"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist"
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revol68
what, fucking what?
well thats just plain lies then isn't it.
Negri I can assure you holds Marx to be a materialist.
Fromm I can quote from right now.
"While Marx was in the philosophical sense a materialist in ontology,he was even really interested in such questions."
"This aspect of "materialism", marx's "materialist method" which distinguishes his view from that of hegel, involves the study of real economic and social life of man and of the influence of man's actual way of life on this thinking and feeling.
'In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven'"
Derrida, Habermas, debord and Zizek all stand in a materialist marixst tradition.
What you are doing is putting up a strawman "materialism" and then setting up your wanky idealism as the cure. This is a ridiculous position and one that would get you laughed out of any serious debate.
Negri I can assure you holds Marx to be a materialist.
Fromm I can quote from right now.
"While Marx was in the philosophical sense a materialist in ontology,he was even really interested in such questions."
"This aspect of "materialism", marx's "materialist method" which distinguishes his view from that of hegel, involves the study of real economic and social life of man and of the influence of man's actual way of life on this thinking and feeling.
'In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven'"
Derrida, Habermas, debord and Zizek all stand in a materialist marixst tradition.
What you are doing is putting up a strawman "materialism" and then setting up your wanky idealism as the cure. This is a ridiculous position and one that would get you laughed out of any serious debate.
revol68 said:
Sir, you are to Marxist philosophy what Stephen Hawking is to speed-skating. Take your third-class degree from QUB out to the back garden, make it dig its own grave, neck-shot the useless bastard and send its mother a bill for the bullet. That's all its good for. You are good for even less.
revol68
what, fucking what?
I'll take that as 1 - 0 to me then, shall I?
So, go on provide me with a quote from any of those thinkers denying Marx as a materialist.
The fact that I got a third and you are an actual paid academic says more about academia than it does about me. Though it quite possibly says more about my ability to procasinate.
So, go on provide me with a quote from any of those thinkers denying Marx as a materialist.
The fact that I got a third and you are an actual paid academic says more about academia than it does about me. Though it quite possibly says more about my ability to procasinate.
revol68
what, fucking what?
so you think that some twat claiming Marx wasn't a materialist should be allowed go unchallenged.
As for mind change reality, what in the name of fuck are you talking about? Im guessing it's something to do with the ability of the mind to interact and effect reality, ie the concreteness of ideas. Of course the mind can interact with reality, they are both material. Consciousness is material.
As for mind change reality, what in the name of fuck are you talking about? Im guessing it's something to do with the ability of the mind to interact and effect reality, ie the concreteness of ideas. Of course the mind can interact with reality, they are both material. Consciousness is material.
Or maybe they`ve badly damaged the medium between body and spirit. 
Some evidence that conciousness isn`t matter based...well when was the last time you held your conciousness in your hand?
BTW the fact you have to revert to plain insults speaks volumes about you. Can you not hold an adult discussion?
Some evidence that conciousness isn`t matter based...well when was the last time you held your conciousness in your hand?
BTW the fact you have to revert to plain insults speaks volumes about you. Can you not hold an adult discussion?
My point is that you can`t pin conciousness on the brain when we don`t fully understand the brain in the first place.
My second point is that people have been experiencing conciousness seperately from their body since the dawn of man, whether it be OBEs, AP, NDE`s , hell even mushroom trips.
The fact you believe there is no evidence is testament to that fact that some concepts are beyond the reach of science. When was the last time you saw love depicted upon a graph? Does sciences failure to quantify love mean it doesn`t exist?
If you believe all emotions stem from neuroactivity would you like to forward a theory on why they evolved? Do animals therefore have emotions?
My second point is that people have been experiencing conciousness seperately from their body since the dawn of man, whether it be OBEs, AP, NDE`s , hell even mushroom trips.
The fact you believe there is no evidence is testament to that fact that some concepts are beyond the reach of science. When was the last time you saw love depicted upon a graph? Does sciences failure to quantify love mean it doesn`t exist?
If you believe all emotions stem from neuroactivity would you like to forward a theory on why they evolved? Do animals therefore have emotions?
On the subject of Marx(ism) and dialectics, I was reading a bit of Materialism and Imperio-Criticism over the weekend where Lenin was talking about 'a new dialectics of matter and energy' in relation to the experiments being conducted with radiation. This sounds suspiciously like a materialist dialectic to me.
Fruitloop said:
You're right, that's Lenin's attempt at it, inspired by Plekhanov. Philosophically, it was a howling, screaming failure. But politically, thanks to the Bolsheviks' ruthlessness, it was a great success, and was long enforced as Communist orthodoxy. We see its hold over junior apparatchiks like revol68 to this day. That fact is, in my view, the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, discrediting Marxism as a theory, and in practice leading directly to the Gulag. It is but a short step from materialism to genocide.
Fruitloop said:
There are too many to cite here, but the most egregious errors are as follows.
1. It claims that "dialectical materialism" was Marx's term for his own ideas. This proved an extremely tenacious falsehood.
2. It claims that atoms are solid matter.
3. It claims that "All knowledge comes from experience, from sensation, from perception." (International Publishers, 1927, 125)
4. It abandons the Hegelian concept of the "totality," to which Marx and even Plekhanov had remained faithful, in favor of a "theory of factors," which posits an irreconcilable opposition between "matter" and "ideas." This is undialectical.
If you take 'sensation' to mean the sensory organs and their interpretative apparatus in the brain then I pretty much agree, although this is once again said with the benefit of scientific knowledge of which Lenin couldn't possibly have been aware.
Marx said: "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."
Some statements from Lenin on the matter stem from the fact that he was keen to counter any notion that matter as a whole had sentient properties, a view that he considered a logical step too far. It seems to me he agrees with Engels when he (Lenin) says:
"As regards materialism, . . . we have already seen in the case of Diderot what the real views of the materialists are. These views do not consist in deriving sensation from the movement of matter or in reducing sensation to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one of the properties of matter in motion. On this question Engels shared the standpoint of Diderot."
And Engels himself said ""Life is the form of existence of albuminous substances", which indicates that he thought that he thought of life and consciousness as arising from particular types of matter - i.e. the complex proteinous structures that we think of as being the building blocks of life. That there are conceptual holes in the thinking of all of the above seems to me to be more to do with the science of their day, which was even further from understanding the physical mechanisms of thought and consciousness than we currently are, rather than any faulty reasoning on their part.
Fruitloop said:
No, its a logical problem, not a matter of insufficient scientific knowledge. It is impossible, logically, to separate the concepts of "matter" and "idea." These concepts determine each other, and each is meaningless, and indeed non-existant without the other. The attempt to think of one in isolation from the other is known as "reductionism." It is true that both Marx and Engels made statements that sound materialist, but (a) they were made in the course of diatribes against equally reductionist idealists, and (b) they retracted these statements numerous times.
Engels, for example, was famously driven, by the impossibility of holding to recuationist materialism, to invent the doctrine of "materialism in the last instance" in the Letter to Bloch: "According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is *ultimately* the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted..." Of course, this is merely a cop-out and won't really do. The truth is that Marxism is a dialectical philosophy, hence opposed to any kind of monism, whether idealist or materialist. In the Paris Manuscripts Marx says that his method "is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and consitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both.' (1975, 3:336) All serious subsequent Marxists have started from there (NB Lenin and Althusser are not serious Marxists in the philosophical sense).
I don't recognise the separation of matter and idea as a sufficient definition of reductionism. Scientific reductionism may ultimately also be ontological reductionism (i.e. monism) but only in a profoundly strange and counter-intuitive way (the vibrations of super-strings in a ten-dimensional reimannian manifold looks like a possible contender at the moment, but I'm not sure if this counts as a single 'substance' in the way that the question was originally construed)
In many respects modern science is already the synthesis of materialism (in its modern sense, i.e. the belief that everything is reducible to energy, forces, and the curvature of space) and dualism, in that although everything is reducible to matter, matter cannot be known apart from observation (which is itself material). I disagree that the advance of scientific knowledge isn't relevant, as I don't think that this is an idea that could have any scientific basis prior to Heisenberg.
In many respects modern science is already the synthesis of materialism (in its modern sense, i.e. the belief that everything is reducible to energy, forces, and the curvature of space) and dualism, in that although everything is reducible to matter, matter cannot be known apart from observation (which is itself material). I disagree that the advance of scientific knowledge isn't relevant, as I don't think that this is an idea that could have any scientific basis prior to Heisenberg.
Are you of the opinion that dialectics is incompatible with scientific reductionism, or is it just materialism (in the sense that I defined it above) that doesn't fit? It seems to me that it would be possible to have scientific reductionism without materialist monism (in fact although the objective is for a 'theory of everything' in physics, part of the picture at the moment is a suprising proliferation of fundamental particles).
Fruitloop said:
Well, the term "reductionism" has negative connotations--it typically involves "reducing" one pole of a dialectical opposition to the other, which is illogical. But it is certainly possible to have science without materialist monism. In fact, isn't it true that modern atomic physics no longer considers itself materialist, and prefers to be called "physicalist" instead? I have my own problems with the latter term too, but its definitely an advance on "materialism."
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