I believe in pictures of Santa. Does the picture in this very thread not exist?

You may be able to catch Lenin out if you try harder, but this is not a good example.

Z:

You really must focus: Lenin argued that if you have an image of something, the object of which it is the image must exist in reality, not parts of it (like colours, or stand-ins for Santa, or pictures of Santa).

So, If you have an image of Santa, Santa must exist.

Sure, it I have an image of a picture of Santa, then, according to Lenin, that picture must exist.

But, neither Lenin nor I were arguing that.

Once more; if I have an image of Santa, the individual called Santa must exist, according to Lenin.

Now, I know it's a screwy argument, but it's the only one Lenin advances to ground his theory in objective reality.

Which is why MEC is among one of the very worst books ever written by a revolutionary.

Well, your naive faith is very touching, but you can only make your reply work by ignoring the very person you are trying to defend: Lenin.

And, there are plenty more screw-ups in MEC; this was just one of the worst.

[He also thought the Ether was 'objective', and that the fourth dimension implied priestcraft!!]

I have an image of a picture in my mind. I decide to call it Santa. That doesn't make it an image of Santa


It's not about naive faith. I do have well founded faith that Lenin was an extremely clever person who wasn't making the howling error you are accusing him of. However I am open to Lenin being proved wrong. But you are misrepresenting the argument to make him seem like an absolute idiot who believed in fairies and goblins, when you must know full well he wasn't arguing that. If he had actually been that degenerate it wouldn't have been hidden away in a few lines of one book, it would instead permeate everything he ever wrote. And you wouldn't be the only person to see through it. You really should think again on this one.

Zurdito:

You keep going on about images of pictures. Why? Lenin did not speak about these, nor did I (except in response to your attempt to do so).

It is a naive faith if you have to ignore Lenin's actual words, and constantly change the subject (to images of pictures), but still refuse to attend to the actual argument.

Lenin was extremely clever, I agree -- but he was a philosophical incompetent.

And you are not open to Lenin being proved wrong, for you constantly ignore what he actually says in order to defend a sanitised Lenin, who you would prefer had said something other than what he actually did say.

Let's walk you through it again:

Quote:

"and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it." [Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p.69. Bold emphasis added. Cf., also p.279.]

Notice that: "an image cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it"

So, the thing imagined (the real Santa) exists independently of the image anyone has of him.

No pictures mentioned here, just the simple inference from images to real objects

On page 279 he is even clearer:

Quoted from here, about half way down the page.

So, the image of Santa inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it "images" -- an image of Santa implies he is an objective reality, for that image of Santa "images" Santa, who now, of necessity, is an "objective reality".

So, it is you, my naive friend who needs to rethink things.

Lenin belived in Santa.

So should you...

[quote=Rosa Lichtenstein;1072541]Because if you have an image of Santa in your mind, inr eality it is an image of a picture, or of a bloke dressed up as Santa. Both of those things objectively exist.
He didn't speak about Santa either.


We have to change Lenin's words, because you yourself are taking his argument and and applying it to a situation he did not deal with, therefore the conversation itself moves beyond what he specifically said. If what he specifically said was self-evident, you wouldn't need the Santa example. Therefore to ahve this conversation, you apparently find it necessarry (and I agree, it is necessarry) to go beyond what was written, and instead apply our own understanding of the logic to a given situation.

Well that's your projection based on past experiences with other people.

No Santa mentioned here either.

A picture is a real object. There is one on this thread. I looked at it and formed an image in my mind. Were my eyes decieving me? Was it not "real"?

You're conflating mental image with the term "image" used to describe a picutre. My understanding is that Lenin strictly meant "mental image" when he said image, and was not saying that drawing a picture of something means that that thing depicted in the picture exists outside of the picture. that's a totally different argument. Nothing I have read implies that he believed that.

Oh please you're takign what he's saying far too literally.

I don't even know any christians that woudl argue such anti-scientific garbage.

Rosa I think you need to put the books down for a week or too. Go experince life or something. The sentance is very simple, there is no need to analyse it.

"Our sensation, our consciousness is only an image of the external world, and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it." [Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p.69. Bold emphasis added. Cf., also p.279.]



People are criticising you. No one buys your bullshit.

[Still having trouble with the board software, or are you gratuitously changing fonts just for fun?]

The error comes in at the underlined part; it suggests that consciousness is tied inexorably to something external to it. Such is the limitation of non-dialectical materialism. Perhaps you could qualify it, however, by saying that consciousness has Photoshop.

Zurdito:

You do not know this at the start; remember, Lenin begins with images, and has not clues as to their nature. All he knows are images.

Now his only attempt to break out of this prison is this argument, which is not about images of pictures (he does not use this wording -- and you find you need to add it to try to sanitise Lenin), or about pictures you can draw, but about mental images.

Now, we both know this is a crazy place to begin any investigation into knowledge, but that is where Lenin began.


No, but he did argue that if you have an image, whatever it is an image of must necessarily exist.

So, if you have an image of a picture, that picture must exist.

And, if you have an image of a hand, that hand must exist.

And, if you have an image of Santa, Santa must exist.

It was a general argument that covered every possibility, including images of unicorns, the Tooth Fairy, Big Foot, Santa...

1) This means that we are no longer discussing Lenin, but your beliefs.

2) It means that your claim that you are ready to countenance the fact that Lenin was wrong was empty since, when you face a difficulty, you simply alter his words.

3) It was a general claim, and so it covers every eventuality. Now, if he had made a more limited claim, my argument would be in trouble, but he did not, he said:

No wiggle room there: "inevitably and of necessity".

Which is why I said he was an philosophical incompetent. Not even Locke would have made this mistake, and he was nearly as bad.

Yes, and I am right to be suspicious of you dialecticians. You, for example, attempted to alter Engels's words when I showed his crazy 'law' ('Quantity into Quality') was defective, and now you are trying to do the same to Lenin.

You probably think Marx wrote: "The marxist philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change what they say".

Yes, I can see you are getting desperate, here; you are clearly having difficulties defending Lenin, so you now have to pretend not to understand the indefinite or the definite article: you clearly think that unless Lenin had given an exhaustive list of acceptable "images", no one can read his words and apply them generally.

This looks pretty general to me; no ifs and buts here. The image inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it “images.”

He did not say "some images", but "the image", and earlier "an image". Now unless you think he was referring to a single image, the "the" here must work as it does when we say "The whale is a mammal".

It would be no use you saying the when we say "The whale is a mammal" we did not mean, say, that specific whale over there, since it was not mentioned.

And when we say "a capitalist is a class enemy" it will not do for you to reply that this does not apply to, say, Bill Scroggins, CEO of the Santa Corporation, since he was not mentioned specifically.

Similarly, when Lenin spoke about "an image", it will not do for you to say 'he did not mean this or that image, since that would imply Santa exists'.

He said it -- you can't alter that fact.

And this just confirms how naive you are; you have to pretend you do not understand language just to bale Lenin out.

Sure, and had Lenin said this:

you would have a point.

But, unfortunately for desperate little old you, he did not.

Quote:

You're conflating mental image with the term "image" used to describe a picutre. My understanding is that Lenin strictly meant "mental image" when he said image, and was not saying that drawing a picture of something means that that thing depicted in the picture exists outside of the picture. that's a totally different argument. Nothing I have read implies that he believed that.

Well you tell me what the "an" in "an image" means. Was Lenin just referring to one individual image, or images in general?

And when someone says to you "a policeman is an agent of the capitalist class", do you take that to mean only one specific policeman?

And I do know that he meant 'mental images'. That is what makes his argument so crass.

He was in effect saying, if you can conjure up an image of something (in your mind's eye), it must exist in reality".

As I said, he was a philosophical incompetent.

And you are naive to think otherwise.

Wat:

You mean, I am taking Lenin at his word, and show he was confused.

But, would you take the same lenient approach to, say, hompohobes who use vile language, or to racists who use offensive language?

Would you argue: "Oh please you're taking what he's saying far too literally"?

Now, these words appeared in a published work, and he said it several times.

If you can only make his 'argument' work by interpreting his words non-literally, then you should have no problem making the Book of Genesis compatible with Darwin.

Ah, but creationists do.

Hiero:

I hold down a full-time job, and I am a union rep (unpaid); I devote my time to this to try to remove confusion from Marxism.

If you do not like it, I do not care.

I have been working on this now for ten years (reading around it for 25), devoting 90% of my free time (in the last 5 years) to it. I am sure as hell not going to stop just because you know how to use abusive language like this:

Yes, and they are getting pretty desperate in their attempts to change what Lenin said, or ignore what he actually said.

But, at least they try to make a weak sort of response; you just resort to abusive language.

[And then you try, in another place, to censure me for flaming!]

V:

And Lenin's only proof of this is the 'Santa argument' (as I will now call, it).

But, that 'argument' is too generous, for it implies that if you have an image in your 'consciousness' it:

Quote:

inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it “images.”

So, Santa must exist -- according to Lenin.

Oh dear, you Lenin-worshippers are really getting desperate, aren't you?

Just wait till I post other crass things he says are 'objective'...

And maybe you need a holiday.

Hiero:

Maybe you need to address the serious weaknesses in Lenin's 'philosophy'.

You need to find some outside interests.

Alastair:

What has that got to do with the subject of this thread?

If you visit the page I linked to in my original post, which contains a very detailed demolition of Lenin's hopeless book, you will see there 12 pictures of a magnificent mountain in Scotland, where I regularly go climbing -- I'm off there in May.

So, can we stick to the subject in hand, and stop trying to deflect attention away from the fact that you Lenin-worhipers can't answer my challenge?

Here is one of them:




More here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page_13%2001.htm

OK, so you don't spend ALL your time on RevLeft ... but you obviously do spend a lot more than is truly necessary, if you really do invest 90% of your free time into it.

Key word there is implies. He's not saying it's a certainty, he's saying it's probable, unless you're dealing with ridiculous notions like the existence of Santa Clause.

When Lenin speaks of "an image" (which is where the greater part of your argument lies), he means an image of something that objectively exists.

Quote:

and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it." [Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Ffs. You're deliberately misinterpreting these two lines. Lenin is saying that to have an image of a thing, that thing must correspondingly exist in reality.

It is impossible to deliver 6 billion toys in one night, that is physically impossible. Therefore, Santa in the sense of a guy who does this, cannot exist. If he did exist, he couldn't do it, and since the notion of Santa we're dealing with here is a guy who does this, Santa in that sense does not exist.

However, even while knowing this to be true, I can still have an image of a fat beared old guy in a red suit in my head, because Santa in the sense if a pop culture entity does exist.

Now I'm off to do check out a thread much less pointless than this one. Shouldn't be hard to find...

Alastair:

No, I said I spent 90% of my free time on my project, of which about 10% is spent here.

Not so; he says this:

That looks pretty certain to me.

So, any image you have of Santa, "implies inevitably and of necessity the objective reality of that which it images", which in this case is Santa.

Lenin's logic may be loopy, but he is pretty clear about it.

Yes he asserts this, but his only argument supporting this conclusion is the 'Santa argument', otherwise he has nothing with which he can answer those who say that his images might not reflect objective reality. This is his attempt to answer them.

What you have done is reverse his inference: from reality to the image. Lenin, on the other hand, infers the opposite way round: from our images to objective reality.

Now, there would be no point answering a critic who argued that all we have in our minds are images, and that we have no way of showing they are of objective reality, by just asserting that our images are of objective reality.

The critic would just say: how do you know?

Lenin thus had to find a way of answering this unanswerable question; so he came up with this 'argument', one of the few in the entire book (a book that is full of repetiton, bluster, abuse and ad hominems).

So, his response is that an image 'inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it “images.”'

If images were already known to be of objective reality, what would be the point of Lenin arguing as he does here?

It would be like arguing that objective images are objective. A critic would still want to know how Lenin knew an 'objective image' was indeed objective.

So, the implication goes from the presence of images in the mind to 'objective' reality, not the other way round, as indeed his words indicate.

Quote:

You're deliberately misinterpreting these two lines. Lenin is saying that to have an image of a thing, that thing must correspondingly exist in reality.

You are in fact adding to Lenin's words in order to to sanitise them (just like other comrades have done here) for he does not talk this way. Here it is again:

Quote:

"Our sensation, our consciousness is only an image of the external world, and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it." [Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p.69. Bold emphasis added.]

He does not talk about "images of objects", but images, and he says that the presence of an image implies that of which the image is, exists.

So he did not say:

Quote:

and it is obvious that an image of an objective thing cannot exist without the thing imagined, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it."

nor:

Quote:

The image of an objective thing inevitably and of necessity implies the objective reality of that which it “images.”

Had he done so, I would not have used it.

I agree, but that is not the point; if Lenin was right then this odd character must exist.

Since Santa does not exist, Lenin's argument is defective.

Now,when I was researching this material, I read through this book very carefully many times, making detailed notes, specifically looking for an argument that Lenin used to break out of the phenomenalist prison he was in (or, rather, his opponents were in), and this was the only one I could find. [If you can find another, let me know. If it's in there it is remarkably well hidden.]

As I have shown above, this is a defective argument, since it is obvious that Lenin did not believe what I alleged of him -- I made these allegations deliberately controversial to bring this out.

But, this is his only argument, and if it is a dud, which it is, then Lenin's theory is no better than the theories of those he was attacking.

Now, the comrades here have fallen into a trap (as have you), for I have successfully exposed the serious flaw in Lenin's attempt to refute Bogdanov, Mach and Avenarius.

So, if we accept his proof, then Lenin must have believed in Santa.

On the other hand, if we reject this inference, then Lenin's proof is no good, and he is a phenomenalist.

You can be sure that his opponents will not have missed this flaw, that is if they could be bothered to read this awful book.

Quote:

Now I'm off to do check out a thread much less pointless than this one. Shouldn't be hard to find...

I feel the same about Lenin's attrocious book.

But, unlike you, I do not wimp out when the going gets tough.

But it still remains a puzzle as to why you think any of this is worthy of our consideration - never mind your own. So Lenin was a shit philosopher. Big deal. Trotsky was a lousy pianist, so what?

I asked comrades at our monthly branch organizing meeting (aka the monthly piss up) last night what they thought of Lenin's "execrable book" and no one had read it (only two people had heard of it). Furthermore, no one could think of a good reason why they'd want to read it! Maybe I'm just lucky enough to belong to a branch full of philistines, I dunno.

Maybe this is what the top brass of Oxford want to hear from you Rosa: obscurantist sneering at heroes of the international proletariat.