- 30 Nov 2016 23:22
#14743971
I'm punching well above my weight not being thoroughly acquainted with enough philosophy of philosophers to properly grasp this but it seems quite interesting and important for understanding Marxism. And I'm relying on a pasting of thoughts from those more articulate to myself to help illuminate what I hope to express.
This might help as a brief introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_internal_relations
http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/39/1/25.full.pdf
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0309816814564128
My thoughts are unclear but I believe I experience an ambiguity in understanding the strength this view takes. I'm wondering if it is as strong as considering that everything has essential properties that to change some other things is to change the thing. Somethings seem more clearly applicable to this sort of reasoning, like class in Marxist thought of the proletariat and bourgeoisie being liquidated once their relation to the means of production is changed by socialist revolution and developed into communism. Where there is no capitalist class taking the surplus profit out of the labour of the proletariat.
So these two classes, proletariat and bourgeoisie, are defined by their relation to the means of production as well as to one another. Once done away with, it becomes incomprehensible to speak of such classes as they would no longer exist. This seems significant to what little of dialectics I've hopefully grasped, where in the simplified understand of dialectics there's speak of contradictory/opposites that subsume one another into something else. That to understand one thing one must also understand its opposing force for a totality.
This seems particularly interesting in that it seems that in my superficial readings of things on Marxist philosophy, totality is seen as necessary to getting close to truth or a improved understanding of reality.
That our mind struggles to conceptualize the totality of reality, its simply impossible to imagine such a thing and so we have to arbitrarily isolate things in the abstract to help bring clarity, which seems the tendency of analytical thought to break things down. Though, hopefully I am not harshly misrepresenting it out of ignorance, but would seem that many analytical thinkers treat their arbitrarily isolation of things as constituting reality rather than seeing it as the limits of human thought.
That situating things in 'context' is to properly affirm relevant information about things as they lose fundamental properties when they are abstracted from things too much. Not that this process isn't useful for clarity but that we should be aware of our arbitrary isolating of things.
This I feel might help touch on this line of thought and seems to fit in line with process philosophy.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php
After all this, I don't know how to make sense in cases less obvious than the class relation, where its not readily apparent what essential property is entailed and how it may be changed because of changes elsewhere. In my own thoughts not knowing how or if they relate, I wonder if there is a temporal relation, as it seems process philosophy and Marxism aren't static in the way analytical notions are.
To help articulate this point...
An illustration of the temporal nature of things and how it can be fruitful to think of things in flux and not stuck in a present moment.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0309816814564128
And something to help illustrate the static nature of abstract thought that I have the impression is considered prevalent in analytical thought.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm
But in this point of things being temporal, I'm not sure whether the idea is a broad as if things had been somewhat different elsewhere in the world, I would not be the same person I am even if in many other ways I was still alike. That it wouldn't be an A=A likeness, but I'm wondering if this is too broad and instead it is limited to things that are more clearly viewable as fundamentally changed by changes in the relations in the world. Much like the Marx quote, that the black fella still be himself, but he can only be a slave in certain relations and so internal relations isn't a universalizing "we're all connected" idea but that what we intrinsically are is defined by relations relations of others thing in what they are defined and seen as.
This is largely a stream of thought that I implore for greater thought on how to better understand this philosophy. I don't know the limits and am speculating to its relation to things like essential and accidental properties as somehow being what I should understand to help make sense but unsure if that is as relevant as I imagine it.
This might help as a brief introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_internal_relations
http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/39/1/25.full.pdf
By contrast, Marxism is based on a dialectical approach which involves the philosophy of internal relations. The productive forces and the relations of production are essentially (i.e. internally) related. A mere person, a mere machine, is not as such a productive force. These things are productive forces only in the context of particular social relations in which they are deployed socially as productive forces.
Marx says, ‘A negro is a negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cottonspinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold itself is money’ (Marx, ‘Wage labour and capital’, cited in Cohen 1978: 88).
...
The philosophy of internal relations is not about what is immediately apparent. What it says is that the more we go beyond what seems immediately evident, the more we learn about a thing or event, the more we come to see its necessity. A complete understanding of things would reveal their full necessity, the internal nature of their connections with all other things. This is what the philosophy of internal relations maintains. As William James (1897: 216) puts it:
It is a common platitude that a complete acquaintance with any one thing, however small, would require a knowledge of the entire universe. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his fall are to be found in the Milky Way.4
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php
No one would deny that things appear and function as they do because of their spatial-temporal ties with other things, including man as a creature with both physical and social characteristics. To conceive of things as Relations is simply to interiorize this interdependence—as we have seen Marx do with social factors—in the thing itself. Thus, the book before me expresses and therefore, on this model, relationally contains everything from the fact that there is a light on in my room to the social practices and institutions of my society which made this particular work possible. The conditions of its existence are taken to be part of what it is, and indicated by the fact that it is just this and nothing else. In the history of ideas, where every new thought is invariably an old one warmed over, this view is generally referred to as the philosophy of internal relations.1
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0309816814564128
The philosophy of external relations, which reigns in both the common sense and learned discourse of our time, holds that there are both ‘things’ (the social science jargon for which is ‘factors’) and relations, but that they are logically independent of each other. Thus, in principle, the relations between two or more things can undergo dramatic changes and even disappear altogether without affecting the qualities by which we recognise these things and with which we define the terms that refer to them. And the same approach is taken to the various stages through which anything passes. As with relations, change is viewed as external to the thing itself, something that happened (or will happen) to it, so that its new form is treated as independent of what it was earlier (as we saw in the myth and riddle recounted above), rather than as an essential aspect or stage of what it is. With this way of organising reality, both perception and conception tend to concentrate on small, relatively isolated and static things, with their many relations and changes only receiving serious attention when they ‘bump’ into us (or we into them). But changes and relations are the basic building materials of the ‘bigger picture’ in every sphere of reality, and reducing them to the role of bit players in a drama whose overall plot is of little concern results in the kind of partial, static and one-sided thinking characteristic of most of bourgeois ideology.
In contrast, the philosophy of internal relations holds that what others take to be a ‘thing’ that may or may not undergo change and may or may not have relations with other things is itself both a ‘process’ and a ‘relation’ (though some of these may take time and special efforts or instruments to uncover). What was a thing for the philosophy of external relations becomes a relation evolving over time (or a process in constant interaction with other processes). The qualities that followers of the philosophy of external relations ascribe to a thing are not denied but transformed into aspects or moments that can serve as vantage points from which to view and study their relations (including indirect relations) and changes, understood as essential aspects of what they are.
My thoughts are unclear but I believe I experience an ambiguity in understanding the strength this view takes. I'm wondering if it is as strong as considering that everything has essential properties that to change some other things is to change the thing. Somethings seem more clearly applicable to this sort of reasoning, like class in Marxist thought of the proletariat and bourgeoisie being liquidated once their relation to the means of production is changed by socialist revolution and developed into communism. Where there is no capitalist class taking the surplus profit out of the labour of the proletariat.
So these two classes, proletariat and bourgeoisie, are defined by their relation to the means of production as well as to one another. Once done away with, it becomes incomprehensible to speak of such classes as they would no longer exist. This seems significant to what little of dialectics I've hopefully grasped, where in the simplified understand of dialectics there's speak of contradictory/opposites that subsume one another into something else. That to understand one thing one must also understand its opposing force for a totality.
This seems particularly interesting in that it seems that in my superficial readings of things on Marxist philosophy, totality is seen as necessary to getting close to truth or a improved understanding of reality.
That our mind struggles to conceptualize the totality of reality, its simply impossible to imagine such a thing and so we have to arbitrarily isolate things in the abstract to help bring clarity, which seems the tendency of analytical thought to break things down. Though, hopefully I am not harshly misrepresenting it out of ignorance, but would seem that many analytical thinkers treat their arbitrarily isolation of things as constituting reality rather than seeing it as the limits of human thought.
That situating things in 'context' is to properly affirm relevant information about things as they lose fundamental properties when they are abstracted from things too much. Not that this process isn't useful for clarity but that we should be aware of our arbitrary isolating of things.
This I feel might help touch on this line of thought and seems to fit in line with process philosophy.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php
Mindful of the dangers of using what one thinker says to support an interpretation of another, I shall limit my comments to features which Marx could not have missed in praising Dietzgen's work. Like Hegel, Dietzgen affirms that the existence of any thing is manifested through qualities which are its relations to other things. Hence, "Any thing that is torn out of its contextual relations ceases to exist" (Dietzgen, 1928, 96). So, too, Dietzgen declares—in almost the same words as Hegel-"The universal is the truth," meaning that the full truth about any one thing includes (because of its internal relations) the truth about everything (Dietzgen, 1928, 110).16 But unlike Hegel—and Marx too—who proceeds from these foundations to an investigation of the whole in each part, Dietzgen's inquiry is directed toward how such parts get established in the first place. For Hegel's and Marx's approach suggests that the preliminary problem of deciding which units of the whole to treat as parts has already been solved. Yet, it may legitimately be asked whether the unity posited by this conception does not preclude the very existence of those separate structures in which they claim to have caught sight of this unity. This is essentially the problem of individuation, or "abstraction", and it constitutes a major stumbling block for any philosophy of internal relations.
Dietzgen's contribution to the solution of this problem is his account of what can occur in individuation and what does occur. He asks, "Where do we find any practical unit outside of our abstract conceptions? Two halves, four fourths, eight eighths, or an infinite number of separate parts form the material out of which the mind fashions the mathematical unit. This book, its leaves, its letters, or their parts—are they units? Where do I begin and where do I stop?" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). His answer is that the real world is composed of an infinite number of sense perceptible qualities whose interdependence makes them a single whole. If we began by applying the relational conception to social factors and then to things, we see now that it can also apply to qualities. Because the process of linking up qualities may be stopped at any point between the individual quality and the whole, the ways of dividing up the latter into distinct parts called "things" is endless. One result is that what appears as a thing here may be taken as an attribute of some other thing there. Every quality can be conceived of as a thing, and every thing as a quality; it all depends where the line is drawn. So much for what is possible.17
What actually occurs, that is the construction of units of a particular size and kind out of the "formless multiplicity" presented to our senses, is the work of the human mind. In Dietzgen's words, "the absolutely relative and transient forms of the sensual world serve as raw material for our brain activity, in order through abstraction of the general or like characteristics, to become systematized, classified or ordered for our consciousness" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). The forms in which the world appears to our senses are "relative" and "transient", but they are also said to possess the "like characteristics" which allow us to generalize from them. "The world of the mind", we learn, finds "its material, its premise, its proof, its beginning, and its boundary, in sensual reality" (Dietzgen, 1928, 119). In this reality, like qualities give rise to a single conception because they are, in fact, alike. This is responsible, too, for the wide agreement in the use of concepts, particularly of those which refer to physical objects. Yet, it is only when we supply these similar qualities with a concept that they become a distinct entity, and can be considered separately from the vast interconnection in which they reside.
According to Dietzgen, therefore, the whole is revealed in certain standard parts (in which some thinkers have sought to reestablish the relations of the whole), because these are the parts in which human beings through conceptualization have actually fragmented the whole. The theoretical problem of individuation is successfully resolved by people in their daily practice. The fact that they do not see what they are doing as individuating parts from an interconnected whole is, of course, another question, and one with which Dietzgen does not concern himself. He is content to make the point that, operating with real sense material, it is the conceptualizing activity of people that gives the world the particular "things" which these same people see in it. Even mind, we learn, results from abstracting certain common qualities out of real experiences of thinking; they become something apart when we consider them as "Mind" (Dietzgen, 1928, 120).18
Dietzgen's practical answer to the problem of individuation suggests how structures can exist within a philosophy of internal relations, something which Althusser for one has declared impossible.19 Yet, if individuation is not an arbitrary act but one governed by broad similarities existing in nature itself, there is a necessary, if vague, correlation between such natural similarities and the structures conveyed by our concepts. This is how the study of any conceptual scheme, whether based on a philosophy of internal relations or not, teaches us something about the real world (unfortunately, this cannot be pressed—as many insist on doing—beyond what is common to all conceptual schemes). That Marx, through his study of capitalism, came to stress certain social relations as more important does not in any way conflict with his conception of each part as relationally containing its ties of dependence to everything else. The fact that some ties are preferred and may, for certain purposes, be viewed as forming a structure is no more surprising than any other act of individuation (conceptualization) based on real similarities.
After all this, I don't know how to make sense in cases less obvious than the class relation, where its not readily apparent what essential property is entailed and how it may be changed because of changes elsewhere. In my own thoughts not knowing how or if they relate, I wonder if there is a temporal relation, as it seems process philosophy and Marxism aren't static in the way analytical notions are.
To help articulate this point...
An illustration of the temporal nature of things and how it can be fruitful to think of things in flux and not stuck in a present moment.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0309816814564128
One of the more profound tales in Greek mythology has the Sphinx ask Oedipus, ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three legs in the evening?’ With his life at stake, Oedipus comes up with the right answer: ‘Man, who crawls on all fours when he is an infant, walks on two legs as an adult, and uses a cane to walk in his old age’. What makes this piece of wisdom as intriguing to us as it was to the people of that time is that the answer is as obvious as the question to which it replies is murky. Of course, man walks; but as we all know – and as the question itself seems to suggest – human beings differ from other animals in using only two legs when walking. With this assumption, our attention is directed to the rest of the animal world. But this assumption rests on another, which is that people are essentially what they appear to be at this moment. How they got that way and what they become as they get older – the stages each of us goes through over a lifetime – are omitted in determining who and what we are (and, in this myth, how many legs we use for walking)
What happened between the Sphinx’s question and the answer it received is that the real differences between the way an individual gets around in infancy, adulthood and old age were treated by Oedipus as internally related aspects of who and what we are and do as human beings. That his answer ‘Man’ is accepted, not only by the Sphinx but by most of us, suggests that extending the notion of ‘Man’ to include the different stages of his life strikes most people as common sense, and that it is relatively easy to switch from viewing the relations between adjoining periods as external to what each one really (and narrowly) is, to viewing them as internally related aspects of the same whole. But the confusion, if only temporary, that most people feel on first hearing the question also suggests that, while reframing the problem in this way is not particularly difficult, recognising when to do so is another matter
And something to help illustrate the static nature of abstract thought that I have the impression is considered prevalent in analytical thought.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm
Concepts, according to Kantianism, do not grow up and develop out of the sensed world but are already given before it, in the a priori categories of reasoning. These categories are supposed to grasp the multifarious material given in sensation, but themselves remain fixed and dead. ‘Sensation’ and ‘reason’ were counterposed to each other in thoroughly mechanical manner, with no connection between them. And the same was true of the content of knowledge and its forms. On this last point Rubin is surely absolutely correct when he states:
One cannot forget that on the question of the relation between content and form, Marx took the standpoint of Hegel and not of Kant. Kant treated form as something external in relation to the content, and as something which adheres to the content from the outside. From the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophy, the content is not in itself something to which form adheres from the outside. Rather, through its development, the content itself gives birth to the form which is already latent in the content. Form necessarily grows from the content itself. (Rubin, 1972, p. 117)
We shall return to this question of economic form specifically in connection with the value-form. But let us note here that it was Hegel, on the basis of his criticism of Kantianism, who attempted to resolve the problem (of the connection between the ‘sensed’ and the ‘logical’, the ‘content’ and the ‘form’) by showing that thought is a dialectical process of movement, from thought of a lower grade to that of a higher grade. According to Hegel, concepts developed by thought ceased to be dead, a priori products of the individual mind, but forms endowed with life, the life of the movement of thought itself. This is Lenin’s point when he says, ‘ What Hegel demands is a logic the forms of which would be forms with content, inseparably connected with that content’ and Lenin notes Hegel’s attack on logic considered entirely from the subjective standpoint:
Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development ‘of all material, natural and spiritual things’, i.e. of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition i.e. the sum-total, the conclusion of the history of knowledge of the world.
But in this point of things being temporal, I'm not sure whether the idea is a broad as if things had been somewhat different elsewhere in the world, I would not be the same person I am even if in many other ways I was still alike. That it wouldn't be an A=A likeness, but I'm wondering if this is too broad and instead it is limited to things that are more clearly viewable as fundamentally changed by changes in the relations in the world. Much like the Marx quote, that the black fella still be himself, but he can only be a slave in certain relations and so internal relations isn't a universalizing "we're all connected" idea but that what we intrinsically are is defined by relations relations of others thing in what they are defined and seen as.
This is largely a stream of thought that I implore for greater thought on how to better understand this philosophy. I don't know the limits and am speculating to its relation to things like essential and accidental properties as somehow being what I should understand to help make sense but unsure if that is as relevant as I imagine it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics