[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: The protectors of the Amazon
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Wed Sep 18 17:00:18 PDT 2019
Yes, I see a very sophisticated understanding of atoms and
molecules in /Dialectics of Nature/. He says also:
If all differences and changes of quality are to be
reduced to quantitative differences and changes, to
mechanical displacement, then we inevitably arrive at
the proposition that all matter consists
of/identical/smallest particles, and that all
qualitative differences of the chemical elements of
matter are caused by quantitative differences in number
and by the spatial grouping of those smallest particles
to form atoms. But we have not got so far yet.
I couldn't find that reference which I recall seeing some
years ago.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Hegel for Social Movements <https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
Home Page <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
On 19/09/2019 7:03 am, David Kellogg wrote:
> Andy--
>
> Engels not only accepted the existence of atoms
> (Dialectics of Nature) he offers us a proof of their
> existence that pre-dates Einstein's (which actually only
> proves the existence of molecules). Engels used the fact
> that the properties of moles of elements could be deduced
> from their atomic weight to demonstrate Hegel's "passage
> of quantity into quality"; there isn't any way to do this
> without the understanding that atoms exist.
>
> Henry--
>
> The term "cyborg" didn't exist until 1960. But I think
> it's a little like the way that Vygotsky and Buhler use
> "Lamarckianism" or "a synthesis of Larmarck and Darwin" to
> refer to what we would now call epigenesis: the term is
> new, but the concept is definitely there in Vygotsky: in
> the form of the "Jennings Principle", or rather Vygotsky's
> criticism of the Jennings principle.
>
> Herbert Spencer Jennings (despite the unfortunate name
> his parents christened him with) was a progressive
> eugenicist (which at the end of the nineteenth century
> must have been like being an airplane pilot with a fear of
> heights). He was mostly interested in paramecia (because
> he wanted to work out the real mathematics behind Mendel's
> discoveries--you know that the numbers Mendel came up with
> for dominance and recessiveness are really WAY too
> convenient). But he used his knowledge of genetics to
> argue against the 1924 anti-Chinese immigration act, a
> piece of racist legislation which is still the basis of
> American immigration law (immigration quotas are designed
> to preserve the ethnic composition of the USA).
>
> In the course of his work on paramecia, Jennings says
> that the sphere of activity of any organism is a function
> (in the mathematical sense) of its organs. Vygotsky is
> skeptical, and not simply because the activity of an
> organism is greater than the sum of the actions of its
> organs. Vygotsky says that humans have the peculiar
> ability to create their own organs: artificial limbs,
> eye-glasses, ear-trumpets, and of course the numerous
> prosthetic devices that our brains use, chief of which is
> language. This means that humans do not obey the Jennings
> principle.
>
> The ability of humans to flout Malthus--our ability to
> make the means of subsistence increase "geometrically" and
> not just "arithmetically"--is not simply a matter of
> altering the environment to suit ourselves and our own
> reproductive proclivities. It is also a matter of altering
> ourselves to suit our better natures. I think that the
> only real hope for the Amazon lies in that latter
> possibility, although I think I would resist
> physicalizing it as "cyborg nature" the way that Donna
> Haraway does. I also think that "cyborg nature"
> essentializes matters: the ability to flout the Jennings
> principle is anything but essential to humans. It's a
> fluke of exaptation: taking an organ that evolved for one
> thing and using it for something quite different (e.g.
> taking organs that evolved for breathing and eating and
> using them for talking about philosophy).
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without
> SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s
> construalism in understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article:
> https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:32 AM HENRY SHONERD
> <hshonerd@gmail.com <mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> David,
> Does biology include the cyborg nature of humanity? I
> mean the way in which technology has changed human
> consciousness, what it is like to be human.
> Henry
>
>
>
>> On Sep 17, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Andy Blunden
>> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>
>> David, I seem to recall that Engels also took atoms
>> to be an unprovable hypothesis. The point for Hegel
>> though is that the question of atoms or not is not a
>> philosophical question, but one which can only be
>> resolved by experiment, and like Engels, he simply
>> failed to imagine that such a thing was possible.
>> Einstein observed atoms c. 1905 via a mathematical
>> analysis of Brownian motion. Another great
>> philosopher, maybe you remember who, claimed that
>> although we could see the Sun, we could not, in
>> principle, ever know what it is made of. Optical
>> spectrometry of course put an end to that,
>>
>> In general, Hegel underestimated the potential for
>> expansion of the domain of natural scientific and
>> technical discovery. But he updated his philosophy as
>> new insights became available, as we all do.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Hegel for Social Movements
>> <https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
>> Home Page
>> <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
>> On 18/09/2019 2:50 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>>> While I was (gratefully) checking out this material
>>> (and also the previously sent material from Mike on
>>> the APA deep poverty challenge) I was turning over
>>> in my head the last discussion we had on Hegel and
>>> social movements. Andy's book prompted me to dig out
>>> my dog-eared copy of Hegel's Logic and give it
>>> another go, and this time I did find it went a lot
>>> more easily (for which to Andy many thanks).
>>>
>>> But I had to cough a bit over Hegel's rejection of
>>> atoms. On the one hand, he says, there isn't and can
>>> never be any empirical evidence for them. On the
>>> other, he says, physics is just miring us in matter,
>>> distracting us from our real task, which is a new
>>> kind of metaphysics that can overleap mathematics,
>>> matter, and elemental sciences stuck in Being
>>> merely and establish a true science of the whole
>>> (his encyclopedia of philosophy, of which the logic
>>> is a part). As usual, when I come up against stuff
>>> like this in Hegel, I try hard to imagine what the
>>> world really looks like to nineteenth century German
>>> philosopher, where atoms are an unproveable
>>> hypothesis and God is simply "pure" reality. It
>>> still seems to me that what Hegel has to say about
>>> atoms is embarrassing, dogmatic, and downright
>>> foolish--but as soon as we transfer what he says to
>>> sociology and psychology, he starts making sense.
>>>
>>> At the same time I've been rereading Darwin. One of
>>> the things that struck me was how much Darwin was
>>> influenced by political economy, and especially by
>>> Malthus. What Darwin is really up to is
>>> taking Malthus OUT of sociology, where it really is
>>> not very good at explaining things like learning and
>>> development, collaboration, and culture generally,
>>> and put him where he really belongs, biology, where
>>> he really does help us to understand precisely why
>>> learning doesn't seem to play much of a role in
>>> evolution and speciation. It was Darwin's misfortune
>>> that many of his most ardent epigones (e.g. Spencer)
>>> were essentially Lamarckians who were trying to
>>> reverse what he did, putting his biology back into
>>> political economy. It was all of our misfortunes
>>> that this resulted in a highly atomistic way of
>>> looking at culture, history, sociology and
>>> psychology, in which the sole supra-individual unit
>>> was a pseudo-biological category of race.
>>>
>>> Darwin only makes sense when you ratchet him down
>>> from social theory to biology. Human culture really
>>> doesn't obey strict Darwinism anymore: agriculture
>>> and husbandry mean we burn forests instead of
>>> hunting and gathering like other species, and
>>> knowledge of how to do this is essentially
>>> Lamarckian in the way it is handed down through
>>> language. Similarly, Hegel only makes sense when you
>>> ratchet him up from physics into social theory.
>>> Atoms exist, and carbon dioxide is made of 'em, but
>>> that doesn't tell us much about how to stop global
>>> warming. Our, physics doesn't really have to listen
>>> to Hegel--there is just too much empirical evidence
>>> for atoms--and the proper name of the new kind of
>>> metaphysics that Hegel had in mind is not
>>> metaphysics at all, but historico-cultural psychology.
>>>
>>> (I have always wondered why my Geneva friends insist
>>> on "historico-cultural" instead of
>>> cultural-historical, but I think I know
>>> now...culture, e.g. guarding the amazon, is the
>>> emerging concept of history and not the other way
>>> around....).
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>>
>>> New Article:
>>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story
>>> without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s
>>> construalism in understanding narratives by
>>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>>> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>> To link to this article:
>>> https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM Martin Packer
>>> <mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>> A season filled with intense, human-caused
>>>> wildfires in the Amazon rainforest has burned
>>>> thousands of square miles, turned the skies
>>>> black and raised red flags on an international
>>>> level. The number of fires is 85% higher than
>>>> the previous year.
>>>>
>>>> The Amazon is both the lungs and the heart of
>>>> our planet. It takes in enormous quantities of
>>>> CO_2and_is thought to produce 12-20% of the
>>>> world’s oxygen. It also acts as a biotic pump
>>>> bringing rain into South America and all over
>>>> the world. Without rainfall, there will be
>>>> cultural and agricultural ruin.
>>>>
>>>> Let’s credit those who have been and continue
>>>> to act as its guardians. Over the course of
>>>> thousands of years, the indigenous people of
>>>> the Amazon have worked to preserve this diverse
>>>> biome that has contributed immensely to the
>>>> habitability of the planet.
>>>>
>>>> They are the ones who can show us the way, we
>>>> must support and follow them in order to save
>>>> this vital ecosystem.
>>>>
>>>> Help the indigenous people fight back
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>>>> -*The Amazon shouldn't sting your eyes with
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>>>> when humans set fires there. -/CNN
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *9 numbers you need to know to understand the
>>>> Amazon fires - * Thousands of fires burning
>>>> across Brazil’s Amazon rainforest have captured
>>>> international attention over the past week. The
>>>> fires are mainly set by ranchers and farmers
>>>> seeking to clear land for cultivation. - /PBS
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