Marx And Historical Materialism

I've never seriously reckoned with Marx before. I hear so much about Marx. My dad told me recently that he just sort of wrote him off. I think many people do. It can be easy to write off Marxism, communism, socialism as crazy ideas that don't matter.

This is America, god dammit. We won the Cold War and we don't need to talk to nobody about no god damn Marxism.

But right now I'm reading The German Ideology. I'm about 100 pages in, half way through. Now I see why Marx needs to be taken seriously.

Recently I was really struggling with Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia. I was reading him, knowing that he was working with Marx, but didn't know what to make of him. I was curious, and am curious, about Walter Benjamin, but know that I would be ill equipped to deal with him.

These people are working with Marx, collaborating with Marx. I need to begin collaborating with these ideas.

This will be a log foray, I suspect.

Just as my entire foray into philosophy will be long. Duh. If I really can do it, if I can really succeed in that world, it will never end. Duh.

But right now I can say there is one thing that is striking me: Marx's notion of historical materialism is meant to combat what he saw as a German tendency to write history as simply the history of thought. That German philosophers spoke of 'man' as a universal thing that didn't change throughout society. He seems to think that German philosophers weren't taking the physical reality of society seriously. That they believed that if you could analyze thought, and change thought, then you would change someone's world.

This is hard for me because I read so much Collingwood, who was very adamant that all history is the history of thought.

But Marx is so adamant that history must be about our physical, material, existence: our struggle for food, for shelter, for a means to subsistence.

Both points make sense to me. But how to reconcile them?

I'm not quite sure yet, of course.

But I'm very pleased to begin taking Marx seriously.

I'm very pleased to be understanding what his views on history were.

It really challenges my idea of 'intellectual insurrection'. Because that idea is founded on the idea that I can change my world by changing the way that I think about it.

But Marx is saying 'You Germans (of the 18th century) don't understand; the world is structured by your physical and material existence; not by your thoughts."

This is why a political revolution is necessary, why physical violence is necessary. Just because we change our thoughts doesn't mean shit. There is a physical world that is structuring us.

How to reconcile these things? Marx and Collingwood? Where do you two come together? How can I squeak between you two?

I am pleased to have this level of richness added to my thoughts.

Just in time for Parts III, IV, and V of 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'.

A Short Essay On Identity, Relationships, and Baggage

I have an idea.

I've been thinking a good bit lately about people and their relationships with one another. I think about how we relate to others and how that constitutes our own identities. I've been thinking about the issues of baggage from previous relationships. Why it is that time has to go by until we feel comfortable or different.

In my post called this world that world your world our world something like that, I was exploring this issue in a casual sense. How much each of us exist by bending our identities to different minds. We go from mind to mind to mind.

I was struck by this idea in the Coke closet at my work. Stocking coke products. What a treat! (Extreme sarcasm).

I was thinking about my friend Rob. Shouts out to you Rob.

I was thinking about how we have lost touch a bit since I moved, and how thats okay, because I know we will reconnect. But why does it matter to be separate from other people? Why is that good?

Here is what I wrote in my notebook in the Coke closet:

"Life in relation to others. My post on many worlds. Life is a conglomeration of all the people and perspectives inside us. New people, new life. Takes time to disconnect. Me n Rob aren't in touch much."

What to make of all these issues?

How to think about the way other minds relate?

Simulation theory is certainly a part of how I'll deal with the issue.

But what else? How?

I feel like my ideas were clearer when I was in the Coke closet. But now I'm not so sure.

I'll be ruminating on this. I hope I can turn it into a bigger statement about empathy, relationships, baggage, identity, so on.

The I and the Other are inseparable.

There is no Me without You.

Thoughts For A New Short Essay

Soon I will write an essay addressing the relationship between language and empathy.

Today I sat down to eat a bowl of broccoli and cheddar soup and a book was sitting in front of me. Not my book. Just a book someone had left. The Age Of Empathy by Frans de Waal.

I have read a fair amount of books that talk about the human tendency and capacity for empathy. Iacoboni, Goldman, a few others. But I don't see much empathy around me.

And I think this might have something to do with another human tendency: to use language and to abstract.

I think that language can smother empathy sometimes. Because when we label things we don't need to spend a lot of time or effort trying to empathize with them.

Zizek, Adorno, Goldman, Iacoboni, Collingwood, and others will hopefully assist me in this essay.

I believe that this writing will help me in Part II of my big essay 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'. But I also think that it is important to take on this topic in its own right.

I recently wrote an essay called 'On The Inadequacy Of Generalization And The Richness Of language'. I hinted at these issues in that essay. But that was a sloppy essay written on a day when I was slightly hungover. I'd like to take a closer look at this.

I care a lot about empathy.

And I also love words.

I know they have the tendency to clash. But I want to bring them together.

Out.