>>> "Daniel" <drdq at m5.sprynet.com> 02/10 11:19 PM >>>
Charles wrote:
"From memory, as Engels, says dialectics recognizes that for all hard and
fast distinctions we eventually find examples that make a contradiction. For
example, if we define a bird as a flying creature, is a chicken a bird ?
But is the definition of a bird useless because chickens can't fly ? More
from Engels on dialectics, all definitions and hard and fast oppositions
tomorrow."
D: There has been quite a debate in the biological sciences on just this matter of words. Is there really that much information conveyed by the word "bird" or "fish," for example. It's true that some people call a whale a fish. As you know, it is very unlike most fish. _______
Charles: I looked up Engels. It is one logical step over perhaps so I won't quote more accurately than above.
I'm not sure that the example you gave was factual. I don't know in what time or place you were speaking of. So, to be fully materialist, as I would be, I can't quite give your hypothetical empirical status, that it really exists or existed. If it is from a while ago, how were they testing for X or Y chromosomes and that sort of thing.
The definite actually existing example I wanted to mention is hermaphrodite humans or individuals of any species. There are people and individuals in other species whose combination of female and male physical characteristics is contradictory with the definition of female and male in the biological sense. However, "male" and "female" are still extraordinarily useful biological categories because they work for such an enormous proportion of the whole population, the people of the earth as a whole. Which is a main focus of my political project. All psychic life of power to all of the People as a whole. Yet, this must be united with the care of the power of the individuals. This a central dialectic of what's happenin'.
D: But, with respect to the larger sense of your comment: is this another way of saying that the exception proves the rule? Now, I understand this idea in terms of the archaic meaning of the word PROVE, as a kind of testing. And, by this definition, the exception disproves the rule. Possibly people understood this when the phrase was coined.
Charles: I am not thinking that this exception in the example which you gave or the one I gave in this post that proves the rule. Maybe it is that saying. I can't remember what that old saying means right now. What I am saying is that female and male, women and men are very useful scientific categories for biology and culture. We might need some other categories to have the full range of existing forms. But the exceptions don't do much to the validity of those categories ;it is rather the enormous general truth , though not 100% truth, of those categories in empirical reality that proves those categories. Nothing is 100% true, absolutely true, except this statement. That's dialectics. Now I am closer to the quote from Engels, but I won't put it on. The same is true of bird despite chicken, turkey and dodo bird. It doesn't hurt to have an association between bird and flying to have a certain amount of knowledge about what is going on with things-in-themselves as they become things-for-us.
D: This is always a very hot issue in music, by the way, since "theorists" are always telling musicians what they can and cannot do, what is and is not music, etc. This has been going on for hundreds of years, and for the most part composers have been happily ignoring it all - with excellent results.
In fact, the "distinctions" you are referring to are words, and just words: hetero, homo, whatever. It is easy to make a rule out of words. Paraphrasing the poet, however, "theory is gray, but life is evergreen."
Charles: Yea, I gotta use words when I talk to you, as we used to say. But words are limited. Definitions breakdown when we examine all of the vast connections of a phenonmenon or a thing-in-itself becoming a thing-for-us, all the while thinking of a thing as a human action. We seek to have our concepts accurately reflect the things-in-themselves and our words to express accurately concepts. But it is impossible to perfect this, because things-in-themselves, Nature, is infinite. This is part of the dialectic of relative and absolute truth. The contradictions that arise in words reflect this asymptotic process of the growth of human knowledge, using Lenin's mathematical metaphor.
In _Anti-Durhing_ Engels says: "To the metaphysicians, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. "His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil' . (footnote: this is a quote of Jesus) . For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other....At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense...For everyday purposes we know and can say, e.g. whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well."
Etc. Etc. if you don't see the connection to this thread let me know. Engels is criticizing the metaphysicians all of the way back to Jesus, who is quoted, for their lack of fluidity of definitions at a certain moment of the process of scientific understanding.
Charles Brown