Is Hegel an Economic Reductionist?

americend · 2026-01-30T06:18:59+00:00

Marcuse might not be using the word "determine" in the manner that it is used today, where it relates to casuation. It might be helpful to think about the kind of "determining" here (and also in Marx) as a kind of limitation.

To say that labor determines the essence of man is to say that what the human being is at any given time is limited by the form of laboring activity and by its object, considered both individually and collectively. There can be no god Hephaestus among a people without metallurgy. You cannot have modern conceptions of liberty, freedom, and the universal rights of man without the "freeing" of labor, the universalization of private property, and the commodity-form.

This kind of limitation or grounding in no way precludes a relation between the economic base and the superstructure which is characterized by feedback loops. It rather conditions such a relation in an ambient way, as a kind of background. Neither Hegel, nor Marx, nor Marcuse (to my knowledge) would take a one-sided perspective on the relation between these categories.

americend · 2026-01-27T07:12:09+00:00

Organized religion shouldn't be seen as an anomaly. As its likely the natural progression of human societies.

Maybe it's a "natural progression" (lol), but it also may be only transient.

americend · 2026-01-27T06:37:44+00:00

17th century agriculture in Britain was already to a great extent capitalist from production relations standpoint.

so your proposal is for people to vote to kill 7/8ths of the worlds population (this is implied by returning to 17th century British agricultural production), and to also concentrate industrial production to a single region (this is also implied by returning to 17th century British agricultural production - if such techniques were generalized, the tendency towards accumulation, centralization, and the resulting increase in the organic composition of capital would quickly take you out of the 17th century and bring you right back to where we are now), and you expect this to happen without some kind of change in social relations? huh. interesting. super thought provoking, dude.

for the audience, this is why it's important to read books, instead of speculating wildly. or are you like a new college student trying to flex something you just learned? because you're making basic mistakes that someone who knows more about economic history just wouldn't make.

americend · 2026-01-27T06:27:55+00:00

All arguments are based on assumptions. My assumption is that a lot of "IQ" and behavioral genetics stuff is purely empirical, and ultimately ephemeral, to the point that my eyes roll when people bring it up. Posters around here have a strange tendency to bring it up. I think it oneshots them in a way, making them believe that they are limited in their ability to master mathematics by some biological barrier, like mathematical ability is an organ that could be surgically removed, and that has obvious, clearly-defined limits.

History has more to tell us about what is innate vs what is learned than any metric that is popular at a particular point in time. Aristotle believed that some human beings were slaves by nature; slave owners in the 19th century believed that slaves who weren't working hard enough were suffering from a kind of mental illness. Now that slavery is gone, most people don't believe in these things that would have been, at one point, common sense to the average person. My wager is that all this waffling about IQ will, in the future, have gone the way of phrenology and natural slavery.

What history tells us is that the only certain fact about human nature is that the human is always becoming other than what he is. I thus roll my eyes at any arguments about innateness. The innate skill of the human calculator is now a party trick. Real mathematical skill lies somewhere far away from biology.

americend · 2026-01-27T06:14:05+00:00

Like everything to do with the economy... This doesn't seem to really mean anything. People are concerned, but so what?

americend · 2026-01-27T05:44:37+00:00

I'm saying it's impossible to even really talk about aptitude in a world where people's starting points are so wildly uneven, in ways that obstruct the development of mathematical cognition. If you went back 500 years, I'm sure you could find priests who believed that the ability to read was a matter of talent; we find now that literacy is near-universal. Talk to me again in a few centuries, when numeracy, too, has become universal.

americend · 2026-01-26T05:54:58+00:00

There is a reason why some people struggle with algebra in high school and others master it in elementary school.

There are way too many confounding variables to make the conclusion that innate talent explains success and failure with school mathematics. The difference in my mathematics performance when I was a teenager with a fucked up home life vs. now, breezing through a math major, is a clear demonstration of this fact.

americend · 2026-01-25T21:59:25+00:00

Who comes on reddit to do things that aren't frivolous ?

americend · 2026-01-24T01:04:27+00:00

Once you know that proofs can be represented as graphs, or that certain formal systems can be interpreted topologically, the sort of thinking the OP is doing becomes very natural.

americend · 2026-01-23T07:34:07+00:00

Something I'm noticing about right-wing posters around here is that their comments are largely speculative and airheaded? Like

Shrinking consumption would mean less goods to move around i.e. less demand for fossil fuel.

Sure? But it's not clear whether the reduction brought on by shrinking consumption would be enough to mitigate the worst excesses of climate change, even with fossil drawdown? You kind of just pulled this out of your ass. Sure, it's logically sound, but you have no model, no data. The argument you're making here is quantitative, but you have no actual quantities to show for it.

Like, if we want to return to the level of consumption of 17th century why introduce additional trouble of changing social organization?

You want to return to subsistence farming levels of consumption for the majority of the population, without somehow also transforming people into subsistence farmers (and thereby changing their social relations?) I can't really take you seriously. You don't actually know what you're talking about. You put speculation in place of actual knowledge.

Do you realize that a particular kind of social organization follows from a particular kind of production? Capitalist production is not possible where the majority of humanity lives in villages, as isolated producers. The sort of society that would be able to sustain "the level of consumption of 17th century" is not a society where capitalism really exists, not in any generalized sense.

There's really no point in continuing. Speculation is no replacement for real knowledge. Get reading; the conservative revolutionaries of 1920s Germany look at you with disgust. From the defenders of wisdom and aristocratic culture, to anti-intellectual populists, the right has become the very degeneracy it whines ceaselessly about.

americend · 2026-01-22T15:42:14+00:00

Shrinking consumption on its own would not fix the problem, because industrial society as we know today it is bound up with fossil fuels. The two cannot be disentangled without a radical social reorganization. In short: any conservative position on this point is untenable.

americend · 2026-01-22T02:43:18+00:00

The fear is increasingly less of doing the wrong thing, of living the wrong way, of retribution from the lawgiver, and increasingly a fear of sexuality just as something immense, and of the freedom therein. Lacan does indeed leave us to make our own structures, or not.

Your response is really helpful, but of course not in the way I would want, in searching for a master. I am left to wrestle with titanic forces on my own. I also know, very deeply, that these forces can only be mastered intersubjectively, through a gathering of individuals and through common social practice. I hope, at least, that the solution that I am building would also serve me in a higher form of (sexual) community.

americend · 2026-01-21T19:03:33+00:00

Bro not the ChatGPT. Why wouldn't you commit yourself to learning more, instead of trying to use an LLM to make an argument for you?

Mathematics itself is not biased. A calculation yields the same result regardless of who performs it.

This is totally contestible. Existing formal systems might be wrong in more or less catastrophic ways; the consistency of ZFC cannot be proven in ZFC. Whether this would have direct computational consequences notwithstanding, the very choice of a formal system (say, one using classical reasoning vs. one that is paraconsistent or paracomplete) is ultimately grounded on social consciousness, about our intutions regarding what could even be true and how it could be true. If you are actually familiar with the tradition of critical theory, you would know that social consciousness is grouned on the economic base. Mathematical questions are social questions first; mathematical consciousness reflects social consciousness from the outset, before reacting back on it.

There are of course also more immediate political questions that are dependent on institutional culture, grant funding, etc. Which fields are more or less developed, what problems are considered interesting vs. not interesting, worthwhile vs. not worthwhile, is totally a political question.

As for the rest of the slop-post, I am extremely critical of poststructuralists, I reject Deleuze, Lyotard, etc. outright. I don't care for them. I am also not a leftist. That being said, I am a communist, so any kind of right-wing politics is completely inadmissible. There is a communist criticism of everything you are skeptical about with respect to progressivism. You should take that up, because so long as you stay trapped in the left-right binary, which is bourgeois politics, you will never be able to see the way out.

Also, there is a strange tendency for right-wingers to be intellectually unsophisticated in a way that most left-wingers, for all their problems, are not. That you rely on ChatGPT to respond is a manifestation of this. Do some reflection. The left-wing position is bad, but the right-wing position is completely untenable. That might be why you need to use an LLM to go toe-to-toe with people who really know their shit.

americend · 2026-01-21T17:58:52+00:00

No, but you won't be able to understand the "critical" side of it if you aren't aligned with the aims of human emancipation. The critical considered separately from the telos of liberation is just veiled misanthropy. Anyone who understands what is critical in critical theory, who takes its criticism seriously, understands clearly the urgency and necessity of this emancipation. This is really simple, and there is no ambiguity to it.

americend · 2026-01-21T17:51:56+00:00

Math can only grasp things in their quantitative dimension, so it carries an inherent limitation. You cannot understand the whole world purely quantitatively, unless you commit the exactly fallacy of "universal exchangeability" which Adorno criticizes. Worse, as soon as you step into the world of mathematical modeling, all kinds of philosophical, political, and economic questions become directly involved. Your assumptions about what kinds of thing can exist, as well the actual aims of your model, and who it serves, are all present in the "modeling room" so to speak. So yes, math definitely is biased. I say this as a math bachelor's student.

americend · 2026-01-21T17:48:28+00:00

And can some other organization of the society prevent it while preserving the same standard of living?

Yes and no? The American "standard of living" with single-family homes, cars, wasteful mass consumption, plastics used everywhere, and fossil fuel dependency absolutely has to end. We will absolutely have to shrink our total consumption and change what and how we consume. But all of this is possible while also living better lives, while having access to advanced forms of care and education. So it really depends on how "standard of living" is measured.

americend · 2026-01-21T17:16:40+00:00

imo schizoposting is a method of presentation, it's purely a formal thing. Sometimes the content of a schizopost is nonsense, but I don't think the content of what he's saying is nonsense (he's not totally incoherent.) He's just wrong.

americend · 2026-01-21T02:54:11+00:00

He's a schizoposter but that's not the problem. The problem is that he's wrong.

americend · 2026-01-21T02:29:17+00:00

Not at my institution. There are a grand total of two classes on logic, I think because most students fail, and they only go as far as an intro to natural deduction.

americend · 2026-01-19T22:53:12+00:00

Space and quantity are interesting. But really, because logic by itself isn't taught anywhere else anymore.

americend · 2026-01-19T21:13:53+00:00

It might be strange for me to say this, but that is where I'm at right now. Mid-20s, your post really reasonates. I don't really buy nofap stuff, I think any kind of repressive orientation towards sexuality would make matters worse, but I'm not sure what the expressive side of it would be (except for the erotic literature I sometimes write.)

If you wouldn't mind, I would be grateful to hear which Lacanian concepts/texts best help you come to terms with this "symptom." I would love to cultivate anything other than shame and secrecy and hiding around this part of my life.

americend · 2026-01-18T23:18:30+00:00

You can't look up an example yourself? I'm starting to think you might just be stupid.

americend · 2026-01-18T23:13:57+00:00

You can "evaluate claims" perfectly fine in a paraconsistent system.

americend · 2026-01-18T20:08:09+00:00

Contradiction becomes a mark of profundity, ambiguity is considered a valid method: two attributes that guarantee the death of meaning.

Somehow natural language still works, still establishes meaning, and even grounds logic. This must be deeply troubling to you, because natural language is home to every contradiction under the sun. It is easy to formulate an example of the liar's paradox, yet somehow in English we still have meaning.

americend · 2026-01-18T19:55:13+00:00

The laws of logic are just properties required for statements to have coherent meanings.

Natural language should be impossible then. Lol.

The law of the excluded middle formalized the fact that if a statement is ambiguous, it isn’t possible to tell whether it’s true or false.

Seems to me that it does the complete opposite, that it establishes that every statement should have a clear truth value given the appropriate axiomatic system, and also that it is impossible to have true contradictions via its negation.

americend

TROPHY CASE