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By SolarCross
#14773672
The Immortal Goon wrote:And Herbert Spencer was hardly some kind of howling Marxist characature you try to paint anybody that dares to complicate the validity of the Great Man thesis.

To work against Spencer's scorn a little, the "Great Men" of history are those that have done something particularly notable with whatever it is they have inherited from their forebears even while others with a similar inheritance did nothing notable. Shakespeare stands out to us even today for the quality of his work and yes a vital ingredient of that is as Spencer says "the multitudinous traditions of civilized life without the various experiences which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had developed and enriched by use?" but he was far from being the only playwright in Elizabethan England and the others also had comparable cultural inheritance without producing anything quite as good while Shakespeare with some talent and some will did something rather more with that inheritance than the others.

Julius Caesar of course had a vital inheritance of centuries of martial development to enable his adventures but then so did a number of other Roman generals yet it was he not they that chose to cross the rubicon and make himself dictator for life.

Even those things that we and the great men inherit are themselves the product of the actions and choices of men and women some of them could also be said to be great for creating it.

Yes Shakespeare had some literature already in existence for to inspire him but that literature such as the works of Plutarch could also be said to be the works of a "great man". :)

It goes back all the way, somewhere in our long lost prehistory some grunting ape man alone of all his fellows first figured out how to make fire without just waiting for lightning. That was great and it made him great for doing it. I think this is the meaning of Greatness.
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By MB.
#14773678
You'll notice that The Immortal Goon did not respond to my comments about what is the proper distribution between Agency and Structure. This is because hard-core Marxist historiography does not allow for the existence of the agent, or rather, treats dogmatically the assumption that the agent's "actions" are merely the surface manifestations of the social structure- at beast useful to the community, at worst, the dangerous ideas and actions of a non-conforming ego-individual (soon to be liquidated). This is done for the round-about justification of historical materialism according to which the adherents of the doctrine must believe that history is a ledger already written that proceeds by clearly defined economic stages towards communism- obviously a fallacy no different from the whig theory described by Butterfield.

I find this amazing considering the obvious role of characters such as Lenin or Mao who abolished their existing social structures, at least at the national level.

I have absolutely no complaint with Carlyle's interest in the qualities of leadership and the virtues of statesmanship that produce national heroes and myths. Spencer's critique is sound, of course, in that it acknowledges the existence of the social structure, which is also perfectly valid. E. H. Carr, who popularized the notion of agency vs structure as a fundamental historical debate, was attempting to reconcile the dislocation caused by radical- or dogmatic- adherence to one or the other doctrine. Any reasonable observer can deduce that the two complement each-other.

I find it very worrying the notion that one must reject one perspective or endorse another on the basis of prevailing majority opinion or, as Spencer would put it, the particular trends of the era. That TIG sets up Spencer and Carlyle as one correct the other wrong is a disturbing indication of the influence of ideological dogmatism on academic thinking.
#14773709
MB. wrote:I don't want to go too off-topic, but I do not agree with your point regarding the supposed universality of historiographical interpretation regarding the work and thesis of Carlyle.


It seems that after clarification on this issue, you do:

MB. wrote:I have absolutely no complaint with Carlyle's insures in the qualities of leadership and the virtues of statesmanship that produce national heroes and myths. Spencer's critique is sound, of course, in that it acknowledges the existence of the social structure, which is also perfectly valid. E. H. Carr, who popularized the notion of agency vs structure as fundamental historical debate, was attempting to reconcile the dislocation caused by radical- or dogmatic- adherence to one or the other doctrine. Any reasonable observer can deduce that the two complement each-other.


I suggested that everyone rejected the notion of the Great Man thesis, you claimed overreach, I admitted that was an overreach, and now here we are cutting this hair into tiny sections.

To imply that I, or anybody else, is against a study about, "the qualities of leadership or virtues of statescraft," is dishonest.

MB. wrote:You'll notice that The Immortal Goon did not respond to my comments about what is the proper distribution between Agency and Structure.


You may note that you specifically said that you, "don't want to go too off-topic into these kinds of questions," though now these questions are of a paramount importance because I followed your lead and conceded your request--I presented the argument, to which you at least partially conceded, and dropped it.

This is why I did not get into Carr and set up Spencer's criticism of Carlyle as a fundamental rejection of the Great Man theory in historiography as its whole:

TIG wrote:It might have been a slight over-reach, but I don't know that I have met a historian of any stripe that is a proud advocate of the Great Man of history thesis. That's not hard to imagine when it's predicated on the scientific understanding of this:


TIG wrote:But, again, as you say, I have no concrete proof that historians will tend to favour the understanding and study of the conditions of a given society rather than a single individual with, "a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them." And even if most did insist that the foundations and mechanics of a society were more important than a, "flowing light-fountain," whatever that is, then you're right that the approach is not necessarily correct.


This is hardly the language of someone that you find, "very worrying," in that I'm supposedly endorsing, "the notion that one must reject perspective or endorse another on the basis of prevailing majority opinion or, as Spencer would put it, the particular trends of the era."

And bringing up Spencer as a non-Marxist that criticized the Great Man theory is hardly, "a disturbing indication of the influence of ideological dogmatism on academic thinking."

These shifts in grounding and changes of argument may lead one to suspect that you're less concerned with the academic integrity you are suddenly worried about, and more concerned with my person.
By SolarCross
#14773716
MB. wrote:You'll notice that The Immortal Goon did not respond to my comments about what is the proper distribution between Agency and Structure.


The Immortal Goon wrote:You may note that you specifically said that you, "don't want to go too off-topic into these kinds of questions," though now these questions are of a paramount importance because I followed your lead and conceded your request--I presented the argument, to which you at least partially conceded, and dropped it.


I say we may as well go off-topic given that commenting on the OP's infantile raving is a lot less interesting than this "great man" tangent we have fallen upon.

So TIG what is your answer to MB's query on the place of agency in history for the marxist historian?

My own view is that human history is 100% agency, whether it is the great men whose names blaze through ages or the small men, the unsung heroes whose names rapidly disappear with their passing, whom are the primary drivers of history, it is still all agency.

These concepts of structure are just concepts plagarised from engineers to serve as metaphors for something that does not exist. The sum of human interaction that we can call civilisation or society is really nothing like an engineered product because there is no single designer with a master plan. Consequently "structure" is an exceedingly poor metaphor for the subject matter. The concepts produced by ecologists would serve better for a metaphorical descriptor because ecologies like human civilisation are emergent phenomena being driven by innumerable different competing and collaborating willful agents.

Well that is my amateur perspective anyway.
By Decky
#14773849
Winston Churchill was a central figure in the direction of British imperial policy for over 50 years and has a strong claim to having led Britain to victory in both First and Second World Wars.


:lol:

The butcher of Gallipoli was one of the most incompetent politicians Britain ever had the misfortune to produce. I would not wish a leader like that on my worst enemy.
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By MB.
#14773902
Speaking of cutting things into tiny parts, I've split this topic so we can talk about Marxist historiography, structure vs agency, who is more intellectually dishonest, MB. or TIG, and wether or not Winston Churchill was a "fountain of light" in the Carlyle sense of a Great Man and leader, or a mere Spencerian product of his circumstances.

Decky wrote:The butcher of Gallipoli was one of the most incompetent politicians Britain ever had the misfortune to produce.


To answer this question, you need to examine the strategic context (STRUCTURE) in which the Dardanelles operation was set into motion, and the extent to which the plan was a reasonable policy. The long and short of it, to put it simply, is that ultimately Churchill was not responsible for the affair after May when he resigned from office in protest over the handling of the campaign. The total Allied loss of life incurred at the Dardanelles- over 10 months- did not much exceed 100,000 casualties, and this is a relatively minor figure compared to a bad day on the Somme. I think you'll need to go into more detail about your critique of Churchill, and his handling of the Gallipoli campaign to justify your comments about his gross incompetence.

TIG wrote:And bringing up Spencer as a non-Marxist that criticized the Great Man theory is hardly, "a disturbing indication of the influence of ideological dogmatism on academic thinking."


What is indicative of a disturbing indication of ideological dogmatism is the notion that Carlyle or Spencer is more right or more wrong than the other, which you clearly endorse as you introduced Spencer into this argument, in an attempt to demonstrate the lunacy of Carlyle. I suspect this is because, as a Marxist, you do not acknowledge the legitimacy of individual agency.
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By Wellsy
#14774028
I can't speak for the trends within Marxist Historiography, but I wish to aim thought at what I suspect is the direction of thought by Marx. I'm hesitant to say that I understand Marx but I do feel that I'm in my early stages towards his thought.

I suspect this a case where neglect to dialectical materialism leads to a unbridgeable divide where one emphasizes one to the expense of the other and there is no synthesis of the two. All those impossible dualities, mechanistic materialism Versus Subjective Idealism, empiricism versus rationalism and many more. I think should also distinguish methodological individualism/collectivism from metaphysical claims of the ontology of reality. That whilst accepting a methodology that emphasizes the economy, it doesn't necessarily mean it entails my metaphysical beliefs because there is always a degree of reductionism in any abstraction, one can't hold the entire world in every detail in one's maps of it, there are different emphasis. It's inevitable that any abstraction is reductionist...
Because chaos is a science of whole dynamic systems, rather than separate parts, it represents, in effect, an unacknowledged vindication of the dialectical view. Up to now, scientific investigation has been too much isolated into its constituent parts. In pursuit of the "parts" the scientific specialist becomes too specialised not infrequently losing all sight of the "whole." Experimentation and theoretical rationalisations thus became increasingly removed from reality. More than a century ago, Engels criticised the narrowness of what he called the metaphysical method, which consisted of looking at things in an isolated way, which lost sight of the whole. The starting point of the supporters of chaos theory was a reaction against precisely this method, which they call "reductionism." Engels explained that the "reduction" of the study of nature to separate disciplines is to some extent necessary and inevitable.

"When we reflect on nature or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless maze of connections in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away…

"But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of phenomena as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we cannot do this, we are not clear about the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately according to its nature, special causes and effects, etc."

But as Engels warned, too great a retreat into "reductionism" can lead to an undialectical view, or a drift to metaphysical ideas.

And so it's not the case that by emphasizing one perspective that one rejects the existence of other parts not within that abstract framing. We necessarily zoom in on certain things, block out many things in order to make sense of things, otherwise we'd be trying to hold the entire reality in our heads, but fortunately we individuate and break things up.

The criticisms that apply to a purely individualist account just as aptly apply to the collectivist account and they remain a subpar grasp of reality to assert one as dominant as the other but an emphasis of both is necessary to begin picturing the whole. That it seems to me that Marx, though not everyone labelled a Marxist asserts the existence of both material limitations but also the agency of individuals who can then be positioned in wider groupings such as a class distinction (which isn't a strictly discrete classification I don't think). That it seems to me that Marxism isn't economic determinist, but is interpreted as such by those that don't grasp aspects of his dialectical thinking. I know from past experiences in trying to tangle with things like the framework of base and superstructure I felt a strong need to emphasize one over the other because I had views of a linear causality where one thing causes the other and so one needs a starting point. But reality is more complex as now seen with things like Chaos theory, where the apparent disorder that is seemingly impossible to predict in a linear fashion is still in its total, deterministic. The difficulty being that minor changes can change everything else, everything is pressing on everything else to various degrees, that can't look to things as one lead thing to another, they're all in a state of flux, in some sort of balance of different forces.

I take it the tough part is a materialist conception of human consciousness, that isn't to say that our thoughts aren't abstractions that don't have an immaterial existence. Thought can't be reduced to or made identical to the material processes that give rise to our consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/one1.htm
These views do not consist in deriving sensation from the movement of matter or in reducing sensation to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one of the properties of matter in motion.

But human consciousness isn't than the result of something as abstract as the intervention of God with a separate ontology where our ability to act is treated as miracle that I think and then act in accordance with that thought. I think in another thread, that Potemkin fella does a nice summary of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Will? which critiques the metaphysical sense of free will.
Human free will is seen as being subject to mechanical forces, but human beings aren't so simple, our consciousness is something that complicate that deterministic view that was arrived at reasonably when applied to the laws of nature.
But man's free will relates to his conscious and approximate awareness of reality. That the practical conception of human's free will is the difference between not being aware of things and thus making decisions out of ignorance and that of making a decision under informed consent.
Here's a useful summary from Engels...
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.

Now when it comes to a Marxist view of human consiousness, I recommend reading Feliks Mikhailov, 1976 - The Riddle of the Self as I won't do justice to his overall work here.
But if one reads it, begin to see how he understands the mind-body problem arises from the limitations of philosophical logic prior to Hegel and how Dialectics don't confront the issue because it goes beyond the problematic assumptions that inform previous logic.
Evald Ilyenkov Dialectical Logic is also a good piece on this but Feliks I think is easier for those of us like myself who aren't that philosophically switched on.
Really, I don't think I know the works well enough in a conscious way to summarize their points and can only recommend them as a read as I think they address the issue of the mind-body problem and give direction understanding human consciousness. Which relates to the assumptions that underpin one's logic and one's logic is the basis on which one derives a rational sense of the world.
That its emphasis on flux and other things avoids the problem arrived at from logic inherited and refined from the past.
So for example, in concieving of man as a passive reflector of the objective world end up with theoretical framings such as:
The basic defect of all materialism before Marxism was, as Marx said, its contemplativeness. The rigid and one-sided line taken by contemplative materialism compels the scientist to view the subject as something passive, responding to the stimulus of external objects. The object is the seal and the brain is the wax. To examine the properties and attributes of the imprint one must naturally study the wax, which, of course, merely copies t e shape of the seal. This is the logic of the inventors of the notorious mind-body problem!

But the brain is not wax and the organism is not a lump of matter on which the external world leaves its imprints. And not just because of the different scales of their material and structural organisation. What matters is the way in which the problem is theoretically formulated.


Within Feliks outline there is a strong emphasis on the social nature of human consciousness, which hints at the material basis of our thinking. That we aren't imbued with knowledge from some metaphysical deity nor are things somewhere to be found in the brain from conception. But human's nature and his consciousness is a social process, one of activity with the world, one in which he inherits the history of humanity into his particular self objectified in the form of buildings, technology, and the writing that disposes acquired knowledge upon him.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/works/riddle/riddle3b.htm
Academician N. P. Dubinin writes: “The possibilities of human cultural growth are endless. This growth is not imprinted in the genes. It is quite obvious that if the children of contemporary parents were deprived from birth of the conditions of contemporary culture, they would remain at the level of our most remote ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Whereas the children of such “primitive people” placed in the conditions of contemporary culture would rise to the heights of contemporary man.” [2]

To emphasize this I think Vygotsky seems to be useful in a better emphasis on human development.
Human thought develops NOT from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual! What a stunningly correct and dialectical conception! So much for the subjective idealist prejudice that all human beings begin as individuals, their development consisting of the cancellation of their essential, inner individuality! In this approach, Hegel agrees with Vygotsky

The point of this is that one can't conceive of human agency without first understanding the nature of the human subject and his consciousness.

And whilst I see these works as hinting a better understanding, I've not yet arrived at any conclusion to the nature of the human subjectivity except that it is clearly derived from our experience of reality and shaped by social forces. This i suspect is still subject to being seen as ones consciousness is determined by social forces upon him, to which in some respect he may be manipulated in such a way and would be unfree in Engel's sense of freedom. That he can only be free by being aware, conscious of his own thought and the world around him. That there's still left unknown about human subjectivity in relation to the world around them, which opens up into all sorts of things around ideology and propaganda (superstructure) directing people. But this seems to be a case of people being unconscious to themselves and the world around them are the unfree, the ones that seem easily propalled by base desires. Not that anyone is above those base emotional tendencies, its an inherent vulnerability of ours. But it would seem that Marx and Engels perhaps thought one could acquire a scientific understanding of the world through the logic of their dialectical materialism. It would make mankind aware of its own thought as well as the conditions in which he existed in. From developing the philosophical outlook of Marxism, one is able to become conscious and thus become free in the sense of being a conscious agent who acts upon an informed sense of the world.

I'm trying to think how tensions within the base, social relations gives rise to changes in the superstructure/culture and thus people under stress from some conditions garner a new consciousness from the material world and leads to them acting on such a tension.
As it's quite clear that without human actions, nothing would be done, man is always in a state of action, society would stagnate and fall apart otherwise, things that seem to be in a static state are in fact actively maintained, in the same way one looks the same but one replenishes ones self with food and water.
So for one tension, I like to think of the shift from feudalism with the family unit as the mode of production having technological changes founded by the initiative of mankind. Who took advantage of natural laws for productive capacities which plays a role in the eventual shift to industrial capital and put pressure on pre-existing gender relations.
And from it emerges feminist consciousness as women find the conditions that actualize their ability to organize around one another in a shared interest as they get brought into capital relations, organizing their own unions, speaking out in their shared experiences of how mens actions leave them destitute when they spend their money on booze or victimization through sexual violence. The patriarchal relations inherited from past conditions, exaggerate themselves under industrial capital with a new ideology around gender relations with cult of domesticity. Men in the public life women in the private, which many women remain in terms of keeping their labor, even paid in the home. But soon women brought to public sphere when they and children are used for cheap labor for emerging industries. The conditions give rise to them to act out in their conditions, orgnaizing unions and so on, their agency has to be concrete and placed within its concrete context. That they weren't just subjectively aware of their situation in some sense, but the conditions played a part in bringing about that consciousness because they had to observe the world to see what was happening and it played a part in them then figuring out how to achieve their perceived needs in addressing those problems.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
To which I think it still might be taken that humans have no free will and are strictly determined by the material conditions, but I think this is still operating in the mechanistic materialist logic. Not seeing that its merely an emphasis that human beings consciousness and actions can not exist in a vacuum, their very being is made through their real world conditions. I suppose to consider how humans are special in regards to having developed language and communication where we have the means to act on things in order to support our material needs and society for many seems to be above the early conditions that gave rise to our being. To which I would recommend reading '2. The Language of Real Life' of Feliks work to better consider the origins of humans nature and consciousness where man seems to have acquired an awareness and unique manner of considering things in order to consider the world, his needs and how to satisfy those needs through increasingly complex ways through improved consciousness.

All this doesn't allow for a predictable reality, in the same way that a cricket game can't be predicted in spite of knowing all the conditions available to it, many differences can lead to dramatically different outcomes whether it be the bowler's spin, the pitch, the skill of the batman, the quality of the bat and so on. So much to be accounted for simultaneously that one can only approximate and it can be really wrong because the likely outcome and better approximation can change as things change further in time.
https://www.marxist.com/science-old/chaostheory.html
But given the almost limitless complexity of human society and economics, it is inconceivable that major events like wars would not disrupt these patterns. Marxists would argue that society does lend itself to scientific study. In contrast to those who see only formlessness, Marxists see human development from the starting point of material forces, and a scientific description of social categories like classes, and so on. If the development of chaos science leads to an acceptance that the scientific method is valid in politics and economics, then it is a valuable plus. However, as Marx and Engels have always understood, theirs is an inexact science, meaning that broad trends and developments could be traced, but detailed and intimate knowledge of all influences and conditions is not possible.

And I suppose part of that unpredictability is humans, it adds a chaotic element that doesn't guarantee as much certainty as when considering nature mechanically. Not that nature isn't chaotic and difficult to predict in linear way because of flux of variables (weather).

There is a sense of determinism when looking to the past as there is a bias to thinking of how could it have been otherwise. But if one looks tot he future, like my example with predicting a simple cricket match, we see the uncertainty, that lack of predictability but only a framing of potentials and possibilities ever changing as conditions ever change. Nothing is guaranteed, because no person can adequately hold knowledge of everything about the world, something always in a state of change, where radically changes can occur suddenly due to mere quantitative increases in many different parts of reality. That one can give a certain direction to such chaos like one can the weather or the cricket match though, if one identifies the essential relations, the limits and components, then one sets a frame for what is possible within reality. That one doesn't draw from one's imagination the impossible but tries to rationally approximate things in a decreasing probability the further into the future one tries to predict things.

I will stumble here as I'm just trying to work out my thought and don't have a firm conclusion.
I think we can certainly note the actions of very notable people because their actions played out through the organizations they worked with in. Someone like a Lenin is of great interest because of his place within history, but he is also a single individual within a particular time and place as well. He didn't single handled create the revolution and Soviet Union. He was but a man, and whilst one can consider actions for which he is responsible for and his influence within his context, we can also consider that there was an entire society of people who acted. And their consciousness was determined by their conditions, what they had inherited from the history of mankinds labour and works. And within all that is a complex interaction where many individuals acting isn't strictly deterministic in a linear fashion, but in a broader scope one can see how they as particulars relate to the universal. To which I imagine there isn't much attention to an individual because because examining an individual doesn't allow for a predictive sense of something as large as society. Looking at the particulars doesn't help us comprehend the universal, that there must be an awareness of the totality when considering the parts.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay2.htm
An immense role in the development of logic, and in preparing the ground for modern views on its subject matter, a role far from fully appreciated, was played by Spinoza. Like Leibniz, Spinoza rose high above the mechanistic limitations of the natural science of his time. Any tendency directly to universalise partial forms and methods of thinking only useful within the bounds of mechanistic, mathematical natural science was also foreign to him.

But it's from this that the individual is of interest as well and I imagine is something that still needs to be investigated, the particular being the human subject, who of course isn't isolated as his consciousness whilst residing in him is implicated in his social world, he isn't the feral child raised by animals. And even in understanding the individual, it is also part of understanding the social, one can't separate the to. And so someone like Lenin can't be separated and treated in an atomized fashion, his being like anyones is social.

And I suppose hard for me to pinpoint the sort of chaotic part where humans move. That its interesting that we seem to embody and retain our reality, that I can think of things which aren't objectively in front of me and such. Which is some quirk of consciousness I don't know how to explain, the sort of enduring nature of it and that we have memory.
All ends up feeling like what is a leader without the group and vice versa. Does the leader dictate the crowd or does the crowd dictate the type of leader that arises? Or is it a case of a dialectical relationship like the base structure where there isn't a clear starting point because everything is happening simultaneously, acting on one another, endless threads of factors to be included or excluded in one's conception of what caused things. That it does seem hard to quantify the influence and impact of Lenin, because in trying to isolate a thing one can end up going through all of history to many threads of factors that can all be considered to have played a part in the causality of things that lead to his place in history and outcomes of his actions. It just puts ones head in a whirl trying to grasp reality and its motion of everything and consider the effects of that motion. Because Lenins actions have real world effects just like anyones actions can have effects to certain degrees, where some actions play pivotal parts at what seem like pivotal events. To which I suppose someone like Lenin if we consider them free by Engels definition was able to be more active an agent in some ways, but then even those that might be seen as unconscious still have effects upon the world but they don't navigate it with the awareness of someone like Lenin. But then even someone who doesn't have a great grasp of things can react to things and cause significant change in what ever grasp they have of their situation, which can effect others and cause them to play a part. So an individual can be the small initial reaction that causes a cascade because somehow the conditions are ripe and so the cascade means that no individual is solely responsible for simply being the first in the reaction. Though this again sounds like mechanistic materialism and talking about a chemical reaction. To which I think of Billy Joel, We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning. Reality came into existence somehow and we ponder a beginning, but regardless its being put into motion and the particulars are many and complicated.

eh struggling with my crass efforts on dialectics and failed to clarify the matter but hopefully point in some direction where a better understand might be developed and resolve this. I suspect someone who understood dialectics would be able to clarify the confusion here.

Good luck to resolving the matter folks :D
Last edited by Wellsy on 09 Feb 2017 15:30, edited 2 times in total.
#14774089
I am hesitant to post after such a well thought out post, but what the hell. I just want to suggest what I might call the permeation of the individual into the societal whole. For example: We see Lenin as the individual who is credited, but perhaps it was some unknown individual who provided the initial impetus for the line of thought? Any of our individual thoughts, once spoken, has the power to permeate society to a level that brings about dramatic change. The process is slow as each individual accepts the thought as their own, but there was one (probably unknown) individual who started the process. We may see this as societal influence, but it was began by an individual. :hmm:

Edit: I find writing my thoughts helps reduce complicated thoughts into something understandable for me. :D
Edit 2: I guess what I was trying to say is I subscribe to the 'great man theory', but find in highly unlikely the actual 'great man' was anyone we ever heard of.
#14774254
SolarCross wrote:So TIG what is your answer to MB's query on the place of agency in history for the marxist historian?


Wells does about as good of a job of breaking things down for the Marxist in general, I think. He's one of my favorite posters at the moment, even if he leaves me little to say sometimes!

But I'm not a proponent of the Great Man, and it does seem that everybody here has immediately recoiled from any kind of pure Great Man theory when pressed. So we're left with a discussion about how much or how little the Great Man has to do with the rest of history.

I can say form myself, I tend to think that if there was no French Revolution, there would be no Robespierre or Napoleon. That is to say, in the chaos, someone was going to be elevated.

But there is notoriously no way to prove this. I favor toward structure because I think that the best ideas and the most powerful tyrant can be a rural barrister or artillary officer and remain that way if history provides no structure for them to do more.
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By Potemkin
#14774276
But it's from this that the individual is of interest as well and I imagine is something that still needs to be investigated, the particular being the human subject, who of course isn't isolated as his consciousness whilst residing in him is implicated in his social world, he isn't the feral child raised by animals. And even in understanding the individual, it is also part of understanding the social, one can't separate the to. And so someone like Lenin can't be separated and treated in an atomized fashion, his being like anyones is social.

I think this is the key. Our being as individuals is a social being. And yet what we call 'society' is itself merely an abstraction from the interactions of countless individuals.... The only way to square this circle, it seems to me, is by thinking dialectically, as Heraclitus did, as Hegel did, as Marx did. The individual is inconceivable without being situated in a social context; after all, most people's ideas and beliefs are not their own but have been inculcated into them by society. A white racist in 1950s Alabama, for example, didn't have those views because he had independently analysed reality and scientifically concluded that black people were inferior to white people; he had those views because those were the views of his society. The inferiority of black people was just something which "everybody knows", what Flaubert called a "received idea". In fact, most people's ideas are received ideas, are social ideas. Thinking makes their heads hurt. They allow society to do their thinking for them. Most people don't think about anything much. They merely give their assent to what society tells them to think. To think of individuals as being entirely autonomous agents who can be conceptually isolated from their social context flies in the face of reality.
By SolarCross
#14774282
@Potemkin

Yet it remains that someone creates the "recieved ideas" and that those that receive those ideas, be it equality or racial bigotry or brotherhood of mankind or platonism etc, are choosing to go with the flow. The structure, if it is a thing at all, is the surface manifestation of innumerable willful agents. Great man, the multitudes whose names history forgets or some mix of both it is all still people choosing.

To reference TIG's examples: Yes Napoleon got some opportunity from the chaos of revolution but it was still people that created that chaos and yearned for someone to put an end to it. Yes Robspierre got his opportunity for bloodshed from a warrior caste too enfeebled and rendered effete by centuries of easy money to effectively deter musket wielding plebs from grinding them into paste. But it was still people choosing to be soft because they could and people choosing to take advantage. The "structure" is absolutely boiling with agency.
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By Potemkin
#14774299
The "structure" is absolutely boiling with agency.

Actually, I agree with that. This is why I said that we must think dialectically - the individual is a social being, and society is composed of the interactions of innumerable individuals. The structure is indeed boiling with agency, but the agents have the structure embedded deep within their thoughts and motivations. The individual and the structure cannot be disentangled.
#14774334
Yeah, I think that's about right, to pivot slightly. I think that's really the only realistic way to view history. I actually got a BS in history and was very much trained to see it as a hard science without the input of emotion or the human element, and I sometimes fall back on that without thinking (as is relevant to these discussions, actually).

And I have the dialectic in my toolbox, but it's not what we commonly reach for when in a society that doesn't underline it, I suppose.

So I think Wellis and Potemkin are right in how to underline the individual in this respect.
By SolarCross
#14774338
Okay so Agency vs Structure is a false dichotomy then, it is all agency in reality with the concept of "structure" just being an abstraction for agency^x.

Is that end of thread?
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By Potemkin
#14774347
Okay so Agency vs Structure is a false dichotomy then, it is all agency in reality with the concept of "structure" just being an abstraction for agency^x.

Society is indeed an abstraction, but so is the autonomous individual. That is the point. The concept of 'agency' is just as much of an abstraction as the concept of 'structure'. The reality is the dialectical interaction of innumerable individuals within the nexus of their social context. And yet that sentence too is an abstraction....
By SolarCross
#14774464
Except it objectively isn't, no "structure" can say cogito ergo sum and actually mean it. It is a sly move to claim everything is an abstraction with the obvious implication that they are illusions but clearly some abstractions are more equal than others. I do exist, I am absolutely self aware. I am fully able to detect my agency, to exercise it, to thrill in it. I cannot see any structures do that.
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By Wellsy
#14774472
SolarCross wrote:Except it objectively isn't, no "structure" can say cogito ergo sum and actually mean it. It is a sly move to claim everything is an abstraction with the obvious implication that they are illusions but clearly some abstractions are more equal than others. I do exist, I am absolutely self aware. I am fully able to detect my agency, to exercise it, to thrill in it. I cannot see any structures do that.

Not sure if it'd be rude as I don't wish to speak for Potemkin as he can certainly speak for himself but I hope that i could speculate what his position might be at length in order to clarify things. Though having lurked these threads and noting him as being a well educated chap, I imagine he could provide more clarity and sensitivity to nuance distinctions than I if needed.

I imagine Potemkin would agree with what you've stated in regards to there being some abstractions that aren't merely illusions, thus some abstractions more equal than others.
I take it that he isn't using the term abstraction from a position of subjective idealism in which the world is only real when its perceived and there is no objective reality. Or some epistemological point of not being able to discern that reality exists outside perception (though I wonder whether points about pre-reflexive conscious might help somehow counter that). I believe he means abstract in terms of 'that which is thought' because our thoughts aren't the objective reality. That there is an objective world, which we perceive and that we don't create the image in our mind because there is but only one object which we're perceiving. Though consciousness is quirky in that we are able to create objects in our minds that don't exist in front of us. Still haven't clarified the position on how we're retaining all that hehe but anyway...
Check out 3. The End of the Mind-Body Problem for some further clarification, though I recommend the whole text.
It has a wonderfuly lucid example posed in the form of a dialogue about percieving a candle on a table, where someone speaks of the object as being replicated in the human mind, so that there is the external candle and an internal candle in one's mind. But that this is the confusion of those who bifurciate things and separate man from the external world.
That one might note that its seems to be empiricists that tend to reject all that which isn't an empirically observable object as merely subjective within their framework.
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/
Spoiler: show
Ilyekov then reviews the failure of the empiricism of James Stuart Mill:

“For example, value in general, value as such, may according to Mill be conceived in abstraction, without analysing any of the types of its existence outside the head. This may and must be done precisely for the reason that it does not exist as a real property of objects outside the head. It only exists as an artificial method of assessment or measurement, as a general principle of man’s subjective attitude to the world of things, that is, as a certain moral attitude. It cannot therefore be considered as a property of things themselves, outside the head, outside consciousness.

According to this kind of logic, of which Mill is a classic representative, that is precisely why value should be regarded only as a concept, only as an a priori moral phenomenon independent from the objective properties of things outside the head and opposing them. As such, it exists only in self-consciousness, in abstract thinking. That is why it can be conceived ‘abstractly’, and that will be the correct mode of considering it.”

Hence why everything is so simple for the empiricists as material reality has been rigorously defined in advance as existing outside of the head that much of sophisticated philosophical enquiry into the nature of logic was seen as wasted effort. This mode of thought is the dominant one in western philosophy whereby we can dispense with abstract thought being a reflection of anything in the material world as this is completely fixed, unchangeable or static. All that is required is to gather more knowledge of the real existing state of things whereby we accumulate more understanding of it; a mere piling up of more and more facts about the objects of investigation before us. In this sense abstract thought has no real place in philosophy and definitely not in logic but deserves to be placed in the field of ethics or morals.

Ilyekov dismantles the faults of this system by recourse to the advances in logic made by Hegel.

“Hegel’s main idea is that intellectual abstractions do not take consciousness beyond the empirical stage of cognition, that they are forms of sensual empirical consciousness beyond the empirical stage of cognition, that they are forms of sensual empirical consciousness rather than thought in the strict sense of the term, are notions and not concepts. Confusing the two, identifying notion with concept on the grounds that both are abstractions, is a most characteristic mark of metaphysics in logic, of the logic of metaphysical thinking.”

It is a mistake to conceive thought as a separate entity from empirically presented facts in this view and it is the specific task of logic to move from the abstract contemplation of notions or concepts of the empirically presented facts to work out an abstraction that would express the essence of the presented facts given in our notions and concepts. The problem is in drawing out the generalised expression of the real nature of the object under investigation from the empirically obvious facts. This is far from straight forward and constitutes the real challenge in dialectical logic.

For Hegel the essence or content of objects of investigation cannot be known by examining them in isolation. The thing cannot be known in itself as its essence exists outside of itself and in relation to, or in its connectedness with, other objects or phenomena. As Ilyenkov explains:


So what I imagine Potemkins thought might come to is that we abstract reality, because our thoughts aren't the objective reality itself. But he not being a subjective idealist he'd note that some abstractions are more objectively true than others. So referring the the summary of Mill's empiricism above, they tend to treat objects as independent of one another and that the only true thing is the appearance/form of an object. Anything projected onto the thing is subjective. But this doesn't make sense when say something like money which as an object is purely metal, paper or plastic but it has a clear social meaning and significance. And that's because those are just its forms but it's essence, meaning is imbued in it from its social significance based on social relations. And even those things that specified the form like metal, paper and plastic are considered abstractions. That the entire world is cognized into parts, this is individuzation, where we are able to separate the sensuously experienced world into different parts.
Because we don't experience the world in some overwhelming sensuous whole. But are able to distinguish things in ways, so that I can tell the difference between dark and not dark (light) and they can have terms. That if there was no dark there could be no light because there would be no difference and thus the category would perhaps not exist because everything has its opposite.
That I can distinguish myself from the rest of reality through my sense of self (ego) so that I am not the external world is another case of this individuation I believe. But purely empirically I'm existing in the same reality and its the human consciousness that cognizes me into a category distinguished from the category of world.
And so things like social relations which aren't empirical entities are just as concrete as objects themselves because they are features of the objective world. And thus there are many things that are in a sense very concrete and real and can be considered objective as existing external to the human mind, but in another sense exist only because we categorize it. That the idea of male and female is such a category, its how we've chosed to categorize our biology based on certain appearances, but without a human to categorize them due to consciousness there is no male and female as a concept, though the biological reality still objectively exists.
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By Potemkin
#14774475
Well summarised Wellsy. :)

I do indeed mean the word 'abstraction' in the sense not that all abstractions are 'illusions', but in the sense that all abstractions are necessarily one-sided and fail to capture the essence of the phenomena being abstracted in our thoughts. I would even go so far as to say that it is necessary to create abstractions about the world in this way before we can even begin to understand it, but with the caveat that we must always be aware of its one-sidedness. The concept of 'structure', or even the concept of 'society' itself, is an abstraction and is therefore merely a thought in our heads, but at the same time it has real effects, and therefore has concrete existence. Likewise, the concept of a monadic, autonomous individual who has metaphysical free will and agency is also an abstraction, and is just as one-sided as the abstraction of 'structure', but is one-sided on the opposite side. The reality is always dialectical and there is always a residue left over from any process of mental abstraction from that reality.
By SolarCross
#14774556
What I mean by agency is an entity that wants things, all this metaphysical stuff about autonomous individuals and freewill that you tacking on is muddying the water a bit. You can certainly divide an "individual", a person's mind is not a literal atom (though atoms as in natural elements can be divided also - nuclear physics) the CIA had a program called Mk Ultra for doing that sort of thing. A lot of people that went through severe trauma or mental illness can suffer mental fracturing something cognitive dissonance but worse. And of course communists are very interested in breaking up people's natural minds to be refashioned for their purposes. It can be done.

Of course full autonomy is a rare thing that few enjoy, at best most of us, most of the time have only a partial autonomy and even that is won through some bargaining and no little sacrifice.

Freewill is also similarly compromised a lot of the time.

Agency is not however freewill it is just will.

The phenomena to which I am using the word agency to represent is something that can be directly experienced without words, concepts or abstractions, we are that experience.

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