Victoribus Spolia wrote:I don't entirely disagree with Marx on this; however, that is part of my criticism that our modern system is not capitalism; true capitalism is anarcho-capitalism. The use of the state as a means of creating and protecting a certain class is not an argument against the existence of natural elites, just unnatural ones. Indeed, the state only protects what could not ordinarily protect itself; this being the case, statism bankrolls the unnatural and the unviable while continuing to grow itself. Such a situation will not require a revolution to overthrow, it will collapse under its own insolvency. Such is inevitable.
I do wonder how you arrived at the view that anarcho-capitalism is truer than what has historically existed other than attempts to disconnect the an assumed necessity of the state with capitalist economy. This distinction between natural and unnatural elites seems superfluous to me thus far.
Though as far as I can tell your view of capitalism is one that seems to make mistakes I was summarizing earlier about the importance of seeing the continuity yet disconunity (the specialness of something) of things.
In my memory of some of your posts somewhere, you tend to generalize things like trade which is essential to capitalism but doesn’t essentially characterize capitalism from previous modes of production. I wonder if you have a sense of socialism/capitalism where the state is emphasized in regards to the market and not focused on the mode of production itself.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/capitalist.htmThe Formulas of the Improvisers Among the improvisers who seek to deny the capitalist nature of German economy, a few have hastily read Marx in order to cull from his works some definition of capitalism which is no longer applicable to the Third Reich. In the main their procedure comes down to defining capitalist economy as a “market economy.” Then they conclude: Since prices in Germany are determined not by the automatic laws of the market but by state decrees, therefore the economy is no longer capitalist. To be sure, the intervention of the state into the sphere of circulation affords certain supplementary channels for the manipulation of prices. But there is essentially nothing new in this. For almost half a century monopolies and cartels have precisely set themselves the task of converting free trade into its opposite. Are monopolies then “non-capitalist” enterprises? The formula of the improvisers is false because they attempt to define capitalism by seeking its essential characteristics in the sphere of circulation.
Marxism teaches us that a correct definition of capitalism can be established only by seeking out the essential relations in the sphere of production, which, in turn, determines those in the sphere of circulation.
I don’t treat a lot of things as inevitable in regards to politics and people. There is not such strong determinism in regards to humanity, only strong trends/tendencies.
Feudalism is not an extension of the state; the feudal revolution occurred in the 11th century as a process of decentralization following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Likewise, the predecessors to this system, emerged out of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Feudalism is nothing more than the stratification of classes based on the means of retaining property (force) following the collapse of a state. Indeed, feudal arrangements decrease in proportion to the centralization of power around a king (the preconditions of the social contract yet to come).
Likewise, contra Marxism (especially Ancoms); hierarchy is not statism; states are third-party monopolists of coercion; nobles ruling their own privately owned lands by their own means of force is not an example of state.
Indeed, that orthodox Marxists did not want to include feudalism in the era of capitalism in their dialectic of history is (besides being arbitrary); quite telling, as it undermines the notion of private property requiring a state to exist.
You’re right, I should’ve been more careful with my words as it’s not an extension of the state but of kinship relations of tribal (stateless) society as it indeed comes after the break down of the Roman empire and is based on a very fragmented agrarian production.
In a sense things went back to a less productive mode due to ‘barbarians’ destroying much of the productive forces and the difficulty of trade between such sparse and separated populations.
But it is my impression although I haven’t given much to Marxist work on Feudalism but it seems that feudalism having a class division still requires some function of a state even if it isn’t some overarching centralized authority. The way I’ve seen it framed is that the explicit relations governed by kinship and position in the hierarchy is that the society itself is that of the state rather than a state independent of a then existing civil society as with the modern state.
It distinguished from tribal stateless society which is more direct in it’s relations and without surplus value to be exploited from from a lower class.
And I agree hierarchy isn’t statism in itself and I don’t necessarily think even in communism hierarchy would be dissolved (as wanted by variants of Anarchists), rather what is to be dissolved is class. Which can still be seen as a governing relation in Feudalist society with its agrarian mode of production and eventually it’s craft guilds in towns.
I’m not sure to whom you’re referring to in regards to Orthodox Marxism. But the marxist view of the state thus far seems to be bad on a need for organized violence in order to maintain one’s class rule.
The general divide between the producing class and those who rule over them. As such there was such an organized violence although differently from slavery of ancient city states. As Feudalism developed more so in country side instead of major towns/cities.
To which such private property was maintained by those who ruled over their subjects/serfs. Which increasingly created problems with the continuous peasant revolts at various times.
So whilst I’m not familiar with the Marxist points in regards to Feudalist society and its mode of production, I’m not convinced that it was simply stateless as there was a class which enforced violence in order to maintain its rule over those whom it extracted labour and products there of.
Tribal society still remains the epitome of existence without a state but then private property is difficult to conceive for such peoples as they are often described as belonging to the land itself rather than it being any particular persons.
Except the class of the modern era that we would likewise find agreement in critiquing is state-dependent for its power and existence. I have no problem with class based of natural elitism; I do not support the artificial elitism stemming from state protection. In a state of nature, class would exist, but it would not owe its existence to state protection, but to personal defense, thrift, competition, and even charity.
I do think this discussion though, would better fit in the Objective Morality thread; where my view of the state is more specifically inferred from certain axioms.
Indeed, and this is in part identified in the Marxist conception of the state in which a class uses it to enforce it’s interest against a subjugated class. A ruling class and a state going hand in hand, although your earlier points on Feudalism seem about not needing a centralized state for private property.
As such, the idea of a natural elite may well be problematic if can’t separate a class enforcing itself against another through violence. In fact, its difficult to imagine the difference other than perhaps a matter of legitimacy in such a ruling class dominating another class without the organs of state that exist in modernity.
Might as well be speaking of corporations that ended up ruling over entire towns and had their own currency and such that it made it difficult for workers to leave and then increasingly got them indebted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scripHere you might describe them as the natural elite if they had their own private army/security to enforce their interests.
To which I don’t know how one would see one as any more appealing than the other and think the distinction between natural and unnatural unconvincing as a category other than a rhetorical appeal. Just as every ruling class has had to legitimize it’s authority, where now its based on the renewal of votes, although this is breaking down in western liberal democracies.
II. Essentialism Regarding Human Nature.
My own philosophical background (before I became Berkeleyan); was in the Dooyweerdian school of Calvinist philosophy and its subset in Presuppositional Apologetics (which took this dooyweerdian perspective and synthesized it with ideas of Anglo-American idealism (neo Hegelianism) and American pragmatism).
In this school, the term "concrete universal" has a lot of use, and I have yet to see how your usage of the term fulfills the meaning of the definition.
Your are simply arguing that we should take our particularized observation ( a pure empiricism); and then (arbitrarily) ought to infer a universal presumption from this observation.
That is, given your argument, we should observe tigers "as they are now" (even in captivity); and from this observation of a particular set; we should then infer the "universal nature" of tigers.
How am I wrong in characterizing your argument?
For if this is the case, you are not advocating a concrete universal, you are merely looking at the concrete and saying it should also be universal.
Rather, a concrete universal is something that is both particular and universal in-and-of-itself.
For instance, a synthetic apriori statement could be a concrete universal; because its based on particularization (experience/the synthetic), but not dependent on such (apriori/analytic/universal).
The Axiom of Human Mentality in this thread and the Axiom of Human Argumentation in my objective morality thread would both be examples of something we might call a "concrete universal" as they are both synthetic-apriori statements.
Because the sense of a concrete universal which I use is meant to be derived from Hegel but slightly different because of Hegel’s objective idealist tendencies. And I don’t think you have got it if you’re assuming Marx or Marxists necessarily adopt a empiricist school of thought rather than emphasizing the empirical as part of the matter.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm#Pill2Empiricism, as a theory of knowledge rests upon the false proposition that perception and sensation constitute the only material and source of knowledge. Marx as a materialist, of course, never denied that the material world, existing prior to and independently of consciousness, is the only source of sensation. But he knew that such a statement, if left at that point, could not provide the basis for a consistent materialism, but at best a mechanical form of materialism, which always left open a loop-hole for idealism. It is true that empiricism lay at the foundation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialism in England and France. But at the same time this very empiricist point of view provided the basis for both the subjective idealism of Berkeley and the agnosticism of Hume.
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Marx’s objection to empiricism rests upon this: that its attention is directed exclusively to the source of knowledge, but not the form of that knowledge. For empiricism the form assumed by our knowledge tends always to be ignored as something having no inherent, necessary, connection with the content, the source of our knowledge.
Basically the empirical world is correctly identified as the source of knowledge but Empiricists are unconcerned of how it determines our concepts in part because it is characterized by a contemplative character rather than ‘sensuous activity’.
I also object to inferring the concrete universal as arbitrary as it is a difficult process to find the abstract ‘notion’ from which to then begin investigating the empirical once again, initially having investigated to find the concrete universal.
I also don’t think your summary of Tigers to my position has been apt and so I’m going to explain further the concrete universal within the Marxist tradition as influenced by Hegel.
I’ll first remind the influence of Goethe’s romantic science.
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oethe held that the whole was present in every part, and every part was connected to the whole. The whole must therefore be perceptible in every part. Nature was not assembled from parts, but began as a whole, and from the whole came parts, and the same principle applied to perception: “In an organic being, first the form as a whole strikes us, then its parts and their shape and combination.”
Thus Goethe came to the idea of the Urphänomen or Archetypal Phenomenon.
Rather than the explanatory principle being some imperceptible force or energy, causing phenomena from behind, so to speak, the Urphänomen was itself a phenomenon, but it had to be the most easily understood, simplest, or archetypal form of the thing, a form which allowed the nature of the whole phenomenon to be understood. Despite a misunderstanding encouraged by Darwin himself, the Urphänomen is not to be confused with the first in time, the beginning of a Darwinian line; the Urphänomen is conceptually rather than genetically primitive. Every particular phenomenon is a manifestation of this one universal phenomenon, so the Urphänomen is a concrete unity, not a common ancestor.
I added the last paragraph as it has caught my eye that Andy Blunden emphasizes that the concrete universal isn’t first in time, but I also find in Ilyenkov with Marx’s example of labor that it is first in time, logically and historically. I take it that Andy Blunden’s emphasis is that it has to be the most logically primitive, but not necessarily first in time/historically.
But from the above you see the idea that a part isn’t something isolated to itself but is part of a whole. Analytical thought breaks things down into its pieces which is useful but often makes the mistake of thinking summing up the pieces is equal to the whole, which seems to meet explanatory problems in many circumstances. One can’t explain more complex phenomenon by their reduction to a sum of individual properties although it is most certain useful if one can reduce them to simpler things, as long as it’s not done so absolutely.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch03-s02.htmlSome scientists, carried away by analysis of the physiological processes forming the basis of mental phenomena, are inclined to regard these processes as the ultimate basis and essence of the mental itself. They imagine that the study of consciousness can be limited to analysis of the physiological aspect of the problem. In the history of science numerous attempts have been made to get rid of the category of the ideal. If thought is inseparable from thinking matter, and is its product, ran the argument of vulgar materialism, then is not thought merely a form of matter? Another school of vulgar materialism regarded the mental as a particularly refined energy that hovers about somewhere in the universe. Some of them have even assumed that all energy is of a mental nature, that the world of the mind with its subjective form of the ego is merely a form of universal energy. This is how some people try to explain "parapsychological" phenomena, not taking into account the fact that although mental activity does possess the element of energy it cannot be reduced to that one element.
Now I’ve done some reading in order to emphasize some certain points in regards to summarizing the concrete universal.
But I should first clarify abstract and concrete:
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/a/b.htmAbstract and Concrete are philosophical concepts concerned with the development of conceptual knowledge. An understanding of what is meant by “abstract” and “concrete” is vital to making sense of dialectics. For Hegel and for Marx, the contrast between abstract and concrete does NOT mean the contrast between an idea and reality. Rather ‘A concrete concept is the combination of many abstractions’. A concept, such as a number or a definition, is very abstract because it indicates just one of millions of the aspects that a concrete thing has, or a brand new idea which has not yet accrued nuances and associations. Concepts are the more concrete the more connections they have. If we say “The British working class are those who work for a wage and live in the UK,” then we've made a very abstract concept. To make it more concrete is to show the many aspects of it; showing the historical circumstances of its rise and development, the state of the world it developed in, etc.
For more in depth explanation:
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#abstractThis view explains the way in which certain concepts although abstract are more concrete than others.
Hegel has an interesting piece called Who Thinks Abstractly to emphasize that the uneducated are those who generalize one feature as if it entailed the whole.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/abstract.htmThis is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.
This is different from how the concrete is typically conceived such as with Feuerbach for which Marx criticized him as thinking that an aggregate of sensually perceived qualities inherent to each individual and common to them all (abstract generality/universal) was highly abstract.
This is different to the concrete universal which instead of looking for the common property to all individuals looks at the differences in order to find the basis of such a diversity of individuals by a logical necessity.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1f.htmone must point out that that characteristic should express the real, objectively universal foundation on which the entire wealth of human culture necessarily grows. Man, as is well-known, becomes separated from the animal world when he begins to work using implements of labour which he himself created. Production of labour implements is exactly the first and in time, logically and historically) form of human life-activity, of human existence.
Thus the real universal basis of everything that is human in man is production of instruments of production. It is from this basis that other diverse qualities of the human being developed, including consciousness and will, speech and thinking, erect walk and all the rest of it.
This is a big difference between finding the abstract universal and the concrete universal (which is also abstract as it’s not synonymous with matter philosophically defined).
To determine whether the abstract universal is extracted correctly or incorrectly, one should see whether it comprehends directly, through simple formal abstraction, each particular and individual fact without exception. If it does not, then we are wrong in considering a given notion as universal.
The situation is different in the case of the relation of the concrete universal concept to the sensually given diversity of particular and individual facts. To find out whether a given concept has revealed a universal definition of the object or a non-universal one, one should undertake a much more complex and meaningful analysis. In this case one should ask oneself the question whether the particular phenomenon directly expressed in it is at the same time the universal genetic basis from the development of which all other, just as particular, phenomena of the given concrete system may be understood in their necessity.
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A concrete universal concept is also an abstraction – in the sense that it does not record in its definitions the absolutely individual, the unique. It expresses the essence of the typical and in this sense of the general, million-fold repeated phenomenon, of an individual instance that is an expression of the universal law.
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Dialectical logic does not at all reject the truth of the proposition that a universal concept is an abstraction expressing the ‘general nature’, the ‘mean type’ of the separate cases, individual things, phenomena, events, yet it goes further and deeper, and therein lies the difference between its conceptions and those of old logic. A dialectical conception of the universal assumes the transformation of the individual into the universal and of the universal into the individual, a transformation continually going on in any actual development.
To which the major issue with formal logic leading up to abstract universals is that it is incapable of identifying the real world universal and hence the problems many have found with abstract universals as insufficient in explaining things in the real world leading to what we see in the reactionary nature of postmodernisms rejection of the (abstract) subject.
Ilyenkov uses what appears to me as Wittgenstein’s criticism of logical positivism of his time with the concept of familial resemblance where one can’t actually recreate the particular phenomenon from which all others originate because averaging things creates an abstract entity that wouldn’t truly reflect the real existing phenomenon.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htmFor a brief summary of Wittgenstein’s position:
https://epistemicepistles.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/a-wittgensteinian-critique-of-conceptual-confusion-in-psychological-research/Essentialism
Similarly to referentialism, in contrast to the essentialism of the Tractatus[15] Wittgenstein came to later reject the idea that there is any essence of a proposition or of language. In the place of ‘essences’, Wittgenstein held there are many different kinds of ‘affinities’[16] between phenomena. The affinities between various ‘games’ illustrates the point well; that in considering a variety of ‘games’ instead of finding something common to them all we instead discover whole series of similarities and affinities between them; i.e. some are skills based, others entertaining, some competitive etc. These similarities he coined ‘family resemblances’ where characteristics overlap but no single feature is necessarily possessed by all.[17] What we call ‘propositions’ and ‘language’ do not have the formal unity essentialists imagine, but rather a ‘family of structures akin to one another’.[18]
See the point about there being overlap but no single feature possessed by all, this isn’t some inherently Marxist position but even found in an insider’s critique of such thinking as Wittgenstein was once a champion of such thinking himself.
To which I should emphasize the naturalism of this approach against metaphysics, because this approach considers the relations between real world things and never beyond them.
he problem of the relation of the universal to the individual arises in this case not only and not so much as the problem of the relation of mental abstraction to the sensually given objective reality but as the problem of the relation of sensually given facts to other sensually given facts, as the object’s internal relation to the object itself, the relation of its different aspects to one another, as the problem of internal differentiation of objective concreteness within itself. On this basis and as a consequence of it, it arises as the problem of the relation between the concepts expressing in this connection the objective articulated concreteness.
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On the contrary, when consciousness has perceived a thing in its interconnections with all the other, just as individual things, facts, phenomena, if it has grasped the individual through its universal interconnections, then it has for the first time perceived it concretely, even if a notion of it was formed not through direct contemplation, touching or smelling but rather through speech from other individuals and is consequently devoid of immediately sensual features.
This is something adopted by Hegel who criticizes Kant’s view of the thing-in-itself beyond human perception.
https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdfMore intriguingly yet, Hegel Hegel’s account of essence rejects all transcendence in favor of appearances. For Hegel there is not one thing, essence, and another thing, appearance such that essences are transcendent to beings like Plato’s forms, or are unchanging and invariant like Aristotle’s essences. Rather, it is appearance all the way down and there is no further fact “beyond” the appearances that is hidden and that must be discovered or uncovered. Hegel will say, “Essence must appear.”4 The real surprise is that the mediation of essence is a reference to another appreance, not a distinct ontological entity to be contrasted with existence. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that essence is relation. Thus, as Hyppolite recounts, “The great joke, Hegel wrote in a personal note, is that things are what they are. There is no reason to go beyond them.”5
It is the real world relations which actually govern a thing and make it what it is.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/If we are free to select one general feature over another we can radically change the concept of capital. If we choose only the ahistorical features we can make capital seem eternal. If abstraction is just seen as the identification of general features then we have no choice but to be arbitrary in our abstractions. But if abstraction is seen differently, as identifying the essential nature of an object, as identifying the “relation within which this thing is this thing” as Ilenkov puts it, then we can be scientific about our abstractions.
And this particularity of what a thing essentially is, rather than its property means concrete universal takes explanatory priority over property universals.
https://brendanwcase.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/hegels-concrete-universal/The individual is no more than an instantiation of universals (there are no ‘bare’ individuals). But the universals that constitute the individual are not just property universals, as these just tell us what attributes the individual has, not what the individual is (so the ‘bundle view’ is false). But the substance universals which constitute the nature of the individual qua individual do not exist in the abstract, but only as particularized through property universals, and thus as instantiated in the form of individuals (so Platonism is false) (Hegelian Metaphysics, 157).
To which the particular which is generalized isn’t an individual made universal, individual things aren’t particulars in this thinking. So it’s not a specific empirical event that is generalized, rather its a particular phenomenon that gives rise to all other particular phenomenon.
That does not, of course, belittle the significance and cognitive role of elementary, ‘intellectual’ general abstractions. Their role is great: no concrete universal concept would be possible without them. They constitute the prerequisite and condition of the emergence of complex scientific concepts. A concrete universal concept is also an abstraction – in the sense that it does not record in its definitions the absolutely individual, the unique. It expresses the essence of the typical and in this sense of the general, million-fold repeated phenomenon, of an individual instance that is an expression of the universal law. In analysing the simple form of value, Marx is not interested, of course, in the individual features of a coat or linen. Nevertheless the relation of coat and linen is taken for the immediate object of analysis, and precisely for the reason that it is a typical (and in this sense general) case of simple commodity exchange, a case corresponding to the typical peculiarities of exchange without money.
This is characteristic of how science has actually developed knowledge and I give here Vygotsky’s summary of Pavlov here to illustrate. Where Pavlov’s discovery of conditional reflexes wasn’t just a factual examination of a dog’s salivating after being conditioned to a new stimulus. Rather in studying this individual (archetype) case he had identified something particular which was generalizable beyond the specific dog but to biological nature of many creatures.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri05.htmFinally, each discovery in science, each step forward in empirical science is always at the same time an act of criticizing the concept. Pavlov discovered the fact of conditional reflexes. But didn’t he really create a new concept! at the same time? Did we really call a trained, well-learned movement a reflex before? And it cannot be otherwise: if science would only discover facts without extending the boundaries of its concepts, it would not discover anything new. It would make no headway in finding more and more new specimens of the same concepts. Each tiny new fact is already an extension of the concept. Each newly discovered relation between two facts immediately requires a critique of the two corresponding concepts and the establishment of a new relation between them. The conditional reflex is a discovery of a new fact by means of an old concept. We learned that mental salivation develops directly from the reflex, more correctly, that it is the same reflex, but operating under other conditions. But at the same time it is a discovery of a new concept by means of an old fact: by means of the fact “salivation occurs at the sight of food,” which is well known to all of us, we acquired a completely new concept of the reflex, our idea of it diametrically changed. Whereas before, the reflex was a synonym for a premental, unconscious, immutable fact, nowadays the whole mind is reduced to reflexes, the reflex has turned out to be a most flexible mechanism, etc. How would this have been possible if Pavlov had only studied the fact of salivation and not the concept of the reflex? This is essentially the same thing expressed in two ways, for in each scientific discovery knowledge of the fact is to the same extent knowledge of the concept. The scientific investigation of facts differs from registration in that it is the accumulation of concepts, the circulation of concepts and facts with a conceptual return.
This is why earlier I emphasized that playing with concepts can’t yield new knowledge, one has to investigate the empirical and it is from the empirical our concepts are derived as well as their expansion and development. Into more essential and concrete concepts if not entirely new concepts that are the beginning of a new paradigm of thought which leaves implicit earlier stages of understanding but bring it to a new perspective.
For example Einstein's theory of special relativity doesn’t made intelligible a bunch of problems in physics of his time but it didn’t simply contradict Newtonian physics in a negative way but gave them a limited validity within a new conceptual framework.
Before things are put into concepts they are in a sense already known unconsciously in human activity. One often does things without having a scientific and rational explanation for how it is done.
Later on I’ll go onto labor in the section which you bring it up as an issue of being universal or not.
Agreed, obviously Aristotle's conception of man as a "rational animal" comes close; as a Christian the conception of man as Imago Dei is very informative and very similar to this notion as it exists in Aristotle; however, how we define man must have some logical basis (as well as empirical, no doubt); and I have done that in my argument from human mentality and argumentation; both in this thread and in my thread on objective morality.
My concern though is that you’ve identified an abstract universal which by logical necessity doesn’t explain the diversity of human beings although correctly identifies only that which is common to them.
I think the abstract universal isn’t the final step in comprehending things, such that it is a relative truth but one that doesn’t go deep enough to the essence of things.
This is all very interesting, but my argument as to the essence of human nature is based on logic, not conjecture; as discussed in my argument for objective morality; especially as it apexes around the points made around human sexuality.
Indeed it should be logically deduced but in my crude point of scholasticism and asserted prejudice of idealism I assert you like kant hold a special sort of logic independent of the empirical world. Hence you want to have syllogisms considered for their own internal consistency which is why I earlier cited Hegel’s criticism of how such syllogisms were unconcerned with the truth of them in relation to the world. Truth was an indifferent matter to the internal consistency of the syllogism.
If man’s nature is to be understood is shouldn’t be independent of the actual history of man and it is in this regard I see Marx as better in seeking to dissolve philosophy.
When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence
I’ll go further with this below.
III. Logic, Empiricism and Essence
Labor as a concrete universal seems arbitrary ; human action is more basic and can have an apriori aspect as suitable for an axiomatic claim; otherwise, I see no reason why "labor" is a concrete universal. That is, on what basis should we infer from the observation of labor; that it is an absolute, logically speaking? Its seem reducible to more basic premises, in my opinion.
As for inferring human nature from formal logic, I have already done so. I don't understand your critique of the scholastic method, but it sounds an awful lot like a claim to polylogisms (which is preposterous).
Propositional reasoning is unassailable, and the use of it determines propositional claims as either true or false. definitions of human nature, if given in propositional form can therefore be analyzed as either true or false. I have done this work.
It isn’t arbitrary at all as it is by logical necessity the basis for the diversity of human civilization.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1f.htmThus, it is not the concept of man as a being producing labour implements that contains in itself the concepts of all the other human traits but rather the actual fact of producing labour implements contains in-itself the necessity of their origin and development.
In identifying action as something more basis what you do is correctly identify an abstract universal, but it’s not particular enough.
Labor is activity quite distinct from many other actions, as seen here in Hannah Arendt’s characterization (who isn’t fond of marxism and I would say often misinterprets Marx):
https://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/#SSH4aiLabor is that activity which corresponds to the biological processes and necessities of human existence, the practices which are necessary for the maintenance of life itself. Labor is distinguished by its never-ending character; it creates nothing of permanence, its efforts are quickly consumed, and must therefore be perpetually renewed so as to sustain life.
This is where Marx begins in his investigation of human nature, that of human needs and thus labor.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htmThe first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, [is that humans] must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life24.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
In fact, the I suspect the more general sense of action for human beings becomes possible because of the specific action/activity of labor. Hence the point about labour as a logical necessity for all forms of human civilization and life.
In regard of the most general characteristic of this system, of the ‘universal definition’ of human nature, one must point out that that characteristic should express the real, objectively universal foundation on which the entire wealth of human culture necessarily grows. Man, as is well-known, becomes separated from the animal world when he begins to work using implements of labour which he himself created. Production of labour implements is exactly the first and in time, logically and historically) form of human life-activity, of human existence.
Not just any human action/activity can be the basis of human beings and I believe Marx was right in identifying labor as satisfying human needs sa the basis of all development to come after.
And within Marx’s sense of labor one sees the sense of action as shared by both of us in terms of setting goals and striving to achieve them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htmLabour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act.
This gap is indeed crucial and it had been cultivated by labor.
https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/hegels-logic/foreword.htmOur needs are never given directly from nature, there is always a gap, a gap between need and its satisfaction, and that delayed gratification is overcome, negated by labour. Without a gap between needs and their satisfaction there is no labour, activity perhaps but not labour. Labour itself generates new needs, needs met by new products. Thus intuition is subsumed under the concept. In the process the universal is being constructed. Nature is supplemented by a ‘second nature’ in the form of an artificial environment; along with the separation of consumption and production comes a division of labour, the possibility of supervision of labour – the differentiation of theory and practice, and a surplus product.
And if you’re further curious, there is some work in regards to what set the pre-conditions for such a capacity for labor also, how man developed from our ancestors as it is pivotal to understanding consciousness also.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/evolution-language.htmhttps://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htmhttps://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegel%20on%20action.pdfThe soul of a creature has no reference to another, no subject/object distinction. It is the regulative function of a finite organism, but it does so naturally, without distinguishing itself from other centers of activity. It just feels. The mental life of the psyche is the registration of a single neurophysiological system of activity embracing the entire organism. Its feeling is the totality of the processes of mediation between sentience and the organism’s activity. The first step towards independence of the psyche from immediate concern with its feelings is habit, which enables the psyche to gain a distance from its own activity.
Through habituation, the organism becomes inured to feelings encountered in the normal course of life, and only those unexpected feelings coming from ‘outside’ gain attention. These feelings take on the significance of a signal of something originating from another centre of activity, something else. This feeling is Sensation and constitutes the basic unit of consciousness.
Consciousness makes the transition to ‘free mind’, i.e., human intelligence, by producing artefacts for use in controlling its own activity and incorporating these artefacts, which stand out as meaningful from the natural background, into its psychic processes.
“The principle of free mind is to make the merely given element in consciousness into something mental, and conversely to make what is mental into an objectivity” (Phil/Spirit. §440 remark)
By mastering the control of its own consciousness by the use of external objects, human beings learn to distance themselves from their own desires, thus freeing themselves of domination by their own nature
I also see it especially relevant in trying to conceptualize a natural conception of free will/self-determination as briefly expressed earlier to OD.
So I don’t see action as more basic, it’s more abstract and not as particular to explaining specifically the origins of human society and its socio-cultural nature as separated from being mere instinctive animal.
The point about a scholastic method was a crude point reiterating the sense of trying to arrive at knowledge by arranging concepts irrelevant to their relation to the empirical world, indifference to truth except to the extent it correlates to another concept one has made primary (axiom).
Well, I am a nominalist. 
However, this all being said; I think your critique here amounts to a dismissal.
Propositional reasoning is not a "method" it is the means. There are no other means by which to determine what is true and thus there is no other method.
Perhaps in your appeals to an "empirical approach" you mean the scientific method, but the scientific method is in reality, impotent to discover truth and is fallacious whenever it attempts to do so.
Likewise, Hoppe's critique that his argument requires no empirical data to validate it, is true; however, that is not the same as saying that his argument has no empirical basis whatsoever, which is neither true, nor is it the same claim as being made in the former statement.
Nominalist in the sense of rejecting the ontological existence of abstract objects or rejection of universals. Because I’m not sure how to fit it into your sense of immaterialism and also what I assert as your abstract universals which I think nominalism is suited to criticizing.
I think nominalism is more sophisticated than some critics in Marxist thought allow it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/jordan/ideology/ch26.htmMethodological nominalism denies that the world contains any other entities but individuals and, consequently, refuses to acknowledge that universal statements have an ‘independent cognitive value’. They are reports in a shorthand notation of what in principle can be fully described by a finite or an infinite conjunction of singular statements. Nominalism is a set of semantical, logical, and methodological rules of describing the world as composed solely of individuals. Properties and relations are inseparable from things to which they belong and are not independent ontological categories. The rules of nominalism do not imply, as some Marxist-Leninists suggested, that a nominalist must abandon the use of general words altogether. For the use of general words does not compel the nominalist to the acceptance of abstract objects whose existence he denies, if he can show that they are in principle expendable, that is, that they are introduced as convenient fictions or abbreviated manners of speaking.
To which there is sympathy to this position in that one shouldn’t mistake abstract universals for reality.
But I am suspicious of any who make absolute the universal, the particular or the individual, all are wrong in making absolute that which is relative and require one another for a real concept.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/development-concept.htmEach of these three Immediate Concepts are made absolute by certain theories of the concept. Plato for instance believed that Universals exist, although not in a spatio-temporal sense, nevertheless, independently of human activity and the symbols by means of which Universals are represented in activity. The intersubjective theory of Robert R. Williams sees concepts entirely constructed by intersubjective actions, leaving no place for symbols or artefacts of any kind, whilst Franz Brentano allowed that only individual things exist. Although none of the Immediate Concepts have stability or can stand up to scrutiny, each is involved in the process of a concept and the immediate concept will always take one or the other of these forms, according to conditions, until forms of mediation develop. We see this when one theory of concepts is abandoned in favour of another, without attempting to interconnect the different theories in a mediating process.
https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/hegels-logic/foreword.htmIn these terms the Universal is the word or name or shape by which the movement is recognised and represented, the banner around which people rally. The Particular is the different instantiations of the movement, the branches, groups, events and so forth only in and through which can a movement be said to exist; and the Individual, a person participating in the movement through the various particular instantiations of it. In this realisation of the idea, the movement is the Notion, and as such it must have a name or some kind of representation or definition (Universal), there must be Particular groups adhering to this name or principle, and those Particular groups must have Individual members or adherents who know themselves to be adhering to a Particular group instantiating the given Universal.
For example, an advocate of the principle of solidarity, a writer perhaps, who purely and simply expounds the idea of solidarity without seeing the need to actually set up groups, campaigns, unions and so forth or make the effort to mobilise and win over individuals to the idea, can be said to take as their motto: “The Universal is Absolute.”
On the other hand, the frenetic, full-time activist who sets up campaigns, self-help groups, parties and so on, without bothering about how each of these endeavours furthers the now long-forgotten reason for it all, can be said to take as their maxim: “The Particular is Absolute.”
And finally, the advocate of People Power and public opinion, who has no confidence in ideology or parties and institutions, can be said to take as their rule: “The Individual is Absolute.”
Every movement has these characters in their ranks and their role is almost obligatory. All of these claims have an element of truth. But if followed one-sidedly obviously they lead nowhere, because they are all abstract; but they are the three essential modes of existence of an idea.
Indeed it is only propositions which can be true and untrue, which is considered with Hegel where he sets up propositions of thing such that X is absolute in order to show through immanent critique that such a thing is in fact relative and thus partially true ie true up to a certain limit.
To which there is indeed a logic in Marx’s work as taken from Hegel, which is part of why his epistemology isn’t some empirical school of thought but relates form (empirical reality) to content (conceptul abstract thinking) such that the empirical is a necessary part of developing adequate/true concepts that reflect relations in reality essentially and not arbitrarily.
To which Marx’s method is often described as scientific but it isn’t to be equated with the positivist strand that prevails as the scientific method today.
And your summary of Hoppe emphasizes a significant difference between us where your sense of logic is indeed only to consider the consistency between words and then there’s another kind of logic in dealing with the empirical. You recreate the same problems and limitations of Kant with such an approach in making form and content independent of one another.
Which results in difficult in explaining how such a priori concepts actually emerge (having taken only the result that such concepts exist and no sense of origins/development) as well as take logic uncritically.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay5.htmFor logic as a science, however, a fundamental difficulty arises here. If it were only permissible to compare logical principles with logical thought, did that then not wipe out any possibility whatsoever of checking whether or not they were correct? It is quite understandable that these principles would always be in agreement with thoughts that had previously been made to agree with them. After all, it only meant that logical principles agreed with themselves, with their own embodiment in empirical acts of thought. In that case, a very ticklish situation was created for theory. Logic had in mind only logically immaculate thinking, and logically incorrect thinking was not an argument against its schemas. But it consented to consider only such thinking as logically immaculate as exactly confirmed its own ideas about thought, and evaluated any deviation from its rules as a fact falling outside its subject matter and therefore to be considered solely as a ‘mistake’ needing to be ‘corrected’.
In any other science such a claim would evoke consternation. What kind of a theory was it that consented to take into account only such facts as confirmed it, and did not wish to consider contradictory facts, although there must be millions and billions such? But surely that was exactly the traditional position of logic, which was presented by its devotees as standing to reason, and which made logic absolutely unself-critical on the one hand and incapable of development on the other.
That, incidentally, was where Kant’s illusion originated, the illusion that logic as a theory had long ago acquired a fully closed, completed character and not only was not in need of development of its propositions but could not be by its very nature. Schelling also understood Kant’s logic as an absolutely precise presentation of the principles and rules of thinking in concepts.
Hegel had doubts about the proposition that it was the rules of logic that prevented understanding of the process of the passage of the concept into the object and vice versa, of the subjective into the objective (and in general of opposites into one another). He saw in it not evidence of the organic deficiency of thought but only the limitations of Kant’s ideas about it. Kantian logic was only a limitedly true theory of thought. Real thought, the real subject matter of logic as a science, as a matter of fact was something else; therefore it was necessary to bring the theory of thought into agreement with its real subject matter.
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But, that being so, man’s actions, and so too the results of his actions, the things created by them, not only could, but must, be considered manifestations of his thought, as acts of the objectifying of his ideas, thoughts, plans, and conscious intentions. Hegel demanded from the very start that thought should be investigated in all the forms in which it was realised, and above all in human affairs, in the creation of things and events. Thought revealed its force and real power not solely in talking but also in the whole grandiose process of creating culture and the whole objective body of civilisation, the whole ‘inorganic body of man’ (Marx), including in that tools and statues, workshops and temples, factories and chancelleries, political organisations and systems of legislation.
It was on that basis that Hegel also acquired the right to consider in logic the objective determinations of things outside consciousness, outside the psyche of the human individual, in all their independence, moreover, from that psyche. There was nothing mystical nor idealist in that; it meant the forms (‘determinations’) of things created by the activity of the thinking individual. In other words, the forms of his thought embodied in natural materials, ‘invested’ in it by human activity. Thus a house appeared as the architect’s conception embodied in stone, a machine as the embodiment of the engineer’s ideas in metal, and so on; and the whole immense objective body of civilisation as thought in its ‘otherness’ (das Idee in der Form des Anderssein), in its sensual objective embodiment. The whole history of humanity was correspondingly also to be considered a process of the ‘outward revelation’ of the power of thought, as a process of the realisation of man’s ideas, concepts, notions, plans, intentions, and purposes, as a process of the embodying of logic, i.e. of the schemas to which men’s purposive activity was subordinated.
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In considering thought as a real productive process expressing itself not only in the movement of words but also in the changing of things, Hegel was able, for the first time in the history of logic, to pose the problem of a special analysis of thought-forms, or the analysis of thought from the aspect of form. Before him such an aim had not arisen in logic, and even could not have. ‘It is hardly surprising that economists, wholly under the influence of material interests, have overlooked the formal side of the relative expression of value, when professional logicians, before Hegel, even overlooked the formal aspect of the propositions and conclusions they used as examples.’
Logicians before Hegel had recorded only the external schemas in which logical actions, judgments and inferences functioned in speech, i.e. as schemas of the joining together of terms signifying general ideas, but the logical form expressed in these figures, i.e. the category, remained outside their sphere of investigation, and the conception of it was simply borrowed from metaphysics and ontology. So it had been even with Kant, despite the fact that he had nevertheless seen categories precisely as the principles of judgments (with objective significance, in his sense).
It was Hegel who subjected formal logic to critique by expanding the definition of thought to include not just it’s objectified form as speech/words/language but also the creations of man’s activity, culture and society’s manifestation itself as the basis on which to consider logic.
Which is part of our difference in regards to form and content where you’re wanting to consider syllogistic forms in themselves as independent of reality, where logic is if it is to be valid must conform to reality. To which formal logic arrives at at certain limits, that it’s true up to a point and isn’t yet the basis for absolute knowledge.
It was thanks to Hegel one could actually consider the world more consciously, as he opened up a way for human activity to be considered scientifically.
He did away with the scholastic tendency in playing with words in part with his novel creation of the concrete universal.
Hegel distinguished clearly between universality, which dialectically contained the whole richness of the particular and the singular within itself and in its determinations, and the simple abstract generality, identicalness, of all the single objects of a given kind. The universal concept expressed itself the actual law of the origin, development, and fading or disappearance of single things. And that was already quite another angle on the concept, much truer and deeper, because, as Hegel demonstrated with a mass of examples, the real law (the immanent nature of the single thing) did not always appear on the surface of phenomena in the form of a simple identicalness, of a common sign or attribute, or in the form of identity. If that were so there would be no need for any theoretical science. The job of thought was not limited to empirically registering common attributes. The central concept of Hegel’s logic was therefore the concrete-universal: he brilliantly illustrated its distinction from the simple, abstract universality of the sphere of notions in his famous pamphlet Wer denkt abstrakt? (Who thinks abstractly?). To think abstractly meant to be enslaved by the force of current catchphrases and clichés, of one-sided, empty definitions; meant to see in real, sensuously intuited things only an insignificant part of their real content, only such determinations of them as were already ‘jelled’ in consciousness and functioned there as ready-made stereotypes. Hence the ‘magic force’ of current catchphrases and expressions, which fence reality off from the thinking person instead of serving as the form of its expression.
In this last interpretation logic finally became a real logic of understanding of unity in variety, and not a scheme for manipulating readymade ideas and notions; a logic of critical and self-critical thought and not a means of the uncritical classification and pedantic, schematic presentation of existing ideas.
Sadly I’m no hegelian and i couldn’t really summarize him and his thought, only fragmented as my own glimpses into his system is.
The problem is that your are identifying only the concrete and then proclaiming it to be universal; whereas, a genuine concrete-universal will have a synthetic basis, but will be ultimately apriori in its formulation. Otherwise, if you are inferring a universal nature from something observed in particular, you are engaging in fallacious reasoning, arguing from part-to-whole (the inductive fallacy).
I think when you look at my summary of labor you may come closer to seeing it’s a priori nature as something that is necessarily true as that is what makes it universal although it isn’t an abstract universal but a concrete in terms of being the result of many determinate abstractions. Such that it took Marx a lot of empirical work and study to arrive at such an notion.
And I hope my earlier summary that it’s not a method that as easily falls into the induction problem in science where they make absolute the relative and come up against contradiction upon future findings.
And it is indeed the case of arguing from a part to the whole but I take it you’re approaching this subject from concepts one typically receives in a traditional study of philosophy but Marx isn’t to be readily understood from such a position as he is quite different although not independent from the problems of such schools of thought.
Reality is only understood through reasoning and direct perception; hence any system that attempts a conclusion not based on such is actually the one which is disconnected from reality.
Likewise, what is "real" anyway?
I have defined such in my argument on this thread; which you have yet to address at all in spite of my frequent requests.
Without analyzing it specifically, you really have no grounds for dismissing my conclusions because you never really engaged my position as stated in its syllogistic form in the first place.
It is more accurately understood through activity, something which contemplative materialism and active idealism couldn’t logically arrive at.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.htmlBecause traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.
Such a point should resonate with your sense of activity/action being human as our needs being based in the natural world necessitate some approximation of reality or we wouldn’t have survived nor developed as we have.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch03.htmlWhile rejecting the idealist explanation of consciousness as the individual's immanent activity arising from the depths of his spirit, science at the same time explodes the concept of metaphysical materialism, which treats consciousness as contemplation divorced from practice. When we speak of the activeness of consciousness, we mean its selectivity, its ability to set itself a goal, its generation of new ideas, acts of creative imagination, its guidance of practical activity. The point of departure for any relationship to the real world is goal-setting activity. The main reason for and historical necessity of the emergence and development of consciousness, which enables man to get an accurate picture of the surrounding world, to foresee the future and on this basis transform the world by his practical activity, is its goal-setting creative activity aimed at changing the world in the interests of man and society. A person's consciousness is not merely a contemplative reflection of objective reality; it creates it. When reality does not satisfy a person, he sets out to change it by means of his labour and various forms of social activity.
To which I think earlier I emphasized the individualist sentiment of pragmatism which emphasizes activity/experimentation in order to find truth (if not simply utility as some are indifferent to truth), they emphasize knowledge as an individual issue rather than seeing men’s consciousness as social. Such that all the concepts which we have, emerge the activity of generations and the relations within the world as they shaped it. As such, it neglects the origins of universals as instantiated in human activity.
I haven’t studied Hegel’s concept of Actuality (synonymous with reality) but it seems tied to possibility and I think it false to treat reality as synonymous with matter (philosophically defined as that which isn’t contingent on consciousness and is independent of it). The mind whilst not a sensuous entity is very real and as such I consider ideal things as being real as their objective manifestation although their ontological existence is essentially different, but their realization is relative because they exist within the subject-object relation where the ideal is derived from human activity in the objective world.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch02-s02.htmlSome philosophers see the unity of objects and processes in their reality, that is, in the fact that they exist. This is indeed the general principle that unites everything in the world. But can the very fact of existence be regarded as a basis for the unity of the world? This depends on how reality itself is interpreted, what is meant by reality: existence may be material or spiritual, imaginary. The theologians, for example, believe that God is real, that he exists but does not possess objective reality. He is unimaginable. Our feelings, thoughts, aspirations and aims are also real—they exist. Yet this is not objective but subjective existence. If existence is the basis of the unity of the world, then it is so only if we are talking about not subjective hut objective existence.
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The principle of materialist monism also applies to society. Social being determines social consciousness. Materialist monism rejects views that single out consciousness and reason as a special substance contrasted to nature and society. Consciousness is, in fact, cognition of reality and a part of that reality. There is no gulf between the laws that govern the motion of the world, and human consciousness. Consciousness belongs not to any transcendental world but to the material world. It is not a supernatural unicum but a natural attribute of highly organised matter.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htmThe ideal, as the form of social man’s activity, exists where the process of the transformation of the body of nature into the object of man’s activity, into the object of labour, and then into the product of labour, takes place. The same thing can be expressed in another way, as follows: the form of the external. thing involved in the labour process is ‘sublated’ in the subjective form of objective activity (action on objects); the latter is objectively registered in the subject in the form of the mechanisms of higher nervous activity; and then there is the reverse sequence of these metamorphoses, namely the verbally expressed idea is transformed into a deed, and through the deed into the form of an external, sensuously perceived thing, into a thing. These two contrary series of metamorphoses form a closed cycle: thing—deed—word—deed—thing. Only in this cyclic movement, constantly renewed, does the ideal, the ideal image of the thing exist.
The ideal is immediately realised in a symbol and through a symbol, i.e. through the external, sensuously perceived, visual or audible body of a word. But this body, while remaining itself, proves at the same time to be the being of another body and as such is its ‘ideal being’, its meaning, which is quite distinct from its bodily form immediately perceived by the ears or eyes. As a sign, as a name, a word has nothing in common with what it is the sign of. What is ‘common’ is only discovered in the act of transforming the word into a deed, and through the deed into a thing (and then again in the reverse process), in practice and the mastering of its results.
Ideality only has existence and meaning as far as human activity actualizes such an ideal.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/development-concept.htmWords have multiple meanings according to context and even within a single context the meaning or applicability of the word can be open to contest. Semantic norms are subject to the same processes of development as the practices and actions organised around them. But it is only the use of words and gestures in contexts where they are constituted meaningfully by on-going social practices, that it is possible even to have the idea of ‘Andy’s Japanese Maple’.
In the end, I’m not sure I’m out to critique your syllogism based on your framing of it. Rather, i’m opposed to your philosophical view and your implied limits or lack thereof.
But if I ever do, it'd be because I understand Hegel's basis for immanent critique in treating somethings as absolutes and showing them to be relative.
But I think part of the difficulty in even doing so is the difference in what approach and understanding I'm trying to work from and yours. There is difficulty for a shared understanding if there is no shared ground as seen with our different conceptions of the concrete universal.
I guess the real task is to illustrate the relationship between concepts/logic and reality itself.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By FiveofSwords
- By JohnRawls
- By Doug64