Marxism and Religion
redflag
Andrew Campkin's News wrote:
>
> Tell me some thing else.
> If I am religious (and I am but that isn't the point) is this in any way
> compatible with holding Marxist views or advocating revolution or hoping for
> workers rule etc?
>
> The only people I have spoken to ventured some BS about a free society after
> the revolution where people can do what they want. This is rubbish.
> Religion seems to be totally incompatible with a materialistic view of the
> world entailed in Marxism. This view is required to get to the point of
> accepting the viability of revolution and a positive outcome. Is there some
> way around this?
> Andrew
You seem already to have made up your mind about the relationship between
Marxism and religion.
Marxian socialism is not concerned with the religious views of people
nor does it involve itself in matters of faith.
Socialist, however, do take issue with religious institutions and leader
that hide behind religion in order to advance a political, economic
or social agendas, particularly if those agendas are intended to perpetuate
the present system of class rule.
--
"Nowadays, atheism is itself *culpa levis*, as compared
with criticism of existing property relations."
Access The People on-line by using our
gopher on the Internet at gopher://gopher.slp.org:7019
Access our web page at http://www.slp.org
William Kaufman
he believes that a truly Christian commonwealth would operate on "socialistic"
principles. You might also check out the writings of the German neo-Marxist Ernst
Bloch, whose concept of "revolutionary hope" is very close to some contemporary
theological ideas. Some other key intersections of socialist and spiritual impulses:
the life and work of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker; the publication Tikkun here
in the United States; the writings and activities of the "liberation theologists" in
the Catholic Church in Latin America over the past quarter century; the kibbutz
movement in Israel; the creative fusion of Buddhist and socialist ideas in the
writings of the American beats of the fifties and the sixites counter-culture; the
writings of Graham Greene, who considered himself both a Marxist and a Catholic; the
writings of Norman Mailer, who considers himself both a free-form spiritualist and a
socialist; the writings of Allen Ginsberg, simultaneously a Buddhist and socialist.
In general, Marxism has criticized the ideological role of organized religion in
legitimating oppressive class social relations--we've all heard of Marx's famour
declaration that religion is "the opiate of the masses." Less often quoted is his
immediately following statement: "Religion is the soul of a soulless world." The
implication here, of course, is that religiosity can also instill a sense of value in
a industrial order that is almost entirely "disenchanted" (Weber's phrase) because of
the relentless commercialization and instrumentalization of all human relationships.
If we recall Kant's formulation of the highest moral principle--to treat all human
beings as ends in themselves and never merely as means--then we can see that the
logic of capitalism, the very essence of the ethos of the marketplace, is to treat
all people merely as means of trade, production, and material accumulation. One need
not belabor the obvious toll this order takes on the human spirit--just as we should
not underestimate the mirror-image depradations engendered by the
atheist/materialist/totalitarian travesties of socialism that have come to power in
this century, which have operated on similarly one-sided materialist assumptions..
The point is that an authentic religious outlook can inspire genuinely
compassionate and progressive impulses and therefore be perfectly conformable to a
democratic socialism, or it can function as an oppressive institutional superstition
and lend itself to oppression and exploitation, just as pseudosocialist bureaucracies
have. In short, religiosity in no more or less inherently inimical to human
liberation than a profession of socialism is--both, in their best variants, profess
high-minded ideals about the destiny and possibilities of human beings. And both, in
their worst variants, become cynical tools of oppression.
Whether Marxism is a materialist doctrine in an absolute philosophical sense is a
matter of debate among Marxists and cannot be definitively answered from Marx's own
writings. But that's a long, complicated topic that one could pursue in future posts.
William Gilders
redflag wrote:
>You seem already to have made up your mind about the relationship between
>Marxism and religion.
>Marxian socialism is not concerned with the religious views of people
>nor does it involve itself in matters of faith.
>Socialist, however, do take issue with religious institutions and leader
>that hide behind religion in order to advance a political, economic
>or social agendas, particularly if those agendas are intended to perpetuate
>the present system of class rule.
????
I find these assertions astonishing! Marx had a great deal to say about
religious belief *itself* as a barrier to human liberation. One of the
requirements of membership in the Communist League (1850) was "Freedom from
all religion" ... and you surely must recall Marx's famous dictum that
religion is "the opium of the people".
How, then, can you assert that Marxian soccialism is unconcerned with
beliefs and faith?
Bill
William Gilders
William Kaufman wrote:
...we've all heard of Marx's famour
>declaration that religion is "the opiate of the masses." Less often >quoted
is his
>immediately following statement: "Religion is the soul of a soulless
>world."
Actually, the line comes BEFORE "It is the opium of the people." Here's the
complete paragraph from the "Introduction" to _Contribution to the Critique
of of Hegel's Philosophy of Right_:
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and
a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Marx continues:
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for
their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their
condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The
criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic critcism of this vale of
tears of which relgion is the halo.
> Whether Marxism is a materialist doctrine in an absolute philosophical
sense is a
>matter of debate among Marxists and cannot be definitively answered from
Marx's own
>writings. But that's a long, complicated topic that one could pursue in
future posts.
Perhaps. But is seems to me that it is far less complicated or
controversial than you make out. It seems fairly clear to me that Marx's
materialism is anti-religious in an ontological sense ... Marx's thought
requires atheism as a starting point.
Bill
Andrew Campkin's News
William Kaufman
on your characterization of Marx's supposed ontological materialism. The whole point
of Marx's approach was to transform traditional abstract metaphysical speculation
into a tool of practical social critique, dragging it down from the heavens, so to
speak. In so doing, however, he expressly prescinded from all metaphysical
ontological speculation as irrelevant at best and as misleading at worst. He was
concerned with the critique of historical forces, not the abstract analysis of
metaphysical forces. Having so prescinded, therefore, he just wasn't playing that
game, and so you will not find anywhere in Marx definitive statements about the
nature of absolute reality--whether it is material, ideal, whatever. Engels did play
those sorts of metaphysical games, but there is no evidence that Marx expressly
endorsed his views on "dialectical materialism" (Engels's term, not Marx's).
Moreover, there is no reason why Marx's historical materialism--that is, the critical
analysis of class and historical forces--cannot and should not be allied to an
explicitly acknowledged value system of some sort, and there is no reason, in turn,
why such a value system cannot be grounded in some sort of spiritual faith.
The nub of the issue is this: pure science is value-free, descriptive rather than
prescirptive. Marx's social and economic analysis aspires to the status of science,
but attains it no more than any other variant of social science, none of which can
ever really meet the standards of true science because of the ethical impossibility
of conducting repeatable, verifiable experiments on human beings to verify
hypotheses. But in addition to its being something closer to critical analysis rather
than science, Marxism is explicitly value-laden and prescriptive--it is a discourse
of "ought" as much as it is a discourse of "is." It therefore embodies a set of
values, whether overtly ackowledged or not: the essential equality and dignity of all
human beings; their right to realize their potential freely; the evil of exploitation
and domination; and so on. These values--any values--can never be legimitated
rationally or scientifically. They are, in effect, a priori assumptions that found
discourse, not the results of discourse. The means by which one legitimates one's
values--socialist or otherwise--do not admit of rational deduction or empirical
verification. Hence, a spiritual or religious approach to undergirding any value
system--including a Marxian or socialist value system--is no more or less legitimate
than any other. (For a brilliantly lucid and rigorous analysis of the contrasting
logic of descriptive and prescriptive statements, see C. S. Lewis's superb little
book The Abolition of Man.)
A.Prianikoff
Andrew Campkin's News wrote in message
<93001439...@totara.its.vuw.ac.nz>...
" Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the
creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of
proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in
our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians
who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating
themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific
world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of
various "Christians". But that does not mean in the least that the religious
question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at
all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really
revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of
third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political
importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of
economic development.
Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now
beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious
strife -- in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the
really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being
solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary
struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces,
which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow
conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly,
consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the
scientific world-outlook -- a preaching alien to any stirring up of
secondary differences.
The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really
private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political
system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and
open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of
the religious humbugging of mankind. "
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
Novaya Zhizn, No. 28,
December 3. 1905
Signed: N. Lenin
Sam Pawlett
<campk...@scs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
>Tell me some thing else.
>If I am religious (and I am but that isn't the point) is this in any way
>compatible with holding Marxist views or advocating revolution or hoping for
>workers rule etc?
>
>The only people I have spoken to ventured some BS about a free society after
>the revolution where people can do what they want. This is rubbish.
>Religion seems to be totally incompatible with a materialistic view of the
>world entailed in Marxism. This view is required to get to the point of
>accepting the viability of revolution and a positive outcome. Is there some
>way around this?
You may want to look at Liberation Theology. Michael Lowy has written
on it.Cornel West has tried to synthesize Marxism with Christianity.
Also the writings of Camilo Torres though he deals with practical
questions like land reform, the state of the class struggle in
Colombia. Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto called for
freedom of religious belief and association. There is a useful
anthology called Marx and Engels on Religion by Progress Pubs.
Myself, i agree with Richard Dawkins that teaching religion to
children is a form of child abuse.
Sam Pawlett
>Andrew
>
>
Hunter H. Watson
Andrew Campkin's News wrote:
> Tell me some thing else.
> If I am religious (and I am but that isn't the point) is this in any way
> compatible with holding Marxist views or advocating revolution or hoping for
> workers rule etc?
>
> The only people I have spoken to ventured some BS about a free society after
> the revolution where people can do what they want. This is rubbish.
> Religion seems to be totally incompatible with a materialistic view of the
> world entailed in Marxism. This view is required to get to the point of
> accepting the viability of revolution and a positive outcome. Is there some
> way around this?
> Andrew
Under Marxist/Leninists religion has been continuously under extreme pressure
throughout the 20th Century. It ranged from the destruction and purposeful
desecration of churches and holy objects to massacres to the Gulag with many
more subtle forms of oppression. It went on for decades. In one form or another
Lenin was perhaps the greatest beast in this sense though his colleague Stalin
continued his policies. There can be no question that Leninism is completely
incompatable with religion. Now, if Trotskyists wish to abandon Lenin. . . . .
HHW
REMEMBER LENIN'S ASSAULT ON THE CHURCH!
Hunter H. Watson
redflag wrote:
> Andrew Campkin's News wrote:
> >
> > Tell me some thing else.
> > If I am religious (and I am but that isn't the point) is this in any way
> > compatible with holding Marxist views or advocating revolution or hoping for
> > workers rule etc?
> >
> > The only people I have spoken to ventured some BS about a free society after
> > the revolution where people can do what they want. This is rubbish.
> > Religion seems to be totally incompatible with a materialistic view of the
> > world entailed in Marxism. This view is required to get to the point of
> > accepting the viability of revolution and a positive outcome. Is there some
> > way around this?
> > Andrew
>
> You seem already to have made up your mind about the relationship between
> Marxism and religion.
> Marxian socialism is not concerned with the religious views of people
> nor does it involve itself in matters of faith.
Perhaps redflag can explain how it is that Marxian socialism is not concerned
with religion but "socialists" are:
> Socialist, however, do take issue with religious institutions and leader
> that hide behind religion in order to advance a political, economic
> or social agendas, particularly if those agendas are intended to perpetuate
> the present system of class rule.
There you are, Andrew, the religious community will not be permitted freedom of
thought or religion. He uses weasel words like "take issue" when he means "purge"
and "repress". He suggests that religious people and leaders are predisposed to
harbor some sort of criminal intent. But you must look at the history to see what
really will happen if these grossly intolerant and violent people take power.
The historian who has given this the most careful study for the early Soviet
period is Richard Pipes. See Chapter 7, "The Assault on Religion" in his "Russia
Under the Bolshevik Regime"
"The Communists attacked religious beliefs and practices with a vehemence not
seen since the days of the Roman Empire. Their aggressive atheism affected the
mass of citizens far more painfully than the suppression of political dissent or
the imposition of censorship. Next to the economic hardships, no action of
Lenin's government brought greater suffering to the population at large, the
so-called 'masses,' than the profanation of its religious beliefs, the closing of
the houses of worship, and the mistreatment of the clergy. Although for reasons
that will be spelled out below, Orthodox Christianity bore the brunt of Communist
persecution, Judaism, Catholocism, and Islam were not spared." The extent to
which they were not spared is hair-raising. Redflag warns you that it will
happen again.
HHW
Hunter H. Watson
William Kaufman wrote:
> You should take a look at C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, in which he explains why
> he believes that a truly Christian commonwealth would operate on "socialistic"
> principles. You might also check out the writings of the German neo-Marxist Ernst
> Bloch, whose concept of "revolutionary hope" is very close to some contemporary
> theological ideas. Some other key intersections of socialist and spiritual impulses:
> the life and work of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker; the publication Tikkun here
> in the United States; the writings and activities of the "liberation theologists" in
> the Catholic Church in Latin America over the past quarter century; the kibbutz
> movement in Israel; the creative fusion of Buddhist and socialist ideas in the
> writings of the American beats of the fifties and the sixites counter-culture; the
> writings of Graham Greene, who considered himself both a Marxist and a Catholic; the
> writings of Norman Mailer, who considers himself both a free-form spiritualist and a
> socialist; the writings of Allen Ginsberg, simultaneously a Buddhist and socialist.
> In general, Marxism has criticized the ideological role of organized religion in
> legitimating oppressive class social relations--we've all heard of Marx's famour
> declaration that religion is "the opiate of the masses." Less often quoted is his
> immediately following statement: "Religion is the soul of a soulless world." The
> implication here, of course, is that religiosity can also instill a sense of value in
> a industrial order that is almost entirely "disenchanted" (Weber's phrase) because of
> the relentless commercialization and instrumentalization of all human relationships.
> If we recall Kant's formulation of the highest moral principle--to treat all human
> beings as ends in themselves and never merely as means--then we can see that the
> logic of capitalism, the very essence of the ethos of the marketplace, is to treat
> all people merely as means of trade, production, and material accumulation. One need
> not belabor the obvious toll this order takes on the human spirit--just as we should
> not underestimate the mirror-image depradations engendered by the
> atheist/materialist/totalitarian travesties of socialism that have come to power in
> this century, which have operated on similarly one-sided materialist assumptions..
> The point is that an authentic religious outlook can inspire genuinely
> compassionate and progressive impulses and therefore be perfectly conformable to a
> democratic socialism, or it can function as an oppressive institutional superstition
> and lend itself to oppression and exploitation, just as pseudosocialist bureaucracies
> have. In short, religiosity in no more or less inherently inimical to human
> liberation than a profession of socialism is--both, in their best variants, profess
> high-minded ideals about the destiny and possibilities of human beings. And both, in
> their worst variants, become cynical tools of oppression.
> Whether Marxism is a materialist doctrine in an absolute philosophical sense is a
> matter of debate among Marxists and cannot be definitively answered from Marx's own
> writings. But that's a long, complicated topic that one could pursue in future posts.
Kaufman too warns you that you that religion will not be free under his regime. It's
subtle and enwrapped in a cloud of high sounding phrases about the compatibility of the
*goals* of socialism and religion. Note, however, that he does not acknowledge the
history, the actual track record of his kind. It is a savage record. He doesn't speak of
actual socialist techniques to be used in the struggle against religion. You owe it to
yourself to read the Chapter about the assault on religion in Pipes' "History of the
Bolshevik Regime". These people, present day Trotskyists for example, *must be defined*
by what their predecessors, in particular Lenin, *did. They refuse to consider revision
of any of the central tenets of the doctrine. Let me close by saying that at pages
350-352 is a long, chilling quote from Lenin himself which can leave no doubt as to
where Leninists actually stand on persecution of religious people. Redflag is more
candid than Kaufman. Neither is anywhere near being fully candid with you.
Hunter H. Watson
Hunter H. Watson
William Gilders wrote:
> redflag wrote:
>
> >You seem already to have made up your mind about the relationship between
> >Marxism and religion.
> >Marxian socialism is not concerned with the religious views of people
> >nor does it involve itself in matters of faith.
> >Socialist, however, do take issue with religious institutions and leader
> >that hide behind religion in order to advance a political, economic
> >or social agendas, particularly if those agendas are intended to perpetuate
> >the present system of class rule.
>
> ????
>
> I find these assertions astonishing! Marx had a great deal to say about
> religious belief *itself* as a barrier to human liberation. One of the
> requirements of membership in the Communist League (1850) was "Freedom from
> all religion" ... and you surely must recall Marx's famous dictum that
> religion is "the opium of the people".
>
> How, then, can you assert that Marxian soccialism is unconcerned with
> beliefs and faith?
>
> Bill
A good point. Kaufman is peddling snake oil. He doesn't want to lose a
potential recruit. But things didn't get really savage on that question until
Lenin took power in Russia.
HHW
Hunter H. Watson
William Gilders wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote:
>
> ...we've all heard of Marx's famour
> >declaration that religion is "the opiate of the masses." Less often >quoted
> is his
> >immediately following statement: "Religion is the soul of a soulless
> >world."
>
> Actually, the line comes BEFORE "It is the opium of the people." Here's the
> complete paragraph from the "Introduction" to _Contribution to the Critique
> of of Hegel's Philosophy of Right_:
>
> Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and
> a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
> creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
> conditions. It is the opium of the people.
>
> Marx continues:
>
> The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for
> their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their
> condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The
> criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic critcism of this vale of
> tears of which relgion is the halo.
>
> > Whether Marxism is a materialist doctrine in an absolute philosophical
> sense is a
> >matter of debate among Marxists and cannot be definitively answered from
> Marx's own
> >writings. But that's a long, complicated topic that one could pursue in
> future posts.
>
> Perhaps. But is seems to me that it is far less complicated or
> controversial than you make out. It seems fairly clear to me that Marx's
> materialism is anti-religious in an ontological sense ... Marx's thought
> requires atheism as a starting point.
But, Bill, you need to remember that the end justifies the means. Kaufman
obviously thinks it is time to deliver some propagandistic fluff to the young
fellow who has dropped bye for a chat. Won't you drive him away if you tell the
truth?
>
>
> Bill
Hunter H. Watson
"A.Prianikoff" wrote:
> Andrew Campkin's News wrote in message
> <93001439...@totara.its.vuw.ac.nz>...
> >Tell me some thing else.
> >If I am religious (and I am but that isn't the point) is this in any way
> >compatible with holding Marxist views or advocating revolution or hoping
> for
> >workers rule etc?
> >
> >The only people I have spoken to ventured some BS about a free society
> after
> >the revolution where people can do what they want. This is rubbish.
> >Religion seems to be totally incompatible with a materialistic view of the
> >world entailed in Marxism. This view is required to get to the point of
> >accepting the viability of revolution and a positive outcome. Is there
> some
> >way around this?
> >Andrew
> >
>
See the long Lenin quote in "Russian Under the Bolshevik Regime" at pp.
350-352. There you will see what Lenin actually means. He means to use murder,
theft, starvation and oppression in the campaign against religion and religious
people in Russia.
Chief Clanger
William Kaufman <kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> The nub of the issue is this: pure science is value-free,
> descriptive rather than prescirptive. Marx's social and economic
> analysis aspires to the status of science, but attains it no more
> than any other variant of social science, none of which can ever
> really meet the standards of true science because of the ethical
> impossibility of conducting repeatable, verifiable experiments on
> human beings to verify hypotheses. But in addition to its being
> something closer to critical analysis rather than science, Marxism is
> explicitly value-laden and prescriptive--it is a discourse of "ought"
> as much as it is a discourse of "is." It therefore embodies a set of
> values, whether overtly ackowledged or not: the essential equality
> and dignity of all human beings; their right to realize their
> potential freely; the evil of exploitation and domination; and so on.
> These values--any values--can never be legimitated rationally or
> scientifically. They are, in effect, a priori assumptions that found
> discourse, not the results of discourse. The means by which one
> legitimates one's values--socialist or otherwise--do not admit of
> rational deduction or empirical verification. Hence, a spiritual or
> religious approach to undergirding any value system--including a
> Marxian or socialist value system--is no more or less legitimate
> than any other. (For a brilliantly lucid and rigorous analysis of the
> contrasting logic of descriptive and prescriptive statements, see C.
> S. Lewis's superb little book The Abolition of Man.)
Kaufman reduces scientific socialism to a moral ideal - it's as if
Hegel never happened - and finishes up by recommending we acquaint
ourselves with an eminent English philosopher of Catholicism.
Hmm.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
William Kaufman
hmmmm, but I acknowledge that they are both useful substitutes for
argumentative cogency. Notice that Clanger, instead of addressing the
substance of my argument, merely gives a distorted summary of it, as though
that constitutes an argument. How nice it must be to be a cult follower,
blessedly free to recite formulas rather than think. While I'm sure that
modus operandi elicits all manner of smug, complacent clucking among his
fellow cultists, it's not likely to impress anyone else.
Now despite Clanger's touching faith that philosophy or the human
sciences progress in the same manner as the hard sciences, there is a
touching naivete in this belief that happens to be almost psychotically out
of touch with reality. His remark "It's as if Hegel never happened"
presupposes that Hegel's writings constituted some sort of unassailable
watershed in the progress of human thought comparable to Newton or
Einstein. But the whole point I made in the paragraph he excerpts is that
the human sciences--by their very nature, being precluded by ethical
considerations from engaging systematic experimentation on their subjects,
human beings--can never even begin to approximate the scientificity of
physics or chemistry. The very term "social science" is a pretentious
misnomer, since there is nothing scientific about any school of the human
sciences, and that includes psychology (whether behaviorist or humanist or
Freudian or whatever), sociology, anthropology, and so on, in their
mainstream or marginal variants. In the hard sciences, once can
definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis--in the human sciences one
cannot. What you end up with is a form of more or less rational conjecture
or analysis tricked up in this or that strain of portentous Latinate
jargon. There are never-ending cycles of competing schools and systems,
none any more provable than the other. And as for Hegel as a hallmark in
the progress of scientific thought? He is regarded without outright
contempt and ridicule as an antique obscurantist by the most advanced
philosophers of science; he is, however, widely admired and embraced by
those neo-Marxist thinkers with the most evolved and sophisticated
understanding of the nature and function of the human sciences precisely
for the ethical dimension of his thought, rather than its creaky, archaic
apparatus of pseudoscience.
Since he is ill-equipped by theoretical training and intellectual
capacity to do so (this empty-headed, pretentious twit Clanger even
laughably misidentifies C. S. Lewis as a Catholic, thereby further
certifying his intellectual fraudulence), Clanger does not challenge my
assertion that Marxism does not emulate the value-free ideal of the hard
sciences but is rather suffused with all manner of value-laden
presuppositions, as indeed are all the so-called human "sciences," even the
mainstream academic variants that profess to be value-free (they simply
conceal their apologist, pro-bourgeois agenda behind a theoretical
reification of existing social relations as some sort of ultimate,
unchangeable "datum"). The most advanced thinking about these immanent
ethical implications of the Marxist tradition nowadays is to be found in
the work of Karl-Otto Appel and Jurgen Habermas, thinkers who have come to
recognized that the most fruitful Hegelian heritage of Marxism is precisely
its ability to counterpose rationally deduced humane values to the arid,
value-free wasteland of contemporary mainstream bourgeois social science.
But these are theoretical refinements and explorations that are clearly
beyond the ken of a lapdog cultist like Flude, whose Marxist education--on
the evidence of the kinds of materials he quotes on this list--seems to
have frozen somewhere around the year 1924. In case he would care to begin
updating himself on trends in contemporary Marxist thought--the very
Marxism he and his group have explicity disavowed while he bizarrely
rebukes others for insufficient Marxist orthodoxy!--he might try
acquainting himself with some of the following authors: Lukacs, Gramsci,
Adorno, Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Appel, Habermas. And for a bit of
background in the evolution of the self-understanding of the human
sciences--outside the hermetically sealed, parochial confines of Marxist
and ex-Marxist cultism, that is--he might read some Weber and Dilthey. In
short, he might consider gaining an elementary education in certain areas
before he further embarrasses himself by attempting to comment upon them.
Hunter H. Watson
William Kaufman wrote:
> Of Clanger's patented rhetorical devices, I much prefer zzzzzzzzzzzz to
> hmmmm, but I acknowledge that they are both useful substitutes for
> argumentative cogency. Notice that Clanger, instead of addressing the
> substance of my argument, merely gives a distorted summary of it, as though
> that constitutes an argument. How nice it must be to be a cult follower,
> blessedly free to recite formulas rather than think. While I'm sure that
> modus operandi elicits all manner of smug, complacent clucking among his
> fellow cultists, it's not likely to impress anyone else.
Get on with it Kaufman. This is nothing but pompous clucking.
>
> Now despite Clanger's touching faith that philosophy or the human
> sciences progress in the same manner as the hard sciences, there is a
> touching naivete in this belief that happens to be almost psychotically out
> of touch with reality. His remark "It's as if Hegel never happened"
> presupposes that Hegel's writings constituted some sort of unassailable
> watershed in the progress of human thought comparable to Newton or
> Einstein.
Cluck, cluck, cluck.
> But the whole point I made in the paragraph he excerpts is that
> the human sciences--by their very nature, being precluded by ethical
> considerations from engaging systematic experimentation on their subjects,
> human beings--can never even begin to approximate the scientificity of
> physics or chemistry. The very term "social science" is a pretentious
> misnomer, since there is nothing scientific about any school of the human
> sciences, and that includes psychology (whether behaviorist or humanist or
> Freudian or whatever), sociology, anthropology, and so on, in their
> mainstream or marginal variants.
It was you, Kaufman, who used the respectable term "social sciences" and it
was you who then puffed up historical materialism/dialectical materialism by
identifying them with the social sciences. I explained that obvious mixing of
apples and oranges to you. Now you back away, switch your terminology to
"human sciences" and denigrate them further by saying there is "nothing
scientific" about them in order to still have some opportunity to pretend that
their residual dignity as respectable disciplines may rub off on your Marxian
cant. It won't. You are a religionist, a mystic, a theologian.
> In the hard sciences, once can
> definitively prove or disprove a hypothesis--in the human sciences one
> cannot. What you end up with is a form of more or less rational conjecture
> or analysis tricked up in this or that strain of portentous Latinate
> jargon. There are never-ending cycles of competing schools and systems,
> none any more provable than the other. And as for Hegel as a hallmark in
> the progress of scientific thought? He is regarded without outright
> contempt and ridicule as an antique obscurantist by the most advanced
> philosophers of science; he is, however, widely admired and embraced by
> those neo-Marxist thinkers with the most evolved and sophisticated
> understanding of the nature and function of the human sciences precisely
> for the ethical dimension of his thought, rather than its creaky, archaic
> apparatus of pseudoscience.
Hegel, the most significant single source for the dialectical concepts and
philosophy of history which came to be associated with Marx, is "regarded ....
as an antique obscurantist by the most advanced philosophers of science."
>
> Since he is ill-equipped by theoretical training and intellectual
> capacity to do so (this empty-headed, pretentious twit Clanger even
> laughably misidentifies C. S. Lewis as a Catholic, thereby further
> certifying his intellectual fraudulence), Clanger does not challenge my
> assertion that Marxism does not emulate the value-free ideal of the hard
> sciences but is rather suffused with all manner of value-laden
> presuppositions, as indeed are all the so-called human "sciences," even the
> mainstream academic variants that profess to be value-free (they simply
> conceal their apologist, pro-bourgeois agenda behind a theoretical
> reification of existing social relations as some sort of ultimate,
> unchangeable "datum").
I challenge it. I did so in the previous post which is reflected in some of
your wriggling about here. Marxism is certainly suffused with value-laden
presuppositions, proletarian dictatorship and historical materialism for
example, but unlike the transient conventions found in the academic social
sciences they do not change appreciably. The Marxist faithful, like adherents
to any revealed religion, fear, hate and resist new hypotheses. They have a
history of murdering people who seem willing to entertain them. As to the
genuine social sciences, there is plenty of flexibility. They have even been
free enough to welcome a constant stream of Marxists academics into their
ranks.
> The most advanced thinking about these immanent
> ethical implications of the Marxist tradition nowadays is to be found in
> the work of Karl-Otto Appel and Jurgen Habermas, thinkers who have come to
> recognized that the most fruitful Hegelian heritage of Marxism is precisely
> its ability to counterpose rationally deduced humane values to the arid,
> value-free wasteland of contemporary mainstream bourgeois social science.
First you accuse the social sciences of toadying to and fronting for the
hated bourgeois power structure yet here you describe the social sciences as
so value-free as to have succumbed to "aridity". I'm gradually coming to the
conclusion that for all your name dropping and ostentatious displays of
erudition, Kaufman, that you are unable to handle the information. You don't
display the requisite discipline. Tell us. Are you an academic? Are you a
professional scholar? Or can we think more in terms of a theologian?
>
> But these are theoretical refinements and explorations that are clearly
> beyond the ken of a lapdog cultist like Flude, whose Marxist education--on
> the evidence of the kinds of materials he quotes on this list--seems to
> have frozen somewhere around the year 1924.
What's the difference in an environment which doesn't change? The Catholocism
of 1924 is perfectly recognizable by the faithful today, just as is Marxism.
> In case he would care to begin
> updating himself on trends in contemporary Marxist thought--the very
> Marxism he and his group have explicity disavowed while he bizarrely
> rebukes others for insufficient Marxist orthodoxy!--he might try
> acquainting himself with some of the following authors: Lukacs, Gramsci,
> Adorno, Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Appel, Habermas.
What a stuffed shirt you are Kaufman. The purpose of the books is their
contents not the names of their authors.
> And for a bit of
> background in the evolution of the self-understanding of the human
> sciences--
A few lines above you called them the "bourgeois social sciences".
> outside the hermetically sealed, parochial confines of Marxist
> and ex-Marxist cultism, that is--he might read some Weber and Dilthey. In
> short, he might consider gaining an elementary education in certain areas
> before he further embarrasses himself by attempting to comment upon them.
Nothing changes, Kaufman. You're wasting your time. Worse, you are wasting our
time.
>
>
> Chief Clanger wrote:
> >
> > Kaufman reduces scientific socialism to a moral ideal - it's as if
> > Hegel never happened - and finishes up by recommending we acquaint
> > ourselves with an eminent English philosopher of Catholicism.
And as for you, Clanger, it ain't social science, it ain't human science, it
ain't a fount of ethics. It's intolerant, violent revolutionary politics and
it's failed at that.
However, your sect must have something going for it. You're no stuffed shirt.
HHW
Andrew Campkin's News
Hunter H. Watson
Andrew Campkin's News wrote:
> So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
Marxist regimes have never been completely able to stamp it out but they
have everywhere tried at minimum to discourage it and in very many
places made it the subject of consistent pogrom-like pressure and
expropriations. They murdered thousands of priests and faithful for
their beliefs.
Snake oil salesmen like William Kaufman will make vague arguments which
might lead you to believe that Marxism is capable of religious
tolerance. The history is to the contrary. I follow the history. I would
not have wanted to have been an Orthodox Priest or Jewish Rabbi in
Lenin's Russia.
H.W.
Sturgeoman
>So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
MArx have had it do so, but it doesn't HAVE to exclude religion.
For Your Musical and Political Needs: http://www.angelfire.com/fl2/stak
... if it [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of
injustice to another, then I say, break the law.
- Thoreau
Sturgeoman
>MArx have had it do so, but it doesn't HAVE to exclude religion.
>
William Kaufman
it were some unitary, monolithic phenomenon, when, in fact--like every other
religion (yes, the more orthodox forms of Marxism function in many respects like
a religion for their followers, complete with holy books and obligatory rituals
and tithes)--Marxism is a multifarious worldwide phenomenon with about as many
interpretations and variants as there are self-designated Marxists. So it's a
bit like asking, "Do Chrisitans favor abortion?" The obvious response would be a
follow-up: Which denomination of Christians are you talking about? The case here
is similar: Which denomination of Marxism are you talking about? There are
billions and billions of them.
Andrew Campkin's News wrote:
Hunter H. Watson
Sturgeoman wrote:
> >
> >So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
>
> MArx have had it do so, but it doesn't HAVE to exclude religion.
Since when have the teachings of Marx been tossed out by the faithful? This is a
religion.
Justin Powers
hwa...@portup.com wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote:
> > Now despite Clanger's touching faith that philosophy or the
> > human sciences progress in the same manner as the hard sciences,
> > there is a touching naivete in this belief that happens to be
> > almost psychotically out of touch with reality. His remark "It's as
> > if Hegel never happened" presupposes that Hegel's writings
> > constituted some sort of unassailable watershed in the progress of
> > human thought comparable to Newton or Einstein.
>
> Cluck, cluck, cluck.
"Cluck" - I like that. I've been trying to form a picture of Kaufman
from his postings, and this allusion is perfect - the self-appointed
rooster of the APST coop, strutting around with those characteristic
jerky movements, pausing only to peck unsuccessfully at some piece of
dirt on the ground - cluck cluck peck cluck flap cluck - incapable of
flight, and like Chicken Little convinced that the sky is about to fall
in.
> And as for you, Clanger, it ain't social science, it ain't human
> science, it ain't a fount of ethics. It's intolerant, violent
> revolutionary politics and it's failed at that.
> However, your sect must have something going for it. You're no
> stuffed shirt.
Kaufman's viewpoint takes Marxism back to the days of Kant,
counterposing subject ("social science") to object ("society") and
making a virtue of their separation. Inevitably he ends up reducing
socialism to a moral ideal, ie. a Kantian "categorial imperative". For
all his bombastic assertion, he doesn't seem to understand the basics.
=================================================
http://www.informinc.co.uk
"LM - the mag for men and women who eat roast chicken"
Justin Powers
kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> Since he is ill-equipped by theoretical training and intellectual
> capacity to do so (this empty-headed, pretentious twit Clanger even
> laughably misidentifies C. S. Lewis as a Catholic, thereby further
> certifying his intellectual fraudulence),
Have a look at http://www.cslewis.org/ you "pretentious twit".
William Gilders
Andrew Campkin:
>So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
In my opinion, philosophically, it does. Marx was emphatic about the fact
that religion played no progressive role in bourgeois society.
In his essay, "On the Jewish Question", commenting on the inadequacy of the
liberties won by bourgeois revolutions such as the American War of
Independence:
***
But the liberty of egoistic man, and the recognition of this liberty, is
rather the recognition of the frenzied movement of the cultural and material
elements which form the content of his life.
Thus man was not liberated from religion; he recieved religious liberty. He
was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property.
He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to
engage in business.
***
In the same year as he wrote the above, Marx penned a lengthy discussion on
"critticism of religion" in the "Introduction" to his _Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right_
... I won't give you the whole thing (you can find it in, for example, _The
Marx-Engels Reader_, ed. Robert C. Tucker), but will give you the
now-classic statement by Marx from this essay:
***
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and
a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for
their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their
condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The
criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of
tears of which religion is the halo.
***
The "Statutes of the Communist League", drafted in 1850 under the
supervisioon of Marx and Engels, include among conditions for membership,
the following:
"Freedom from all religion, practical renunciation of every churchly
association and all ceremonies not ordered by civil law."
***
It seems fauirly clear to me that Marx and Engels understood religious ideas
to be part of the "superstructure" that grew up on the basis of relations of
production and the attendant class struggle. It could either support the
struggles of the oppressed (as, for example, the religious ideology of the
peasant revolts of the 16th century) or the ideology of the oppressor (i.e.
notions of "the divine right of kings"), but was ALWAYS a human creation,
andd not an expression of any spiritual reality beyond the world of human
relations.
Clearly, Marx believed that genuine human progress required freedom from
religious illusion and a committment to the struggle in the here and now.
That having been said, when the workers' movement began to grow and mass
parties were built, Marx did not oppose membership by workers who still
believed in religion, nor did any of his later supporters. Still, he, and
they, believed that the ideological core of a party had to be atheistic, and
that such atheism needed to be reflected in public policy ... such things as
separation of church and state ... as much as this is ignored in the modern
United States, the philosophical basis of keeping the state out of the
church and the church out of the state is the assumption that there is no
god who demands a specific social order on earth ... a frank denial of what
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have taught.
Bill
Sturgeoman
>Since when have the teachings of Marx been tossed out by the faithful? This
>is a
>religion.
Of course they haven't been tossed out. But blind worship of the founder of
your religion can have negative affects. The ideal Marxist environment truly
WOULD have no religion. A society couldn't get to that point without offering
freedom of choice first, however. Over time, religion would seep out of the
culture. When this happened, the entire question of whether or not religion is
permissable would be meaningless. Seems like we both win.
-Adam Frumkin-Sokolow
William Gilders
Justin Powers wrote:
>Have a look at http://www.cslewis.org/ you "pretentious twit".
What was this supposed to prove? I went to the web-site. It gives all the
standard information on Lewis, and nowhere claims he was a Catholic ... i.e.
Roman Catholic (Church of Rome), which is what Kaufman understood you to be
claiming.
Lewis was an Anglican. Anglicans are "Catholic" in the sense that they
claim to be part of the the "one, Holy, Catholic Church" ... which is not
the same as being a member of the Roman Catholic Church (Church of Rome, in
communion with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome).
In normal conversation, the label "Catholic" indicates someone as a member
of the Roman Catholic Church. Lewis was not. Hence your error.
Care to retract?
Bill
Hunter H. Watson
Justin Powers wrote:
> In article <37717D71...@portup.com>,
> hwa...@portup.com wrote:
> > William Kaufman wrote:
> > > Now despite Clanger's touching faith that philosophy or the
> > > human sciences progress in the same manner as the hard sciences,
> > > there is a touching naivete in this belief that happens to be
> > > almost psychotically out of touch with reality. His remark "It's as
> > > if Hegel never happened" presupposes that Hegel's writings
> > > constituted some sort of unassailable watershed in the progress of
> > > human thought comparable to Newton or Einstein.
> >
> > Cluck, cluck, cluck.
>
> "Cluck" - I like that. I've been trying to form a picture of Kaufman
> from his postings, and this allusion is perfect - the self-appointed
> rooster of the APST coop, strutting around with those characteristic
> jerky movements, pausing only to peck unsuccessfully at some piece of
> dirt on the ground - cluck cluck peck cluck flap cluck - incapable of
> flight, and like Chicken Little convinced that the sky is about to fall
> in.
LOL
> > And as for you, Clanger, it ain't social science, it ain't human
> > science, it ain't a fount of ethics. It's intolerant, violent
> > revolutionary politics and it's failed at that.
> > However, your sect must have something going for it. You're no
> > stuffed shirt.
>
> Kaufman's viewpoint takes Marxism back to the days of Kant,
> counterposing subject ("social science") to object ("society") and
> making a virtue of their separation. Inevitably he ends up reducing
> socialism to a moral ideal, ie. a Kantian "categorial imperative". For
> all his bombastic assertion, he doesn't seem to understand the basics.
You know I don't pose as an expert as to the present state of the theory,
but one thing is certain about Kaufman. Interspersed among the endless
strings of dropped authors' names are confusions and contradictions which
would be fatal in any faculty lounge.
>
>
> =================================================
> http://www.informinc.co.uk
> "LM - the mag for men and women who eat roast chicken"
for lunch.
Hunter H. Watson
Justin Powers wrote:
> In article <3771357D...@earthlink.net>,
> kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> > Since he is ill-equipped by theoretical training and intellectual
> > capacity to do so (this empty-headed, pretentious twit Clanger even
> > laughably misidentifies C. S. Lewis as a Catholic, thereby further
> > certifying his intellectual fraudulence),
>
> Have a look at http://www.cslewis.org/ you "pretentious twit".
AWWWW, you've done it already? I had plans for that one.
Pretty funny, eh?
Justin Powers
"William Gilders" <gil...@netcom.ca> wrote:
> all the standard information on Lewis, and nowhere claims he was a
> Catholic ... i.e. Roman Catholic (Church of Rome), which is what
> Kaufman understood you to be claiming.
>
> Lewis was an Anglican. Anglicans are "Catholic" in the sense that
> they claim to be part of the the "one, Holy, Catholic Church" ...
> which is not the same as being a member of the Roman Catholic Church
> (Church of Rome, in communion with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome).
Steady, Bill. Us Brits who've taken an interest in the affairs of
Ireland don't need a primer on the subject :)
> In normal conversation, the label "Catholic" indicates someone as a
> member of the Roman Catholic Church. Lewis was not. Hence your
> error.
>
> Care to retract?
Consider it done. I incorrectly remembered Lewis as a Catholic,
possibly confused because he was a great pal of Tolkien, who was indeed
a Papist.
I think the point is that whatever brand of Christianity he adhered to,
it's difficult to see why Kaufman thinks his moral philosophy has
anything to teach Marxists. On the other hand, his history of romantic
love could well teach the modern-day left a thing or two, especially
when they claim that it's "all in the genes".
Hunter H. Watson
Sturgeoman wrote:
> >
> >Since when have the teachings of Marx been tossed out by the faithful? This
> >is a
> >religion.
>
> Of course they haven't been tossed out. But blind worship of the founder of
> your religion can have negative affects. The ideal Marxist environment truly
> WOULD have no religion. A society couldn't get to that point without offering
> freedom of choice first, however. Over time, religion would seep out of the
> culture. When this happened, the entire question of whether or not religion is
> permissable would be meaningless. Seems like we both win.
> -Adam Frumkin-Sokolow
If your scenario had any objective meaning we might. We on the outside, however,
have only your track record to use as a basis for judgments. You fail the test.
There was no freedom of choice. Worse, there were anti-religious pogroms and
expropriations. We don't believe that under a re-run regime it will be any
different. You don't toss anything out. You expect us to have faith in an "ideal
Marxist environment". It is a non starter. You guys are the equivalent of
assaultive felons on parole. All the presumptions are against you.
HHW
Hunter H. Watson
William Gilders wrote:
> Andrew Campkin:
>
> >So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
>
> In my opinion, philosophically, it does.
>
> Clearly, Marx believed that genuine human progress required freedom from
> religious illusion and a committment to the struggle in the here and now.
>
> That having been said, when the workers' movement began to grow and mass
> parties were built, Marx did not oppose membership by workers who still
> believed in religion, nor did any of his later supporters. Still, he, and
> they, believed that the ideological core of a party had to be atheistic, and
> that such atheism needed to be reflected in public policy ... such things as
> separation of church and state ... as much as this is ignored in the modern
> United States, the philosophical basis of keeping the state out of the
> church and the church out of the state is the assumption that there is no
> god who demands a specific social order on earth ... a frank denial of what
> Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have taught.
How was it carried into practice, Bill? Chapter 7, "The Assault Against
Religion" in "Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime" will tell you what actually
happened. That matters, you know. You have to fact the facts. We don't trust
you. We never again will trust you. No arguments to the effect that you are
good guys now days and won't do those things again will be believed. No bland
and misleading talk of "separation of church and state" will get to first base
with us. You have to dismantle the parts of the doctrine which lead to mayhem.
Maybe there will be something left?
HHW
>
>
> Bill
William Kaufman
the decline of organized religion, with its arbitrary, neurosislike rituals, as
a progressive development, as would I. But I think it's possible to regard
Marx's comments as bearing on the social implications of organized religion and
not necessarily on the affirmation of any faith whatsoever in any kind of
spiritual dimension in life. Nowhere does Marx imply that spirituality per se is
a retrograde phenomenon, only the mass, organized apparatuses that herd
followers into passive acceptance of the status quo. In brief, a reading of Marx
in which "religion" is to be read as "organized religion" is certainly possible
and is not precluded by the texts.
It's useful to remember that many of the greatest minds of the
post-Enlightenment era believed in some sort of God or spiritual reality, and I
think it's important to dwell a bit--in more detail than I can here at the
moment--on the positive role that such reflections can play in instilling a more
humane outlook on the world. Anyway, some of the names of the distinguished
minds who have affirmed some sort of spiritual faith, no matter how heterodox:
Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley (the
later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake, Kierkegaard,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley,
Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy,
Norman Mailer, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul
Bellow, Milan Kundera. This is an odd, random assortment I've reeled off of the
top of my head, but the main point is that a spiritual quest is not something
that is confined to the credulous poor and oppressed--it is often the hallmark
of the most cultivated minds for whom earthly material security still cannot
provide the last word in complacency in the face of the vast mysteries of birth
and death. Even after all the injustices of earthly life have been resolved and
a labor-free utopia established for all, the riddle of death will still instill
anguish and wonder in humans, who will still be no closer to understanding
intuitively what they are than they are now. Earthly justice and material
security are important elements of a humane life, but they do not address every
need--indeed, perhaps, not even the most crucial inner needs --of human beings.
A person is not an answer. A person, to paraphrase Holderlin, is a question.
William Gilders wrote:
> Andrew Campkin:
>
> >So does Marxism exclude religion or not?
>
> Clearly, Marx believed that genuine human progress required freedom from
> religious illusion and a committment to the struggle in the here and now.
>
> That having been said, when the workers' movement began to grow and mass
> parties were built, Marx did not oppose membership by workers who still
> believed in religion, nor did any of his later supporters. Still, he, and
> they, believed that the ideological core of a party had to be atheistic, and
> that such atheism needed to be reflected in public policy ... such things as
> separation of church and state ... as much as this is ignored in the modern
> United States, the philosophical basis of keeping the state out of the
> church and the church out of the state is the assumption that there is no
> god who demands a specific social order on earth ... a frank denial of what
> Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have taught.
>
> Bill
Justin Powers
kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> But nowhere does he mandate a coercive banning of religious faith. He
> considers the decline of organized religion, with its arbitrary,
> neurosislike rituals, as a progressive development, as would I. But I
> think it's possible to regard Marx's comments as bearing on the
> social implications of organized religion and not necessarily on the
> affirmation of any faith whatsoever in any kind of spiritual
> dimension in life. Nowhere does Marx imply that spirituality per se is
> a retrograde phenomenon, only the mass, organized apparatuses that
> herd followers into passive acceptance of the status quo. In brief, a
> reading of Marx in which "religion" is to be read as "organized
> religion" is certainly possible and is not precluded by the texts.
What a load of cobblers. Kaufman appears to be systematically
distorting Marx into some kind of sandal-wearing, New Age mystic eco-
hippie. I can see where this is leading - Kaufman playing counterpoint
on the finger-cymbals to Claude de Paris's banging of gongs at
Stonehenge.
In fact, Marx's critique of religion wasn't at all directed at
"organised religion", but at the reification of capitalist social
relations into the form of the Holy Family etc. It's funny how in one
post Kaufman can pose as the erudite explicator of Lukacs, while in the
next he commits gross blunders like this.
(Incidentally, I also find it really hilarious that Kaufman can promote
Lukacs as an enemy of positivism in one post, while defending "value-
free" science against the claims of Marxism in another. Does he really
understand the terms and concepts he's bandying about, or is he
furiously transcribing long-forgotten theoretical journals from God*
knows where?)
* that's my personal God, not the organised one, so I hope you approve,
William.
William Kaufman
Flude:
"Cluck" - I like that. I've been trying to form a picture of Kaufman
> from his postings, and this allusion is perfect - the self-appointed
> rooster of the APST coop, strutting around with those characteristic
> jerky movements, pausing only to peck unsuccessfully at some piece of
> dirt on the ground - cluck cluck peck cluck flap cluck - incapable of
> flight, and like Chicken Little convinced that the sky is about to fall
> in.
Kaufman:
You like "cluck"? Then you'll note that Watson stole it from the first paragraph
of my post, in which I applied it to you and your cohorts. Thanks for the
complement on my originality and for showing your obtuseness in not recognizing
Watson's lack of it. Of course, you daren't offend Watson, though--that pathetic
sociopath is your only ally out here (apart from your fellow LM robots, of
course). And talk about "peck[ing] at some piece of dirt on the ground"--it's
you who employs the hit-and-run tactics of smarmy aphorism, never pausing to
develop a sustained argument that examines specific points in detail. And
speaking of fleeing, it was you who fled the newsgroup a month ago with your
sorry tail between your legs after I exposed you as a witless poseur by massing
incontrovertible scientific authority against your crackpot thesis, on a par
with the rest of your theorizing here, that global warming causes the sea levels
to drop! (Of course, to this day you have been unable to provide a shred of
credible evidence for this bizarre notion, which you evidently lapped up like a
good obedient dog from your cultmasters without having bothered to check it out,
which is evidently your modus operandi in general out here, since you never seem
to be able to sustain more than frivolous, one-sentence defenses for your
various nutty notions.) Until you do offer something more of substance here,
something more than your casual little bulletins, the the evaluation that you
are a shallow, ill-informed parrot will continue to pervade the newsgroup, and,
I daresay, your own tormented, insecure, corroded little mind.
> Flude:
> Kaufman's viewpoint takes Marxism back to the days of Kant,
> counterposing subject ("social science") to object ("society") and
> making a virtue of their separation. Inevitably he ends up reducing
> socialism to a moral ideal, ie. a Kantian "categorial imperative". For
> all his bombastic assertion, he doesn't seem to understand the basics.
Kaufman:
This is such a stupefyingly ill-informed caricature of my viewpoint that is
defies belief--until one reminds oneself that it comes from robot-boy. Flude,
have you ever considered entering a course in remedial occupational therapy,
where one might be able to help you to sustain a train of thought beyond one
sentence?
>
>
> =================================================
> http://www.informinc.co.uk
> "LM - the mag for men and women who eat roast chicken"
Sturgeoman
>however,
>have only your track record to use as a basis for judgments. You fail the
>test.
True. This is why I'm not a Marxist. I try to avoid the labels anyway. But
you're right- it hasn't allowed freedom of choice yet, which is rather annoying
since "freedom" is tthe major goal of Communism.
-Adam Frumkin-Sokolow
William Gilders
>Steady, Bill. Us Brits who've taken an interest in the affairs of
>Ireland don't need a primer on the subject :)
I didn't think so! Which was a major factor in my astonishment at your
seeming confusion on the matter!
>> Care to retract?
>
>Consider it done. I incorrectly remembered Lewis as a Catholic,
>possibly confused because he was a great pal of Tolkien, who was >indeed
>a Papist.
Well, this was really all that was at issue here ... but I am still
wondering at what the reference to the website was about?
>I think the point is that whatever brand of Christianity he adhered to,
>it's difficult to see why Kaufman thinks his moral philosophy has
>anything to teach Marxists.
Well, that's another question. Kaufman KNOWS Lewis is a Christian. I take
it that he genuinely DOES believe that Lewis has something to teach
Marxists. What this is rather escapes me. In another post, Kaufman claims
that he'd welcome the decline of "organized religion" and its neurotic
rituals, etc. ... and THEN highlights Lewis as a positive model of
spirituality! ... when he was a staunch advocate of broken-willed submission
to God, and firm committment to the institutions and rituals of reactionary
state Christianity! Despite my dismay at what I see as some non-starters in
your responses to Kaufman, I am pretty sure I agree with your over-all take
on this issue.
Bill
William Kaufman
My partial, random list of brainy believers did indeed include Lewis, but the
point of the list was not to point to ritual-free models of spiritual freedom,
but to emphasize that some of the finest, most penetrating minds of the past few
hundred years believed that the ultimate reality of life is spiritual, not
material. For a man as cultivated and brilliant as Lewis was, it's hard to
imagine his adherence to Anglican ritual as a debilitating crutch; rather, it
seems to have been the metaphor that brought him in closest contact with his
spiritual intuitions. By the way, the one book by Lewis I recommended out here
has nothing whatever to do with theology, except in the loosest, most
metaphorical sense--in it he uses the term "the Tao" as a kind of catchall
phrase for ethical discourse--but there is not one mention of God or
Christianity. The volume, called The Abolition of Man, is, rather, as lucid a
philosophical discourse as you will find on the essential difference between
descriptive and prescriptive discourse. His point is that the contemporary world
is one devoid of ethical orientation because its rampant, relativist, scientism
precludes an objective grounding for ethical discourse. Hence, in such an
atmosphere the claims of a socialist about social justice can find no more
rational grounding than any other counterclaim, such as the assertion that
hierarchy and the will to power are the natural conditions of humankind. Lewis's
book shows quite compellingly that relativizing ethical discourse in this
manner--radically divorcing fact and value--can only have disastrous, dystopian
consequences for the human race. It's a point that is quite similar in thrust,
if not in detail and provenance, to the thinking of Habermas and Apel, two of
the most distinguished contemporary neo-Marxists, who contend that the chief
value of the Marxian tradition of social theory is precisely its wedding of fact
and value, although this self-understanding of the original Marxian project was
more evident in Marx's early writings and in the Grundrisse than it was in
Capital. At any rate, The Abolition of Man is a short and very readable text
that I highly recommend for its lucid untangling of these theoretical issues.
Hunter H. Watson
William Kaufman wrote:
> Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley (the
> later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake, Kierkegaard,
> Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley,
> Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy,
> Norman Mailer, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul
> Bellow, Milan Kundera.
A classic stuffed shirt. A quasi-intellectual Babbit or better, perhaps, Elmer
Gantry.
Hunter H. Watson
William Kaufman wrote:
> Flude:
>
> "Cluck" - I like that. I've been trying to form a picture of Kaufman
>
> > from his postings, and this allusion is perfect - the self-appointed
> > rooster of the APST coop, strutting around with those characteristic
> > jerky movements, pausing only to peck unsuccessfully at some piece of
> > dirt on the ground - cluck cluck peck cluck flap cluck - incapable of
> > flight, and like Chicken Little convinced that the sky is about to fall
> > in.
>
> Kaufman:
> You like "cluck"? Then you'll note that Watson stole it from the first paragraph
> of my post, in which I applied it to you and your cohorts.
So much for the boycott.
> Thanks for the
> complement on my originality and for showing your obtuseness in not recognizing
> Watson's lack of it. Of course, you daren't offend Watson, though--that pathetic
> sociopath is your only ally out here (apart from your fellow LM robots, of
> course).
What!? I choose my own allies. Flude and I have a couple of reasonably civil
encounters and suddenly he's my ally? I'm sure he's as offended by this as I am.
> And talk about "peck[ing] at some piece of dirt on the ground"--it's
> you who employs the hit-and-run tactics of smarmy aphorism, never pausing to
> develop a sustained argument that examines specific points in detail.
Sustained argument with with a man whose repertoire consists of two ploys, dropping
names of authors he thinks probably exist and insulting his interlocutor, is
neither productive nor agreeable. You will end up absolutely alone here, Kaufman.
Just as you are in your real life. I'm going to hold up a mirror for your. Peer
into it. Immediately below are the epithets and derogatory statements culled from
one brief paragraph of your work. *All of your work* is like this:
>
> sorry tail
> witless poseur
> crackpot thesis,
> bizarre notion,
> lapped up like a
> good obedient dog
> cultmasters
> your modus operandi
> frivolous, one-sentence defenses
> nutty notions.
> casual little bulletins,
> a shallow, ill-informed parrot
> tormented, insecure, corroded little mind.
>
> a stupefyingly ill-informed caricature
> robot-boy
> remedial occupational therapy where one might be able to help you to sustain a
> train of thought beyond one sentence?
>
You have a hidden history of failure, Kaufman. You display major problems of
judgment. This is vile behavior. I haven't any doubt that the people among whom you
live on a daily daily basis have long since figured you out. You're dead in the
water and know it.
Hunter Watson
Hunter H. Watson
Justin Powers wrote:
> In article <cIsc3.36757$%65.9...@tor-nn1.netcom.ca>,
> "William Gilders" <gil...@netcom.ca> wrote:
> > Justin Powers wrote:
> >
> > >Have a look at http://www.cslewis.org/ you "pretentious twit".
> >
> > What was this supposed to prove? I went to the web-site. It gives
> > all the standard information on Lewis, and nowhere claims he was a
> > Catholic ... i.e. Roman Catholic (Church of Rome), which is what
> > Kaufman understood you to be claiming.
> >
> > Lewis was an Anglican. Anglicans are "Catholic" in the sense that
> > they claim to be part of the the "one, Holy, Catholic Church" ...
> > which is not the same as being a member of the Roman Catholic Church
> > (Church of Rome, in communion with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome).
>
> Steady, Bill. Us Brits who've taken an interest in the affairs of
> Ireland don't need a primer on the subject :)
>
> > In normal conversation, the label "Catholic" indicates someone as a
> > member of the Roman Catholic Church. Lewis was not. Hence your
> > error.
> >
> > Care to retract?
>
> Consider it done.
I could swear he was a mid life convert. I'm too lazy to look it up.
> I incorrectly remembered Lewis as a Catholic,
> possibly confused because he was a great pal of Tolkien, who was indeed
> a Papist.
>
> I think the point is that whatever brand of Christianity he adhered to,
> it's difficult to see why Kaufman thinks his moral philosophy has
> anything to teach Marxists. On the other hand, his history of romantic
> love could well teach the modern-day left a thing or two, especially
> when they claim that it's "all in the genes".
>
William Kaufman
Flude wrote:
> What a load of cobblers. Kaufman appears to be systematically
> distorting Marx into some kind of sandal-wearing, New Age mystic eco-
> hippie. I can see where this is leading - Kaufman playing counterpoint
> on the finger-cymbals to Claude de Paris's banging of gongs at
> Stonehenge.
>
> In fact, Marx's critique of religion wasn't at all directed at
> "organised religion", but at the reification of capitalist social
> relations into the form of the Holy Family etc. It's funny how in one
> post Kaufman can pose as the erudite explicator of Lukacs, while in the
> next he commits gross blunders like this.
The only gross blunders are your own. In fact, you make my own point for me. The
Holy Family pertains to the socially and culturally oppressive role of organized
religions, not the heterodox spirituality of the poets and mystics. You're out
of your depth again (not surprising, since you're splashing about in your narrow
little intellectual kiddie pool all the time, the only one with your cult's
official seal of approval). It's easy to lazily parrot the conventional party
line about such matters--or toss off a few empty zingers. It's a lot easier than
thinking--I'll let you know when you've actually express an original thought
rather just parrot your cult's catechism. The way you robotically recite your
cult's scripture all the time, one would think that you would be the person out
here most intimately acquainted with the terrible toll taken on the mind by
organized religion.
>
> (Incidentally, I also find it really hilarious that Kaufman can promote
> Lukacs as an enemy of positivism in one post, while defending "value-
> free" science against the claims of Marxism in another. Does he really
> understand the terms and concepts he's bandying about, or is he
> furiously transcribing long-forgotten theoretical journals from God*
> knows where?)
>
Once again, the joke's on you, fop. I have never--not once--"defend[ed]
'value-free' science against the claims of Marxism." If you had the requisite
education in the relevant literature so that you could understand what I am
saying, you would realize that I have been doing just the opposite--defending
Marxism as critique of ideology against the claims of value-free scientism, both
in positivist bourgeois social science and the positivist, dogmatic
pseudo-Marxism that has warped what's left of your cult-corroded brain. Now be a
good puppy and go fetch the party line for tomorrow's posts.
William Gilders
...defending
>Marxism as critique of ideology against the claims of value-free
>scientism, both
>in positivist bourgeois social science and the positivist, dogmatic
>pseudo-Marxism...
Have I understood correclty that your conception of Marxism as a "critique
of ideology" is based on the writings of George Lukacs when he was a
compliant lap-dog of the Hungarian Stalinists? If so, might I suggest that
you come down of your lofty perch for a short while and read a simple and
straight-forward analysis of the issue of Marxism's status as "science" and
its ethical claims: "Part One: What is Marxism?" in _What is the Real
Marxist Tradition?_, by John Molyneux (Bookmarks, 1985)?
This short discussion makes very clear that the "developments" in Lukasc's
thinking had everything to do with his abandonment of an authentically
Marxist class-position, and his adoption of a notion of Marxism as a
"universal" method that transcended the modern struggle of proletarians and
bourgeoisie ... the same thing many other "Marxists" have done when they
turned against the working class.
Bill
William Kaufman
becoming a Stalinist lackey. As I said before, his most interesting ideas were
taken up and further developed by the thinkers collectively known as the
Frankfurt School, who have always been uncompromisingly anti-Stalinist and
antiauthoritarian in their practical orientation. I think you'd find their work
quite interesting. If you want a succinct compendium of their history and
thinking, you might check out a book called The Dialectical Imagination by
Martin Jay. The more recent thinkers identified with the school, most notably
Jurgen Habermas, tend to have a more specifically political orientation than the
school's founding fathers. In general, however, I'd be suspicious of secondary
sources such as the one you mention. Each such interpreter has his own ax to
grind and refracts the thinker's ideas through his own viewpoint, and so that's
not a good way of evaluating a thinker's work. It's best to grapple with the
original stuff. For Habermas, a good place to start is Legitimation Crisis, but
you can check out his many other interesting titles on amazon.com. (Of the
founding fathers, Herbert Marcuse tends to be more accessible than Horkheimer or
Adorno--you might try taking a look at his Eros and Civilization.) There was
also an extensive interview with Habermas in the New Left Review in the past
year or so (the specific issue is listed on the NLR Web site). I can tell you
that once you wean yourself from the dogmatic presuppostion--and that's all it
can ever be in the human sciences--that Marxism (whichever of the myriad
competing variants you choose to call Marxism, that is) is the ne plus ultra in
human thought and wisdom, you'll be amazed at the rush of intellectual
stimulation you'll go through. Speculative freedom, which is the lifeblood of
thought, is the first victim of Marxist orthodoxy of whatever stripe or
tendency. Once you relax and admit that you can only make more or less
convincing arguments but can never reach absolute, provable certainty about any
subject pertaining to human behavior, it's like lifting an enormous weight off
your mind. That was my experience, anyway.
William Kaufman
Theory and Practice
Knowledge and Human Interests
There are many other stimulating titles by and about Habermas listed at
amazon.com. And although I've made my caveat against secondary sources, one
whose quality I can vouch for is Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of Jurgen
Habermas. It's a good introduction, although Habermas's thinking has evolved a
good deal since that book was written.
Denzil
"William Gilders" <gil...@netcom.ca> wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote:
>
> ...defending
> >Marxism as critique of ideology against the claims of value-free
> >scientism, both in positivist bourgeois social science and the
> positivist, dogmatic pseudo-Marxism...
>
> Have I understood correclty that your conception of Marxism as a
> "critique of ideology" is based on the writings of George Lukacs when
> he was a compliant lap-dog of the Hungarian Stalinists?
To describe Lukacs as a "compliant lag-dog of Stalinism" is a gross
distortion of his life and career. "History and Class Consciousness"
was written to clarify the problems facing the Hungarian
revolutionaries, and predates the Stalinist take-over of the USSR and
the Comintern by some years. Much of it was written when Lukacs was
imprisoned by the counter-revolution - the work aimed to reestablish
the centrality of dialectic and ideology to the Marxist project in a
period when the defeats of the working class upsurge after WW1 exposed
the mechanistic and fatalistic thinking of much of the left. What's
really funny is that you suggest that we'd be better off looking to the
works of Molyneux and other economistic Cliffite pygmies. If you want
an example of a real fellow-traveller of Stalinised Marxism, and
someone whose theoretical illiteracy is so profound that he can't help
making even elementary mistakes about the subject, I commend to you
Louis Althusser, of whom Molyneux's cothinker and mentor, Alex
Callinicos, is a big fan.
Denzil
kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> No, as a matter of fact, Lukacs made his most creative contributions
> before becoming a Stalinist lackey. As I said before, his most
> interesting ideas were taken up and further developed by the thinkers
> collectively known as the Frankfurt School
On the contrary, they vulgarised historical materialism, breaking the
connection between ideology and material relations, turning ideology
into an autonomous sphere that could be understood in its own terms, a
parallel to the fatalistic and mechanistic theory of the downfall of
capitalism due to economic catastrophe promoted by the Stalinised
Comintern. By 1945, Adorno and Horkheimer could identify the drive
towards mastery of nature, the very belief in and struggle for social
progress, as responsible for the horrors of WW2 (see "Dialectic of
Enlightenment"). Today this reaction against the universalism of
Enlightenment values has become the dominant, mainstream view in
society.
Denzil
> affirmed some sort of spiritual faith, no matter how heterodox:
> Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
> Shelley (the later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake,
> Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert
> Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John
> Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy, Norman Mailer, John Ashbery,
> Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul Bellow, Milan
> Kundera.
Tinky-Winky, Dipsy-Wipsy, La La, Po, ...
ps. Einstein was an atheist (and a socialistic atheist, to boot).
Jim F.
> > affirmed some sort of spiritual faith, no matter how heterodox:
> > Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
> > Shelley (the later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake,
> > Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert
> > Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John
> > Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy, Norman Mailer, John Ashbery,
> > Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul Bellow, Milan
> > Kundera.
>
>
> ps. Einstein was an atheist (and a socialistic atheist, to boot).
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Actually Einstein was more a Spinozan pantheist than an atheist,
strictly speaking. He did reject belief in a personal God, in
immortality, and in free will. He was certainly a socialist, and
although not a Marxist as such he did contribute an essay "Why
Socialism?" to the premier issue of Monthly Review.
As for the other people listed by Kaufman, their beliefs were quite
varied indeed, so while to call them religious would be accurate, it
is also not very enlightening. Graham Greene who was a noted convert
to Catholicism ih his later years often described himself as a
"Catholic atheist", Shelley who had been sent down from Oxford for
his pamphlet on atheism, tended towards pantheism later on. I don't
think that Allen Ginsburg with his Buddhist sensibilities was a believer
in a personal God.
Even the description of Hegel as a theist is open to some question since
his conception of the Absolute Spirit was pretty pantheistic. Hegel is
known to have been an avowed freethinker in his youth, and some scholars
have suspected that his outlook may have been closer to atheism than
he would appear at first glance. The jump from Hegel to the humanism
of Feuerbach may not have been all that great.
Jim F.
Hunter H. Watson
"Jim F." wrote:
> Denzil wrote:
> >
> > In article <37726232...@earthlink.net>,
> > kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> > > Anyway, some of the names of the distinguished minds who have
> > > affirmed some sort of spiritual faith, no matter how heterodox:
> > > Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
> > > Shelley (the later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake,
> > > Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert
> > > Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John
> > > Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy, Norman Mailer, John Ashbery,
> > > Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul Bellow, Milan
> > > Kundera.
> >
> > Tinky-Winky, Dipsy-Wipsy, La La, Po, ...
> >
> > ps. Einstein was an atheist (and a socialistic atheist, to boot).
> >
> > Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> > Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>
> Actually Einstein was more a Spinozan pantheist than an atheist,
> strictly speaking. He did reject belief in a personal God, in
> immortality, and in free will. He was certainly a socialist, and
> although not a Marxist as such he did contribute an essay "Why
> Socialism?" to the premier issue of Monthly Review.
>
> As for the other people listed by Kaufman, their beliefs were quite
> varied indeed, so while to call them religious would be accurate, it
> is also not very enlightening. Graham Greene who was a noted convert
> to Catholicism ih his later years often described himself as a
> "Catholic atheist", Shelley who had been sent down from Oxford for
> his pamphlet on atheism, tended towards pantheism later on. I don't
> think that Allen Ginsburg with his Buddhist sensibilities was a believer
> in a personal God.
>
> Even the description of Hegel as a theist is open to some question since
> his conception of the Absolute Spirit was pretty pantheistic. Hegel is
> known to have been an avowed freethinker in his youth, and some scholars
> have suspected that his outlook may have been closer to atheism than
> he would appear at first glance. The jump from Hegel to the humanism
> of Feuerbach may not have been all that great.
>
> Jim F.
Fresh air.
Stephen R. Diamond
<"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> wrote:
> Actually Einstein was more a Spinozan pantheist than an atheist,
> strictly speaking.
I have never quite understood the import of pantheism. How exactly does
it differ from atheism, other than as employing a figure of speech?
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
this list; moreover, you seem to imply that pantheism does not qualify as a form
of true spiritualism, which is nonsense--it's certainly a far cry from the
philistine, vulgar materialist atheism that you evidently champion. Moreover,
you are inaccurate in your characterization of many of the people on the list:
your statement of Einstein's spiritual beliefs, for example, is off the mark. He
had a rather ecumenical interest in all manner of spiritual traditions, and even
had a copy of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy on his shelf in Princeton. Moreover,
he rejected Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with the declaration, "God does
not play dice with the universe." This can only be taken to mean some sort of
personal God characterized by will and intentionality. Although I don't have the
relevant literature in front of me right now, I'd be most interested to see any
documentation you can produce in which Einstein explicitly "rejects the idea of
a personal God." In addition, Hegel's constant and explicit references to God
might seem merely a ruse to you, but to call him a pantheist is to betray a
total misunderstanding of his work. Pantheism implies a passive, almost
materialistic conception of diety, whereas Hegel's notion of Geist was that of a
living, critical, restlessly developing critically penetrating mind--clearly an
active, subjective force, so any attempt to pin the label "pantheism" on that
outlook is a sure sign of philosophical incompetence. As for Graham Greene,
anyone who has read The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, or The Power
and the Glory know that this man was wrestling earnestly with the issue of
belief in God all his life, and spent most of it believing in God, but with the
usual existential anguish and doubt that afflicts most intellectually aware,
serious believers at least episodically. There were times when his theodicy
strained his ability to believe in a personal God, and his comment about
"Catholic atheism" represented a very late, pessimistic stage in his approach,
but one in which he had not definitively rejected God, because he retained his
membership in the Church until his death. If, however, your overall intent was
to show that the people I identified as believers, were not really believers,
then you have failed badly. (And people should read Shelley's "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty" and decide for themselves.)
Finally, since the comments I allude to seems at least reasonably informed if
not entirely accurate and skewed by a tendentious atheist agenda, I'd be amazed
but gratified if they were actually written by Flude, as opposed to a
correspondent of Flude's which seems to be the case, given the sequence of
comments below--Flude making an ignorant misstatement about Einstein and his
correspondent, the intelligent one, then correcting him (semicorrecting him). If
you want some unmistakable vintage Flude from that exchange, here it is:
Tinky-Winky, Dipsy-Wipsy, La La, Po, ...
Here, evidently, Flude is seen in the process of learning one of his cult's
nursery rhymes, the mastery of which is a prerequisite to their letting him
sweep the floors at LM. Judging by his constant misstatements in important
intellectual matters, they surely aren't likely to let him anywhere near
terminals where the writers work.
"Jim F." wrote:
> Denzil wrote:
> >
> > In article <37726232...@earthlink.net>,
> > kma...@earthlink.net wrote:
> > > Anyway, some of the names of the distinguished minds who have
> > > affirmed some sort of spiritual faith, no matter how heterodox:
> > > Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
> > > Shelley (the later Shelley, of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"), Blake,
> > > Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Albert
> > > Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Simone Weil, John
> > > Updike, Walker Percy, Walker Percy, Norman Mailer, John Ashbery,
> > > Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, Saul Bellow, Milan
> > > Kundera.
> >
> > Tinky-Winky, Dipsy-Wipsy, La La, Po, ...
> >
> > ps. Einstein was an atheist (and a socialistic atheist, to boot).
> >
> > Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> > Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>
> Actually Einstein was more a Spinozan pantheist than an atheist,
Stephen R. Diamond
<kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Once you relax and admit that you can only make more or
> less convincing arguments but can never reach absolute,
> provable certainty about any subject pertaining to human
> behavior, it's like lifting an enormous weight off your
> mind. That was my experience, anyway.
1. You commingle the issue of certainty with the issue of freedom from
values. They are separate issues. One can be a dogmatist and regard
Marxism as evaluative. Or one can be a "positivist" and yet a skeptic
about the possibility of absolute truth. These dimensions are not only
conceptually separate, but I think they have little relation to one
another in reality. Recognizing that one's "cult" does not have an
absolute corner on truth does not require espousing an evaluative
relativism.
2. I think your view that "positivistic" conclusions about society are
inevitably arbitrary, because hard experimentation is out of the
question, leads to a vicious regress when you also want to assert, as
you must, that some arguments are more convincing than others. The
convincingness of arguments is either:
a. A 'positivistic' fact about human beings, which itself would, on
your view, become unknowable in practice. OR
b. An expression of value, on which account convincingness is
subjective, and rationality goes overboard entirely.
3. The possibility of experimentation on humans is not limited only or
mainly by ethics (who says the experiments must be done by an ethical
society. An unethical society could do them, and ethical societies
'borrow the results), but by the impossibility of controling the
antecedent variables with the requisite rigor.
However, the model of a "positivistic" science, physics, originally
developed from the observational (non-experimental) science of
astronomy. Experimentation is not the sine qua non of science.
4. I don't understand what you mean by a rational but value-laden
science. From what kind of data or premises do you think values derive.
It is possible to demonstrate the irrational character of a set of
values. This is part of Marcuse's project in One Dimensional Man, if I
recall correctly. How does one show a set of values is rational; what
does doing so mean?
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
Denzil wrote:
> On the contrary, they vulgarised historical materialism, breaking the
> connection between ideology and material relations, turning ideology
> into an autonomous sphere that could be understood in its own terms, a
> parallel to the fatalistic and mechanistic theory of the downfall of
> capitalism due to economic catastrophe promoted by the Stalinised
> Comintern. By 1945, Adorno and Horkheimer could identify the drive
> towards mastery of nature, the very belief in and struggle for social
> progress, as responsible for the horrors of WW2 (see "Dialectic of
> Enlightenment"). Today this reaction against the universalism of
> Enlightenment values has become the dominant, mainstream view in
> society.
Now in the orbit of slick, mainstream (read "bourgeois") magazine publishing,
Flude thinks it's adequate to offer glib, Time magazine-style glosses on
important subjects, perhaps to cover the superficiality of his knowledge. For
anyone to seriously believe that the Frankfurt School broke "the connection
between ideology and material relations" indicates that he has not read
Horkheimer's essay on the materialist interpretation of history in the volume
Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School did do was highlight the extent to
which so-called materialist forces of history--capital, property, nation-states,
and so on--are actually forms of reified human, social relationships, a truth
that can be verified by a simple thought experiment. Look at a photograph of a
factory, not knowing whether its' a factory in Moscow in 1970 or one in Michigan
in 1950. Are there any purely physical attributes that mark it out as a
capitalist or socialist factory, as private or public property? A purely and
vulgarly materialist, physicalist analysis of the factory does not reveal
anything about its social use or function. What does reveal its class character
is the nature of the social relations of the people who work in it--do the
workers function as equals in a self-managed factory committee that helps to
decide production plans for the factory? Or do they defer to a single boss or
supervisor, the agent of a private owner who claims exclusive rights to the
factory and what is produced there? The factory is only the physical mediation
of the human relationships that subsist there--so property or capital, then, is
not some physical object like a rock but a human, social relationship through
which the disposition of material things is governed. But the relationship is
not a physical thing but a form of symbolic interaction with practical
implications, oppressive and ideological or revolutionary and emancipatory,
depending on the circumstances. Again, Marx explains this truth quite clearly in
the chapter in Capital on the fetishism of commodities, a chapter I commend
heartily to all the would-be champions of simple-minded vulgar materialism out
here.
Finally, it is true that H and A's book The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
written under the shadow of the barbarities of fascism and developing World War,
expressed an ambivalent--but not, let us be clear, overtly, one-sidedly
hostile--attitude toward the enlightenment--note the title, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, not Enlightenment Sucks, Man! I also find it intriguing that the
responder here simply fails to address the issue of Habermas, the disciple of
the Frankfurt school whom I most strongly recommended in my remarks, no doubt
because the respondent knows nothing about his work. Habermas is the staunchest
and most eloquent defender of enlightenment values against the attacks of
postmodernism. In fact, his running debate with Foucault and Derrida has been
collected in book form--it's available from amazon.com.
William Gilders
William Kaufman wrote:
> Again, Marx explains this truth quite clearly in
>the chapter in Capital on the fetishism of commodities, a chapter I
>commend
>heartily to all the would-be champions of simple-minded vulgar >materialism
out
>here.
Why is it that my appeal to Marx's elucidation of key truths is dogmatism
but your declaration that Marx "explains this truth" is not? I'm sure the
answer will be fascinating ... and verbose.
Bill
Jim F.
>
> I do not necessarily agree with your glib characterizations of all the people on
> this list; moreover, you seem to imply that pantheism does not qualify as a form
> of true spiritualism, which is nonsense--it's certainly a far cry from the
> philistine, vulgar materialist atheism that you evidently champion.
I would disagree with that last statement as anybody who has read
Lucretius'
poem "On the Nature of Things" should be well aware of.
> Moreover,
> you are inaccurate in your characterization of many of the people on the list:
> your statement of Einstein's spiritual beliefs, for example, is off the mark.
Easy Kaufman, you are going to give yourself a seizure carrying on like
that.
> He
> had a rather ecumenical interest in all manner of spiritual traditions, and even
> had a copy of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy on his shelf in Princeton.
You would do well to read the collections of Einstein's essays such as
*Idead and Opinions* or *Out of My Later Years.* Einstein was emphatic
in his
rejection of traditional religious beliefs especially a personal God.
Thus in a transatlantic cable he said "I believe in Spinoza's God who
reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God
who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
And in 1947 he wrote:
It seems to me that that the idea of a personal God is
an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously.
I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside
the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza:
admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical
simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp
humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to
content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and
understanding and treat values and moral obligations as
a purely human problem - the most important of all
human problems.
> Moreover,
> he rejected Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with the declaration, "God does
> not play dice with the universe." This can only be taken to mean some sort of
> personal God characterized by will and intentionality.
In Einstein's case most certainly not. You seem unaware of the ways
that theoretical physicists use the word "God" in a metaphorical sense.
Stephen Hawking sometimes this sort of "God talk" too but he is most
certainly an agnostic.
> Although I don't have the
> relevant literature in front of me right now, I'd be most interested to see any
> documentation you can produce in which Einstein explicitly "rejects the idea of
> a personal God." In addition, Hegel's constant and explicit references to God
> might seem merely a ruse to you, but to call him a pantheist is to betray a
> total misunderstanding of his work.
Hegel is certainly difficult to interpret but many respected
commentators
on him do treat him as a pantheist.
> Pantheism implies a passive, almost
> materialistic conception of diety, whereas Hegel's notion of Geist was that of a
> living, critical, restlessly developing critically penetrating mind--clearly an
> active, subjective force, so any attempt to pin the label "pantheism" on that
> outlook is a sure sign of philosophical incompetence. As for Graham Greene,
> anyone who has read The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, or The Power
> and the Glory know that this man was wrestling earnestly with the issue of
> belief in God all his life, and spent most of it believing in God, but with the
> usual existential anguish and doubt that afflicts most intellectually aware,
> serious believers at least episodically. There were times when his theodicy
> strained his ability to believe in a personal God, and his comment about
> "Catholic atheism" represented a very late, pessimistic stage in his approach,
> but one in which he had not definitively rejected God, because he retained his
> membership in the Church until his death.
The Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana also called himself
a "Catholic atheist." He most certainly was an atheist, yet at the same
time he had a very strong emotional identification with Roman
Catholicism
and indeed he spent his last years in a Catholic religious retreat, yet
as his letters indicate he still remained an atheist. This may seem
weird to us but is not entirely uncommon among people in Catholic
countries like Spain or Italy. I don't think it is so incredible
that Greene in his later years might have adopted a similar stance.
> If, however, your overall intent was
> to show that the people I identified as believers, were not really believers,
> then you have failed badly. (And people should read Shelley's "Hymn to
> Intellectual Beauty" and decide for themselves.)
>
> Finally, since the comments I allude to seems at least reasonably informed if
> not entirely accurate and skewed by a tendentious atheist agenda, I'd be amazed
> but gratified if they were actually written by Flude, as opposed to a
> correspondent of Flude's which seems to be the case, given the sequence of
> comments below--Flude making an ignorant misstatement about Einstein and his
> correspondent, the intelligent one, then correcting him (semicorrecting him). If
> you want some unmistakable vintage Flude from that exchange, here it is:
>
> Tinky-Winky, Dipsy-Wipsy, La La, Po, ...
>
> Here, evidently, Flude is seen in the process of learning one of his cult's
> nursery rhymes, the mastery of which is a prerequisite to their letting him
> sweep the floors at LM. Judging by his constant misstatements in important
> intellectual matters, they surely aren't likely to let him anywhere near
> terminals where the writers work.
I guess cultisms (of various sorts) are running rampant in apst.
Jim F.
>
>
Jim F.
beliefs
for William Kaufman's benefit:
What I cannot understand is how there could possibly be a God who would
reward or punish his subjects or who could induce us to develop our
will in our
daily life. I cannot then believe in this concept of an
anthropomorphic God who
has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. [The Private
Albert
Einstein]
The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of
the law of
causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who
interferes in
the course of events - provided, of course, that he takes the
hypothesis of
causality really seriously. [New York Times Magazine November 9,
1930]
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events
the firmer
becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of
this ordered
regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the
rule of human
nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of
natural events.
[Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium]
An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my
comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the
fears or
absurd egoism of feeble souls. [The World as I See It]
If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every
human
action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration
is also
His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible
for their deeds
and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out
punishment and
rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on
Himself. How
can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed
to Him?
[Out of My Later Years]
Prayer is useless.
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes
place is
determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the
actions of
people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be
inclined to believe
that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a
wish addressed to a supernatural Being. [Einstein - The Human Side]
As far as Einstein's interest or alleged interest in the writings of
various
spiritual traditions including the writings of Madame Blavatsky.
Einstein
once drew a distinction between two kinds of philosophical literature
which he liked to read. On the one hand there was the type of
literature
as represented by the writings of Hume, Kant, and Mach which Einstein
relied upon when either doing his scientific work or when reflecting
upon that work's broader implications for our worldviews. Thus Einstein
drew upon the works of those three authors when developing his theory
of special relativity. Einstein's famous 1905 paper, "On the
Electrodynamics
of Moving Bodies" - which presented his theory of special relativity -
drew especially upon Mach's writings. He used Machian-like arguments
in analyzing concepts like simultaneity, time, and space. Einstein
also like to read what he called "edifying" philosophical literature,
specially the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He read the
writings of these thinkers in a different manner than he would those
of Kant or Mach. He saw their writings as a kind of poetry that was
inspirational in nature. He was not interested in discovering literal
truths in this type of literature. I would suggest that the same was
true in regards to whatever spiritual literature he may have read as
well.
It is difficult though to beleive that he ever took Blavatsky too
seriously
though.
This attitude towards philosophical literature was BTW hardly unique to
Einstein. Thus Rudolf Carnap, a leading figure in the Vienna Circle
is said to have been fond of the philosophical poetry of the Indian
Rabindranath Tagore.
I wonder if Kaufman regards himself to be a "god-seeking" Marxist
in the manner of Nicolai Berdyaev and his friends who worked their
to Orthodox Christianity?
Jim F.
Hunter H. Watson
"Jim F." wrote:
> Here are a few more quotes from Einstein concerning his religious
> beliefs
> for William Kaufman's benefit:
They benefit us all. Thank you.
William Kaufman
though you might be coming down with a bad case of the quipster's flude--er, I
mean, flu. If you consider it verbosity to attempt to actually develop a thought
rather than to toss off hit-and-run references to secondary sources by
likeminded dogmatists, I can't argue with that--that's simply your preference,
but it is not an open, honest engagement with ideas. But I can wish that you
would address specific points--for example, the ones above in which I tried to
elaborate on the idea that practical social categories like capital and property
are only mediately material, and what that implies about a positivist,
mechanistically materialist interpretation of Marx's thought. Besides, what
"elucidation of key truths" in Marx are you talking about? If you'd care to
specify rather than to hit and run, I'll do my best to grapple collegially with
your ideas. The passage on the fetishism of commodities is there in plain sight,
inviting your scrutiny. If you'd care to raise and elaborate specific points of
your own rather than bruiting about this or that second-hand authority, I'd be
glad to have a point-by-point discussion with you, not a mere swapping of
spiteful spittle. Why don't we leave that to Flude and his cohorts?
William Kaufman
but certainly not an atheist, a point of which you are no doubt well aware and
which I could easily prove to you when I have time to extract the relevant
counterquotations. Note that even in your one-sided citations Einstein
repeatedly doubts the existence of a God who would do x, y, or z, not the
existence of God period--certainly not the same God he appeals to in his famous
quotation objecting to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle! No atheist appeals to
God as a means of making a point in an epic scientific argument! It is evident
from Einstein's various remarks--including the rather tendentious selection you
present here, which nevertheless merely delimit his conception of God but do not
deny it outright--that Einstein believed in some sort of God, if not an
interventionist one. If your point is to prove that Einstein was a militant
atheist of the sort rampant among dogmatic Marxist circles, then you have
failed, since even the skewed selection of quotes you furnish below do not even
intimate such an outlook, much less state it outright. What Einstein's belief in
God--however delimited and circumscribed it might have been--demonstrates is
that his was a questing intellect that puts to shame the endless dogmatic
parroting of received doctrine that passes for thinking among the epigoni of
Marx. So try as you might to fit Einstein into your procrustean bed of dogmatic,
militant atheism, he just won't fit. And that was the point of my list to begin
with. Dogmatic Marxists like to think that they have reached the summit of human
wisdom, when the reality is that they are just so weighted down with received
dogmas--many of them hand-me-down distortions and petrifactions of Marx rather
than the living spirit of his thought--that they are unable to proceed any
further and mistake their self-imposed stasis for the limits of reality. But
there are more things on heaven and earth than are contained in your Marxism,
Jim F. Einstein and Newton understood this, as did the other people on my
original list, and reserved this pervasive sense of the mysterious to something
they called God. You evidently can't allow yourself to admit even one such
thought, since it might finally burst open that overstuffed baggage of Marxology
you've lugged around that you think of it as one of your bodily appendages. Try
it, though. You might find that you're even able to develop some thoughts of
your own for which you don't need certification from a groupthink authority,
past or present.
Finally, your wanting to know whether my position corresponds to this or that
person of the past is the surest sign of the philistine dogmatist who can
apprehend reality and thought only through preestablished categories. Thank
God--yes, God--for the free thinkers of this world, including Marx and Einstein,
who never spent one day of their lives justifying their ideas by quoting a
preceding "authority." That's what made them great intellectual
revolutionaries--precisely their mental antiauthoritarianism, which stands in
bold contrast to the scripture-quoting minions of the dogmatic left. That's the
truly regressive religious posture, one that you and your cohorts exemplify far
more fully than any heterodox mystic.
"Jim F." wrote:
> Here are a few more quotes from Einstein concerning his religious
> beliefs
> for William Kaufman's benefit:
>
William Kaufman
"Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
> In article <9303216...@news.remarQ.com>, Jim F.
> <"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> wrote:
>
> > Actually Einstein was more a Spinozan pantheist than an atheist,
> > strictly speaking.
>
> I have never quite understood the import of pantheism. How exactly does
> it differ from atheism, other than as employing a figure of speech?
>
There's a huge difference, embedded in the Greek root. Atheism believes that God
is nowhere. Pantheism believes that God is everywhere.
William Kaufman
> Here are a few more quotes from Einstein concerning his religious
> beliefs
> for William Kaufman's benefit:
Since you like to play the quoting game, here, as promised are some quotations from
Einstein on God and spirituality that that cast a quite different light on the matter
and put your dessicated atheism to shame:
Einstein on Religion and God
As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious
emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.
And this mysticality is the power of all true science. If there is
any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of
a man that so many have fixed in their minds. In essence, my religion consists of a
humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the
slight
details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds .
Quoted in the New York Times obituary April 19, 1955
Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all.
Letter to V. T Aaltonen, May 7, 1952, on his opinion that
belief in a personal God is
better than atheism--Einstein Archive 59-059
I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational
nature of
reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is
absent, science
degenerates into uninspired empiricism.
Letter to Maurice Solovine, I January 1, 1951; Einstein
Archive 21-174, 80-871,
published in Letters to Solovine, p. 119.
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a
spirit is
manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man.... In
this way the
pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed
quite different
from the religiosity of someone more naive.
Letter to a child who asked if scientists pray, January 24,
1936; Einstein Archive
42-601
'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' So Einstein
once wrote to
explain his personal creed: 'A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no
doubt of the
significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are
capable of
rational foundation.'
His was not a life of prayer and worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith--a faith not
capabIe of
rational foundation--that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong
pursuit was to
discover them. His realism and his optimism are illuminated by his remark: 'Subtle is
the Lord,
but malicious He is not' ('Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er
nicht.'.'). When asked
by a colleague what he meant by that, he replied: 'Nature hides her secret because of
her
essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse' ('Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis
durch die
Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List.').
From "Subtle is the Lord-- " : the science and the life of Albert
Einstein by Abraham Pais, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1982.
"A human being is a part of the
whole, called by us 'Universe,' a
part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings as
something separated from the
rest—a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison
for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to
affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening
our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty."
>
Jim F.
A pantheist is one who suggests that God is All or at the very least
that All is God, that is God and the cosmos are one. However, one
may well ask how this position really differs from atheism,
since from a logical point of view a God who is everything, seems
little different from a God who is nothing. Santayana
thought that there wasn't much difference, he suggested that pantheism
was "naturalism made poetic" (I think that he had Goethe in mind when he
wrote that). Thus Sanatayana seemed to suggest that the real difference
between atheism and pantheism was emotive. However, I cited Lucretius
(an author much admired by both Marx and Einstein) to show how an
atheist can experience the same kind of awe and reverencefor nature
that religious people experience in regards to their gods.
Jimm F.
Jim F.
>
> All of your quotes illustrate, if anything, that Einstein was a kind of deist,
> but certainly not an atheist, a point of which you are no doubt well aware and
> which I could easily prove to you when I have time to extract the relevant
> counterquotations.
If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
> Note that even in your one-sided citations Einstein
> repeatedly doubts the existence of a God who would do x, y, or z, not the
> existence of God period--certainly not the same God he appeals to in his famous
> quotation objecting to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle! No atheist appeals to
> God as a means of making a point in an epic scientific argument! It is evident
> from Einstein's various remarks--including the rather tendentious selection you
> present here, which nevertheless merely delimit his conception of God but do not
> deny it outright--that Einstein believed in some sort of God, if not an
> interventionist one.
You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
> If your point is to prove that Einstein was a militant
> atheist of the sort rampant among dogmatic Marxist circles, then you have
> failed, since even the skewed selection of quotes you furnish below do not even
> intimate such an outlook, much less state it outright. What Einstein's belief in
> God--however delimited and circumscribed it might have been--demonstrates is
> that his was a questing intellect that puts to shame the endless dogmatic
> parroting of received doctrine that passes for thinking among the epigoni of
> Marx. So try as you might to fit Einstein into your procrustean bed of dogmatic,
> militant atheism, he just won't fit. And that was the point of my list to begin
> with. Dogmatic Marxists like to think that they have reached the summit of human
> wisdom, when the reality is that they are just so weighted down with received
> dogmas--many of them hand-me-down distortions and petrifactions of Marx rather
> than the living spirit of his thought--that they are unable to proceed any
> further and mistake their self-imposed stasis for the limits of reality. But
> there are more things on heaven and earth than are contained in your Marxism,
> Jim F. Einstein and Newton understood this,
Well Newton might have had a little trouble as clever as he was since
he died long before Marx was born. Anyway, what do you make of Newton's
interest in alchemy.
> as did the other people on my
> original list, and reserved this pervasive sense of the mysterious to something
> they called God. You evidently can't allow yourself to admit even one such
> thought, since it might finally burst open that overstuffed baggage of Marxology
> you've lugged around that you think of it as one of your bodily appendages. Try
> it, though. You might find that you're even able to develop some thoughts of
> your own for which you don't need certification from a groupthink authority,
> past or present.
If you have been reading my post then you would be aware of my practice
of
citing a wide variety of writers and thinkers including Marxists and
non-Marxists alike. I have often indicated my interest in the American
pragmatists and the analytical philosophers.
>
> Finally, your wanting to know whether my position corresponds to this or that
> person of the past is the surest sign of the philistine dogmatist who can
> apprehend reality and thought only through preestablished categories.
My question concerning any possible affinities between your views and
those of Berdayaev was a sincere one. As clever and creative as we like
to think ourselves to be, we are seldom so creative as to not to
reiterate the ideas of past thinkers (there is in philosophy very few
ideas
that were not first expounded by some Greek in the 5th century BC).
Berdayaev as you undoubtedly know was one of the "god-seeker" Marxists.
Following the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia, there developed
a debate among Russian Marxists concerning the relations between Marxism
and religion. Within the Bolshevik faction there arose "god-building"
tendency that included Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Gorky who concluded
that
Marxism was lacking in emotive appeal. Just as they turned to Mach and
Avenarius to provide Marxism with what they theought to be a more
scientific
epistemology so they turned to Nietzsche and August Comte to enhance
its emotive appeal by giving it some of the trappings of religion
while remaining atheistic.
On the other hand there also arose a "god-seeking" tendency around
Nicolai Berdayaev and his friends. Like the "god-builders" they
turned to Nitzsche but they also looke towards Kant and the
neo-Kantians in order to provide a philosophy of freedom to
supplement Marxism. Eventually, they moved closer and closer
to Russian Orthodoxy and Berdayaev, himself, became an Orthodox
priest.
> Thank
> God--yes, God--for the free thinkers of this world, including Marx and Einstein,
> who never spent one day of their lives justifying their ideas by quoting a
> preceding "authority." That's what made them great intellectual
> revolutionaries--precisely their mental antiauthoritarianism, which stands in
> bold contrast to the scripture-quoting minions of the dogmatic left. That's the
> truly regressive religious posture, one that you and your cohorts exemplify far
> more fully than any heterodox mystic.
>
To quote Ronald Ray-gun, "there he goes again."
Jim F.
William Kaufman
"Jim F." wrote:
> If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
> was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
> reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
> in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
> is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
Yes, but it is a God, which is the main point. An his believing in a pantheist God does
not make him any less of a believer. In fact, one could argue, based on the quotes I've
marshalled above in this thread, that his notion of God was a mystical one that does not
conform to Spinozist categories. It is the kind of belief that Aldous Huxley expounds and
traces in his book The Perennial Philosophy.
> You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
Yes, but again, in Einstein's case the invocation of God is not merely a heuristic device
but is founded on belief.
>
> Well Newton might have had a little trouble as clever as he was since
> he died long before Marx was born. Anyway, what do you make of Newton's
> interest in alchemy.
Obviously I meant that Newton understood the need for the mind to be open to realities
that found the supraempirical and not wear blinkers that train one to look only at the
empirical. So he, in the seventeenth century, already displayed a more advanced
consciousness than Marxist epigoni display in the twentieth. That was my point, as I'm
sure you realized when you tried to insert this petty, meaningless debater's point that is
based on a willful and silly misreading of my sentence.
>
>
> If you have been reading my post then you would be aware of my practice
> of
> citing a wide variety of writers and thinkers including Marxists and
> non-Marxists alike. I have often indicated my interest in the American
> pragmatists and the analytical philosophers.
That's the problem--in taking an interest, seemingly exclusively, in thinkers who inhabit
the tellurian realm of the a posteriori, you weigh your consciousness down so that it can
never rise to the empyrean.
I would be happy to see any of my ideas echoed in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, who are
a much more fertile ground for overall speculation on human destiny than Marx and his
followers alone (and most people on this list have an exclusively Marxist diet). I'm not
claiming absolute originality for any of my ideas in absolute or historical terms, I'm
simply encouraging patterns of intellectual engagement that might spur thoughts that are
new to the thinker, even if they have been anticipated earlier, unbeknownst to him.
> > Thank
> > God--yes, God--for the free thinkers of this world, including Marx and Einstein,
> > who never spent one day of their lives justifying their ideas by quoting a
> > preceding "authority." That's what made them great intellectual
> > revolutionaries--precisely their mental antiauthoritarianism, which stands in
> > bold contrast to the scripture-quoting minions of the dogmatic left. That's the
> > truly regressive religious posture, one that you and your cohorts exemplify far
> > more fully than any heterodox mystic.
> >
>
> To quote Ronald Ray-gun, "there he goes again."
Your use of this rhetorical tactic is just as facile and empty as Reagan's--he deployed it
to conceal his lack of substance, and so are you. What you need is to spend a few weeks
making your way through the major works of Owen Barfield. A good starting place is Poetic
Diction, since it begins with a very rich and rigorous study of the what we can learn
about the overall nature of language from poetry, which, he concludes through historical
reflection and philosophical analysis, is the paradigmatic form (in its metaphorical
essence) of all language--this is obviously a broadly antiempiricist approach to language,
but I guarantee that you will find his argument compelling and worthy of reflection. Then,
for broader philosophical reflections, you might go on to History, Guilt, and Habit and
then onto Worlds Apart. Barfield, by the way, is the fellow who converted C. S. Lewis from
his own youthful atheism--you should look at their protracted correspondence sometime. I
believe it's published under the title The Great Debate.
>
>
> Jim F.
Stephen R. Diamond
<"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> replying to William Kaufman:
> > Note that even in your one-sided citations Einstein
> > repeatedly doubts the existence of a God who would do x, y, or z, not the
> > existence of God period--certainly not the same God he appeals to in his
> > famous
> > quotation objecting to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle! No atheist
> > appeals to
> > God as a means of making a point in an epic scientific argument! It is
> > evident
> > from Einstein's various remarks--including the rather tendentious selection
> > you
> > present here, which nevertheless merely delimit his conception of God but
> > do not
> > deny it outright--that Einstein believed in some sort of God, if not an
> > interventionist one.
>
> You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
>
Logicians too often use God talk when wanting to refer to the way the
world actually is, as contrasted with what we know about the world.
"God doesn't play dice" was not an argument. Einstein did have an
argument - a thought experiment he debated with Bohr. "God doesn't play
dice" was only a metaphorical expression of Einstein's position - that
probability should not enter into fundamental physical laws. It
expressed his intuitions about the ways of the universe - intutions he
knew required defense by rational means.
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
> Thank God--yes, God--for the free thinkers of this world, including
> Marx and Einstein, who never spent one day of their lives justifying
> their ideas by quoting a preceding "authority." That's what made them
> great intellectual revolutionaries--precisely their mental
> antiauthoritarianism, which stands in bold contrast to the
> scripture-quoting minions of the dogmatic left. That's the truly
> regressive religious posture, one that you and your cohorts exemplify
> far more fully than any heterodox mystic.
Marx and Einstein didn't quote authorities? What about Marx expressly
"borrowing" his theory of value from the British economists, his
dialectical method from Hegel, and his socialism from the French
utopians?
What about Einstein's reliance on the Michelson-Morley experiment? Or
should he have done the experiment again himself?
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
<kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> "Jim F." wrote:
>
> > If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
> > was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
> > reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
> > in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
> > is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
>
> Yes, but it is a God, which is the main point. An his believing in a
> pantheist God does
> not make him any less of a believer. In fact, one could argue, based on the
> quotes I've
> marshalled above in this thread, that his notion of God was a mystical one
> that does not
> conform to Spinozist categories. It is the kind of belief that Aldous Huxley
> expounds and
> traces in his book The Perennial Philosophy.
Because the word 'God' is invoked doesn't make it God. What exactly do
you take a "believer" to hold? If "God" has the same properties as
matter, then God is matter. What do you think Einstein actually
believed that would not be acceptable to a strict materialist? That is,
what beliefs that include the word "God" are not in Einstein's case
fully translatable into a materialist language?
>
> > You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> > is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> > scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> > in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> > sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> > believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
>
> Yes, but again, in Einstein's case the invocation of God is not merely a
> heuristic device
> but is founded on belief.
That's your conclusion, but not an argument for it. Actually, it is
neither a belief nor a heuristic device, but only an idiom. To see
this, just ask yourself why a belief in any identifiable form of theism
entails that God doesn't play dice. How is the absence of fundamental
chance derivable from the existence of God? Why shouldn't any form of a
god be averse to playing dice, except by wholly arbitrary assertion, in
which case God plays no role in the reasoning.
>
> >
<snip on Newton>
> >
> >
<snip on realms of truth>
> >
<snip on the rest>
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
"Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
> Marx and Einstein didn't quote authorities? What about Marx expressly
> "borrowing" his theory of value from the British economists, his
> dialectical method from Hegel, and his socialism from the French
> utopians?
> What about Einstein's reliance on the Michelson-Morley experiment? Or
> should he have done the experiment again himself?
Kaufman's response:
Marx borrowed what was of value while mercilessly deconstructing the
systematic shortcomings of those very sources you cite. How can you
possibly compare this creative, intensely critical process with the rapt,
rote uncritical recitation of scripture that has been swallowed whole by
Marxist dogmatists? You are really missing the point on this one.
As regards the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point is precisely that is
was a VERIFIABLE PROVEN RESULT about physical science, not an august
pronouncement or disputed opinion by Lenin or Trotsky on human matters that
do not admit of certain demonstration. The authority of the
Michelson-Morley experiment lies not in the apotheosis of the two men's
pronouncements on everything in life, such that you have a bunch of
scientists or lay followers walking around calling themselves
Michelson-Morleyists--their experiment was an objective result that is
repeatable and verifiable by anyone. By contrast, Marx's conclusions about
economics or Lenin's or Trotsky's about politics do not represent certain
knowledge that is publicly verifiable by anyone under conditions of
rigorously controlled experimentation--no matter how persuasive you or I
might find them, there are plenty of brilliant, erudite people who
vigorously and often trenchantly dispute their every conclusion every day
of the week. So trying to settle a disputed point simply by posting a quote
from Marx on the long-term tendencies of capitalism or Lenin on
revolutionary strategy is merely a dogmatic appeal to likeminded
religionists (since no one outside the circle of true believers confers
awestruck oracular power on such quotations)--people who have granted
judgmental infallibility to those figures to the extent of giving their
worldview a proper-adjective form "Marxist," "Leninist," and so on,
something no self-respecting scientist would do. (Even the Catholics no
longer regard the Pope as infallible, so they are already a good bit more
enlightened common run of religious Marxists in this respect--they reserve
infallibility to God, not men, as some Marxists still do!) There are
differeing schools of thought in science, but they are preponderantly named
after concepts, not cult-worshiped human authorities of the kind that are
so common on the dogmatic left. Get the difference? (If not, please spare
me a quotation from Marx or Lenin or Trotsky in response.)
>
William Kaufman
as you want to make Einstein say that he is a dogmatic, militant atheist, you
can't do so, because he never did. He doubted the existence of a simplistically
anthropomorrphic God who can at a whim reverse the laws of nature or miraculously
cure quadriplegics at the touch of a televised faith healer, but then so do most
sophisticated believers--which is what Einstein was, your wishful kvetching and
retroactive surmising and writhing about it notwithstanding. If you want more
evidence of Einstein's clearly affirmed spiritual convictions, see the quotes in
the aforementioned thread. Meatime, here's the skinny: Yes, Stephen, there are
people way smarter than you on this earth who are open to the idea of God, and
that's been true for a long time, even since the advent of the Enlightenment. That
doesn't prove anything, I grant you, but it should remind you that if you wear
your atheist badge as a mark of intellectual superiority, you've got some awfully
tough competition who are wearing badges of a very different sort.
"Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
> In article <3774FA36...@earthlink.net>, William Kaufman
> <kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > "Jim F." wrote:
> >
> > > If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
> > > was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
> > > reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
> > > in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
> > > is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
> >
> > Yes, but it is a God, which is the main point. An his believing in a
> > pantheist God does
> > not make him any less of a believer. In fact, one could argue, based on the
> > quotes I've
> > marshalled above in this thread, that his notion of God was a mystical one
> > that does not
> > conform to Spinozist categories. It is the kind of belief that Aldous Huxley
> > expounds and
> > traces in his book The Perennial Philosophy.
>
> Because the word 'God' is invoked doesn't make it God. What exactly do
> you take a "believer" to hold? If "God" has the same properties as
> matter, then God is matter. What do you think Einstein actually
> believed that would not be acceptable to a strict materialist? That is,
> what beliefs that include the word "God" are not in Einstein's case
> fully translatable into a materialist language?
> >
> > > You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> > > is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> > > scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> > > in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> > > sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> > > believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
> >
> > Yes, but again, in Einstein's case the invocation of God is not merely a
> > heuristic device
> > but is founded on belief.
>
Jim F.
>
> "Jim F." wrote:
>
> > If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
> > was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
> > reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
> > in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
> > is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
>
> Yes, but it is a God, which is the main point. An his believing in a pantheist God does
> not make him any less of a believer. In fact, one could argue, based on the quotes I've
> marshalled above in this thread, that his notion of God was a mystical one that does not
> conform to Spinozist categories. It is the kind of belief that Aldous Huxley expounds and
> traces in his book The Perennial Philosophy.
See my post in this thread that I posted at 5:08 AM in which I discussed
pantheism and atheism and cited Santayana and Lucretius.
>
> > You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> > is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> > scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> > in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> > sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> > believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
>
> Yes, but again, in Einstein's case the invocation of God is not merely a heuristic device
> but is founded on belief.
As Steve Diamond suggested, it seems to have mainly a rhetorical device,
after all it is by no means clear how one cand deduce from the
hypothesis
of a God (Spinozan or otherwise) the non-existence of quantum
indeterminism.
>
> >
> > Well Newton might have had a little trouble as clever as he was since
> > he died long before Marx was born. Anyway, what do you make of Newton's
> > interest in alchemy.
>
> Obviously I meant that Newton understood the need for the mind to be open to realities
> that found the supraempirical and not wear blinkers that train one to look only at the
> empirical. So he, in the seventeenth century, already displayed a more advanced
> consciousness than Marxist epigoni display in the twentieth. That was my point, as I'm
> sure you realized when you tried to insert this petty, meaningless debater's point that is
> based on a willful and silly misreading of my sentence.
Perhaps you can explain to us a bit about the nature of these
suprempirical
realities and how they can be known by humans. Marxism as I understand
it offers an alternative basis for explaining religious consciousness
that
on a naturalist basis that does not require the postulating of a
supraempirical
realm. Perhaps you can explain why such an approach is wrong.
>
> >
> >
> > If you have been reading my post then you would be aware of my practice
> > of
> > citing a wide variety of writers and thinkers including Marxists and
> > non-Marxists alike. I have often indicated my interest in the American
> > pragmatists and the analytical philosophers.
>
> That's the problem--in taking an interest, seemingly exclusively, in thinkers who inhabit
> the tellurian realm of the a posteriori, you weigh your consciousness down so that it can
> never rise to the empyrean.
If you have read more of the American pragmatists then you most
certainly
would have included William James and C.S. Peirce on your list of
"spiritual" thinkers, I would think. My own sypathies are closer to
Dewey and George Herbert Mead whose naturalisms were akin in some
respects
to Marxism.
Jim F.
Jim F.
>
> "Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
>
> > Marx and Einstein didn't quote authorities? What about Marx expressly
> > "borrowing" his theory of value from the British economists, his
> > dialectical method from Hegel, and his socialism from the French
> > utopians?
>
> > What about Einstein's reliance on the Michelson-Morley experiment? Or
> > should he have done the experiment again himself?
>
> Kaufman's response:
> Marx borrowed what was of value while mercilessly deconstructing the
> systematic shortcomings of those very sources you cite. How can you
> possibly compare this creative, intensely critical process with the rapt,
> rote uncritical recitation of scripture that has been swallowed whole by
> Marxist dogmatists? You are really missing the point on this one.
Perhaps you might do us the favor of naming names here. Who are the
dogmatists that you are referring to?
>
> As regards the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point is precisely that is
> was a VERIFIABLE PROVEN RESULT about physical science, not an august
> pronouncement or disputed opinion by Lenin or Trotsky on human matters that
> do not admit of certain demonstration. The authority of the
> Michelson-Morley experiment lies not in the apotheosis of the two men's
> pronouncements on everything in life, such that you have a bunch of
> scientists or lay followers walking around calling themselves
> Michelson-Morleyists--their experiment was an objective result that is
> repeatable and verifiable by anyone. By contrast, Marx's conclusions about
> economics or Lenin's or Trotsky's about politics do not represent certain
> knowledge that is publicly verifiable by anyone under conditions of
> rigorously controlled experimentation--no matter how persuasive you or I
> might find them, there are plenty of brilliant, erudite people who
> vigorously and often trenchantly dispute their every conclusion every day
> of the week.
You might recall the thread a little while back on the question of
whether
or not history can be made into a science. To the argument that the
social
sciences are not open to the types of controlled experiments that are
said
to be the basis for natural science, I pointed out that there are a
whole
branches of natural science where controlled experimentation does not
play a significant role either. Astronomy, geology, and paleontology
are some good examples. In all these areas of natural science,
researchers
are forced to make interpretations of phenomena whose validity is
verified
by their consistency with observed data on the one hand and by their
compatibility with the best verified theories of those sciences that are
invoked as a basis for theoretical explanations within these sciences.
Thus in astronomy, the consistency of a theory with the known laws of
physics
is an important critrion for the acceptability of an astronomical
theory.
Likewise in paleontology, consistency of an interpretation with the best
established principles of physiology and biochemistry (and more recently
of molecular biology) is similarly important for judging the
acceptability
of a proposed interpretation.
I would argue that the difficulty of conclusively verifying a hypothesis
in social science is not therefore an argument against such disciplines
being regarded as genuine sciences IMO.
> So trying to settle a disputed point simply by posting a quote
> from Marx on the long-term tendencies of capitalism or Lenin on
> revolutionary strategy is merely a dogmatic appeal to likeminded
> religionists (since no one outside the circle of true believers confers
> awestruck oracular power on such quotations)--people who have granted
> judgmental infallibility to those figures to the extent of giving their
> worldview a proper-adjective form "Marxist," "Leninist," and so on,
> something no self-respecting scientist would do.
I don't quite understand this. Are you asserting that in the natural
sciences, theories don't get named after individuals? In physics we
have such things as Newtonian mechanics, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian
dynamics, Einsteinian gravitational theory etc. In biology we have
Darwinism, named after you know who. I am not sure how many Marxists
actually would regard Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky as infalliable figures
as you claim. Most Marxists I would think recognize that a given theory
even if consistent with the views of these figures must still be
verified
against the facts of the matter if it is to be accepted as valid.
>(Even the Catholics no
> longer regard the Pope as infallible, so they are already a good bit more
> enlightened common run of religious Marxists in this respect--they reserve
> infallibility to God, not men, as some Marxists still do!)
Actually you are wrong about the Catholic Church's stance on
infalliability.
The Pope is still regarde to be infallible on issues of faith and morals
when he speaks "ex cathedra." I think that perogative has been
exercized
about three times in the modern era, most recently when John Paul II
in his letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared that the Church's teaching
against female ordination to be infallible.
> There are
> differeing schools of thought in science, but they are preponderantly named
> after concepts, not cult-worshiped human authorities of the kind that are
> so common on the dogmatic left. Get the difference? (If not, please spare
> me a quotation from Marx or Lenin or Trotsky in response.)
Newtonian mechanics was named after Newton. Back in the 18th century
people spoke of Newtonian versus Cartesian science for instance.
I already mentioned Darwinism. There is of course Mendelian
genetics which in the former USSR was for a time repressed by
Lysenkoism.
Probably the real reason why there is less naming of schools in thought
after individuals in the natural sciences than in the social sciences
is probably that in the natural sciences theories are often the work
of many different investigators rather than the products of a few
individual geniuses.
Jim F.
>
> >
William Kaufman
(1) Offer some counterquotes on Einstein's view of God and religion, in case you missed this
post in this thread or when I posted it separately
(2) Reproduce my response to Prianikoff on much the same question as you pose here, as to why it
is not self-evident that the material should be privileged in any rigorous rational analysis of
reality. Keep in mind that scientists are not ontologists--they look for mathematizable
abstractions and regularities in nature but never ask or care in any ultimate philisophical
sense what kind of "stuff" they are made of--that seems to be more a concern of
nineteenth-century philosophers and Engelsian "diamat" Marxists, who are, there scientific
pretensions, notwithstanding, more ontologists than scientists, at least in the sense that
science is actually practiced among professional working scientists. Moreover, there is no more
proof of the world's consisting of something like "matter" than "spirit." These are arid
speculations unrelated to any real scientific issue. The problem boils down to an ethical one:
if you choose to repose your faith in a reality that is essentially more like a rock than a
mind, then things like love, compassion, courage, will, freedom, and justice become illusory
epiphenomena of that "rock." As Nietzsche said, "The kind of philosophy a man espouses reveals
nothing about reality but everything about the kind of man he is." If this metaphor of a dead
rock contains your sense of the meaning of being, so be it. I prefer to see the "rock" of the
visible world as a kind of metaphorical picture of a divine language that exalts and ultimately
explains and redeems those higher realities--love, justice, freedom, and so on--that you seem
content to explain away as derivative epehemera of dead matter. I, on the other hand, see the
matter as ephemera, the other things as enduring. A chacun son gout!
So here are the two posts: First the Einstein quotes, and then my response to Prianikoff:
Post I-- Einstein Quotes:
For the record, and to balance Jim F.'s tendentiously selective quoting in the
"Marxism and Religion" thread, I present a counterselection of observations
from Einstein on religion and God (and if you really want to go on a mystical
trip, look into Newton's fascination with the the otherworldly).
Remember, the point of all this is to show that great minds can be inspired with
a sense of mystery that impels their thoughts beyond their cherished dogmas and
certitudes; this Mystery is what the greatest minds have always worshipped/
pondered/anguished over/rejoiced in as God.
Here are the Einstein quotations:
"Jim F." wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote:
> >
> > "Jim F." wrote:
> >
> > > If you had bothered noticing, I said right off the bat that Einstein
> > > was a Spinozan pantheist. If you haven't already I would suggest
> > > reading Spinoza's *Ethics*. Einstein often said that he believed
> > > in the God of Spinoza. The God of Spinoza was not the God that
> > > is believed in by most orthodox Chrisitians, Jews, and Muslims.
> >
> > Yes, but it is a God, which is the main point. An his believing in a pantheist God does
> > not make him any less of a believer. In fact, one could argue, based on the quotes I've
> > marshalled above in this thread, that his notion of God was a mystical one that does not
> > conform to Spinozist categories. It is the kind of belief that Aldous Huxley expounds and
> > traces in his book The Perennial Philosophy.
>
> See my post in this thread that I posted at 5:08 AM in which I discussed
> pantheism and atheism and cited Santayana and Lucretius.
>
> >
> > > You seem a bit naive concerning the ways of theoretical physicists. It
> > > is not uncommon for them to use "God talk" in making points within
> > > scientific arguments (i.e. "God would have had to make the universe
> > > in such-and-such a manner"). Stephen Hawking who is an avowed agnostic
> > > sometimes invokes such "God talk." Within the physics community both
> > > believers and atheists indulge in this practice.
> >
> > Yes, but again, in Einstein's case the invocation of God is not merely a heuristic device
> > but is founded on belief.
>
> As Steve Diamond suggested, it seems to have mainly a rhetorical device,
> after all it is by no means clear how one cand deduce from the
> hypothesis
> of a God (Spinozan or otherwise) the non-existence of quantum
> indeterminism.
>
> >
> > >
> > > Well Newton might have had a little trouble as clever as he was since
> > > he died long before Marx was born. Anyway, what do you make of Newton's
> > > interest in alchemy.
> >
> > Obviously I meant that Newton understood the need for the mind to be open to realities
> > that found the supraempirical and not wear blinkers that train one to look only at the
> > empirical. So he, in the seventeenth century, already displayed a more advanced
> > consciousness than Marxist epigoni display in the twentieth. That was my point, as I'm
> > sure you realized when you tried to insert this petty, meaningless debater's point that is
> > based on a willful and silly misreading of my sentence.
>
> Perhaps you can explain to us a bit about the nature of these
> suprempirical
> realities and how they can be known by humans. Marxism as I understand
> it offers an alternative basis for explaining religious consciousness
> that
> on a naturalist basis that does not require the postulating of a
> supraempirical
> realm. Perhaps you can explain why such an approach is wrong.
>
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > If you have been reading my post then you would be aware of my practice
> > > of
> > > citing a wide variety of writers and thinkers including Marxists and
> > > non-Marxists alike. I have often indicated my interest in the American
> > > pragmatists and the analytical philosophers.
> >
> > That's the problem--in taking an interest, seemingly exclusively, in thinkers who inhabit
> > the tellurian realm of the a posteriori, you weigh your consciousness down so that it can
> > never rise to the empyrean.
>
> If you have read more of the American pragmatists then you most
> certainly
> would have included William James and C.S. Peirce on your list of
> "spiritual" thinkers, I would think. My own sypathies are closer to
> Dewey and George Herbert Mead whose naturalisms were akin in some
> respects
> to Marxism.
>
> Jim F.
Post II--Response to Prianikoff:
Prianikoff:
A materialist would argue that this "mystery" is inherent in the fact that
the human mind can only ever have an approximate picture of objective
reality. Matter precedes mind, the unconscious precedes the conscious. The
"Mystery" you refer to, could equally be explained as the ultimate primacy
of objective material laws over subjective thought.
Saying that this represents a God suggests the reverse process - that matter
emanated from the ideas of a subjective being. There really is an
unbridgeable dividing line between idealism and materialism on this point.
To worship means ultimately, to give up the struggle to understand. Because
we are material beings, we are compelled to sensually engage the material
world - respond, consume, attempt to master -not simply contemplate it.
Historically speaking, there has been vast progress in the demystification
of natural and social phenomena since the dominance of religious thought was
challenged by the bourgeois revolutions. Reverting to a worship of the
mysteries is an to attempt to halt this process.
The struggle for survival, mediated by the social and economic framework we
have been bequeathed by history, rules out this possibility. Indeed, it
selects which individual inspirations will be given social importance in
each era.
Kaufman:
Your statement is loaded with a lot of unreflected upon presuppositions that
need examining. First of all, have you ever had direct contact with an
undifferentiated entity called "matter"? You have experienced red, yellow,
hardness, softness, itches, tastes, pains, pleasures, circles, squares, and
other qualitative phenomena, but never some abstract substrate that you call
matter. Neither have scientists, whose glimpses into the innermost secrets of
the visible world yield blips on screens that they take to represent this or
that entity (such as quarks), but they have no direct apperception of an
undifferentiated substrate of all phenomena that is called "matter." In fact,
many of them have begun to doubt that there is such a thing, even in theory (try
getting your arms around the concept of dark matter or antimatter, for instance,
and see how well it dovetails with quaintly mechanistic nineteenth-century
notions of some ultimate, hard, resistant, rocklike specks of "reality). In
fact, "matter" is an intellectual and methodological abstraction, not anything
you have a direct experience of. What do you have a direct experience of? The
aforementioned sights, sounds, tactile qualities, etc. But even here you
experience only your own phenomenal reality, your own field of consciousness.
You don't apprehend the chair in itself, you experience a constellation of
mental phenomena, qualitative sensations that subsist in your field of
consciousness--perceptions of its shape, consistency, tactile qualities,
etc.--but all you are ever experiencing directly is your own field of
consciousness in its phenomenal diversity. Even to presuppose that there is an
external world that is physically independent of your phenomenal field of
consciousness is itself an act of faith, since you have no direct experience of
any such independent world, only your field of consciousness, which you merely
posit as reflecting some such external physicality,
Now the preceding thought experiment is a very rough, compressed sketch of
what Edmund Husserl called the phenomenological reduction--that is, reducing
your statements about the world to what you actually experience firsthand. Given
that your only firsthand experiences are qualitative phenomena of consciounsess,
it's easy to see that any thesis about any material undergirding for "reality",
any notion of a mathematized, lawlike nature, is actually itself an abstraction
constructed upon the phenomenal primacy of consciousness itself. Thus Husserl
has trumped the materialists who want to claim that consciousness is a mere
epiphenomenon of matter by showing, through a simple thought experiment, that
matter is an abstraction erected by consciousness, an abstraction, moreover, of
which we have no direct experience. So choose your faith in an ultimate
reality--yours happens to be matter, but that's all it is, a faith, since you
have no direct apperception of this single substrate called matter than I have
of God. To my taste "matter," that hard lifeless "whatever," seems a rather
deadening metaphor with which to construct a world, one with fatal consequences
for any notion of volition or freedom--things socialists should presumably be
concerned about--but I'll let you join the sociobiologists in erecting a
materialist dystopia in which there's no essential difference between a pigeon
and a poet, aside, maybe from the number of molecules and the complexity of
their interactions.
Today's closing riddle: Do brains fall in love with each other, or do people
fall in love with each other? Just wondering.
William Kaufman
"Jim F." wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote:
> >
> >
> Perhaps you might do us the favor of naming names here. Who are the
> dogmatists that you are referring to?
If you can ask this question with a straight face, then you have never spent anytime in
any sort of Marxist organization or on this list, for that matter.
You're quite right, and philosophers of science do not regard those other disciplines as
rigorously scientific in the same sense that the experimental sciences are. You can
stretch the term "science" all day long until it has no real meaning left. The point is
that the human sciences stretch so far beyond the boundaries of any of the disciplines you
mention, soft as their "scientificity" is compared to physics, that the term becomes
something of a catchall, like "justice" endlessly repeated by hypocritical lying
politicians at political conventions. Anyone is free to use it--but let's maintain a sense
of perspective on how strict a meaning we're applying to it.
> I don't quite understand this. Are you asserting that in the natural
> sciences, theories don't get named after individuals? In physics we
> have such things as Newtonian mechanics, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian
> dynamics, Einsteinian gravitational theory etc. In biology we have
> Darwinism, named after you know who. I am not sure how many Marxists
> actually would regard Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky as infalliable figures
> as you claim. Most Marxists I would think recognize that a given theory
> even if consistent with the views of these figures must still be
> verified
> against the facts of the matter if it is to be accepted as valid.
You're being willfully blind here. Of course specific theories or results are routinely
named after their discoverers, but not whole schools of thought. You are talking about
specific results or theories, not whole cosmogonies. The difference is this: a
contemporary scientist might say, "I subscribe to the Einsteinian theory of gravitation."
Or he might say, "I believe in relativity" or "I believe in quantum theory." But he would
never say, "I'm an Einsteinist" or "I'm a Heisenbergist" as a shorthand for his entire
cosmogony. But that is exactly what Marxists (or Leninists or Trotskyists, etc.) because
the legitimacy of those theories rests so much more heavily on the personal authority of
the authors to certify their legitimacy than on any objectively verifiable results--so the
enhanced personal factor is registered in followers' adopting proper adjective to describe
THEIR ENTIRE WORLDVIEWS in a way that no self-respecting scientist would ever do.
> Actually you are wrong about the Catholic Church's stance on
> infalliability.
> The Pope is still regarde to be infallible on issues of faith and morals
> when he speaks "ex cathedra." I think that perogative has been
> exercized
> about three times in the modern era, most recently when John Paul II
> in his letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared that the Church's teaching
> against female ordination to be infallible.
So what's your point here--that that makes it OK for "scientific socialists" to do the
same thing? To the extent that the Pope's infallibility is bounded at all, it still makes
him more fallible than Marx is to many "Marxists," who frequently deploy quotations from
his texts to clinch debating points, as though his personal authority were some sort of
holy writ. And again, if you doubt that this sort of thing is pandemic in the Marxist
movement, you can't have been around it very long or you have your head in the sand.
>
>
>
> Newtonian mechanics was named after Newton.
I have already addressed this point above. You're repeating yourself here. I've already
addressed this point above.
>
> Probably the real reason why there is less naming of schools in thought
> after individuals in the natural sciences than in the social sciences
> is probably that in the natural sciences theories are often the work
> of many different investigators rather than the products of a few
> individual geniuses.
>
To repeat myself--it's not just schools of thought or specific results or theories we're
talking about--it's using a proper adjective to describe an entire cosmogony, which is
exactly what Marxism is for Marxists: an exhaustive explanation of history, theory, and
the ontological foundations of the universe. Again, no self-respecting practicing
contemporary scientist would describe his overall theoretical perspective in terms of a
person rather than idea--that's because in genuine science what carries the day is
verifiable results, not personal authority.
By the way, though I agree with you on almost nothing, I find your posts interesting,
literate, stimulating, and above all, civil and collegial, two virtues that are all too
scarce on this list. Thanks for the engaging discussions, and I look forward to more.
>
>
>
>
> >
> > >
Stephen R. Diamond
<kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> As regards the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point is precisely that is
> was a VERIFIABLE PROVEN RESULT about physical science, not an august
> pronouncement or disputed opinion by Lenin or Trotsky on human matters that
> do not admit of certain demonstration. The authority of the
> Michelson-Morley experiment lies not in the apotheosis of the two men's
> pronouncements on everything in life, such that you have a bunch of
> scientists or lay followers walking around calling themselves
> Michelson-Morleyists--their experiment was an objective result that is
> repeatable and verifiable by anyone. By contrast, Marx's conclusions about
> economics or Lenin's or Trotsky's about politics do not represent certain
> knowledge that is publicly verifiable by anyone under conditions of
> rigorously controlled experimentation--no matter how persuasive you or I
> might find them, there are plenty of brilliant, erudite people who
> vigorously and often trenchantly dispute their every conclusion every day
> of the week. So trying to settle a disputed point simply by posting a quote
> from Marx on the long-term tendencies of capitalism or Lenin on
> revolutionary strategy is merely a dogmatic appeal to likeminded
> religionists (since no one outside the circle of true believers confers
> awestruck oracular power on such quotations)--people who have granted
> judgmental infallibility to those figures to the extent of giving their
> worldview a proper-adjective form "Marxist," "Leninist," and so on,
> something no self-respecting scientist would do.
Whereas results in the physical sciences ideally should be verifiable
by any competent investigator, at any actual time they are not. How
many different investigators had verified the Michelson-Morley
experiment beforee Einstein used their result?
If some unknown had announced the Michelson-Morley result, it might
have been ignored. The credence that is given to scientific reports
depends on the "authority" of the investigators.
The fact that scientific results can be replicated does not diminish
the "authoritarian" character of scientists' reliance on them, when
they have not been actually replicated. In science results frequently
go unreplicated for a long time, because the "authority" is trusted,
and there is little prestige in replicating an accepted result.
So, the use to which Marxists put their "authorities" is not so
drastically different from the use of authority in physical science.
One difference is the "results" often are not empirical, but judgments.
If a previous revolutionary demonstrates unusually good interpretive
judgment, if those judgments tended to be borne out by experience, if
he lived in an epoch in which the opportunity to make good judgments,
and to develop the capacity for such judgment, was substantially
greater than our own, if the particular judgment is deeply entrenched
in a system of judgments, there is a rational basis for a rebuttable
presumption that such a judgment was good, and, to the extent the
judgment was of an invariant condition, it is applicable today.
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
to Jim F. <kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Probably the real reason why there is less naming of schools in thought
> > after individuals in the natural sciences than in the social sciences
> > is probably that in the natural sciences theories are often the work
> > of many different investigators rather than the products of a few
> > individual geniuses.
> >
>
> To repeat myself--it's not just schools of thought or specific results
> or theories we're talking about--it's using a proper adjective to
> describe an entire cosmogony, which is exactly what Marxism is for
> Marxists: an exhaustive explanation of history, theory, and the
> ontological foundations of the universe.
It is true Marxism is more inclusive than physical theory, but not as
exhaustive as you portray it. Marxism apparently implies nothing in
particular for most Marxists, in the fields, for example, of
psychology, aesthetics, or linguistics.
This difference has to do with the degree of integration of the theory.
Had Einstein found his Unified Field Theory, physicists would be more
likely to call themselves Einsteinians.
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
himself with a man rather than with an overall theory. Your stretching this as a
rationalization for what is unmistakably a form of intellectual personality cult among
Marxists that does not exist in the hard sciences, period--the reason being that Marxism
is not a hard science but the accumulated respository of faith in the writings of one man
on issues that cannot be adjudicated by the methods of hard science. It's a totally
different ball game. Deal with it. Then, if you still want to call yourself a Marxist,
have a ball. Just so long as you conjure with the real implications of that proper
adjective.
And, by the way, you're way off on Marxism's totalism as a theory. Any theory that
presumes to explain not only all of history and current society but the onotlogical
foundation of the FUCKING UNIVERSE is a total theory that seeks to explain all phenomena,
including the ones you mention. If you think there have never been any Marxists in those
fields, then you haven't examined the annals of Soviet academia or, for that matter, the
humanities and social science departments of any number of elite American and European
universities.
"Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
> In article <37759CB9...@earthlink.net>, William Kaufman responded
> to Jim F. <kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > > Probably the real reason why there is less naming of schools in thought
> > > after individuals in the natural sciences than in the social sciences
> > > is probably that in the natural sciences theories are often the work
> > > of many different investigators rather than the products of a few
> > > individual geniuses.
> > >
> >
> > To repeat myself--it's not just schools of thought or specific results
> > or theories we're talking about--it's using a proper adjective to
> > describe an entire cosmogony, which is exactly what Marxism is for
> > Marxists: an exhaustive explanation of history, theory, and the
> > ontological foundations of the universe.
>
William Kaufman
"Stephen R. Diamond" wrote:
>
> The fact that scientific results can be replicated does not diminish
> the "authoritarian" character of scientists' reliance on them, when
> they have not been actually replicated. In science results frequently
> go unreplicated for a long time, because the "authority" is trusted,
> and there is little prestige in replicating an accepted result.
>
>
Steve, I greatly respect the thoughtfulness of your contributions, but you are just
squirming here, desperate for some sense of scientific legitimacy for a faith in Marx,
Lenin, and Trotsky that is quite different in principle from reliance on proven scientific
results. You know this perfectly well, but your identity as a Marxist is so deeply
ingrained by now, you cannot bring yourself to admit that there is a large measure of hero
worship in it that is not characteristic of the hard sciences.
Jim F.
This reprisal of Bishop Berkeley's arguments against an epistemological
realism raises the issue of what philosophers call the "egocentric
predicament" - that is the thesis that one can never eliminate the
human mind from cognition and discover what things are really like
apart from one's consciousness or, indeed, whether they exist apart
from being known. However, it is quenstionable whether the types of
conclusions that idealists (or atleast subjective idealists) wish
to draw from this can be sustained. It would seem fallacious to
infer from it the thesis that nothing exists outside of consciousness.
The fact that one cannot discover X does not mean tha X does not
exist or that it is unreasonable to assert the existence of X.
Furthermore, if like the subjective idealists we are willing to infer
from the egocentric predicament nothing exists apart from people's
consciousness of them, we could legitimately fraw the same inference
in regards to other persons as well, thus leading to a radical
soliphism. Nor does it necessarily follow that if there are things
that exist outside of consciousness, they are radically different
from those things that do exist within consciousness.
The Anglo-American realists of the turn of this century for
the most part argued that realism was a basic intuition of human
consciousness. Thus they argued that it was not necessary so much
as to establish a positive case for realism as to suubject anti-realist
philosophies like idealism to a searching critique.
> Now the preceding thought experiment is a very rough, compressed sketch of
> what Edmund Husserl called the phenomenological reduction--that is, reducing
> your statements about the world to what you actually experience firsthand.
Husserl's method of phenomenlogical reduction was essentially an
updating
of Descartes' method of universal doubt (a point that Husserl often
insisted
upon; He also I recall titled one of his books *Cartesian Meditations*).
> Given
> that your only firsthand experiences are qualitative phenomena of consciounsess,
> it's easy to see that any thesis about any material undergirding for "reality",
> any notion of a mathematized, lawlike nature, is actually itself an abstraction
> constructed upon the phenomenal primacy of consciousness itself. Thus Husserl
> has trumped the materialists who want to claim that consciousness is a mere
> epiphenomenon of matter by showing, through a simple thought experiment, that
> matter is an abstraction erected by consciousness, an abstraction, moreover, of
> which we have no direct experience. So choose your faith in an ultimate
> reality--yours happens to be matter, but that's all it is, a faith, since you
> have no direct apperception of this single substrate called matter than I have
> of God. To my taste "matter," that hard lifeless "whatever," seems a rather
> deadening metaphor with which to construct a world, one with fatal consequences
> for any notion of volition or freedom--things socialists should presumably be
> concerned about--but I'll let you join the sociobiologists in erecting a
> materialist dystopia in which there's no essential difference between a pigeon
> and a poet, aside, maybe from the number of molecules and the complexity of
> their interactions.
I would argue that philosophically Marxism is most compatible with some
variety of a scientific realism. The type of realism that seems implicit
in Marxism seems to be a variety of critical realism, in which it argued
that we do not perceive the external world directly because our
perceptions
are always mediated socially. Roy Bhaskar is a leading proponent of
a Marxist critical realism.
Jim F.
William Kaufman
Prianikoff, which addresses some of the issues you raise. Please forgive its somewhat
repetitive, meandering presentation--it was written, perforce, in haste. By the way: have
you ever read any Owen Barfield, especially Poetic Diction and Worlds Apart?
My reply to Prianikoff:
Yes, all your daily experiences of the physical world lead you to expect some sort of
regularity and connected among the events therein. But as to the utimate constitution, the
essential "whatness," of some "stuff," that might be underlying those events, you haven't
a clue, and neither does anyone else, given the impossibility of experiencing it directly,
and even according to modern physical theory, there might not even be any such possibility
in principle. For example, I'm sure you know physicists have not resolved the issue
whether light--surely one of the most visible and tangible aspects of the natural
world--consists of waves or particles. Both theories fit in with the theoretical apparatus
of modern physics, and each has its partisans among modern physicists. But then what if
light is waves, not particles? Surely there is nothing less matterlike than a wave. Now
scientists are forever exploring theses about the ultimate constitution of matter, but
they are venturing theories into it's lawlike behavior, not its ultimate "whatness" in
some sense of philosphical ontology. Scientists might have personal opinions about this,
but it doesn't enter into their work for one second. What they are doing is attempting,
theoretically and experimentally, to identify the ultimate consitutents of matter that are
MATHEMATICALLY coherent is an overall MATHEMATICAL structuring of reality. As such, they
are after the universe's "howness," not its "whatness."
Now you would like to believe that that whatness of the tangible world is something
called matter. Yet we know not only that one of the most tangible things of all, light,
might be based, paradoxically, not on little bits of things but on something as invisible
as waves, but also that the ultimate consituents of matter--quarks and beyond--might be
something more like little currents of energy than, metaphorically tiny pebbles. And
that's the whole point. Your concepttion of matter seems to require some hard, resistant,
irreducibly tangible "whatness" that securely undergirds visible reality like some
reassuring foundation for a house. But not only is such a conception irrelevant to and not
really found in contemporary science, it might even be confuted by it, even in the most
basic theoretical terms. Remember the equivalence of matter and energy, the
transformabililty of the former into the latter--there goes your rock-solid foundation
once again. Also, remember that in quanum theory the position of the observer can actually
affect the outcome of the behavior of particles.
Now nothing I've pointed out here implies that the universes is an illusion or any
such nonsense. Nor do phenomenological theories of lived experience contend that I
magically "create" the universe out of my mind. But the reality of lived experience--the
phenomenal lived experience of qualities and essences--is forever beyond the reach of
quantitative science. For instance, take the qualitative redness of red or the yellowness
of yellow. On a spectrograph these become mere numbers. Science can never ever--in
principle--account for their distinctive qualitiative reality, which is the immediate one
we intuit. Science understands the world by methodologically converting into
mathemetizable abstractions--but says exactly zero about the immediate nature of lived
experience or the ultimate nature of reality itself, which remain, as they ever have the
domains of art and philosophy. For them matter is just as abstract a mathematical theorem
as the number on the spectrograph, and says just as little about some ultimate qualitative
"reality" of matter as the spectrograph's number tells you about the yellowness of
yellow. Moreover, science doesn't even ask certain questions that are certainly legitimate
horizons of query for a rational mind. For example, if the big bang theory is true, how
did the original unimaginably dense speck get there? There answer? We don't even ask that
question. And if you are concerned with something besides the quantifiable "how" of
things, and are concerned to know "why"--why does the universe exist? Why do things exist?
The scientists will also send you elsewhere, since their field of inquiry is
precircumscribed to questions that might have mathematical anwers. Leibniz, in fact, said
that there was only one important question: Why is there anything rather than nothing?
This is a question science doesn't even ask, much less try to answer. In the words of Dr.
Leon M. Lederman, 76, director emeritus of the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
Q. When you're investigating the micro-mysteries of the universe, how much does thinking
about God and
creation come into play with your work? I ask because you titled your last book,
''The God Particle.''
A. It comes into play. It doesn't have to. But it does. People ask you about it.
There's always a place at
the edge of our knowledge, where what's beyond is unimaginable, and that edge, of
course, moves. . . .
We've gotten closer and closer to some ultimate question. We now know that the
universe was created
some 13 billion years ago, and we will get that number more precisely, in some
kind of fiery explosion
called the Big Bang. The question is: is that creation?
And then, ''What was there before?'' A possibly defensible answer is: the laws of
physics. They dictated
there should be this event. Then, if you want to go in that direction, some will
ask, ''Well, how did the
laws of physics get there?'' And then, you're stuck. I usually say, ''Go across
the street to the theology
school, and ask those guys, because I don't know.''
What I believe is that the laws of physics got there, I don't know how, and they
determine the future
course of the universe. The sequence is: the Big Bang, expansion and cooling, the
formation of complex
objects -- eventually atoms and the atoms formed molecules, and the molecules
formed things that
crawled out of the ocean. And here we are, worrying about the whole thing!
Science thinks only in terms of mechanical and efficient causation, not formal or final
causation. If you with to understand human motivation--as opposed to mechanically
predetermined behavior--you are obliged to resort to a mode of discourse that is not
subsumable into mathematics. Love is a good example. I pointed out the absurdity of the
idea that it is brains that fall in love, not people, and you did me a favor by reducing
to an even more absurd kind of physicality--genitals. Well, now your girlfriend will know
where your true feelings are the next time you say, "I love you." So here's your thesis:
love=genital stimulation. You can see the problem with this sort of vulgar materialism, of
course--never more vulgar than in your genital formulation--it gives us no basis for
establishing a hierarchy of value between higher and lower feelings, higher life forms and
lower, etc. In your theory there is not only no essential qualitative difference between
an orgasm and a mother's tenderness for her child--there is no qualitative difference
between her child and the blanket it is wrapped in--just the number and complexity of
molecular interaction. It is a world devoid of value and feeling--in principle, anyway. In
fact, you contradict yourself by valuing all sorts of things--equality, justice, and so
on. But you have no way to make sense of such preferences as an ontological
materialist--matter just is, and whether it should be this way or that is beyond our
control since it's all governed by predetermined laws. Your very existence as a Marxist is
a declaration that something like human will and intentionality and intervene in the
course of those iron laws and have them do something else that they should be doing but
are not already doing. But that is a discourse of should, a prescriptive discourse, that
can never fit into your procrustean bed of materialism, which is purely a descriptive
discourse. To make sense of your own Engelsian diamat political doctrine, you must shed
the dogmatic, unprovable, and unscientific materialist ontology at its base.
rabhegmarlen
Jim F.
>Husserl's method of phenomenlogical reduction was essentially an
>updating
>of Descartes' method of universal doubt (a point that Husserl often
>insisted
>upon; He also I recall titled one of his books *Cartesian Meditations*).
Interestingly enough when Descartes was supposedly doubting everything at no
time do I remember him doubting his own logic or the rationality of his
thought. If he was to doubt this then he would not be able to draw any
conclusions, especially not "I think therefore I am". All the process of
doubting PRESUPPOSED a certain method of thought and one which was fixed and
rigid at that. Compare this method with Lenin in Vol.38 where he said:
"And, in the second place, if EVERYTHING develops, does not that apply also
to the most general CONCEPTS and CATEGORIES of thought? If not, it means
that thinking is not connected with being. If it does, it means that there
is a dialectics of concepts and a dialectics of cognition that has objective
significance."
Descartes did not have the advantage of learning from Darwin's discoveries,
but for 20th century philosophers there is no excuse. For instance, we know
that man developed from the higher apes and they must have had a small
vocabularly and a limited logic to go with it. We must conclude from this
that as humans developed their language and methods of communication so also
did their logic and means of thought make progress. Thus logic is not
immutable and it too develops even now and whether it is slow is not the
issue. Therefore Descartes did not start with the basics but with a method
of thought that took millions of years to develop. He overlooked that which
was most obvious and made the same mistake as countless philosophers who
started with their own thought. Any updating of Descartes method in the
modern world ignores the enormous developments made in the sciences.
Marxists have always paid close attention to these developments, because
with each major development in science, so materialist philosophy has to
develop as well if it is to remain connected with being, in Lenin's words.
________________________________
Roger Blackwell, Norwich, NR3, Britain
Pager: 01523 187644
Chat to me at: www.delphi.com/norwich
A.Prianikoff
>Yes, all your daily experiences of the physical world lead you to expect
some sort of
>regularity and connected among the events therein. But as to the utimate
constitution, the
>essential "whatness," of some "stuff," that might be underlying those
events, you haven't
>a clue, and neither does anyone else, given the impossibility of
experiencing it directly,
Such a sweeping statement. You have got a clue. More than just a clue.
Enough sensory data to construct theories and be able to predict with a
reasonable degree of certainty, the future course of events. If that were
not the case any predictive science would be impossible.
>and even according to modern physical theory, there might not even be any
such possibility
> in principle. For example, I'm sure you know physicists have not resolved
the issue
>whether light--surely one of the most visible and tangible aspects of the
natural
>world--consists of waves or particles. Both theories fit in with the
theoretical apparatus
>of modern physics, and each has its partisans among modern physicists. But
then what if
>light is waves, not particles? Surely there is nothing less matterlike than
a wave.
Why is that ? You have waves in water which is certainly a form of matter,
as well as in air (sound waves) Both are the result of energising molecules
which respond in a predictable way. Photons also have mass and obey the
laws of mechanics as was demonstrated by Compton's experiments with the
reflection of x-rays in 1923,
The fact that light also exhibits interference patterns (Young's diffraction
grating experiment) is an indication of wave behaviour (constructive and
destructive interference) The results are paradoxical, but isn't that an
illustraton of the contradictory nature of reality itself ?
>Remember the equivalence of matter and energy, the
>transformabililty of the former into the latter--there goes your rock-solid
foundation
>once again. Also, remember that in quanum theory the position of the
observer can actually
>affect the outcome of the behavior of particles.
You're making the mistake of viewing matter as something "hard" like a lump
of rock. That would be a very crude way of looking at it, more akin to
mechanical materialism than the views of Marxists. Even Engels, writing
before the discovery of the atom was able to say " Matter without motion is
just as inconceivable as motion without matter."
You don't need to invoke Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to affect the
behaviour of particles, just go to a pool hall. Neither is it inconsistent
with the view that objective reality exists and can never be completely and
accurately apprehended.
>Now nothing I've pointed out here implies that the universes is an illusion
or any
>such nonsense. Nor do phenomenological theories of lived experience contend
that I
>magically "create" the universe out of my mind. But the reality of lived
experience--the
>phenomenal lived experience of qualities and essences--is forever beyond
the reach of
>quantitative science.
I don't see anything especially wrong with that statement. But the subject
matter is you and your sensory experience. This is more the province of
psychology,art or literature. Even in these fields subjectivity can lead to
quite dangerous conclusions, isolating the individual from their social and
economic framework.
>Moreover, science doesn't even ask certain questions that are certainly
legitimate
>horizons of query for a rational mind. For example, if the big bang theory
is true, how
>did the original unimaginably dense speck get there? There answer? We don't
even ask that
>question. And if you are concerned with something besides the quantifiable
"how" of
>things, and are concerned to know "why"--why does the universe exist? Why
do things exist?
Well one answer might be that it represented a hypostasis i.e. the point at
which such questions no longer become meaningful. It just was. The other
point of view would be that the "big-bang" (if it happened) was simply the
moment of "rebound" of a previous implosion of the comsos. At present there
appears to be evidence against this ( the lack of sufficient dark matter to
create the gravitational attraction to counterbalance the expansion of the
universe, evidence from the nature of the background radiation of the "big
bang") As to the "why" question is it really meaningful in this context ?
"Why" implies intentions, it leads back to a religious theory of origins.
or it in its modern guise: -
>''The God Particle.''
>molecular interaction. It is a world devoid of value and feeling.
First of all what are people in this context ? They aren't disembodied
spirits. They interact in their totality and their relationships are
determined by both evolution and the social framework they are in. The
origin of the "higher" feelings that you allude to is certainly to do with
the maternal care. It is experienced by both sexes in various measure and it
isn't the same as the mere sexual act. There is a qualitative difference.
Just as there is between an inanimate object and a human being! But life
isn't all sweetness and light. Eros and thanatos will be in conflict
forever. That's the truth and everyone knows it.
>you contradict yourself by valuing all sorts of things--equality, justice,
and so
>on. But you have no way to make sense of such preferences as an ontological
>materialist--matter just is, and whether it should be this way or that is
beyond our
>control since it's all governed by predetermined laws. Your very existence
as a Marxist is
>a declaration that something like human will and intentionality and
intervene in the
>course of those iron laws and have them do something else that they should
be doing but
>are not already doing. But that is a discourse of should, a prescriptive
discourse, that
>can never fit into your procrustean bed of materialism, which is purely a
descriptive
>discourse. To make sense of your own Engelsian diamat political doctrine,
you must shed
>the dogmatic, unprovable, and unscientific materialist ontology at its
base.
Wrong from start to finish - the dinosaurs never made it. We've got a
better chance precisely because of developed consciousness, language, manual
dexterity and social solidarity. But it's not predetermined.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
P.S. Try looking at Ted Grant & Alan Woods "Marxism and Modern Science"
http://www.marxist.com/science which contains some interesting material
relating to this thread. Grant is a fan of the late Hannes Alven and rejects
the Big Bang Theory, which takes a bit of nerve these days! ( not sure I
agree with him on this point)
Stephen R. Diamond
<kma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> You know this perfectly well, but your identity as a Marxist is so deeply
> ingrained by now, you cannot bring yourself to admit that there is a large
> measure of hero
> worship in it that is not characteristic of the hard sciences.
But I am not a Marxist.
Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
<"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> wrote:
> The Anglo-American realists of the turn of this century for
> the most part argued that realism was a basic intuition of human
> consciousness. Thus they argued that it was not necessary so much
> as to establish a positive case for realism as to suubject anti-realist
> philosophies like idealism to a searching critique.
I don't think the argument has any real force. Intuitions are often
false - even basic ones. It is a "basic intuition" of the bourgeoisie
that capitalism expresses "human nature." Arguments from "intutions"
are inherently dogmatic and anti-philosophical.
> This reprisal of Bishop Berkeley's arguments against an epistemological
> realism raises the issue of what philosophers call the "egocentric
> predicament" - that is the thesis that one can never eliminate the
> human mind from cognition and discover what things are really like
> apart from one's consciousness or, indeed, whether they exist apart
> from being known. However, it is quenstionable whether the types of
> conclusions that idealists (or atleast subjective idealists) wish
> to draw from this can be sustained. It would seem fallacious to
> infer from it the thesis that nothing exists outside of consciousness.
> The fact that one cannot discover X does not mean tha X does not
> exist or that it is unreasonable to assert the existence of X.
If it were true that we had direct and certain knowledge of the
contents of our minds, I think this fact would lead to the inference
that belief in constructs based on that knowledge are illicit. We
invoke constructs to bring us closer to the truth. If ultimate
certaintly resides in "sense data," why invoke an external world at
all.
I think the correct answer to the "egocentric predicament" is to deny
its premise. There is nothing privileged about mental contents. We can
be wrong about what we think we sense, just as we can be wrong in our
physical or sociological theories. Knowledge of sensation, like
knowledge of the "external world" requires categorization of
experience, and all categorization is theoretical. We really only know
the contents of our minds by constructing at the same time a theory of
the world. The development of that theory is not of the form of a
deduction or inference from mental contents. Our ability to develop
correct theories depends on our biological natures, not on any formal
process.
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
"A.Prianikoff" wrote:
> William Kaufman wrote in message <37766207...@earthlink.net>...
>
> >Yes, all your daily experiences of the physical world lead you to expect
> some sort of
> >regularity and connected among the events therein. But as to the utimate
> constitution, the
> >essential "whatness," of some "stuff," that might be underlying those
> events, you haven't
> >a clue, and neither does anyone else, given the impossibility of
> experiencing it directly,
>
> Such a sweeping statement. You have got a clue. More than just a clue.
> Enough sensory data to construct theories and be able to predict with a
> reasonable degree of certainty, the future course of events. If that were
> not the case any predictive science would be impossible.
Kaufman:
But that's just the point--I'm not talking about prediction or law, which describes "how"
things behave. I'm talking about an ontological statement of "what" they are
ontologically, and on this question science is mute. Extension and mass are mathematical,
not ontological concepts. Scientists don't seek answers to questions about ontology, but
so-called "scientific socialists" do! All of science's vocabulary of being is
mathematical--period. What cannot be mathematized falls outside their scope of inquiry,
and that includes any characterization of "whatness." They analyze behavior, not essences.
>
>
> Why is that ? You have waves in water which is certainly a form of matter
The waves are water propelled, not the water itself. The point about light also behaves in
a wavelike way is simply a way of pointing out that it might not correspond to a
conventional ontological notion of matter.
>
>
>
>
> You're making the mistake of viewing matter as something "hard" like a lump
> of rock. That would be a very crude way of looking at it, more akin to
> mechanical materialism than the views of Marxists. Even Engels, writing
> before the discovery of the atom was able to say " Matter without motion is
> just as inconceivable as motion without matter."
>
Yes, but Engels still posited a dualism between matter and energy, and he most certainly
did define matter in that "hard" way that you disown--I don't have the quotation in front
of me now, but I could obtain it easily. He certainly did not understand, much less posit,
the convertibility of one into the other, for it would literally undermined the
foundations of his ontological materialism.
>
>
> >Now nothing I've pointed out here implies that the universes is an illusion
> or any
> >such nonsense. Nor do phenomenological theories of lived experience contend
> that I
> >magically "create" the universe out of my mind. But the reality of lived
> experience--the
> >phenomenal lived experience of qualities and essences--is forever beyond
> the reach of
> >quantitative science.
>
> I don't see anything especially wrong with that statement. But the subject
> matter is you and your sensory experience. This is more the province of
> psychology,art or literature. Even in these fields subjectivity can lead to
> quite dangerous conclusions, isolating the individual from their social and
> economic framework.
Yes, but the problem is that the qualities that are closest to us: the yellowness of
yellow, the qualitative timbre of a voice, the flavor of a dish, and so on, not being
mathematizable qua qualities, are beyond the grasp of science by definition, since they
are not mathematizable--once you quantify them, they disappear, like yellowness turning
into a mere numerical symbol on a spectrograph. So that because of its inherent
methodological limitations--confining itself by definition and in principle to that which
is quantifiable--science precisely cannot even begin to account for that which is most
real to us. So how can its concepts of matter and so on be taken as an ontological
foundation for reality itsself! Science is an artificially circumscribed method of
accounting for lawlike behavior that can be mathematically formulated, but so
circumscribed, it is useless for defining or coming to terms with anything like "reality,"
most especially the reality of immediate lived experience. Scientific concepts are more
like a map of reality than reality itself. The place to explore reality is not via that
map but through the immediacy of your lived experience, since that is where it resides,
not in the absract constructs of science.
>
>
> >Moreover, science doesn't even ask certain questions that are certainly
> legitimate
> >horizons of query for a rational mind. For example, if the big bang theory
> is true, how
> >did the original unimaginably dense speck get there? There answer? We don't
> even ask that
> >question. And if you are concerned with something besides the quantifiable
> "how" of
> >things, and are concerned to know "why"--why does the universe exist? Why
> do things exist?
>
> Well one answer might be that it represented a hypostasis i.e. the point at
> which such questions no longer become meaningful. It just was. The other
> point of view would be that the "big-bang" (if it happened) was simply the
> moment of "rebound" of a previous implosion of the comsos. At present there
> appears to be evidence against this ( the lack of sufficient dark matter to
> create the gravitational attraction to counterbalance the expansion of the
> universe, evidence from the nature of the background radiation of the "big
> bang") As to the "why" question is it really meaningful in this context ?
> "Why" implies intentions, it leads back to a religious theory of origins.
Again--that's the whole point. The question of "why" is perfectly intelligible and
meaningful--we ask it and answer it all day long when it comes to motivation (which is in
principle different from cause, if you think it through). Just because scientists
methodologically exclude it from their language game doesn't render it meaningless--it
shows us the limits of science, not the question.
>
>
>
>
> First of all what are people in this context ? They aren't disembodied
> spirits. They interact in their totality and their relationships are
> determined by both evolution and the social framework they are in. The
> origin of the "higher" feelings that you allude to is certainly to do with
> the maternal care. It is experienced by both sexes in various measure and it
> isn't the same as the mere sexual act. There is a qualitative difference.
> Just as there is between an inanimate object and a human being! But life
> isn't all sweetness and light. Eros and thanatos will be in conflict
> forever. That's the truth and everyone knows it.
It's good to see a dogmatic materialist having recourse to mythological categories such as
Eros and Thanatos to make his arguments. These ideas are, of course, taken from the late
Freud, and not even his most ardent defenders ever pretended that they were anything more
than philosophical speculation. In point of fact, in an absolutist materialist framework
there is no possibility for a scale of value because you are locked into a purely
descriptive discourse about reality. Prescription can be viewed only as derivative and
epiphenomenal and therefore as illusory. Therefore, your political preferences and
prescriptions have no objective foundations, being entirely prescriptive. Perhaps you
believe that socialism is going to happen via an automatic mechanism of social evolution
comparable to Darwin's theory of natural evolution--in which case there's no need for any
revolutionary political activity--it will all happen automatically! If you understand
consciousness as nothing but an epiphenomenon of matter, you can never understand anything
about freedom, volition, intention, or will, since by definition they fall outside the
predetermination of matter. If you so subsume them, you are rendering them illusory. You
can't have your matter and eat your volitional cake too. You're trying to have it both
ways. Just relax, admit you're a materialist monist, and that nothing is real but matter.
It's a dreary universe, but at least you can call it yours.
>
> Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
Sounds like something right out of Orwell. If that's your notion of freedom, then please
just lock me up in the prisonhouse of matter and be done with it.
William Kaufman
Jim F.
>
> In article <93049959...@news.remarQ.com>, Jim F.
> <"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> wrote:
>
> > the most part argued that realism was a basic intuition of human
> > consciousness. Thus they argued that it was not necessary so much
> > as to establish a positive case for realism as to suubject anti-realist
> > philosophies like idealism to a searching critique.
>
> false - even basic ones. It is a "basic intuition" of the bourgeoisie
> that capitalism expresses "human nature." Arguments from "intutions"
> are inherently dogmatic and anti-philosophical.
I think that is basicly correct. Intuitions more often than not
are representations of unreflective consciousness. I wonder what
you think of Engels' contention that the reality of the external
world is demonstrated through praxis in "experiment and industry"?
In *Ludwig Feuerbach* he argued that "If we are able to prove the
correctnessof our conceptions of a natural process by making it
ourselves . . . then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable
"thing-in-itself." This contention that practice refutes radical
skepticism is not unlike arguments framed by Hume and Hegel amongst
others. Similar lines of argument can also be found in some
pragmatist writers as well. I think that the Anglo-Ameican realists
were on the right track but they placed too much emphasis on the
epistemological powers of intuition and not enough on practice.
>
> > This reprisal of Bishop Berkeley's arguments against an epistemological
> > realism raises the issue of what philosophers call the "egocentric
> > predicament" - that is the thesis that one can never eliminate the
> > human mind from cognition and discover what things are really like
> > apart from one's consciousness or, indeed, whether they exist apart
> > from being known. However, it is quenstionable whether the types of
> > conclusions that idealists (or atleast subjective idealists) wish
> > to draw from this can be sustained. It would seem fallacious to
> > infer from it the thesis that nothing exists outside of consciousness.
> > The fact that one cannot discover X does not mean tha X does not
> > exist or that it is unreasonable to assert the existence of X.
>
> If it were true that we had direct and certain knowledge of the
> contents of our minds, I think this fact would lead to the inference
> that belief in constructs based on that knowledge are illicit. We
> invoke constructs to bring us closer to the truth. If ultimate
> certaintly resides in "sense data," why invoke an external world at
> all.
>
> I think the correct answer to the "egocentric predicament" is to deny
> its premise. There is nothing privileged about mental contents. We can
> be wrong about what we think we sense, just as we can be wrong in our
> physical or sociological theories. Knowledge of sensation, like
> knowledge of the "external world" requires categorization of
> experience, and all categorization is theoretical. We really only know
> the contents of our minds by constructing at the same time a theory of
> the world. The development of that theory is not of the form of a
> deduction or inference from mental contents. Our ability to develop
> correct theories depends on our biological natures, not on any formal
> process.
Bhaskar as I understand him makes similar points with his critique of
what he calls the "epistemic fallacy" - which reduces being to knowing.
Jim F.
>
> Stephen R. Diamond
Stephen R. Diamond
<"deb...@gis.net"@pop.gis.net> wrote:
> I wonder what you think of Engels' contention that the reality of the
> external world is demonstrated through praxis in "experiment and
> industry"? In *Ludwig Feuerbach* he argued that "If we are able to
> prove the correctnessof our conceptions of a natural process by making
> it ourselves . . . then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable
> "thing-in-itself." This contention that practice refutes radical
> skepticism is not unlike arguments framed by Hume and Hegel amongst
> others. Similar lines of argument can also be found in some pragmatist
> writers as well. I think that the Anglo-Ameican realists were on the
> right track but they placed too much emphasis on the epistemological
> powers of intuition and not enough on practice.
I find Engels' statement ambiguous. Is he making an epistemological
argument, that practice in principle can do something that mere
observation cannot? If that's what he meant, I think he was wrong.
Or, was he making a sociological point - that empiricism derives from
the ignoring of practice, such that it becomes inconceivable to those
who build their theories around passive observation to see how the
nature of matter is mentally reflected. We learn about the nature of
things by manipulating them - maybe even the mental manipulation of
data counts as "practice."
The sociological point is plausible, but as as an epistemological
argument, I think it is irrelevant. An argument to practice cannot
persuade a skeptic, because the skeptic will deny the import of the
results of practice.
I don't think radical skepticism can be refuted. How could we ever
really know that what we call our life is not only a dream, etc?
Radical skepticism is the only tenable position besides materialism. We
cannot refute skepticism, nor can be prove it. As a pragmatic decision,
we decide for materialism - that decision is really a sort of "Pascal's
Wager."
Practice doesn't prove the existence of the world, but it impels the
belief in such a world, a belief that is neither provable nor
disprovable.
Stephen R. Diamond
William Kaufman
something more like a rock or more like an idea. If you're an ontological materialist, the
rock is your favored metaphor for being. If you believe that in being there inheres
something like meaning or purpose, then your favored metaphor is an idea. But both are
merely metaphors. Anyone who thinks there is a philosophical proof for anything is kidding
himself. You're absolutely right about that.
Jim F.
>
> "A.Prianikoff" wrote:
>
> > Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
>
> Sounds like something right out of Orwell. If that's your notion of freedom, then please
> just lock me up in the prisonhouse of matter and be done with it.
However, Engels' position on the nature of freedom has its precedents
both in Spinoza's philosophy and in Hegel's. It corresponds to what
contemporary philosophers would call compatibilism - that is the
position
that we can make sense of human freedom within a framework of
determinism.
Jim F.
A.Prianikoff
>The waves are water propelled, not the water itself. The point about light
also behaves in
>a wavelike way is simply a way of pointing out that it might not correspond
to a
>conventional ontological notion of matter.
Actually the behaviour of the waves and the properties of water including
its "slipperiness" are a result of its molecular structure and its
interaction with gravity. The way that this is experienced by a human being
is a different order of question.
>Engels still posited a dualism between matter and energy, and he most
certainly
>did define matter in that "hard" way that you disown--I don't have the
quotation in front
>of me now, but I could obtain it easily. He certainly did not understand,
much less posit,
>the convertibility of one into the other, for it would literally undermined
the
>foundations of his ontological materialism.
No he didn't he saw those who claimed that matter was immutable as
mechanical materialists.
He lived in an era in which the molecular theory had been described, but not
the structure of the atom.
He could hardly be expected to incorporate this into his theory. But if
anything his comments were prophetic on this score and his basic method
correct.
>It's good to see a dogmatic materialist having recourse to mythological
categories such as
>Eros and Thanatos to make his arguments. These ideas are, of course, taken
from the late
>Freud, and not even his most ardent defenders ever pretended that they were
anything more
>than philosophical speculation.
Life and Death seem to be scientific concepts to me. You might want to
disagree with Freud's idea that these principles were embodied in human
psychology, but quite a few Marxists have agreed. e.g. Erich Fromm.
Trotsky also saw no contradiction between Freud's basic ideas and Marxism.
>Perhaps you
>believe that socialism is going to happen via an automatic mechanism of
social evolution
>comparable to Darwin's theory of natural evolution--in which case there's
no need for any
>revolutionary political activity--it will all happen automatically! If you
understand
>consciousness as nothing but an epiphenomenon of matter, you can never
understand anything
>about freedom, volition, intention, or will, since by definition they fall
outside the
>predetermination of matter. If you so subsume them, you are rendering them
illusory. You
>can't have your matter and eat your volitional cake too. You're trying to
have it both
>ways. Just relax, admit you're a materialist monist, and that nothing is
real but matter.
>It's a dreary universe, but at least you can call it yours.
What's automatic about evolution ?
There is a need for activity precisely because we aren't bystanders
observing, we are part of the picture. You can't collapse consciousness into
matter either. This is a typical distortion based on failing to see a
qualitative difference between the interaction of inanimate objects and the
interaction of conscious beings with the material world. But making the
correct choices requires understanding the material basis of existence and
is not an "epiphenomenon" of consciousness.
>> Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
>Sounds like something right out of Orwell. If that's your notion of
freedom, then please
>just lock me up in the prisonhouse of matter and be done with it.
Your in a prison house of abstract moralising already. It's like a hall of
mirrors and you have no way of finding the exit.
rabhegmarlen
Stephen R. Diamond wrote in message
>But I am not a Marxist.
>
My reading of the rest of this thread certainly confirms this statement.
You prefer your philosophy divorced from practice, and you argue in a
completely formal sense, logically, so that for instance you use the
concepts prove and disprove in the same sense as a Kantian. This means that
they are completely separated in the formal sense.
Personally, I agree with Engels' statement about experiment and industry and
he too was with Marx when he declared that the philosophers have only
interpreted the world, the point, however is to change it. Of course
thinking is a practice there is no need to be equivocal about it.
We are, for once, in complete agreement, you are NOT a Marxist.
William Gilders
A.Prianikoff wrote:
>Your in a prison house of abstract moralising already. It's like a hall
>of
>mirrors and you have no way of finding the exit.
... and he he has yet failed to explain the basis for his morality. If he's
explained where the necessity of socialism inheres ... other than in the
material reality of existence ... I missed it along the way ... or maybe I
have to spend five years reading the books on his reading list before
Kaufman will offer initiation into the secrets of the universe.
Bill
Stephen R. Diamond
<rog...@blackwell23.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> This means that
> they are completely separated in the formal sense.
What is your account of the unity of proof and disproof, such that
Marxists get it and Kantians don't.
Stephen R. Diamond
A.Prianikoff
" There is not the slightest doubt that Heisenberg’s interpretation of
quantum physics was heavily influenced by his philosophical views. Even as a
student, Heisenberg was a conscious idealist, who admits being greatly
impressed by Plato’s Timaeus (where Plato’s idealism is expressed in the
most obscurantist way), while fighting in the ranks of the reactionary
Freikorps against the German workers in 1919. Subsequently he stated that he
was "much more interested in the underlying philosophical ideas than in the
rest," and that it was necessary "to get away from the idea of objective
processes in time and space." In other words, Heisenberg’s philosophical
interpretation of quantum physics was very far from being the objective
result of scientific experiment. It was clearly linked to idealist
philosophy, which he consciously applied to physics, and which determined
his outlook.
Such a philosophy is at odds not only with science, but the whole of human
experience. Not only does it lack any scientific content, but it turns out
to be perfectly useless in practice. Scientists who, as a rule, like to
steer clear of philosophical speculation, make a polite nod in the direction
of Heisenberg, and simply get on with the job of investigating the laws of
nature, taking for granted not only that it exists, but that it functions
according to definite laws, including those of cause and effect, and that,
with a bit of effort, can be perfectly well understood, and even predicted
by men and women. The reactionary consequences of this subjective idealism
are shown by Heisenberg’s own evolution. He justified his active
collaboration with the Nazis on the grounds that "There are no general
guidelines to which we can cling. We have to decide for ourselves, and
cannot tell in advance if we are doing right or wrong." "
from Ted Grant & Alan Woods "Marxism and Modern Science"
http://www.marxist.com/science
William Kaufman
Heisenberg's views than a genius like Heisenberg himself or the countless physicists who
take quite seriously his theories on observational variables affecting the behavior of
particles.
"A.Prianikoff" wrote:
> from Ted Grant & Alan Woods "Marxism and Modern Science"
> http://www.marxist.com/science
Jim F.
>
> Ted Grant and Alan Woods are, of course, far more reliable sources on the reliablility of
> Heisenberg's views than a genius like Heisenberg himself or the countless physicists who
> take quite seriously his theories on observational variables affecting the behavior of
> particles.
Ted Grant and Alan Woods are certainly correct concerning the
ideological influences
on Heisenberg's philosophy of nature. The Copenhagen Interpretation
while
dialectical in character is also idealist, and Heisenberg was pretty
much an
avowed idealist as were most German intellectuals of his time.
Heisenberg
was also most certainly a genius and one of the greatest physicists of
this century. And it must be admitted that formulating a compelling
alternative to the Copenhagen Interpretation has been no easy task.
Jim F.
> > from Ted Grant & Alan Woods "Marxism and Modern Science"
> > http://www.marxist.com/science
rabhegmarlen
It's a bit like truth in this respect. I am using another quote from Hegel
to help explain my point: "The more conventional opinion gets fixated on
the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given
philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it
finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of
philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees
in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the
blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter;
similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a
false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of
it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they
also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time
their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not
only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and
this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. But he who
rejects a philosophical system [i.e. the new philosopher] does not usually
comprehend what he is doing in this way; and he who grasps the contradiction
between them [i.e. the historian of philosophy] does not, as a general rule,
know how to free it from its one-sidedness, or maintain it in its freedom by
recognizing the reciprocally necessary moments that take shape as a conflict
and seeming incompatibility."
*Phenomenology of Spirit* OUP page 2.
As you well know, proof and truth are very much related concepts as we often
say "prove the truth" etc. Hegel did not see it in such an either/or way
and the essence of his dialectical method was preserved in dialectical
materialism. Marx was a materialist, he broke from Hegel, but he sublated
the dialectical method. I'm not saying the formal way of thinking is false,
but it is not yet dialectical, but why worry, you reject Marxism anyway
according to your post?
BTW what would you call your own philosophical viewpoint?