Very interesting post. Just a few isolated comments to begin . . .
At 03:10 PM 6/7/2005 +0200, Victor wrote:
..................
The fact that life forms activities are directed to concrete future
states, they are, no matter how simple or mechanical, exercises in
reason. This why, if you will permit a reference to an earlier thread, I
regard the investigation into biosemiology to be a vitally important
exploration of the roots of reason. The most primitive forms of self
reproduction are a totally mechanical process yet
they are at the very root of the rational process.
We are not here proposing that nature has a rational aspect, a la Spinoza.
As I wrote earlier I really have no idea what nature or Nature is. What I am
proposing is that the roots of rationality are in the mechanical purposive
activity of life forms and that whatever life forms "know" [including
ourselves of course] is a function of our practical activities in nature
FROM THE VERY ORIGINS OF THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE in whatever form it
may be acquired, stored, recovered etc.
........................
But biosemiology itself seems to be rather obscurantist, more akin to
Whitehead's philosophy of organism than to Marx.
2. Objectivity: In its essence objectivity refers to conscious reflection
on something rather than the reflection of something in consciousness. That
is to say that objectivity is the function of a activity and not something
we passively assimilate as we confront the daily world. Some of the things
or, better, activities we objectify (very few in my opinion) are those of
our own subjective consciousness. Most are not. Most of our objectifying
involves activities that are the preconditions for our own subjectivities,
either the activities that emerge out of the collective subjective activities
of men learned or developed in the course of collaborative activities while
others involve activities that are preconditions for consciousness in all
its aspects. Hegel, for example, divides his system of logic into two
parts, objective logic and subjective logic or notional logic where the
former is that logic which we enact without subjective reflection. Objective
logic is objective because the only way we can deal with it intellectually
in any other fashion than just doing it is as an object of reflection [I
expect AB to come down on me like a ton of bricks on this one].
In its many concrete manifestations in human activity, intellectual and
material, the principle of self-perpetuation, at least for men, is as
subjective an issue as is the concept of self; the idea of property, of
individual interests and even of "family values" are directly related to the
activity of primitive self-perpetuation, though highly charged with many
concrete connections to the complexities of human social existence. These
slogans of superficial individualism of Social Darwinism and its
inheritors, the bio-sociologists and others like them, only scratch the
surface of things. Regarded objectively, the self-perpetuating activity of
life forms is sublated in virtually all forms of human activity from eating
and intercourse to social labour, wage slavery, and social revolution.
Sounds like some version of Lenin's (or the Soviets' in general) theory of
reflection. Life activity is a form of reflection. However, the 'roots of
reason' strike me as no more than roots, not reason.
...............
The natural sciences reflect exactly this relation between intellect and
practice. There are no real ontological truths in science. Nothing is holy
or beyond question and the only real proof is a sort of abstracted form of
practice, experimentation. Whatever ontologising scientists do, and some
do, is tolerated by the scientific community only insofar as it remains
speculation and does not interfere with the scientific process. Great
scientists have had "ideas"; Newton philosophized that the world was a
clock wound up by the creator and then left to its own devices, Einstein
was sure that "God does not play dice", and Hawkins was until a few years
ago sure that unified field theory would answer all the questions of
physics. Most of these and many more are, fortunately, either forgotten or
on the way to being forgotten, though the scientific contributions of their
makers remain important, even vital, components of the giant artefactual
system men have built to enable their persistence in the world.
The Royal Society started this practice, to keep metaphysics and theology
out of empirical science.
Finally, the natural science of human activity and history, and this is what
Historical Materialism, should be and sometimes is, can least afford the
ontologising forays that occasionally crop up in fields such as physics,
chemistry and organic sciences. The very abstractness of the subjects of
these sciences renders the prononciamentos of important scientists fairly
harmless in the long run. The natural science of human activity is as
concrete as a science can be. It deals directly with human activity and
with its consequences, and philosophic dogmatism of the left and of the
right can only cause disaster, to real people and real communities
(as we have witnessed in the past and as we do witness today). The only way
to avoid these disasters, to the extent they can be avoided at all, is
through adopting a critical and practical approach to theorizing and to
subject every idea to serious debate and testing much as we are doing here.
Sounds very much like Popper, who himself ended up ontologizing in the end.
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