Marxism and Lacan - Incompatible Theories

[Cael]

That's starting from thought, Cael. Why not try it the other way around? The stone exists independently of us. Our senses receive an "imprint" from the stone. Our brains process that imprint through thought (which is a complex process)
The rock of course has all the physical qualities of a rock and we get a partial and incomplete but accurate reflection of it through our senses.

But imagine for a minute you are building a robot. There are a range of sensors you can equip it with. You might give it an echo sounding system, or you might give it vision in infra red, or sound sensors in a given range. Depending on which systems you give it and how you calibrate those systems, the perception of the rock will be different. After that you must chose what data processing systems to give your robot. These will have to be programmed to proccess data according to given categories. Again you must choose these categories. If you build five different robots, you can have five very different perceptions of what a rock is. All of them are likely to be valid, none of them contradicting each other, but, still, the robots perception of the rock is limited to the perceptive and data processing systems you decided to give the robots. In the idealist mode of thinking, you were God and the robots were us humans. You gave the robots a system of thinking, and then you sent it into the world.

[Cael]

But let's continue tomorrow, oiche mhaith a chara.

[cactusflower]

You, me and your robot. Cheers.

[cactusflower]

Right you are Cael, break's over.

Recognition of the external world and the reflection of it in the human mind forms the basis of dialectical materialism, which is the Marxist theory of knowledge.

I'm wondering if you've read Lenin's "Materialism and Empirio Criticism"
(1908). Lenin responds in this book to philosophers who he says claim to offer an updated Marxism, which is really the reactionary idealist philosophy of Bishop Berkeley, dressed up in some new phraseology.

Lacan's theory as quoted by you is strikingly similar to Berkeley's philosophy.

"The connexion of ideas... does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified." "Hence, it is evident that those things which, under the notion of a cause co-operating or concurring to the production of effects, are altogether inexplicable, and run us into great absurdities, may be very naturally explained...when they are only considered as marks or signs for our information". Signs and symbols in Berkeley's theory replace the "pretence" that things can be explained by material causes. Lenin shows Berkeley's idealism to ultimately rely on the existence of a god who puts the same ideas about the world into everyone's heads.

Lenin cites Engels "Ludwig Feuerbach" as a key work. "Engels divides philosophers into "two great camps" - materialists and idealists. Engels ...sees the fundamental distinction between them in the fact that while for the materialists nature is primary and spirit secondary, for the idealists the reverse is the case. In between these two camps Engels places the adherents of Hume and Kant, who deny the possibility of knowing the world, or at least of knowing it fully, and calls them agnostics."

Lenin makes it clear that he sees these two philosophies, materialism and idealism as irreconcilable.

In terms of how effective they were as a guide to practice, Berkeley ended up selling "Tar water" as a cure for all ailments, and Lenin lead the Russian Revolution.

[Cael]

Unfortunately, a chara, I havent yet read the article by Lenin you refer to, and my knowledge of Berkeley is very limited. I will only say that he didnt claim that the material world dosnt exist, just that it couldnt be proven to exist.

You find that in human knowledge there is a great deal of overlap. Yes, Marx's materialism and idealism are incompatable, when viewed in isolation, but we must remember that Marx and Engels founded dialectical materialism by taking idealism and changing its perspective - not by throwing out all its insights. Marx, when Hegel had fallen out of fashon, took great pleasure in praising Hegel, if only to annoy the trendies. The point where idealism and materialism contradict each other is in the question of the origin and source of human thought. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky has put forward the proposition that language aquistion is inherent to humans and not entirely learned, which would tend to support the idealist perspective.

From my own personal perpective I think that both idealism and materialism are correct. How we see the world and think about it is limited by our physical perceptive process and the way we think is limited by the structure of our brains, but once language has been aquired it is constantly being altered by our encounter with the relations of production. That this is true is clearly seen by the massive effort the state, media and churches put into trying to stop us thinking and looking at what is before out eyes.

[cactusflower]

Cael-

The point where idealism and materialism contradict each other is in the question of the origin and source of human thought.

What is your view on the origin of thought?

Marx, when Hegel had fallen out of fashon, took great pleasure in praising Hegel, if only to annoy the trendies.

Marx ( and Lenin ) didn't praise Hegel in a general way, they took his dialectical method and "stood it on its head", - their view of the origin of thought was diametrically opposed to that of Hegel. If you have a look at Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (Vol. 38) you can see the detailed hand written notes he wrote on dialectics between 1914 and 1916 - the objectivity of things, the union of analysis and synthesis, the totality of relations of things to others and the development of things (as a unity of opposites) in their internally contradiction-driven movement and life, transition, change through negation of negation, leaps and so on.
This process is true both of nature and of thought, which is part of it and which reflects it.

Is thought, in your opinion, derived from the material world?

Marx, Engels and Lenin set out to develop the theory of knowledge as a science (Dialectical Materialism), complementary to Historical Materialism and Marxist economics. They were unremittingly hostile to idealism and to religion.

What do you mean by language being inherent ? There have been a number of children raised by wolves. None of them had human language. Language is entirely social,is it not ?

Bourgeois ideology is the dominant ideology under capitalism, but if we don't have a theory of knowledge that supercedes and transcends bourgeois philosophy, we have no way of recognising it and replacing it.

All of modern science is based on the premise of the knowability of the material world and its unity. Successive advances in human knowledge deepen our knowledge and understanding of it. Do you accept science ?

[Cael]

Still, the dialectical method is that you take contradictions and synthesize a resolution. You have to rememeber that Marx and Engels were facing a huge battle in taking on idealism, and they may have overstated their differences with the old guard.

Science is certainly based on the premise that we can know matter, but only within confines laid down by science itself. Science is limited to the phenomenal, and is happy to limit itself to the phenominal. (For example Science makes positive statements about energy, but does not try to answer the question: what is energy?) It seems to me that Marx and Engels were taking the same approach, except that, unlike science, they did not seek to foreclose subjectivity.

Feral children is an interesting question. All research indicates that if language is not learned by four years, it will not be learned to a satisfactory level after that. This would indicate that language is not entirely social - if it was, there should be no upper age for learning it. An actual physical process is taking place in the brain up to four years of age.

Marx was certainly very driven by the need to expose bourgeois ideology as being in error. I think, to some extent, he didnt do himself any favours by being so hostile to the spiritual. No spiritual person even needs theory to see that the capitalist system is entirely criminal.

Certainly Darwin's descoveries point to the likelihood that our brains have evolved to take account of the material world. However, saying that dosnt entirely negate what the idealists say. Evolution moves much more slowly than the relations of production do. Its unlikely that there is any real change in the human brain between the height of feudalism to the height of 19th century capitalism. So there must be a certain block to thought being formed by present social structure, i.e. our thought process lags behind our actual conditions. Beyond that, even taking evolution into account, its clear that we can only see as far as our stage of evolution allows us to see.

[cactusflower]

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Still, the dialectical method is that you take contradictions and synthesize a resolution. You have to rememeber that Marx and Engels were facing a huge battle in taking on idealism, and they may have overstated their differences with the old guard.

Cael - that isn't the dialectical method as Marx would have recognised it. The contradictions are inherent in the thing: you can't force a resolution where the conditions don't exist for it.

If "no spiritual person even needs theory to see the capitalist system is entirely criminal" then the issue is not a class issue and could be resolved by CORI: is that really what you think ?

You didn't answer my question about the origin of thought.

Our brains are part of the material world. Thought and the brain are not the same thing. Our sense organs receive information from the material world that are processed in the brain. The physical characteristics of the brain don't have to change for theory and knowledge to be developed.

I think you are right in saying that thought processes lag behind our actual conditions. The reasons for that are that we are living in a society dominated by bourgeois ideology - in the media, the universities, and in society at large. The ideology reflects the predominant social relations of the era. It is more difficult to develop new ideology than to reiterate an old one. But at the same time, the ideology is clearly failed, as it can't deal with the social, economic and geopolitical contradictions in the world today with the disintegration of relations and the catastrophic shift in the economic conditions. In that sense, the conditions are here for a leap in understanding.


The question I asked

[Christel]

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - Duchamp. He wanted to make it clear that a picture of a pipe was not a pipe. I don't agree with your interpretation of the Fountain, but as you say, its late.

Btw - I didn't say "numbers count material objects" - although they most certainly do. I said

Wasn't that Magritte, with the pipe, I mean?

[Christel]

That would be a rather redundant statement, wouldn't it? To go further with what I said on Duchamp, he showed that it is the space itself that determines what the object inside it will be counted as. A urinal would not be considered a work of art, but if a celebrated artist puts it on a pedestal in an art gallery, then it has filled a space reserved for works of art, and so, it becomes a work of art.

That's the same principle like context in language, that has an important part in the meaning of words uttered?