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[xmca] dualism and monism



Ineresting, the parallel discussions on inside/outside and material/mental, ideal/natural. ?

Yes the quote is a good one, Martin, forcing me to try harder to clarify my view on monism. There is no doubt at all that the overcoming of Kant's dualism was the main issue for that period of criticism of Kant, with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. I think Fichte did a fair job of it, but left us with a Jacobin subjectivism which solved the problem of dualism by subsuming everything under Ego. In my opinion, Schelling's attempt to recover an objective world in a monist system (Nature) relies a lot on the kind of gesture I have mentioned. But I think it was Hegel who succeeded in a monism which could be really productive. I think Feuerbach had it right when he accused Hegel of having an abstract and not a real natural human beings constituting Spirit, and Marx pointed us in the right direction, etc., etc., in all of which I should give thanks to Ilyenkov ...

Mike said it in his tuppence worth. When confronted with a duality, I think we should asked "how is this distinction mediated?" rather than "this distinction is false (or illusory)." This was Hegel's approach.

Of course one also needs some kind of conception of the nature of the underlying reality, and this should not incorporate a dualism.

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
Andy, this is cheap scholarship, copying quotes, but... from chapter 4 of
"Dialectical Logic," on Fichte:

"From two different, dualistically isolated halves, having no connection at
all with each other, you could not create a single, integral system. What
was needed was not dualism, but monism, not two initial principles but one
only. Because, when there were two different initial principles, there were
two different sciences, which never merged into one."

Just words? Just WORDS? JUST words?

Martin


On 2/23/09 9:58 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

The point I want to make is this: to claim that everything
is material or by some such sweeping statement make a claim
to a radical monism, is just words. At some point you have
to make a distinction. It doesn't really matter whether you
call everything "Spirit", "matter", "nature", "texts" or
whatever. So long as it is "everything" it is nothing, it is
just a Kantian "thing-in-itself."


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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

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