[PEN-L:11670] Nominalism, Realism, and Historical Materialism Re: Re: wojtek

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

My subject heading goes beyond my technical competence, but if posters
are going to argue these kind of points they ought to acknowledge the
traps and complexities involved, and I can point out some of those at
an elementary level.

Charles Brown wrote:

> >>> Wojtek Sokolowski  [SNIP]
> Charles, with all due respect, i disagree.  I lean toward philosophical
> nominalism and tend to view 'wholes' as nothing but figments of human
> imagination, platonic ideas imbued with 'real' existence - or a way of
> interpreting the world, if you will.
>
> (((((((((

Charles: Wojtek, respectfully, couldn't the same thing be said about your "units" ?
Afterall, they are whole or totalities too. Just at a "lower" level. How do we know
that you do not arrive at your units by a platonic process ?

Basically your approach assumes disorder above the level of your unit except as
the result of the interaction of your "units".

--------------------

Charles is of course right. Nominalism in most of its forms must either
deny intelligibility of the world or sneak in Platonic reals at some point,
as Wojtek indeed has done. It is that trap, I take it, from which historical
materialism promises an exit. (Whether it fulfills that promise is another
question of course.)

Relations, Marx somewhere remarks, must be thought, in contrast to
the things which they relate. I take it that fundamental to Marxist thought
is the assumption that relations are real: that is, knowledge of the things
related can not, even in principle, ever substitute for knowledge of the
relations. For example, if we knew every empirical fact there was to
know about every capitalist who ever lived and every empirical fact
there was to know about every worker who ever lived, we still would
not know what made the capitalists capitalists or the workers workers.
We would not have even a beginning of knowing what needs to be
known to understand capitalism. Capitalism is a web of relations,
and those relations are not revealed through examination of the
individuals who make up the capitalist system. What is
historical about historical materialism is precisely this  insistence
that knowledge is above all knowledge of relations.

It is in the attempt to change from these merely negative preliminaries
to postitive exposition that I more or less reach the limits of my
own competence. I can passively understand beyond that limit,
but I'm not going to try to argue the points on a maillist. I
will suggest a useful image. A friend on another maillist once
cracked, "Marx is Aristotle with an attitude." That is illuminating.
And see also the remarks on Plato in Marx's chapter in the
*Anti-Duhring*.

Carrol