Nikos, isn't what you wrote actually closer to a description of idealization? Abstraction is a bit different in that it removes the object of consideration from its concrete context. But the two concepts blur so easily into each other.Originally Posted by Nikos
Abstraction removes the object from the context indeed but if we describe it like this we dont give much info to someone who has a different opinion on this. For example, who is doing the act of removing? How? The object is a set (maybe not the correct word) of characteristics. What characterstics do we abstract and what do we leave? How do we decide what to do? When we talk about sounds or sights its easy to answer because we all have experiences (when we want to listen to a sound). But what about working with concepts or the general laws in economy or the laws who explain the general process of human societies? Its not enought to remove these concepts from their context. I mean that is step one. We do have levels of abstractions. From the chaotic whole to the simplest relation through analysis.
If I understood blindpig's objection correctly, his problem was that abstraction seemed to produce a new object (an actual object x and its abstraction x' for example) which we treat it like it is a real object like object x. So, it seemed to him that abstracting is the same as making stuff up and creating new entities out of real things and calling these entities real. We do remove the object from the concrete context but we want to find the essential characteristic of the thing or to use Ilienkov's terms, the simplest relation of that object. The real object is the object that has all of its determinations and qualities. The goal is to describe how we go from the multiplicity of the real object to the simplicity of the simple relation of the object. Idealists on the other hand seperate the abstracted object from the real object and they consider the x' object as the source for the existance of x. Somehow the x' becomes autonomous and the "ruler" that measures the value of x. Closer the x is to x', the superior level existance it has or something to that effect. Isnt what Church says? The real world is up there. Down here is the world of phenomena, up there is the world of truth. The less you care about stuff of the world dow her, the more you are communicating with the world up there.
ps. I sense it is terms like "essence" that might triggered your anti-idealistic sensors, hehe. I am innocent of the crime!
Last edited by Nikos; 04-10-2012 at 06:44 PM.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
Ah, I should have said a few more words to say that my hackles weren't up here. I think regular old idealization goes hand in hand with abstraction and is a perfectly legitimate tool to use. From Galileo on (at the least) the natural sciences have made extensive and effective use of idealization (frictionless motion and so on)
Idealism with a capital I is something different I think --as you describe, it gets into the idea that the figments of the mind have supremacy over the real/concrete/natural world (or if not supremacy at least primacy/logical priority)
Yes, you nailed my objection to the wall. It seemed incomprehensible that materialist should resort to such.
I didnt know that term so I had to look it up. Well, no, it is not like idealization because in abstraction we dont really assume that ideal conditions exist. We dont need to make such scientific hypothesis. Also, idealization is a method which we apply externally to the object. It is like a necessary or obligatory compromise which we do because of our weakness to understand the general process of nature for example. Idealization is more of a method of that era when nature was perceived to be like a machine.
On the other hand, you are right that there is a distinction we have to make here. Its the distinction between the typical abstraction (removing the object from the concrete contect which also means removing the time quality of the thing) and the dialectical abstraction. The dialectical abstraction is different from the typical abstraction because dialectical abstraction has an explanatory role. We are making the dialectical abstraction because we need to find the simplest universal relation inside the thing which is capable of explaining the multipliity of the determinations and qualities of the real thing.
For example, we want to study the human being. We need to make the typical abstraction. We remove man from the actual society he lives in and we arent taking into account the time he lives in. It is not that we dont know that the man exists only inside the society and inside the time but we dont use these infos in this phase. We also understand the man is a biological entity, he has an individual identity and he is a social creature. He creates societies. We separate these qualities by astraction. The typical abstraction is useful but is it enough? Typical abstraction tells us about the different qualities but it doesnt tell us what are we going to do with these qualities. How do they explain man? We nned to make the dialectical abstraction. And we have to find the simplest relation working our way back from the real man of our society (the mature organic whole) to the simplest relation. Which is that? Well, here is the problem. Different schools of thought in Dialectics, different solutions. Ilienkov says the simplest relation is that man is capable of working and producing the tools for his surviving. Vazjulin says it is the relations of production and consumption. The simplest relation cant be too general (characteristics that other creatures have too) or too narrow (because they wont be able to explain the complexity of the thing in his maturity). Marx was wondering in Grundrisse what is the simplest relation in Capitalism? The work for wage, the money, the commodity? What is the simplest universal relation that is capable to explain the complexity and the multiplicity of the thing as we see it today in its real existence? The simplest relation should be able to guarantee the genetic unity of all determinations of the object as a whole.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
"Idealization" is pure diversion here.
What you wrote about abstraction above perfectly answers blindpig's question. More... in this context it is nearly identical to "negation". And, it is the same point as my analogy on sounds in the night.
"Determinatio est negatio", wrote Spinoza (determination is negation). He might just as easily have said, "determination is abstraction". This is the basis of human thinking itself.
"Idealization", on the other hand, actually reinforces blindpig's confusion. The "ideal" here is a non-existent thing... like the search for the "fundamental particle in nature". Say what?
When we negate away the noise, we don't negate away reality to get to an ideal... quite the opposite. We abstract away the detail which makes reality indecipherable. In this, the dialectic helps us to distinguish what is "noise".
"Idealization", on the other hand - particularly in the hands of the bourgeoisie - is like a five year old child with a handgun. They make up their ideals first and then abstract away until they get to them:
"natural rights"
"freedom"
phooey...
Thanks, that clears up a lot for me
Guys, here is another article about Hegel and dialectic method in general, posted in an interesting blog I found yesterday. Prigogine, the famous physicist and Nobel laureate, is discussing the virtues of dialectics in science and politics. Isnt that fascinating?
http://educationalphilosophy.blogspo...gel-today.html
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
I was going to dismiss this cause this stuff just makes me all wormy but decided to dig a bit instead. To my considerable surprise the evil old bastard seems to have anticipated 'punctuated equilibrium'.
So now you have my reluctant attention.".... there suddenly emerges a return, a surprising accord, of which no hint
was given by the quality of what immediately proceeded it, but which appears
as an action in distans, as a connection with something far removed........
water when its temperature is altered does not merely get more or less hot but
passes through from the liquid into either the solid or gaseous states; these
states do not appear gradually; on the contrary, each new state appears as a
leap, suddenly interrupting and checking the gradual succession of temperature
changes at these points. Every birth and death, far from being a progressive
gradualness, is an interruption of it and is the leap from the quantitative into
a qualitative alternation......... ordinary thinking when it has to grasp a
coming-to-be or a ceasing-to-be, fancies it has done so by representing it as a
gradual emergence or disappearance. But we have seen that the alterations of
being in general are not only the transition of one magnitude into another, but
a transition from quality into quantity and vice versa, a becoming-other
which is an interruption of gradualness and the production of something
qualitatively different from the reality which preceded it. Water, in cooling,
does not
gradually harden as if it thickened like porridge, gradually solidifying until
it reaches the consistency of ice; it suddenly solidifies, all at once, It
can remain quite fluid even at freezing point if it is standing undisturbed, and
then a slight shock will bring it into the solid state........ The attempt to
explain coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be on the basis of the gradualness of the
alternation is tedious like any tautology; what comes to be or ceases to be is
assumed as already complete and in existence beforehand and the alteration is
turned into a mere change of an external difference, with the result that the
explanation is in fact a mere tautology. The intellectual difficulty
attendant on such an attempted explanation comes from the qualitative
translation from
something into its other in general, and then into its opposite; but the
identity and the alteration are misrepresented as the indifferent, external
determinations of the quantitative sphere."
To everyone on this thread: This is some really good stuff. This is progression...
I like Prigogine a lot too
Haha, I was 100% sure that a phrase with the words science and dialectis in the same sentence would provoke an immediate response from blindpig. I can only imagine your reaction to "They [the scientists] consider that the actual progress made by science places them far above philosophy. In reality, however, they are far below philosophy at its most primitive level."
I am under the impression that there is a very fundamental misunderstanding about dialectics and its relation with science here which was the cause of your suprise. I mean that dialectics isnt physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, medicine or archaeology. You dont have to know what dialectic is to make a surgical operation or to built a bridge. You can hate Hegel or Marx and still you can be the next Godel or Einstein.
There is a popular misunderstanding about science. Scientists dont take a microscope or a telescope ans start searching for something in the dark. They work trying to prove or reject their scientific hypotheses, hypotheses which rest upon other hypotheses. Where is the beginning of the thread? The general principle about knowledge and the function of the world, the general principles who reflect the beliefs of the people about the existence and the universe. Every historic era had its own principles. During the 16th-17th century the aristotelian principles about the world collapses. New inventions and discoveries and a new model arises. But the problem is that the new model isnt as neat as the old aristotelian model. For example, the old model could explain better some phenomena and beside that there were already some fascinating inventions according to this model and a significant progress was made the previous centuries because of the "old" principles. You see, it isnt that the old model was a model for idiots, it is that the new model was a more accurate description of the world. It was the model that depicted "Κόσμος" (Cosmos/Universe) as a machine which had many different parts and components that work together and because of that function the world could be an object of knowledge and study. This new model was the base for new scientific discoveries but at that time other scientists like Leibniz begun to believe that the machine model maybe isnt the most accurate reflection of Cosmos. He introduces some of the dialectics principles we use today, like the one I wrote in my previous post, the organic whole. Leibniz's first dialectic principles were the base for many scientific discoveries, sometimes in contrast to Newtonian physics.
Hegel is one of those philosophers who belong to that tradition. Dialectics isnt how you remove an appendicitis or how to build a house. It is a general scheme of principles who describe a general theory. A theory that explains how we might be able to understand the general process of the world. What is the reality and why the world is like this. All sciences can work in their won respective fields but what is the general principle that organizes all the findings? What is in other words, the model of Cosmos of our era? What is the principles that organizes all human knowledge and what can we make out of the scientific discoveries.
But also dialectic as a way of seeing the general process has a saying as all methods have a saying. Fore example in psychiatrics. Dialectics doesnt dismiss other methods of pshyciatrics as false or stupid. However, it points out that since dialectic materialists have different views on human development, it is also natural that they wont think that drugs is the only way of treating some cases since human isnt just a biological being. Or in education, Makarenko's paedagogical views on child's development led to a different educational model in USSR. Vygotsky's views on Psycology were different than those scientists who werent dialectic materialists. Another example, some mathematicians today are platonists, they have a model about numbers which is close to Plato's beliefs. Dialectic say that there is no a priori knowledge of mathematics and that everything is coming from the experience.
Another example: The Big bang theory. Dialectic materialists want to know what happened before 10−43 seconds in Planck time. Materialism has a problem with physicists saying that we cant ask what happened before Big Bang. It sounds not right according to dialectic method if someone tells you that the universe had a start, that something was created out of nothing. Or another example in philosophy. Analytic philosophy, child of logical positivism, works on specific problems using only the methods of typical logic. This is their method. Its not the general process they care about, they dont even recognize such a notion. They dont care about the historic perspective when they study a problem. It is not that they are stupid. On the contrary, they have some of extremely intelligent philosophers but is it their method enough to give us an accurate image of the world? Those who follow these general principles say yes. Dialectic principles refute such a claim.
Dialectics predict a very complicated and dynamic structure of the world while non dialectic methods dont. They have both great scientists but whose views are more close to the reality? I have to make this clear. Dialectics isnt nothing like a non scientific new age religion or something. It isnt a knowledge of everything but it is more like the presuppositions of knowledge. We cant know something before we get a general idea of what we are dealing with. Dialectics help science to acquire a pretty accurate general description of how world may look like.
PS. And something else: Down with Popper!
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
To add another example: Non dialectic philosophers of Ethics often ask: Is Man free? Or Does Man have a free will. A dialectic philosopher will have to take into his account all the stuff we discussed in the previous posts about abstraction. A non dialectic philosopher will use only typical logic taking into his account some principles about human beings and he will answer the question without caring about historical perspective. Both methods are ok but which method is more accurate to describe the problem of free will? Dialectics isnt a new science or a science that will abolish all sciences. Scientists ask themselves about the principles of science all the time. We have Popperians, we have the Kuhn views on scientific paradigm, we have Lakatos programm and yes we have dialectic method as well. All methods can present great advances but which is the best way to describe our world in general?
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
I suppose that the science of ecology is entirely dialectic, both in concept and practice.( this would not include the bourgeois, politicised form). As I have been immersed in ecology since a rather early age that difficulty in dealing with the idea of the dialectic is like not seeing the forest for the trees. In ecology connectivity is the primary assumption.Haha, I was 100% sure that a phrase with the words science and dialectis in the same sentence would provoke an immediate response from blindpig. I can only imagine your reaction to "They [the scientists] consider that the actual progress made by science places them far above philosophy. In reality, however, they are far below philosophy at its most primitive level."
I am under the impression that there is a very fundamental misunderstanding about dialectics and its relation with science here which was the cause of your suprise. I mean that dialectics isnt physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, medicine or archaeology. You dont have to know what dialectic is to make a surgical operation or to built a bridge. You can hate Hegel or Marx and still you can be the next Godel or Einstein.
There is a popular misunderstanding about science. Scientists dont take a microscope or a telescope ans start searching for something in the dark. They work trying to prove or reject their scientific hypotheses, hypotheses which rest upon other hypotheses. Where is the beginning of the thread? The general principle about knowledge and the function of the world, the general principles who reflect the beliefs of the people about the existence and the universe. Every historic era had its own principles. During the 16th-17th century the aristotelian principles about the world collapses. New inventions and discoveries and a new model arises. But the problem is that the new model isnt as neat as the old aristotelian model. For example, the old model could explain better some phenomena and beside that there were already some fascinating inventions according to this model and a significant progress was made the previous centuries because of the "old" principles. You see, it isnt that the old model was a model for idiots, it is that the new model was a more accurate description of the world. It was the model that depicted "Κόσμος" (Cosmos/Universe) as a machine which had many different parts and components that work together and because of that function the world could be an object of knowledge and study. This new model was the base for new scientific discoveries but at that time other scientists like Leibniz begun to believe that the machine model maybe isnt the most accurate reflection of Cosmos. He introduces some of the dialectics principles we use today, like the one I wrote in my previous post, the organic whole. Leibniz's first dialectic principles were the base for many scientific discoveries, sometimes in contrast to Newtonian physics.
Hegel is one of those philosophers who belong to that tradition. Dialectics isnt how you remove an appendicitis or how to build a house. It is a general scheme of principles who describe a general theory. A theory that explains how we might be able to understand the general process of the world. What is the reality and why the world is like this. All sciences can work in their won respective fields but what is the general principle that organizes all the findings? What is in other words, the model of Cosmos of our era? What is the principles that organizes all human knowledge and what can we make out of the scientific discoveries.
But also dialectic as a way of seeing the general process has a saying as all methods have a saying. Fore example in psychiatrics. Dialectics doesnt dismiss other methods of pshyciatrics as false or stupid. However, it points out that since dialectic materialists have different views on human development, it is also natural that they wont think that drugs is the only way of treating some cases since human isnt just a biological being. Or in education, Makarenko's paedagogical views on child's development led to a different educational model in USSR. Vygotsky's views on Psycology were different than those scientists who werent dialectic materialists. Another example, some mathematicians today are platonists, they have a model about numbers which is close to Plato's beliefs. Dialectic say that there is no a priori knowledge of mathematics and that everything is coming from the experience.
Another example: The Big bang theory. Dialectic materialists want to know what happened before 10−43 seconds in Planck time. Materialism has a problem with physicists saying that we cant ask what happened before Big Bang. It sounds not right according to dialectic method if someone tells you that the universe had a start, that something was created out of nothing. Or another example in philosophy. Analytic philosophy, child of logical positivism, works on specific problems using only the methods of typical logic. This is their method. Its not the general process they care about, they dont even recognize such a notion. They dont care about the historic perspective when they study a problem. It is not that they are stupid. On the contrary, they have some of extremely intelligent philosophers but is it their method enough to give us an accurate image of the world? Those who follow these general principles say yes. Dialectic principles refute such a claim.
Dialectics predict a very complicated and dynamic structure of the world while non dialectic methods dont. They have both great scientists but whose views are more close to the reality? I have to make this clear. Dialectics isnt nothing like a non scientific new age religion or something. It isnt a knowledge of everything but it is more like the presuppositions of knowledge. We cant know something before we get a general idea of what we are dealing with. Dialectics help science to acquire a pretty accurate general description of how world may look like.
PS. And something else: Down with Popper!
"One damned thing leads to another."
Well, here is a problem with the use of these terms. Science per se isnt dialectic or not dialectic. Science is whatever we want it to be. I mean we chose the means to fulfill specific scientific goals. We cant say that there are sciences that are by nature dialectic and others not. But there are scientific branches where the merits of dialectic materialism are very obvious. I think history is one of them. There are different schools of writing history and dialectic is one of them. Actually, it is only the dialectic method in social sciences that have ever predict phenomena with accuracy. The same applies in Economy. Connectivity is one thing but it isnt what characterizes dielectics. Dialectics is against logical positivism, blind empeiricism, idealistic dualism or formalism. There are dialectic geneticists like Lewontin and historians like Hobsbawm. Soviet science was the juggernaut of dialectic method for 80 years. And there are sworn enemies of dialectics like Popper and most of the analytic philosophy which is the primary if not the only trend among american philosophers. Where others talk about entities, entities that are eternal, dialectic materialism is talking about relations and a dynamic process. In mathematics or in physics the differences are obscure due to extreme specialization and accessible unfortunately to those who have advanced knowledge but in many other areas the comparison between different methods can show the virtues of dialectic materialism.
Edit: Contrary to what many people believe, scientists and philosophers of science are very far from finding theory of science accpetable by all. Take any book about theory of science written by a respectable author (materialist or no materialist) and read the endless discussions and scientific propositions about the correct way of understanding the basis of science. It is still an ongoing discussion.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!
Rosa Luxemburg
You can see the political ebbs and flows in the sciences (partitioned, to an extent, by individual subject matter).
Science as a whole is clearly a bourgeois innovation and the early pioneers are themselves bourgeois. Still, the hard headed "objectivity" of the English materialists is in evidence even where the dialectic is nowhere to be found. Then, as theory begins to border on topics with social implications, you can actually see the reactionary movements being born. Both positivism and crude empiricism count as such and both arise outside the fields of inquiry. They are like the religious fundamentalism which appears in bourgeois politics every time secularism appears to advance on economic subjects.
I suppose you could argue that the social sciences have always been an oxymoron but by the 1930s, the study of history and of sociology are clearly dominated by a materialist and even a loosely Marxist method...
Then, it becomes time to "rediscover" the crude philistine banalities of the old reactionaries, to challenge the primacy of social classes or to reinterpret them in meaningless ways. The real effort is to push back the science.
As with their production, so too with their ideas: they inevitably find themselves at war with their own creations. They tattoo on their backsides that their time has come to exit the historical stage. Instead of advances, there are retreats. In place of light; fog. Instead of hard-headed materialism, a mushy sentimentalism.
Every time they declare, "thus far and no further..."
Going back to Nikos's Popper reference..I picked him up one time and all I could think was this guy puts the "crude" in any and every "discipline" hes foists himself on. Then I read commentary about how very erudite and refined he was.
Funny think about the dialectic. It is quite easy to trace out the dialectic thread/"movement" in all of their bourgeoisie sciences -- the history of mathematics is the one I'm most familiar with but the effect certainly isn't limited to math. You can find very precise accounts of this development, as long as you read over the embarrassing musings about "why does math turn out to work so well on reality?"
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