Indeed. However, I’m currently finding it difficult to stitch all these ideas together.

I just read something and thought it was vaguely relevant.

Ever since puberty, when it is customary to get excited about such ques­tions, I have never again really understood the so-called problem of rela­tivism. My experience was that whoever gave himself over in earnest to the discipline of a particular subject learned to distinguish very precisely be­tween true and false, and that in contrast to such experience the assertion of general insecurity as to what is known had something abstract and un­convincing about it. Let it be that confronted with the ideal of the absolute, everything human stands under the shadow of the conditional and temporary - what happens when the boundary is reached at which thought must recognize that it is not identical to being, not only allows the most convincing insights, but forces them. — Adorno

I’m thinking that indirect realism, though popularly often expressed in modern scientific language, is a hangover from theology and speculative metaphysics. Compared with the view of God, “everything human stands under the shadow of the conditional and temporary,”—in this case, everything we experience is removed from the world and uncertain.

Ditch the ideal of the absolute, and experience is no longer a barrier, but just the way we interact with the rest of the world.

It also makes me think of Wittgenstein:

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Even the nice guys in philosophy have been full of themselves. Kant believed he’d sorted everything out once and for all.

Ok, well maybe somebody here can help answer the question anyway.

"if suppose origin of argument is god and suppose causal order the same logical order, In that case, we have to deny the possibility from the universe." — Ali Hosein

Hi Ali and welcome. It would be good if you could edit your post to include a more accurate English version of the quotation, because the quotation you have here, which I’m guessing is a translation of a translation, is not very clear.

Human nature is both egalitarian and stratifying, i.e. we do have tendencies tor greed, social status seeking etc etc... but at the same time we also have a moral impulse that wants to tear down those who seek to elevate themselves above others at the cost of the group.

Egalitarian projects fail, because of scale and specialisation that becomes needed in larger groups. The moral impulse, social control, works better in smaller groups where nobody is inherently all that much elevated above others. But when you get larger groups, more specialisation and more power concentrated in certain required roles, it's harder for these moral impulses to keep those that seek elevation down.

Scale is the issue, not human nature (or at least not directly). — ChatteringMonkey

Useful post, thanks.

It’s well-known that urban settlements and the division of labour led to increasing stratification. The socialist response is that once, however, the basic necessities of life are abundant—the development of the productive forces has reached a certain level—we can abandon the stratification. I agree with that, and also think that we reached that point some time ago, but clearly it’s not an easy task.

I agree. I’d go further and point out that Stalin was a committed Marxist and not just an opportunist monster as Trotskyists like to imagine.

But that’s all boring, and it doesn’t invalidate Marx’s critique.

If human beings have lived in stable egalitarian groups for long periods, that is, if egalitarianism (loosely defined, as in the OP) is significant in the history or prehistory of humans, then it’s wrong to say that egalitarianism is against human nature, or else it’s wrong to say that our natural inegalitarian instincts cannot be overcome.

So as I see it, @frank has to argue either that the kind of society that has been most common in the human past, namely hunter-gatherers, is or was not egalitarian, because of human nature; or that although those societies were egalitarian, they went against our nature, and given agriculture and industry, our inegalitarian nature is now impossible to overcome.

Anthropologists differ on how egalitarian humans are and on how egalitarian hunter-gatherers were, but it’s safe to say that we can withstand a great variety of societies, and I don’t see any reason to think that egalitarianism is doomed. In the end, that’s temperamental—but also political.

Fair.

I think there's still a good chance we can get there peacefully as we're not denied political expression — Benkei

Yes, and without the remotest prospect of a movement for the overthrow of capitalism, I think it follows that liberal democracy must be defended, and also constantly criticized from within.

I don’t know if anyone here is arguing that we shouldn’t read Marx. I wish people knew more Marx than the relatively unimportant manifesto.

So it will simply be more likely that I will sit next to a plumber at a Michelin-star than now — Benkei

Unless the plumber has taken your table after slaughtering you along with all the other lickspittles of the bourgeoisie.

(I hope it doesn’t happen, just to be clear)

Fair enough. I don’t find it so easy to dismiss the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France, the Red Terror in revolutionary Russia, the famines in the Soviet Union, or the Great Terror of the 1930s, all of which were expressly justified by the elimination of counter-revolution or the elimination of class distinctions.

Attempts at creating a classless society have so far resulted in monstrous regimes that were in many ways worse than what they replaced. Those who believe, as I do and against the OP, that a classless, egalitarian society is possible, probably have to face up to this.

The context is important, but doesn’t really alter the fact that he spoke favourably of non-democratic (and violent) means to achieve a classless society.

What did Marx do other than be a committed democrat during his lifetime? — Benkei

I’m vaguely ashamed of myself for criticizing you, as I’m usually on your side against liberal apologists for capitalism like @ssu, however, things are a bit more complicated. (I also said I wasn’t going to carry on down this route in this discussion, but here I am again, arguing about Marxism.)

First, ssu mentioned Marxism, the tradition that grew out of Marx and developed the theories. One such development, as ssu has mentioned, was Marxism-Leninism, which can fairly be said to promote one party rule.

Second, Marx himself spoke in favour of “revolutionary terror” and of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

On the other hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t necessarily entail one-party rule: anti-Stalinist Marxists point to the unfulfilled promise of workplace and soviet (council) democracy as a way to actualize it.

One party rule might not change the basic system of government, but reality with a one party system does have major differences to a multiparty system. — ssu

Of course. It’s just weird to use “Marxism” to refer to a system of government, because it’s primarily an analysis and critique of capitalism. It implies that Marxism is necessarily against democracy.

But this discussion is much wider and more interesting than the issue of what is or isn’t Marxist, so I won’t continue to debate it here.

That’s fair. On the other hand, what might be called “his economic work” is intimately bound up with his political philosophy, encompassing alienation, ideology, class struggle, and a dialectical understanding of progress. There’s a reason we call his economic work “political economy” and not “economics”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: elbow patches.

It's both. I think the mistake that @ssu makes is in implying that it is also a system of government.

In other words, good never ubiquitously prevails because there is bad in the world. Therefore, we should shun a striving for that which is good; instead favoring either the bad or a magical type of eternally unchanging, self-sustained, homeostasis between good and bad that never progresses in either direction.

Am I missing something significant in this interpretation of the issue? — javra

Yes. That's exactly what I was saying — frank

Although the OP expresses the central thought of conservatism, conservatism actually offers an alternative that’s a bit more hopeful than a “homeostasis between good and bad that never progresses in either direction,” namely gradual, organic change produced communally.*

Of course, this change would merely avoid the most egregious evils of inequality and oppression, and never result in the banishment of social hierarchy. To the humane, optimistic conservative, hierarchy and inequality don’t have to be bad—they’re natural and we should do our best to live with them.

This is why the welfare state was an important conservative policy until quite recently. The Emperor Ashoka said “all men are my children”, and later on, Bismarck created the first modern welfare state.

*communally: for a conservative, communally produced change doesn’t necessarily imply democracy; it’s still often those at the top who are making the decisions and doing the leading, in the context of a harmonious hierarchy in which everyone knows his or her place.

Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason — Jamal

It was good. More pedestrian than Dialectic of Enlightenment, and while it’s much clearer, it’s perhaps less persuasive. The critique of pragmatism is good, and I’m already primed to agree with it, though I haven’t actually read much of the American pragmatists so I’m not sure how fair the criticism is. On the whole it doesn’t go into things in much depth and really just gives a kind of overview of the concerns and the approach of the Frankfurt School.

In the chapter on the individual, Horkheimer contrasts the period of the liberal entrepreneur with the technocratic administered capitalism of big business. It’s hard not to read into his words a nostalgia for the old-fashioned business practices of his father, who had a very successful textile business.

But he concludes that chapter with this:

The real individuals of our time are the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression, not the inflated personalities of popular culture, the conventional dignitaries. These unsung heroes consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terroristic annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process. The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny.

Next, because I started this and might as well do it properly:

The Origin of Negative Dialectics by Susan Buck-Morss
Lectures on Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

And maybe some of Adorno’s other lectures, such as those on the Critique of Pure Reason (which will be a re-read) and on Philosophy and Sociology.

If that goes well I’d like to read Negative Dialectics itself, although there doesn’t seem to be a well-regarded translation.

For me, both the deliberate forcing of new ways of speaking and writing, and also the attempts to protect the language—which means to prevent change—are equally suspect.

Well, I wasn’t saying anything about the attempts to de-gender language. I probably agree with you on that. But I don’t think you can just appeal to conventional rules to defend conventional rules. What if changes were proposed that were based on a thorough understanding of the language—would you then think the changes were acceptable?

Lexical and grammatical structures are based on logic and they were established with the aim of "writing well" and put some norms in the vocabulary — javi2541997

I disagree. They are structures of human speech, not imposed rules of writing. The former precedes the latter.

It's like the people who want to destroy the statues of the false heroes of the past. Those statues are the monuments to human stupidity, greed, and gullibility. We need to keep those statues around to remind us what to watch out for today, and tomorrow — Pantagruel

Do you think the removal of the Stalin statues all across the USSR in the 1960s was wrong?

Statues are made to celebrate people, their actions and their ideology, and they don’t function as neutral historical documents even many years later. When they’re not worth celebrating any more, pull them down.

It seems to me that what you mean by “subjective” is just “private”. The original question seems to be about whether or not you can share or convey an experience, making it a question of public and private.

I didn't think Smith was a problem -- he didn't bother me — BC

Note that the majority of his posts and discussions were deleted, so most people never saw them.

The policy is that bans are permanent. There has been only one exception that I can recall. If you’re asking if the platform allows a ban to be reversed, yes it does, because bans do not actually delete the user account.

We introduced temporary suspensions about a year ago. Agent Smith was suspended for a week, then again for two weeks, and lastly for three weeks, the reasons being explained to him at length in private messages. He was told that the third suspension would be the last and that the same posting behaviour thereafter would result in a ban.

You seem to have partially clarified yourself within this discussion so no, I’m not thinking of banning you. And the original comment was at least ambiguous, rather than downright obnoxious, so…well done!

It didn’t sound remotely cold and brutal to me. Frank is up to his old tricks again.

Luxury!

Oh, I should have said: dishwasher? We didn’t even have dishes.

That’s quite agreeable.

Left politics - being mocked by a school friend's family because my family couldn't afford a dish washing machine. — fdrake

I used to tell a similar story, but now I think maybe it’s just a small part of it. Or who knows, maybe it is the deep psychological cause and I just haven’t faced up to it. Anyway…my lower middle-class parents got into money problems and we had our house repossessed and we were struggling for a long time after that. It was about that time that I declared I was a communist.

But there was more to it than that. The contrarian element was strong in me. My Dad had been a kind of socialist. He was on the side of the miners in the eighties and I used to repeat his opinions among my friends, many of whom were the children of pro-Thatcher parents. I was just nine years old and didn’t know what I was talking about, but I was sure I was right.

He also used to talk sympathetically about the Soviet Union, and I was attracted to this, knowing it was a non-standard view. So I began with similar sympathy for the Soviet Union, but luckily ended up going the Trotskyist route. The fact that I became left-wing via wrong opinions isn’t a problem, just the way things go. (Sympathy for the USSR was the wrong opinion, not sympathy for the miners, btw)

I remember the excitement of the weird ideas more than I remember the feelings of injustice or the misery of eating cheap generic supermarket-brand fish-fingers every day.

As I discern it, Wayf, mind is nonmind-dependent insofar as it is embodied, ergo nonmind (aka "world") is not "mind-dependent" and is much more than just "my idea" in the way (e.g.) the territory must exceed in every way (re: dynamics, complexity) mapping of that territory. Kantianism sells that 'the territory is mapmaker-dependent' story (i.e. "world" is mind-dependent) which – like epicycles, etc – I'm still not buying — 180 Proof

(Sorry about losing your formatting)

I tend to agree with you. Of course, the transcendental idealist has a ready answer for this: your notion of the embodied and of the non-mind is yet another example of uncritical transcendental realism that unjustifiably thinks it can get beyond the “correlation” and beyond the field of possible experience created by the subject in the first place. Thus, they would say, you’re begging the question, assuming the nonmind in order to prove it.

So doesn’t it come down to a meta-philosophical choice? Just as we might refuse to play the game of Cartesian scepticism and make a choice to begin in the world rather than in our heads—and in doing so show how the very idea of beginning in the head is historically conditioned, rather than trans-historically self-evident—we can similarly refuse to play the Kantian game and say yes, ok, we can only experience what we can experience, but I am convinced from experience and science that there is something nonmind to be experienced in the first place.

He studied medicine but couldn’t stomach the sight of blood or the suffering of the patients.

Me, I was a lazy student and couldn’t get into Edinburgh.

Darwin was historically later, but his ideas were very much influenced by it — Wayfarer

Yes, and it may have helped that he was at the University of Edinburgh for two years before he dropped out and was sent to Cambridge to take the theological route.

I'll see if I can state succinctly what I believe to be the important point. The difference between Hegel and Marx is the difference between idealism and materialism. The two are actually very similar, but there is an inversion between them in the way that first principles are produced, which results in somewhat opposing ways of looking at the very same thing.

So Hegel described the State as being a manifestation of the Idea. The Idea might be something like "the good", "the right", "the just", and being ideal, it's derived from God. From here, the history of the State is described as a history of the Idea, and how human beings strive to serve the Idea. The Idea comes from God, and there is always a need for the human subjects to be servants to the Idea.

Marx liked Hegel's historical approach, but figured he got the first principle wrong. In order to produce a true historicity he had to replace the Idea with matter, as the first principle. This was to place the living human being, and its material body as the first principle, rather than some pie in the sky "good", "right", or "God". So from Marx's perspective there is real substance grounding these ideas like "good", "right", "just", and this is the material needs of the material human being. From this perspective we can have a real history of the State, judging by its practises of providing for the material needs of material human bodies.

You can see the inversion. From the Hegelian perspective, the people must be judged in their capacity to serve the ideals of the State. From the Marxian perspective, the State must be judged in its capacity to serve the material needs of human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you succeeded. Nicely put.

If I had to quibble or add something, I’d want to emphasize that “material needs” for Marx included social, creative, spiritual and intellectual needs.

“I see the tree as it really is” is either normally true but sometimes not*, or else it’s incoherent, along with its contrary statement. These are two ways of using the words.

With the second sense, it’s incoherent because it’s like saying “I see the tree as it appears without my intervening process of perception”. But obviously, a tree that is not perceived does not appear.

Despite appearances, this is an argument against indirect, not direct, realism.

* “Sometimes not”: I was at the top of a mountain once, looking down upon a pine forest. Within this forest, surrounded by pines, was a group of golden birch trees, which was strange considering it was the South of France in spring. A short while later the correct perception snapped into place: they were not birch trees at all but just a patch of pine trees lit up by evening sunlight through a gap in the clouds.

Non-sceptical realism.

The danger of this poll is that it feeds the layperson’s impression that the existence of the external world is the central issue in philosophy.

I banned @Agent Smith for refusing moderation. Having deleted several of his low quality posts yesterday, I gave up and told him publicly to stop. He replied with a snickering emoji and, when I deleted that, with “Stop stalking me! :snicker:”.

Knowing that he is generally good-natured, I would not have banned him just for that had it not come after years of warnings and suspensions, and several private conversations. I had to delete many of his low quality comments every day. The staff discussed his case several times and we were generally in agreement.

We went out of our way to keep him here, but he just couldn’t do what we asked him to. I even created temporary suspensions primarily so that we didn’t have to ban him.

The forum is not a chat room. Outside of the Shoutbox and the Lounge, posts should be substantial and relevant.