Anthropological comments on Carlos Garrido’s “ From Hegel’s Philosophy of History to Marx’s Historical Materialism

Anthropological comments on Carlos Garrido's video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwd9pGjsVaM) From Hegel’s Philosophy of History to Marxist Historical Materialism” By Charles Brown First let me point out ideas and Hegel’s Idea are material . Ideas are material ; they are the motion of neurons in the brain, synapses . ( There is no mind -body problem; minds are part of the body , the brain) However , that is not the most important point of agreement I have with what you say. My hypothesis is that Hegel’s Idea ( and Ilyenkov’s Ideal; Hegel’s Spirit, God, Mind , even Plato’s Ideas ) is the anthropological concept of Language -Culture-Tradition-Custom or Symbolic Communication -Behavior -Inheritance . When I think , I talk to myself silently _in words _; as when I silently read to myself . Ideas are words or symbolic signs -using something to represent something that they are not. My thoughts are not what they think about . With humans , symbolic signs-words guide most of our behavior ( practice, action , activity, bodily motion ) ; some behavior is guided by genetically based instincts like hunger. Symbolic signs are learned from other humans’ brains , nurture ; instincts are genetic in origin, nature . For humans , learning langusge and culture is instinctive . Each individual adult human brain has its whole Language -Culture in its memory. It has Hegel’s whole Idea ( Mind , Spirit , God) in its memory. So, when Hegel says the Idea alienates or externalizes itself as Nature, or Subject unites with Object in practice, he is saying Language-Words ( ideas are words) guide Culture ( culture is behavior, practice by a human , bodily motion outside of the brain but guided by the brain’s ideas ) . Since ideas are words or symbolic signs which represent something that they are not , culture is a unity of something with something it is not , a unity of opposites or differences. Hegel is talking about a Language -Culture in its stasis or fixity ; Marx is talking about how a Language-Culture system _ changes _. It changes because of class struggles which is Hegelian theory in that there are contradictions in class struggle . ( This by the way is why Culture-the Idea does not change much in the Stone Age compared with so-called Civilization ; because there were no class struggles then) . Now Language-Culture ( Symbolic Communication and Behavior) , the Idea , are inherited from dead generations of our species. By this dead generations gain a figurative immortality; their behaviors are duplicated in future generations. ( Newton stood on the shoulders of giants , past generations of physicists) Marx alludes to this in the following famous passage from The 18th Brumaire: “ Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Notice that because Marx is interested in change , revolution, he considers Culture-the Idea as a nightmare holding back change . And on a fundamental point he makes against Hegel , he is correct in that the current Idea -Culture was originally the product of practice of past Ideas contradicting an environment and being changed by the contradiction. (This is the sense in which Hegel’s Idea is a “reflection “ or made by objective reality ). To change something , including an Idea, is to make another something , something new. This was true both of ideas in the Stone Age and in Civilization. Homo erectus invented ideas on control of fire because of some contradiction in the struggle for existence, like meat tough to chew or cold weather. Same with the invention of large scale agriculture techniques as part of the Culture-Idea ; which originated slavery ; with slavery there originated class struggle contradictions causing changes in the Idea as described in Marx’s famous Being determines Consciousness ( but rarely in revolutions, “ punctuations in long term equilibria “, analogous to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea concerning evolution) . Marx’s aphorism might be better said “In revolutionary punctuations , Changes in Being determine changes in Consciousness ( I just thought of that ).” Most of the time in history there is reciprocal determination; Consciousness determines behavior in Being , and vice versa . Hegel seems to think that the Idea is self-changing . But Ideas are formal logic’s based on the principle of identity, abjuring contradictions . So, it is the change in the Idea that _reflects_ changes caused by contradictions with objective reality , not contradictions in the Idea itself . We are using language when we say “A is A. “ It is a violation of grammatical rules , definitions, to say “A is not A. “ But that is language failing to fully reflect objective reality where all “A’s” change or become “not A’s.” On another point , you mention that for Hegel the pure Idea is the same as Nothing. The word “Nothing “ caught my attention, because of the way I define Imagination to my students. Recall my definition of a symbolic sign as using something to represent something it is not ; the words “Charles Brown” are not me but used to represent me. I then define Imagination as using something to represent Nothing (!) . The words “Micky Mouse “ or “Hamlet “ are used to represent Nothing , because Micky Mouse and Hamlet do not exist. This is true of all the words of fiction, stories because they are imaginary . It’s true of an architect’s blueprints , because the plan doesn’t exist yet . It represents Nothing objective . Recall Marx distinguishing the labor of a human from that of a bee or a spider by the human imagining her product before producing it . Imagination is symbolic sign thinking , the uniquely human form of thought. Imagination is the human method of invention ; rearrangement of memories of experiences in objective reality . Thanks again , Comrade, for teaching me the rational kernel of Hegel that Marx and Engels may have overlooked; and inspiring me to see how the sciences of anthropology and linguistics, their concepts of culture and language , confirm and explain the truths in the thinking of Hegel, Marx and Engels. PS: Thinking Anthropologically about Plato’s Realm of Reality as Ideas, I hypothesize that Greek philosophy originates in the era of the origin of the male supremacist family, private property and the state ( as per chapter on Greece in Engels’s book); and Alphabetic writing originates in Greece in this complex of so-called Civilization. I’m thinking that the people in Plato’s cave only have oral language , speech , poets , oracles and picture-drawing artists as their wise people . Plato’s is saying that those , like him outside of the cave , who are building up the body of Culture _in alphabetic writing _ have a more complete , a more real comprehension of objective reality , because writing can record , preserve and pass on to future generations and accumulate more Ideas about experience than oral memorizing and inheritance. Students writing notes can record more than oral poets memorizing . Plato represents the alphabetic writing revolution in Greece. The Academy is a big Library . Alexander robbed the _library_ in Alexandria and gave books to Aristotle.