As for this:
"This conversion of abstractions into entities [*] smells more of a dialectic of concepts than of a realistic examination of facts, even though it makes more of an emotional appeal to many than do the results of the latter."
While it seems to undermine the "scientific" basis of Marx's analysis, it confirms the fundamental idea that all concepts are rooted in material conditions (which include personal emotions), and every one (including Dewey's) is merely a hypothesis about what's out there, and a means of orientation for a limited time and situation and a specific group of people.
BobW
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
> Dwayne,
>
> [and towards the end, also a question for Ian and
> Wojtek]
>
> looking for ways to clarify my recent posts
> (including Sean
> Gonsalves' recounting of Freud, Einstein and Zinn's
> thoughts on the
> history of [interaction within] the species), I
> followed a hunch to
> revisit some writings of John Dewey, which I will
> start documenting
> here, and perhaps try to sum up in terms of how I
> understand them and
> how they relate to my previous posts regarding
> scientists, atomism/
> individualism, etc.
>
> First the quote:
>
> To say that all past historic social progress
> has been the
> result of co-operation and not of conflict
> would be ... an
> exaggeration. But exaggeration against
> exaggeration, it is
> the more reasonable of the two. And it is no
> exaggeration
> to say that the measure of civilisation is the
> degree in
> which the method of co-operative intelligence
> replaces the
> method of brute conflict.
>
> Most who consider themselves leftists will probably
> neither disagree
> not find anything particularly novel in the above.
> The term I wish to
> highlight and build upon is his idea of
> "co-operative intelligence",
> to which end I will offer other thoughts from Dewey
> on the
> limitations of the liberal notion (or subscription
> to the idea) of
> intelligence (and its use) as an individual
> attribute and activity.
>
> Ian, Woj, and others who may wish to respond:
>
> The quote above is preceded by a criticism of the
> use of 'class' as
> the defining concept for describing turn of the 20th
> century
> existence. Dewey writes:
>
> In spite of the existence of class conflicts,
> amounting at
> times to veiled civil war, any one habituated
> to the use
> of the method of science will view with
> considerable
> suspicion the erection of actual human beings
> into fixed
> entities called classes, having no overlapping
> interests
> and so internally unified and externally
> separated that
> they are made the protagonists of history --
> itself
> hypothetical. Such an idea of classes is a
> survival of
> a rigid logic that once prevailed in the
> sciences of
> nature, but that no longer has any place there.
> This
> conversion of abstractions into entities [*]
> smells more
> of a dialectic of concepts than of a realistic
> examination
> of facts, even though it makes more of an
> emotional appeal
> to many than do the results of the latter.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --ravi
>
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