it's surely a wonderful experience to have a hang-over on Friday,
because of the tour-de-force done on Thursday, under the influence,
of ripping Engels to pieces, then forget about that on Saturday,
giving a Seminar on the Rep-Grid-Technique [see later: Re: affect=20
(cultural differences in...)], going to a birthday party to discuss,
among other themes, the recent ritual here between green/autonomous
fighters against atomic-energy-waste-proliferation and green/white
uniformed defenders of the state authority. And finally using a
pause in writing work on Sunday, to find your wonderfully serene
and horizon opening answers to my calling out, pro-vocation.
Ah, yes, I can see the dialectics today, too.
And I have even looked up the context of the quotes in one of my=20
oldest main sourcec (Selected Works, vol. II). The German title of the
quoted article is: "Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen
deutschen Philosophie". How is this translated in the English version
of this canonical book of Soviet Philosophy ? I don't know, I don't
own it.
The variants would be:
* L.F. and the end ... =20
* and the result ...
* and the exit ...
* and the way out ...
* ... of classical German philosophy
To re-read it diagonally, looking at my markings and scribbles in the=20
margins (25 years old) to find those two suspiciously unmarked places=20
where Ellen and Vera took the quotes from, was *fascinating*, and I
found several con-texts that resonate strongly with several points
that you two, Jay and Vera, have raised.
The second part of the quote in "Mind and Society", p 120, comes
actually first in the article, and speaks about the power of the
Hegelian "system", of course "as rightly understood after the
materialist turning, putting Hegel who stood on his head again
on his feet..." (on ca the third page of the article):
>In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all
>time, nothing is absolute or sacred. On everything and in everything
>it sees the stamp of inevitable decline; nothing can resist it save
>the unceasing process of formation and destruction, the unending
>ascent from lower to the higher -- a process of which philosophy
>itself is only a simple reflection within the thinking brain.
On Thursday, I had given free rein to my first self -- Arne(1) --
who like all Johns(1) or H=E4nse(1) feels *very* superior because of=20
insights they gain, sitting on the shoulder of the eagle, or, to
use the more recent Nordic image, traveling as a rider of the big
mother goose, as a Nils(1), son of Holger.
We know it better than Engels because we have the additional experience.
We do not look down to religion as a "primitive form of the spirit"
anymore, rather we see it as one of the "enemy sisters" -- as the
wonderful genre goes that C. West Churchman has used in his Alterswerk
(wise age work) "The Systems Approach and Its Enemies". The Greeks
might have invented it, or the even older philosophers in India or
China ? Science is one of the sisters, big industry another, the
state institutions a whole gang/group/team of them. Tank-Girls,
these days, it seems.
And, of course, as contradictions go, the supreme irony of this
quote of Engels if you just turn it against the official high priests
of the Marx and Engels secular belief system. The "eternal" party
hierarchy, the fixed ideas about what constitutes the right way to
ensure reproduction of a society, all these things that were still
going on 25 years ago just some 50 kilometers east of here...
I imagine that (e.g.) Peter Ruben, a professional philosopher
in the German Democratic Republic, must have drawn much of his
immense energy of criticizing his own community and their politics
from quotes like this one. Three times he was sent "into production"
to drive caterpillars or assemble appliances, and came back, grateful=20
for the new experiences, and with arguments so much stronger. I wish
someone out there would just take the volume "Dialektik und Arbeit
der Philosophie", and translate it into English. Or has it been done
already ?
=46or Ruben, philosophy must be defined as "Allgemeine Arbeit",=20
"generalisation work", a very simple and powerful idea. He also has=20
established a very important distinction between "Widerstreit" and=20
"Widerspruch", literally: fight-against and speak-against,=20
or: counter-conflict and contra-diction.=20
The first is a typical one-time encounter of two independent,=20
autonomous systems -- like when a meteor hits mother earth
either hard or by just scratching her gaseous outskirts. For both
systems this encounter surely has grave consequences, among them good
ones -- like apparently our marsupial and mammal ancestors finding
a big open, albeit dusty, sphere to spread and invent their endless=20
varieties...=20
=46or one of the both systems or even both at once, the Widerstreit=20
might end with obliteration, systems' death. But they might also=20
just part again, each on its own autonomous course. The important
characteristics is the lack of *common* consequences of a sort of
one-time-event of counter-action.
The second, the contradiction in the Marxian/Hegelian sense, is much
more interesting, because both systems (sometimes also more than just
the perennial *two*) not only survive the encounter, they also continue
to "struggle" against one another, thereby essentially making up
their own autonomous meta-system, driven by the endless (oh, no, not
really "endless", all sorts of ends and pauses do occur) counter-
forces. As example, see the developing world markets, of goods, of
labour, of happiness...
But then, really: Colleagues and Countrymen: Isn't this a wisdom
of nearly everybody today ? Look at the second quote (about three
pages into section V of the article) from Engels "L.F. and the way
out of classical German Philosophy", once again:=20
>The great basic idea that the world is not to be viewed as a complex
>of fully fashioned objects, but as a complex of processes, in
>which apparently stable objects, no less than the images of them inside
>our heads (our concepts), are undergoing incessant changes ...=20
Engels continues (my translation):
>incessant changes, in which in spite of all apparent randomness, and
>against all momentaneous backdropping tendencies, in the long run a
>progressive development is making itself felt -- this great basic
>idea has, especially since Hegel, been so thouroughly absorbed by the
>common sense, that it will probably find no contradiction anymore. But
>to acknowledge the idea in the phrase, and to apply it in the reality,
>concretely and on every field of enquiry, these are two different
>things altogether.
This is really worth citing, even today.
However, I remain stubborn as regards the serious flaw in Engels and
also Marx's theory of the subjective -- of which the Cartesian split
into reality and its reflection "in our brains" is only the most
conspicous symptom. Their category system did not really encompass
cultures in our sense today. The category of "the ideal", together
with it's contradictive partner, "the material" *must* be transformed=20
into a better understanding of public mind, et cetera. =20
Along the lines that Jay is so diligently drawing up for a couple of
years now for us-all, yes, Vera, I agree.
Wishing you a bright Sunday: Arne.