:http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/earth-carrying-capacity.htmbasically, every additional mouth to feed is a pair of hands to work: poverty exists because of property distribution and politics, not because of the absolute number of human beings, even if we try not to reach the potential carrying capacity of 40 billion. Indeed, there is a strong argument that you are being robbed. Where countries have low life expectancies, such as Gambia at around 40, you are being deprived of the useful work, knowledge and skills of those people who are dying young. Calls to cut the population are calls to make us all poorer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342
Quote:Spencer Wells explained: "When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns."Dr Haak concurs: "None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history."So: 1) The genetic evidence alone isn't enough, we can only read it as part of a geographic/historic story in which we know otehr facts. 2) The Europeans only came up here 7,500 years ago. JBS Haldane measured the Darwin of humans to be about 70,000 years, so that's one tenth, which is almost an irrelevence in evolutionary terms.
