Heidegger

The sceptic says that if your evidence for P is E, and P does not follow from E by deductive certainty, you have no basis for P because it might be false, given E. I'd just point out that it is false that one does not a justification to believe P, based on E, if P doesn't follow deductively from E.

The sceptic needs to prove that human purpose requires us to have this level of certainty for believes, in order for a belief to serve its human function of grounding/guiding action.

t.

Then you need to explain what or who you mean by "the sceptic." A sceptic concerning the independent existence of the physical world typically argues that we don't know of its existence because its existence doesn't deductively follow from the existence of sensory experiences. This was Hume's reasoning, and the reason historically for idealist or phenomenalist reductionism.

t.

This has been interesting.

1. One thing that occurs to me in the argument around realism/anti-realism is that there is often confusion regarding the idea that something objectively exists because the different notions of objective are not grappled with.

For example, objective can mean extra-mental. By this notion, both society/social relations, even insane ones, are objective.

However, objective also relates to extra-human, as in the extra-human physical world. This is a very different kind of objective from society, which while extra-mental, is in no way extra-human.

To take up the 13 pound cat, cat, 13, pound, weight, are both mental and extra-mental, but not extra-human because they are idealizations. However, the object we denote and attempt to make a statement re: is extra-human, that is, it exists objectively of us (though one can get picky and argue that most house cats are at least largely products of human breeding, and so one then merely retreats to objects on the bottom of the ocean or planets or some such.)

The problem is that we are always only approaching the cat as something for us. Why is the cat an object for us? How is it that this thing appears to us at all? It is not its knowability that is per se the problem, as it was for Kant, but its very appearance for us as an object of our consciousness, and our subsequent reflection on our own consciousness, that is at issue for Hegel.

2. I find it interesting that syndicalistcat argues that the critique of the split between science and philosophy effected by Kant is only recently critiqued in a serious manner. Schelling and Hegel both, quite immediately, critique this distinction, as they are obliged to in their rejection of the noumena-phenomena dichotomy and Hegel especially in his attempt to grapple with the subject-object problem. His dialectic is animated by this problem, as well as by most of the other classical 'big questions' of philosophy.

IMO, Hegel is a realist, in so far as he does not deny the independent material existence of the natural world, but he does reject that there is a Subject-Object relation in Nature, insofar as only a being with consciousness, which nature does not have, is properly a Subject. Human social and intellectual life, including the natural sciences, is the product of a subject-object dialectic. For him, and IMO for Marx, humans are only human insofar as they are not natural but social beings and their possible capacities are only meaningful and developed through social activity (which IMO for Hegel is primarily the activity of consciousness, whereas for Marx it is both ideal and material social practice in which material activity has pride of place.)

As such, there is an implicit criticism of Heidegger and Husserelian phenomenology in Hegel's phenomenology and logic.

3. At the same time, Hegel would clearly be an opponent of the law of non-contradiction as an absolute or even as generally true. Analysis has its place, but synthetic logic does something fundamentally different in the reconstruction of the relation between essence and appearance or content and form, in which contradictions do exist, not merely paradoxes.

4. It would be interesting to compare say Marx's notion of what makes the proletariat a universal, revolutionary class with that of standpoint theory, which it certainly could be read as reducing class to just another kind of oppression without getting at the root.

5. This discussion, in its own way, very much reminds me of the discussion about Radicals and a science fetish, as the terms of logic and method raised by syndicalistcat are very much those used by Gurrier, though with greater philosophical sophistication and nuance, and the arguments against him seem very much familiar as well. Happily, I think lem is getting more useful engagement here than there, but the essential lines of contention are not that different.

I think lem said that science abolishes philosophy if one takes syndicalistcat literally. I would rather say that what happens in the 20th century (or rather which coheres in the 20th century) is a split between the reduction of philosophy to the problems of the philosophy of science or logic and method (logical positivism, logical empiricism, analytic philosophy), on one side, and the growth of irrationalism and lebensphilosophie on the other (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, existentialism, etc.) Their split indicates a certain crisis in the possibility of philosophy to proceed rationally that marks the end of philosophy as science, much Ricardo marks the end of political economy's scientific period and its descent into vulgar economics with its own scientistic (socialist, Keynesian) and irrationalist (Marginalist, Schumpeterian, monetarist) extremes.

That of course is a big claim which I will be hard pressed to back up on a listserve

Chris

Woh! You've covered a lot of territory, Chris. I confess, I have a hard time making sense out of Hegel. Partly this is the style in which he writes. I think it's not quite correct to say that Hegel rejects the categories that Kant organized in his treatment, tho it may be that my explanation of the way that the old distinctions have been undermined was not clearly explained. I think Hegel attempted a particular way out of the problem that Descartes posed. Descartes looks inward to conscious states to find a ground of certainty, to rebuild knowledge on. But then it becomes a problem how to validate our claims to know of the physical cosmos, which we take to exist independently of our consciousness, indeed as the physical world is perceived by us to be. In the 18th and 19th centuries the most popular solution was idealism -- the reduction of the world to the contents of consciousness. In the end this is not a solution at all because the reduction can't be carried out in practice, in terms of unpacking our physical world language into a language with referentce to consciousness. But Hegel was one of those who tried this tack, as I interpret him. That is, he is an idealist, and as an idealist that shows he is still trapped by Descartes' problematic.

All idealists, except for an extreme solipsist, agree there are things apart from the consciousness of this or that human. But that doesn't make them "realists". Realism concerning the physical world that presents itself in sense
perception is the view that this world, and its various forces, exist independently of all consciousness.

This is also shown by Hegel's use of the term "dialectic" to allegedly refer to an, as you put it, "ex-human" reality. The word "dialectic" was first coined by Aristotle to refer to the social process of trying to convince others of something by giving them reasons, and the back and forth of objection and reply and so on. A dialectic, in other words, is a debate, and its components are the assertions and pieces of reasoning that actors in that process create.
As such, it's hard to see how, say, physical non-human reality has any "dialectic." It all seems like a bad metaphor. Engels, unfortunately, also tried to carry over this piece of baggage from Hegel, but it becomes even more obtuse for Engels since he's a materialist.

Of course, we can see debate and conflict in society as involving "dialectical" components, but these should be at the level of the "superstructure" for a marxist.

redt.: "To take up the 13 pound cat, cat, 13, pound, weight, are both mental and extra-mental, but not extra-human because they are idealizations."

Well, the problem i have here is that it's not clear what you're using the words "13 pound cat", "cat", "13", "pound" and "weight" to refer to. When I talk about my cats, I don't take myself to be talking about "idealizations", tho you could reasonably say that in my thinking and referring to them i make use of concepts that are "idealizations" in some sense. I'd call that a "conception" but i think we agree there is such a thing. But it's in my head, and is thus not what i'm talking about when I'm talking about the black furry things chasing toy mice on my floor.

But then you add: "However, the object we denote and attempt to make a statement re: is extra-human, that is, it exists objectively of us". But i don't think you should want to say that "idealizations" exist independently of us.

Marx, as i read him, is a realist. He believes there are in the world independent of human consciousness "laws of motion," that is, capacities, tendencies, forces. Marx did his PhD dissertation on the debate in Greek philosophy of science between Aristotle and the atomists, and Marx was influenced in his thinking by Aristotle. For exampel, Marx's ethics, to the extent he can be said to have any, seems to be a kind of "human flourishing" ethics, a naturalistic ethics grounded in human nature. Of course it's controversial as to whether Marx has any clear moral theory at all, as in the controversy over whether M. thinks capitalism is unjust.

redt.: "It would be interesting to compare say Marx's notion of what makes the proletariat a universal, revolutionary class with that of standpoint theory, which it certainly could be read as reducing class to just another kind of oppression without getting at the root."

well, standpoint theory isn't a metaphysics, but an epistemology, so it isn't about "reducing" something to something else. There are a variety of different "standpoints" since there are a variety of different oppressions. Standpoint theory doesn't propose a theory about the nature of these various oppressions (tho it may make use of such a theory such as marxism or feminism) but is about how they affect knowledge.

redt.: "I would rather say that what happens in the 20th century (or rather which coheres in the 20th century) is a split between the reduction of philosophy to the problems of the philosophy of science or logic and method (logical positivism, logical empiricism, analytic philosophy), on one side, and the growth of irrationalism and lebensphilosophie on the other (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, existentialism, etc.) Their split indicates a certain crisis in the possibility of philosophy to proceed rationally that marks the end of philosophy as science."

The analytic tradition also generates its own attacks on realism (Quine, Putnam, and others). The "linguistic turn" of the 20th century generated its own "linguistic idealism" (like Saussure's post-structuralism) just as Descartes' "epistemological turn" generated idealism and phenomenalism and, eventually, both phenomenology and logical empiricism/positivism.

You are willing to take much more seriously the irrealist, irrationalist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, etc. than i am. But, of course, I'm a realist. The best defense of realism against those trends that i've seen is John Post's little book "Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction."

As I've mentioned before, he proposes there a materialist theory of meaning and intentionality as an answer to those anti-realist trends. Very easy to read and very well done.

t.

In your first point, you are correct and even when I wrote it I was not quite happy. It is not that Hegel dispenses with Kant's treatment of form and essence per se, but that he transforms it, just as I think it is fair to say that Marx does not reject the problem Kant poses of transcending both idealism and natural-scientific materialism. Whereas Kant tries to sustain the two, Marx attempts a resolution of the problem. This is what is going on the These on Feuerbach in my opinion, which is even more critical of French materialism than of idealism.

More on the rest later, my sone just appeared with dinner for me: eel roll!!! My favorite!!!

Chris

Mmmm, I am not saying that idealizations exist independent of us, I am saying that idealizations are not merely in our heads or a product of individual brains, but that they are products of social practice, which is both ideas and material relations. I do not take the base-superstructure comment as more than a metaphor. Hans Georg Backhaus has a very good discussion of it in his marvelous essay Between Philosophy and Science in Open Marxism Vol. 1. It is an excellent essay, one of the best treatments of the matter in English IMO.

As for Hegel and Descartes, I tend to think that he considers Spinoza, Hume and Kant's resolutions of the problems Descartes addressed as unsatisfactory. However, I also see Kant, Aristotle and Schelling as Hegel's main invisible interlocutors in the Phenomenology, with Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, most of the Greeks, and Fichte as secondary, though I doubt it would be possible to do any kind of simple association as Hegel touches on something from such a wide range of philosophers before him at one moment or another that even scholars have a hard time discerning it.

Chris

The funny thing about Hegel's language is that he was specifically attacking the horrid academicism of Wolffe and Kant and wanted to write in plain language (he was a high school teacher for many years, after all, in a gymnasium), but his speculative use of many words where he tries to evoke the meaning and its opposite, its simultaneous truth and untruth, makes some of his work especially difficult. I have labored for hours over a single paragraph, and while it is rewarding IMO (and makes me think that much Hegel scholarship is shoddy or shallow, incl notables such as Findlay), it is not easy going.

Chris

Hmmm, my point re: standpoint theory is that it is not sufficient, that in trying to address epistemology from the constitution of social relations, it tends to read, as I read your statement, as one where all oppressions are in effect equal or it is forced to say that it has no answer to the question. Marx and Hegel IMO reject such a separation.

As for irrationalism, i do not take it as more valid. i think that lebensphilosophie is a pox. It is rather that I see the two as poles which are both ultimately incapable of the kind of theoretical work that needs to be undertaken, indicative of a crisis which neither offers a way out of.

I also do not know why dialectic would be relegated to the superstructure. That strikes me as a very odd comment. Can you explain?

Cheers,
Chris

lem: "A recent book I read on Heidegger and Levinas, suggests that the driving force immanent to philosophy has more been that we do not know the things inthemselves."

this is a classic anti-realist gambit and you find it in Putnam and other places. I think Post has a reply to it in "Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction" as does William Alston in "A Realist Conception of Truth." basically it isn't clear what it would mean "to know something in itself." it may be based on some subjectivistic notion of what knowing is, that we only know our own internal states or some such...and that indicates a person is still trapped in the Cartesian box, where we are allegedly separated from the world behind a "veil of appearances" -- a view that doesn't square with the biological function of belief.

If you are ready for a more techical (but clearly written) discussion, you can take a look at John Post's "Terminal Philosophy":

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/~postjf/ch1terml.htm

But I'd recommend reading his little intro book first. Post explains the point i made earlier about how circularity doesn't clearly apply to abductive arguments, and thus the sceptic's argument that it is circular to use facts about our biology and so on is an objection that fails.

t.

this whole thread looks like the discarded notes to Anti-Oedipus put through babelfish and then represented visually in a David Lynch film.

lem: "If capacities just_exist, how do the things that they are capacities of come about? If again they just exist as laws are their nature, then this doesn't seem like a contingent fact: either way it didn't immediately grab me as a solution."

typically things that have capacities have structures that the capacities derive from. a chunk of metal has a certain matrix structure at the atomic level, and it has a capacity like conductivity in virtue of this. But those structures have capacities and wouldn't hold together without them. We can't assume there will always be grounding structures because that would lead to a vicious infinite regress. So the most basic physical tendencies must be capacities not grounded in more basic structures.

the laws could be regarded as presupposing the capacities; if you think of laws as the theoretical statement, the capacities are what would verify them, i guess. So we can say that Ohm's Law -- a particular formula -- refers to a capacity that all metals have.

lem: "Can one argue that apparances are external states?"

okay, first you need to differentiate the mental state of something appearing to you to be such-and-such from the the thing's being such-and-such, the state it appears to be in. The state of the thing's being such and such can exist externally.

lem: "How does one acknowledge subjectivity without splitting it from the world."

Again, check out the materialist account of intentionality ("ofness") described in Post's little book (ultimately based on the materialist theory of meaning and intentionality advanced by Millikan).

well, marx needs a social ontology because he assumes there are actual entities such as social formations (which have "laws of motion") and classes. These are social objects.

t.

er adorno would be the obvious choice i guess (the jargon of authenticity), though personally i think heideggers not really worth ''critiqing'' i mean the guy left the nazi party because it wasn't anti-modern enough for him. He's just a pathetic provincial landed peasant cunt who waffles on about oooh how lovely it would be to own a patch of land out of the city in the fresh air. No wonder he found that dull whining liberal academic hannah arendt attractive.

lem: "As I understand it, the law of gravity can be (stipulatively) derived from "water turns into steam when heated" only in conjunction with some initial conditions."

i don't think so, but this is a physical question, not a philosophical question.

t.

lem: "Your saying that there are a handful of basic capacities and these alone can create a magnesium atom?"

No. an explanation for any event, including the coming into existence of a magnesium atom, requires two types of cause: (1) a structural cause; this is a tendency, susceptibility, capacity, that is, what philosophers call a dispositional property; and (2) an occasioning cause, which is an occurent entity such as an event or action or process. Capacities are the structural components in causal explanations.

t.

The series of occasioning causes may be infinite. The theists of course will say that to explain the totality one must posit God, outside the physical cosmos. But that does not lead to a final explanation. That's because God's will to create such a world would be an unexplainable contingency. In that case, the addition of the God hypothesis adds nothing. Rejecting the God hypothesis, the nature of the world would be the basic structural causes. And these would be necessary. But you can't get rid of contingency, and thus something must be unexplained.

t.

lem: "But you don't seem to be arguing for the existence of just "something", but of specifically capacities or occasional causes. So is it ok to leave the problem?"
okay for me. My claim was that there is causality, and that this has two aspects, structural and occasioning (that is, capactities and events). This seems unproblematic to me, but I'm a realist.

lem: "Eraly H. says that history has meaning through the way in which the past is interpreted by the self (that cannoty exist separately from the choise of histroical mode but can choose differently). Later H. says that history has meaning and is driven by the tacit inter-relationahsips between epochal manifestations of being (i.e. philosophy)."

well, as i said at the beginning of this discussion, I don't profess to understand Heidegger and i'm not sure he has enough insights to justify expending the effort. To say that history has meaning thru our interpretation is fairly unproblematic since humans give meaning to our world; meaning isn't a non-human thing. But the part about history being "driven by" philosophy i find rather bizarre, if taken literally. As Marx might say, history is driven by human practice, not by the efforts of the philosophers to understand it.

t.

lem: "You haven't made the best case for reducing everything (meaningful acts mostly?) to an understanding that is compatible with science."

well, i'm not a reductionist. I don't want to go into the details of a theory of meaning here. I would suggest reading the Post book that I referred to. The argument there is a long one.

lem: "And I don't think you can be called a realist, for everything if you deny the existence of mindindeoendent e.g. mathematics."

No, i don't deny the reality of mathematics. I just don't think it has an apriori basis, i don't think it consists of entities outside the physical world. If you mean I deny the existence of eternally, necessarily existing abstract entities outside the physical cosmos, yes, I do deny THAT form of realism, that is Platonist realism, and I am not a Platonist. Like Scotus, I believe the world of abstract objects exists in re, in the physical world. the Platonist view involves assumptions we don't have to make, in my opinion. but this is hurried, i'm about to run off to the gym.

t.

I'd have thought he was saying the opposite.