waste of time
there's no value in reading a 175 year old marxist "materialist" critique of german "idealism" in 2013 that was repeatedly deemed unfit for publication until well after engels' death. eventually, the soviet government finally published it for historical rather than theoretical reasons. hegel's brand of platonism is too insane to require a rebuttal, and marx was never able to truly understand what science is. it's the deaf arguing against the deaf, with the intent of leading the blind.
the critique, at it's core, is presented as a rejection of the idea that history is teleological. yet, marx is no less teleological than hegel or feuerbach, he just derives a mildly different ideal. as mentioned, engels is confused, primarily, by marx' bizarre concept of science, which in truth has more in common with something like intelligent design than it does with any kind of real science. it's also plagued by a decidedly classical/newtonian mindset, precisely as the world was entering the modern era. so, the dichotomy presented here is blatantly false. do we need a dialectic, then? maybe. historical materialism is a branch of german idealism, rather than a reaction against it. nor does it have anything at all to do with science. this essay is utter nonsense.
points of interest...
- engels has made similar, but more interesting, arguments elsewhere in deriving "materialism" from baconian science and pitting it against continental philosophy.
- engels suggests two flaws of eighteenth century materialism. the first is the idea that natural laws only function at a chemical/physical level. the implication is that natural laws also apply to human behaviour, but the statement is too vague to really analyze. if he means to suggest that there are mechanical laws that govern human economic behaviour, he's certainly wrong; today, we model the complexity of human societies using dynamical systems and chaos theory rather than causal laws. human behaviour is dominated by uncertainty, rather than certainty. in truth, physics is also dominated by uncertainty; we don't model molecules using causal laws anymore, either. there is indeed a cited flaw in eighteenth century materialism, but it's in the idea of assigning mechanical cause to the universe in the first place, not in it's limited application. this observation is devastating to marx' pseudo-scientific arguments. the second supposed flaw is that it doesn't understand history as a "process". but, what is this but a restated teleology? the flaw in materialism is that it wasn't idealistic! ha! some materialism!
- the attempt to describe evolution teleologically is painful. biology profs could conceivably use this text to teach common fallacies in evolutionary thought.
- "the conviction that humanity, at least at the present moment, moves on the whole in a progressive direction has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism". marx/engels did not deny their teleology, they just didn't realize that teleology is inconsistent with baconian science. rather, they seemed to think it was an essential aspect of materialism that actually helps define it.
- historical materialism is explained, here, as a hidden variable theory. events may seem random, but they are controlled by hidden laws. i wonder if there's an analogous bell theorem? do humans obey an uncertainty principle?
- to be fair, if you replace marx' teleology with a concept of chance (as measured with probabilities, rather than causal laws) then his description of things as being processes does have some insight. it completely negates his entire dialectic, sure, but it at least realizes that everything exists merely within a moment that is defined by perpetual flux.
- likewise, the idea that economics and class struggle may play a role in shaping history is a good one, and well-established. the error marx is making is pretty common: he's generalizing the specific. it's just that he's doing it in a way that is exceedingly derpish, in no small part due to his flamboyantly arrogant rhetoric. what he's failing at, badly, in his generalization is three-fold: (1) there's no idea of controlled laboratory conditions, (2) he's falsely equating variables that are obviously widely different and (3) there's no idea of repeatability. they often provide an example or two, claim they've proven something and then turn that into a general law that they claim is on the same footing as the conservation of energy, without any attempt to build statistical correlations or mathematical models. any scientifically literate person would interpret this writing as consistently preposterous, and essentially write these guys off as quacks.
- yet, if you read between the lines, it seems like marx is more interested in constructing a morality out of history than he is in taking historical materialism seriously. he reacts badly to the idea of a history that narrates the ignoble defeating the noble. it's like he doesn't want the bad guys to win, so he's rewriting the story. how seriously this is really meant to be taken really strikes me as an open question. is it just propaganda? is it even really some kind of joke?
full text:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/B/2973.E572/index.html
