Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Lukacs's retrogression into neo-Kantianoid/crypto-Christianoid Radical Dualism

Dear Readers,

Stuart A. Kauffmann, in books such as his "The Origin of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution", and via concepts such as "Order for Free", has done much to supersede the prevailing Darwinian-mechanistic, "gene-ist", "lifeless view of life".

Likewise, Lynn Margulis, in books such as her "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution", and through her development of the concepts of "endosymbiosis" and "symbiogenesis" in the emergence of eukaryotic "cells" from prokaryotic "cells", has done great service in demonstrating non-genomic, non-genetic, non-DNA-centered aspects of the processes of actual [r]evolution, even in the strictly "biological" epochs of universal [r]evolution.


In a later blog-entry, I plan to set forth in detail the positive fruition of a Marxian, dialectical, immanent critique of Darwinism that is called "Universal meta-Darwinism".

One upshot of that new theory is the realization that "Natural Selection" is a misleading misnomer, which Darwin coined in an ill-conceived analogy to the "Artificial Selection" carried on by human agents / subjects in their Neolithic+ agricultural production activities of plant and animal domestication.

In typical bourgeois-ideological fashion, Darwinism projects an inversion of real subject and real object, metaphorically and fallaciously positing a Nature-God-like "pseudo-agent", or "pseudo-subject", that, as if, "selects" certain traits or species, and condemns others to oblivion / extinction.

In reality, the key to all natural evolutions -- including "natural revolutions" -- in the larger, universal, cosmological, including trans-genomic, trans-genetic sense, applying to epochs of natural history both before and after those in which DNA-mediated self-organization is central [specifically, those exceptionally more DNA-determined epochs are the tau = 4 epoch of the prokaryotic-cellular [r]evolution, the tau = 5 epoch of the eukaryotic-cellular [r]evolution, and the tau = 6 epoch of the asocial multi-cellular organism / meta-biotic [r]evolution] -- is the differential sustained rates of the self-expanding self-reproduction of the local <<arithmoi>>, or "populations", of the <<monads>> of the various ontological categories of natural formation(s), which are the real "subjects" or "agents" that bring about natural "selection"; not human, self-sentient "subjects", but "subjects" in the "sentence-ial" sense; "subjects" in the "subject-verb-object", "agent-of-action" sense.

Those natural formations -- those "ontos" -- that sustain a higher rate of "auto-catalytic onto-mass expanded self-reproduction" of their own "onto-mass" come to fill a larger proportion of natural, cosmological existential reality, while those that sustain a lower average rate of expanded self-reproduction of their own"onto-mass", or that enter a sustained period of contracted self-reproduction of their "onto-mass", come to fill an ever smaller proportion of existence, even to the point of extinction.



An interlocutor wrote:  "Another dogma that needs to be kennelized is the outrageously unfounded Western Marxist declaration that there can be no natural dialectic."

"This separates humanity from nature and "Marxists" from Marx."

"Lukacs, himself, [later] had grave reservations concerning the position he took on this."

"In any case, Marx and Engels viewed the materialist dialectic as "the science of the general laws of nature, human society, and thought." "



I would like to register my strong concurrence with the above-stated critique. [Although am not sure that even a "kennel" is the right place for such a "dead" dog].

Lukacs's radical dualism of <<Natur>> vs. <<Geist>>, "Nature" versus "Humanity", as asserted, e.g., in his History and Class Consciousness -- later partially recanted by Lukacs himself, as you point out -- is a collapse back into neo-Kantianoid, crypto-Christianoid sub-dialectics of the most crippling kind, one which, quite predictably, has become a suppurating "sore-se" of further debilitating error.

The denial of the actuality of The Dialectic of Nature is one of the most vitiating symptoms of the Post-WWI decline of Marxian theory into a schism of "Marxist ideologies", and a sign of the profound theoretical and practical weakness of the Western Marxian movement, one which also ever "expandedly reproduces" that weakness, especially by way of its capitulation to ideologically-vitiated variants of the bourgeois "sciences", and, especially, of the "natural sciences", and by way of its abandonment of the core Marxian praxis of the dialectical, immanent critique of the bourgeois, ideological-"sciences".


Marx himself was not of this persuasion!


For example, Marx and Engels wrote, in the [circa 1846] manuscript of their critique of "The German Ideology":

"We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable . . ." [emphasis added].


In his 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Capital, Volume I., Marx wrote of:

"My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history..."

[Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, <<Buch>> I.: The Productionsprocess of Capitals, Preface, page 10, International Publishers, [NY: 1967], emphasis added].


In the body of that work, in the opening chapter of Part III. -- Chapter VII. -- in Marx's classic, dialectical definition of human labor, the word "Nature" should be understood as signifying extra-human Nature, as becomes clear in the course of the passage itself.

In this passage, Marx describes human labor as a self-reflexive action of Nature back upon itself, via that self-extension of Nature which is humanity. This human-Nature activity of labor is one which further develops, "works up", both of the "sides" of this "intra-duality" of action within "Nature" as totality, including humanities -- both the extra-human-Nature "side", and the human-Nature "side", in the form of a further self-development of Nature as totality. Marx writes:

"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers. . ."

[Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, <<Buch>> I., ibid., page 177, emphasis added].


But, after all, what has Marx's actual theory got to do with "Marxian" "movements", or, more realistically, of the gaggles of "groupuscles", that each wants to go its own way [and yet still call itself "Marxian"]?!


Regards,

Miguel




F.E.D. definitions of special terms utilized in the narrative above --

endosymbiosis
no definition available as yet in Archive

eukaryotic cells
no definition available as yet in Archive, but see cells in--
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Glossary_files/D.I.,Post,Phono-Neograms,%5BC%5D.w3_OCR.pdf
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Glossary.html

extra-human Nature
no definition available as yet in Archive

onto(s)
http://www.point-of-departure.org/Point-Of-Departure/ClarificationsArchive/Onto/Onto.htm

onto-mass
no definition available as yet in Archive

prokaryotic cells
no definition available as yet in Archive, but see cells in--
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Glossary_files/D.I.,Post,Phono-Neograms,%5BC%5D.w3_OCR.pdf
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Glossary.html

self-development
no definition available as yet in Archive

self-reflexive
no definition available as yet in Archive

symbiogenesis
no definition available as yet in Archive

[dialectical] totality
no definition available as yet in Archive

Universal Meta-Darwinism
no definition available as yet in Archive, but see --
http://www.point-of-departure.org/Point-Of-Departure/ClarificationsArchive/PsychoHistory/PsychoHistory.htm























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