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  • Comrade_Improving
    1·
    1 month ago

    It is very interesting tactic to start your comment saying that I’m “using a strawman argument” and then proceed into an attempt to invalidate my arguments by attacking the notion that the subjective denies the objective, or vice-versa. I’ve never said such a thing and not only that, but the quote I made from Lenin in my last comment claims the opposite.

    V. Lenin - On the Question of Dialectics

    The distinction between subjectivism (scepticism, sophistry, etc.) and dialectics, incidentally, is that in (objective) dialectics the difference between the relative and the absolute is itself relative. For objective dialectics there is an absolute within the relative.

    What I’ve actually been claiming since the beginning of this discussion is that our subjective knowledge does reach the objective, even if imperfectly, it contains part of it, so the difference between a Dialectical internal contradiction and a common external one isn’t “is just a matter of perspective”, it isn’t subjective, it is objective, because the internal contradiction belongs to the thing-in-itself, not to our perception of it. Our knowledge of them is “limited by our own subjective apprehension of that system” but they still exist beyond it and beyond us as well, which is why they are objective, as you said: “If you never studied physics and can’t comprehend the atoms it doesn’t mean the atoms don’t exist”

    V. Lenin - Philosophical Notebook

    Essentially, Hegel is completely right as opposed to Kant. Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract—provided it is Correct (and Kant, like all philosophers, speaks of correct thought) does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it. The abstraction of matter, of a value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely. From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice—such is the dialectical path of objective reality. Kant disparages knowledge in order to make way for faith: Hegel exalts knowledge, asserting that knowledge is knowledge of God. The materialist exalts the knowledge of matter, of nature, consigning God, and the philosophical rabble that defends God, to the rubbish heap.

    Also by being a part of the object in itself, the search and understanding of those internal contradictions gets us closer to the truth that is the thing-in-itself. Even if our subjective will never fully reach it, and as such will always have something new to learn about it, saying that the difference between internal and external “is based on level of abstraction” is completely missing the point of the difference between subjective and objective knowledge and only running away from the search for “objective, absolute, eternal truths”. And that’s why it falls into subjective idealism/agnosticism.

    On your Edit:

    argument by citation is in itself a fallacy. People cite Lenin, Mao, Marx, Trotsky, Althusser etc to claim someone is being a idealist, as if there was one true dialectics

    Now that’s just absurd. I show the quotes to give the material basis from where I arrived at my logic, to show that it didn’t just pop into my head as I was in the shower, it is based on my understanding of these texts by these classic authors, while also giving the opportunity to anyone reading to reach their own understanding of those texts and giving a reference to whoever wants to dive deeper into the matter being discussed.

    The leap in logic in that only because I am showing the basis for my reasoning I therefore hold these basis as dogmas is as baseless as it is absurd.

    • burlemarx
      2·
      1 month ago

      It is very interesting tactic to start your comment saying that I’m “using a strawman argument” and then proceed into an attempt to invalidate my arguments by attacking the notion that the subjective denies the objective, or vice-versa. I’ve never said such a thing and not only that, but the quote I made from Lenin in my last comment claims the opposite.

      Let’s remind ourselves of the affirmation you have done:

      falling into Subjective idealism/agnosticism, it is your misunderstanding of contradictions that is “self-sublating” into defining the process of change as subjective, consequently leading you to subjective idealism/agnosticism

      You are attacking an argument implying the fall into “Subjective idealism/agnosticism” and then claiming things Grain Eater didn’t mention in his argument. This is a clear case of strawman fallacy.

      What I’ve actually been claiming since the beginning of this discussion is that our subjective knowledge does reach the objective, even if imperfectly, it contains part of it, so the difference between a Dialectical internal contradiction and a common external one isn’t “is just a matter of perspective”, it isn’t subjective, it is objective, because the internal contradiction belongs to the thing-in-itself, not to our perception of it. Our knowledge of them is “limited by our own subjective apprehension of that system” but they still exist beyond it and beyond us as well, which is why they are objective, as you said: “If you never studied physics and can’t comprehend the atoms it doesn’t mean the atoms don’t exist”

      It is ironic that when you try to explain objectivity, you will use an idealistic argument. Let me explain to you. When you are studying something, you are an external observer. The thing you want to observe is your object of study. You then examine the object’s properties and its relation with other things. When you use the dialectical method (let me re-emphasize this, it’s a method), you look for establishing identity and opposition between two objects based on your observation. However, when you are doing so, you are focusing on the relationship between those two objects, even if in reality there are many more external objects which interact with the objects you are observing. For example, when we study the relation of a capitalist and a worker, and how surplus is generated from the process of transforming commodity into money and money into commodity, you are not concerned with the movement of the earth around the sun. The earth moving around the sun produces changes that affect both the capitalist and the worker, but they aren’t your objects of your study at that moment, so you are not considering the relation between solar rays and the circuit of accumulation of capital, and any contradiction that arises externally from the object you are studying is “external”. If I don’t try to limit my observation, always seeking the eternal truth by observing the relations, and the relations between the relations and the relations between the relations of relations, I won’t arrive anywhere, because my cognitive capacity is objectively limited. I have a brain, not an immortal soul. So, the perspective matters, and by a lot.

      Also by being a part of the object in itself, the search and understanding of those internal contradictions gets us closer to the truth that is the thing-in-itself. Even if our subjective will never fully reach it, and as such will always have something new to learn about it, saying that the difference between internal and external “is based on level of abstraction” is completely missing the point of the difference between subjective and objective knowledge and only running away from the search for “objective, absolute, eternal truths”. And that’s why it falls into subjective idealism/agnosticism.

      Your statement is profoundly Hegelian. The idea that an absolute truth exists and by understanding the internal contradictions we get closer to this absolute truth is part of the essence of Hegelian dialectics. Note that Hegelian dialectics is profoundly idealist, because it assumes that an eternal truth exists and our knowledge, based on our observations, aims to arrive at these eternal truths.

      As a dialectical materialist, I don’t assume eternal truths exist, nor I am concerned in arriving at that point. What I do is to observe the world around me, try to reason about it so I can build my knowledge around it, and then I try to act on the world based on my knowledge and rinse and repeat. When I do this, I have to consider that my object of study can always change, so I need to situate my observation in a point in time, or in a specific point of human history, if I’m trying to understand society.

      Another point I need to make is that nature does not obey any laws. It’s not like there’s a law, an idea, that bounds matter in a determinate direction or relation. The laws and theories we come up with happen a posteriori, they are abstractions we create to understand reality, and are all imperfect models of it. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism are methods we use to understand reality and human history, they are a lens we use to understand reality. So nature does not give a damn about dialectics, and nature is not dialectical. Nature is nature, reality is reality, and they are totally external to us, and will keep existing regardless if we interact with or not. We use dialectics to try to comprehend nature, human relations and so on, so we can then use the knowldege gained to affect the world around us. If we really want to be materialists, then we need to drop the notion of wanting to achieve eternal truths.

      • Comrade_Improving
        1·
        30 days ago

        Now here is another advantage of basing my arguments in classical authors, I don’t run the risk of looking foolish giving statements that only demonstrate my ignorance on the matter discussed:

        Note that Hegelian dialectics is profoundly idealist, because it assumes that an eternal truth exists and our knowledge, based on our observations, aims to arrive at these eternal truths.

        As a dialectical materialist, I don’t assume eternal truths exist, nor I am concerned in arriving at that point.

        Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism - Chapter 2.1 - The Thing-in-Itself

        But for all materialists, including those of the seventeenth century whom Bishop Berkeley demolished, “phenomena” are “things-for-us” or copies of the “objects in themselves”

        For the professorial idealists, Humeans and Kantians every kind of materialism is “metaphysics”, because beyond the phenomenon (appearance, the thing-for-us) it discerns a reality outside us. (…) Marx’s opinion there corresponds to man’s “phenomenal activity” “an activity of things”, that is to say, human practice has not only a phenomenal (in the Humean and Kantian sense of the term), but an objectively real significance. (…) “Humanity partakes of the absolute” means that human knowledge reflects absolute truth; the practice of humanity, by verifying our ideas, corroborates what in those ideas corresponds to absolute truth.

        The essence of idealism is that the psychical is taken as the starting-point; from it external nature is deduced, and only then is the ordinary human consciousness deduced from nature. Hence, this primary “psychical” always turns out to be a lifeless abstraction concealing a diluted theology.

        Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism - Chapter 3.6 - Freedom and Necessity

        the complete identity between Engels’ argument on the knowability of the objective nature of things and on the transformation of “things-in-themselves” into “things-for-us”, on the one hand, and his argument on a blind, unknown necessity, on the other. The development of consciousness in each human individual and the development of the collective knowledge of humanity as a whole presents us at every step with examples of the transformation of the unknown “thing-in-itself” into the known “thing-for-us”

        Epistemologically, there is no difference whatsoever between these two transformations, for the basic point of view in both cases is the same, viz., materialistic, the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external nature, and of the fact that both this world and these laws are fully knowable to man but can never be known to him with finality. We do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather, and to that extent we are inevitably slaves of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we know that it exists.

        For Engels all living human practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth. For until we know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently of and outside our mind, makes us slaves of “blind necessity”. But once we come to know this law, which acts (as Marx repeated a thousand times) independently of our will and our mind, we become the masters of nature. The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, eternal truth.

        What is the result? Every step in Engels’ argument, literally almost every phrase, every proposition, is constructed entirely and exclusively upon the epistemology of dialectical materialism (…) Without being in the least perturbed by this, the Machists abandon materialism and repeat threadbare banalities about dialectics, and at the same time welcome with open arms one of the applications of dialectical materialism! They have taken their philosophy from an eclectic pauper’s broth and are continuing to offer this hotchpotch to the reader. They take a bit of agnosticism and a morsel of idealism from Mach, add to it a bit of dialectical materialism from Marx, and call this hash a development of Marxism.

        Another point I need to make is that nature does not obey any laws.

        So nature does not give a damn about dialectics, and nature is not dialectical.

        Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism - Chapter 3.3 - Causality and Necessity in Nature

        to anyone who has read his philosophical works at all attentively it must be clear that Engels does not admit even a shadow of doubt as to the existence of objective law, causality and necessity in nature.

        the human conception of cause and effect always somewhat simplifies the objective connection of the phenomena of nature, reflecting it only approximately, artificially isolating one or another aspect of a single world process. If we find that the laws of thought correspond with the laws of nature, says Engels, this becomes quite conceivable when we take into account that reason and consciousness are “products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature.” Of course, “the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature’s interconnections but are in correspondence with them”. There is no doubt that there exists a natural, objective interconnection between the phenomena of the world. Engels constantly speaks of the “laws of nature”, of the “necessities of nature”, without considering it necessary to explain the generally known propositions of materialism

        “the general laws of motion—both of the external world and of human thought—[are] two sets of laws which are identical in substance but differ in their expression insofar as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents”. And Engels reproaches the old natural philosophy for having replaced “the real but as yet unknown interconnections” (of the phenomena of nature) by “ideal and imaginary ones”. Engels’ recognition of objective law, causality and necessity in nature is absolutely clear, as is his emphasis on the relative character of our, i.e., man’s, approximate reflections of this law in various concepts.

        The distinction between the Humean and the Kantian theories of causality is only a secondary difference of opinion between agnostics who are basically at one, viz., in their denial of objective law in nature, and who thus inevitably condemn themselves to idealist conclusions of one kind or another.

        The idea that knowledge can “create” universal forms, replace the primeval chaos by order, etc., is the idea of idealist philosophy. The world is matter moving in conformity to law, and our knowledge, being the highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this conformity to law.

        As if it hadn’t already become clear your ignorance of the differences between materialism and subjective idealism/agnosticism with your direct epistemological opposition to Lenin and Engels, we now reach the grand finale of this spectacle, with an act to rival Bogdanov’s, giving us a necessity of “Materialism”

        If we really want to be materialists, then we need to drop the notion of wanting to achieve eternal truths.

        Lenin - Materialism and Empirio-Criticism - 2.4 - Does Objective Truth Exist?

        Bogdanov declares: “As I understand it, Marxism contains a denial of the unconditional objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the denial of all eternal truths”

        Bogdanov’s denial of objective truth is agnosticism and subjectivism. The absurdity of this denial is evident even from the single example of a scientific truth quoted above. Natural science leaves no room for doubt that its assertion that the earth existed prior to man is a truth.

        For the first point of view, i.e., agnosticism, or, pushed a little further, subjective idealism, there can be no objective truth. For the second point of view, i.e., materialism, the recognition of objective truth is essential.

        The inconsistency of your empiricism, of your philosophy of experience, will in that case lie in the fact that you deny the objective content of experience, the objective truth of knowledge through experience.

        To regard our sensations as images of the external world, to recognize objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge—these are all one and the same thing.

        If we really want to be materialists, then we need to drop “the materialist theory of knowledge”, truly astounding words.

        It has now become clear that the reason you don’t understand the correction that I have been making, or even the importance of it, is because you are not able to, because you have no clue on what the differences between Materialism and subjective idealism/agnosticism are in the first place.

        As such, we finally reach the essence of this discussion and it becomes clear that, in its truth, it has been about post-modernism thought/empiricism masquerading itself as ignorant dialectical materialism all this time, which is why it keeps falling into subjective idealism/agnosticism, because that’s the consequence of that line of thought. So I will repeat the recommendations I made in my original comment, that if one wants to go beyond the “Dialectical materialism” created in their own head and learn actual dialectical materialism they should read: Anti-Dühring by F. Engels and Materialism and Empirio-criticism by V.I. Lenin.

        • burlemarx
          2·
          28 days ago

          The problem of argument by citation is that people often cite things without reflecting much about what they are reading. First of all, I don’t call people whose argument does not match mine as subjective idealist, agnostic, and now postmodern. If I don’t have proper knowledge in those schools of thought so I avoid using strawmen and pure repetition of what I read somewhere as some kind of clever criticism.

          So, let’s discuss the things I have mentioned. And since you like citations, let’s work with them so they will probably make you very happy.

          So there’s this book Marx co-wrote with Engels called “The Holy Family”:

          If from real apples, pears, strawberries and almonds I form the general idea "Fruit”, if I go further and imagine that my abstract idea "Fruit”, derived from real fruit, is an entity existing outside me, is indeed the true essence of the pear, the apple, etc., then in the language of speculative philosophy — I am declaring that "Fruit” is the "Substance” of the pear, the apple, the almond, etc. I am saying, therefore, that to be a pear is not essential to the pear, that to be an apple is not essential to the apple; that what is essential to these things is not their real existence, perceptible to the senses, but the essence that I have abstracted from them and then foisted on them, the essence of my idea — "Fruit”. I therefore declare apples, pears, almonds, etc., to be mere forms of existence, modi, of "Fruit” My finite understanding supported by my senses does of course distinguish an apple from a pear and a pear from an almond, but my speculative reason declares these sensuous differences inessential and irrelevant. It sees in the apple the same as in the pear, and in the pear the same as in the almond, namely "Fruit”. Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is “the substance” — "Fruit”.

          Later he proceeds:

          We see that if the Christian religion knows only one Incarnation of God, speculative philosophy has as many incarnations as there are things, just as it has here in every fruit an incarnation of the Substance, of the Absolute Fruit. The main interest for the speculative philosopher is therefore to produce the existence of the real ordinary fruits and to say in some mysterious way that there are apples, pears, almonds and raisins. But the apples, pears, almonds and raisins that we rediscover in the speculative world are nothing but semblances of apples, semblances of pears, semblances of almonds and semblances of raisins, for they are moments in the life of “the Fruit”, this abstract creation of the mind, and therefore themselves abstract creations of the mind. Hence what is delightful in this speculation is to rediscover all the real fruits there, but as fruits which have a higher mystical significance, which have grown out of the ether of your brain and not out of the material earth, which are incarnations of “the Fruit”, of the Absolute Subject. When you return from the abstraction, the supernatural creation of the mind, “the Fruit”, to real natural fruits, you give on the contrary the natural fruits a supernatural significance and transform them into sheer abstractions. Your main interest is then to point out the unity of “the Fruit” in all the manifestations of its life — the apple, the pear, the almond — that is, to show the mystical interconnection between these fruits, how in each one of them “the Fruit” realises itself by degrees and necessarily progresses, for instance, from its existence as a raisin to its existence as an almond. Hence the value of the ordinary fruits no longer consists in their natural qualities, but in their speculative quality, which gives each of them a definite place in the life-process of “the Absolute Fruit”

          […]It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, “the Fruit”

          I will avoid posting the whole section here otherwise I’ll run out of space to comment. Marx here is ridiculing the idea of the absolute truth, in the form of the absolute fruit. We see all objects like apples, oranges, pears, almonds and raisings as natural manifestations of the idea of “the absolute fruit”. Note how silly that, in order for us to understand what a fruit is, we need to transform the real into the supernatural so we have the notion that all fruits are manifestation of the “absolute fruit”.

          The problem of your whole confusion with objective and subjective is that you are mixing the idealist concept of absolute truth with objective reality. The idea of absolute truth is that an idea exists a priori of the objects, which are a manifestation of the idea. This is simply metaphysics and it’s exactly the criticism that Marx is doing to the young Hegelians. Another point that you also fail to understand is that objective reality, differently from the Hegelian concept of absolute truth, can also change as a the result of our practical activity, as well by other phenomena that produce changes in objective reality.

          Now, since you like to citing texts without properly understanding them, let’s re-analyze the excerpt you cited from Lenin:

          For Engels all living human practice permeates the theory of knowledge itself and provides an objective criterion of truth. For until we know a law of nature, it, existing and acting independently of and outside our mind, makes us slaves of “blind necessity”. But once we come to know this law, which acts (as Marx repeated a thousand times) independently of our will and our mind, we become the masters of nature. The mastery of nature manifested in human practice is a result of an objectively correct reflection within the human head of the phenomena and processes of nature, and is proof of the fact that this reflection (within the limits of what is revealed by practice) is objective, absolute, eternal truth.

          What is the result? Every step in Engels’ argument, literally almost every phrase, every proposition, is constructed entirely and exclusively upon the epistemology of dialectical materialism (…) Without being in the least perturbed by this, the Machists abandon materialism and repeat threadbare banalities about dialectics, and at the same time welcome with open arms one of the applications of dialectical materialism! They have taken their philosophy from an eclectic pauper’s broth and are continuing to offer this hotchpotch to the reader. They take a bit of agnosticism and a morsel of idealism from Mach, add to it a bit of dialectical materialism from Marx, and call this hash a development of Marxism.

          Lenin is saying that as the result of real activity our knowledge reflects the objective, the absolute, but within the limits of what is revealed by practice. I never denied the objective reality existed, but what I said was our knowledge of the real depends on our previous knowledge and our experience. Also in Lenin’s words, what we acquire as knowledge is a mere reflection of the objective reality, which is limited by our practice.

          And again, as stated by Lenin, Engels argument related to the “dialectics of nature” is epistemological. What he is saying is the exact same thing I said. It’s not as if nature is dialectical, Engels is using the epistemology of dialectical materialism to understand nature. Again, as I said, dialectical materialism acts as a lens to understand natural phenomena. But dialectical materialism is not the truth in itself.

          And then you cited Lenin again:

          Bogdanov declares: “As I understand it, Marxism contains a denial of the unconditional objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the denial of all eternal truths” Bogdanov’s denial of objective truth is agnosticism and subjectivism. The absurdity of this denial is evident even from the single example of a scientific truth quoted above. Natural science leaves no room for doubt that its assertion that the earth existed prior to man is a truth. For the first point of view, i.e., agnosticism, or, pushed a little further, subjective idealism, there can be no objective truth. For the second point of view, i.e., materialism, the recognition of objective truth is essential. The inconsistency of your empiricism, of your philosophy of experience, will in that case lie in the fact that you deny the objective content of experience, the objective truth of knowledge through experience. To regard our sensations as images of the external world, to recognize objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge—these are all one and the same thing.

          If we really want to be materialists, then we need to drop “the materialist theory of knowledge”, truly astounding words.

          It has now become clear that the reason you don’t understand the correction that I have been making, or even the importance of it, is because you are not able to, because you have no clue on what the differences between Materialism and subjective idealism/agnosticism are in the first place.

          No, you are the one who can’t understand what I said before. Again, I never denied the existence of the objective reality. What I simply said is that our knowledge is a product of our observations of the objective, together with our previous knowledge and experiences. But the objects themselves are completely independent of our ideas of it. And then you used the terms subjective idealism/agnosticism by just parroting a citation without even understanding what those terms mean. And again, you make a confusion by flipping dialectical materialism upside down, transforming it back into Hegel’s dialectics.

          • burlemarx
            2·
            28 days ago

            Continuing…

            Another book I like very much is called “The German Ideology”, which unfortunately only got published after Lenin was dead or seriously ill. Let’s see what Marx says about materialism:

            The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

            In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.

            This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.

            Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident.

            So, again, what Marx is saying is that our consciousness is a reflection of our practical activity. So, when we study nature, or human relations, or whatever it is our object of study, by practical activity we acquire knowledge of the real and validate this knowledge empirically. But again, the knowledge is not the real, they are “sublimates of our material life process”. Marx also emphasizes that knowledge is not isolated from history, it is a result of a historical process. Our knowledge is not timeless, it stands at a point in the human history, which also changes as a result of our practical activity and so does our knowledge.

            The main problem with empiricists, as Marx states, is that they see history as a rigid collection of facts. So their understanding of phenomena tends to be metaphysical, just like it happens with idealists.

            So, in summary, I stand by everything I said before. My position has absolutely nothing to do with postmodernism, subjective idealism, agnosticism or any of the loaded terms you cited. My statements are all inside the comprehension of dialectical and historical materialism.

            • Comrade_Improving
              1·
              25 days ago

              I don’t call people whose argument does not match mine as subjective idealist, agnostic, and now postmodern. If I don’t have proper knowledge in those schools of thought so I avoid using strawmen and pure repetition of what I read somewhere as some kind of clever criticism

              I now regret the form that I used those words, having not put enough effort into explaining the meaning behind them, that comparison sounded as just a personal attack, and for that I apologize. Having reflected more upon that I’ve realized that I’ve have lacked focus on what this discussion has centered around, I will now attempt to rectify that:

              What I’ve been claiming is that, according to dialectical materialism, we reach part of the thing-in-itself with our senses, therefore our abstractions of those things, even if subjective by nature of being abstractions, have also a part of the objective, making our thoughts a mix of objective reality as understood by subjective perceptions. As it is a mix, we must then test the correctness of those abstractions by praxis, meaning to test these abstractions we made of a thing, the thing-for-us, against the object itself, and if the object agrees with our abstraction of it, if we pass the test of reality, then our abstraction contained part of an absolute, eternal truth. This truth is just a part of the thing-in-itself and as such we have not exhausted, and because of or reliance on subjective perceptions never will, the knowledge present in the object in which we based our abstraction of, so although we made an image in our head of the object that correctly contained part of it, it did not contain the object in its totality, which is why it is only an “imperfect image” of the thing-in-itself, it is only, as Engels and Lenin call it, a thing-for-us.

              Now the parts that you disagree with me as far as I’m aware:

              Hegelian dialectics is profoundly idealist, because it assumes that an eternal truth exists and our knowledge, based on our observations, aims to arrive at these eternal truths. As a dialectical materialist, I don’t assume eternal truths exist, nor I am concerned in arriving at that point.

              Another point I need to make is that nature does not obey any laws. It’s not like there’s a law, an idea, that bounds matter in a determinate direction or relation. The laws and theories we come up with happen a posteriori, they are abstractions we create to understand reality. (…) So nature does not give a damn about dialectics, and nature is not dialectical. Nature is nature, reality is reality, and they are totally external to us.

              The problem of your whole confusion with objective and subjective is that you are mixing the idealist concept of absolute truth with objective reality. The idea of absolute truth is that an idea exists a priori of the objects, which are a manifestation of the idea.

              I never denied the objective reality existed, but what I said was our knowledge of the real depends on our previous knowledge and our experience. Also in Lenin’s words, what we acquire as knowledge is a mere reflection of the objective reality, which is limited by our practice.

              And again, as stated by Lenin, Engels argument related to the “dialectics of nature” is epistemological. What he is saying is the exact same thing I said. It’s not as if nature is dialectical, Engels is using the epistemology of dialectical materialism to understand nature.

              So in an attempt to resume your points of disagreement:

              Nature is not dialectical, nature and reality are totally external to us, and to be able to act upon this external thing that is reality, the human mind created the dialectical method in “a posteriori”. Also, while we can use dialectical materialism to act on nature, this knowledge we attain is not objective, as it is limited by our experience it is therefore enclosed within our subjective, we might be able to act trough practice upon the object, be we are not truly able to comprehend it. Which is why the idea of an “objective, absolute, eternal truth” is idealistic, because we as subjective beings can never attain a knowledge from the thing-in-itself, only the results from our subjective experiences and practices. And as such Hegelian dialectics is profoundly idealist because it aims to arrive at these eternal truths, it is because Hegel attempts to reach and comprehend the object that he becomes an absolute idealist.

              So to solve the contradictions between our points of views, I’ll reduce those differences into questions:

              What is the actual difference between Hegelian Dialectics and Materialist Dialectics?

              Is our knowledge limited within our subjective, or does it reach the object, are we limited to only our own subjective experiences or does our knowledge contain a part of the objective thing-in-itself?

              Where did Materialistic Dialectics come from, how did we reach it, and what is it’s relationship, if any, with nature?

              • Comrade_Improving
                1·
                25 days ago

                To tackle the first question I’ll use the text you yourself brought, which indeed made me very happy that you did, allowing me to be able to understand where you are basing your ideas from and to reach my own conclusions on that same basis, so first your conclusions from that text:

                Marx here is ridiculing the idea of the absolute truth, in the form of the absolute fruit.

                The problem of your whole confusion with objective and subjective is that you are mixing the idealist concept of absolute truth with objective reality. The idea of absolute truth is that an idea exists a priori of the objects, which are a manifestation of the idea.

                However, not only is Marx not criticizing the idea of an objective truth, but he is drawing attention to how regarding the abstraction as a priori to reality leads to “the Absolute Subject” which actually goes further from understanding the thing-in-itself and attempts to determine the world based in the eyes of subject that created that abstraction. Therefore what he is actually ridiculing in the form of the “absolute fruit”, is the logic that based on a purely subjective abstraction we can reach the truth and that reality is merely a consequence of that subjective abstraction, so what is ridiculous is thinking that the object is a consequence of the subject.

                Expanding the criticism that Marx made to the young hegelians to Hegel himself in an effort to answer the first question, we understand that what separates Hegelian Dialectics from Materialist Dialectics is not that the hegelian one tries to reach the object while the materialist one doesn’t and is satisfied within subjectivity, in fact, it is quite the opposite, hegelian dialectics in an attempt to reach the object trough pure thinking and holding that its own abstraction as primary to reality strays further from the thing-in-itself and consequently falls into “the Absolute Subject”, and that’s why it is Idealistic. While Materialistic Dialectics understands the primacy of reality and that to reach an “objective, absolute, eternal truth” we begin by analyzing the real thing-in-itself, and to always put our abstractions made of them trough the “test of nature”, or praxis, in order actually achieve an objective knowledge.

                So not only the problem of Hegelian Dialectics is not that it tried to reach “objective, absolute, eternal truth”, but the actual problem is that it didn’t try well enough, it got too worried with its own subjective abstractions of the absolute idea that it lost sight that the actual source for those truths is reality itself. It didn’t become idealistic because it was trying to reach objective truths, but it failed to do so because it was idealistic. What Dialectical Materialism achieves, is exactly to correct that limitation, it understands that our thoughts, ideas, abstractions, are all consequence of nature itself, as such they do not stand above reality, but are based upon it. Which is why both Engels and Lenin said:

                F. Engels - Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

                Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen. In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from the idealist trimmings which with Hegel had prevented its consistent execution.

                V. Lenin – Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

                Hegel’s “Absolute Idea” gathered together all the contradictions of Kantian idealism and all the weaknesses of Fichteanism. Feuerbach had to make only one serious step in order to return to materialism, namely, universally to discard, absolutely to eliminate, the Absolute Idea, that Hegelian “substitution-of the psychical” for physical nature. Feuerbach cut off the Chinese pigtail of philosophical idealism, in other words, he took nature as the basis without any “substitution” whatever.

                • Comrade_Improving
                  1·
                  25 days ago

                  To answer the second question let’s first look at some quotes from Engels and Lenin:

                  F. Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

                  But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This “thing-in-itself” is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant’s celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant’s time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious “thing-in-itself”. But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable.

                  F. Engels - Anti-Duhring - Chapter 1.9 - Eternal Truths

                  In this sense human thought is just as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its capacity for knowledge just as much unlimited as limited. It is sovereign and unlimited in its disposition, its vocation, its possibilities and its historical ultimate goal; it is not sovereign and it is limited in its individual realisation and in reality at any particular moment.

                  It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind ever reached the stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable would have been performed.

                  Are there then nevertheless eternal truths, final and ultimate truths? Certainly there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity.

                  V. Lenin – Materialism and Empirio-Criticism – Chapters 2.5 and 2.6

                  To be a materialist is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth. And it is this “one way or another” which distinguishes the metaphysical materialist Dühring from the dialectical materialist Engels

                  For Bogdanov (as for all the Machists) recognition of the relativity of our knowledge excludes even the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician.

                  Human thought then by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge.

                  From the standpoint of modern materialism, i.e., Marxism, the limits of approximation of our knowledge to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth is unconditional, and the fact that we are approaching nearer to it is also unconditional.

                  Dialectics—as Hegel in his time explained—contains an element of relativism, of negation, of scepticism, but is not reducible to relativism. The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledge to this truth are historically conditional

                  For the materialist the “success” of human practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and the objective nature of the things we perceive. For the solipsist “success” is everything needed by me in practice, which can be regarded separately from the theory of knowledge.

                  “The fundamental defect of idealism is precisely that it asks and answers the question of objectivity and subjectivity, of the reality or unreality of the world, only from the standpoint of theory” (ibid., 189). Feuerbach makes the sum-total of human practice the basis of the theory of knowledge. He says that idealists of course also recognise the reality of the I and the Thou in practical life. For the idealists “this point of view is valid only for practical life and not for speculation."

                  The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion held by Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is that by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies.

                  Engels, Marx and Lenin are in agreement when both Engels and Lenin mention not only the existence, but the capacity for human knowledge to reach those eternal truths, what they differ from the young hegelians, and other idealists, is the understanding that we arrive at those objective truths from our interaction, abstraction and practice, upon the thing-in-itself. And consequently, that those truths, even if they are “objective, absolute, eternal”, are only part of the object itself and as such have not exhausted the knowledge we can attain from it, which means we have not achieved a complete comprehension of the object we are studying, and dialectically, also means we have more to learn about it.

                  The understanding that our abstractions of real objects, the things-for-us of the thing-in-themselves, contain part, even if imperfect and limited by the historical conditions, of the object in reality, and that this knowledge, trough praxis, can pass the “test of nature” and consequently confirm that we objectively comprehend part of the thing, is the central logic of Dialectical Materialism.

                  Absolute idealism claims that our perception is equal or even the source of the object-in-itself, agnosticism/subjective idealism says that our perception cannot reach the object-in-itself, materialism understands that our perception creates an imperfect image, an imperfect copy, of the object, a thing-for-us of the thing-in-itself.

                  • Comrade_Improving
                    1·
                    25 days ago

                    And for the last question, we shall look at Lenin quoting both Engels and Feuerbach:

                    V. Lenin – Materialism and Empirio-Criticism – Chapter 3.3:

                    Order, purpose, law are words used by man to translate the acts of nature into his own language in order that he may understand them. These words are not devoid of meaning or of objective content; nevertheless, a distinction must be made between the original and the translation.

                    The reason of the theists … is reason contradictory to nature, reason absolutely devoid of understanding of the essence of nature. The reason of the theists splits nature into two beings—one material, and the other formal or spiritual”

                    Feuerbach’s views are consistently materialist. All other views, or rather, any other philosophical line on the question of causality, the denial of objective law, causality and necessity in nature, are justly regarded by Feuerbach as belonging to the fideist trend. For it is, indeed, clear that the subjectivist line on the question of causality, the deduction of the order and necessity of nature not from the external objective world, but from consciousness, reason, logic, and so forth, not only cuts human reason off from nature, not only opposes the former to the latter, but makes nature a part of reason, instead of regarding reason as a part of nature. The subjectivist line on the question of causality is philosophical idealism (varieties of which are the theories of causality of both Hume and Kant), i.e., fideism, more or less weakened and diluted. The recognition of objective law in nature and the recognition that this law is reflected with approximate fidelity in the mind of man is materialism.

                    to anyone who has read his philosophical works at all attentively it must be clear that Engels does not admit even a shadow of doubt as to the existence of objective law, causality and necessity in nature.

                    the human conception of cause and effect always somewhat simplifies the objective connection of the phenomena of nature, reflecting it only approximately, artificially isolating one or another aspect of a single world process

                    “the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature’s interconnections but are in correspondence with them”

                    “the general laws of motion—both of the external world and of human thought—[are] two sets of laws which are identical in substance but differ in their expression insofar as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents”. And Engels reproaches the old natural philosophy for having replaced “the real but as yet unknown interconnections” (of the phenomena of nature) by “ideal and imaginary ones”. Engels’ recognition of objective law, causality and necessity in nature is absolutely clear, as is his emphasis on the relative character of our, i.e., man’s, approximate reflections of this law in various concepts.

                    The really important epistemological question that divides the philosophical trends is not the degree of precision attained by our descriptions of causal connections, or whether these descriptions can be expressed in exact mathematical formulas, but whether the source of our knowledge of these connections is objective natural law or properties of our mind, its innate faculty of apprehending certain a priori truths, and so forth. This is what irrevocably divides the materialists Feuerbach, Marx and Engels from the agnostics (Humeans) Avenarius and Mach.

                    The idea that knowledge can “create” universal forms, replace the primeval chaos by order, etc., is the idea of idealist philosophy. The world is matter moving in conformity to law, and our knowledge, being the highest product of nature, is in a position only to reflect this conformity to law.

                    You claimed that “nature does not obey any laws”, that those laws “are abstractions we create to understand reality.” because “Nature is nature, reality is reality, and they are totally external to us.” Focusing on the relationship between nature and man, we understand that according to your logic, man for being external to nature, created out of its own ingenuity laws to understand nature, laws that somehow appeared in peoples mind, but that don’t actually come from nature, because even if they work to explain nature, nature doesn’t actually follows them, and as such couldn’t help us reach them, and consequently we can’t also really explain why or how it works, it just somehow appeared and someway it works. And that’s what we call Dialectics.

                    However, dialectics are not a pure creation of the human mind, but the human mind’s understanding of the laws of nature, nature doesn’t follow dialectical laws because we thought so, neither are we able to think things outside nature, we are only able to understand the dialectical laws of nature, which we are a small part of, because it follows those dialectical laws in the first place.

                    If we then go back to the beginning of the discussion, we can understand why I was bringing attention to the objectiveness of contradictions and why its wrong usage lead to agnosticism/subjective idealism, because to think that their are based on point of reference, or are pure abstractions made by our mind with no relationship with actual reality or nature, and therefore are subjective, is agnosticism/subjective idealism. To understand that contradictions are given by nature itself, and that our knowledge is and will always be based on the laws of nature is Dialectical Materialism.

                    To hold the human thought above nature is absolute idealism, to hold human thought as separated from nature, following laws different than those of nature, is agnosticism/subjective idealism, to understand that our thoughts are part of nature, and as such the dialectical movement is the thing-for-us of the movement of nature itself, following the very same laws as the rest of nature, that’s actual Dialectical Materialism.

                    Having answered those 3 questions, we are now left with 2 new ones, two “whys?”, consequences of the answers of the first three.