Against neo-Kantian agnosticism on the Left
Why MUST Marxists be certain beyond a reasonable doubt of the validity of Marxism ? Why must Marxists be so certain about Marxism in communication with other members of the 99% ?
Why must we be authorities on the nature of society ?
We must be authorities because we are asking , urging tens of millions, billions of people to overthrow the existing authoritative order . We can't ask them to do that if we are not sure , if we are agnostic , Kantian skeptics about our own science ! We can't go to other workers and say , " Storm Wall Street ! Damn the police and courts, the authorities.. Though hey their theory might be as good as ours is. We're not really sure that we are correct . There are no correct political theories actually. But risk your lives and livelihoods for our Interpretation of Marxism."
It is evident that to be the basis for effective practice , a theory must be authoritatively held ; it must be authoritatively espoused to be the guide to action of tens of millions of people.,
Most importantly that things-in-themselves are UNKNOWABLE. Engels calls them "shamefaced materialists ". There is a material world but we can't know it ! We can only know truths that are a priori somehow in our thoughts . We can only know our thoughts ; or for Mach and the Empirio-critics Lenin polemicized against we can only know sense datums , not objective reality . Hegel critiqued Kant by saying we know reality by practice . Just that for Hegel reality is one big Idea; that's _objective_ idealism like Plato.
Gunnar :Could you please outline the most important differences between objective idealism vs subjective idealism. Where do most religions lie?
The most important difference I think of first is as I say above between Hegel and Kant; also contra Hume and Berkeley. The latter two are the most explicit; Kant is sort of implicitly subjective idealist . On the surface , he's a " materialist . Solopsisism is the boldest abstract form of subjective idealism; affirmatively asserting that all reality is just ones thoughts . Actually , it's the mentality of the capitalist and all richest people of all . times . Private property as Self.
Hume and Berkeley and Kant are not affirmatively stating this so they are not naked solopsists. However, their absolute skepticism , only negative criticism , no synthesis , arrives at not being able to prove the existence of anything but their thoughts ; logically the same place . Thus, for Kant we can only be sure that geometric proofs are true ; formal logic; identity ; a is a; tautology ; the truth is trivial .
The necessity of construing and purveying our theory authoritatively is why, for example, Engels and Marx use the term "inevitable " to describe the victory of the proletariat in the Manifesto. It's got to be a sure thing to ask the proletariat to take such great risks as a revolutionary struggle. It is necessary to revolutionary esprit de corps , enthusiasm , rah , rah team !
Basically in Engels's famous formulation of the difference between materialism and idealism he equates idealism with religion. Creationism. Really Hegelianism is a kind of Intelligent Designism, which is Creationist and evolutionism in the popular debate of today . Anyway , Engels:
darwin The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
Here's the critique of Kant's anti-epistemology , claim that there is no valid way of knowing being, an impenetrable barrier between thought and being:
"But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world is precisely its thought-content — that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers. In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world."
Notice Engels defines practice as experiment and industry.
Kant is an agnostic , ashamed to admit he's an atheist. Scared to admit it. Hegel wrote his philosophy as a form of Christianity probably to stay on the good side of the Prussian ruling class. Anyway there's another explicit identity of idealism and religion.
On Hegel and the world as one big Idea , it is not the idea of one individual but as Marx calls it , a virtual demiurge of the world . So, Hegel is not a subjective , but objective idealist ; objective reality is an idea.
Lenin notes that Hegel is arch-brilliant and close to materialism . Why ? I'd say because we do think of everything in the form of an idea, words , language, symbols. The ideas are coming from our culture , society , other people , many past generations , not one big abstract Idea or God. It's just that those words do represent an actually existing objective reality , and are not that reality . So, objective idealism (Hegel , Plato) does give a sense that between individuals , subjects, and non-human physical objective reality is the objective reality of human society that is made up of culture, language, words IDEAS. Even material culture is shaped according to ideas.
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