>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 12/23 6:26 AM >>> I am with Charles Brown 100% (almost) in this dispute. __________ Charles: Thanks for that, comrade. _____ Charles: I think you are making fundamentally helpful points in emphasizing the usual aspects of materialism. It's funny but we have been discussing mainly dialectics and comes the charge from Andy that Engels and Lenin are idealists in their position. I have been arguing against this without going into the usual fundamentals of materialism to combat Andy's charge of idealism. As you point out, it usually means that oneself is the real idealist when one tries to say Engels is an idealist. ________ The turning point in this argument was the Giraffe debate where the evolution of the long neck was accepted as (partially) dialectical. None could say what _______ Charles: Oops I cut off some. I think the giraffe example, which I only skimmed is dialectics in a natural example. It seems like the discussion of Lewontin and Levins in _The Dialectical Biologist_ ; animals have some subjectivity vis-a-vis their environments. The whole is prior to the parts. These are dialectical principles. But Darwinism is dialectical too. Did you see the letter in which Marx called Darwin's work "our (Marx AND Engels'_ method in natural history ? 1. There are no universal, absolute laws we are told. Then comes the current, very good debate, on Marx and the particular and the general. But Charles Brawn must be aware the there is an even more *general* statement of the general. _______ Charles: Yes ! That quote was rattling around in the back of my mind and I was going to find it and post it. This is the fullest statement of the principle I am getting at. Thanks. This will help to concentrate the argument. I refer to Engels famous passage an Anti-Duhring (Gerry Healy*s favourite to enrage the anti-diamets): " When we consider and reflect on nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. [We see therefore at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still kept more or less in the background.; we observe the movement, transition, connections, rather than the things that move, combine and are connected.] This primitive, naïve, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly coming into being and passing away. 2. But this conception, correct as it expresses the General character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and as long as we do not understand these we cannot have a clear ideal of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, specific causes, etc. * The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the groupi8ng of the different natural processes and objectives in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms - these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge during the last four hundred years. But this method of work also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century." AND THATS DIALECTICAL ________ Charles: Yes indeedy ! Gerry Downing Charles Brown
>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 12/23 6:26 AM >>> I am with Charles Brown 100% (almost) in this dispute. __________ Charles: Thanks for that, comrade. _____ Charles: I think you are making fundamentally helpful points in emphasizing the usual aspects of materialism. It's funny but we have been discussing mainly dialectics and comes the charge from Andy that Engels and Lenin are idealists in their position. I have been arguing against this without going into the usual fundamentals of materialism to combat Andy's charge of idealism. As you point out, it usually means that oneself is the real idealist when one tries to say Engels is an idealist. ________ The turning point in this argument was the Giraffe debate where the evolution of the long neck was accepted as (partially) dialectical. None could say what _______ Charles: Oops I cut off some. I think the giraffe example, which I only skimmed is dialectics in a natural example. It seems like the discussion of Lewontin and Levins in _The Dialectical Biologist_ ; animals have some subjectivity vis-a-vis their environments. The whole is prior to the parts. These are dialectical principles. But Darwinism is dialectical too. Did you see the letter in which Marx called Darwin's work "our (Marx AND Engels'_ method in natural history ? 1. There are no universal, absolute laws we are told. Then comes the current, very good debate, on Marx and the particular and the general. But Charles Brawn must be aware the there is an even more *general* statement of the general. _______ Charles: Yes ! That quote was rattling around in the back of my mind and I was going to find it and post it. This is the fullest statement of the principle I am getting at. Thanks. This will help to concentrate the argument. I refer to Engels famous passage an Anti-Duhring (Gerry Healy*s favourite to enrage the anti-diamets): " When we consider and reflect on nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. [We see therefore at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still kept more or less in the background.; we observe the movement, transition, connections, rather than the things that move, combine and are connected.] This primitive, naïve, but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly coming into being and passing away. 2. But this conception, correct as it expresses the General character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and as long as we do not understand these we cannot have a clear ideal of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, specific causes, etc. * The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the groupi8ng of the different natural processes and objectives in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms - these were the fundamental conditions for the gigantic strides in our knowledge during the last four hundred years. But this method of work also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century." AND THATS DIALECTICAL ________ Charles: Yes indeedy ! Gerry Downing Charles Brown --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
