The Rational Proof of God's Existence
- Thread starter phildwyer
- Start date
- Status
I would have to continue to assert that financial value is our physical and mental health in alienated conditions along with certain laws. What makes this explanation unacceptable?phildwyer said:
As I see it alienated labor power is alienated in that it occurs in alienated conditions, not because it is no longer composed of labor power.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
phildwyer said:
And you told me that you went to live in the States when you were 23...but that doesn't mean anything, given the fact that none of us know how old you are. So how old are you phil? 25?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
nino_savatte said:
the mystic number!Older than that, at a guess.
I found your defence of those ideas pretty lacking, as apparently did several others on this thread. What's all of this 'effaces use-value stuff' anyway? I don't remember any of this from before. Pragmatism values models of the world according to their use-value, no?
I found your defence of those ideas pretty lacking, as apparently did several others on this thread. What's all of this 'effaces use-value stuff' anyway? I don't remember any of this from before. Pragmatism values models of the world according to their use-value, no?
Sorry if this has been asked before but I really couldn't face reading all those posts.
Why choose to use marxist dialectical materialism as a model for proving the existence of god? Seems a bit barmy to me - like using St Augustine to prove atheism. Or is that the clever bit?
Once again, if this has been fully discussed earlier please forgive me.
By the way, if there is a god, he certainly isn't arsed about us. He got bored ages back and is now probably relaxing in a cloud which he has turned into a magic shed. He is sitting back with a few Stellas and a DVD box set of Highway.
Laughing.
Why choose to use marxist dialectical materialism as a model for proving the existence of god? Seems a bit barmy to me - like using St Augustine to prove atheism. Or is that the clever bit?
Once again, if this has been fully discussed earlier please forgive me.
By the way, if there is a god, he certainly isn't arsed about us. He got bored ages back and is now probably relaxing in a cloud which he has turned into a magic shed. He is sitting back with a few Stellas and a DVD box set of Highway.
Laughing.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
What are your ideas on the concept of time, phil?
Time is a twat. Goes slow as fuck when everything is shite and depressing and miserable .....and then whizzes past when stuff is good. If that isn't god having a laugh, I don't know what is.
sorry i am not phyl but i doubt very much that he knows what time is either - if he had any answers to any of this stuff he would have Nobel Prizes coming out his arse and been on Trisha.
sorry i am not phyl but i doubt very much that he knows what time is either
- if he had any answers to any of this stuff he would have Nobel Prizes coming out his arse and been on Trisha.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Batley said:Time is a twat. Goes slow as fuck when everything is shite and depressing and miserable .....and then whizzes past when stuff is good. If that isn't god having a laugh, I don't know what is.
sorry i am not phyl but i doubt very much that he knows what time is either
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
two quick things about this thread:
this proof isn't, and it's not rational either.
this proof isn't, and it's not rational either.
118118 said:
I was just idly wondering where it was that phild was sneaking in his conclusion as an assumption - and you come up with a candidate.
So: assert that the labour power is material and value is transcendental, and you have a basis for something very much like the "ontological proof" - which is a sleight of hand conducted by taking "it is possible that there is a god" as an axiom,
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Pickman's model said:
Shouldn't that be "mystick"?
parallelepipete
Aelod cysylltiol y Taliban Cymraeg
fractionMan
Custom Title
Rational theor-aye! *gets coat*parallelepipete said:
Maidmarian
Stubborn Socialist
Ooooooooh! I do hope not ! 
118118 said:
If by "alienated conditions" you mean private ownership of the means of production, I can't agree. Labour-power is alienated when it is represented in financial form, no matter what other conditions pertain. However, only under capitalism would there be a motive to so represent labour-power, for only under capitalism does finanancial value become valuable *in itself,* without reference to what can be purchased with it. Onbly under capitalism does financial value become an independent, autonomous power with, among other things, the power to *reproduce.* Only under capitalism does financial value come *alive.*
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
was that mockery?
Fruitloop said:
Pragmatism values truths according to their *utility,* not their "use-value." As I've said before, "use-value" is inherent in the body of the object: it is an essential property of the object. As you'll recall, exchange-value is an idea, a concept, imosed upon the object (the cow qua-value-of-lamb). A market society abstracts exchange-value into the form of financial value, and imposes this artificial value on natural objects. To the degree that the market dominates society, use-value is effaced and we see *only* exchange-value. This means that belief in essential truth and reality evaporate and are replaced by relativisitic "hyper-reality" in which trueh becomes, as the pragmatists and capitalists tell us, what "works."
Are we ready to move on now?
I'm getting off the God-bus, I think.
I think in ascribing an independent existence to financial value you're making the same mistake that Wittgenstein identified in the Tractatus, i.e. the assumption that because we see things as relating to each other there must be some substance, phlogiston-like, that is common to both of them, when in fact all you have is a system of usages; and that it would be better to concentrate on the way that actual things are really used rather than building hypothetical castles in the air.
I also don't think that your thumbnail genealogy of scientific thinking and capitalism amounts to a critique, as such - and I don't see how there could be such a thing without standing so far outside our current episteme as to reject an enormous amount of the fascinating and detailed picture of the world that has been built up over the last few centuries. If you're going to genealogise then do it properly - at what point does scientific rationality depart from what you would regard as the truth? Or is it an intrinsically flawed endeavour?
It's ironic that you criticise exchange as symptomatic of capitalistic ideology, when the token-like way that terms in your exposition seem to be infinitely replaceable is philosophizing qua exchange par excellence - as an example we now have a new category of 'utility' which is I think making its first appearance in order to account for the slightly wacky concept of use-value under which we are presently labouring. What I also find unnerving about this reading of Marx is that it appears to have been emasculated of any practical implications it might have politically - what it needs is a bracing gust of Benjamin's 'crude thinking', IMHO.
I think in ascribing an independent existence to financial value you're making the same mistake that Wittgenstein identified in the Tractatus, i.e. the assumption that because we see things as relating to each other there must be some substance, phlogiston-like, that is common to both of them, when in fact all you have is a system of usages; and that it would be better to concentrate on the way that actual things are really used rather than building hypothetical castles in the air.
I also don't think that your thumbnail genealogy of scientific thinking and capitalism amounts to a critique, as such - and I don't see how there could be such a thing without standing so far outside our current episteme as to reject an enormous amount of the fascinating and detailed picture of the world that has been built up over the last few centuries. If you're going to genealogise then do it properly - at what point does scientific rationality depart from what you would regard as the truth? Or is it an intrinsically flawed endeavour?
It's ironic that you criticise exchange as symptomatic of capitalistic ideology, when the token-like way that terms in your exposition seem to be infinitely replaceable is philosophizing qua exchange par excellence - as an example we now have a new category of 'utility' which is I think making its first appearance in order to account for the slightly wacky concept of use-value under which we are presently labouring. What I also find unnerving about this reading of Marx is that it appears to have been emasculated of any practical implications it might have politically - what it needs is a bracing gust of Benjamin's 'crude thinking', IMHO.
- Status
Similar threads
