I wonder what her views on hamas are now though. 15 years ago she would be on campus protesting, there is no doubt about it! but did she get boring and start collecting bob dylan records?
An Emergent Order
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I wonder what her views on hamas are now though. 15 years ago she would be on campus protesting, there is no doubt about it! but did she get boring and start collecting bob dylan records?
germaphobian
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why must your asymmetrical contradictions resolve progressively toward higher syntheses, if not because you have smuggled hegel's teleological absolute into materialism?
pattycakes_
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third often just says stuff
germaphobian
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because if you concede contradictions can resolve in non-teleological ways doesn’t your ‘asymmetrical dialectics’ collapse into simple description of change—not a law of progress towards global communism?
again, I do not believe so:
Heavy objects move downward. Objects that do not move downward are not heavy: is the weight of the pendulum heavy or not?
This is what the old aristotelians struggled with, and they could not resolve it because they merely proposed negations as affirmations.
But we know that a heavy object accelerates when it goes downwards, and decelerates when it goes upwards.
Thus we can now say that the pendulum is always a heavy object, and that the original question was erroneously posed, but we can also now say that heaviness is the cause of acceleration, of an increased velocity, not of motion.
Now it would be clearly absurd to say that Galileo figured this out by practicing the dialectic (that would be a cold formalism) the dialectic in and of itself cannot tell us the new point at which a negation as (determinate) negation arises, that can only be established by experimental research. The dialectic is not a substitute for research, it is a destructivist power that shatters the once great and supposedly immutable forms of thought.
Here Marx shattering Hegel is important. What Marx gets from Hegel is not teleology, but that there are no fixed categories, that all categories inter-penetrate each other, that everything in motion reciprocally influences everything else. Modern science would agree with this, and it did this through experimental research (not through Hegel, thank God!) but then becomes agnostic on the question of history, of human societies, and the erroneously labelled 'social sciences' which are neither social nor scientific.
In the old metaphysical method, the contradictions can neither mix nor touch. But just as when one mixes in cooking one flabour predominates and also additionally a new taste is formed, in scientific research, one proceeds by taking hypotheses and their potential falsifications, and then arriving at an understanding.
If your argument is that Hegel dissolves the logical categories in the theological absolute, then yes, I would agree with that, but that is where he pushes idealism to its limits. He wants to speak of multilateral relation of all things, but then cannot overcome the limitations of God. Ideas exist for us and by way of us, and thus the search for the absolute idea or the absolute truth cannot be carried out. because he only starts with the idea, of consciousness and self-consciousness.
For scientists (or let us say researchers) consciousness has to come later, truth first must come through initial misrecognition (all experiments must misrecognise) then it is only through an evaluation of the past that a greater clarity and understanding of it arises. Precisely because our mind must perceive the past in its relations to the passage of time.
again, if we reduced dialectic to the purely logical abstract method of Hegel, you are right. But when we use it to think through the actual changes taking place in society, we can see the tendancy to global communism already being extant. The only way you could argue against this is to postulate a return to some kind of feudalism (and I'm not sure how you could do this convincingly without resorting to near planetary destruction.) This is not completely impossible, such a regression could take place, but it would have to be based on unimaginable and colossal failures, failures neither you or I can at the moment can anticipate, and you would actually end up having to invent an absurd amount of speculation. The threats of AI and the matrix don't count, these are childs play for maladroit bohemians. you would have to think on the scale of interplanetary nuclear war.
Otherwise, you would have to argue that capitalism begot feudalism and capitalism negated back into feudalism. So basically no evolution at all, just a constant regression. Even your argument earlier about increased free market mechanisms improving living standards in Eastern Europe (something I don't disagree with) would have to be some kind of progressive teleology per your analysis, no?
This is not an accusation, you know. Many spectacular so-called 'geniuses' have turned out to be colossal idiots of the highest order. If I am a bumbling fool, then this is the ultimate compliment, for me. It means I'm getting good inputs from the matrix and giving it good outputs.
oh for the crying love of Simone Piles, what feels right to you is irrelevant. It is impossible to carry out any form of research, let alone make any argument, without eliminating, and then eliminating at a new affirmative point again. You cannot just have free floating multiplicity in the ether, even physicists don't think like that anymore!
sus
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I'm an intellectual. Thank you.
william_kent
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version
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What I mean by realistic is that their emphasis on multiplicity feels closer to how I experience things. I'm taking it as description, not a 'guide to action' as you put it. We're talking at cross purposes again.
version
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Basically, we've been discussing whether various frameworks like postmodernism, Marxism, etc. can tell us anything about the world or whether they merely describe themselves.
germaphobian
Well-known member
you claim to reject foundationalism and fixed categories, but you insist that ‘matter as motion’ is ‘undeniably correct’ and exactly that sort of category. if you truly reject foundationalism - matter-in motion can’t serve as your ground any more than "consciousness" could.
and on what independent grounds can you prove that matter-in-motion precedes consciousness, if any such proof already assumes its own conclusion?
and it also assumes that the way we find out something (epistemology, basically) justifies the ontological claim that matter comes first or how things REALLY ARE.
i mean, it's kind of pointless, because you will keep falling back into this contradiction, because it's a in-built glitch that no theory can prove its own axioms, it's own foundationas and its own fundamental distinctions (matter/consciousness); that is - step outside itself to observe itself.
problem is that you present this point of view a sort of ultimate vantage point from which you can see the order of things somehow OBJECTIVLEY, but you are just doing it from within certain framework which already determines how you perceive and what distinctions - more or less arbitrarily - you choose to apply. meaning, it can only be correct if it stays within its own framework.
germaphobian
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no, because those improvements (not just in Eastern Europe, but in many parts of the globe) were due to contingency, as a side effecy you could say. it's not any sort of dialectical necessity or progress
that's exactly the bigger point, that you see these contingencies (and predict their future developments), because you are looking at them from within your dialectical, hegelian framework, which, again, determins how you see them.
germaphobian
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i'm not indulging in any kind of apologetics about the beauties (or horrors) of free market either. it's just a dumb, amoral (but not immoral as many lefties moralize it) mechanism that tends to produce higher and higher general standarts of living wherever applied. Obviously it creates a difference, but even when people complain about the downsides, and i think Zizek has pointed it out, the complaint is always that there are some who are excluded from the workings of the market, who don't have enough access to it, the complaint is not that they are being "exploited", but that they are not being exploited enough (precarious work - where you are not being exploited on a regular basis with clear rules and not for enough hours to make a decent wage, for example); so even in that way one admits how efficient the mechanism itself is.
germaphobian
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also, it would be silly to deny that capitalism could end up, through some sort of metamorphosis, turning us all into serfs, for example. but from my point of view - i cannot deny any possibilty imaginable, even global communism (although seems highly unlikley, at least i hope so)
