Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
too materialist where's your dialect
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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My dialectic is internal contradictions move all things. Nature is dialectical, that doesn’t contradict determinism. Men may make their own history, but did they have the free will whether to do so?
the above quote is very clearly anti-determinist: we may act within a web of social-economic conditions, and may have our actions altered by said conditions, but we still actively choose within those conditions
How does it disprove determinism? Where do choices come from beyond a vast array of material factors? You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you” you have to show I’m wrong.
You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you”
that aside, for this conversation to make sense you need to say which conception of "free will" you think is illusory. Sometimes people mean something like a spirit or soul expressing itself through your brain. Sure, that's not real, Engels' arguments against agnosticism apply. Some ideas are better. I personally don't think that determinism is a useful tool to predict individual behavior since we can't go back in time to prove it.
for this conversation to make sense you need to say which conception of "free will" you think is illusory
I’m sad OP never directly responded to this as far as I can tell… because it would clear things up a lot
Personally I don’t believe in the idea that people just make decisions independent of context, or have ideas from divine inspiration or “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. In this sense classic free will doesn’t exist but also choice and, yes, to an extent, what some people would call free will does exist, because we still make choices and make our own histories, just in shit tons of context
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but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Yeah this is definitely just a terminology argument, they’re arguing for dialectical materialism but phrased it as if they believed in supernatural determinism, probably because supernatural free will is the default hardline stance for most people and it’s satisfying to take the direct opposite take the way it’s satisfying to be Satanist and stuff
Or maybe they think Communist Jesus defines all our actions idfk
Men will literally engage in the most insane metaphysical sophistry instead of going to therapy.
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Dialectical materialism holds that both are at work but that material conditions are dominant. As a response to idealism, it's not simply materialism.
How can free will possibly exist though? There are no science compatible arguments for it.
Free will is a metaphysical question that science cannot address. It can rule out some false claims about it, like some historical religious claims, but not the basic metaphysical question. Over time science will only build more and more specific explanations that show minds to be contingent on biological, chemical, physical, mechanisms and a relatively straightforward framework of causal reality. It will seem to narrow down the possibility for free will because it makes the space occupied by a ghost in the machine smaller and more fringe, but this is drawing too much from the religious tradition of blurring metaphysical and scientifically investigable questions - it will address only those hypotheses that confuse the two the same way it addresses the falsehood of all animals being created in their current forms all at once.
The kind of thinking you're referring to is called vulgar materialism by Marxists and Marx and Engels specifically criticized it; it's incompatible with the basic Marxist framing of political organization. Lenin famously derogatorily referenced the quote, "the brain secretes thought in the same way as the liver secretes bile" and spent a lot of time crapping on it.
Vulgar materialism lends a helping hand to the ruling class as it gives a definitive answer to the question of whether you "should" decide to politically organize and foment revolution: "no and your question is invalid because you can't choose to do anything". Dialectical materialism is a direct response to both an idealistic dialectic (Hegel) and vulgar materialists (positivist-inclined liberals).
Humans have no issue with identifying cause and effect in everything but their own heads. To believe we are immune or that it is "unknown" is akin to believing in the soul imo. We aren't special. Just another part of the universe.
Being part of the universe doesn't change the metaphysical question, it just rejects a historical religious framing of it. Souls, a ghost in the machine, etc. Most people believe in the latter and have for a very long time, so it's understandable that this is the usual object of the critique, but it doesn't exhaust the question.
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I am a dialectical materialist. The material world is a lot more complicated than some determinists make it seem. Just because there are contradictions in everything doesn’t mean determinism is disproven.
One of Marx's main things was in picking fights with Feuerbach on this exact issue, though, and Dialectical Materialism is strictly incompatible with vulgar materialism.
This is an interesting reading on the topic: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/
I'm not saying you can't personally be a determinist but it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
From that reading: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated"
it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
Unless "materialist determinist" means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you're being silly. The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn't one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
Unless "materialist determinist" means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you're being silly.
???
OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action. Early on, Marx struggled with this in critiques of Feuerbach et al and eventually settled on a more coherent conceptualization of dialectical materialism that centered social forces. A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don't call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn't one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
I would say that vulgar materialism is still proper materialist, it's just not Marxist.
I'm not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it's pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully, and that's what would be needed to go back and forth on a level deeper than where I'm trying to keep it: "Marx said X" and not "Marx was right because [nerd terms]". I also don't think it really matters other than to push back against, as you mention, fatalistic thinking. This tends to paralyze in either extreme: that revolution is inevitable so you can observe the world without dedicating yourself to revolution or that you lack agency and the future is simply out of your hands, good or bad. I'd like to see folks joining and creating orgs and gaining the skills of getting people to engage in collective action.
A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don't call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
There are different kinds of determinism that get called materialist, and my argument hinges on separating them. As an example, there is economic determinism (here is someone arguing Marx is not that), which though metaphysically materialist is idealist in the Marxist sense of relying on abstraction that rejects some aspects of causality in the material world. In The German Ideology, for example, he refers to Hegelians as idealist in this special sense because they considered only, to put it crassly, their intellectual circlejerking over Consciousness and so on as though all of humanity was causally downstream from this when that is plainly not the case. Likewise, though it appears more materialist than whatever the Hegelians were doing, economic determinism is still discounting the causality of non-economic factors in the world and therefore meets this particular definition of idealist. Among these non-economic factors, of course, are things like the person's own psychology, or those aspects which cannot be credited to their economic position (we can start with their perception of space if it must be proved that such aspects exist).
So what I'm complaining about are determinist framings that claim the idea of materialism while discounting factors that exist within material reality. Whether you choose to act or not is itself a material factor, and the fact that Laplace's Demon could have predicted it is beside the point. There is no overarching I-Swear-This-Is-Materialist-Guys Destiny that operates independently from your choices, those choices are part of the causal chain as they are both caused and causing. Anyone who uses a phrase like OP of "free will is an illusion" is surely deluding themselves into quietism with a belief in some kind of destiny that is absolutely at odds with sincere materialism. Such people are just renaming Fate to Science and misappropriating scientific anecdotes and rhetoric to clumsily defend this sleight-of-hand.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
OP is being silly, but my point is that a compatibilist framing is one that endorses the idea of free will as an element of a nonetheless-deterministic system, which I think is the only way one can do Marxism coherently. Then again, I suppose this position comes from the fact that I think you need compatibilism to do anything coherently, so this isn't nearly as focused an argument as I thought it was (and I didn't think it was very focused to begin with).
I'm not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it's pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully,
In my defense, I do read Schopenhauer sometimes, but what you really mean I assume are the more popular authors like the Hegelians and so on. I do make some effort to read Engels carefully, but he has the merit of not being as interested in Hegel as Marx.
It sounds like we have basically the same opinion but just expressed it in ways that lead to miscommunication, lol.
If I were to tweak something to match my approach more closely, it's that I consider diamat to be closer to a framework of investigation, one epistemology (that I'm a fan of) among several, just like "the" scientific method or the accumulated knowledge of communities that doesn't fit cleanly into a Eurocentric framing. I don't really need it to be more than that, so I'm okay with the idea that it also has its limitations. What matters is that we can become more determined and better at building revolution - and diamat definitely helps in one's thinking about it.
Re: 19th century German philosophers I have regrettably read many. It's only useful for exactly this topic, which is to say, not very. Wiederholen sie auf Deutsch. Okay it's also useful for one other thing: I can make toxic Trots and DSA libs shut up sometimes irl.
Fun fact: Freud used plain German words for id, ego, etc. Academics that love to get up their own asses decided to make them Latin in translation.
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GOOD post
Why thank you!
People immediately jumping to the Marx quote is so sad and funny because literally no one is saying you can’t choose things, we’re saying free will has not and could not ever exist, it is a made up concept, you would have to be a supernatural being completely independent from all material context to exist with free will. You can certainly make your own history and decisions, but the decisions presented to you and the reasons you make those decisions are all shaped by other things! Without the influence of outside things, you would be nothing, a form without content making no decisions and with no purpose! Decision and control are intertwined- Both free will and determinism are nonsensical concepts!
You are given a hand of cards and it’s your choice what to do with them, but it’s important to keep in mind that what thoughts you have about choosing the cards is also part of your hand and so are the prompts for those thoughts or the skill you have in poker or… so it’s kind of recursive using this metaphor but hopefully you get the point, I’m not saying people are set to a specific path or can’t make choices
Also I am hardline against determinism too because it’s a meaningless concept without being able to actually predict the future Oracle style
I'm not reading through this whole thread to see where this might fit in, I'mma drop it right here.
I saw some chatter about free will being a historically religious driven ideology, essentially boiling it all down to a spirit or soul housed inside our bodies. And this invalidates it because it is not scientific or materialist.
There's points that I could argue about that, but that's a different rabbit hole. The thing I want to touch on is the fact that determinism has also been historically driven by religion, and in a very official capacity. The Christian reformation had a notable figure by the name of John Calvin, who preached the doctrine of predestination. In this view, God's elect will go to heaven and nerds go to hell. This wasn't some deviation from a lot of traditional Catholic teachings, but he had a weird fixation on it. It's also present in many other conservative interpretations of different faiths.
This belief has been used as an excuse to shit on marginalized people in the same way that the meme depicts, except it's framed in terms of 'God made you less than, and I will treat your as such because that is your lot. Don't you dare argue with it, it's ordained by God!'.
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DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.
A leaf was riven from a tree,
"I mean to fall to earth," said he.
The west wind, rising, made him veer.
"Eastward," said he, "I now shall steer."
The east wind rose with greater force.
Said he: "'Twere wise to change my course."
With equal power they contend.
He said: "My judgment I suspend. "
Down died the winds; the leaf, elate,
Cried: "I've decided to fall straight."
"First thoughts are best?" That's not the moral;
Just choose your own and we'll not quarrel.
Howe'er your choice may chance to fall,
You'll have no hand in it at all. —G.J.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
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