[lbo-talk] Chuck's Cassirer posts

Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Jun 19 06:28:31 PDT 2008


Carrol: "That view" belongs to Charles & to a crude pragmatism ^^^ CB: Fuck you. This derives from your crude misreading or purposely ignoring what my view is on this issue, as expressed dozens of times on this list and others.

^^^

which has nothing to do with Marx, since for Marx, at least in the Theses Charles is relying on here, practice was (a) collective (revolutionizing, changing those involved in it) and (b) the test of "truth" not in the sense Charles has in mind, ^^^^^ CB; My response to Chris was precisely that his error is that he doesn't think of practice as social (collective) , proving that you are exactly wrong as to what I have in mind concerning the 2nd Thesis on Feuerbach. My discussion of these issues is saturated with emphasis on the social nature of humans, which you are too crude to notice, or you can't believe that I understand, or some such disrespectful ignorance on your part.

^^^^^

the correctness of particular propositions, but truth in the sense of "this-sidedness" -- meaning a collective agent always already involved in "the world out there" -- i.e., it was not out there but "in here, we with it." ^^^^ CB: And as Engels explains ( and I know and you don't, in your ignorance of the full Marxist classics) the task of science is to turn things-in-themselves into things-for-us, That's _us_, plural, not singular; not "things-for-me".

^^^^

When you automatically, it seems, identify practice with the practice of the isolated individual you (yes, Chris does identify practice with the isolated individual -CB) show your spontaneous acceptance of the fundamental perspective of capitalist ideology, the abstract--isolated--individual (or the mere sum of such individuals) as constituting the human species.

^^^^ CB: Exactly. I almost added to my reply to Chris something like this comment. It reveals that Chris is thinking of "practice" as the practice of an individual, not a social practice. It reveals a positivist view of science. The main error of positivism is this Robinsonade. The scientific principle of repeatability of experimental results ( by others) gets to the social practice principle.

The most important and primary aspect of a human individual's objective reality ( in Lenin's sense) is other human beings. An individual subject's observations are confirmed as objective by agreement from other people , other subjects. Thus, the importance of repeatability of experimental results to scientific proof, i.e. repeated by more than one individual experimenter.

The test of objectivity is inter-subjective agreement. Human science originates in _social_ labor, back at the origin of the human species.

^^^^^^

Carrol


>
> --- On Wed, 6/18/08, Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
wrote:
> >
> > As to whether we can observe nature directly, that reminds
> > of Kant's
> > unknowable-things-in- themselves. I subscribe to the
> > Hegel/Engels way of
> > dealing with that. In a few words, practice as the test of
> > theory cuts
> > throw the problem that our cultural/symbol system bias
> > mediates our
> > observation of objective reality.
> >
> >
> > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl
> > plc. www.surfcontrol.com
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>


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