I am a dialectical materialist. The material world is a lot more complicated than some determinists make it seem. Just because there are contradictions in everything doesn’t mean determinism is disproven.
One of Marx’s main things was in picking fights with Feuerbach on this exact issue, though, and Dialectical Materialism is strictly incompatible with vulgar materialism.
I’m not saying you can’t personally be a determinist but it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
From that reading: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated”
it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
Unless “materialist determinist” means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you’re being silly. The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn’t one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
Unless “materialist determinist” means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you’re being silly.
???
OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action. Early on, Marx struggled with this in critiques of Feuerbach et al and eventually settled on a more coherent conceptualization of dialectical materialism that centered social forces. A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don’t call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn’t one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
I would say that vulgar materialism is still proper materialist, it’s just not Marxist.
I’m not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it’s pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully, and that’s what would be needed to go back and forth on a level deeper than where I’m trying to keep it: “Marx said X” and not “Marx was right because [nerd terms]”. I also don’t think it really matters other than to push back against, as you mention, fatalistic thinking. This tends to paralyze in either extreme: that revolution is inevitable so you can observe the world without dedicating yourself to revolution or that you lack agency and the future is simply out of your hands, good or bad. I’d like to see folks joining and creating orgs and gaining the skills of getting people to engage in collective action.
A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don’t call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
There are different kinds of determinism that get called materialist, and my argument hinges on separating them. As an example, there is economic determinism (here is someone arguing Marx is not that), which though metaphysically materialist is idealist in the Marxist sense of relying on abstraction that rejects some aspects of causality in the material world. In The German Ideology, for example, he refers to Hegelians as idealist in this special sense because they considered only, to put it crassly, their intellectual circlejerking over Consciousness and so on as though all of humanity was causally downstream from this when that is plainly not the case. Likewise, though it appears more materialist than whatever the Hegelians were doing, economic determinism is still discounting the causality of non-economic factors in the world and therefore meets this particular definition of idealist. Among these non-economic factors, of course, are things like the person’s own psychology, or those aspects which cannot be credited to their economic position (we can start with their perception of space if it must be proved that such aspects exist).
So what I’m complaining about are determinist framings that claim the idea of materialism while discounting factors that exist within material reality. Whether you choose to act or not is itself a material factor, and the fact that Laplace’s Demon could have predicted it is beside the point. There is no overarching I-Swear-This-Is-Materialist-Guys Destiny that operates independently from your choices, those choices are part of the causal chain as they are both caused and causing. Anyone who uses a phrase like OP of “free will is an illusion” is surely deluding themselves into quietism with a belief in some kind of destiny that is absolutely at odds with sincere materialism. Such people are just renaming Fate to Science and misappropriating scientific anecdotes and rhetoric to clumsily defend this sleight-of-hand.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
OP is being silly, but my point is that a compatibilist framing is one that endorses the idea of free will as an element of a nonetheless-deterministic system, which I think is the only way one can do Marxism coherently. Then again, I suppose this position comes from the fact that I think you need compatibilism to do anything coherently, so this isn’t nearly as focused an argument as I thought it was (and I didn’t think it was very focused to begin with).
I’m not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it’s pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully,
In my defense, I do read Schopenhauer sometimes, but what you really mean I assume are the more popular authors like the Hegelians and so on. I do make some effort to read Engels carefully, but he has the merit of not being as interested in Hegel as Marx.
It sounds like we have basically the same opinion but just expressed it in ways that lead to miscommunication, lol.
If I were to tweak something to match my approach more closely, it’s that I consider diamat to be closer to a framework of investigation, one epistemology (that I’m a fan of) among several, just like “the” scientific method or the accumulated knowledge of communities that doesn’t fit cleanly into a Eurocentric framing. I don’t really need it to be more than that, so I’m okay with the idea that it also has its limitations. What matters is that we can become more determined and better at building revolution - and diamat definitely helps in one’s thinking about it.
Re: 19th century German philosophers I have regrettably read many. It’s only useful for exactly this topic, which is to say, not very. Wiederholen sie auf Deutsch. Okay it’s also useful for one other thing: I can make toxic Trots and DSA libs shut up sometimes irl.
Fun fact: Freud used plain German words for id, ego, etc. Academics that love to get up their own asses decided to make them Latin in translation.
It sounds like we have basically the same opinion but just expressed it in ways that lead to miscommunication, lol.
Fair enough, that’s what most of these things end up being
If I were to tweak something to match my approach more closely, it’s that I consider diamat to be closer to a framework of investigation, one epistemology (that I’m a fan of) among several, just like “the” scientific method or the accumulated knowledge of communities that doesn’t fit cleanly into a Eurocentric framing. I don’t really need it to be more than that, so I’m okay with the idea that it also has its limitations. What matters is that we can become more determined and better at building revolution - and diamat definitely helps in one’s thinking about it.
I dislike the idea of reducing diamat to “merely” a lens to view things rather than a scientific method that can and should be developed to overcome whatever limitations it has. You might like this essay, which unfortunately I can only find in audio form now. I don’t like show-and-tell philosophy where everything is a toy to be played with and then put away, it feels nihilistic.
Okay it’s also useful for one other thing: I can make toxic Trots and DSA libs shut up sometimes irl.
OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action.W
Where did I imply this, allow me to quote myself on my previous post.
in recognizing determinism one can resign themselves to the supposed inevitable - that would be stupid, or one could go on living as if they had free will even though it’s probably determined or at least random. Remember that even if it is determined your determined actions still matter. Being convinced whether or not you have free will may be out of your control, but the following actions will still affect the world.
So what is it? This whole argument seems to have started because you didn’t like that I used “determinism” positively in the title, as you assumed it implied I thought the universe worked in simple mechanics as Marx’s opponents did.
How am I a vulgar materialist? You can’t just say “my idea is in this category, and yours is in that category, therefore you are wrong.” For your quote, where does that contradict my ideas. Yes, things are more complicated than acting like a person is a billiard ball or a pure subject. In dialectical materialism all things are subjects and objects, but where does the choice come in. All you’re saying is things are more complicated than certain determinists make out and I’m not denying that. P.S. Breht from Revolutionary Left Radio is a determinist and he’s as marxist as you can get.
Dialectical Materialism is not a sterile philosophical framework, it’s a cart being driven by the horse of stoking revolutionary action. Marx’s writings were about how to be a revolutionary, why be a revolutionary, what is fundamentally at issue with capitalism that requires revolution, and how can we address revolution via the “right” epistemological framework. Its most basic statement is to reject (1) the (pejorative of) idealism, of placing a framework of understanding in the driver’s seat and conforming material reality to fit within in, and (2) vulgar materialism, which is to say a sterile materialism that says material forces caused X to happen and there ya go, end of story. In rejecting the latter there is a call to action, of recognizing the ability to self-shape and foment revolution through developed class consciousness, through revolutionary class consciousness. One of the reasons Marx spends so much time clarifying proletarians from lumpens and personally pushing to organize and radicalize. Diamat is a philosophy of activism.
Holding hard to this kind of deterministic thinking is a vulgarization that strips the entirety of the activist struggle. You seem to call something diamat if it recognizes mutual shaping of material conditions and society, but if that society and you and your org have no agency then the point is entirely moot. You have merely created a framework of describing a clockwork, not at all what Marx was getting at. The subjectivity addressed, for example, is not just being the subject of an object. As an epistemological endeavor, the whole point of diamat is to use it to explore how to build revolution. What you choose to build, how you advocate, who you fight and argue with, etc.
I’m not surprised that a Western self-labeled Marxist podcaster may be incoherent lol. The thing that characterizes the Western left more than anything is a deep urge to have and share strong opinions, to do insufficient self-criticism, and then call it a day, failing to actually organize anything. But I dunno I don’t follow or really care about that one dude.
I know what Marxism is and I know people affect society. I just don’t know where you think free will comes from. At this point it just seems like you’re mad I used the word “determinism.” I’ll have you know Breht is not a hot takes kind of guy except when he shows his raw emotions around palestine. He is a nuanced dialectician and the podcast where he mentioned determinism wasn’t meant to be widely seen or make anyone mad.
Why do I need to know where free will comes from? This line of pushback makes no sense to me. I do not need to provide a positive alternative for your claims to be contradictory. Contradictory claims are not good and true by default, waiting for a pure and good alternative until they can really properly be contradicted. What would be so bad about saying, “oh I guess this doesn’t make sense” and just… leaving it there and probing deeper later?
The hard line incompatibilist determinism you and others are mentioning is basically what liberals hold up as a straw man to criticize Marx’s strong emphasis on material conditions (including historical contingency on past human action) shaping all the context in which we operate, including the shape of our thoughts. Something something “like a nightmare”.
Re: podcast guy, maybe he’s fine who knows but I cannot recommend, “a podcast guy said it” as a supporting argument for why a philosophical position isn’t contradictory. Cold takes can also be incoherent and this one is about 150 years old.
Contradictions are within all things including ideas, I’m sure there are contradictions in mine and I try to work through them. However, I don’t know what you’re pointing to that invalidates my argument. Free will can’t exist in a material world. Consciousness arises from the world and acts within it as a part of it. It is not an outside actor as anyone who proposes free will assumes, and it is not simply being acted upon as a non-dialectical determinist would assume. Determinism doesn’t mean the world is simple, it means it is knowable and free will doesn’t exist. No one individual or society has the capacity to be laplace’s demon, so we might as well act like we have free will. I only appealed to authority because you weren’t listening to my rational argumentation and I hoped you’d know one of the most principled online figures.
I don’t mean contradictions in the dialectical sense. I mean truly incompatible ideas being called compatible. A=B but also A!=B. I am a hippopotamus and also a hummingbird. Category errors. That kind of thing.
I’m not hearing anything in the other statements that clarifies how your position is not a materialist determinism, which was implied by earlier references. Everything said there is consistent with materialist determinism as are the fairly basic criticisms of free will (they are actually the usual arguments for materialist determinant as well lol).
I didn’t call referencing a podcast guy an appeal to authority.
If you review our interaction I think you’ll see that I’ve tried very hard to listen to you and explain what I’m talking about in a way that addresses what you are saying, including with references and trying to use both academic and non-academic language. When people take their time to do these things it is a comradely exercise.
OK then, I think I understand your perspective on the argument. My language use may have contradictions, but I have articulated the ideas I subscribe to the best I can.
I know I am using arguments in common with mechanical materialists. My position is they are wrong because they failed to see the complexity of the world as seen through dialectics.
I did not mean to suggest you were calling me fallacious. I was simply admitting it was an attempt at Ethos because my Logos was failing to reach you.
That doesn’t mean its proven, either. The quantum mechanical world does not appear to fit our deterministic models. It suggests those models are only approximations of reality, that they only have a useful predictive capacity within a cosmically narrow set of conditions.
it’s unknown, the bit of the map that says “here be dragons”. Maybe there is some quantum component to the phenomenon we’re calling free will. Maybe it’s just a hallucination of meat. To say one or the other definitively isn’t happening, that it does not exist, would be a crude misrepresentation of the research.
I am a dialectical materialist. The material world is a lot more complicated than some determinists make it seem. Just because there are contradictions in everything doesn’t mean determinism is disproven.
One of Marx’s main things was in picking fights with Feuerbach on this exact issue, though, and Dialectical Materialism is strictly incompatible with vulgar materialism.
This is an interesting reading on the topic: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/
I’m not saying you can’t personally be a determinist but it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
From that reading: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated”
Unless “materialist determinist” means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you’re being silly. The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn’t one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
???
OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action. Early on, Marx struggled with this in critiques of Feuerbach et al and eventually settled on a more coherent conceptualization of dialectical materialism that centered social forces. A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don’t call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
I would say that vulgar materialism is still proper materialist, it’s just not Marxist.
I’m not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it’s pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully, and that’s what would be needed to go back and forth on a level deeper than where I’m trying to keep it: “Marx said X” and not “Marx was right because [nerd terms]”. I also don’t think it really matters other than to push back against, as you mention, fatalistic thinking. This tends to paralyze in either extreme: that revolution is inevitable so you can observe the world without dedicating yourself to revolution or that you lack agency and the future is simply out of your hands, good or bad. I’d like to see folks joining and creating orgs and gaining the skills of getting people to engage in collective action.
There are different kinds of determinism that get called materialist, and my argument hinges on separating them. As an example, there is economic determinism (here is someone arguing Marx is not that), which though metaphysically materialist is idealist in the Marxist sense of relying on abstraction that rejects some aspects of causality in the material world. In The German Ideology, for example, he refers to Hegelians as idealist in this special sense because they considered only, to put it crassly, their intellectual circlejerking over Consciousness and so on as though all of humanity was causally downstream from this when that is plainly not the case. Likewise, though it appears more materialist than whatever the Hegelians were doing, economic determinism is still discounting the causality of non-economic factors in the world and therefore meets this particular definition of idealist. Among these non-economic factors, of course, are things like the person’s own psychology, or those aspects which cannot be credited to their economic position (we can start with their perception of space if it must be proved that such aspects exist).
So what I’m complaining about are determinist framings that claim the idea of materialism while discounting factors that exist within material reality. Whether you choose to act or not is itself a material factor, and the fact that Laplace’s Demon could have predicted it is beside the point. There is no overarching I-Swear-This-Is-Materialist-Guys Destiny that operates independently from your choices, those choices are part of the causal chain as they are both caused and causing. Anyone who uses a phrase like OP of “free will is an illusion” is surely deluding themselves into quietism with a belief in some kind of destiny that is absolutely at odds with sincere materialism. Such people are just renaming Fate to Science and misappropriating scientific anecdotes and rhetoric to clumsily defend this sleight-of-hand.
OP is being silly, but my point is that a compatibilist framing is one that endorses the idea of free will as an element of a nonetheless-deterministic system, which I think is the only way one can do Marxism coherently. Then again, I suppose this position comes from the fact that I think you need compatibilism to do anything coherently, so this isn’t nearly as focused an argument as I thought it was (and I didn’t think it was very focused to begin with).
In my defense, I do read Schopenhauer sometimes, but what you really mean I assume are the more popular authors like the Hegelians and so on. I do make some effort to read Engels carefully, but he has the merit of not being as interested in Hegel as Marx.
It sounds like we have basically the same opinion but just expressed it in ways that lead to miscommunication, lol.
If I were to tweak something to match my approach more closely, it’s that I consider diamat to be closer to a framework of investigation, one epistemology (that I’m a fan of) among several, just like “the” scientific method or the accumulated knowledge of communities that doesn’t fit cleanly into a Eurocentric framing. I don’t really need it to be more than that, so I’m okay with the idea that it also has its limitations. What matters is that we can become more determined and better at building revolution - and diamat definitely helps in one’s thinking about it.
Re: 19th century German philosophers I have regrettably read many. It’s only useful for exactly this topic, which is to say, not very. Wiederholen sie auf Deutsch. Okay it’s also useful for one other thing: I can make toxic Trots and DSA libs shut up sometimes irl.
Fun fact: Freud used plain German words for id, ego, etc. Academics that love to get up their own asses decided to make them Latin in translation.
Fair enough, that’s what most of these things end up being
I dislike the idea of reducing diamat to “merely” a lens to view things rather than a scientific method that can and should be developed to overcome whatever limitations it has. You might like this essay, which unfortunately I can only find in audio form now. I don’t like show-and-tell philosophy where everything is a toy to be played with and then put away, it feels nihilistic.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Where did I imply this, allow me to quote myself on my previous post.
There’s my dialectics.
The title of this post, the content of this post, and your first response to me.
Sorry for making my meme simplified without a long caveat explaining what I mean exactly philosophically.
Oversimplification is not anyone’s complaint here
So what is it? This whole argument seems to have started because you didn’t like that I used “determinism” positively in the title, as you assumed it implied I thought the universe worked in simple mechanics as Marx’s opponents did.
How am I a vulgar materialist? You can’t just say “my idea is in this category, and yours is in that category, therefore you are wrong.” For your quote, where does that contradict my ideas. Yes, things are more complicated than acting like a person is a billiard ball or a pure subject. In dialectical materialism all things are subjects and objects, but where does the choice come in. All you’re saying is things are more complicated than certain determinists make out and I’m not denying that. P.S. Breht from Revolutionary Left Radio is a determinist and he’s as marxist as you can get.
Dialectical Materialism is not a sterile philosophical framework, it’s a cart being driven by the horse of stoking revolutionary action. Marx’s writings were about how to be a revolutionary, why be a revolutionary, what is fundamentally at issue with capitalism that requires revolution, and how can we address revolution via the “right” epistemological framework. Its most basic statement is to reject (1) the (pejorative of) idealism, of placing a framework of understanding in the driver’s seat and conforming material reality to fit within in, and (2) vulgar materialism, which is to say a sterile materialism that says material forces caused X to happen and there ya go, end of story. In rejecting the latter there is a call to action, of recognizing the ability to self-shape and foment revolution through developed class consciousness, through revolutionary class consciousness. One of the reasons Marx spends so much time clarifying proletarians from lumpens and personally pushing to organize and radicalize. Diamat is a philosophy of activism.
Holding hard to this kind of deterministic thinking is a vulgarization that strips the entirety of the activist struggle. You seem to call something diamat if it recognizes mutual shaping of material conditions and society, but if that society and you and your org have no agency then the point is entirely moot. You have merely created a framework of describing a clockwork, not at all what Marx was getting at. The subjectivity addressed, for example, is not just being the subject of an object. As an epistemological endeavor, the whole point of diamat is to use it to explore how to build revolution. What you choose to build, how you advocate, who you fight and argue with, etc.
I’m not surprised that a Western self-labeled Marxist podcaster may be incoherent lol. The thing that characterizes the Western left more than anything is a deep urge to have and share strong opinions, to do insufficient self-criticism, and then call it a day, failing to actually organize anything. But I dunno I don’t follow or really care about that one dude.
I know what Marxism is and I know people affect society. I just don’t know where you think free will comes from. At this point it just seems like you’re mad I used the word “determinism.” I’ll have you know Breht is not a hot takes kind of guy except when he shows his raw emotions around palestine. He is a nuanced dialectician and the podcast where he mentioned determinism wasn’t meant to be widely seen or make anyone mad.
Why do I need to know where free will comes from? This line of pushback makes no sense to me. I do not need to provide a positive alternative for your claims to be contradictory. Contradictory claims are not good and true by default, waiting for a pure and good alternative until they can really properly be contradicted. What would be so bad about saying, “oh I guess this doesn’t make sense” and just… leaving it there and probing deeper later?
The hard line incompatibilist determinism you and others are mentioning is basically what liberals hold up as a straw man to criticize Marx’s strong emphasis on material conditions (including historical contingency on past human action) shaping all the context in which we operate, including the shape of our thoughts. Something something “like a nightmare”.
Re: podcast guy, maybe he’s fine who knows but I cannot recommend, “a podcast guy said it” as a supporting argument for why a philosophical position isn’t contradictory. Cold takes can also be incoherent and this one is about 150 years old.
Contradictions are within all things including ideas, I’m sure there are contradictions in mine and I try to work through them. However, I don’t know what you’re pointing to that invalidates my argument. Free will can’t exist in a material world. Consciousness arises from the world and acts within it as a part of it. It is not an outside actor as anyone who proposes free will assumes, and it is not simply being acted upon as a non-dialectical determinist would assume. Determinism doesn’t mean the world is simple, it means it is knowable and free will doesn’t exist. No one individual or society has the capacity to be laplace’s demon, so we might as well act like we have free will. I only appealed to authority because you weren’t listening to my rational argumentation and I hoped you’d know one of the most principled online figures.
I don’t mean contradictions in the dialectical sense. I mean truly incompatible ideas being called compatible. A=B but also A!=B. I am a hippopotamus and also a hummingbird. Category errors. That kind of thing.
I’m not hearing anything in the other statements that clarifies how your position is not a materialist determinism, which was implied by earlier references. Everything said there is consistent with materialist determinism as are the fairly basic criticisms of free will (they are actually the usual arguments for materialist determinant as well lol).
I didn’t call referencing a podcast guy an appeal to authority.
If you review our interaction I think you’ll see that I’ve tried very hard to listen to you and explain what I’m talking about in a way that addresses what you are saying, including with references and trying to use both academic and non-academic language. When people take their time to do these things it is a comradely exercise.
OK then, I think I understand your perspective on the argument. My language use may have contradictions, but I have articulated the ideas I subscribe to the best I can.
I know I am using arguments in common with mechanical materialists. My position is they are wrong because they failed to see the complexity of the world as seen through dialectics.
I did not mean to suggest you were calling me fallacious. I was simply admitting it was an attempt at Ethos because my Logos was failing to reach you.
That doesn’t mean its proven, either. The quantum mechanical world does not appear to fit our deterministic models. It suggests those models are only approximations of reality, that they only have a useful predictive capacity within a cosmically narrow set of conditions.
Maybe there’s a bit of pure randomness in the universe, how’s that a point for free will.
it’s unknown, the bit of the map that says “here be dragons”. Maybe there is some quantum component to the phenomenon we’re calling free will. Maybe it’s just a hallucination of meat. To say one or the other definitively isn’t happening, that it does not exist, would be a crude misrepresentation of the research.