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  • Comrade_Improving
    1·
    3 months ago

    The first one is: If you actually had already studied Dialectical Materialism, already had read at least some of those books I quoted, why did you still fall into subjectivism/agnosticism? Or in another form: Why did I bring up Post-Modernism in the first place?

    While I don’t know you well enough in order to concretely answer this question, considering the angle you are taking when defining materialism and considering the impact that focaunian and post-modern thought has had among leftists over the last 50 years, I can make a very sensible guess that it is a consequence of the spread of post-modern thought that you are claiming materialism while uttering empiricism.

    To give a more cohesive answer to this question it would easily take more than double of what I’ve already written, so I will focus on the main parts to keep it short.

    For Post-modernism there is no scientific objective knowledge, there is no possibility to share knowledge, only the subjective knowledge of each individual, only personal experience, which is why for Foucault any attempt at integrating struggles, like seeing most of humanity as working class, to increase the power of the oppressed, leads to a metadiscourse where that unity becomes as bad as what they are fighting against, and as such we can only fight for our own individual freedom, reducing the fight against capitalism from a class struggle to a micro-level individual struggle for better conditions.

    Now this post-modern denial of scientific objective knowledge and the primacy of each individual experiences/insticts over objective knowledge has lead to the common contemporaneous mistake of thinking that materialism also only deals with experiences and practices, forgetting or even denying the capacity or the validity of abstractions or scientific objective knowledge, concluding so that all that we know, and can know, is based purely on our own experiences, being as a consequence merely subjective.

    Lenin – Materialism and Empirio-Criticism – Chapter 2.4

    In this connection it seems to me not uninteresting to note that Hegel, declaring materialism to be “a consistent system of empiricism”, wrote: “For empiricism the external in general is the truth, and if then a supersensible too be admitted, nevertheless knowledge of it cannot occur and one must keep exclusively to what belongs to perception. However, this principle in its realisation produced what was subsequently termed materialism. This materialism regards matter, as such, as the truly objective.

    All knowledge comes from experience, from sensation, from perception. That is true. But the question arises, does objective reality “belong to perception”, i.e., is it the source of perception? If you answer yes, you are a materialist. If you answer no, you are inconsistent and will inevitably arrive at subjectivism, or agnosticism, irrespective of whether you deny the knowability of the thing-in-itself, or the objectivity of time, space and causality (with Kant), or whether you do not even permit the thought of a thing-in-itself (with Hume). 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.

    Considering that this whole discussion has been around the fact that I, like all the great Dialectical Materialists that I quoted, understand that our knowledge reaches beyond our own personal experiences and contains part of the thing-in-itself, while you have been claiming that it doesn’t, that it doesn’t go beyond our own practices and experiences, that our laws have don’t even have any relation whatsoever with nature. I’ve come to the conclusion that you follow that logic because you are mistaking actual materialism with the post-modern view of it, to Empiricism.

    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.

    It should be noted that what I wrote before is not just a disagreement, it is not just a subjective difference of point of views, I’m not writing those words to sound mean or try to hurt your feelings, I’m writing them because they are the consequence of a line of thought that strays away from materialism, just as Lenin says in the quoted passage, the empiricist’s denial of objective knowledge, “the objective content of experience, the objective truth of knowledge through experience” inevitably leads to subjectivism/agnosticism. As I already mentioned before, those categories are not at odds with each other, but are consequences of one another, I’m not calling you names, I am bringing attention to your own line of logic.

    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.

    Materialism is action based on abstractions based on reality, “From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice—such is the dialectical path of objective reality.” Empiricism, masqueraded by post-modern thought as Materialism, is practice based on pure experience, there is no object, there is only the subject, there is no objective scientific truth, only lies told by those in power, which is why there is no end to our struggle, only small wins in personal individual conditions.

    Finally our last question, our second “why?”: Why does it even matter if you hold empiricism and not actual materialism, and therefore hold dialectical materialism in a subjective way? if it at the end it only was only reduced to a difference between external and internal contradictions, does it even make any difference in practice?

    To answer that we again return to Lenin:

    V. Lenin – Materialism and Empirio-Criticism – Chapter 6.4

    Either materialism consistent to the end, or the falsehood and confusion of philosophical idealism—such is the formulation of the question given in every paragraph of Anti-Dühring;

    The task of Marxists in both cases is to be able to master and refashion the achievements of these “salesmen” (for instance, you will not make the slightest progress in the investigation of new economic phenomena without making use of the works of these salesmen) and to be able to lop off their reactionary tendency, to pursue our own line and to combat the whole line of the forces and classes hostile to us.

    The infatuation for empirio-criticist and “physical” idealism passes as rapidly as the infatuation for neo-Kantianism and “physiological” idealism; but fideism takes advantage of every such infatuation and modifies its devices in a thousand ways for the benefit of philosophical idealism.

    Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every weapon against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism—and that is all that fideism requires.

    If you factor into what Lenin is saying the logic of Post-modernism (something that sadly we can’t quote him on) with their denial of a unified struggle, and its view of power and oppression as inevitable in human society, Lenin’s words gain an even stronger meaning: “Either materialism consistent to the end, or the falsehood and confusion of philosophical idealism”, “Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every weapon against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism”, Lenin’s explanation on the importance of the correct application of Dialectical Materialism is as clear as possible.