RE: [Marxism] The notion of absolute truth and marxisms- aquestionfor the list

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louise--

How is absolute truth different, in your question, from regular truth? When
you ask about absolute truth, do you start with a defensible notion of
regular truth and try to rigorize it? Or do you mean is there anything that
is undisputably true, knowable beyond any questioning now and forever?

Some people would divide out the question and make it two questions: is
there truth, or reality, and can we ever know it for sure? These are
sometimes discussed in philosophy as "being" and "knowledge;" other people
think only things that can be reduced to numbers are truly real. Hence the
Pythagorean bias against biological science -- evolution for instance --
because the theory does not make mathematically precise predictions, on the
order of where an artillery shell will fall if propelled in a certain
direction at a certain speed....

This is a very deep world and truly full of horseshit. You could start at
the beginning of western attempts at explanations with a good digest of
Greek philosophy. This is worthwhile since their influence on our culture is
so enormous that seeing how these questions were posed and answered at the
dawn of european rationality is worthwhile in and of itself. It shows that
essentially we are dealing with exactly the questions these guys posed and
pretty much on their terms, i.e. thinking about it with the conceptual tools
handed down from them. Once you've gotten through Plato and Aristotle and
Democritus you've hit the major threads.

You could, skipping a whole lot, jump forward to the framework that Marx
started from, which was Hegelianism. For that, if you have the stomach, try
to work through the Preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind, found here
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/ and which begins:

"In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in
view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to
begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author
had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation
in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same
subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For whatever it
might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface - say, an
historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content
and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the
truth - this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound
philosophical truth."

Fortunately, it is not all that long. Then, you might turn to the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which are full of Marx's working out
his basic philosophical approach. Also, the Theses on Feuerbach express a
certain view of The Truth.

Of course, there are entire libraries full of other philosophers and their
writings, and most philosophers are not Marxists.

I am interested in an American physicist and Marxist named David Bohm. Dead
now, he wrote several books attempting to work through quantum mechanics to
arrive at answers to your questions. "Causality and Chance in Modern
Physics" is a non-mathematical treatment of many of the fundamental quesions
posed by quantum mechanics. Later in life Bohm became interested in the way
Khrisnamurti and other Eastern thinkers described reality and began to
attempt to work with the concept of wholeness, which he came to think was a
good starting place for apprehending reality. He suggested and participated
in various dialogues with these forces, some of the transcripts of which are
available on the net since Bohm has a bit of a following.

I am a total amateur in these things so I hope the professionals will be
merciful about the numerous limbs I have crawled out on here.


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