From a NYT opinion piece titled "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!" by Jason Barker, "an associate professor of philosophy at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and author of the novel 'Marx Returns.'"
Here's the Amazon link for "Marx Returns." From the description: "Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds...."
Calculus, eh? From the book:
Do the math! How do you get from horseshit to warm bath through calculus and dragon energy?
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I never got anything from Hegel either. I read Kant for pleasure, though. Kant hit the right questions. Say you're thinking of AI.
Coleridge on Kant in the volume "Logic" of the Bollingen Collected Works is an interesting introduction, sideways to what you get reading Kant.
How do you get from horseshit to warm bath...
He didn't. Marx stuck with the horseshit. It's horseshit all the way down.
Deny individual dignity, deny intrinsic value, engage in social justice adventures (e.g. open mass abortion fields), advocate for "=" (not equal) rights, promote secular indulgences, and pursue minority (i.e. monopoly) capital and control... and thus was established the Pro-Choice selective, opportunistic, and politically congruent religious/moral philosophy.
Hegel gave Marx hope that things will change. The terrible inhumanity of man can be solved. You simply 1)murder all the people in control now and 2)steal all their property and 3)trap the rest with kill and torture squads, and voila, men will become humane to other men.
If not, then we will repeat 1-3 over and over.
1) Kill/imprison anyone who disagrees with you
2) ?
3) Enjoy the view from the peak of socialist perfection
Marx, just wait 'til we invent a time machine.
Until then, burn in Hell.
Thomas Sowell - Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
How do you get from horseshit to warm bath through calculus
You don't.
Calculus can describe the movement of shit descending from the asshole to the pavement, of the movement of the asshole to the bath; but, once the shit is on the pavement, there is no movement in time or in place.
Now there are those who claim that Marx was full of horseshit so maybe we are talking about how Marx, being full of shit, moved in time and space, from the point where the horseshit fell on the pavement to where he, Marx being full of shit, entered the bath. Calculus can help us with this problem.
As to the problem of the movement of Marx's internal shit to the bath, well we have to wait for another secular Jew in Switzerland to account for the analysis of differing frames of reference (since the movement of shit through the horse, or through Marx is relative to the movement of the bodies through the streets of Germany).
This says nothing about the writer and his being totally full of shit.
I've got enough shit to deal with than read such shit.
It would appear that such shit is NOT subject to diminishing returns; probably an exponential function.
Whatever.
I'm trying to think of who would read that excerpt and want to go out and buy the book? Maybe the people who have read Das Kapital?.....Has anyone here have ever even known someone who has read Das Kapital? That must be the most influential and unread book of all time.
Mayday ! Mayday !
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chairs.
That writer is going to be so happy when he meets Kim.
Marx in the flesh !
My favorite Marx quote--"I am not a Marxist."
Marx was right! So says an article in a newspaper owned by Carlos Sim, one of the richest men in the world.
Actually, Marx may have been right about one thing: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
rhhardin said...
I never got anything from Hegel either
If that's who I think it is, he still owes me $10.
Daniel Jackson said...
This says nothing about the writer and his being totally full of shit.
The polite word for that is "literary".
The polite word for that is "literary".
Ah, yes; but "literary" lacks authenticity and certainly obfuscates truth to power.
Perhaps, plein de merde would approach adequacy?
Kant and Hegel endeavored to think systematically, but I think in both cases it is their specific insights that have proven to be so powerful and fruitful. Neither deserves to be saddled with the legacy of Marxism.
traditionalguy said...
Hegel gave Marx hope that things will change. The terrible inhumanity of man can be solved. You simply 1)murder all the people in control now and 2)steal all their property and 3)trap the rest with kill and torture squads, and voila, men will become humane to other men.
In 2008, Obama ran his campaign on promises of "hope and change." However, like Marx, Obama didn't grasp that not all change is for the better. From Chesterton: The Drift from Domesticity (1929):
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
The reason for listing "differential calculus" in this list is to resurrect the notion that Marxism is "scientific" socialism.
Nonetheless, whoever wrote that "description" would do better to invoke quantum physics, or perhaps General Relativity, than differential calculus. Even though doing so would be anachronistic, as neither theory existed in Marx's day.
Because, although the math of General Relativity is forbidding, and quantum physics remains deeply counter-intuitive (despite its many everyday technical applications), just about anyone who could pass high school algebra will have little difficulty learning at least the rudiments of differential calculus.
And, if you're going to attempt to attach the prestige of Science to your bunkum/hokum show, it's usually best to select some aspect of it that is truly difficult.
Otherwise, people might just think you're a charlatan trying to peddle "Science, Math, and Marxism forever!" even though one of these is not at all like the other two.
If you were given the choice between reading this novel, Das Kapital, Finnegan's Wake, or Hillary's latest memoir which would you choose? I think I'd opt for this novel. So it's far from the last book on earth I would ever want to read........Lenin has his own, explicitly stated version of the Categorical Imperative. He stated that any act that furthered the cause of world revolution was justified.
The Hegelian Dialectic is history.
"Has anyone here have ever even known someone who has read Das Kapital? That must be the most influential and unread book of all time."
Depends on what you mean by reading and by Das Kapital.
Many people have trudged through Volume 1. Few have read all three volumes, even fewer the MEGA versions (conveniently available in pdf, no labor exploited in their production).
"Kant hit the right questions."
Yes. But to judge the rightness of the questions you already have to make some more basic assumptions.
Marx changed assumptions, for the worse, but you can see why he did.
How much he really got out of Hegel, besides a kind of general confidence in being able to grasp the course of history, is not all that clear. Feuerbach -- a little more.
"Actually, Marx may have been right about one thing: 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'"
That was Lenin.
"In 2008, Obama ran his campaign on promises of 'hope and change.' However, like Marx, Obama didn't grasp that not all change is for the better."
Ah...but Obama's great failure is that he didn't change anything. He protected the status quo.
Here's some old-school change that we need!!
As I understand him, Hegel was the intellectual high priest of the Cult of the State. Probably since caveman days, when one caveman, bigger and meaner than the others, was able to intimidate his neighbors and take their food and furs for himself, there have been statists; and probably as long as there have been statists there have been apologists for their violence; but Hegel seems to have elevated the apologies, justifications and excuses into an art form. So Inga, ARM and the other State-shtuppers who regularly post here, on this May Day, honor your religion's founding "pope!" Kiss a jackboot today in his name!
Of course Marx was right. He predicted the capitalist class would freeze real wages and pocket the productivity gains, and that is exactly what has occurred in America in the past thirty years: Jobs that formerly paid well were handed over to immigrants (who are happy to do them for cheaper), and the difference was pocketed by the capitalist class (whose wealth has risen considerably even though everyone else's has stagnated). The Left's dirty little secret is that they're now happy with this state of affairs.
Oh, great. I have a telephone conference to prep for this afternoon, & Althouse does a post on Hegel. Thanks a bunch, Professor!
@William Chadwick,
As I understand him, Hegel was the intellectual high priest of the Cult of the State
No, just no. That nonsense comes from Karl Popper. The Philosophy of Right [the German "Recht" is more properly translated "Law"] ends up with a State that is a constitutional monarchy with a parliament. Honestly, a more bourgeois state can scarcely be imagined. Hegel's State is by the very nature of the dialectic the preserver of the non-state "Ethical World" (Sittlichkeit) that precedes it.
What came after Hegel took all sorts of different things from him. In Germany, by 25 years after his death, they had pretty much succeeded in forgetting about him. By then, Scientific Positivism was all the rage, & it really is into that tradition Marx properly belongs. Marx saw philosophy as "mental onanism" & thought the science of economics as the way to make philosophy "walk on its feet & not its head". Marx took more than he cared to admit from Hegel, but aside from the Dialectic of Lordship & Bondage that creates class consciousness, it was a source that Marx struggled mightily to divorce himself from.
Aside from Marx, the legacy of Hegelianism & the state is mixed. The Nazis, Bronowski's moronic musings aside, really made little use of Hegel. Among the German Idealists, they had more use for the German uber-patriot, Fichte. The Italian Fascists, on the other hand, claimed to have developed their theory of the state from Hegel via Georges Sorel & especially Giovanni Gentile.
In other parts, it was very different. In the US, the St. Louis Hegelians & Idealists like Josiah Royce just fit right into the life of the Republic, doing much of the grunt work in re-shaping the American University system into the German vs the earlier British model. The later British Idealists, like F.H. Bradley or Bernard Bosanquet, were also anything but political bomb-throwers. If any of these guys thought that "Nothing outside the State" was the way to go, they sure hid it well, considering how verbose they all were.
@rhhardin,
I never got anything from Hegel either. I read Kant for pleasure, though. Kant hit the right questions. Say you're thinking of AI.
This doesn't surprise me. You went deep into Philosophy of Language, & folks with a bent towards Idealism just don't take to linguistic explanations of epistemology & vice versa. Kant can be fitted into both worlds.
One of my professors did his work in late "linguistic-period" Wittgenstein & once, in a conversation, I raised some Hegelian objections to a point he made. He said "Oh, God, you're into Hegel? You probably see Wittgenstein as a bomb-throwing anarchist, then". Close enough, I had to admit.
All I know is that all these Kraut philosophers have done is fuck the world. Then again what do I know I'm not an intellectual.
So Earnest Prole, assuming for the sake of a non-argument that you're not just spouting BS. . . what is to be done?
So Earnest Prole, assuming for the sake of a non-argument that you're not just spouting BS. . . what is to be done?
Build that big, beautiful wall.
YoungHegelian, I just "discovered" Gentile through a Dinesh D'Souza (sp?) video about the Leftist roots of Italian fascism. It's funny (in a sad way) how much Gentile sounded like Obama, Hillary and the rest of the Hive, not to mention the "anti-fascists" of the Stupid Left canaille.
YoungHegelian, I just "discovered" Gentile through a Dinesh D'Souza (sp?) video about the Leftist roots of Italian fascism. It's funny (in a sad way) how much Gentile sounded like Obama, Hillary and the rest of the Hive, not to mention the "anti-fascists" of the Stupid Left canaille.
@WC,
Gentile was the Italian scholar/intellectual of his day. He was a yuuuuuge catch in terms of intellectual respectability for the Fascists.
What's weird about Gentile is that he was, unlike Mussolini or many of the Nazi intellectuals like Heidegger, a decent person. He fought against censorship, since he thought that Fascist thought could hold its own against any other political philosophy. He had no use for any sort of racialism, including antisemitism. He saved the German Jewish Renaissance scholar, Paul Oskar Kristeller, by offering him a university position when the Nazis expelled all the Jews from the universities.
He was out of party politics for a long time by the war. He made the unfortunate decision to join Mussolini in the rump Fascist state of the Republic of Salo, which was northern Italy under German occupation. Many of the Fascists wanted to take general revenge on the Italians who they felt had betrayed them, but Gentile argued against them. He angered them so much that when Gentile was killed by partisans, Mussolini had the killing investigated to make sure that it wasn't false flag operation & that Gentile hadn't been murdered by his fellow Fascists. Gentile's family then publicly requested clemency for his killers, in the spirit of Italian unity in the face of a war that had torn the country apart.
Blogger Robert Cook said...
"Actually, Marx may have been right about one thing: 'The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'"
That was Lenin.
It is odd that people think that this aphorism tells us about capitalism. It tells us about Lenin; he wants to hang people.
@RC/LW,
That was Lenin.
And speaking of things that folks think is from Marx that aren't from Marx, False Consciousness isn't from Marx. It's used a couple of times by Engels, but in it's modern usage it's really from Gyorgy Lukacs.
I never read Marx or Hegel, but I did make an honest attempt at Kant. If you tried hard enough, you could comprehend what he was saying, but jeez, you really had to slog through it. He certainly didn't dumb down his prose for a mass audience.......I doubt that any of the people at the Nuremberg rallies had been led there by the persuasive reasoning of Heidegger.......Lenin wrote over fifty books of over six hundred pages each. He'd be just the kind of guy to actually read Marx, but I don't think many of his followers actually did. Poor people resent rich people. That's the nub of Marx's mass appeal.........I was reading a book about some early preacher's experience among the animists in Africa. Some woman in the audience that he was preaching to jumped up and said "All my life I knew that such a God must exist". Some Marxists had epiphanies like that, but it didn't come from reading Das Kapital.
The British empiricists used to make an effort to expound their thoughts in the simplest and most direct way possible. In some ways, the lucidity of their prose was the real achievement of their thought. The German Idealists not so much. At the University of Heidelberg there was an annual contest to see how many subordinate clauses and tangential variables could be packed into a single sentence without violating the rules of grammar which are, anyway, self referential and tautological in nature when you stop to ponder their real nature.
Tom Wolfe has gotten some grief for attacking Darwinism in _The Kingdom of Speech_. Wolfe's attackers are missing the point. In _The Kingdom of Speech_ Wolfe claims that the social elites took to Darwinism because they were seeking a non-religious explanation for the existence of mankind. They didn't want man to have been created intentionally by a superior being, because this would have limited mankind's potential. If God created man for a purpose, some things were rightly human and other things weren't. The truth or untruth of Darwin's claims didn't matter.
You can say the same thing about Marx (and Freud, I suppose). Whether Marx's economic and historical account of the story of man was right or wrong did not and does not matter. He promises the keys to the kingdom.
"It is odd that people think that this aphorism tells us about capitalism."
Oh, but it does. Capitalists will do and sell anything if they can profit by it, even if it threatens to destroy everything, from national economies to life on the planet(The oil companies knew about the dangers of global warming/climate change decades ago...they commissioned studies on it.)
"Wolfe claims that the social elites took to Darwinism because they were seeking a non-religious explanation for the existence of mankind. They didn't want man to have been created intentionally by a superior being, because this would have limited mankind's potential. If God created man for a purpose, some things were rightly human and other things weren't. The truth or untruth of Darwin's claims didn't matter."
I think Wolfe is pulling this out of his ass. It's just that the religious stories of humankind's creation are superstitious fables, while Darwin proposed a credible rational explanation for the rise of not just humans but all living organisms. This is, sensibly, more palatable to non-superstitious adults.
Or, to be more generous to religious creation myths and doctrines, they are allegorical stories about life, existence, and creation.
I think Wolfe is pulling this out of his ass. It's just that the religious stories of humankind's creation are superstitious fables, while Darwin proposed a credible rational explanation for the rise of not just humans but all living organisms.
You really should read the Wolfe book, Robert Cooke. Wolfe points out that the people defending Darwin, at the time, defended not only those things that we find rational in the 21st century, but the things Darwin wrote that were irrational, or pure guesswork, or just plain wrong (such as Darwin's belief that only male songbirds sing).
@Robert Cook,
I think Wolfe is pulling this out of his ass
Well, you're wrong & Wolfe is right.
Read Fuerbach's Essence of Christianity. The work of God was to be pulled out of the skies & given back to its rightful owners, humanity. The work of creation was Man's job, not God's. Man was not just Protagoras' Measure of All Things, he was their maker, too.
Through both Saint-Simon & Fuerbach, this thinking moved into all facets of the Left that came after. Hells Bells, there was even a group under the Bolsheviks who called themselves the God Builders.
In Darwin's defense, the Marxists rejected Darwinism as "bourgeois science", since it postulated species as stable, which didn't jive with the Marxists' idea of the plasticity of nature & Man. That's how come they ended up with the economic, scientific, & moral disaster that was Lysenkoism.
For those of you who aren't as liberty-phobic as Robert Cook and the other State Cultists who post their servile bilge here regularly, you might want to look at the blog Miss Liberty's Film % Documentary World. The post for May Day (known to us in the pro-freedom camp as "Victims of Communism Day")is a list of films that show why Communism was bad. (Admittedly there are many reasons to call it bad, but this is the most blatant one: the murderousness.)
Instapundit has a link. I'd post a link but I haven't figured out how to do that.
If you want to try this, feel free:
http://missliberty.com/may-1-victims-of-communism-day-ten-films-to-honor-the-dead/
How does this compare to Kant, Hegel and Marx?
https://www.amazon.com/Dim-Hypothesis-Lights-West-Going/dp/0451466640
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