/edu/ - Education

Sounds like cockshott got filtered

>>3347
>Be some 18 year old
>try to read Hegel
>be eternally mad because he didn't get him right away

Theorylets need a little more humble pie and just say he doesn't make sense to me. He's not easy and this is understood, but when you dismiss something in this arrogant way the alarm bells start going off. The materialist elemeng to Hegel can't be ignored.

It looks like he's relegated himself to analytical Marxists and epistemologists, deluding himself into thinking that this is the real stuff. Scholarship on Marx has advanced past Althusser's idea of a "epistemological break" between the young Marx and old.

Hegel matters.

>>3349
Pee-pee-pew is an anglo, so he's analytical.
The difference between anals and conts is that anals are focused on understanding but find thinking pointless, whereas conts are the other way around. It's kinda like Kant's analytic/synthetic or understanding/reason distinction.
So you see the reason anglos hate yuros like Hegel is because you can't simply understand them, you have to think while reading them, but thinking is for pseuds.

>>3349
>>3351
smug fart sniffing egomaniacs

>>3347
>Don't waste your time on Hegel
The working amount of theory needed is accessible without Hegel. That much is true, but the rest of the article is trash.

At least Engels disagrees wholly and entirely with Cockshott.
>Once again, therefore, it is no one but Herr Dühring who is mystifying us when he asserts that the negation of the negation is a stupid analogy invented by Hegel, borrowed from the sphere of religion and based on the story of the fall of man and his redemp-tion [D. K. G. 504]. Men thought dialectically long before they knew what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the term prose existed.3 The law of negation of the negation, which is unconsciously operative in nature and history and, until it has been recognised, also in our heads, was only first clearly formulated by Hegel.

From the little I've read of Cockshott's article and of Anti-Dühring, I think a good rebuttal to Cockshott would be Anti-Dühring.

>>3353 (me)
Other fun quotes:
>Seriously, you can only subdue Hegel by first of all becoming Hegel yourselves. As I have already remarked—Moor's beloved can only die at the hands of Moor

Here is Engels quoting Marx in Anti-Dühring:
>But, as Marx says: "The mystification which dialectics suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

From the quoted passage, Marx writes in the afterward of the second german edition:
>Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the sub-ject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.
So, first investigate wtf is going on, then apply dialectics to it. He's saying he didn't discover the laws via dialectics, but applied dialectics a posteriori, which is different than the Hegelian dialectics in that the Hegelian dialectics is primarily internal investigation of pure reason. (from what I understand)
He continues:
>My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i. e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of "the Idea", he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea". With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
From my limited understanding of Hegelianism, the difference here is what is taken as the origin/foundation (the arche [1]) of thought itself (I'm probably using arche wrong btw). Hegel sets off to begin his investigation having no suppositions and looks for the foundation which holds all else. This foundation cannot be dependent (mediated) on anything else (aka immediate, aka unmediated), or otherwise, it wouldn't be foundational. This means that the foundation must justify itself as a foundation, a self-"referential" foundation. He basically sets up a thought process in which he finds this self-referential foundation and builds upon it to greater and greater complexity and encompassing power. The starting point, however, and the investigation of Hegel, centers around thought, a system of meta thinking, in which thought itself is the subject of inquiry. Basically, our way of thinking is dependent on this meta-thinking system. As an analogy, thinking is doing basic arithmetic (2+2=4) and Hegel's system is the description of the Peano Axioms [2].
Marx, however, instead of having thought as the arche (and hence contingent on a thinker), places the arche as material reality itself, and makes human a subject of inquiry in such a reality.
>The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion.31 But just as I was working at the first volume ofDas Kapital,it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre '[descendants (original in greek, couldn't copy it)]3 2 who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i. e., as a "dead dog".33 I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of work-ing in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is stand-ing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell
Marx saying, "no wait, Hegel is actually big boss."
>In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
Marx saying human society is impermanent, and that porky fears the theory that realizes this and is not subject to capitalist realism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arche
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

>>3355 (me)
> Hegel's system is the description of the Peano Axioms [2].
But this is only his exposition of the system itself, not of the dialectical method.
The dialectical method is what is used to arrive at such system. If you were to get the results of such system without the process, they would seem absurd and contradictory. The point of the method is to discover ways in which systems develop, in which many times patterns occur, such as the negation of the negation, and the contingency of two perpendicular elements (use value, exchange value).

Anyways, I'm not an expert in this stuff, so I'll just stop.

>>3352
Conts are cunts, their writing forces you to think because they don't give a shit if it's hard to understand. In fact, the less understandable the more thoughtful.
But anals are the ones who are smug. Conts travel around the world and socialize, while anals look down upon visiting conts and try to ban them from lecturing. So much thinking and so little understanding makes their autistic brains hurt. It's sad, but it's true.
So I would say conts are butthurt from all the anality of anals, while anals are brainhurt from all the cuntiness of conts.

>>3357
clever and loled.

>>3358
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/08/21/a-comment-on-a-lecture-about-hegel/#respond


Cockshott continues to BTFO Hegelians

>>3369
This is embarrassing and reddit-tier, it's like he's deliberately trying to make materialism look extremely autistic. The problem is not that he reduces everything to matter, which is great, but that he reduces matter itself to the extremely limited pop-science conceptions. In other words he's selling materialism short.
Unironically, reading Hegel is exactly the thing that would have helped him.

>>3369
I had no idea that Taimur Rahman had made a video on Hegel.
I also had no idea that Taimur followed Cockshott's work. Not to aggrandize, but the leftypol community has been instrumental in putting Cockshott's work in the limelight and popularizing it (however mildly) on the internet left.

On the topic of Cockshott's response, there are so many glaring errors, I don't even know where to start. Again, do keep in mind that I have a cursory understanding of Hegel, so a lot of these ideas come from shallow reading of secondary sources.
>These ideas are not relied upon by any of the contemporary sciences.
This is scientism. It is basically ignoring philosophy of science, which is very important and is one of the things that is gravely missing from modern science. And Hegel absolutely BTFOs science as a totalizing venture of specific fields precisely because they take as supposition the limits of their study. They must isolate un-isolatable phenomena in order to study them, and hence are forever doomed to not get a complete picture. And, further, science is philosophy's bitch, science's foundation depends on philosophy, not the other way around.

>Logic can only occur where matter is so configured as to perform logical operations, conjunctions, disjunctions negations etc.
I'm not sure I agree with this characterization. It is a weird one that IMO characterizes logic as a physical process, rather than a system that exists in different contexts. What I mean is that if true, then it can also be said that physics doesn't exist in nature, it can only occur where matter is configured to perform physics. Which is true to some extent, but also doesn't really explain what physics is, and makes this weird characterization of physics just being a mental masturbation with no relation to reality.

>But that is because it is advantageous to the evolutionary survival of organisms to be able to react to their environment
This is some teleology of evolution or some shit. It is ironic that he says "No biologist thinks that there are essences" then says something that implies an essence moving evolution forward. I really dislike this interpretation of evolutionary biology. He just says this as this were a scientific fact. Again, philosophy of science comes to view as crucially important. I might be stretching what he really thinks, but I see this "essence" of evolution all the time in reddit-tier pop-sci explanations of evolution. As if the species had a meta-mind that chooses what is advantageous. It also ignores completely that a stupid jellyfish or mushrooms, or even diatoms are just as "evolved" as a human. Where is this "advantageous" logic in mushrooms?

>A more sophisticated understanding would be in terms of matrix multiplication rather than simple logic.
Here he is committing the same mistake he says he is wary to avoid. Matrix multiplication as such is a human endeavor. He is projecting a purely mathematical structure onto an organism that is unaware of formal mathematics.
Which he then follows up with
>I can not think of any instances in which a useful understanding of any real process can be well modeled by the sort of abstractions that Hegel employs.
That's his problem. Even if I learned tensor math, I wouldn't know how to apply it to the spacetime manifold.

>We have so more tools to look at the world with developed in the last 200 years that to go back to 1820s would be a terrible retrograde step.
This assumes that we have overcome Hegel, which many philosophers do not think so. And it also assumes that there is no value in reading philosophy, which many prominent scientists of the 20th century would disagree. There is value in reading any philosopher, regardless of what time period they are from. Plato and especially Aristotle are still being "rehashed" by 20th century philosophy, and I'm sure 21st century as well.

>The great danger is that young people’s minds will get stuck in a time warp,
In other words "Don't read philosophy, it will make you get stuck in a time warp" This is absurd.
>employing modes of thought that have long since been abandoned
Yes. And this is a serious problem of so called scientists and contemporary science.
>whilst in the process they ignore the concepts and threads of intellectual development that have led up to a modern scientific understanding.
Such as?

>If people are to understand a modern materialist outlook, and if they are to start that with philosophy then the starting point has to be Lucretius.
>Lived during 1st century BC
Oh by god! Please no! Otherwise young people’s minds will get stuck in a time warp


In fact I think a close reading of Marx might reveal a much more "mystical" component that Cockshott criticizes. I don't condemn the work that Cockshott does, of course. I don't even care that much that his philosophy takes are absolute trash (goes without saying that his takes on gender shit and other social issues are also trash). Neither Marx nor Cockshott are sacred cows. They both developed excellent ways of thinking about our current state of affairs that represent the only viable alternative of interpreting reality, with repercussions that impact basically all fields of knowledge.

>>3375
>the leftypol community has been instrumental in putting Cockshott's work in the limelight
Don't be silly. Look up when TANS was written. Look up when the translations of TANS were made. That was all long before 8chan. Cockshott has made acquaintances in Germany, China etc. over the decades and we got nothing to do with that. The guys at Monthly Review who are publishing How the World Works also have known Cockshott for decades I'm sure.
>>Logic can only occur where matter is so configured as to perform logical operations, conjunctions, disjunctions negations etc.
>I'm not sure I agree with this characterization. It is a weird one that IMO characterizes logic as a physical process
It's just consistent materialism.
>>The great danger is that young people’s minds will get stuck in a time warp,
>In other words "Don't read philosophy, it will make you get stuck in a time warp" This is absurd.
There are only so many hours in a day. Time spent reading Hegel is not time spent learning anything about the developments in the field of physics over the past 100 years.

>>3377
>There are only so many hours in a day.
I don't disagree with that. If he said that Hegel wasn't necessary, or that there might be more fruitful reading for a leftist, I'd agree wholeheartedly, but he's not doing that here. He's saying that Hegel has nothing of value, and hence shouldn't be studied.
>Don't be silly. Look up when TANS was written.
True, I concede and agree.

bump

So this is the power of analyticals.

>>3348
>>3349
>>3351
>>3352
>>3353
>>3355
>>3356
>>3357
>>3358
>>3369
>>3373
>>3375
>>3377
>>3379
>>5484
>>5486

read hegel

>>3377
> There are only so many hours in a day. Time spent reading Hegel is not time spent learning anything about the developments in the field of physics over the past 100 years
You think I don’t literally do both? I feel like the only people that make up dichotomies about philosophy and science literally just sit on their asses all day on anime forums doing absolutely nothing.
I’m a computer engineering major so I have to learn all this bullshit you’re talking about. I read philosophy because I understand the limitations of pure logic to everyday life and have seen its limits.

>>5492
>I understand the limitations of pure logic to everyday life and have seen its limits
Can you give some examples. I'm really interested in that and how Philosophy helps with it

>>3377
>There are only so many hours in a day. Time spent reading Hegel is not time spent learning anything about the developments in the field of physics over the past 100 years.
You think I will spend time down either? Book cuck. I can't read motherfucker!

>>5498
The theories of logic of Godel and Wittgenstein.