For some reason, Gilhyle could not post this, so I have been asked by Jacob Richter to post it for her/him:

Originally Posted by gilhyle

Thanks for posting my previous message Jacob and this one. I lost a somewhat longer response to Rosa's reply yesterday evening when I got logged out again from this forum by trying to post a message, but here is an inferior version of my response:

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This looks like yet more a priori dogmatics, and something that should be left scientists to find out, not for philosophers to legislate over.

No it is not a priori, it is a generalisation based on observation of the actual usage of concepts that people engage in and the actual inter-relationships of those concepts one with the other. As to leaving it to scientists, revolutionaries cannot wait for a scientific practice funded by capitalism to provide the conceptual framework for revolutionary theorising: that will be a cold day in hell, turkeys voting for Christmas etc.


The use of philosophical methods of rough approximation, rules of thumb to develop a rounded critical view of the society we live in and its ideological framework is part of the development of a critical capacity in Marxism to deal with the obstacles (including Philosophical obstacles) capitalist ideology places in our way.

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And, if considered philosophically, it confuses the rules we have for the use of certain words, with the alleged targets of those words.

We cannot differentiate between the words we use and the 'alleged targets' of those words in the way suggested (except to the extent that words do not encompass our perspective - which is trivial for the purpose of this discussion). The only thing I can say about the 'alleged target' of words independent of using those words to speak about the 'alleged target' is that there is such a target and even then I must use other words to speak about that !!


There are no super-truths about all reality in my previous post, but rather an observation about the manner in which concepts rely on each other and an acknowledgement that insofar as we believe what we affirm we must believe those interconnections to be true of what is spoken about as well as true of the structure of the language used. (That is not to claim that the structure of language is the structure of reality, it is only to see the structure of language (and concepts) as an unavoidable framework of which our understanding of reality is a part. In practice, any actual 'internal relations' identified are always subject to revision in the light of progress in understanding and in the light of debate: no dogmatic super truths about all reality here.

This does not fetishise language. In fact the opposite view is more guilty of linguistic idealism. My view refuses to see language as either a product of social relations or as an expression of what are taken to be real relations between things. Rather it insists that language speaks about things from within the social relations. It is to be contrasted with a linguistic idealism which sees language as a reflection of social relations and it is to be contrasted with a crude materialism which sees language as expressions of real relations between things simpliciter.

(I'll shut up now on this topic since I obviously cant take further part in this debate, having tried to post on three different computers and having failed on all three - the problem is clearly at the Revleft end and seems confined to the philosophy forum.) My thanks to Jacob Richter again for his practical assistance in posting this for me.

Gil:

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No it is not a priori, it is a generalisation based on observation of the actual usage of concepts that people engage in and the actual inter-relationships of those concepts one with the other. As to leaving it to scientists, revolutionaries cannot wait for a scientific practice funded by capitalism to provide the conceptual framework for revolutionary theorising: that will be a cold day in hell, turkeys voting for Christmas etc.

This is a very naive view of what the prize-fighters of history's ruling elites (aka 'Philosophers') have been up to for 2400 years.

But, it is just a long-winded admission that your words are indeed yet more a priori dogmatics (and based on the jargon employed by ruling-class hacks for millennia, and not the material language of the working class) -- derived from a few specialised terms-of-art that purport to reveal fundamental truths about reality, unavaible to the senses, and thus forever beyond the grasp of science.

Superscience, as I said

And all that talk about not being able to 'wait' for science to catch up simply confirms this.

I wrote this in Essay Two -- and it applies to you:

More to follow.

Gil:

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The use of philosophical methods of rough approximation, rules of thumb to develop a rounded critical view of the society we live in and its ideological framework is part of the development of a critical capacity in Marxism to deal with the obstacles (including Philosophical obstacles) capitalist ideology places in our way.

In contrast, Marx actually said:

And:

And you, like so many previous generations of supposed radicals, have fallen for this guff.

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There are no super-truths about all reality in my previous post, but rather an observation about the manner in which concepts rely on each other and an acknowledgement that insofar as we believe what we affirm we must believe those interconnections to be true of what is spoken about as well as true of the structure of the language used. (That is not to claim that the structure of language is the structure of reality, it is only to see the structure of language (and concepts) as an unavoidable framework of which our understanding of reality is a part. In practice, any actual 'internal relations' identified are always subject to revision in the light of progress in understanding and in the light of debate: no dogmatic super truths about all reality here.

Not so; practically all your posts in philosophy, including the one we are speaking of, contain supertruths of one sort or another derived solely from the alleged meaning a few jargonised expressions.

Once again it does fetishise language, for from it, you constantly derive truths allegedly valid for all of space and time.

Language for you is like a secret, if not magical code, from whose depths such supertruths can be apprehended by thought alone.

Wow I can post...great !

I get told Im long winded and naive. I get told I fall for guff. I get contrasted with a quote from Marx. I get told that 'practically all' my posts express supertruths. I get a quote addressed to others as if it was addressed to me. I cannot find much engagement with what I actually wrote in all this, so there is no possibility of debate without focused response, but one thing puzzles me in this preoccupation with 'supertruths'...why is the followingnot a 'supertruth': - neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own,... they are only manifestations of actual life

I know even asking this replicates the repeated structure of philosophical debates on this site that usually just ramble round the topic, but Im still curioius.

Gil:

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I get told I'm long winded and naive. I get told I fall for guff. I get contrasted with a quote from Marx.

You have fallen for ruling-class guff, and should not moan when it is pointed out to you.

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I get a quote addressed to others as if it was addressed to me.

It most surely is if you too have swallowed the same sort of guff Marx was on about.

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I cannot find much engagement with what I actually wrote in all this, so there is no possibility of debate without focused response,

Welcome to the club; that happens to me all the time, and you are one of the worst offenders. You just ignore stuff you do not like, or which does not fit the ruling-class theory you have bought into.

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but one thing puzzles me in this preoccupation with 'supertruths'...why is the following not a 'supertruth': neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own,... they are only manifestations of actual life

Because its negation makes sense.

You really do need to read more analytic philosophy...

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I know even asking this replicates the repeated structure of philosophical debates on this site that usually just ramble round the topic, but I'm still curious.

Then have a read of this:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm

Sorry, you are not surious enough to do that, are you?

Well, stay mired in the failed, and nonsensical ruling-class thought that has you in its grip...

See if I care.

By that argument, if the negation of the claim that In conceptualising a thing, an object, we are mobilising a range of concepts of the relationships of that 'thing' to its elements and to what is outside it.' proves to be meaningful, then that claim itself is not a 'supertruth'

THe negation is of course, It is not the case that In conceptualising a thing, an object, we are mobilising a range of concepts of the relationships of that 'thing' to its elements and to what is outside it. This claim, while false, is to my mind quite meaningful.

At stake here is an expression of a view on what the concept of totality is. You have said that it is a supertruth. You have therefore claimed that its negation is meaningless. Show why

Gil:

Unfortunately, the above sentence is in Martian.

You will need to translate it before I, a mere earthling, can follow your point.

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You have said that it is a supertruth. Show why.

Done it; here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2011_01.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2011%2002.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm


Now, I know you only like to read ruling-class guff, and reams of it, but the above will at least rescue you from your present benighted state of mind.

Ah, no Rosa, why do you always run away !

You know exactly what that sentence means....your problem is you call things meaningless and you have no way to show that in this case. To avoid that being evident, you refuse to engage but just charging the other person with being convoluted.

And whatever else is on your website, there isnt an answer there to a suggestion as to what totality is for marxists which has only now been posed on this thread...... To avoid engaging, you refer people to your website.

You know when 'celebs' appear on chat shows to promote their book and start every response with 'Well in my book, I ....' It feels cheap, the audience is cheated. Why ? because the celeb doesn't treat them with any respect. Its in my book/its on my website....isnt good enough. It betokens a person who is not prepared to debate, only to market their wares.

Gil:

I never back down; on the contrary, it is you my mystical friend who always legs it.

If a Christain Trinitarian comes out with this sort of stuff:


which seems to contain mostly ordinary words, I would say the same.

You, too, are using traditional jargon, which, likewise, has no material sense.

Or, none that you could explain, just as Christian mystics cannot explain the above.

Now, I have an explanation why this is so (in the links I gave), but you are too lazy to read it.

Stay confused and ignorant, then.

To avoid reading my essays, you hide behind laziness.

Nice try. Feel cheap if you want. Use any excuise you like to stay ignorant. I careth not.

The bottom line is that you are an ignorant defender of ruling class ideology.

gilhyle, although I know you're chatting with Rosa, I too must admit a bit of guilt for doing something similar on this board (linking to past threads and posts).

However, I am "promoting" past threads and posts precisely to spark debate.



P.S. - It's a good thing that the two of you are limiting your barbs at each other to this forum. I wouldn't want this kind of crap to occur in my user group.

Jacob, then you would not want the real Lenin (of, say, Materialism and Empirio-criticism) to post in that user group either, for he was just a prickly as I am.

And what Gil objects to are links to my Essays, which he/she (Gil's gender is undecided; originally he/she was a she, then more recently, after the op, one presumes, she became a he) refuses to read (despite the fact that he/she will wade happily through page after page of incomprehensible ruling-class ideology), requesting short and snappy answers to what are complex problems. Because of that, I just take the piss out of her/him, and have been doing so for well over a year.

Plus, I enjoy winding-up mystics...

[On the one occasion I managed to persuade Gil to read part of one of my essays, which systematically demolished the core rationale of Hegel's 'Logic', she/he went very quiet about it.]

^^^ Perhaps I'm not as polemically inclined as he was. As for you, you'd have to drop your SWP membership AND overall revisionist Trotskyist leanings (outside of dialectics, so I'm talking about bigger fish here) to join.

Thanks for the weak insult...

You know what the Xians say: "Hate the sin, love/not the sinner."

[Hence I am attacking your leanings outside of anti-dialectics, not you as a person.]

Yes, I note you can only make that work by taking advice from Christians.

But, we get on too well for me to be miffed at you.

Or as us psychoanalysts say; Love the sin of loving the sinner!

I agree, such barbs should be limited to here. I dont think its always a bad thing to refer somewhere else either. The problem with Rosa's reference to her website is that they dont really work as references. They are references to texts which are probably MILLIONS of words long, incredibly badly edited (although often with an interesting argument or two hidden in there somewhere) and which often are only tangentally related to the subject under discussion.

Its part of a pattern of discourse Rosa engages in which is very confrontational, pointlessly so in my view, and which includes a lot of rhetorical devices which are not conducive to any sort of progress in philosophical debate. (I have referred to a few of those - at key moments she will often charge people with meaninglessness or transpose the point of reference from the topic to one of class allegiances or just hurl out some insults, or tell posters how often she has already supposedly demolished this argument and all this type of behaviour often at moments which allow a point of difficulty for her to be conveniently lost - and lets face it we all have points of difficulty in our perspectives.)

Dont get me wrong, Rosa doesn't annoy me - I was annoyed the first time I discussed a topic with her, but not any more. I find her substantive arguments quite interesting. I guess I have read about 10% of her website and my invariable urge is to just edit it so the ideas would become clearer (her own summaries I dont like, I think she often misses her own most interesting arguments in her own summaries). She is an asset to the board, in my opinion - but in the way that some things that are good for you are hard to take and in this case unnecesarily so. So if I seem to be annoyed or attacking her personally, that is a pity - I am just being straight and calling it as I see it.

I was concerned in this thread that her style would spread. The only thing that makes her style endurable is that she does have some challenging arguments to make. Others who lack her particular background in philosophy and logic will be just wasting space if they copy her style and the board will be the worse for it.

I regret very much the fact that her style makes it impossible for me to engage in a debate of substance with her. I have in the past shared an interest in many of the issues that interest her. But she just doesnt continue a debate in a rational form for more than two or three posts before the temptation to insult or refer to the website etc. takes over, at least when it comes to philosophy.

But what the hell, shine on Rosa ! (you will anyway, whatever I say - which is comforting )

Gil:

You would not know, since you have read very little of my work.

And, all of my essays so far total, at most, 1.2 million words -- which means that each one does not contain 'milliosn' of words. In fact my longest essay is just over 82,000 words.

You just can't resist making stuff up, can you?

Here is why:

And you are one of the worst offenders; hence my robust response to you.

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I regret very much the fact that her style makes it impossible for me to engage in a debate of substance with her. I have in the past shared an interest in many of the issues that interest her. But she just doesnt continue a debate in a rational form for more than two or three posts before the temptation to insult or refer to the website etc. takes over, at least when it comes to philosophy.

You continually run away when I ask you to explain a single dialectical idea, and you constantly ignore stuff you cannot answer -- probably because you have an insecure grasp of logic.

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I was concerned in this thread that her style would spread. The only thing that makes her style endurable is that she does have some challenging arguments to make. Others who lack her particular background in philosophy and logic will be just wasting space if they copy her style and the board will be the worse for it.

Yes, we already know you prefer ruling-class wafflers to the work based on the language of the working class.

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I guess I have read about 10% of her website and my invariable urge is to just edit it so the ideas would become clearer (her own summaries I dont like, I think she often misses her own most interesting arguments in her own summaries). She is an asset to the board, in my opinion - but in the way that some things that are good for you are hard to take and in this case unnecesarily so. So if I seem to be annoyed or attacking her personally, that is a pity - I am just being straight and calling it as I see it.

Let me get this straight: someone who thinks highly of that incomprehensible buffoon Hegel, and other terminally-prolix bumblers (aka 'Continental Philosophers') has advice to give me on clarity, concision and editing?

^^^ And yet you, for all your talk of logic, have yet to explain the one fundamental logical error of yours... [I won't elaborate on this in public.]

What error?

Elaborate away -- I have nothing to fear.