sus
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Ok phew I didn't miss anything, thanks
An Emergent Order
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sus
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And he punches back!
sus
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Lords of the Fall
It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying…
www.ecosophia.net
luka
Well-known member
Brilliant example of 1st year undergrad writingLords of the Fall
It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying…www.ecosophia.net
yes but the idea that history has no progress and just goes by contingency is also a foundational framework, it can't be proved in and of itself, without, again, going back to the thing-in-itself of Kant. so you then end up refuting yourself. you are essentially arguing that society can have a consciousness of itself via contingency, but also that to have a self-consciousness is teleology. You see how even you can't make the contradiction symmetrical?
'matter' is a human word, yes. Such is inescapable. There is no thing one can call a particle of matter-qua-matter in and of itself. I have never denied that, hence me qualifying repeatedly that materialism is an anti-philosophical tendancy within philosophy.
But where you struggle is that you want to pose the question of whether thought precedes being or vice-versa. In actuality thought is an property of human being and both modify each other. In that sense, yes, we are of course limited. But the alternative is to relapse into absolute unknowingness, which, again, is also a mental abstraction carried out by thought, an anti-social abdication of responsibility in fact. The point of experimental research is not to abandon our human categories (which are mutable) but to sharpen their clarity. If this was not so, if everything was based on chance, as I believe you are intending to say, then nothing could be connected to anything and you would have the idea of randomness (which is largely a philosophical problem.) Pure randomness, again, is a human concept.
Now as to the matter of contingency, this makes your position even more untenable as that which comes before must be determining in the final instance.
no, the communist acquisition of central power has been tried and it regressed to capitalistic forms, whether it was a true or false communism is a moral judgment which can be best left to the bourgeois — there are only true and false communists as political currents with men personifying them (who can or cannot revise the programatic tasks.) To speak of true or false communism in terms of the scientific tendancy is sheer bumbling insanity, either communism is correct or it is not, and noone has been able to unequivocally refute the idea that capitalism tends to the socialisation of labour, suppression of the freedom of the producer, etc.
If I may be so bold as to be imprudent and make an assumption, based on your style of argumentation, you seem to possess a habit which is lamentable (what the kids would call edgy) of reading things into arguments that they do not say.
And even then the communist acquisition of state power cannot be said to be an unequivocal failure, as it inaugurated the anti-feudal revolutions. People like Mao, Ho, etc were great revolutionaries, just not for the proletariat.
In the russian example, for instance, the alternative would have been the partition of russia and its territories between England, France and Japan, and the retention of pre-capitalist relations. Again, even failure is not as symmetrical as you think it is, it must be interpenetrated with a degree of success. Dissensus is not reddit, albeit @luka 's slovenly lack of zealotry of late has threatened to allow biscuits and co. to turn it into a british analog.
germaphobian
Well-known member
Contingency can be observed empirically, the changes of history, collapse and failure of communism, breakdowns of old systems and birth of new ones and so on; thing-in-itself is something that's outside empirical observations.
you and @Mr. Tea
people keep saying religious argument as if this is some kind of criticism when it is anything but.
For the contemporary liberal atheist, if God doesn't exist, nothing is permitted, and hence there is a return back to religion as reflected through philosophical atheism. Obviously the return is not complete, and hence we use the term reflection. It is like a shadow which haunts. Religious people will say atheism is a kind of religion, which in its etymological meaning is obviously rubbish, but contemporary liberalism possesses religious aspects. For you and tea religion is just bonkers ideas people have. Neither of you choose to ask how said bonkers ideas come about.
yes, but empirical observation provides no inherent ground for narritive. you just have a mass of data, you have to go back to the mutable human categories of thought to make sense of any of it. I know you want to have social sciences standing above all social relations as some kind of neutral arbiter, but this is make believe.
Even in bourgeois universities the first thing a historian learns is that history is *written* not compiled.
Someone like David Irving observed the empirical recording of contingency, and this still led him to write reprehensible and falsified history negating Hitler's responsibility for the holocaust, precisely because his narritives were motivated by certain political biases. History, like all things, is a battlefield.
or as even his wiki page says
germaphobian
Well-known member
contingency doesn' exclude the fact that systems are interconnected, that they influence each other or that they evolve and collide; it only means that their interactions and mutations follow no predetermined necessity. in short,, things could always have turned out otherwise.
you have completley the opposite view
yes, and your statement that 'things could have turned out otherwise' is a statement of causal determinism itself. The fact that they didn't means that systems do not follow random courses of action (which again, is an incoherent proposition.) to make evaluations of why x happened instead of y is to make a statement of determination.
The only way I can see you can uphold your view is the multiverse theory, which I am open to on principle — just like the existence of alien lifeforms (which i cannot and would not want to discount.) I would, however, take issue that these universes replicate the same timelines as us, I think that is an assumption that is overzealous.
germaphobian
Well-known member
Why do you think contingency excludes laws of causation? it's not randomness, that's a different concept entirely.
contingency doesn't exclude laws of causation, it's that all contingencies are causal and are the product of other contingent causes, and thus determined, in the broadest sense.
Hume tried to refute this by saying causality is just a mental abstraction with no real world referent, but then one has to deny the material world entirely, because our senses cannot provide accurate mental representations at all. Even Judith Butler must congregate for a dump of the faecal nature, and I can not propell myself to Brussels via flight after jumping outside of an open window in London. in spite of the idea that I have convinced myself that somehow my lack of wings is a sensory deception.
germaphobian
Well-known member
hume's skepticism was epistemological not ontological. he was talking about how we interfere causality from constant conjunction, not denying brute and well known facts about material reality.
yes, for Hume it was epistemological, but conjunction is causation its broadest sense, even if it does not appear to us as being so. Coincidences are a case of incomplete knowledge (something I have never denied.) Hence why some philosophy departments in England will use Hume to justify the brain-in-a-vat theory, even if Hume's scepticism was ultimately directed against religious dogma.
It reminds me of something funny that Plekhanov recounts (I don't have the reference to hand but I think it's in the 5th chapter of Monist view of history) Hume once quipped at a dinner in France that he had not met a single atheist. and Holbach responds that there are some 16-17 seated at the table. Hume was mostly a religious indifferentist, and thus left his epigones to use his philosophy in different ways. Hence Kant uses it to justify a practical religion based on categorical imperative.
But incomplete knowledge (and as a rule all knowledge has to be incomplete) doesn't negate the ontology we construct to make sense of the material world. Otherwise we couldn't function in it.
Think about the difference between being and non-being. Now we can take a piece of chalk and say it exists. We can then destroy it and say now it does not exist. Very well. But does that mean we have justified existence or being-qua-being as such? no, because there is nothing to justify. the difference between being and non-being is ultimately nothing.
If you want to claim that I am a prisoner of my dialectical framework, then you must concede in good faith that you are a prisoner of language and cannot escape language, and absolute unmediated non-linguistic access to knowledge is not possible for you either. But then, you are also inside of a framework!
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
You know, you could, if you wanted to, actually explain your little gnomic non-sequiturs like this, and "Brexit is ultra-Bremain" etc., rather than just stating them as if they were self-evident, which always makes me suspect you're just hoping no-one will call your bluff.
Well that's not true at all, at least not for me. Not being religious myself doesn't mean I'm not interested in it, or in its origins and evolutions. I read The Golden Bough a few years back and it was a blast.
germaphobian
Well-known member
the whole point of his was exactly that conjunction is NOT a causation. causation as a necessary connection is a mental habit we project on regular observations not an intrinsic feature of reality.