determinism - what is it?

[peaccenicked]

Marxist glossary
"Determinism is the acceptance of causality as an objective relation. If carried to the point of absolute (or mechanical) determinism - the denial of chance and accident - as in the case of Laplace, determinism becomes a kind of fatalism in which everything is absolutely determined by what has gone before."

from Lenin's philosophical notebooks
"The all-sidedness and all-embracing character of the interconnection of the world, which is only one-sidedly, fragmentarily and incompletely expressed by causality"

Thus any description of Lenin as a mechanical thinker is false.

[vox]

Okay, let's say I accept that, for the time being. I'm still a little confused.

What, exactly, is the "all-embracing character of the interconnection of the world, which is only one-sidedly, fragmentarily and incompletely expressed by causality?"

That is, and I'm not meaning to be smarmy here, it's an honest question, why is something which is "all-embracing" suddenly converted to the one-sided by Lenin? On what is this based, on what foundation does this rest? The question is, I suppose, why an all-embracing idealism is changed to a single-sided determinism, and by what standard?

Like I said, I'll accept this for the moment and hold my reservations, but I'd really like a coherent answer.

vox

[peaccenicked]

here is Lenin again.
Since everything has multiple content determinations, so any number of arguments for and against can be put forward. That is what Socrates and Plato called sophistry. Such arguments do not contain "the whole extent of the thing", they do not "exhaust" it (in the sense "of constituting its connections" and "containing all" its sides).
The transition of Ground into condition.

If I am not mistaken, there is much mysticism and empty pedantry in these conclusions of Hegel, but the basic idea is one of genius: that of the universal, all-sided vital connection of everything with everything and the reflection of this connection - materialistically turned upside down - in human concepts, which must likewise be hewn, treated, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world. Continuation of the work of Hegel and Marx must consist in the dialectical elaboration of the history of human thought, science and technique

A river and the drops in this river. The position of every drop, its relation to the others; its connection with the others; the direction of its movement; its speed; the line of the movement - straight, curved, circular, etc - upwards, downwards. The sum of the movement. Concepts, as registration of individual aspects of the movement, of individual "streams", etc. There you have approximately the picture of the world according to Hegel's Logic, - of course minus God and the Absolute

[TheDerminator]

Vox
There is no contradiction in the statement by Lenin, what he is saying is that the all-sided approach is reduced to the one side of causal determinism, and this is for Lenin, mechanical.
If that there was all there was to it, I would leave it there, but causal determinism is not any different from essentialist determinism in its one-sided ness, and in my view Lenin underestimated the value of causal determinism as against essentialistic determinism.
You do not have to throw out essence as a concept, but if you recognise that cause all precedes essence, causal determinism is more or less the starting point for an all-sided analysis, because you are asking primarily why was the essence created, and the answer to this question, provides you with the objectives behind the creation of the essence. The latter gives the limitations upon the objectives, and once you know these limitations, you can then expose those limitations, and then say how can we go beyond those limitations.
Your all-sided analysis starts from an overview, and that overview can only stem from knowing why the essence was created in the first place.
Still you can never throw out the essence, because the objective of creating the essence is a major part of the causation, and not to see it is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Only more or less the starting point, because you are not really starting from the determinant of causation, you are starting from a very different determinant and that is the heart of the matter, the latter is a Hegelian concept in origin, but you can rationalise it, and all it means is the essential relationship between the subject and the essential environment.
You can call the essential environment the ground another Hegelian term. The heart of the matter is therefore, the relationship between the essential subject and the ground.
If the subject is economy, you start from the barter system, and ask what is the cause in the ground which made the subject appear? It is the why and the how question put together so it is both cause and essence, but you still have to go deeper and ask why was the barter system created. Still, it is an error to believe you are starting with causation, you are starting with your overview, you are starting with the question as to what is the heart of the matter, hence your all-sidedness.
The heart of the matter determinism, is all you are trying to determine, and that is all-sidedness, because it includes all the other determinants.
Hope, that ends confusion. Might just deepen it!
derminated.

[The Iron Heel]

Ends confusion?! Teehee, interesting post though nonetheless. All those ontological considerations aside, I think that Lenin is simply stating that reality is neither determisitic nor indterministic, rather it is a dialectical intercourse between the two. A similar relationsip as to that which exists with chaos and order, finity and infinity, universality and particularity, etc. That is, there's a recieprocal interconnectedness, interdependence, and the interpenetration of these opposites. One without the other is inconcievable, one cannot exist without the other.

[Rosa]

to peaccenick: Why minus God and the Absolute? I hate when the interpretators of Hegel say that The Absolute is something spreaded from individauals who make that Absolute. Isn't it that "river made of drops" ,and a result of them?..."of their movements"?...t's how I see it.

[vox]

The Derminator,

That's all very well and good if you accept the initial problematic, but I do not.

I'm afraid I'm confused again. Are you positing the Essential alongside everything else? It sounds a bit as though the Essential is made by man, and so not Absolute, and if it is not Absolute, but dependent upon certain relations, then how is it essential?

Again, I'm not attacking and I don't want to sound smarmy, but I truly and honestly do not understand this approach to the Essential, nor to that which is dialectical.

You talk of an "essential" relationship between "subject" and the "essential environment," yet neither is defined, which leaves me scratching my poor head, and, I'd wager, there are a good many other head scratchers as well.

Peacnicked brings up, and immediately dismisses as sophistry, the idea that relations may be overdetermined. I tend to believe that they are, but he, it seems, does not, and you talk of an "essential" relationship.

So, I guess at this point my question is:

Are dialectical relationships overdetermined or "essential" in nature, and if they are "essential relationships," what defines this "essence?"

vox

[peaccenicked]

I think you are right I think here lenin is referring to
the absolute idea and not the notion of absolute.
I might be wrong but I think that is why he capitalises
the 'A'. The rest of the work suggests that he sees the absolute as the material infinite.


(Edited by peaccenicked at 6:32 pm on Feb. 24, 2002)

[TheDerminator]

Vox,

There is a difference between essence and the essential.
The essential does not mean "of essence", it means only necessary. You see the problem with orthodox Marxism is that it more or less only sees essence as essential, hence the ontological approach only deals with different forms of being within the economic essence: the infrastructure.
However, you have to qualify even that statement, the infrastructure has an appearance, and thus Capital is only an analysis of the static relations of the infrastructure only its essence.
The point about the letter to Bloch by Engels, is that it recognises that the ideological fight is a necessity, it is essential. Some form of the superstructure is essential, and this the appearance not the essence.
There is an essential appearance.
Now, I do not use the term "dialectics" because the unity of opposites is just one part of objective methodology.
You see the ontological approach of Marx was as you should know extracted from a rationalisation of Hegel's "lesser" and Science of Logic, but this method was only tailored to ontology, thus the essential appearance could not be tackled.
If you want to know more about "ground", the heart of the mater, and the essential appearance, you can always check out my website. It is too big a treatise to explain in the limitations of a forum like this.
You see, not to understand what is essential in the appearance is a bit of gaping whole in theory of orthodox Marxism. The whole superstructure is the appearance as is the actual form of the economic relations. Do we use a subjective critique?
No, we use an objective method, just like Karl Marx, and that is the subject of the treatise on my website.

"Overdetermination" is a clumsy phrase, you objectify with the determinant concepts, such as cause, essence, necessity, sameness, absolute, positive, limit, positive, and their opposites as well as other objectifying determinants such as content, form, totality, ground, the heart of the matter and so on. You cannot over-objectify, and if you can only see determinants and not objectifying determinants you do not know the power of the determinants or their purpose, and that is to objectify, subjective development.
derminated.

[vox]

To both Peacenicked and Derminator:

I appreciate your responses, and this is true.

However, I would also appreciate it very much if you would speak in complete sentences. Both of you seem to be adverse to this task, but it allows for less unintentional obfuscation and also permits a greater clarity.

Now, I do not know either of you, and perhaps you are not native English speakers. If not, I'm happy to assist you. However, if you are native speakers, there really is no excuse for the sentence fragments, which, I think, lead not only myself but others to conclusions about you both that you may or may not intend.

Indeed, I seem to recall other complaints about this. So please, from now on, when responding to me, use complete sentences. You are both posturing, at the very least, as intellectuals. One would think that basic sentence structure wouldn't be too hard for either of you.

Okay?

Thanks. I appreciate it, and I think that it will alleviate many problems. Now, please, rewrite your posts, especially you, Derminator, using only and always complete sentences, and reread them before you click on "submit," okay?

Thanks. I really do think this will clear a lot of things up and lead to more fruitful conversation in the future. As it stands now, I can't make heads or tails of Derminator's post. I think that if he succumbed to the beauty of complete sentences, rather than sentence fragments, however, he and I would be eye to eye, and that's a good thing, huh?

Thanks, fellas.

vox

[TheDerminator]

Vox pedantry is maybe the last resort of an academic, who is not capable of defending his own bullshit. Save your lectures for five year olds. You write clearly enough, but the arguments you give are muddied ones, it does not say a great deal for your clarity of thought, and clarity of analysis. Being able to clearly analyse philosophy, is different from correct grammar.
My grammar is poor, and I admit it, but my analysis leaves your deconstructionalist shit behind. Mabye, if you were a better analyst you would not find my trains of thought so hard to follow. Or is it just me?
I think we have to agree to differ.
derminated.

[vox]

TheDerminator,

I followed you right up until here:

"Some form of the superstructure is essential, and this the appearance not the essence."

From what I can tell, you're following clockwork Marx about the Superstructure, but you really lost me with this one.

Oh, and then there's this:

"'Overdetermination' is a clumsy phrase, you objectify with the determinant concepts, such as cause, essence, necessity, sameness, absolute, positive, limit, positive, and their opposites as well as other objectifying determinants such as content, form, totality, ground, the heart of the matter and so on. You cannot over-objectify, and if you can only see determinants and not objectifying determinants you do not know the power of the determinants or their purpose, and that is to objectify, subjective development."

It reads like nonsense. Indeed, I think it probably is, but I'm a kind person, as you well know, and I wish to withold judgment until you can make just a bit more sense.

I'm not being pedantic, I'm being practical.

vox

[vox]

Here's another example of someone who has not responded to me, and I truly believe I made some legitimate points.

Again, discrediting me is, apparently, easier than responding to me.

It's a shame.

vox

[peaccenicked]

just in case you missed it.
http://www.che-lives.net/cgi/community/top...um=13&topic=141 (http://www.che-lives.net/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=13&topic=141)

[TheDerminator]

vox,

Sorry, I missed this post, must have been occupied elsewhere.

"I followed you right up until here:
["Some form of the superstructure is essential, and this the appearance not the essence." ]"

Superstructure is the appearance of society in historical development.

The general societal structures of the State, and the societal structures of industry follow the same template for each BORG State. They are necessary, but they are not of essence. That is they are not part of the static relations of the economic infrastructure, although they are inherently connected to that infrastructure.
[ "'Overdetermination' is a clumsy phrase, you objectify with the determinant concepts, such as cause, essence, necessity, sameness, absolute, positive, limit, positive, and their opposites as well as other objectifying determinants such as content, form, totality, ground, the heart of the matter and so on. You cannot over-objectify, and if you can only see determinants and not objectifying determinants you do not know the power of the determinants or their purpose, and that is to objectify, subjective development."

It reads like nonsense. Indeed, I think it probably is, but I'm a kind person, as you well know, and I wish to withold judgment until you can make just a bit more sense.]

Let me simplify: words like "cause" and "essence" can become objectifying determinants when used in an objective methodology.

Even in empericism, causation is the objectifying concept in relation to the particular law and singular observation. The particular and the singular are two other objectifying determinants.

These three objectifying determinants are the basis for all empirical science. The particular law of causation is abstracted from the observation of a singular.

Now, Marx had a very different method to empirical methodology, and this method revolved around analysis of contradictions in relation to the unity of opposites.

The opposites of essence and appearance, were the two most important historical determinants for Marx.

The contradiction between the static relations of the infrastructure and the actual relations of the superstructure produces the class struggle, and is ultimately resolved through class struggle given a political battlefield.

However, there was more to the method of Marx, and as far as I can make it out, it revolved around the interconnections of different ontological forms of being in movement, between the unity of the main unity of opposites Essence and Appearance. Capital and Labour, and the exploitation of Labour by the major owners of Capital, the BORGS.

The method of Marx is not an abstract conceptual method, it is a historical method, with subject of historical development at its heart.

The task is to extend the method into the realm of the superstructure, beyond the realm of ontology, since ultimately Marx is still viewing the relationship of the exploitation of Labour in relation to capital from an ontological foundation.

Marx admits it himself. It is for him an "ontological" method.

U have raised legitimate points, but U're in error when U say "It reads like nonsense. Indeed, I think it probably is"

Just because U do not comprehend, and just because something requires clarification, it does not mean it is "nonsense". U are making an arrogant assumption.

Resistance is Futile!

May the Force be with U!

derminated