Practical Necessity and Historical Necessity in Historical Materialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
David James
Keyword(s):  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Practical Necessity ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Necessity

Practical necessity is shown to play a key role in Marx’s explanation of the historical necessity to which historical materialism is committed and to facilitate the adoption of a first-person standpoint that introduces minimal assumptions about what would lead the relevant agents to act in ways that bring about certain events and states of affairs. It is argued that Marx’s commitment to the idea of historical necessity, on the one hand, and his account of the possibility of a society in which freedom and necessity are reconciled, on the other, generate a problem in relation to the historical necessity of a phase of history that precedes a post-capitalist society in which freedom and necessity are reconciled. The idea of historical necessity would not apply to this phase of history, whereas to claim that it does so implies the existence of ‘surplus’ practical necessity.

The Compatibility of Freedom and Necessity in Marx’s Idea of Communist Society

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-191
Author(s):  
David James
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Communist Society ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practical Necessity ◽  
Historical Necessity ◽  
Mode Of Production

It is argued that the manner in which workers organize production and determine its goals explains how freedom and necessity are reconciled in Marx’s idea of communist society. Freedom and necessity are reconciled, moreover, in such a way that both self-realization and engagement in activities that possess some intrinsic value become possible, whereas this is not the case for workers in capitalist society. Communist society is explained in terms of a concept of freedom that incorporates three distinct types of freedom, whereas this concept of freedom is incompatible with the constraints generated by the capitalist mode of production and the social relations that emerge on its basis. The theme of how historical materialism is committed to the idea of historical necessity and seeks to explain this necessity in terms of practical necessity is then introduced.

Marx, Central Planning, and Utopian Socialism

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Central Planning ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Utopian Socialism

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version (or vision) of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails.

scholarly journals Image schemas, mimetic schemas and children's gestures

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Zlatev
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Cognitive Linguistic ◽  
Third Person ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The One

Abstract Mimetic schemas, unlike the popular cognitive linguistic notion of image schemas, have been characterized in earlier work as explicitly representational, bodily structures arising from imitation of culture-specific practical actions (Zlatev 2005, 2007a, 2007b). We performed an analysis of the gestures of three Swedish and three Thai children at the age of 18, 22 and 26 months in episodes of natural interaction with caregivers and siblings in order to analyze the hypothesis that iconic gestures emerge as mimetic schemas. In accordance with this hypothesis, we predicted that the children's first iconic gestures would be (a) intermediately specific, (b) culture-typical, (c) falling in a set of recurrent types, (d) predominantly enacted from a first-person perspective (1pp) rather than performed from a third-person perspective (3pp), with (e) 3pp gestures being more dependent on direct imitation than 1pp gestures and (f) more often co-occurring with speech. All specific predictions but the last were confirmed, and differences were found between the children's iconic gestures on the one side and their deictic and emblematic gestures on the other. Thus, the study both confirms earlier conjectures that mimetic schemas “ground” both gesture and speech and implies the need to qualify these proposals, limiting the link between mimetic schemas and gestures to the iconic category.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Crucial Element ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Necessity

Born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund to an Italian Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father, Adorno would take his mother’s vaguely aristocratic last name. Philosopher, aesthetician, social theorist, and musician, Adorno throughout his life remained committed to a decidedly secular and socialist European consciousness, even when dissecting German anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Yet his notion of utopian political transformation owed much to his early reading of Ernst Bloch’s insistence on a hunger for the transcendent that Bloch added to Marxian materialism. Adorno’s understanding of the work of art—a crucial element of his thinking, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory—was equally in tension over the historical necessity of its progressive secularization and rationalization. On the one hand, any "contamination of art with revelation" would uncritically embrace the mystical, fetish character of art. On the other hand, "the eradication of every trace of revelation from art" would reduce the artwork to a mere repetition of the status quo—that is, the lifeless routines of an administered society, including film and jazz, both of which Adorno denigrated.

scholarly journals We Shall Fight: Speaker-Exclusive We as a Grammatical Metaphor

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Francesca Santulli
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
First Person ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The One ◽  
Metaphorical Interpretation

The first person plural pronoun cannot be considered as an expression of pluralization of the first. Its semantic boundaries are defined in context, and this inherent vagueness an be pragmatically exploited for communicative purposes. Beyond the frequently investigated opposition between (addressee-) inclusive vs exclusive forms, this paper explores non-prototypical uses of the first person plural pronoun, focusing on the conflicts that arise when it is used in contexts that semantically exclude the speaker. Speaker-exclusive forms can occur in different situations, ranging from interpersonal exchanges to public discourse. The paper investigates their different semantic implications, highlighting their common traits as well as their crucial peculiarities. Both the review of the literature and the analysis of actual examples bring forth the different values and functions of various speaker-exclusive occurrences of the first person plural. A more systematic categorization of the forms can be obtained adopting a metaphorical interpretation, which on the one hand emphasises their common denominator (i.e. speaker-exclusiveness) and, on the other, sheds light on their varying communicative potential.

scholarly journals Pensamiento crítico versus razón arrogante

2005 ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Carlos Pereda
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third Person

In this article, several levels in which can be proposed/presented the old dilemma of liberty and determinism are discussed and which is the task of critical thought or, particularly, of this critical thought that is philosophy. On the one hand, this dilemma is confronted in its metaphysical side. On the other, its epistemological and ethical implications are considered. Along this multiple levels I particularly consider the crash between the point of view of the first person and the third person.

scholarly journals Developmental evidence for enhanced theory of mind for competitive versus cooperative contexts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Tsoi ◽  
Kiley Hamlin ◽  
Adam Waytz ◽  
Andrew Scott Baron ◽  
Liane Young
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

There is a debate regarding the function of theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to infer, attribute, and reason about mental states. On the one hand are evolutionary and psychological work suggesting that ToM is greater for competition than cooperation. On the other hand are findings and theories promoting greater ToM for cooperation than competition. We investigate the question of whether ToM is greater for competition than cooperation or vice versa by examining the period of development during which explicit ToM comes online. In two studies, we examined preschool children’s abilities to explicitly express an understanding of false beliefs—a key marker of ToM—and ability to apply that understanding in first-person social interactions in competitive and cooperative contexts. Our findings reveal that preschool children are better at understanding false beliefs and applying that understanding in competitive contexts than in cooperative contexts.

Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts

Husserl ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 193-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ullrich Melle
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
The Other ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts. The latter, in reacting to the objects presented in objectifying acts, reveal further, nonmaterial determinations of objects, most notably, the value of the objects or states of affairs presented, which values, in turn, motivate desires and choices. The chapter explores the distinction and relations among the three classes of experience (logical-cognitive or intellective, evaluative, and practical) in order to reveal how Husserl tried to navigate between two theories of reason, a pure intellectualism on the one hand and a pure emotivism on the other, and how these two views of reason affected Husserl’s accounts of the three domains of reason (logical-intellective, axiological, and practical), each with its own form of justification. Husserl envisioned these three domains of reason in a determinate relationship: axiological reason is grounded in and dependent upon logical-cognitive reason, and practical reason is grounded in and dependent upon axiological reason.

Engels, Friedrich (1820–95)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrell Carver
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Production ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Dialectical Method ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
The Core ◽  
Communist Movement ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Socialism

Until the 1970s the most influential framework for understanding Marx’s career and ideas was the one established by Engels. This framework was crucially related to his understanding of philosophy and its supposed culmination in Hegel’s systematic and all-encompassing idealism. Engels claimed that Marx had grounded Hegel’s insights in a materialism that was coincident with the physical and natural sciences of his day, and that Marx had identified a dialectical method applicable to nature, history and thought. With respect to history, Marx was said to have formed a ‘materialist conception’, from which his analysis of capitalist society and its ‘secret’ of surplus value were derived. Together these intellectual features were the core of the ‘scientific socialism’ which, Engels argued, should form the theory, and inform the practice, of the worldwide socialist or communist movement. This was to abolish the poverty and exploitation necessarily engendered, he claimed, by modern industrial production. Philosophically the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism have been defended and modified by orthodox communists and non-party Marxists, and expounded and criticized by political and intellectual opponents. The three laws of dialectics, and the doctrine that history is determined by material factors in the last instance, have been attacked as tautologous and indeterminate. Engels’s view that scientific socialism is a defensible representation of Marx’s project has also been challenged by textual scholars and historians.

scholarly journals The freedom of alienated reflexive subjectivity inThe Stanley Parable

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
Theory Of The Novel ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) is a game that self-reflexively meditates on the relationship between the structure in which choices are presented to the player in first-person exploration games and contemporary concerns over freedom. It takes, as its subject matter, its own ‘variable expressiveness’, yet must also delimit that expressiveness in order to direct the player towards a self-reflexive mindset. The article proposes, by analysing three of the endings in the game, that this endeavour necessitates the game to compromise its ‘gameness’ and to move towards being a Lukácsian novel caught in an endless interiority; it must maintain a tension between giving the player freedom and room for expression, on the one hand, and being tightly focused on reflections concerning freedom and meaning, on the other. This reveals something about what computer games must sacrifice in order to grasp at meaning and also what would be required for a work to indicate that in which freedom consists. It will be argued that neither of the two kinds of subjectivity that are detailed by Lukács ((1971) The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press) – the Homeric subject without interiority and the alienated modern subject on a Sisyphean quest for meaning – are compatible with freedom. Instead, the carefully conceived tensions to which The Stanley Parable gives rise initiates a ‘dance’ that gestures towards freedom inhering in a subjectivity which avoids these possibilities. This could only be accomplished by being more than both a game and a novel. The implications bear upon the form of a medium that can most suitably function as a homology for the aforementioned subjectivity that transcends the two Lukácsian poles.

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