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#15154489
Wellsy wrote:[...]

But then perhaps the emphasis is also how language itself is a kind of alienation and those who fetishize language, miss the point of how spoken words do not inherently communicate understanding. To grasp something requires some sort of prior experience and understanding in order to grasp it.
[...]
Hmm, I perhaps have a diminutive view of the intuitive as being real but simply an underdeveloped stage of conscious understanding. I think there are limits but generally, things can be rationally apprehended. It's just that many logical pursuits sometimes hit a brick wall and can go no further.

Intuitive knowledge seems to be real knowledge but that which is simply pre-verbal, unconscious. But things can be developed and brought into conscious/awareness. It is in fact a logical point that one must have had an experience before conscious thought about it is even possible.


The inherent duality of reality and the concept of reality cannot be transcended by the rational mind. In fact, the more we proceed with our rationalization, the more we distance ourselves from reality. I.e. the gap between reality and its concept grows wider. As the gap widens, the rational mind constructs abstract castles in the air, which are detached from reality, like the Ptolemaic model of the universe, which tried to reconcile disparities between the observed planetary orbits and the geocentric model by inventing different circular spheres in which each planet was supposed to move. This artificial construct of the mind was replaced by the intuition of a little known scholar on the Baltic coast, a long distance from the centers of learning in the Mediterranean. Copernicus never had the means of observation precise enough to prove the heliocentric model; instead he relied on his intuition, perhaps led on by the "erudite ignorance” of Nicolas de Cusa, of whom he was a great fan.

The bean-counting faction believes that it’s all due to adding empirical fact upon empirical fact to build the grand edifice of science. That’s ignoring the essential, the intuition that guides our quest for knowledge.

What we can understand rationally is conditioned by our individual experience. People with similar experiences can understand each other more easily, but ultimately, we all draw from the same source, which we can access by intuition but not by rationalization. Conceptualization and language is just the outer layer of the universal mind. Hans-Peter Dürr, a quantum physicist and disciple of Heisenberg, once said that we are like the waves on the surface of a vast ocean. In other words, even if we cannot perfectly communicate from one wave crest to another, ultimately we are united by the vast ocean.

I’m not sure if you have the courage to confront another “dangerous German thinker” ;) , in any case, here is the gist from a short interview with Hans-Peter Dürr in a manually edited machine translation since I don’t have the time to do a proper translation.

“We don’t understand the human body and therefore look at the individual organs. We don’t understand these either and therefore examines their cells. Since we don't understand these either, we look at which molecules are being exchanged and now you finally see a way to describe life in a scientifically exact manner. ”

This reductionist approach that Hans-Peter Dürr laconically caricatures is the secret of success in natural science. Biology, too, has come a long way with the reductionist method, down to the level of molecules. So is there ultimately just physics behind the phenomenon of life? Yes, says Dürr, but it is not the mechanistic physics of the 19th century, but modern physics that we actually cannot understand, and launches an excursus about the decline of the materialistic worldview.

Towards the end of the 19th century, science was convinced that it knew the laws according to which matter had to function. The world ran like a clockwork that a god could have set in motion at some point, but in which he no longer intervened. The most important building block in this world was pure, indivisible matter that no longer has any form or shape. That was the atom.

But at the turn of the century discrepancies arose: the atom turned out to be by no means indivisible, but rather a kind of planetary system in which electrically negative electrons buzz around a positively charged nucleus. According to the laws of electrodynamics, the electrons would have had to constantly emit energy on their orbits and would have tumbled into the nucleus. The stability of atoms remained inexplicable.

Physicists were only able to save themselves from this predicament by radically questioning the concept of matter: electrons do not behave like particles, but like standing waves. On closer inspection, the matter dissolved, so to speak. "Matter is not made up of matter, but of relationships, of shape," says Dürr in an overstated manner. “And reality is the potential to be realized as matter.” Before an observer can research where a particle is, it is “smeared” everywhere with a certain probability density. It is only through the measuring process that it is fixed to a certain place and is materialized just there.

His teacher Werner Heisenberg put it like this, remembers Dürr: You can only deal with the statements of modern physics in a mathematical way, but if you want to explain them to someone, you have to fall back on pictures and parables.

Heisenberg came to the conclusion that the world does not have the structure to be knowable, but ultimately remains incomprehensible.For me, premonition (ie. intuition) is a parable for what we call potentiality in physics. In premonition (intuition), there exists already what will happen in the future, but I only suspect (intuit) it. And at the moment when the thought is formulated, the premonition (intuition) shrinks to this point, and materializes. ”

According to Dürr, parting with the deterministic world view of old physics leads to a world that is spontaneously alive and in which no strict causal processes apply. A god as a watchmaker is no longer necessary. The conceivable god of this world would always be curious about the next step, because he himself could not know how it would go on.

There is nothing fixed in this reality, only the change is perceptible. In every moment the world is created anew in the expectation field of the old. Even though the future is open here, it is not random; it has a certain topology, a structure in time.

A hundred years after the foundations of the deterministic world view collapsed, biologists and physicians are now joining the camp of the physics of the 19th century, complains Dürr. "They work with mechanistic models and are convinced that all living things can be put together from a few letters like Lego bricks." But while taking apart a clock, for example, actually shows how the whole thing works and a patient tinkerer can also reassemble it, something essential is lost when a living being is taken apart.

A machine is made up of individual parts that are connected at certain points, “but with a living being everything is related to everything else. It has a higher degree of freedom, which makes it unpredictable. Life is more finely structured than a network, it is more like an ocean”. We reject this insight, says Dürr, because we want to understand things, touch them in order to manipulate them. “Understanding comes from grasping, you grasp with your hand to break off a piece of reality. If you leave your hand open, you can sense (intuit) reality. "

Das Leben ist kein Legobaukasten


The German term "Wirklichkeit" and "Realität" are both translated by the English term "reality"; however, while "Realität" (reality) signifies especially material reality, the term "Wirklichkeit" Dürr uses here is broader and also includes non-material aspects.
#15154635
Politics_Observer wrote:I don't have time to read Das Kapital. Plus, communism is not a subject that really interests me.


Then, five seconds later, trying to prove that Marxism is violent and dangerous[size=50]TM[/size], he wrote:That's not what I have read. Ph. D in Philosophy Stephen Hicks states:

So you are unable to read Marx-Engels because "not interested" but you are totally able to cite authors who have read Marx-Engels and are critical of them?

Is this because you are afraid of German authors and only trust North American authors?

If this is the case, shouldn't you also stay away from international discussion forums? There might be a few crypto-Germans here pretending to be anglos.
#15154664
Atlantis wrote:The inherent duality of reality and the concept of reality cannot be transcended by the rational mind. In fact, the more we proceed with our rationalization, the more we distance ourselves from reality. I.e. the gap between reality and its concept grows wider. As the gap widens, the rational mind constructs abstract castles in the air, which are detached from reality, like the Ptolemaic model of the universe, which tried to reconcile disparities between the observed planetary orbits and the geocentric model by inventing different circular spheres in which each planet was supposed to move. This artificial construct of the mind was replaced by the intuition of a little known scholar on the Baltic coast, a long distance from the centers of learning in the Mediterranean. Copernicus never had the means of observation precise enough to prove the heliocentric model; instead he relied on his intuition, perhaps led on by the "erudite ignorance” of Nicolas de Cusa, of whom he was a great fan.

The bean-counting faction believes that it’s all due to adding empirical fact upon empirical fact to build the grand edifice of science. That’s ignoring the essential, the intuition that guides our quest for knowledge.

What we can understand rationally is conditioned by our individual experience. People with similar experiences can understand each other more easily, but ultimately, we all draw from the same source, which we can access by intuition but not by rationalization. Conceptualization and language is just the outer layer of the universal mind. Hans-Peter Dürr, a quantum physicist and disciple of Heisenberg, once said that we are like the waves on the surface of a vast ocean. In other words, even if we cannot perfectly communicate from one wave crest to another, ultimately we are united by the vast ocean.

In regards to reality, I'm not clear on whether I prescribe the duality to reality itself or to the need for distinction in concepts creating the duality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_monism
I tend to side with the point that the unity of opposites emphasizes the reality of seemingly opposing relations in a real-world unity which isn't a contradiction simply in the mind due to errors in reasoning, but arise necessarily as a result of surrendering to the object being analyzed.

I agree with the sentiment that rationalization can create a distance between the self and the world and this also ends up reflected in some epistemologies which can't overcome the gap between the individual and the object except partially.
But of course our knowledge is always knowledge of an object or one ends up with the pseudo-problem of positivists of perfecting language, but language only reflects reality imperfectly and isn't the object of knowledge itself and cannot in itself be called knowledge. Hence the issue of students leaving school not knowing how to act as their education was words describing contexts they had no experience with.
That link about the happiness of the fish also exemplifies the way in which the logician in that example separates himself from the immediacy of knowing and is unsatisfied due to the dominance of having to reason as to how and why something is the case, unable to accept what is.

And I have some attachment to the ability for abstraction as I think Marx's method as slightly altered from Hegel's 'objective/absolute idealism' provides an advancement in reasoning which isn't a schematic approach in which the mind imprints its external schemas onto reality but is in fact shaped by reality.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm#Pill2
To examine this matter further, let us consider Kant’s position, a position which appears to be at the root of many misunderstandings about Capital. In an effort to vindicate scientific reason in the light of Hume’s rejection of causation and of knowledge of the external world, Kant argued that the mind is an instrument which, by its very construction, always apprehends isolated, individual facts in rational form. Kant realised that without categories, rational thought was impossible; but for him these categories have their basis in our thoughts, thought which is necessarily sundered from the material world. Sensation and the logical moments of knowledge do not on this view have a common basis – there is and can be no transition between the two. (Or as the Althusserian; would put it, ‘Our constructions and our arguments are in theoretical terms and they can only be evaluated in theoretical terms – in terms, that is to say, of their rigour and theoretical coherence. They cannot be refuted by any empiricist recourse to the supposed “facts” of history’ (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, p. 3).) 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)

...
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.
...
In this respect there can be no doubt whatsoever that Marx adopted Hegel’s position (against Kant). In stressing the historical and objective nature of concepts, Hegel prepared the way for introducing the role of practice into human thought, even though his conception of this practice remained too narrow. Marx followed Hegel’s lead in insisting that the movement from the ‘sensed’ to the ‘logical’ was a process in which social man penetrated ever more deeply through the appearance of phenomena, deeper and deeper into their essence. It was this social practice that lies at the very heart and foundation of the development of man’s conceptual thinking. The form taken by man’s knowledge, summarised in the concepts of science, represents an index, a resume, of his education and in particular the education of his senses.

So there are limits to reason, but I would assert to not universally the limits of many people's reasoning for the limitation of reasoning entirely. Many have in a sense turned their back on it and emphasize their own limitations as they haven't properly engaged with the intellectual heritage of the Western tradition. Many in their spontaneous thinking are at regressive points and already resolved problems of thought.

ANd part of the epistemological development is the considering of man not as an individual in relation to nature but to change the subject-object relation of man within a culture or humanized nature, as we do not grasp reality with concepts purely of our own making but are educated in a way of life. As such we can reproduce the developments of human understanding. This doesn't require that we fetishize language in itself, but can see how language plays a part in our conceptualizing of reality.
I do not aspire to the eidetic memory of primitive man over the logical memory of modern man. As a modern man can actually learn a great deal more in general than primitive man, although perhaps not in the exact same richness of content. But while primitive man can be quite knowledgable, his ability for abstraction is quite limited and doesn't allow him to obtain the same developments of human thought which have been achieved.

I'll admit I'm not entirely familiar with Copernicus in any great detail but it was my impression that there were certain facts/data which required amendments to the Ptolemic model . In the vein of Lakatos, it seemed as if it was becoming an increasingly degenerative research program on the basis of the accumulating facts which it was attempting to accommodate but were better explained by copernicus' alternative of the earth rotting around the sun which better fit the astronomical facts.
In Hegel's logic, the shift to the new paradigm of science is begun with the abstract notion which synthesizes to earlier facts but explains the increasingly contradictory ones.
It's a kind of fact which opens the door to a higher comprehension of the facts.
http://caute.ru/am/text/truth.htm
This or that theory suffers defeat and falls into oblivion not because novel facts of experience falsify it (nowise — it is impossible), but owing to its inability to cope with contradictions so well as a rival theory does. “There is no refutation without a better theory,” as Lakatos said. But is it enough for theory to surpass rivals in predicting some novel facts to be regarded as a better theory? For Ilyenkov, this is not enough. The “better theory” is required to be more concrete than a former one. It does not simply moves the worse theory to the background, but inherit and absorb it, turning it into the abstract moment or the particular case of their common object. Only if the “research programme” should succeed in assimilating its precursors and direct rivals, it acquires the last and final proof.
...
Generally, truth arises in overcoming of errors. If we did not just renounce an error, but have cleared up its reason, thereby we have converted the error into the truth. Into the absolute truth at that, for the given error has been cancelled, or rather “sublated,” for good and all.
...
Error emerges if we regard an abstract, particular knowledge of thing as the concrete concept of it. True idea, refuting false ones, does not cast them away as worthless, but assigns the real limits, within which the “sublated” ideas are to be perfectly right. Having showed the genuine limits for this or that fallacious point of view, we have worked over the abstract idea into the concrete one. So Einstein, having outlined the limits of verity of Newton laws of motion and destroyed its claim to be the absolute truth, have not refuted these laws, but rather amended them, made their concept more concrete. One could say that it was Einstein who transformed Newtonian mechanics from the relative truth to the absolute truth.

And indeed, the tendency to an endless description of particular empirical facts while the basis of a rich foundation, is the most impoverished point in understanding. One needs not endless repeititons of a fact but instead to find the root or essence of the matter. You find the exemplar as Goethe's romantic science would have one do, a unit which exemplifies the whole. To which perhaps sympathetic to your point of intuition he is said required a kind of immersing yourself in the empirical experience of the thing.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
At the same time as Herder was writing his book on Spinoza, Goethe was touring through Italy making botanical sketches, noting the changing form of the various species of plant at different altitudes and latitudes. Goethe arrived at an idea which he called the Urphänomen, or archetypal phenomenon: the simplest imaginable, single example of a phenomenon (plants), stripped of all its particular, contingent attributes, which exhibited the properties of all plants. In that one simple cell, you would see the whole process.

As chronicled in his Italian Journey of 1786-7 (1788/1989), Goethe developed the concept of Urphänomen in letters to Herder. He studied the plants by making botanical sketches of them and sensuously familiarising himself with all the variations of what he took to be the same basic archetype. All plants, he believed, were a realisation, according to conditions, of an underlying form which he called the Urpflanze. Even though the Urpflanze is an image rather than a form of words, it is to be understood as the concept of plant, what it is that makes something a plant rather than something else. Goethe sought to determine this concept by sustained sensory attention to plants in all their variety.

You have to submit yourself to the object, which allows you to press upon the concepts you use to grasp it and form new ones. To be able to see things with open eyes and not just our preconceived notions is the basis of growing a new concept.

And I have some sympathy for the emphasis that there is a reality to ground all of us. Without such a reality there would be difficulty communicating anything of meaning.
I’m not sure if you have the courage to confront another “dangerous German thinker” ;) , in any case, here is the gist from a short interview with Hans-Peter Dürr in a manually edited machine translation since I don’t have the time to do a proper translation.


The German term "Wirklichkeit" and "Realität" are both translated by the English term "reality"; however, while "Realität" (reality) signifies especially material reality, the term "Wirklichkeit" Dürr uses here is broader and also includes non-material aspects.

I'll admit I'm wary to tread into the philosophical implications of physics of the 20th century.
But I have the impression that Lenin did make one sound point in disposing of the illusion that 'matter' disappeared and instead emphasize the philosophical concept of matter which wasn't contingent on any particular form of matter.
https://platypus1917.org/2017/07/21/horkheimer-lenins-empiriocriticism-max-horkheimers-1928-29-reaction-lenins-epistemological-polemic-materialism-empiriocriticism/
In the 1900s, the conception of matter underwent a fundamental change. The atom, as was said at the time, began to dissolve; waves and vibrations taking its place. Matter dematerialized. In his PhD thesis, published in 1962, Alfred Schmidt explains that “at the turn of the century… the ‘disappearance of matter’ and the future impossibility of a philosophical materialism [were] being mooted in connection with epoch-making discoveries in physics.”[6] It was against this mélange of ideologies of science that Lenin reacted, vigorously opposing any theoretical reformulation of Marxism, any renunciation of its materialistic basis.

In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin develops a perhaps unfamiliar, rather minimalist definition of matter with which he—in response to the apparent disappearance of matter in the new physics of the time—attempts to specify or open up the concept with a view to the more unconventional forms in which matters appears as well. The concept of matter, as Lenin philosophically conceives it, includes not only matter’s seemingly static forms of being, but also matter in its less tangible form of waves, oscillations, and energy. According to Lenin (in a passage both Horkheimer and Schmidt point to), “the sole 'property' of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up,” is the “property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind.”[7]

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/bazhenov.html
One can say that to try to discover the relation of matter and mind has always been central to philosophy; it was tacitly implied in the realization that the answer to the question "what is matter?" was different from the solution of the basic issue of philosophy, i.e., was it to be precisely the understanding of the true character of matter as such, apart from its relation to consciousness?

Until the end of the 19th century the metaphysical concept of proto‑matter had never entered into a too obvious conflict with the progress of science. Yet at the turn of the 19th‑20th century, there came about the "modern revolution in physics." It was as if proto‑matter once caught by physicists was quickly eluding their grasp. What had been hitherto called matter was vanishing, only to be replaced by what was then known as electricity, ether, etc. The phrase "Matter has disappeared" became fashionable among physicists. In the physical parlance of the day the phrase meant in fact that what featured such and such properties and had thus far been known as matter was no longer there. Instead, something new became known, with new unusual properties, and no longer answering the previous definition of matter (matter is that and only that which displays properties P1 . . . Pn). The newly‑emerged something possessed the properties Pn+1, etc., but no longer possessed some of the properties P1 . . . Pn previously ascribed to matter.

From the viewpoint of Dialectical Materialism what disappeared was not matter, but the limit indicating the extent of our knowledge until then. But in order to make this deduction, it was necessary to change the very concept of matter and delimit clearly the properly philosophical purport of the concept of matter and the concept natural science has about the latter's structure. The error was precisely a lack of delimitation underlying the statements of idealist philosophers about the disappearance of matter, though no longer in the sense physicists had meant it. In the parlance of idealist philosophy "the disappearance" of matter meant a disappearance of objective reality, a disappearance of objective content from our scientific theories, a collapse of philosophical Materialism, "dematerialization of matter," etc.

This is also an issue in Marxism relative to other forms of Materialism in which they tend to emphasize matter in it's physical form only rather than seeing how many immaterial things are quite objective and not a a prior property of the mind.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
It does not follow from this, however, that in the language of modern materialism the term “ideal” equals “existing in the consciousness”, that it is the name reserved for phenomena located in the head, in the brain tissue, where, according to the ideas of modern science, “consciousness” is realised.

In Capital Marx defines the form of value in general as “purely ideal” not on the grounds that it exists only “in the consciousness”, only in the head of the commodity-owner, but on quite opposite grounds. The price or the money form of value, like any form of value in general, is IDEAL because it is totally distinct from the palpable, corporeal form of commodity in which it is presented, we read in the chapter on “Money”. [Capital, Vol. I, pp. 98-99.]

In other words, the form of value is IDEAL, although it exists outside human consciousness and independently of it.

This use of the term may perplex the reader who is accustomed to the terminology of popular essays on materialism and the relationship of the material to the “ideal”. The ideal that exists outside people’s heads and consciousness, as something completely objective, a reality of a special kind that is independent of their consciousness and will, invisible, impalpable and sensuously imperceptible, may seem to them something that is only “imagined”, something “suprasensuous”.

The more sophisticated reader may, perhaps, suspect Marx of an unnecessary flirtation with Hegelian terminology, with the “semantic tradition” associated with the names of Plato, Schelling and Hegel, typical representatives of “objective idealism”, i.e., of a conception according to which the “ideal” exists as a special world of incorporeal entities (“ideas”) that is outside and independent of man. He will be inclined to reproach Marx for an unjustified or “incorrect” use of the term “ideal”, of Hegelian “hypostatisation” of the phenomena of the consciousness and other mortal sins, quite unforgivable in a materialist.

But the question is not so simple as that. It is not a matter of terminology at all. But since terminology plays a most important role in science, Marx uses the term “ideal” in a sense that is close to the “Hegelian” interpretation just because it contains far more meaning than does the popular pseudo-materialistic understanding of the ideal as a phenomenon of consciousness, as a purely mental function. The point is that intelligent (dialectical) idealism – the idealism of Plato and Hegel – is far nearer the truth than popular materialism of the superficial and vulgar type (what Lenin called silly materialism). In the Hegelian system, even though in inverted form, the fact of the dialectical transformation of the ideal into the material and vice versa was theoretically expressed, a fact that was never suspected by “silly” materialism, which had got stuck on the crude – undialectical – opposition of “things outside the consciousness” to “things inside the consciousness”, of the “material” to the “ideal”.

The “popular” understanding of the ideal cannot imagine what insidious traps the dialectics of these categories has laid for it in the given case.
...
But here we are immediately confronted with the trickiness of this distinction, which is fully provided for by the Hegelian school and its conception of the “materialisation”, the “alienation”, the “reification” of universal notions. As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”.

For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination.

This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.


I at least agree with the point about the lack of a linear causality to reality as causality only extends to an understanding of reciprocity/cycles.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
Hegel showed that causality is extremely limited in its explanatory capacity, because the invocation of causation leads to an infinite regress. Efficient causes are always of interest, but a phenomenon is only understood when it is grasped as a cause of itself (a causa sui), that is, the relevant process is seen to create and recreate the conditions for its own existence. But even then, explanation often takes the form of Reciprocity of cause and effect. Hegel (1831) grants that “to make the manners of the Spartans the cause of their constitution and their constitution conversely the cause of their manners, may no doubt be in a way correct,” but still explains nothing. But Reciprocity is as far as Causality can go. The understanding of a process as a cause sui means grasping it as a concept and usually incorporates an investigation of its origins and development.

He criticizes perhaps a positivist science.

It is interesting that he speaks of possibility and actuality. This is apparently Hegel's sense of reality because potential things or conditions for something actual is quite real. But I don't know enough to relate it to the summary. I do like his example of thought in relation to realizing it in the future though. This is the great aspect of possibility and actuality.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/education/vasili-davydov.pdf
Aristotle, who is considered the father of psychology, wrote that “soul is an actuality or
formulable essence of something that possesses a potentiality of being besouled.” In the
light of that idea, the paradox of search consists in that it combines the possible and the
real. Foresight as the basis of planning is the identification of the possible. In his real
actions man who possesses a “soul” carries out what is capable of being carried out in
reality. The construction of a possible future to predict the real activity of the subject is
precisely what cannot be described or explained by the methods used in the natural
sciences. It is not that they are weak in themselves – they are very powerful in their own
sphere based on the type of determinism that explains phenomena and events by tracing
the links between cause and effect. Due to these links, the state of an object in the past
determines its present state. But man bases his actions on what may happen in the future
– a future that doesn’t yet exist! In this case, the goal – an ideal image of the future, an
image of what must be – determines the present and actual behaviour and state of the
subject.

I like to hope the tradition of CHAT will help here in situating the individual in relation to universals of culture as mediated by particular social institutions/projects. Which all relate to one another but are never fully identical.
And I resonate with the unknowability of the future as many possibilities exist until they are of course actualized. Hence the naivety who read Marx as some strict determinist which was their views not his.
As such chaos theory and the like are at least better in emphasizing the boundaries of possibility but emphasize how changeable they are. One can know all the condti9ons of a cricket match but not predict the outcome with certainty and that's okay.

I quite like that sense of breaking off a piece of reality and holding it static in ones mind. This is most apparent to me with linear time as a measurement.
Spoiler: show
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249905268_Dharmakirti_and_Priest_on_Change
In order to examine Dharmakı¯rti’s account of change in light of Priest’s inconsistent theory, we need to revisit Dharmakı¯rti’s notion of momentariness. Here I follow Georges Dreyfus’ authoritative reconstruction of Dharmakı¯rti’s philosophy from a Tibetan point of view.20

Dharmakı¯rti follows Vasubandhu’s view of momentariness as well as most of Vasubandhu’s metaphysics and ontology, in his Abhidharmakos´a.21 According to Vasubandhu,

Destruction of things is spontaneous. Things perish by themselves, because it is their nature to perish. Since they perish by themselves, they perish as they are produced. Since they perish by themselves, they are momentary.22

According to Dreyfus, Dharmakı¯rti elaborates on this ‘‘process view’’ of ontology in two ways: the argument from disintegration and the inference from existence.23 Dharmakı¯rti presents the argument from disintegration as a refutation of Nya¯ya ontology, according to which the term ‘‘disintegration’’ describes ‘‘the state of an already disintegrated thing.’’24 This Nya¯ya view of disintegration posits substances that undergo disintegration in dependence on causes of destruction (vina¯s´ahetu). Against this view, Dharmakı¯rti proposes a dilemma: is the disintegration of a substance an event that the substance undergoes or is it of the substance itself? If the former, it is difficult to see how all qualities disintegrate as soon as they are produced. If the latter, the substance itself must bring about its own disintegration. This means that one can infer the effect, that is, disintegration, from the cause, that is, substance. But for Dharmakı¯rti an inference from cause to effect is a fallacy. Hence, one cannot posit substances separate from their disintegration. Instead, we must think of the term ‘‘disintegration’’ as referring to the process of disintegration. What this means, by using Mortensen’s terminology, is that each spatiotemporal point is not occupied by a substance undergoing disintegration but by a process of disintegration itself.25

Dharmakı¯rti’s inference from existence goes as follows:

[T]hings truly exist insofar as they are able to perform a function. To function is to be capable of producing an effect, a faculty possible only if the object is constantly [ceasing to exist].26 A static object is not acting on anything else nor is it being acted upon. Therefore, that something exists shows that it is momentary.27

What this means is that if something exists, then it exists only momentarily. Hence, Mortensen is correct in saying that for Dharmakı¯rti every existing thing occupies only a spatiotemporal point

Nonetheless, Mortensen seems to underestimate the importance of Dharmakı¯rti’s process view of reality. For Dharmakı¯rti, if something exists, it occupies only a spatiotemporal point. But what exists is not really a substance that undergoes change. Rather, it is the process, or the change, itself that is at a spatiotemporal point. Once we understand Dharmakı¯rti’s view of momentariness in its full extent, it becomes unclear whether or not Dharmakı¯rti has enough resources to reject Priest’s argument for the inconsistent theory of change. This is what I will show below.

Dharmakı¯rti versus Priest

As we saw above, for Dharmakı¯rti there is no distinction between the object and the state in which the object is: the object is said to occupy a spatiotemporal point only to the extent that it is in the process of disintegration or cessation. Now, this view of reality rings a bell. It is a very similar view to Priest’s, if not the same, that a changing object must be in a state of flux at each spatiotemporal point. I examine in this section whether or not Dharmakı¯rti can resist the temptation of Priest and reject an inconsistent theory of change.

And I agree with the emphasis on change of things over abstractions which hold moments of it.
And this is exemplified in Zeno's paradox where mathematicians think they have resolved the problem of motion when they focus only on the quantitative aspect of it and measure different moments in time but can't capture the flow of time. More like photographs at different points that give the illusion of motion like early cinema projectors.
This is why I am interested in dialectics and Marxism as it claims to be able to describe things as they're in flux in some sense, fluid moments and shifts which aren't simply logical but emphasize the transformation of things in actuality. Which gets simplified in cycles like M - C - M'and what ever but reflect a syllogism which helps make things intelligible.

And it does seem many a physicist is dipping their toes in Daoism and the sort, and I have only a superficial sense of such things, but I think in the end, for what truths it hold, it reflects a lot of wisdom but isn't necessarily anti-rationalist I guess as much as it involves plying games with those who fetishize reason above all else like some sort of supra entity or God.

And one last scattered thought, in your summary of the distinction between reality as material and reality as inclusive of more than the material, this fits to the naturalism Marx engages in which is similarly inclusive.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
Marx would not dissent from some of the beliefs of materialism, but it is doubtful whether he would attach as much importance to them as the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century did or as contemporary dialectical materialists do. For it is right to say, as Marx emphasized in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, that ‘consistent naturalism or humanism’ should be distinguished not only from idealism but also from materialism.[1] Marx’s basic philosophic attitude differed from absolute and reductive materialism, the only form of materialism known at the time, and could best be described as naturalism, a classificatory name which he chose himself. In this respect Marx was a Feuerbachian, for it was Feuerbach who declared his indifference to all previous philosophical schools and claimed that his own philosophy, being concerned with man, was neither materialist nor idealist.[2] Nature is a more comprehensive concept than matter. It includes matter and life, body and mind, the motions of inanimate objects and the flights of passion and imagination. ‘Nature’, wrote Santayana, ‘is material but not materialistic’,[3] a comment that might have come from Feuerbach or from Marx.

And is affirmed by my early ilyenkov quotes on ideality.
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@Wellsy, thanks for checking up on sources of Western philosophy that may be relevant. I think the problem is that what sounds similar doesn’t have to designate the same thing. For example, I doubt that Kant’s “sensation” and “reason” correspond to the “intuition” and “rationalisation” we have been talking about.

Kant argued that the mind is an instrument which, by its very construction, always apprehends isolated, individual facts in rational form. Kant realised that without categories, rational thought was impossible; but for him these categories have their basis in our thoughts, thought which is necessarily sundered from the material world. Sensation and the logical moments of knowledge do not on this view have a common basis – there is and can be no transition between the two. 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

While rationalization and reason may be similar, I think there is a difference between sensation and intuition. Sensation is a subjective perception that has passed through the bias of our feelings or previous experience, while intuition is spontaneous and fresh without all the baggage we carry around with us.

What Kant says here about “thought being sundered from the material world” corresponds well to the duality of reality and the concept of reality, we have talked about. However, that there “can be no transition between sensation and logical moments of knowledge” is not how I view the relation between intuition and rationalization. I think the two are closely linked in that intuition informs rationalization and that rational concepts are only the slag of a cosmic mind in constant motion. And that the “logical concepts” should be “a priory categories” is totally opposed to what we have said about the cosmos not having to conform with human logic.

But I have the impression that Lenin did make one sound point in disposing of the illusion that 'matter' disappeared and instead emphasize the philosophical concept of matter which wasn't contingent on any particular form of matter.

It must have been quite a shock for materialist Marxists when the concept of matter disappeared in modern physics. There may have been exceptions, but I think that most of Western thinking assumes an atomist view of matter in a mind-matter duality. To argue that matter didn’t have a particular form in philosophy isn’t convincing. Even if Marxists are not directly concerned with physics, they are based on the opposition of the spiritual and the material. In Quantum physics, the mind-matter duality disappears to make way for potentiality. Thus it does concern Marxist’s materialistic orientation.

Schmidt explains that “at the turn of the century… the ‘disappearance of matter’ and the future impossibility of a philosophical materialism [were] being mooted in connection with epoch-making discoveries in physics.”[6] It was against this mélange of ideologies of science that Lenin reacted, vigorously opposing any theoretical reformulation of Marxism, any renunciation of its materialistic basis.


Marxists reacted to this revolution in physics like the Church reacted to Galileo’s defence of the heliocentric model. By seeing itself as the antagonist of religion, the Communist Party was created in the image of the Church, just with opposite signs. If anything, the revolution in the microcosm of sub-atomic particles is more significant than Copernicus’ revolution in the macrocosm.

Both the Copernican revolution and Quantum physics represent a reversal of previous doctrine triggered by what I call intuition. In the case of Quantum physics, that intuition was triggered by Far Eastern philosophy, which resulted in a reversal of the atomist model just like Copernicus’ intuition led to a reversal of the Ptolemaic model.

It doesn’t matter that the 19th century founders of Quantum physics, just like Schopenhauer, probably didn’t have a very firm grasp of Buddhism or Daoism, it was the inspiration of those novel ideas that allowed them to view matter in a different way.

I’m not very familiar with Marxism, but I think, it would have been better to revise Marxism in the view of “the disappearing matter” instead of holding onto the doctrine of materialism. Religion has become irrelevant and Marxism no longer needs atheism to position itself as an antagonist of the Church. And I guess that Marxist dialectic doesn’t need the mind-matter duality?

It’s a bit rich for a Marxist to refer to natural science as an “ideology.”
#15155072
Atlantis wrote:@Wellsy, thanks for checking up on sources of Western philosophy that may be relevant. I think the problem is that what sounds similar doesn’t have to designate the same thing. For example, I doubt that Kant’s “sensation” and “reason” correspond to the “intuition” and “rationalisation” we have been talking about.

True, they need not signified the same thing.

While rationalization and reason may be similar, I think there is a difference between sensation and intuition. Sensation is a subjective perception that has passed through the bias of our feelings or previous experience, while intuition is spontaneous and fresh without all the baggage we carry around with us.

What Kant says here about “thought being sundered from the material world” corresponds well to the duality of reality and the concept of reality, we have talked about. However, that there “can be no transition between sensation and logical moments of knowledge” is not how I view the relation between intuition and rationalization. I think the two are closely linked in that intuition informs rationalization and that rational concepts are only the slag of a cosmic mind in constant motion. And that the “logical concepts” should be “a priory categories” is totally opposed to what we have said about the cosmos not having to conform with human logic.

I disagree about this sense of intuition as I think the ground for an intuitive insight is also prepared on past experiences and concepts. Intuition signifies the sudden aha moment where insight appears abruptly which is simply the sign of an intelligent response to a situation as opposed to a conditioned response.
For example, Wolfgang Kohler's examination of Chimpanzees shows how when they're presented with an obstacle to their usual behavior and they can't resort to their habitual responses, after a short period of simply exerting more effort and trial and error, they seem to stop their physical activity and reflect/think. Some chimps after such a time can suddenly resolve a problem that they had not previously faced. But instead of a protracted period of training as with a conditioned response, they execute the correct solution as if they were already conditioned to know. Humans act the same way, we don't really consciously think about things until confronted with problems that disrupt our usual experience so thoroughly that we can't operate by habit or rely on stereotypical responses.
To me it is an extending of existing understanding and experience otherwise it poses that one can have an intuitive insight about anything. As if scientific discovery comes from somewhere into the mind but seems to simply discard consideration of what are the preconditions for a new concept/abstract notion (in Hegel's terminology). And quite often before a new concept emerges, a lot of ground is worked over.
Perhaps one wishes to mark a distinction between scientific insights of intuition from perhaps spiritual ones where one has a radical shift in one's sense of self towards reality as a whole rather than perhaps limited to a field.

And I don't tie your position to the characterization just made of Kant. I rather used that to explain the sense of reason Marx had as taken from Hegel, in which reason is organically tied to reality and is not independent of it.

It must have been quite a shock for materialist Marxists when the concept of matter disappeared in modern physics. There may have been exceptions, but I think that most of Western thinking assumes an atomist view of matter in a mind-matter duality. To argue that matter didn’t have a particular form in philosophy isn’t convincing. Even if Marxists are not directly concerned with physics, they are based on the opposition of the spiritual and the material. In Quantum physics, the mind-matter duality disappears to make way for potentiality. Thus it does concern Marxist’s materialistic orientation.


A shock for a crude materialist perhaps, one who takes scientific progress to be equivalent to metaphysical outlooks since they tied their sense of materialism to particularly forms of matter.

I strongly disagree, Lenin made a sensible point that the philosophical definition of matter isn't somehow disrupted by the fact that matter wasn't reducible to atoms.
Because if you confuse the ontological distinction between matter and mind then you're simply confused and engaging in a disruption of a clear ontological distinction.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf
Lenin refers to “philosophical materialism.” He refers to the fact that philosophical materialism simply makes the distinction between, on the one hand, matter – everything that exists outside of our consciousness, and in whatever shape, is given to us in our consciousness, and on the other hand, our consciousness. Beyond the claim that matter exists independently of consciousness philosophical materialism cannot take a step further; matter is defined by being outside of our consciousness. And it is through our consciousness that we get to know about the world. Any attempt to blur the distinction between consciousness and matter, under this definition, is madness. At best it is missing the point. If I can’t distinguish between my thought and what I am thinking of, then either I am an infant or simply don’t understand the question. The question of the distinction between thought and matter is the fundamental question of philosophy. As Descartes saw, consciousness is what we are given. The question then is, what is there beyond that, behind our consciousness. If we blur that distinction, and obfuscate the question then we surely must have misunderstood the question.

In The German Ideology, Marx wrote “My relation to my environment is my consciousness,” but then crossed it out. But this is a very succinct way of putting it. Marx puts it in the first person; he does not say “a person’s relation to their environment is their consciousness,” because he must treat anyone else’s consciousness scientifically, in the knowledge that another person’s consciousness must be inferred from their behaviour and whatever we know about their physiological condition. But his own consciousness occupies a special position because everything he knows passes through his consciousness, including his scientific investigations. The point is that the special ontological status occupied by consciousness only applies in the first person. Descartes’ mistake was to extend a perfectly valid question he asked of himself, to consciousness in general.

THIS IS what transformed “consciousness” into a problematic substance. Your consciousness is part of the material world, and is reducible to the totality of the state of your organism and its environment, all of which is accessible to scientific investigation. BUT my consciousness, I cannot investigate scientifically. As Feuerbach put it quite correctly: “what for me is a mental, non-material, suprasensory act, is in itself a material, sensory act.”

The other point about Marx’s aphorism is that he defines it as “My relation to my environment” without any qualification. It is all-inclusive. Marx does not limit consciousness to “awareness” nor does he exclude emotions, or make any other such qualification. It is the totality of my relation to my environment. The problem of the further specification of consciousness cannot be settled in advance by philosophy but requires positive, experimental investigation. So philosophy can only give this very starting point: “My relation to my environment is my consciousness.”


It is in fact the tendency for idealists to simply muddle the distinction and thus confuse the matter and hence why Lenin attacked the Machists of the time.
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/bazhenov.html
Coming as it did from the absolutization of the method of principles (emergent at the time in the form of the energetic thermodynamical method), Energetism led toward quite definite philosophical conclusions. The energetists spoke strongly against the recognition of the existence of atoms and declared the only objective of physics was to establish and describe energy correlations. Thus, Mach compared the recognition by physicists of the real existence of atoms to the medieval obscurants' belief in witches and referred to the atomistic hypothesis as a witches' Sabbath. Together with atoms, Energetism rejected the possibility of any vehicle of material energy, for energy was proclaimed as existing in itself, and, therefore, it required no vehicle whatsoever. Surprisingly, the energetists never considered themselves idealists: Energetism, they reiterated, stood above Materialism and Idealism as though bridging the gap between them.

V. I. Lenin laid bare the flagrant inconsistency and falsity of these contentions. [20] To be sure, Lenin noted, both materialistic and idealistic lines are describable in energetist terms (with greater or lesser consistency). If we declare all being to be but energy and proclaim energy to be but substance and recognize that the substance exists apart from, and independent of, consciousness, we remain still on the grounds of Materialism, though of a desultory and inconsistent kind of Materialism. The well‑defined term designating objective reality the term "matter"—we have changed to the term "energy," ambiguous in this particular usage. However, when the energetists admitted the concept of energy to philosophical usage, they did so by no means in order to have it designate an objective source of knowledge but only in order to confuse, under a plausible pretext, the question as to whether or not such a source exists.

Thus they postulated with metaphysical hypertrophy the impossibility, that was evidently revealed by science with increasing depth, of objects existing apart from motion. The energetists declared motion to be the only thing that exists, thus claiming to have overcome the opposition between Materialism and Idealism. In his critique of W. Ostwald, one of the founders of Energetism, V. I. Lenin noted "Ostwald endeavored to avoid this inevitable philosophical alternative (Materialism or Idealism) by an indefinite use of the word "energy," but this very endeavor only goes to prove once again the futility of such artifices. If energy is motion, you have only changed the question, does matter move? into the question, is energy material? Does the transformation of energy take place outside my mind, independently of man and mankind, or are these only ideas, symbols, conventional signs, and so forth?" [21]

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm
Describing the writings of the Machians, Lenin says that one thread that runs through their texts is their rejection of binaries, their claim that they have "risen above" materialism and idealism and "have transcended this 'obsolete' antithesis." This gesture, Lenin writes, is no more than an ideological alibi because in their actual practices, they "are continually sliding into idealism and are conducting a steady and incessant struggle against materialism" (354).
...
In his interrogation of Berkeley, Lenin points to this dilemma that runs through all forms of idealism: the epistemological unwillingness to make distinctions between 'ideas" and "things" (Materialism 130-300),

Basically, he reacted against the unnecessary confusion introduced by those who do not properly mark the ontological distinction between one's own thoughts and reality itself.

Marxists reacted to this revolution in physics like the Church reacted to Galileo’s defence of the heliocentric model. By seeing itself as the antagonist of religion, the Communist Party was created in the image of the Church, just with opposite signs. If anything, the revolution in the microcosm of sub-atomic particles is more significant than Copernicus’ revolution in the macrocosm.

Both the Copernican revolution and Quantum physics represent a reversal of previous doctrine triggered by what I call intuition. In the case of Quantum physics, that intuition was triggered by Far Eastern philosophy, which resulted in a reversal of the atomist model just like Copernicus’ intuition led to a reversal of the Ptolemaic model.

It doesn’t matter that the 19th century founders of Quantum physics, just like Schopenhauer, probably didn’t have a very firm grasp of Buddhism or Daoism, it was the inspiration of those novel ideas that allowed them to view matter in a different way.

I’m not very familiar with Marxism, but I think, it would have been better to revise Marxism in the view of “the disappearing matter” instead of holding onto the doctrine of materialism. Religion has become irrelevant and Marxism no longer needs atheism to position itself as an antagonist of the Church. And I guess that Marxist dialectic doesn’t need the mind-matter duality?

I think this is an interesting but uncharitable interpretation considering the above. It wasn't simply a reaction but in fact a clarification of the fundamental insight of Descartes not to confuse the ontological categories of mind and matter. But for the philosophically naive scientist whose sense of materialism was specifically tied to a form of materialism, it was easy to be lead astray.

And I think you in fact speak way to certain of what appears to be the implications of the Copenhagen interpretation and let me remind you it is an interpretation, not something directly proven by the facts and findings of science as science cannot resolve philosophical questions, only preclude erroneous paths.

And I think your sense of materialism you speak tends to be a crude one as opposed to the point raised about Marx's being a kind of naturalism which doesn't reduce things to physical forms and quite accurately accepts the existence of consciousness and such, but gives primacy to matter as underpinning such things although not identical. In fact, Marx in his theses of fuerbach criticizes both the mechanistic materialism as well as active idealism.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html
For the point of his first Thesis on Feuerbach is exactly that the truth lies in the middle: between idealism and materialism, between humanism and postmodernism. That elusive middle is captured by Marx’s claim that the external object, on which humanity depends, is in turn dependent on the formative power of human activity. In other words: nature determines (causes, affects) man, who in turn determines (works upon) nature. Thus man is indirectly self-determining, mediated by nature. This reciprocal determination of man and nature is what Marx means by “praxis".
...
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because 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.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm
For the understanding of Marx a different point is, however, important. The Marxian conception of nature, of man, and man’s relation to nature disposes of many traditional epistemological problems. Marx neither needs to prove existence of the external world, nor disprove its existence. From his point of view both these endeavours are prompted by false assumptions concerning the relation of man to nature, by considering man as a detached observer, setting him against the world or placing him, as it were, on a totally different level. For man, who is part of nature, to doubt the existence of the external world or to consider it as in need of proof is to doubt his own existence, and even Descartes and Berkeley refused to go to such a length.

This conclusion is of considerable significance for the interpretation of Marxian philosophy. As Marx refused to dissociate nature from man and man from nature and conceived man not only as part of nature but also nature in a certain sense as a product of man’s activity and, thus, part of man, Marx’s naturalism has no need of metaphysical foundation. Moreover, since man knows only socially mediated nature, ‘man’, and not natural reality, ‘is the immediate object of natural science’. To use Marx’s terminology, the natural science of man is logically prior to all other knowledge.[59] What Feuerbach said about his anthropological materialism applies even more fittingly to Marx’s naturalism. ‘The new philosophy’, wrote Feuerbach, ‘makes man, including nature as the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest object of philosophy, makes, therefore, of anthropology, including physiology, the universal science.’ [60]


And in terms of methodology, I'm not sure metaphysical speculations of what underpins reality necessarily disrupts a kind of practical materialism in which the world clearly pre-exists me and isn't contingent upon my perception of it. And thus the philosophical distinction between mind and matter isn't somehow disrupted by speculations of the metaphysical grounding to reality. As one is then pushing idealism as a certain conclusion and I think only by assuming it rather than proving it because of the crude sense fo materialism not in its philosophical distinction. It seems that all it attests to is that it can be a coherent and consistent position in regards to the difficulties with particles, but isn't a closed book.

Because it seems that it is simply an idealist interpretation to state that something doesn't exist because it hasn't been 'observed'/measured. I can't measure it so it must not have any physical significance. That sounds like positivist science trying to confine reality to it's a narrow sense of science or an idealist giving up on making sense of reality.
What quantum mechanics disrupt is the view of the matter in terms of having some fundamental substance (ie. only atoms make up all of reality), it doesn't destroy the very notion of matter as that which isn't dependent on my consciousness to exist. You don't go from I can't measure the particle to the world around me is contingent on my perception.
The tendency to prescribe such nonexistence to particles on that basis seems not a certainty as far as I can tell.
Heisenberg himself even went as far as to reduce the matter to that of belief.
[URL]tinyurl.com/jk94gjng
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this knowledge of the past is of a purely speculative nature…It is a matter of personal belief whether such a calculation concerning the past history of the electron can be ascribed any physical reality or not.”

One might as well then accept Born Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_rule#:~:text=In%20its%20simplest%20form%2C%20it,physicist%20Max%20Born%20in%201926.
Which is summarized by Albert Einstein (On Quantum Physics, 1940)
“…. it proved impossible to associate with these Schrodinger waves definite motions of the mass points - and that, after all, had been the original purpose of the whole construction. The difficulty appeared insurmountable until it was overcome by Born in a way as simple as it was unexpected. The de Broglie-Schrodinger wave fields were not to be interpreted as a mathematical description of how an event actually takes place in time and space, though, of course, they have reference to such an event. Rather they are a mathematical description of what we can actually know about the system. They serve only to make statistical statements and predictions of the results of all measurements which we can carry out upon the system.”

But this sort of thing gets beyond my head as I don't have a physics background, but I simply introduce these to emphasize that you speak with confidence on Heisenberg's position that I don't know if it's that warranted as it is very controversial.

But following Marx's inseparability of Man from nature, it is the case that natural science has often ignored the relation of an active social subject (all scientists) when in fact knowledge independent humans is nonsensical. But that is of course changing as absolute time and the sort as in Newtownian physics has been displaced by special/general relativity that at least does better situate the significance of the individual in relation to a phenomenon.
Which is in part the issue with Kant's concept of the thing-in-itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay4.htm
Fichte sought and found the fundamental inconsistency in the Kantian doctrine on thought in the initial concept that Kant consciously proposed as the basis of all his constructions, in the concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’. Already, in this concept, and not in the categorial predicates that might be ascribed to things, there was a flagrant contradiction: the supreme fundamental principle of all analytical statements was violated, the principle of contradiction in determinations. This concept was thus inconsistent in a logically developed system-theory. In fact, in the concept ‘of a thing as it exists before and outside any possible experience’ there was included a bit of nonsense not noted by Kant: to say that the Ego was conscious of a thing outside consciousness was the same as to say that there was money in one’s pocket outside one’s pocket.

The idea of knowing things in a way that precisely excludes the subject as a kind of pure objectivity is a pseudoproblem of epistemology. Because the subject-object relation is not so independent of one another nor crude.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259742845_Reality_of_the_Ideal
"To know an object – and be unable to correlate this knowledge (knowledge of the object!) with the object?! In actual fact, this paradoxical situation arises where a person does not really know an object, but knows something else. What? Phrases about the object. Words, terms, formulas, signs, symbols, and stable combinations thereof deposited in science, mastered (memorized) in place of knowledge of the object – as a special object that exists above and outside reality, as a special world of ideal, abstract, phantom ‘objects’. It is here that an illusion of knowledge arises, followed by the insoluble task of relating this illusory knowledge to reality, to life."

Ilyenkov most probably bears in mind here the ‘third world’ by Popper, populated by ‘linguistic entities’.

The problem of the correlation of knowledge with a thing arises only if they are treated as two primordially different ‘worlds’. Reality (‘world’ number one) seems to be transcendent or ‘the beyond’ with respect to knowledge (‘world’ number three), while the individual consciousness (‘world’ number two) is allotted a part of a medium, correlating ideas with things. All the while truth is being sheltered between the ‘worlds’ like Epicurean gods. Little wonder, then, that Popper considered truth to be a purely relative concept and altogether rejected the existence of absolute truths. However, as Ilyenkov’s disciple S.N. Mareyev noticed, relative truth without the absolute truth is as the North Pole without the South – namely nonsense.

The very concept of truth is different in dialectics and formal logic. The latter demands to eliminate subjectivity – this ideal is clearly pronounced in the title of the report by Popper: ‘Epistemology without a knowing subject’. By contrast, in dialectics truth is understood as a process of transformation of the subjective into the objective, and vice versa. And the ideal is an objective form of a subject’s activity.

It’s a bit rich for a Marxist to refer to natural science as an “ideology.”

I get that your sense of Marxists might be primarily associated with dogmatism of the USSR, but as a world view, Marxism can be quite dynamic and even with the severe ideological repression, many invocative thinkers did prevail. Evald Ilyenkov is a tragic figure who exemplifies as much, but he didn't stand alone as a great thinker.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/i/d.htm
Marxists seek to subject all ideology to critique, uncovering the internal contradictions in an ideology and exposing the social interests expressed by it.

Marxism itself is frequently described as ideology, in the sense in which a negative connotation is attached to the word; that is, that Marxism is a closed system of ideas which maintains itself in the face of contrary experience. Any social view must contain an element of ideology, since an entirely objective and supra-historical view of the world is unattainable. Further, by its very scope and strength, Marxism lends itself to transformation into a closed and self-justifying system of assertions.

However, such a development of Marxism is contrary to its spirit which is relentlessly critical and self-critical and draws sustenance from the unceasing creation of new material for reflection in the progress of culture and social life.

When I think of ideology in terms of justifying a particular class interest, I tend to not just deride it as class interest but emphasize the manner in which it is one sided and arbitrary. Like how capitalism is framed as simply a quantitative expansion of production and thus eternal and natural.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/
The goal of this abstraction is to eventually identify the essential connections between different abstract aspects, slowly piecing the pieces together to give us a concrete picture of the whole. However this can only happen if we abstract correctly. There are two senses in with Marx talks of abstractions, a good and a bad way of abstracting. When abstraction has gone bad Marx often refers to the abstraction as ‘one-sided’. This means that the abstraction views an aspect of reality in an incomplete, one-sided way. An essential aspect of the nature of the object has been left out. Often Marx critiques bourgeois economists for making one-sided abstractions that make it seem like capitalism is a universal, a-historical system by abstracting away all of the historically specific aspects of capital. For instance, if we say that capital is just tools used to make more tools we have performed a sloppy, 1-sided abstraction. We are viewing capital merely from the abstract general features that capital has of increasing physical quantities of things while abstracting away the historically specific value-relations that give capitalism its essential nature.

This shows that abstraction can be arbitrary. 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.

When we make an abstraction we want to select that aspect of the object which identifies its essence. Since the essence of things is in their relation to other things, we want to identify the essential relations which govern the object, abstracting away other non-essential aspects.
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oops wrong thread :D anyway when droped by mistake I'll say per-se dangerous is all western humanism coz rests on neopagan strive for heaven on earth [1][1] some push such utopias more vigorously but they are in the same cauldron with the rest of the western thinkers, so dont judge noone so easily, look on the position outside-in also!
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Wellsy wrote:I disagree about this sense of intuition as I think the ground for an intuitive insight is also prepared on past experiences and concepts.
Intuition signifies the sudden aha moment where insight appears abruptly which is simply the sign of an intelligent response to a situation as opposed to a conditioned response.


I don’t claim anything different. The physicist having an aha-moment about the nature of matter obviously has acquired knowledge about physics, thus his aha-moment relates to the problems in physics he’s been studying and not, for example, to the stock market. That still means he has to set aside his acquired knowledge for an instant to let intuition guide him to new knowledge.

Let me use an example from language learning. I have known highly educated people who have studied a foreign language for ten years or more without being able to communicate verbally even in very simple sentences. On the other hand, kids without formal education can pick up any language spontaneously to reach fluency within a short period of time.

The former uses the rational mind to learn vocabulary and grammar, while the latter spontaneously picks up language skills. That may sound different from the intuition of reality transcending the conventional concepts of the rational mind, but psychologically it is the same process. The former can’t let go of the straightjacket of conventional linguistic concepts, while the latter spontaneously dives into a new linguistic universe with her whole being and not just with her conceptual faculties. Linguistic patterns are anchored at a subconscious level that can't be altered by the consciousness without an effort of the will that transcends rationalization. Logically toying with concepts won't get you there.

Thus, intuition is always the same, but the content of the insight is different according to circumstances.

For example, Wolfgang Kohler's examination of Chimpanzees shows how when they're presented with an obstacle to their usual behavior and they can't resort to their habitual responses, after a short period of simply exerting more effort and trial and error, they seem to stop their physical activity and reflect/think. Some chimps after such a time can suddenly resolve a problem that they had not previously faced. But instead of a protracted period of training as with a conditioned response, they execute the correct solution as if they were already conditioned to know.


That demonstrates the process of intuition in primates. They stop their habitual responses not to “think”, but to wait for something new to bubble up. Here, the “habitual responses” correspond to the conventional concepts of human rationalization, which is the preferred tool in humans. I previously mentioned that the roots of our dualistic conceptual thinking can be found in the behaviour of primates. It all fits nicely.

To me it is an extending of existing understanding and experience otherwise it poses that one can have an intuitive insight about anything.


That’s supposing that there is an unbridgeable gap between reality and conceptualization. I think that conceptualization can be re-attached to reality in a moment of intuition at any time, just like Copernicus re-attached to the reality of planetary orbits by discarding conventional concepts. The intuition “can be about anything;” but when it takes on conscious form it has to find expression within a particular field of consciousness.

As if scientific discovery comes from somewhere into the mind but seems to simply discard consideration of what are the preconditions for a new concept/abstract notion (in Hegel's terminology). And quite often before a new concept emerges, a lot of ground is worked over.
Perhaps one wishes to mark a distinction between scientific insights of intuition from perhaps spiritual ones where one has a radical shift in one's sense of self towards reality as a whole rather than perhaps limited to a field.


The biology and neurons of scientists don’t differ from those of artists or religious leaders. I think the process of intuition is identical in religion, the arts, science and everyday life. It’s just the expression it takes that differs; an artist comes up with a piece of art and not with a mathematical formula of particle physics.

A shock for a crude materialist perhaps, one who takes scientific progress to be equivalent to metaphysical outlooks since they tied their sense of materialism to particularly forms of matter.

I strongly disagree, Lenin made a sensible point that the philosophical definition of matter isn't somehow disrupted by the fact that matter wasn't reducible to atoms.
Because if you confuse the ontological distinction between matter and mind then you're simply confused and engaging in a disruption of a clear ontological distinction.

What comes across in the passage you quoted from
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vy ... usness.pdf
is that Marxism seems to be a totally ego-centred philosophy. How can you juxtapose “matter” and “(individual) consciousness”? Individual consciousness has no more reality than a dream, while matter is usually associated with the basic substance of reality. Surely, the juxtaposition ought to be “mind and matter”, wherein, mind is not individual consciousness, but some sort of universal mind. But as “matter disappears” in the new physics so does mind. In other words, the synthesis of mind and matter results in potentiality, as the ultimate non-dual reality.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it, if it is empirically proven by science it becomes the new paradigm. Most people felt uncomfortable with the worldview suggested by Quantum physics. Einstein never accepted it. According to him “god does not play dice”. Einstein has been proven wrong and all his objections have been experimentally shown to be wrong.

Philosophy is not longer the master discipline guiding all other sciences. Unable to provide a holistic view of reality, philosophy has been relegated to the second row while the natural sciences are sprawling into all directions.

I’ll cut short my reply here because it’s getting too long. I’m not a philosopher who compares the different systems of thought of Western philosophers. I can only say what makes sense to me. It’s been interesting to contrast my thoughts with your views of Western philosophy, but so far I haven't seen anything that proves me wrong.
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Politics_Observer wrote:Have both of you read Mien Kampf? If not, do you both have an opinion on Hitler's ideas? What would those opinions be?


I read about a third of it. It's only interesting because it gives you an insight into Hitler's character. The ideas themselves are an indigestible mix of socialism, social darwinism, nationalism (i.e. Germanness fandom) and conspiracy theories (e.g. the Jews are out to destroy Germany).

I read a part of Kapital, but it was rather boring and trivial up to that point. I might finish it, just for being able to brag about it on Pofo. :lol:

Potemkin wrote:But in debates concerning whether Marx was a good or a bad economist, it might help to have actually read what Marx wrote on economics. Just a thought. :)


You would also have to read his contemporaries to judge how important respectively original his ideas were.
#15155181
Atlantis wrote:I don’t claim anything different. The physicist having an aha-moment about the nature of matter obviously has acquired knowledge about physics, thus his aha-moment relates to the problems in physics he’s been studying and not, for example, to the stock market. That still means he has to set aside his acquired knowledge for an instant to let intuition guide him to new knowledge.

Let me use an example from language learning. I have known highly educated people who have studied a foreign language for ten years or more without being able to communicate verbally even in very simple sentences. On the other hand, kids without formal education can pick up any language spontaneously to reach fluency within a short period of time.

The former uses the rational mind to learn vocabulary and grammar, while the latter spontaneously picks up language skills. That may sound different from the intuition of reality transcending the conventional concepts of the rational mind, but psychologically it is the same process. The former can’t let go of the straightjacket of conventional linguistic concepts, while the latter spontaneously dives into a new linguistic universe with her whole being and not just with her conceptual faculties. Linguistic patterns are anchored at a subconscious level that can't be altered by the consciousness without an effort of the will that transcends rationalization. Logically toying with concepts won't get you there.

Thus, intuition is always the same, but the content of the insight is different according to circumstances.

So we're agreeable the ones intuition is based in the experiences of the individual and isn't the case that they have some universal access through intuition to things that are simply outside their experience.

I find that characterization agreeable in that the adult relates the foreign language to the system of signs and meanings they already established in their first language. While a child at a particular age has little basis for a similar process as they know too little language. But this is specific to a child t a particular stage because children do undergo some sense of language and in the process fo learning a new language becomes quite self-conscious of their dominant/first.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch06.htm
It is well known that the child learns a foreign language in school in a completely different way than he learns his native language. Few of the empirical regularities or laws characteristic of the development of the native language are repeated when a foreign language is learned by the school child. Piaget is right when he argues that adult language does not represent for the child what a foreign language represents for the adult. Specifically, it is not a system of signs that corresponds point for point with a system of concepts that have already been acquired. Learning a foreign language is profoundly different from learning a native language. This is partly because a set of fully formed and developed word meanings already exist in the former case. These word meanings are simply translated into the foreign language. In other words, this is partly a function of the relative maturity of the native language itself. It is also partially a function of the fact that the foreign language is learned under entirely different internal and external conditions, of the fact that the conditions that characterize the learning process differ profoundly from those that characterize the learning of the native language. Different developmental paths, followed under different conditions, cannot lead to identical results.

It would be odd if the process involved in learning a foreign language in school reproduced that involved in learning the native language, repeating a process that had occurred earlier under entirely different conditions. Nonetheless, the profound differences between these processes must not divert us from the fact that they are both aspects of speech development. The processes involved in the development of written speech are a third variant of this unified process of language development; it repeats neither of the two processes of speech development mentioned up to this point. All three of these processes, the learning of the native language, the learning of foreign languages, and the development of written speech interact with each other in complex ways. This reflects their mutual membership in a single class of genetic processes and the internal unity of these processes. As we indicated above, the learning of a foreign language is unique in that it relies on the semantic aspect of the native language. Thus the instruction of the school child in a foreign language has its foundation in his knowledge of the native language. Less obvious and less well known is the fact that the foreign language influences the development of the child’s native language. Goethe understood this influence clearly. In his words, he who does not know at least one foreign language does not know his own. This idea is fully supported by research. Learning a foreign language raises the level of development of the child’s native speech. His conscious awareness of linguistic forms, and the level of his abstraction of linguistic phenomena, increases. He develops a more conscious, voluntary capacity to use words as tools of thought and as means of expressing ideas. Learning a foreign language raises the level of the child’s native speech in much the same way that learning algebra raises the level of his arithmetic thinking. By learning algebra, the child comes to understand arithmetic operations as particular instantiations of algebraic operations. This gives the child a freer, more abstract and generalized view of his operations with concrete quantities. Just as algebra frees the child’s thought from the grasp of concrete numerical relations and raises it to the level of more abstract thought, learning a foreign language frees the child’s verbal thought from the grasp of concrete linguistic forms and phenomena.

Thus, research indicates that: (1) the learning of a foreign language both depends on the child’s native speech and influences it; (2) the course of its development does not repeat that of native speech; and (3) the strengths and weaknesses of native and foreign languages differ.

We have every reason to believe that an analogous relationship exists between everyday and scientific concepts. Two significant considerations support this notion. First, the development of all concepts (both spontaneous and scientific) is part of the more general process of speech development. The development of concepts represents the semantic aspect of speech development. Psychologically, the development of concepts and the development of word meaning are one and the same process. As part of the general process of linguistic development, it can be anticipated that the development of word meanings will manifest the regularities that are characteristic of the process as a whole. Second, in their most essential features, the internal and external conditions involved in the development of foreign languages and those involved in the development of scientific concepts coincide. Perhaps more significantly, they differ from the conditions involved in the development of the native language and spontaneous concepts in much the same way. In both cases, instruction emerges as a new factor in development. In this way, just as we differentiate spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts, we can speak of spontaneous speech development with the native language and nonspontaneous speech development with the foreign language.

In Vygotsky's distinction between spontaneous and scientific concepts where concept and begin from the abstract or immediate but connect with one another, your sense of intuition would emphasize the spontaneous here where one constructs their sense of things individually and is not lead by a concept.
So a child has a spontaneous concept of a brother because they grew up with one, but they don't yet understand how to express such relations in words, their concept is tied to their experiences rather than biological connections.
And indeed, it seems almost impossible for someone to have developed connections through language which mark logical memory and the sort instead of actual eidetic memory. Except through perhaps intense practice of meditation where one tries to recreate the immediacy of being.

That demonstrates the process of intuition in primates. They stop their habitual responses not to “think”, but to wait for something new to bubble up. Here, the “habitual responses” correspond to the conventional concepts of human rationalization, which is the preferred tool in humans. I previously mentioned that the roots of our dualistic conceptual thinking can be found in the behaviour of primates. It all fits nicely.

Hmm when I think of habits I think of unconscious or subconscious practices which were once conscious but have been mastered and are automatic. In Cultural Historical Activity Theory, these are called '[url]=https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#operationoperations[/url]' and can readily be shifted back into consciousness. Like walking, you don't think about it because you been doing it so long you can just control your ability to walk but not in some analytical sense of now I move my leg this way and so on. BUt if you misjudge the sidewalk and slip, suddenly you are thinking about walking in order to gain control because the habitual response was disrupted.

And agreed, humans in their habits rely on their conventional concept and hence why disruption is required to evoke actual thinking through something consciously.


Well yes you could call it intuition in that the Primate is seeking to find the aha moment in solving their problem but to not also call it thinking is dubious I believe because as 've been saying about active thought, it breaks or disrupts the habit and thus requires a conscious effort to resolve the problem. They aren't simply going about their business as usual and aha pops up, they have to direct their efforts to considering the task. Perhaps you could speak of how conscious thought isn't the whole of consciousness and that we don't hold everything in awareness so that the subconscious and all that underpins the concentrated effort of thought to find such solutions.
That’s supposing that there is an unbridgeable gap between reality and conceptualization. I think that conceptualization can be re-attached to reality in a moment of intuition at any time, just like Copernicus re-attached to the reality of planetary orbits by discarding conventional concepts. The intuition “can be about anything;” but when it takes on conscious form it has to find expression within a particular field of consciousness.

I don't think their is some impassable gap but in fact think that in a person, the abstract generalizations of human culture and language are connected up with the individual's sense/experience of things.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Journal/pdfs/20-1-holodynski.pdf
People do not appropriate the use of signs and their meanings during social interactions in an impartial way. They interpret and use them in the light of their actually elicited motives along with the motives they assign to the interaction partner (see González-Rey, 2012). The societal meaning of the used signs does not have to match the individually assigned personal sense. For example, an outsider may well interpret a public fit of rage by a low-ranking bank employee toward his superior as an inexcusable violation of social etiquette. However, for the menial employee, it may well be a reassertion of self-esteem in response to a humiliating directive.

The second psychological factor deals with the situatedness of sign-use. The personal sense of sign-use is also determined by the situatedness and sensory mediation of the previous encounters in which the use of signs is (or was) embedded. Societal meanings are coded primarily not by propositional phrases (e.g., “a dog is a mammal” or “wide-open eyes signal fear”) but through their ties to sensorially mediated and situated perceptions—as complex as these interrelations may be (Leont’ev, 1978). For example, two persons can use propositional phrases to agree on the same definition of the term “dog” or “fear.” These terms, however, will be situated very differently and enriched with other sensory perceptions when one person grew up with a very likeable family dog and the other person experienced a highly dramatic episode with an overpoweringly large and aggressive dog. Research on “grounded cognition” (Barsalou, 2008) and developmental studies on the appropriation of goal-directed actions (Hommel & Elsner, 2009) and of speech (Bruner, 1983; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) have also corroborated this sensorially anchored use of signs.

Thus, conventionalized signs and the meanings assigned to them are subject to an interpersonal process of interpretation and coordination that more or less successfully supports the embodiment and expression of personal sense. People do not have a private “speech” at their disposal that they can construct and use on their own (Wittgenstein). Therefore, they depend on the appropriation and use of conventionalized signs when they want to communicate successfully and satisfy their motives in social interactions (Gebauer, 2012). From this perspective, it is the principle of internalization in particular that offers concepts that help us to conceptualize the particular status of the mind as a coconstruction of the social and material world by means of conventionalized signs that are anchored in sensory perceptions related to the motives of a person.

And I disagree strongly in the characterization that copernicus, or anyone who revolutionizes the understanding of a science simply discards the old theory, they in fact incorporate many facts already established in the theory and explain more facts. Like how Albert Einstein's theory of general and special relativity didn't emerge independently of Newtonian classical physics but in fact subscumed the same facts but properly delinated the manner in which they were true as they were made universal but were in fact only absolutely true within particular limits.
And yes, I agree that the content of consciousness (not confined to awareness but to the entirety of the mind) can be applied to anything and that thought necessarily finds its container in some sort of concept.

The biology and neurons of scientists don’t differ from those of artists or religious leaders. I think the process of intuition is identical in religion, the arts, science and everyday life. It’s just the expression it takes that differs; an artist comes up with a piece of art and not with a mathematical formula of particle physics.

Agreed, they're all humans.
Indeed it takes a different form but I would say that art requires just as much intelligence and understanding of things more than primarily being characterized by sponatenous inspiration alone which in fact seems to be the result of great concentration and thought on an issue at length.
[ur;]https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch01-s05.html[/url]
The work of the artist is not spontaneous. It always follows some kind of plan and it is most effective when talent is guided by a world-view, when the artist has something to tell people, much more rarely is it effective when it comes about as a result of the accidental associative play of the imagination, and never is it effective when it is a result of blind instinct. The keen attention that is given to the problems of method is a sign of progress in both modern science and art, a sign of the increasing interaction of all aspects of intellectual life—science, philosophy, and art.


What comes across in the passage you quoted from
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vy ... usness.pdf
is that Marxism seems to be a totally ego-centred philosophy. How can you juxtapose “matter” and “(individual) consciousness”? Individual consciousness has no more reality than a dream, while matter is usually associated with the basic substance of reality. Surely, the juxtaposition ought to be “mind and matter”, wherein, mind is not individual consciousness, but some sort of universal mind. But as “matter disappears” in the new physics so does mind. In other words, the synthesis of mind and matter results in potentiality, as the ultimate non-dual reality.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it, if it is empirically proven by science it becomes the new paradigm. Most people felt uncomfortable with the worldview suggested by Quantum physics. Einstein never accepted it. According to him “god does not play dice”. Einstein has been proven wrong and all his objections have been experimentally shown to be wrong.

Philosophy is not longer the master discipline guiding all other sciences. Unable to provide a holistic view of reality, philosophy has been relegated to the second row while the natural sciences are sprawling into all directions.

I’ll cut short my reply here because it’s getting too long. I’m not a philosopher who compares the different systems of thought of Western philosophers. I can only say what makes sense to me. It’s been interesting to contrast my thoughts with your views of Western philosophy, but so far I haven't seen anything that proves me wrong.

What would the universal mind even be because this just sounds like the sort of idealist stuff that I consider nonsensical and in the vein of Jung's collective unconscious and isn't able to be substantied in it's ontology other than reference to how human consciousness isn't a sum of individual consciousness.
In this regard, the Marxist tradition follows Hegel.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phi
Practical reason is inseparable from social practice. It is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the armative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the rst question armatively and the second negatively. In other words, it is only individuals who act, have 108 intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.


And you seem to not to have understood the very criticism against Descartes who generalizes the quality of his own consciousness to everything when in fact your consciousness is different for yourself than it is someone else's consciousness. Someone else's consciousness is by definition matter, not in the crude physical sense but in the philosophical definition that it is outside and independent your consciousness. In fact, the whole point is that the error of Descrates was to treat the ontological distinction between mind and matter as an epistemological problem which is instead the subject-object relation. Just because your entire experience of reality passes through your consciousness, this doesn't then characterize the inherent quality of reality. It doesn't allow a scientific understanding because it doesn't in itself allow distinctions between dreams and reality alone. I can think that I wrote a particular word but then examine the result of my actions and see I mispelt it or had a fruedian slip.
Reality isn't syonynmous with one's consciousness.
BUt neither is there a universal mind, psychological states are only passed by individual organisms and although they relate to the real world and for many are social, this doesn't extend consciousness outside one's mind only that it necessarily participates in reality.

In fact, the manner in which consciousness becomes socialized is through social practices, in which you can think to your own upbringing by your parents and how they acculturate you to use cultural artefacts, a world organized with human activities and meaning. WHich then end up reflected in ideal form in the consciousness.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/the-individual.htm
Once, however, the process of internalisation is complete, the artefact, which may begin its life as an objective, material thing outside consciousness, albeit a thing endowed with social significance, has become integrated into the psyche itself, and cannot be said to be something other than the psyche. The same can be said of the activity of consciousness in relation to other people and an artefact; this activity ceases to be something that the psyche does, but rather is the psyche itself. In Leontyev’s words: “Man’s activity is the substance of his consciousness,” or as Johann Fichte put it: “The self is pure activity.” (Fichte 2000)


And no, Marxism isn't a kind of egoism, as it doesn't give primacy to the individual consciousness, the point is simply the fact that consciousness is not experienced in any other way than individually. To treat mind as some sort of stuff is nonsense.
On the other hand, Marxism also is novel, thanks to Hegel, in how it considers ideality as objective/matter.
Ilyenkov explains as much and is pivotal to Marx's conception of value as not simply subjective.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

And if you don't get the issue here in which the individual's consciousness may be social but consciousness is not the universal quality of reality but simply a property of the object, then you seem to be confused about what the mind is and it's nuclear to me what significance you give to this 'universal mind' ontologically.

When you talk about synthesis of mind and matter, you're more appropriately speaking about the subject-object relation in which we interact with the world and it changes us as much as we change it and hence the reciprocal determination of man determining his own nature by changing nature.
But even in this, the distinction between my thoughts and the world is still quite clear unless you have lost your sense of individuation as a subject as distinct from the world.
Otherwise you're engaging in the ery problem Lenin characterized as underpinning idealism, which is an aversion to marking the clear binary distinction between mind and matter and eclectically and haphazardly jumping between the two without coherence.

And there is something interesting to be said about the potential of human action but in this again I would emphasize that prior man necessarily has social experiences before he has the consciousness to then plan. THis follows the earlier point by William james that no first act can be considered a free act because it is only once we have trained our bodies and minds that we're able to consciously self direct ourselves.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
If we were to consider how an athlete or artist or mathematician achieves a particular feat, there are two phases: first a protracted process of training their bodies to respond to artificial stimuli in certain complex ways, and secondly the performance of the feat by the activation of the self-constructed bodily apparatus. In this second phase, the various forms of action have been mastered and are executed with conscious control, but without conscious direction of the individual reactions. ('Consciousness’ includes those processes which, while not part of conscious awareness, can move into conscious awareness in response to events.)
...
These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.

“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.

Man is able to plan out in his mind a course of action, based on his past experiences and self control.
But even in the subject-object relation a clear distinction is maintained even though it is one of interaction because there can be the difference between the ideal end and the realized end after one pursues ones plan but reality doesn't pan out according to the ideal perfectly.

I don't think my position is that I simply don't like it, as much as I have points of why it seems to be untenable and even incomprehensible.
Science is inseparable from philosophy and it often the philosophically naive that end up in silly positions like the Machists or simply repeat old and already resolved problems.


Indeed it has been interesting but as much as I think we have found somethings agreeable and maybe give things a different emphasis or are simply trying to clarify between ourselves, I must say this last passage has me confused. As I don't think it defends the Copenhagen interpretation and the manner in which Heisenberg came to the conclusion that particles have an immateriality. And that could be my own limited understanding of quantum mechanics but I also can't just take his authority on the matter as truth, particularly if there seems to be reasons to be skeptical of his conclusions.
I am also confused to your sense of 'universal mind'.
In the Marxist or Cultural Historical Activity Theory tradition, cultural artefacts constitute the universals within (particular) social institutions which give the social quality to individual's consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#constructivism
The Marxist School of psychology including Lev Vygotsky, Georges Politzer, Lucien Séve, A R Luria, A N Leontyev and others, is ‘constructivist’, emphasising the social-historical and collaborative character of human activity. On the other hand, relativist constructivism emphasises the voluntarism and autonomy of an individual subject in constructing personal meaning.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Brandom.pdf
The metaphor of judge-made law cited above, which is a pragmatic rendering of Hegel’s conception of sprit, by disposing of the need for a pre-existing principle governing the development of new propositions, seems to justify the idea that the whole process of cultural and historical development can be rendered as interactions between individuals. But this does not stand up. The process depends essentially on the availability of the precedents, the body of enacted law and all the legal principles which exist in the form of documents. These documents are crucial mediating artefacts which regulate the development of the common law. The idea that the judge is able to make explicit what was merely implicit in the previous decisions is an attractive and eminently Hegelian idea. But it presupposes that these documented decisions act as mediating elements in the development of law, not to mention the entire material culture which supports the way of life in which the decisions are made by judges and enforced by a state.

A proposition appears to be something created and enacted in the moment when two people interact, but neither the language used in the interaction nor the concepts which are embedded in the language are created de novo in that interaction. The words and concepts relied upon in any interaction “are always already there in the always alreadyup-and-running communal linguistic practices into which I enter as a young one” (Brandom 2009: 73). Through the provision of these artefacts, every linguistic interaction is mediated by the concepts of the wider community.

If Hegel’s idea of Recognition is taken out of the context of his whole method it is easily misunderstood, and taken to be an unmediated binary relation between two individuals, but this is never the case; interactions between subjects are always mediated. As Hegel states at the very beginning of the Logic: “There is nothing, nothing in Heaven, or in Nature or in Mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation” (Hegel 1816/1969: §92). Analytical philosophy, and all varieties of interactionism and recognition theories, systematically ignore this maxim of Hegel’s, which characterises his entire corpus. Mutual understanding even between strangers, apparently unmediated by common language or custom, is possible provided that each person can produce something which the other person needs. As participants in a shared culture there are concepts which are “always already-up-and-running.” This mediating element is something not created by the interaction (although every interaction maintains and modifies the culture). The mediating structure exists independently of any single interaction and is a ‘larger’ unit, being a property or aspect of the entire community of which the partners to interaction are a part. Concepts belong to this larger unit, and are evoked in the interactions and thinking of individuals as mediating elements. This stands in contradiction to Brandom’s efforts to found his inferentialism and his reading of Hegel exclusively in actions. It is as if actions and interactions (such as uttering a proposition, recognising another individual, committing oneself to a concept, etc.) can exist prior to and independently of the cultural constellations and social formations which mediate individuals’ actions and from which actions draw their meaning


But it is most certainly not universal as in the underpinning reality between me and others, this would fly in the face of the sound points Hegel makes in summarizing the manner in which independent subjects come to recognize one another. Such as that of strangers to colonizer and colonized.
Hegel offers the most sensible position I believe in groups of people who already share a way of life coming into increasing contact with others and having to develop a shared means of meaning and life. At the moment, the only universally shared condition is perhaps that of the market, which even if it hasn't swallowed up everything is pretty close and is part of the reason that it is seena s the basis for realizing the possibility of a humanized world despite all it's problems. It has brought the world into increasing connect and to be more tied up with one another than ever before.
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Wellsy wrote:So we're agreeable the ones intuition is based in the experiences of the individual and isn't the case that they have some universal access through intuition to things that are simply outside their experience.


In the sense that we arrive at a new idea, we obviously access something that’s outside our experience. The new idea is not formless; to reach consciousness it has to take on the forms or archetypes that constitute our experience. If we are able to communicate concepts, it’s because they refer to something universal. We understand each other if my experience of reality corresponds to your experience of reality. That presupposes the universality of reality and our ability to intuite reality, even if it is too fleeting to grasp.

I find that characterization agreeable in that the adult relates the foreign language to the system of signs and meanings they already established in their first language. While a child at a particular age has little basis for a similar process as they know too little language. But this is specific to a child t a particular stage because children do undergo some sense of language and in the process fo learning a new language becomes quite self-conscious of their dominant/first.


I’m sorry if I wasn’t more specific. I wasn’t comparing adults learning a foreign language to children learning their mother tongue. I was referring to learners of foreign language using a) traditional methods comprising linguistic concepts, such as grammar, or b) direct intuitive learning of language patterns without referring to theoretical concepts of grammar, or the like. While the latter may be more common in young people without formal education, it’s not limited to age.

It’s common that students of foreign language are prevented from speaking their target language because they cling to the linguistic concept they have learned instead of subjecting themselves directly to an alien linguistic system. Learning a foreign language is a violation of your native phonetic/linguistic systems which requires a greater effort than toying with the semantic concepts you have familiarized yourself with.

In Vygotsky's distinction between spontaneous and scientific concepts where concept and begin from the abstract or immediate but connect with one another, your sense of intuition would emphasize the spontaneous here where one constructs their sense of things individually and is not lead by a concept.
And indeed, it seems almost impossible for someone to have developed connections through language which mark logical memory and the sort instead of actual eidetic memory. Except through perhaps intense practice of meditation where one tries to recreate the immediacy of being.


I think language is a sign to jolt our memory. It brings back the memory of an experience like an old photography, but they won’t bring back the actual experience. The actual experience can only be in the here and now. Looking at a picture from your trip to Venice brings back the shadow of a past experience but prevents you from experiencing the here and now. It drives me mad to think of the millions of tourists travelling the world while holding their Smartphone in front of their eyes to capture a fleeting moment that will seep like water from between their fingers while sacrificing the only experience they can have.

Hmm when I think of habits I think of unconscious or subconscious practices which were once conscious but have been mastered and are automatic. In Cultural Historical Activity Theory, these are called '[url]=https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#operationoperations[/url]' and can readily be shifted back into consciousness. Like walking, you don't think about it because you been doing it so long you can just control your ability to walk but not in some analytical sense of now I move my leg this way and so on. BUt if you misjudge the sidewalk and slip, suddenly you are thinking about walking in order to gain control because the habitual response was disrupted.


I think conscious thoughts are too slow to direct the motor functions of the body. When I type with 10 fingers on my keyboard, the finger movements are not directed by the brain but by the peripheral nervous system. Consciously directing my fingers would reduce my typing speed to that of the two-finger system.


People do not have a private “speech” at their disposal that they can construct and use on their own (Wittgenstein).


I think it’s also possible to conceive the opposite in that people do have a private language, or an individual system of interpreting the world, which is different for each individual. Between a person’s individual understanding and the normalized language of a culture, there is a whole range of linguistic subsets comprising family specific expressions, speech invented between lovers, group slang, technical jargon, village dialects, regional dialects, etc. The individual can gain understanding without formulating it in concepts that can be understood by others. Again that is a proof of intuitive understanding.

Agreed, they're all humans.
Indeed it takes a different form but I would say that art requires just as much intelligence and understanding of things more than primarily being characterized by sponatenous inspiration alone which in fact seems to be the result of great concentration and thought on an issue at length.

The work of the artist is not spontaneous. It always follows some kind of plan and it is most effective when talent is guided by a world-view, when the artist has something to tell people, much more rarely is it effective when it comes about as a result of the accidental associative play of the imagination, and never is it effective when it is a result of blind instinct. The keen attention that is given to the problems of method is a sign of progress in both modern science and art, a sign of the increasing interaction of all aspects of intellectual life—science, philosophy, and art.


What is art? I think the answer would have been very different in the past from what it is today. I even wonder if modern “conceptual art” is even art. I’m not an art historian, but it appears to me that conceptual art has become more like engineering by incorporating science in the form of concepts to give it the credibility of the “higher arts.” Prior to the Renaissance, the “fine arts” such as architecture, painting, sculpture, etc., were considered to be lower arts similar to builders or craftsmen, while astronomy, mathematics, theology and of course philosophy were considered as higher arts. By incorporating geometric principles, for example in the form of the central perspective, the lower arts were raised to the level of the higher arts. Perhaps something similar is happening with modern conceptual art

I guess there is an element of creativity in carefully planning and crafting an oil pointing or in designing conceptual art like an engineer, but to me personally, the ultimate art is Chinese calligraphy, which allows a spontaneous expression.

Whatever definition we may have of art, I think it ought to allow the expression of an internal insight. Tinkering around with nuts and bolts while trying to figure which configuration will get most attention or by weighing one theory against the other, is that still art?

Socialist realism in art gives me the creeps just like Nazi art. To me, true art “is spontaneous” like Chinese calligraphy, it is “not guided by a world-view” it has nothing to do with “the accidental play of the imagination” or with “blind instinct.” In Chinese calligraphy, the artist can spontaneously express his innermost insight within the tradition of a vast and varied culture while walking in the footsteps of great masters to express himself freely to the best ability of his art.

Regarding such expression as “universal mind” or “universal consciousness”, let’s not forget that they are just concepts attempting to provide an interpretation of reality. They are not reality itself, which is beyond our rational understanding and therefore beyond this discussion. We don’t even have to discuss whether they exist or not, just like we don’t have to discuss the existence or non-existence of god. They are attempts at interpretation.

Viewed from the individual point of view, they have psychological aspects in that the individual consciousness is not separate from the collective consciousness or from the universal consciousness, if we admit for one moment that such a thing does exist. From the ontological point of view, the universal mind permeates all things and if we transcend the duality of mind and matter, the mind becomes the universe itself. While according to some schools of thought the mind or consciousness is the product of the universe, according to others mind generates the universe; by combining the two we get a cyclic movement, which at least solves the problem of the infinite or finite universe.

The analogy here is that of the ocean in which we are like the waves appearing and disappearing on its surface. Our individual consciousness is temporal, it’ll go with the dissolution of our body after death, but that doesn’t mean the universe will cease to exist with our death. So there is something bigger than our consciousness, which we are part of.

The bottom line is that the dualistic rational mind cannot grasp nondual reality. It’s not made for that. Nagarjuna pushed to the outer limits of logic 2,000 years ago. Going beyond in physics, the arts, etc., requires intuition.
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I think we have some agreement in things though perhaps put different emphasis on some parts than one another. I think I was initially concerned about whether you perhaps resorted to a kind of idealism that didn't give emphasis to how the objective reality necessarily underpins human consciousness. Which I find untenable in that man must satisfy his material needs before there is even the prospect of conscious thought and the sort.

Atlantis wrote:In the sense that we arrive at a new idea, we obviously access something that’s outside our experience. The new idea is not formless; to reach consciousness it has to take on the forms or archetypes that constitute our experience. If we are able to communicate concepts, it’s because they refer to something universal. We understand each other if my experience of reality corresponds to your experience of reality. That presupposes the universality of reality and our ability to intuite reality, even if it is too fleeting to grasp.

Of course it isn't formless, but we grasp at new things with our preconceptions, our existing concepts and experiences. This can result in not noticing the new thing at all in fact, or for the more perceptive, they attempt to describe the new things with existing language, pushing the boundaries of old concepts until it is made to express the new sense of reality.
As an example of how one can experience something new but fail to identify it: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling1.htm#Pill1
We know that late in the past century, the phlogistic theory still prevailed. It assumed that combustion consisted essentially in this: that a certain hypothetical substance, an absolute combustible named phlogiston, separated from the burning body. This theory sufficed to explain most chemical phenomena then known, although it had to be considerably strained in some cases. But in 1774 Priestley produced a certain kind of air ‘which he found to be so pure, so free from phlogiston, that common air seemed adulterated in comparison with it’. He called it ‘dephlogisticated air’. Shortly after him Scheele obtained the same kind of air in Sweden and demonstrated its existence in the atmosphere. He also found that this kind of air disappeared whenever some body was burned in it or in ordinary air and therefore he called it ‘fireair’. From these facts he drew the conclusion that the combination arising from the union of phlogiston with one of the components of the atmosphere (that is to say from combustion) ‘was nothing but fire or heat which escaped through glass’. (Preface by Engels to Capital II)

As Engels remarks, Priestley and Scheele ‘had produced oxygen without knowing what they had laid their hands on’ (Preface to II). They remained prisoners of the conventional categories of chemistry. It fell to Lavoisier (to whom Priestley had communicated his findings) to analyse the entire phlogistic chemistry in the light of this discovery. It was Lavoisier who came to the conclusion that this new kind of air was a new chemical element and that combustion was not the result of this mysterious phlogiston leaving a burning body, but of this new element combining with that body. Priestley and Scheele, although they had produced oxygen prior to Lavoisier, because they remained trapped in the old concepts, were unable to grasp what they had done. Thus although Lavoisier ‘did not produce oxygen simultaneously and independently of the other two, as he claimed later on, he nevertheless is the real discoverer of oxygen vis-a-vis the others, who had only produced it without knowing what they had produced’ (Preface to Capital II).

This is the emphasis on not only doing things but praxis as the unity of actions with theory. You can miss things entirely because the theoretical understanding simply can't grasp as much. Hence my characterization that EInstein's new theory and revolutionizing of the field would be impossible without the pre-existing practice of Newtownian physics.
But of course such new content has to find the right form to express itself and thus many discoveries often employ unfamiliar language to try and express themselves at times.

So the bursting into a new understanding is based on the existing knowledge and furthers it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/development-concept.htm
Each discovery is preceded by a period of conflict and turmoil in the theory of the phenomenon, brought to a point where knowledge in the field falls into ever sharper contradiction and even threatens to descend into disrepute. The new idea arises out of and rests upon the material of this struggle of opposites in that it suddenly makes sense of the observations which seemed previously to be senseless. No-one would have thought of such an idea except that someone is driven to do so by the new observations arising especially from the use of new techniques and new, more perfect instruments, and makes a suggestion which is quite senseless in terms of previous theories. The new idea does not gradually take shape but appears more or less all at once. Although it solves all the problems brought to light by previous theories it is not a deduction from these theories, quite the opposite. It has an entirely different foundation.

Thomas Kuhn (1962) has famously studied the sociology of these revolutions in science, describing the trauma that accompanies the emergence of what he called a ‘new paradigm’ and the active resistance mounted by the old theory.

Also, the new idea proposes a simple archetype: in the case of Lavoisier, a combination with oxygen; in the case of biology, a single-cell organism; in the case of Einstein, the act of measuring an interval in time or space. The entire theory will have to be reorganised with the introduction of this new idea, and the transformation of the science continues without ceasing until the whole of natural science is transformed.

I'm not sure that I see all concepts referring to something universal although it must be shared. In that, some concepts are very cultural-specific and are difficult to translate into other languages precisely because they reflect something particular in that culture's history. ALthough one approximates the other's sense of a thing when translating it into another form or language.
A great example of such a difficulty is: https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/perezhivanie.htm

I’m sorry if I wasn’t more specific. I wasn’t comparing adults learning a foreign language to children learning their mother tongue. I was referring to learners of foreign language using a) traditional methods comprising linguistic concepts, such as grammar, or b) direct intuitive learning of language patterns without referring to theoretical concepts of grammar, or the like. While the latter may be more common in young people without formal education, it’s not limited to age.

It’s common that students of foreign language are prevented from speaking their target language because they cling to the linguistic concept they have learned instead of subjecting themselves directly to an alien linguistic system. Learning a foreign language is a violation of your native phonetic/linguistic systems which requires a greater effort than toying with the semantic concepts you have familiarized yourself with.

It is often said that one can't truly learn a language without living within the very cultures which use such a language. In the same way, you don't really learn slang until you get the feel for how it is used.


I think language is a sign to jolt our memory. It brings back the memory of an experience like an old photography, but they won’t bring back the actual experience. The actual experience can only be in the here and now. Looking at a picture from your trip to Venice brings back the shadow of a past experience but prevents you from experiencing the here and now. It drives me mad to think of the millions of tourists travelling the world while holding their Smartphone in front of their eyes to capture a fleeting moment that will seep like water from between their fingers while sacrificing the only experience they can have.

It of course is incredibly useful in logical memory, but I see the use of signs in a reciprocal process with actions.
Hence the point of praxis as the unity of actions with signs/theory.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay8.htm
The 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.


Well, that is an issue with the proliferation of images, never have we been so swamped with images in every part of our lives. Things become a spectacle among many more so than something special to be experienced.
Many would have no sense to visit the Sistine Chapel to look at the ceiling because isn't it just the same images I can get off of google? Of course, there was a time when it was unique, there was no reproduction and this gave an 'aura' of that works uniqueness (Cue Walter Benjamin).
And there is the sense in which the mobilization of such artefacts to prompt our memory of experiences is useful. THis is a pivotal thing in Vygotsky's work as he emphasizes the manner how primitive man begins to shift from a kind of concrete an episodic approach to extending his senses through material artifacts but which are used for psychological functions.
So you find elaborate tools used to remember things, rather than simply hold it in your mind you have something to prompt the recall. The modern equivalent he made in his time was that of tying a knot in a handkerchief, it's an immediate conditioned connection that evokes the recall.


I think conscious thoughts are too slow to direct the motor functions of the body. When I type with 10 fingers on my keyboard, the finger movements are not directed by the brain but by the peripheral nervous system. Consciously directing my fingers would reduce my typing speed to that of the two-finger system.

Think of it this way, you already undergone the extensive training process where typing was initially quite conscious, you would look at the keys and such. But with enough practice/doing it, you no longer consciously think of each key and thus it is unconscious/'operation'. At the same time this mastery is readily accessed by consciousness if needed. In the same way that a musician can do an improvisation but it is derived from much training and often theory that they reproduce what was once a very conscious training.


I think it’s also possible to conceive the opposite in that people do have a private language, or an individual system of interpreting the world, which is different for each individual. Between a person’s individual understanding and the normalized language of a culture, there is a whole range of linguistic subsets comprising family specific expressions, speech invented between lovers, group slang, technical jargon, village dialects, regional dialects, etc. The individual can gain understanding without formulating it in concepts that can be understood by others. Again that is a proof of intuitive understanding.

Indeed there is always a personal sense as language isn't grasped in a purely denotive and abstract way and is always tied to the individual's motives of what they're communicating. But this isn't an example of an individual language as it's still a shared one it's just able to be used in a way that is highly specific.
ANnd indeed the close connection between a people does allow an intuitive sense that doesn't require a much communication as their activity is so entwined.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch07.htm
In both cases, pure predication arises where the subject of the expression is present in the interlocutors’ thoughts. If their thoughts coincide, if both have the same thing in mind, complete understanding can be realized through a single predicate. If the predicate is related to different subjects, however, inevitable and often humorous misunderstandings arise.

We find many examples of the abbreviation of external speech – of the reduction of external speech to a single predicate – in the works of Tolstoy (an author who dealt regularly with issues related to the psychology of understanding). Consider, for example: “No one heard what he [i.e., the dying Nikolai Levin – L.V.] had said; only Kitty understood. She understood because she constantly followed his thought so that she might know what he needed” (1893, v. 10, p. 311). Because Kitty followed the thought of the dying man, her thoughts contained the subject to which the word that no one had understood was related. The most striking example of the phenomenon of abbreviation in Tolstoy’s works is found in the interchange between Kitty and Levin in which they communicated using nothing more than the initial letters of words...

Tolstoy turned to our attention the fact that understanding through abbreviated speech is more the rule than the exception for people who live in close psychological contact.

So in a sense I agree with what you describe although I wouldn't consider individual language although it emphasizes the way that language isn't simply an abstract system of meaning but gets it meaning within the lives of human beings.

What is art? I think the answer would have been very different in the past from what it is today. I even wonder if modern “conceptual art” is even art. I’m not an art historian, but it appears to me that conceptual art has become more like engineering by incorporating science in the form of concepts to give it the credibility of the “higher arts.” Prior to the Renaissance, the “fine arts” such as architecture, painting, sculpture, etc., were considered to be lower arts similar to builders or craftsmen, while astronomy, mathematics, theology and of course philosophy were considered as higher arts. By incorporating geometric principles, for example in the form of the central perspective, the lower arts were raised to the level of the higher arts. Perhaps something similar is happening with modern conceptual art

I guess there is an element of creativity in carefully planning and crafting an oil pointing or in designing conceptual art like an engineer, but to me personally, the ultimate art is Chinese calligraphy, which allows a spontaneous expression.

Whatever definition we may have of art, I think it ought to allow the expression of an internal insight. Tinkering around with nuts and bolts while trying to figure which configuration will get most attention or by weighing one theory against the other, is that still art?

Socialist realism in art gives me the creeps just like Nazi art. To me, true art “is spontaneous” like Chinese calligraphy, it is “not guided by a world-view” it has nothing to do with “the accidental play of the imagination” or with “blind instinct.” In Chinese calligraphy, the artist can spontaneously express his innermost insight within the tradition of a vast and varied culture while walking in the footsteps of great masters to express himself freely to the best ability of his art.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to deny spontaneity in art and expression but that even in improvisation of a jazz musician is quite distinct from that of a small child who has never played an instrument. The long education of using the instrument and understanding music and coordinating one's body so that it is automatic/unconscious in how smooth it is, is still an expression of the human sense for the thing even while they're acting in a subconscious manner. But it also the case that to have something meaningful say and express can often require great thought and deliberation even if happy accidents occur along the way. A bit like how the sudden insight of a scientist clears the ground for the new ide by devoting their attention to their work for a long period. I believe it has been examined that many insights can be shown to be bubbling up already before it is in the person's awareness, the evidence of the changes as they struggle through a subject. It just isn't fully formed in those earlier stages.
I guesshere i emphasize the humanizing of the sensed.
http://www.kafu-academic-journal.info/journal/6/164/
The basis of vexation of mind is nothing but pain. Its essence differs, however, from a sudden heart attack. Thirst for justice differs from mere physical thirst. Someone who listens to symphonic music hears it with his ears, but he does not hear just a collection of sounds. Human senses are physically always the same. This means that the highest spiritual qualities do not presuppose different organs but different abilities of an individual which form a richer content of human life and behaviour.

According to Ilyenkov, the ability to perceive the outer world in a human mode and the ability to reason about it are formed by the life activity of an individual based on the practical transformation of this world. The elementary forms of such abilities are assimilated entirely spontaneously by the child, which can not be said about the highest forms.

Great inspiration without disciplined training results in inspired but amateurish results. Great artists tend to have perfected their craft, some even in relation to others.
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/3469551/mod_resource/content/0/Vygotskian%20View%20of%20Emotions.pdf
One way to look at creative collaboration and cooperative learning is to envision them as dynamic systems between individuals linked by shared objectives. The Cubist painters, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, shared a powerful vision; they aimed at revealing ‘the interlocking of phenomena . . . of processes instead of static states of being’ (Berger, 1965, p. 59). The joy of discovery, the commitment to remain open to one another’s ideas, and a temporary erasure of individual egos, were all necessary to their work, which transformed established views of the painterly surface. During their most intensely collaborative years, these two painters chose similar scenes and each incorporated innovations by the other into his own painting. Picasso later recalled: ‘Almost every evening I went to Braque’s studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas was not finished until both of us felt it was’ (Gilot and Lake, 1964, p. 76).

Even when alone, one uses the history of a tradition which has developed methods, practices and such which the individual has submitted themselves to before they push the boundaries of it. You don't tend to break new ground indepently of a great understanding of traditional forms.

But I would also agree that art expresses a deep insight of a person and it is difficult to dig through ones self over and over for ones craft. Louis CK once made a crude example of this process where he learn that George Carlin would throw away old jokes and start working on new ones. He said when you did this and it kept you fresh comedically, you had to go deeper into yourself to find new content, you couldn't rely on what you already dug up.

Regarding such expression as “universal mind” or “universal consciousness”, let’s not forget that they are just concepts attempting to provide an interpretation of reality. They are not reality itself, which is beyond our rational understanding and therefore beyond this discussion. We don’t even have to discuss whether they exist or not, just like we don’t have to discuss the existence or non-existence of god. They are attempts at interpretation.

Viewed from the individual point of view, they have psychological aspects in that the individual consciousness is not separate from the collective consciousness or from the universal consciousness, if we admit for one moment that such a thing does exist. From the ontological point of view, the universal mind permeates all things and if we transcend the duality of mind and matter, the mind becomes the universe itself. While according to some schools of thought the mind or consciousness is the product of the universe, according to others mind generates the universe; by combining the two we get a cyclic movement, which at least solves the problem of the infinite or finite universe.

The analogy here is that of the ocean in which we are like the waves appearing and disappearing on its surface. Our individual consciousness is temporal, it’ll go with the dissolution of our body after death, but that doesn’t mean the universe will cease to exist with our death. So there is something bigger than our consciousness, which we are part of.

The bottom line is that the dualistic rational mind cannot grasp nondual reality. It’s not made for that. Nagarjuna pushed to the outer limits of logic 2,000 years ago. Going beyond in physics, the arts, etc., requires intuition.

Indeed, all concepts act as such and aren't identical to reality but do help guide one's activity and sense of things. And I agree that reality is simply not able to be identical to the symbolic representation. But it does offer a description of reality, it allows a window into parts of it, as language isn't meaningfully created beyond it.

Well I asked about the ontology because the sort of dualistic split between subject and object is one which I think is understood in a triad.This doesn't result in a sense in which symbols become identical to reality or anything, but there is a more fruitful understanding when things are considered in mediation than a counterposing of signifiers to reality.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/subject-foundations.htm
Dichotomies and Triads
Hegel always took care to foreswear, somewhat counter-factually, any commitment to triads, Marx cared not a hoot for any such thing, but Peirce was insistent on the importance of the triadic relation. I side with Peirce on this issue. Wherever we see a relation, we look for the mediating term.

The dichotomous relationships which lie at the heart of positivist, structuralist and poststructuralist theory act, in my view, as a barrier to understanding. The dichotomy acts in two ways: firstly, in response to every proposition, it asks what is denied, excluded or reflected; which is all very well, but secondly, it splits the universe into two independent realms according to what is given and what is denied or reflected. As a result of the failure of the two worlds to be perfect mirror images of one another (there can be no final one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified), each then becomes a self-sustaining and meaningless tautology. The rupture of the world of activity into signifiers and signified is the archetypal case. Dichotomy is the logic of choice for the professional dogmatist, since by its means he can rule in a world composed entirely of text, unchallenged by events in the world beyond the text.

The Peircean or Hegelian trichotomy on the other hand, responds to every relation, every contrast and every meaning by asking what mediates the relation. This has the effect of everywhere generating yet new avenues for enquiry, and instead of rupturing the field of activity into mutual alien and meaningless realms, makes connections between what was otherwise separated. Fichte’s notion of activity, mediating between subject and object, did away with dualism of Kant’s transcendental subject and thing-in-itself. Although Fichte’s activity was not itself mediated activity, it was Fichte’s insight which opened the way for the Hegelian and Peircean systems. The sign-object-interpretant trichotomy is the archetypal case.

And in the Marxist tradition, the manner in which one access the universal (not strictly reality itself in it's entirety but that which has been appropriated and represented) is through the mediation of tools/signs within social activities. So you have a triad of individual persons, universals as signs/tools and projects or social activities in which the individual acts within.
And this is what exemplifies Hegel's absolute spirit or geist, the sort of social consciousness that isn't reducible to each and every individual consciousness and thus the nonsense of those who try to treat individual consciousness as additive when it comes to the ideal existence of things which are in fact material (that is objective matter).
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htm
The key concept which comes out of at the end of Donald’s enquiry is the concept of ‘extended mind’ – the combination of material artefacts and mnemonic and computational devices with the internal cognitive apparatus of human beings who have been raised in the practice of using them. Human physiology, behaviour and consciousness cannot be reproduced by individual human beings alone; we are reliant for our every action on the world of artefacts, with its own intricate inherent system of relations. Theory is the ideal form of the structure of material culture. Every thought, memory, problem solution or communication, is effected by the mobilisation of the internal mind of individuals, and the external mind contained within human culture. Taken together, the internal and external mind is called ‘extended mind’. This is what Hegel called Geist, an entity in which the division between subjectivity and objectivity is relative and not absolute.

Humans are animals which have learnt to build and mobilise an extended mind. This has proved to be a powerful adaption. Individuals in this species stand in quite a different relation to the world around them than the individuals of any other extant species. Understanding of the psyche of the modern individual depends on understanding the process of development of a human being growing up in such a culture...

And as mentioned above, this approach doesn't require specific attention to the absolute distinction between mind and matter as it focuses on the relative relation between object and subject which are in interaction.
Hegel changed the traditional epistemological gap: https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
Although Nature is always the starting point, Hegel has shifted the focus from relations between human individuals and the material world outside of thought and human life, to the relations between human beings, each other and their own culture. Cultural products are constructed from Nature which remains the ultimate source of human needs, but the understanding of human life means making that life the centre of attention. People living as individuals in Nature is an impossible myth and cannot function as the presupposition for philosophy. Our relation to Nature is mediated by a division of labour within the community and means of production. In Hegel’s terminology, what mediates between the individual person and Nature is Geist (Spirit) or in the terminology of this very early work, the Idea, made up of collaborative forms of activity, a constellation of artefacts and human beings themselves.

Epistemology was posed initially in terms of the relation between the consciousness of an individual and Nature outside of and independently of human activity, and presented intractable problems. When posed in terms of the relation of individuals to their own culture, the situation is transformed. Of course people understand how their own culture works. How could they not, for ‘understanding’ is nothing other than formulating an idea in the terms of one’s own culture? The point then becomes the deeper understanding of the dynamics of culture and the relation of individuals to their own culture and that of others.
...
To recap, what constitutes a Gestalt is:

- a way of thinking or ideology (with the meaning it attaches to forms of activity and artefacts such as words and symbols),
- a way of life, or social formation (forms of practical activity, including the institutions and forms of practical activity in production, communication, family life, government and so on), and
- a constellation of material culture (including the language, art, literature, technology, land and so on).

Each of these three aspects constitutes the others and mediates between them. There is no mind/matter dichotomy here. Hegel never took up a position on epistemology or ontology. He took each of the various systems of epistemology and ontology to be part of a formation of consciousness. All those dichotomies which had tortured the minds of earlier generations of philosophers he simply made the subject of internal critique in tracing the contradictory development of the formations of consciousness. Questions about whether a thought-form corresponds to a natural object outside of thought, interested Hegel only in the sense of asking: under what conditions do people ask questions like that? For Hegel, subject and object always exist in a mutually constituting, more or less adequate, relation to one another. The question is not the correspondence of the subject to the object, but of the capacity of a mutually constituting subject/object, that is, a formation of consciousness, to withstand sceptical criticism. Under the impact of sceptical attack the subject and object will both change. The object changes because it is constituted by the subject, and vice versa. The Gestalt is a subject/object which understands its own activity and its own production according to its own thinking.


And as a very long quote but one which I think does beautifully to help depict this relation between universal, particular and individual.
Spoiler: show
[/url]https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/development-concept.htm[/url]
One of the most challenging aspects of Hegel’s Concept is the three moments of the Concept – the Individual, the Universal and the Particular, but it is just this which makes Hegel’s approach so powerful. The moments of the abstract (or subjective) Concept are the structure of a concept both in its objective and subjective aspects, and is therefore well suited to represent the concept as a subject/object, that is to say, as an integral unit of a formation of consciousness. These three moments are the minimal representation of a concept. Let us explain this idea, using an example, presenting the idea in terms of objective relations.

In such an objective view, the Individual is some individual action or a thing, such as the Japanese Maple tree growing outside my window. It is a finite thing which will one day exist no more, but at the moment it is located at a specific latitude and longitude, as a concrete individual thing, it is more than my thought of it. The concept of Andy’s Japanese Maple presupposes this Individual thing.

It is however my Japanese Maple, because of its location, property rights prevailing in Australia and a purchase I made a few years ago. It is a Japanese Maple because of the practice of domestication of trees, their culture and sale in nurseries and the taxonomic practices in botany and the use of the English language. Aside from all this, which you could say is the decisive proof of it being ‘Andy’s Japanese Maple’, I could just point to it, or describe it to you and with these practices establish that it is indeed ‘Andy’s Japanese Maple’. All these that I have just described are the social practices whereby this Individual tree is made a Particular, that is, is identified as a tree in a specific location occupying a particular place in the property relations and in botanical taxonomy. They are objective to me personally, but they are normative practices which are meaningful only in a given social formation. This tree is a Particular tree, different from the Japanese Maple up the road in a particular way, even if it were identical in every respect. This particularity differs from individuality in that it belongs to on-going forms of social practice which outlive the tree and will outlive me, which bind it into a social fabric which stretches down through history. It is not so much the actual practices of pointing or writing, but the extent to which such social practices are normative. For example, you cannot make the tree your tree or make it a silver birch, simply by saying so. This action is true only insofar as it is normative, and is supported by the social system in which it exists.

But none of these relations are possible outside of the fact that a number of universal relations have been inherited from the past, which are moment by moment instantiated in words (or diagrams, maps, etc.) such as ‘tree’, ‘Japanese Maple’, ‘property’. It is possible to particularise this individual tree only thanks to relevant concepts being fixed in words and other symbols. The Universal is instantiated again and again in the uttering of the word as individual sound bites or text in appropriate social contexts. Words 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’. Otherwise I would look out the windows and maybe see patterns of green movement and no more. On the other hand, a future archaeologist can mentally recreate these universals provided only that they can mentally reconstruct the relevant social and material circumstances. But they cannot bring back this individual tree, and once sufficient time has passed the social practices which made this individual tree a particular tree will eventually pass away too.

So we see in the instance of this simple object concept, of the type considered as an archetypal example in the Psychology of Concepts considered above, that the concept can only exist through the coincidence of three moments: Individual, Particular and Universal. We saw that

. the Individual is each concrete individual thought, action or thing;
. the Particular is some normative social practice; and
. the Universal is a word or symbol which unifies it all under a concept.

If I have never heard of trees, if I am excluded from property rights in this country, if I have never been introduced to this type of domesticated tree, or if such property rights and botanical practices never existed, I could not form the concept of ‘Andy’s Japanese Maple tree’. More generally, something is what it is, so far as human activity is concerned, only by means of the identity of Individual, Universal and Particular. This differs from the formal approach chiefly in that the relation of the Individual to the Universal is mediated by the Particular, that is, the meaning of words is determined by social practice. But for Hegel the converse relations are equally valid.

My Japanese Maple tree is not my Japanese Maple tree because it resembles others of my trees or any such thing, or because of any contingent attributes of the vision from my window; it is what it is because of the specific identity of Particular, Universal and Individual described above.

It doesn’t matter whether you have in mind a material object of which someone has a thought within some formation of consciousness, or you have in mind the thought of that object as constituted within that formation of consciousness. In either case, the same relations of Individual, Universal and Particular apply: an object thought of, or the thought of an object. This is not to say that the object and a thought of it are the same, but such a distinction is indicative of movement and contradiction within the formation of consciousness. Such contradictions are manifested in the non-identity of universal, particular and individual.

In fact, Individual, Particular and Universal never completely coincide. There is always a degree of dissonance between them. The meaning of a word is never quite the same from one context to another, what people do is never quite normative, people never quite manage to say what they mean or do what they say. So when we say that a concept is the identity of Particular, Individual and Universal, we recognise that such an identity never exists. So a concept is always to one extent or another imperfect and riven with contradictions.

But it ecemplfies the dynamism of Hegel's logic over that of formal logic. It is a logic that is open to change with the world itself and the conditions of people's lives today. It doesn't have to be ideological in terms of being a closed and eternal system not subject to change.

So in this context, the individual consciousness is indeed inserpable from the whole of their culture and community. They wouldn't be human other than biologically.
But this is a very distinct sense as it's based on a huaminized culture not a nature independent of man and the universal mind or consciousness relates to human culture and it' activity, not to all of reality except to the extent that it has become the subject of human activity.
SO I think we perhaps agree in that emphasis of the cyclical movement between subject and object, as I stated in Marx's example of the inserpability of man from nature, man changes nature and thus changes himself and continues to change nature and thus himself in an ongoing process. As he meets his biological needs, he develops new social needs and relations.

ANd I think I perhaps agree in that scientific development requires intuition although I would emphasize that it follows a rational process, one which is outlined by Hegel but which doesn't mean a schematic form pushed upon reality, but one that gives the outlines of how things develop but the content of which is always particular to that area. THe point is to adopt Hegel's dialectical method rather than his system.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm
In addressing the genesis of thought and language in human individuals, it would have been very tempting for an admirer of dialectics to seek a solution in some kind of reworking of Hegel’s genesis of the Notion in his Logic. But heeding Engels’ advice, Vygotsky utilised the dialectical method, and did so consistently materialistically. Whereas Hegel provided many insights in his analysis of the history of philosophy on the basis of the system of Logic, and his system continues to provide a valuable approach to the critique of philosophical method, the result of Vygotsky’s application of the dialectical method to the genesis of thought and language in the development of the individual human being is a series of concepts quite incommensurate with the stages of the Logical Idea which populate the pages of the Logic.

And so it should be! Hegel advises that: “... this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject matter itself and its content”.
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Unthinking Majority wrote:In my university years my philosophy professor once told me that philosophers (British/American, French, Ancient Greek etc) have traditionally been careful to consider what would happen if their philosophies, especially political philosophies, were taken to an extreme. They were careful in their writings over the centuries, to take responsibility for what their ideas could be used for, good or bad.

Many key German thinkers and philosophers have not taken this same care. German thinkers are radical and revolutionary and dangerous. Nietzsche was dangerous. Marx was dangerous. Hitler and his inner circle were dangerous. Martin Luther was dangerous. Trump is dangerous, following in the great German tradition and his father's nutty teachings.

That's not to say there isn't useful value to come out of the writings of Marx and Nietzsche, but these are radical far-left and far-right thinkers that need to studied with caution because many people have taken some of their thoughts to the extreme and/or twisted them and caused some of the most suffering and death of the last 100 years.

I'm really tired of German thought leaders. English (of the British variety) philosophers have been FAR more reasonable and productive over the centuries. Trump is a sad reminder.

Interesting points you have made. I myself am by and large a German-American, as you could probably surmise by my username. And as one might expect, given my posting on this forum, am also passionately interested in philosophy, especially of the political variety. So this question really is of personally pertinent concern to me. Are we ethnic Germans on the whole predisposed by our over all character towards hardline fanatical extremism? The first counterpoint I would like to make is that such a hypothesis seems to me to be the very inverse of what was posited by the Anglophobic German intellectual Werner Sombart , in regards to the concept of the national spirit (Volksgeist) . It would seem that @Unthinking Majority feels that we the Deutsch are possessed by the spirit of ideological extremism. And while I don't wish to contribute to anti-Teutonic prejudice, especially since I am myself of German heritage, I will humor the matter. I think that a possible factor that might contribute to a possible tendency towards such various fiercely opinionated worldviews is our rigid personality . It is my impression, from both my own introspection and from watching YouTube videos by Germans about the traits and culture of the German , that Germans are inclined to be obsessed with having a sound stable order to life, to the point of approaching being autistic. If you were to compare the traits of those on the autistic spectrum with those personality traits which predominate among Germans, you will notice an overlap. A number of us Deutschers , such as some might even say myself, might even cross the line into actually being autistic. We tend to have an abrupt blunt manner, and stubborn dedication to our preferred point of view. Such a strongly outspoken steadfast conviction of opinion can of course at times be a virtue, however I can also see how it could lead to a lack of reasonable consideration of both the perspective of others, and the potential shortcomings of our own ideology. But is there really no essential difference between my own left-wing populism and my father's right-wing populism ? Are we really just two different sides of the same hardcore coin? Is it nothing more than the same fervent spirit manifested in different incarnations, shaped by a gap of generations? I simply leave it to other people to discern whether or not I have gone too far in my mentality, and if I might have developed a pathological personality. The only judge that is worthy to judge a person, or for that matter a people, besides one's own self, and God , if God is to be thought to exist, is history. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can only hope that the fruits of my thoughts are found to be good, and that if there be found to be any faults they will be be corrected and forgiven. In writing down my philosophical musings, which I will link to below, for any interested parties to read, I had come to realize that a selective drawing from portions of it could feed into on one hand anarchism, and on the other hand fascism. So that's why within the section on my political thoughts, I wrote that both libertarianism and totalitarianism should in my opinion be rejected in favor of communitarianism. While I didn't want to push my own particular political bias onto my audience , and instead wanted my words of wisdom to have a wider appeal, of timeless value, I certainly was concerned that some passages in isolation could be taken to a toxic extreme. One in which both the black bloc and blackshirts alike could draw inspiration, even long after my own life's expiration. I think that I , like all of those who have gone on before me, such as Marx, Hegel, among most of the others mentioned in the original post, have just wanted to contribute to the creation of a happy nation , where we can all join in the dance of the progression of human society throughout history, to reference a couple songs listed below in the end notes. Lastly, we thinkers of German heritage didn't develop our philosophy in a vacuum. We have taken inspiration from a number of foreign figures, past and present. Even Hitler drew inspiration from such writers as most notably the British Houston Stewart Chamberlain . So you cannot rightly solely blame Germans for unsound attitudes. Book of Marmion , An Essay on Werner Sombart , and his Concept of "Volksgeist" , "Tanz Mit Laibach" English lyrics
#15255381
Deutschmania wrote:. Such a strongly outspoken steadfast conviction of opinion can of course at times be a virtue, however I can also see how it could lead to a lack of reasonable consideration of both the perspective of others, and the potential shortcomings of our own ideology. But is there really no essential difference between my own left-wing populism and my father's right-wing populism ? Are we really just two different sides of the same hardcore coin?

Maybe you hit it right there: Germans are hardcore. Intense people it seems. Russians are pretty hardcore too.
#15255606
Unthinking Majority wrote:1. True. But he lived in a time when science didn't know anything about genetics, and to my knowledge he didn't use it to push racism. He's not Hitler.

Good God Nazi demonisation has reached its depths when you start to argue that Hitler was worse than Plato.

We face two great demonisations

1 The demonisation of the Nazis

2 The demonisation of slavery in the United States and the Jim Crow compromise that succeeded it.

Now some people want to make out they are the same phenomena, others want to make out that they are completely different. Libertarians want to make out that America is the antithesis of the Nazis, the very opposite of National Socialism and Communism, which to the libertarian, if not identical are very similar.

Racism in the ancient world was endemic, extreme, murderous and when necessary genocidal. The slaves we tend to hear about were the exceptions the educated slaves or minor celebrities like the gladiator Spartacus. Slavery for most slaves, particularly those that worked in mining and other primary production was utterly brutal as bad or in many case worse than a typical slave in early nineteenth century United States. if a group was considered a threat such as the Carthaginians, the ancients had no moral qualms about genociding them.

There have been 3 types of racism:

1 Cultural racism, between different tribal / national / ethnic / religious groups. For most of our three hundred thousand year human existence this was the only form of racism. Mostly it was between groups that were morphologically identical. However these groups do everything possible to make themselves look different. We see this in more recent times with say the Sikhs, with biker gangs, the Bloods and the Crips or the fights between the Mods and the Rockers.

2 Socio-economic class racism. This emerged late a few thousand years ago, but the aristocracy most certainly considered themselves a race apart, often descended from God's, or at the very least anointed by the Gods, and were considered so by many in the lower classes. Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century was still an apartheid state, but an apartheid based on socio-economic class not morphology.

3 Morphological racism this only became important with the European break out in the late fifteenth century, but in the pathetic fantasy world of the Liberal this has now become the only racism that ever existed.
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