: Symboling is ,as I like to explain it , using something to represent something it is not. Imaginary beings are using something ( words or drawing or sculpture ) to represent something that doesn't exist or nothing. Math is all that. Numbers don't exist except in the imagination . Lines in geometry are infinitely long, but there are no infinitely long lines in reality , only in imagination.
Ancestor veneration , original culture and language, are using things and words to represent people who no longer exist.
I hypothesize that ,the immortality of gods is symbolic of many generations from the past, mortal beings who attain symbolic immortality by the living generation having so many recorded memories in living individual brains of the experiences of the dead while the dead were still alive . The living individual brains get this by learning language and culture, custom and tradition , religion .
Culture as material, not mystical, it is "soul" transcending generationally the mortality of all individual Selves; cultural immortality, eternity is symbolized as gods.
Iconographic signs (like the drawing of a pipe above )are still not what they represent, even as they are not arbitrary. Iconographic signs are similar to what they represent , so they are not arbitrarily related to what thry represent , like words.
< Drawings and paintings are iconographic signs . A portrait of Lincoln is not Lincoln. So , after Lincoln is dead , the portrait of Lincoln can share the appearance of Lincoln with future generations . This is the critical characteristic of a sign that allows communication between generations, AND ONLY HUMANS HAVE IT SO ONLY HUMANS CAN ACCUMULATE KNOWLEDGE.
Lincoln's _name_ is arbitrarily related to Lincoln .
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Against neo-Kantian agnosticism on the Left
Against neo-Kantian agnosticism on the Left
Why MUST Marxists be certain beyond a reasonable doubt of the validity of Marxism ? Why must Marxists be so certain about Marxism in communication with other members of the 99% ?
Why must we be authorities on the nature of society ?
We must be authorities because we are asking , urging tens of millions, billions of people to overthrow the existing authoritative order . We can't ask them to do that if we are not sure , if we are agnostic , Kantian skeptics about our own science ! We can't go to other workers and say , " Storm Wall Street ! Damn the police and courts, the authorities.. Though hey their theory might be as good as ours is. We're not really sure that we are correct . There are no correct political theories actually. But risk your lives and livelihoods for our Interpretation of Marxism."
It is evident that to be the basis for effective practice , a theory must be authoritatively held ; it must be authoritatively espoused to be the guide to action of tens of millions of people.,
Most importantly that things-in-themselves are UNKNOWABLE. Engels calls them "shamefaced materialists ". There is a material world but we can't know it ! We can only know truths that are a priori somehow in our thoughts . We can only know our thoughts ; or for Mach and the Empirio-critics Lenin polemicized against we can only know sense datums , not objective reality . Hegel critiqued Kant by saying we know reality by practice . Just that for Hegel reality is one big Idea; that's _objective_ idealism like Plato.
Gunnar :Could you please outline the most important differences between objective idealism vs subjective idealism. Where do most religions lie?
The most important difference I think of first is as I say above between Hegel and Kant; also contra Hume and Berkeley. The latter two are the most explicit; Kant is sort of implicitly subjective idealist . On the surface , he's a " materialist . Solopsisism is the boldest abstract form of subjective idealism; affirmatively asserting that all reality is just ones thoughts . Actually , it's the mentality of the capitalist and all richest people of all . times . Private property as Self.
Hume and Berkeley and Kant are not affirmatively stating this so they are not naked solopsists. However, their absolute skepticism , only negative criticism , no synthesis , arrives at not being able to prove the existence of anything but their thoughts ; logically the same place . Thus, for Kant we can only be sure that geometric proofs are true ; formal logic; identity ; a is a; tautology ; the truth is trivial .
The necessity of construing and purveying our theory authoritatively is why, for example, Engels and Marx use the term "inevitable " to describe the victory of the proletariat in the Manifesto. It's got to be a sure thing to ask the proletariat to take such great risks as a revolutionary struggle. It is necessary to revolutionary esprit de corps , enthusiasm , rah , rah team !
Basically in Engels's famous formulation of the difference between materialism and idealism he equates idealism with religion. Creationism. Really Hegelianism is a kind of Intelligent Designism, which is Creationist and evolutionism in the popular debate of today . Anyway , Engels:
darwin The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
Here's the critique of Kant's anti-epistemology , claim that there is no valid way of knowing being, an impenetrable barrier between thought and being:
"But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world is precisely its thought-content — that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers. In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world."
Charles Brown: Notice Engels defines practice as experiment and industry.
Kant is an agnostic , ashamed to admit he's an atheist. Scared to admit it. Hegel wrote his philosophy as a form of Christianity probably to stay on the good side of the Prussian ruling class. Anyway there's another explicit identity of idealism and religion.
On Hegel and the world as one big Idea , it is not the idea of one individual but as Marx calls it , a virtual demiurge of the world . So, Hegel is not a subjective , but objective idealist ; objective reality is an idea.
Lenin notes that Hegel is arch-brilliant and close to materialism . Why ? I'd say because we do think of everything in the form of an idea, words , language, symbols. The ideas are coming from our culture , society , other people , many past generations , not one big abstract Idea or God. It's just that those words do represent an actually existing objective reality , and are not that reality . So, objective idealism (Hegel , Plato) does give a sense that between individuals , subjects, and non-human physical objective reality is the objective reality of human society that is made up of culture, language, words IDEAS. Even material culture is shaped according to ideas.
Why MUST Marxists be certain beyond a reasonable doubt of the validity of Marxism ? Why must Marxists be so certain about Marxism in communication with other members of the 99% ?
Why must we be authorities on the nature of society ?
We must be authorities because we are asking , urging tens of millions, billions of people to overthrow the existing authoritative order . We can't ask them to do that if we are not sure , if we are agnostic , Kantian skeptics about our own science ! We can't go to other workers and say , " Storm Wall Street ! Damn the police and courts, the authorities.. Though hey their theory might be as good as ours is. We're not really sure that we are correct . There are no correct political theories actually. But risk your lives and livelihoods for our Interpretation of Marxism."
It is evident that to be the basis for effective practice , a theory must be authoritatively held ; it must be authoritatively espoused to be the guide to action of tens of millions of people.,
Most importantly that things-in-themselves are UNKNOWABLE. Engels calls them "shamefaced materialists ". There is a material world but we can't know it ! We can only know truths that are a priori somehow in our thoughts . We can only know our thoughts ; or for Mach and the Empirio-critics Lenin polemicized against we can only know sense datums , not objective reality . Hegel critiqued Kant by saying we know reality by practice . Just that for Hegel reality is one big Idea; that's _objective_ idealism like Plato.
Gunnar :Could you please outline the most important differences between objective idealism vs subjective idealism. Where do most religions lie?
The most important difference I think of first is as I say above between Hegel and Kant; also contra Hume and Berkeley. The latter two are the most explicit; Kant is sort of implicitly subjective idealist . On the surface , he's a " materialist . Solopsisism is the boldest abstract form of subjective idealism; affirmatively asserting that all reality is just ones thoughts . Actually , it's the mentality of the capitalist and all richest people of all . times . Private property as Self.
Hume and Berkeley and Kant are not affirmatively stating this so they are not naked solopsists. However, their absolute skepticism , only negative criticism , no synthesis , arrives at not being able to prove the existence of anything but their thoughts ; logically the same place . Thus, for Kant we can only be sure that geometric proofs are true ; formal logic; identity ; a is a; tautology ; the truth is trivial .
The necessity of construing and purveying our theory authoritatively is why, for example, Engels and Marx use the term "inevitable " to describe the victory of the proletariat in the Manifesto. It's got to be a sure thing to ask the proletariat to take such great risks as a revolutionary struggle. It is necessary to revolutionary esprit de corps , enthusiasm , rah , rah team !
Basically in Engels's famous formulation of the difference between materialism and idealism he equates idealism with religion. Creationism. Really Hegelianism is a kind of Intelligent Designism, which is Creationist and evolutionism in the popular debate of today . Anyway , Engels:
darwin The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
Here's the critique of Kant's anti-epistemology , claim that there is no valid way of knowing being, an impenetrable barrier between thought and being:
"But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side: in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is called the question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in the real world is precisely its thought-content — that which makes the world a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which is from the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct for his thinking, is therefore the only correct one, and that the identity of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediately translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he shares with well-nigh all philosophers. In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world."
Charles Brown: Notice Engels defines practice as experiment and industry.
Kant is an agnostic , ashamed to admit he's an atheist. Scared to admit it. Hegel wrote his philosophy as a form of Christianity probably to stay on the good side of the Prussian ruling class. Anyway there's another explicit identity of idealism and religion.
On Hegel and the world as one big Idea , it is not the idea of one individual but as Marx calls it , a virtual demiurge of the world . So, Hegel is not a subjective , but objective idealist ; objective reality is an idea.
Lenin notes that Hegel is arch-brilliant and close to materialism . Why ? I'd say because we do think of everything in the form of an idea, words , language, symbols. The ideas are coming from our culture , society , other people , many past generations , not one big abstract Idea or God. It's just that those words do represent an actually existing objective reality , and are not that reality . So, objective idealism (Hegel , Plato) does give a sense that between individuals , subjects, and non-human physical objective reality is the objective reality of human society that is made up of culture, language, words IDEAS. Even material culture is shaped according to ideas.
Monday, February 26, 2024
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/carter-woodson-black-history-month/
The story of Claudette Colvin is one of many examples of the impact of Negro History Week (Black History Month). She refused to move on a Montgomery bus on March 2, 1955, inspired by the lessons in February at her school.
I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat. . . It felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move.
For more on Woodson, read Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching and visit the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site (National Park Service) and statue in Washington, D.C.
By Daryl Michael Scott
Carter G. Woodson chose February for Negro History Week for reasons of tradition and reform. It is commonly said that Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping Black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th and the 14th, respectively. More importantly, he chose them for reasons of tradition. Since Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Black community, along with other Republicans, had been celebrating the fallen president’s birthday. And since the late 1890s, Black communities across the country had been celebrating Douglass’. Well aware of the pre-existing celebrations, Woodson built Negro History Week around traditional days of commemorating the Black past. He was asking the public to extend their study of Black history, not to create a new tradition. In doing so, he increased his chances for success.
Yet Woodson was up to something more than building on tradition. Without saying so, he aimed to reform it from the study of two great men to a great race. Though he admired both men, Woodson had never been fond of the celebrations held in their honor. He railed against the “ignorant spellbinders” who addressed large, convivial gatherings and displayed their lack of knowledge about the men and their contributions to history. More importantly, Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by great men. He envisioned the study and celebration of the Negro as a race, not simply as the producers of a great man. And Lincoln, however great, had not freed the slaves — the Union Army, including hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers and sailors, had done that. Rather than focusing on two men, the Black community, he believed, should focus on the countless Black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization.
From the beginning, Woodson was overwhelmed by the response to his call. Negro History Week appeared across the country in schools and before the public. The 1920s was the decade of the New Negro, a name given to the post-World War I generation because of its rising racial pride and consciousness. Urbanization and industrialization had brought over a million African Americans from the rural South into big cities of the nation. The expanding Black middle class became participants in and consumers of Black literature and culture. Black history clubs sprang up, teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils, and progressive whites stepped forward and endorsed the efforts.
Woodson and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) scrambled to meet the demand. They set a theme for the annual celebration, and provided study materials—pictures, lessons for teachers, plays for historical performances, and posters of important dates and people. Provisioned with a steady flow of knowledge, high schools in progressive communities formed Negro History Clubs. To serve the desire of history buffs to participate in the re-education of Black folks and the nation, ASALH formed branches that stretched from coast to coast. In 1937, at the urging of Mary McLeod Bethune, Woodson established the Negro History Bulletin, which focused on the annual theme. As Black populations grew, mayors issued Negro History Week proclamations, and in cities, like Syracuse, progressive whites joined Negro History Week with National Brotherhood Week.
Like most ideas that resonate with the spirit of the times, Negro History Week proved to be more dynamic than Woodson or ASALH could control. By the 1930s, Woodson complained about the intellectual charlatans, Black and white, popping up everywhere, seeking to take advantage of the public interest in Black history. He warned teachers not to invite speakers who had less knowledge than the students themselves. Increasingly, publishing houses that had previously ignored black topics and authors rushed to put books on the market and in the schools. Instant experts appeared everywhere, and non-scholarly works appeared from “mushroom presses.” In America, nothing popular escapes either commercialization or eventual trivialization, and so Woodson, the constant reformer, had his hands full in promoting celebrations worthy of the people who had made the history.
Well before his death in 1950, Woodson believed that the weekly celebrations — not the study or celebration of Black history — would eventually come to an end. In fact, Woodson never viewed Black history as a one-week affair. He pressed for schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year. In the same vein, he established a Black studies extension program to reach adults throughout the year. It was in this sense that Blacks would learn of their past on a daily basis that he looked forward to the time when an annual celebration would no longer be necessary. Generations before Morgan Freeman and other advocates of all-year commemorations, Woodson believed that Black history was too important to America and the world to be crammed into a limited time frame. He spoke of a shift from Negro History Week to Negro History Year.
In the 1940s, efforts began slowly within the Black community to expand the study of Black history in the schools and Black history celebrations before the public. In the South, Black teachers often taught Negro History as a supplement to United States history. One early beneficiary of the movement reported that his teacher would hide Woodson’s textbook beneath his desk to avoid drawing the wrath of the principal. During the Civil Rights Movement in the South, the Freedom Schools incorporated Black history into the curriculum to advance social change. The Negro History movement was an intellectual insurgency that was part of every larger effort to transform race relations.
The 1960s had a dramatic effect on the study and celebration of Black history. Before the decade was over, Negro History Week would be well on its way to becoming Black History Month. The shift to a month-long celebration began even before Woodson’s death. As early as 1940s, Blacks in West Virginia, Woodson’s home state where he often spoke, began to celebrate February as Negro History Month. In Chicago, a now forgotten cultural activist, Fredrick H. Hammaurabi, started celebrating Negro History Month in the mid-1960s. Having taken an African name in the 1930s, Hammaurabi used his cultural center, the House of Knowledge, to fuse African consciousness with the study of the Black past.
By the late 1960s, as young Blacks on college campuses became increasingly conscious of links with Africa, Black History Month replaced Negro History Week at a quickening pace. Within ASALH, younger intellectuals, part of the awakening, prodded Woodson’s organization to change with the times. They succeeded. In 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, ASALH used its influence to institutionalize the shifts from a week to a month, and from Negro history to Black history. Since the mid-1970s, every U.S. president has issued proclamations endorsing the ASALH’s annual theme.
What Carter G. Woodson would say about the continued celebrations is unknown, but he would smile on all honest efforts to make Black history a field of serious study and provide the public with thoughtful celebrations.
Carter G. Woodson statue at 900 Rhode Island Ave NW in Washington, D.C. Photo by Scott Abbott.
Daryl Michael Scott is professor of history at Howard University and former president of ASALH.
Reprinted from ASALH with hyperlinks added by the Zinn Education Project. © 2011, 2010, 2009 ASALH
Resources for Teaching African American History
The Zinn Education Project offers a selection of recommended lessons, books, films, articles, archives, and websites for teaching African American history as central to all U.S. history. The resources can be filtered by time period, type of resource, and/or reading level.
Find more resources below, including a children’s book about Carter Woodson.
