QatzelOk wrote:What if there's nothing to salvage? Maybe what you suggest is like trying to "make the best of a bad situation" by propping up a dead body at the dinner table and talking to it once in a while ... in order to make the best of the situation (instead of buring or cremating the cadavre).
Well that's the difference, modernism has been shown inadequate but I think that throwing out the baby with the bathwater is losing sight of what value modernism does bring. It's a bit like seeing that liberalism has some significant limitations, but there are positive elements in it to be retained but superseded also. The ideals of the earliest liberals are worthwhile, the problem is that they are left rather abstract and not concrete enough. For example, leaving only significant rights for male property owners is clearly a poor starting point in spite of the universal human values and appeal to shared reason.
I guess the question here is whether Marx was an early post-modernist, or one of the last modernists.
I think his "feelings" (which one can deduce in his texts) were late modernist, but his theory leads to post-modernism.
Like anyone, he was limited in his vision of the future by the tools and behavior of the people of his time and locality.
I see a lot of modernist's as not properly getting beyond Kant so the entire german idealist school and it's reaction to Kant has not been properly incorporated into the culture more broadly and thus even the significance of Marx as a reaction to the limitations of systems of thought of his time.
It's a bit like asking was Marx as Post or A-Ricardian, many do not see an essential distinction between Marx and Ricardo while he significantly criticizes his limitations in political economy. I do think Marx was a modernist, and contributed to such a school, the issue is he is largely dissected and disavowed in the full implications of his work.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/marxist-leninist.htmI fully agree with the premise from which the organizers of this symposium proceed, namely, that Marx is indeed a “son of the West” as are Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Rousseau and Hegel, and Goethe and Beethoven. In other words, the system of ideas called “Marxism” is a natural outgrowth of the development of the tradition of “Western Culture,” or more precisely, Western Europe civilization.
It is an outgrowth of that very civilization which for various reasons and circumstances during the last centuries (roughly from the fifteenth-sixteenth century) was undeniably in the vanguard of all earthly civilization and of all technological and scientific culture of the entire globe. Consequently the repudiation of Marx by “Western Curlture” is, in our view, a repudiation of the most progressive traditions of its own past.
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The world of private property will undoubtedly drift toward the opposite goal. Therefore in summary it seems that Marxist communism in the twentieth century is the only rationally based doctrine that is strong enough to offer people a real earthly ideal. There is no rational doctrine opposed to communism but only an absence of one. Therefore reasonable people must choose now between Marxism, some form of social pessimism or salvation in the form of a transcendental religion. I, personally, prefer communism which opens to humanity a real, albeit difficult, road to a future here on earth.
I see the biggest limitation in Marx is the shortness of his life to achieve the gigantic task he set for himself. His work still forms the best foundation for progressive and radical elements and a disavowal of his work is to be met with suspicion not because he is a God among men but he thoroughly absorbed the best elements of other thinkers and found essential truths about capitalist relations which we still have. Although his work isn't to be a slapping of quotes to things arbitrarily, as it's the method more so than a specific system that must be adopted, he offers a way to identify what is essential in a field, although his own life exemplifies the challenge of such an approach.
I agree with you, but would state this differently. Mankind has been fooled into thinking he can "make things true" by just committing ideas to words. And when these word-based truths fall apart, his response is more words, making his world increasingly and needlessly complex. Complexity makes the house of cards's weaknesses harder to see.
Modernity has buried mankind in complexity.
Agreed, we are drowning in images and signs with an unclear relationship to reality where even the idea of truth is one of trying to correlate words to reality, which already misses the point.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/activity/index.htmIn pedagogy, there is a troubling and (when you think about it) strange problem that is usually described as the problem of “the practical application of knowledge to life.” And it is in fact true that the graduate from school (whether high school or college) finds himself in the quandary of not knowing how to “apply” knowledge to any problem that arises outside the walls of school.
This seems to imply that human abilities should include the special ability of somehow “correlating” knowledge with its object, i.e. with reality as given in contemplation. This means that there should be a special kind of activity of correlating knowledge and its object, where “knowledge” and “object” are thought of as two different “things” distinct from the person himself. One of these things is knowledge as contained in general formulas, instructions, and propositions, and the other thing is the unstructured chaos of phenomena as given in perception. If this were so, then we could clearly try to formulate rules for making this correlation, and also to enumerate and classify typical errors so that we could warn ahead of time how to avoid them. In instructional theory, one often tries to solve the problem of knowing “how to apply knowledge to life” by creating just this kind of system of rules and warnings. But the result is that the system of rules and warnings becomes so cumbersome that it starts to impede rather than help things, becoming an additional source of errors and failures.
Thus, there is every reason to believe that the very problem we are trying to solve arises only because the “knowledge” has been given to the person in an inadequate form; or, to put it more crudely, it is not real knowledge, but only some substitute…
In fact, knowledge in the precise sense of the word is always knowledge of an object. Of a particular object, for it is impossible to know “in general,” without knowing a particular system of phenomena, whether these are chemical, psychological, or some other phenomena.
But, after all, in this case the very phrase about the difficulties of “applying” knowledge to an object sounds rather absurd. To know an object, and to “apply” this knowledge – knowledge of the object – to the object? At best, this must be only an imprecise, confusing way of expressing some other, hidden situation.
But this situation is rather typical.
And this situation is possible only under particular circumstances – when the person has mastered not knowledge of an object but knowledge of something else instead. And this “other thing” can only be a system of phrases about an object, learned either irrespective of the latter or in only an imaginary, tenuous, and easily broken connection to it. A system of words, terms, symbols, signs, and their stable combinations, as formed and legitimized in everyday life – “statements” and “systems of statements.” Language, in particular, the “language of science” with its supply of words and its syntactic organization and “structure.” In other words, the object, as represented in available language, as an already verbalized object.
Language is considered independent of the activities in which it is realized.
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.
It is easy to feel like there is no grounding when swimming in words, images and the like with a felt lack of actions upon the material world.
Indeed, there is too much complexity and part of that is in fact the difficulty of how does one sift through the mass amount of information and find what is true, what is essential, to cut out the chaff. We must be able to distinguish what is relevant and what is irrelevant as many facts are so benign that they become a distraction to what is essential.
http://caute.ru/am/text/truth.htmThe conformity of idea with object is called usually the “truth.” Spinoza, however, considered this conformity to be only denominatio extrinseca of truth [8, vol. 2, p. 447]. The habitual definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei expresses the nature of truth as little as Plato’s “two-footed animal without feathers” expresses the nature of human being. “A true idea must agree with its object” is a mere axiom for Spinoza [8, vol. 1, p. 410]. This feature is certainly belongs to any true idea, but it is not the “agreement” that makes it true. And false ideas do agree with some real object as well.
Spinoza seeks a criterion of truth inside thought itself. The genuine truth needs not to be collated with a thing, it verifies itself: veritas sui sit norma. If some architect makes an idea of building in due order, his thought is true regardless of the fact, whether the building be raised or not. On the other hand, if someone states, for example, that Peter exists, and nevertheless does not know that Peter exists, that thought is not true, even though Peter really exists [8, p. 31]. Hence, there is something real inside thought itself that differs true ideas from the false ones. That “objective essence” of idea Spinoza calls “certainty”. 2
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The principal difference between verbal and conceptual, or formal and objective, knowledge was proclaimed insistently by the same Spinoza. A gulf between thing itself and its concept seems impassable only to those people who name “concept” a mere verbal expression of thought, having no concept of concept as such, viz. “of the concept which the soul has of the thing, without or apart from words” [8, p. 124]. 3 Perception from hearsay (ex auditu) Spinoza rates as the lowest and most inadequate form of acquiring knowledge. And confusion of words with concepts is treated as a cause of the gravest mistakes and of meaningless logomachies.
What if post-modernity is NOT something we can "pull off?" What if it's just the Last Rites of mankind and all his stupid ideation?
Well then we will destroy ourselves and perhaps not soon enough as we will be like a post-apocalypse, it's already gone wrong and we must endure and suffer the calamity.
THe other option is that there may be the prospect of disrupting it and shaking off the overwhelming dominance of capital and our felt helplessness.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfThe social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, selfcontempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity. (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, MECW 6:231)
I relate too much with cynicism and hopelessness so I angerly resist it, I hate it, its disgusting to experience and witness in others.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Rancid
- By wat0n
- By Tainari88
- By litwin