Hegelian contradiction and the prime numbers (part 2)(ianwrightsite.wordpress.com)
ianwrightsite.wordpress.com
Hegelian contradiction and the prime numbers (part 2)
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2019/02/09/hegelian-contradiction-and-the-prime-numbers-part-2/
51 comments
Your criticism reminds me of the book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie"; it is only available in French, but Wikipedia has a good summary [0]:
> Jacques Bouveresse is interested in the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel and their philosophical consequences. On this account, he has attacked, in a popular work Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie, the use made of these theorems by Régis Debray. Bouveresse denounces the literary distortion of a scientific concept for the purpose of a thesis. This distortion, according to him, has no other purpose than to overwhelm a readership which lacks the training necessary to comprehend such complex theorems. Bouveresse's reproach to Debray is not that he uses a scientific concept for the purpose of an analogy, but that he uses such a difficult to understand theorem in the attempt to provide an absolute justification in the form of the classic sophism of the argument from authority. According to Bouveresse, the incompleteness of a formal system which applies to certain mathematical systems in no way implies the incompleteness of sociology, which is not a formal system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleten...
> Jacques Bouveresse is interested in the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel and their philosophical consequences. On this account, he has attacked, in a popular work Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie, the use made of these theorems by Régis Debray. Bouveresse denounces the literary distortion of a scientific concept for the purpose of a thesis. This distortion, according to him, has no other purpose than to overwhelm a readership which lacks the training necessary to comprehend such complex theorems. Bouveresse's reproach to Debray is not that he uses a scientific concept for the purpose of an analogy, but that he uses such a difficult to understand theorem in the attempt to provide an absolute justification in the form of the classic sophism of the argument from authority. According to Bouveresse, the incompleteness of a formal system which applies to certain mathematical systems in no way implies the incompleteness of sociology, which is not a formal system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleten...
"Hegel aims to merely observe what is there – once we drop all our knowledge, all our presuppositions, all our theories, and even the sense of our own existence.
...
"I think it’s worth emphasising that when Hegel talks about pure being he isn’t talking about an abstract concept. He’s actually talking about a real phenomenon, an actually existing thing, which he claims we all have immediate access to, if we’re prepared to perform the mental exercise."
I cannot help but read the claim of the second paragraph as being a presupposition of the sort disavowed in the first.
...
"I think it’s worth emphasising that when Hegel talks about pure being he isn’t talking about an abstract concept. He’s actually talking about a real phenomenon, an actually existing thing, which he claims we all have immediate access to, if we’re prepared to perform the mental exercise."
I cannot help but read the claim of the second paragraph as being a presupposition of the sort disavowed in the first.
well, hegel did-apparently-love his contradictions.
Doublethink is a powerful thing!
Philosophical thinking has its own kind of structure which is very lovely but quite distinct from the rigorous logical way you learn by studying mathematics. I learned the latter in school and the former after. (The former is a lot about 'thinking with words' in a very long attention-span manner, and about holding multiple perspectives in your head at the same time and refining analogies by slowly making your ideas clearer and clearer. Very unlike the intense intuitive sort of thinking done in maths.) Both are very useful but I feel like totally different people when I apply one or the other to making sense of things, and I'm still not sure how to mesh them together into one brain-tool. Maybe one day with enough practice will brain-plasticity make me enlightened, or maybe I'm too old and cemented for them to merge.
Try looking at a Monet painting very close (like leaning over those protective wire barriers at the museum until the guards shoo you away)...it’s a mess of gloppy paint. After awhile you see structure and you can start to build up an understanding of his method in the madness.
Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree.
The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.
Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree.
The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.
Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one? Or are all correct and you just have to hold them all in your mind at the same time?
(This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)
(This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)
I don't know Hegel, if there is one thing I know it's that everyone starts talking about him by saying "he's obscure, even by deep-in-the-weeds philosophical standards". BUT I think a lot of his whole thing is to instead of trying to find a 'correct' 'one' you look at the tension between multiple interpretations.
Like Monet: splotches of paint resolve into water lilies but we're not seeing water lilies we're seeing various RGB luminance values from our optic nerves and our brain resolves them to a scene which we again break down into constituent parts, water stems, flowers... and rebuild into water lilies... which we again dissect looking for meaning.
The point then is to look at a perspective as just a point in a greater flux. The flux is the correct 'one' that's where the meaning is.
I'm sure Hegel would slap the taste out of my mouth for that analogy but he's dead and no one else seems to know what he meant either, so I feel safe.
Like Monet: splotches of paint resolve into water lilies but we're not seeing water lilies we're seeing various RGB luminance values from our optic nerves and our brain resolves them to a scene which we again break down into constituent parts, water stems, flowers... and rebuild into water lilies... which we again dissect looking for meaning.
The point then is to look at a perspective as just a point in a greater flux. The flux is the correct 'one' that's where the meaning is.
I'm sure Hegel would slap the taste out of my mouth for that analogy but he's dead and no one else seems to know what he meant either, so I feel safe.
I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in.
All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.
All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.
[deleted]
>Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one?
Which one has predictive power?
Which one has predictive power?
Given how intertwined between philosophy and mathematics is the history and foundational logic underlying computation, programmers of all people should not be quick to dismiss the mathematical insights found in philosophy.
There are those philosophers which are as concerned with logic as you'd expect from a pure mathematician ;-)
If you're interested, Shapiro's "Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics" gives a nice introduction into that topic, discussing several schools of philosophy and their thinkers (without forcing the authors pov on the reader). We had a seminar discussing that book, and while most philosophy students seemed happy to skip that seminar (too much math/logic), those of us with a MINT background (CS major here) found it quite amazing.
If you're interested, Shapiro's "Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics" gives a nice introduction into that topic, discussing several schools of philosophy and their thinkers (without forcing the authors pov on the reader). We had a seminar discussing that book, and while most philosophy students seemed happy to skip that seminar (too much math/logic), those of us with a MINT background (CS major here) found it quite amazing.
This is pretty silly.
The only real connection to Hegel is that Hegel talks about "being" and "nothing" kinda-sorta turning into one another, which the author riffs on in terms of differential equations and takes as corresponding to the differential equation for a harmonic oscillator.
The rest -- the idea that you can see the Riemann zeta function as something a bit like a Fourier transform of the integers -- is old hat. (As Terry Tao put it at one point: "the Riemann zeta function is essentially the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb on the natural numbers". See also du Sautoy's popular book about RH, "The music of the primes".)
The idea that sometimes you have two things turning into one another is not exactly startling, nor is it original to Hegel. The idea that this yields harmonic-oscillator-like dynamics is also not exactly startling, and in any case it's not something Hegel had any idea about. The thing that's distinctly Hegelian here, so far as I can tell (note: I am very far indeed from being a Hegel expert) is the idea that it's being and nothing that are in this relationship, and that specific aspect has nothing to do with the author's calculations. (He just writes them as x and y. They could equally have been "ham" and "eggs" or "Vishnu" and "Shiva" or "Linux" and "Windows" instead of "being" and "nothing".)
The only real connection to Hegel is that Hegel talks about "being" and "nothing" kinda-sorta turning into one another, which the author riffs on in terms of differential equations and takes as corresponding to the differential equation for a harmonic oscillator.
The rest -- the idea that you can see the Riemann zeta function as something a bit like a Fourier transform of the integers -- is old hat. (As Terry Tao put it at one point: "the Riemann zeta function is essentially the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb on the natural numbers". See also du Sautoy's popular book about RH, "The music of the primes".)
The idea that sometimes you have two things turning into one another is not exactly startling, nor is it original to Hegel. The idea that this yields harmonic-oscillator-like dynamics is also not exactly startling, and in any case it's not something Hegel had any idea about. The thing that's distinctly Hegelian here, so far as I can tell (note: I am very far indeed from being a Hegel expert) is the idea that it's being and nothing that are in this relationship, and that specific aspect has nothing to do with the author's calculations. (He just writes them as x and y. They could equally have been "ham" and "eggs" or "Vishnu" and "Shiva" or "Linux" and "Windows" instead of "being" and "nothing".)
Yes, it's well known that Riemann's zeta is the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb of the natural numbers. The philosophical, rather than the mathematical, question the author addresses is: Why is the Zeta representation uniquely informative of the order in the primes? Why must we move to the complex plane? Why analytic number theory? What is the possible meaning of this mathematical move? etc. The central claim is the efficacy of the Zeta representation is strong evidence that the natural numbers are, contrary to appearances, not static and independent quantities, but fundamentally dynamic and interdependent structures of being and nothing (literally Hegelian contradictions). So this is a philosophical or metaphysical interpretation of existing results in number theory.
I'm afraid this seems all wrong to me.
First of all: If that's your idea of "strong evidence" then there are a bunch of other things that seem preposterous to me but have "strong evidence" for them. For instance: Mathematicians have found it very useful to build mathematics on top of set theory; that is, to think of numbers (and everything else) in terms of structures of things belonging to other things. This is "strong evidence" that the notion of belonging-to is fundamental, and therefore that capitalism is the One True Economic System. (This absolutely honestly seems to me no more far-fetched than your argument here.)
Second: so far as I can see, even if we take the argument of the OP seriously, there is absolutely no reason to say that the things in these "dynamic and independent structures" are being and nothing. As I said above, they could just as well be any two things. Horizontal and vertical. Penn and Teller. Red and blue. But taking them to be "being and nothing" is the only thing that really connects this to Hegel at all.
Of course anyone's welcome to see parallels to anything anywhere. If the Riemann zeta function makes you think of Hegel, fair enough. It might make someone else think of Beethoven, or civil engineering. The only thing I take any exception to here is the idea that this somehow indicates that there's something specially insightful in Hegel rather than that human brains are good at spotting patterns, including patterns that aren't really there.
First of all: If that's your idea of "strong evidence" then there are a bunch of other things that seem preposterous to me but have "strong evidence" for them. For instance: Mathematicians have found it very useful to build mathematics on top of set theory; that is, to think of numbers (and everything else) in terms of structures of things belonging to other things. This is "strong evidence" that the notion of belonging-to is fundamental, and therefore that capitalism is the One True Economic System. (This absolutely honestly seems to me no more far-fetched than your argument here.)
Second: so far as I can see, even if we take the argument of the OP seriously, there is absolutely no reason to say that the things in these "dynamic and independent structures" are being and nothing. As I said above, they could just as well be any two things. Horizontal and vertical. Penn and Teller. Red and blue. But taking them to be "being and nothing" is the only thing that really connects this to Hegel at all.
Of course anyone's welcome to see parallels to anything anywhere. If the Riemann zeta function makes you think of Hegel, fair enough. It might make someone else think of Beethoven, or civil engineering. The only thing I take any exception to here is the idea that this somehow indicates that there's something specially insightful in Hegel rather than that human brains are good at spotting patterns, including patterns that aren't really there.
I actually recommend reading Lacan to everyone interested in Hegel.
It takes some suspension of disbelief (but then, the scientific psychologies that took over clinical practices are skating on thin ice and only successful in certain serious mental illnesses ) but it's well worth reading at least Malcolm Bowie's intellectual biography of him and maybe Zizek's "Less than nothing" to have some access to Lacan. (Lacan, of course, is a long self-winding reiteration of Hegelian theory on a pseudoclinical domain)
It takes some suspension of disbelief (but then, the scientific psychologies that took over clinical practices are skating on thin ice and only successful in certain serious mental illnesses ) but it's well worth reading at least Malcolm Bowie's intellectual biography of him and maybe Zizek's "Less than nothing" to have some access to Lacan. (Lacan, of course, is a long self-winding reiteration of Hegelian theory on a pseudoclinical domain)
> The success of Riemann’s project is strong evidence that the whole numbers – which we think of as static, unchanging quantities – are really some kind of shadow or projection of the Hegelian integers. The Zeta function reveals more because it represents whole numbers as what they actually are, that is dynamic contradictions of being and nothing.
> But, in addition, the Zeta function represents the whole numbers as a sublated unity, where the entities internally relate via the exchange of a conserved substance. And this whole moves and changes with time. This is quite unlike the vision offered by set theory.
The way modelling normally works is you have a certain phenomenon (falling rocks, fish populations, market booms-and-busts) that you attempt to describe numerically, and then create a mathematical model to make conclusions about the phenomenon. Here we have the opposite: the author takes the phenomenon (the Hegelian contradiction) and uses the model to make conclusions about mathematics!
> But, in addition, the Zeta function represents the whole numbers as a sublated unity, where the entities internally relate via the exchange of a conserved substance. And this whole moves and changes with time. This is quite unlike the vision offered by set theory.
The way modelling normally works is you have a certain phenomenon (falling rocks, fish populations, market booms-and-busts) that you attempt to describe numerically, and then create a mathematical model to make conclusions about the phenomenon. Here we have the opposite: the author takes the phenomenon (the Hegelian contradiction) and uses the model to make conclusions about mathematics!
>Hegel aims to discover the fundamental structure of everything from pure reflection alone.
Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything?
The problem with linking small pieces of science to large works of metaphysics is like finding shapes in the clouds or "Five ways TV shows predicted the future!" If you have enough material to sift through you can draw a circle in it and decide this particular piece of the morass is significant while ignoring the rest of the meaningless unfalsifiable piffle.
Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything?
The problem with linking small pieces of science to large works of metaphysics is like finding shapes in the clouds or "Five ways TV shows predicted the future!" If you have enough material to sift through you can draw a circle in it and decide this particular piece of the morass is significant while ignoring the rest of the meaningless unfalsifiable piffle.
If you read Hegel (or read someone interpreting him, I don't recommend reading Hegel unless you're a masochist), you'll find a key part of his approach was the limitations of observation. And Hegel wasn't even first to the gate on that one - philosophers have been questioning the value of observation relative to a comprehensive understanding of reality since the ancient Greeks (and the ancient Chinese, if you bring Taoism into it).
There's a lot more to it than "meaningless unfalsifiable piffle".
There's a lot more to it than "meaningless unfalsifiable piffle".
>Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything?
Judging by its adoption, quite a lot.
Judging by its adoption, quite a lot.
This claim will be hard for anyone to assess without having read and understood Hegel, particularly the incredibly long and dense "Science of Logic." While I haven't read the latter, his interpretation on the surface seems like a gross simplification of something that few scholars agree on, regarding a book that few have read. If Hegel's ontology were as simple as the author described, it would be standard knowledge in how to interpret Hegel, something I would have learned in my college modern philosophy class.
The prime numbers of course would have been just fine and irreducible as ever if Hegel had never existed. He did however manage to influence a lot of other iffy stuff:
> Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."(wikipedia)
> Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."(wikipedia)
I don't think of any of those things as "iffy", myself.
But if you wanna take a shot at dismissing anything that Nietzsche or Heidegger wrote, without resorting to cultural bias points, be my guest. There's a PhD in it for you.
But if you wanna take a shot at dismissing anything that Nietzsche or Heidegger wrote, without resorting to cultural bias points, be my guest. There's a PhD in it for you.
From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Fri...
>The "fascist" Nietzsche was above all considered to be a heroic opponent of necrotic Enlightenment "rationality" and a kind of spiritual vitalist, who had glorified war and violence in an age of herd-lemming shopkeepers, inspiring the anti-Marxist revolutions of the interwar period.
I'm a fan of rationality and object to the violence enthusiasts he inspired gassing my relatives but each to their own.
>The "fascist" Nietzsche was above all considered to be a heroic opponent of necrotic Enlightenment "rationality" and a kind of spiritual vitalist, who had glorified war and violence in an age of herd-lemming shopkeepers, inspiring the anti-Marxist revolutions of the interwar period.
I'm a fan of rationality and object to the violence enthusiasts he inspired gassing my relatives but each to their own.
They might be seen as iffy because of the damage that has been done in the name of each of their theories. Marx obviously has a lot to answer for if you consider him responsible for everything that went wrong in the USSR; Freud's influence is probably as much bad as good, if you consider it as having brought a compelling but pseudoscientific method to bear on psychology. And so on.
It does sound anti-intellectual to dismiss all those thinkers as iffy, but I'd much rather retain the option of treating their views with skepticism than enrol in a PhD programme where it's implicit that all one can do is write footnotes on the work of these great men. (You seem to imply that — unless, that is, the student is a rare and impertinent genius who has the temerity to take them on.)
It does sound anti-intellectual to dismiss all those thinkers as iffy, but I'd much rather retain the option of treating their views with skepticism than enrol in a PhD programme where it's implicit that all one can do is write footnotes on the work of these great men. (You seem to imply that — unless, that is, the student is a rare and impertinent genius who has the temerity to take them on.)
to steal a line from Stroustrup:
"there are to kinds of philosophies: the ones people kill each other over and the ones nobody uses"
"there are to kinds of philosophies: the ones people kill each other over and the ones nobody uses"
Though some like humanism tend to lead to less killing than might have gone on otherwise.
Let it run its full course, and humanism will lead to an unimaginably horrific dystopia. Think "Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley. The surest way to make a man stumble and fall is to puff him up with flattery and tell him how wise and sure-footed he is.
I meant iffy mostly as having negative side effects as seen with most attempts at Marxism for example. I also dislike the intellectual style which seems to lead towards grand sweeping but vague and unfalsifiable theories. Give me simplicity and testability.
I think you are essentially dismissing philosophy in general.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."
I don't consider Marx to be responsible for what went wrong in the USSR, and I think that thinking so is a very poor (and politically loaded) reading of history. And I'll note for the record that the same people who blame Marx for the disasters of the USSR never credit him for the miracle of modern China, where per capita GDP has grown 130x (in constant dollars) over the past 50-odd years.
And back to first principles here. We're not talking about whether Marx is bad; we're talking about whether Hegel is bad, because Hegel's dialectic was fundamental to the thinking of Marx and pretty much everyone who was anyone for the past two centuries of critical thought. And it wasn't just targeted at Marx, either. The broad brush also painted Nietzsche, Heidegger, "existentialism", even Wittgenstein (who was sort of a critical reaction to Hegel) as somehow wrong.
In my shallow, lazy, uncritical mind, this smells a great deal like a political bias masquerading as an idea.
And back to first principles here. We're not talking about whether Marx is bad; we're talking about whether Hegel is bad, because Hegel's dialectic was fundamental to the thinking of Marx and pretty much everyone who was anyone for the past two centuries of critical thought. And it wasn't just targeted at Marx, either. The broad brush also painted Nietzsche, Heidegger, "existentialism", even Wittgenstein (who was sort of a critical reaction to Hegel) as somehow wrong.
In my shallow, lazy, uncritical mind, this smells a great deal like a political bias masquerading as an idea.
I think Deleuze (who described some of his work as belonging to the genre of "generalized anti-Hegelianism", which I take to mean a kind of inversion of Hegel, i.e. a materialism) would just have laughed if you said his ideas were iffy. It's part and parcel of being on the radical cutting edge "producing concepts" in the philosophical tradition (participation in which necessitates acknowledging Hegel).
Is there a philosopher whose significant ideas were not steps into the unknown, moving beyond accepted thought? No philosophical idea worth considering is incontestable.
Is there a philosopher whose significant ideas were not steps into the unknown, moving beyond accepted thought? No philosophical idea worth considering is incontestable.
It's obviously not the case that we can hold Marx responsible for what was carried out in his name (I'd be happy to point you to Marxist analyses of how the USSR differed from Marx's limited notes on praxis) and it is the case (if one is familiar with the literature) that Marx is treated with skepticism, and Freud probably doubly so.
PhDs and research in political economy, critical theory and sociology - the three most "Marxist" disciplines one can name at universities - are awash with criticisms of Marx, either major or minor. In fact, there seems to be more people criticising (or at least amending) his work than there are still people defending it. This is especially true in the analytic side of political economy, in which many researchers believe (rightly or wrongly) that the last vestiges of Marx have been finally cut off by Sraffa, and the most we can hope for is Ricardian socialism or social-democratic reform. The very author of the piece we are commenting on has published amendments to Marx's consideration of the theory of value in an attempt to dissolve the transformation problem. Even Marxists (considered as those with an affinity to Marx who reject a few or some of his theses) themselves disavow Marx to various degrees - either in his theory of value (Sraffa, Yoshihara, Roemer, perhaps Okishio) or his construction of historical materialism (Elster), the transformation problem (Laibman, Mohun, Veneziani). In fact, the number of people who hold that Marx was absolutely correct and that interpretation can save him from criticisms since the 60s is vanishingly small, though it does wield some influence - Kliman, McGlone, Carchedi, Freeman, Moseley, Patrick Murray. But all of the figures I have mentioned engage in critique and counter-critique of each other, sometimes even stretching to the mean-spirited. They are not isolated or refusing to engage on dogmatic principles. Even the most ardent defenders of Marx to the letter are accomplished academics, often professors of philosophy or economics, with PhDs and tenure.
On the matter of Freud I'm not so familiar other than to point out that psychoanalysis is not psychology and it is not taken as part of psychology. The question of whether it qualifies as science or not, or whether it can become scientific (in its post-Freud incarnations) is still debated. But criticisms of Freud are everywhere, not least from actual philosophers in psychoanalysis - Feminist philosophy has been very critical of Freud, for example. Extremely influential philosophers in the continental tradition have been critical of Freud - Deleuze and Guattari, for example.
It's not at all fair to say that Freud and Marx, at the least, are not treated with skepticism, even in the disciplines they are most popular in. Outside of those disciplines they are dismissed, and in my opinion, dismissed out of hand. They do not hold some great sway that makes them unquestionable today. There may have been a time at which that was true (perhaps when Das Kapital was being used as a textbook at some Japanese universities in the 20s and 30s) but it is certainly not true today, at lesat if we consider published research rather than the (sometimes misguided) opinions of students who may cling dogmatically to Marx and Freud or to anti-Marxists Karl Popper.
PhDs and research in political economy, critical theory and sociology - the three most "Marxist" disciplines one can name at universities - are awash with criticisms of Marx, either major or minor. In fact, there seems to be more people criticising (or at least amending) his work than there are still people defending it. This is especially true in the analytic side of political economy, in which many researchers believe (rightly or wrongly) that the last vestiges of Marx have been finally cut off by Sraffa, and the most we can hope for is Ricardian socialism or social-democratic reform. The very author of the piece we are commenting on has published amendments to Marx's consideration of the theory of value in an attempt to dissolve the transformation problem. Even Marxists (considered as those with an affinity to Marx who reject a few or some of his theses) themselves disavow Marx to various degrees - either in his theory of value (Sraffa, Yoshihara, Roemer, perhaps Okishio) or his construction of historical materialism (Elster), the transformation problem (Laibman, Mohun, Veneziani). In fact, the number of people who hold that Marx was absolutely correct and that interpretation can save him from criticisms since the 60s is vanishingly small, though it does wield some influence - Kliman, McGlone, Carchedi, Freeman, Moseley, Patrick Murray. But all of the figures I have mentioned engage in critique and counter-critique of each other, sometimes even stretching to the mean-spirited. They are not isolated or refusing to engage on dogmatic principles. Even the most ardent defenders of Marx to the letter are accomplished academics, often professors of philosophy or economics, with PhDs and tenure.
On the matter of Freud I'm not so familiar other than to point out that psychoanalysis is not psychology and it is not taken as part of psychology. The question of whether it qualifies as science or not, or whether it can become scientific (in its post-Freud incarnations) is still debated. But criticisms of Freud are everywhere, not least from actual philosophers in psychoanalysis - Feminist philosophy has been very critical of Freud, for example. Extremely influential philosophers in the continental tradition have been critical of Freud - Deleuze and Guattari, for example.
It's not at all fair to say that Freud and Marx, at the least, are not treated with skepticism, even in the disciplines they are most popular in. Outside of those disciplines they are dismissed, and in my opinion, dismissed out of hand. They do not hold some great sway that makes them unquestionable today. There may have been a time at which that was true (perhaps when Das Kapital was being used as a textbook at some Japanese universities in the 20s and 30s) but it is certainly not true today, at lesat if we consider published research rather than the (sometimes misguided) opinions of students who may cling dogmatically to Marx and Freud or to anti-Marxists Karl Popper.
That's all fine. I think you will agree, though, that engaging with Marx's writing, however critically, is not the same as offering an explicit correction to Marx's theories or putting them to the test. It's more of a case of "thinking with Marx". The tropes of Marx's thinking are kept alive somehow rather than dismissed — there is faith that Marx and the others had put their finger on something important and that their writing continues to be worth discussing.
An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.
An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.
>An attempt to entirely refute Marx or Freud would not be taken seriously in academia — there's always some kind of affirmative stance in relation to the old theorists. Unless you are some kind of genius or enfant terrible.
I don't think that's true either; while it's more likely to be true inside the three disciplines I named, it's not true outside them. Samuelson's and Steedman's criticisms of Marx are held to be pretty much the end of Marx in economics, for example - and economics is far larger of a science in academia than political economy is. There are theories of Marx which are held by many to be simply wrong, or perhaps with some insight that he offered but his theories don't live up to, even what Marx called the theories he was most proud of. Obviously nobody can refute Marx entirely in one fell swoop - since Marx's project was multi-disciplinary and very few people nowadays have knowledge in all the requisite fields to a sufficient level - but as I said, Marx and Freud are questioned both sympathetically (thinking with) and unsympathetically (questioning their bedrock philosophies and most proud achievements). I really think they are only held to the esteem that other greats are held - and possibly less. Keynes, Weber and Aristotle in my judgement enjoy far more support than Marx and Freud do today the entire academy considered as a whole.
I don't think that's true either; while it's more likely to be true inside the three disciplines I named, it's not true outside them. Samuelson's and Steedman's criticisms of Marx are held to be pretty much the end of Marx in economics, for example - and economics is far larger of a science in academia than political economy is. There are theories of Marx which are held by many to be simply wrong, or perhaps with some insight that he offered but his theories don't live up to, even what Marx called the theories he was most proud of. Obviously nobody can refute Marx entirely in one fell swoop - since Marx's project was multi-disciplinary and very few people nowadays have knowledge in all the requisite fields to a sufficient level - but as I said, Marx and Freud are questioned both sympathetically (thinking with) and unsympathetically (questioning their bedrock philosophies and most proud achievements). I really think they are only held to the esteem that other greats are held - and possibly less. Keynes, Weber and Aristotle in my judgement enjoy far more support than Marx and Freud do today the entire academy considered as a whole.
This is an unsatisfactory discussion, because you are attacking straw men.
Samuelson was a genius and a once-in-a-generation thinker. I specifically avoided excluding the existence of such people who can take on the incumbents of the theoretical pantheon.
You at least concede that great thinkers are all more or less held in a certain level of esteem. It's precisely this pious, respectful attitude that makes unsympathetic critiques rare. I'm not saying that an academic world in which such critiques were commonplace would be better, or even possible. The conservatism and conventionality of the framework in which academic work takes place may well be intrinsic to the social function of the activity. The fact is that a vast amount of work is done which rehearses, builds on, applies, or seeks to recover value from the work of the 'masters'. Skepticism is not the word I would use to describe the way the literature is typically approached. Criticality is circumscribed by a sense of decorum — one must not be too critical of a thinker whose work so many others have engaged with. To be too critical would be arrogant, or at the very least it would indicate that one was in the wrong intellectual milieu.
I really am not aware of highly respected "unsympathetic" engagements in today's academia. Yes, there were high-profile disputes in the past between contemporaries — Einstein and Bergson, for example. But today refutations and dismissals don't seem to be considered appropriate. The overwhelming mood is one of appreciation of classic texts within small specialized interest groups. Rigorous refutations (as in Samuelson's work on Marx) really don't seem to happen very often at all. They almost seem like something rude.
Samuelson was a genius and a once-in-a-generation thinker. I specifically avoided excluding the existence of such people who can take on the incumbents of the theoretical pantheon.
You at least concede that great thinkers are all more or less held in a certain level of esteem. It's precisely this pious, respectful attitude that makes unsympathetic critiques rare. I'm not saying that an academic world in which such critiques were commonplace would be better, or even possible. The conservatism and conventionality of the framework in which academic work takes place may well be intrinsic to the social function of the activity. The fact is that a vast amount of work is done which rehearses, builds on, applies, or seeks to recover value from the work of the 'masters'. Skepticism is not the word I would use to describe the way the literature is typically approached. Criticality is circumscribed by a sense of decorum — one must not be too critical of a thinker whose work so many others have engaged with. To be too critical would be arrogant, or at the very least it would indicate that one was in the wrong intellectual milieu.
I really am not aware of highly respected "unsympathetic" engagements in today's academia. Yes, there were high-profile disputes in the past between contemporaries — Einstein and Bergson, for example. But today refutations and dismissals don't seem to be considered appropriate. The overwhelming mood is one of appreciation of classic texts within small specialized interest groups. Rigorous refutations (as in Samuelson's work on Marx) really don't seem to happen very often at all. They almost seem like something rude.
That's probably because in no small part, "rigorous refutation" is confused with "vigorous refutation" that is shallow and partisan in nature. Hating on Marx is easy; refuting Marx completely in a rigorous manner is hard; doing it without an obvious axe to grind is even harder.
Even to the extent that Marx was wrong in the particulars, he got a lot of essentials right in new and unique ways. More importantly, it's impossible to have a serious conversation about labor that excludes Marx entirely (unserious conversations are another thing). And we've now had over a century of refutations of various types and degrees, from both right and left. Contributing something actually new and significant to the literature would be even more difficult than developing a thorough and academically rigorous "refutation".
Hence, the nitpicking about details from the left, and the unrigorous blanket rejection from the right. Both are far safer ground than trying to introduce breadth on the left or rigor on the right.
Even to the extent that Marx was wrong in the particulars, he got a lot of essentials right in new and unique ways. More importantly, it's impossible to have a serious conversation about labor that excludes Marx entirely (unserious conversations are another thing). And we've now had over a century of refutations of various types and degrees, from both right and left. Contributing something actually new and significant to the literature would be even more difficult than developing a thorough and academically rigorous "refutation".
Hence, the nitpicking about details from the left, and the unrigorous blanket rejection from the right. Both are far safer ground than trying to introduce breadth on the left or rigor on the right.
One can engage with Marx's writings without being "Marxist", and certainly without being Leninist. I think of when Matthew B Crawford wrote his excellent Shop Class as Soulcraft. He used Marxist terminology about labor in order to critique Taylorism and the social harm of scientific management, in terms of removing worker control over their own production. And he got lambasted from some corners for it, even though his argument was not by any stretch of the imagination socialist, much less "Marxist". He responded by pointing out that if you're going to talk about the value of labor at all, you'd be a fool to not use Marx's terminology, because otherwise, you'd have to reinvent the wheel.
The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though. To use Feynman's analogy, birds would still be doing what birds do even if it weren't for ornithologists. Although the author is a Marxist economist (and I have some sympathies with him), it's probably better to consider Hegel on his own grounds - Hegelianism does not lead to Marxism and existentialism just as rationalism does not lead to the ontological argument. On the contrary, far from being iffy, I'd say that Marx and Nietzche (even if you would only concede due to their fundamental place in the culture of suspicion - doubting the notions they doubted) and existentialism from that list, at least, are worthy of some praise.
Psychoanalysis is a different beast, but there has been some interesting recent (post-Popper, which I must mention since people seem to end psychoanalysis with Popper which seems premature) work on it, even from outsiders and psychologists.
Psychoanalysis is a different beast, but there has been some interesting recent (post-Popper, which I must mention since people seem to end psychoanalysis with Popper which seems premature) work on it, even from outsiders and psychologists.
> The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though.
This is a lot more philosophically fraught. If you believe that mathematical entities exist in some acausal, nonphysical realm separate from the activity of beings doing math, you need to explain how those beings can access them. If you take Brouwer’s position that mathematics is the free languageless creation of the mind, then it’s no longer true that prime numbers would be irreducible if not for mathematicians.
This is a lot more philosophically fraught. If you believe that mathematical entities exist in some acausal, nonphysical realm separate from the activity of beings doing math, you need to explain how those beings can access them. If you take Brouwer’s position that mathematics is the free languageless creation of the mind, then it’s no longer true that prime numbers would be irreducible if not for mathematicians.
That's true, and I accept that - though my claim was more intended to attack the notion that a certain analysis is useless just because the thing being analyzed would exist otherwise - whether that existence is due to initial theorists (i.e primes are a creation of the mind) or whether it's due to their non-physical existence as Platonic forms was a little beside the point of what I was trying to say. I meant it more in the way that we could say science would still exist even if Popper hadn't theorized falsificationism.
I don't see how that follows personally - mathematics are about configuration of information which may or may not be descriptions that exist within reality. Impetus based momentum could be described mathematically but that doesn't mean it exists.
Which highlights Hegel's central flaw in derivation - possibilities are infinite without any grounding assumptions. At best you would get a smaller but still infinite subset compared to literally everything (all valis equations vs all equations even 2 = 1).
There is no need to "access" what may simply be rederived. It isn't a physical place. The only constraints are on what configurations are possible within the system attempting to describe it. You can't describe 0 to 1024 with only a single bit.
In a "world of silence" with no "life" capable of describing primes it would still hold that the smallest non-1 divisions of 6 particles would be 2 and 3 and for 7 it would be 7 - even though there is nobody around to understand this.
Which highlights Hegel's central flaw in derivation - possibilities are infinite without any grounding assumptions. At best you would get a smaller but still infinite subset compared to literally everything (all valis equations vs all equations even 2 = 1).
There is no need to "access" what may simply be rederived. It isn't a physical place. The only constraints are on what configurations are possible within the system attempting to describe it. You can't describe 0 to 1024 with only a single bit.
In a "world of silence" with no "life" capable of describing primes it would still hold that the smallest non-1 divisions of 6 particles would be 2 and 3 and for 7 it would be 7 - even though there is nobody around to understand this.
It's worth noting that the idea that mathematical forms are mind-independent and can be "accessed" is taken seriously by non-crackpot philosophers. It's not a settled matter. See the SEP[0] entry for some of the debates surrounding it. A nice passage is:
>This counterfactual independence (as we may call it) is accepted by most analytic philosophers. To see why, consider the role that mathematics plays in our reasoning. We often reason about scenarios that aren’t actual. Were we to build a bridge across this canyon, say, how strong would it have to be to withstand the powerful gusts of wind? Sadly, the previous bridge collapsed. Would it have done so had the steel girders been twice as thick? This form of reasoning about counterfactual scenarios is indispensable both to our everyday deliberations and to science. The permissibility of such reasoning has an important consequence. Since the truths of pure mathematics can freely be appealed to throughout our counterfactual reasoning, it follows that these truths are counterfactually independent of us humans, and all other intelligent life for that matter. That is, had been there been no intelligent life, these truths would still have remained the same.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
>This counterfactual independence (as we may call it) is accepted by most analytic philosophers. To see why, consider the role that mathematics plays in our reasoning. We often reason about scenarios that aren’t actual. Were we to build a bridge across this canyon, say, how strong would it have to be to withstand the powerful gusts of wind? Sadly, the previous bridge collapsed. Would it have done so had the steel girders been twice as thick? This form of reasoning about counterfactual scenarios is indispensable both to our everyday deliberations and to science. The permissibility of such reasoning has an important consequence. Since the truths of pure mathematics can freely be appealed to throughout our counterfactual reasoning, it follows that these truths are counterfactually independent of us humans, and all other intelligent life for that matter. That is, had been there been no intelligent life, these truths would still have remained the same.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
You can suppose we can figure they exist using logic and reasoning rather needing access to some mystical realm.
I wonder what zizek has to say about this
Both TFA and the linked article referenced by TFA seem to me to be the ramblings of somebody trying really, really, hard to pull a rabbit out of a hat. By linking together abstract concepts you can prove that philosophy and mathematics are one and the same!
>So it’s very remarkable that Hegel’s mystical starting point, which is purely conceptual and abstract – and makes no reference to physical reality or empirical knowledge whatsoever – nonetheless implies a structure of ‘becoming’ that is equivalent to the fundamental structure found everywhere in physical science.
Well, you can read Hegel this way... I guess. Figure it makes for some really warm and fuzzy insightful feelings, regardless of whether they are meaningful.