User:RD/9k/sublation (Q697)
(Redirected from Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q697 sublation)
Main entry
sublation
/ The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence (Marx) [1] -> takes a bit to properly explain, but very important. I've even been using it in a whole lot of propositions here without thinking about the exact word. sublation is something like a description of how material objects are transformed into new material objects. kingdoms are transformed into republics, and the kingdom or empire shape is partially preserved because the republic had to be made from something, it doesn't sprout from nowhere, but removing the feudal order allows the kingdom shape to be preserved in a new very different form as the republic for better or for worse.
from time to time, I keep trying to explain sublation in terms of superhero shows. like Agumon turns into MetalGreymon and it's still Agumon but it's better even though it had to leave behind the characteristics of Agumon. Ultraman, which is a blatant failed Communism metaphor anyway, has all the people turning into big aliens with powers to represent that the society has been transformed, and with their new form they have become something greater by leaving behind what they were previously but they also can't totally get rid of it. you can also connect sublation to real-world evolution, and how it often takes a while for any particular ancestral characteristic to be lost and you always have some of them. but I like to point to superhero shows because they portray things happening without having to wait for them, this idea that something part of a bigger thing can simply change itself when change is needed.
Aufhebung
(noun) / aufheben (verb, ; linguistics) [2] -> so, this verb has two meanings, and the two meanings are separate. an idea is aufgehoben when it is lifted up, or retracted. a physical object is aufgehoben when it is picked up to claim, hoard, or protect. in a sense, the physical object is preserved when you "pick it up" because in being concrete it inherently keeps existing. but a national law or a principle cannot actually be picked up and 'held in your inventory' in that sense, because all ideas are somewhat transient; only a physical object that keeps existing can actually hold an idea. this opens up the field for a third meaning of the word, which is to simultaneously pick up a material object and get rid of the intangible ideas associated with it, because the implication is that when you pick up a material object and appropriate it the ideas basically stay where they were and do not actually follow. this of course makes the concept of Aufhebung severely interesting to a Communist revolution. because, what would happen if a collection of people had particular ideas about what businesses were but then somebody else picked them up? would the previous ideas that people claimed to be explanations of how businesses work actually still hold? the answers are.... complicated. but the question is a really good start. one of the most genius usages of a single word within a European language that I have ever seen- Take the shovel, and its image falls out / When you pick up a shovel (any concrete physical object; shovel, rock, sword, dollar coin, building), the abstract idea someone else attributes to it and assumes to inhabit it falls out and does not go along with it; the external idea is lifted out of your hand /
Aufhebest die Schaufel, dem Bild aufheben(wrong) -> I do not really speak German. I wish I did, because it would make it so much easier to label a few particular propositions.
How sublation defeats eclectic materialism
- eclecticism (combination of seemingly random propositions)
- eclecticism (combination of Marxism with seemingly random propositions; Western-Marxism, etc) [3] -> Western-Marxists do this all the time. though the problem isn't that they read non-Marxist works, it's that they take them at face value.
- eclectic materialism / eclecticism (strawberry Materialism; combination of 'blue' Idealism and 'red' Materialism) [4] / philosophy which is supposedly Materialism but does not fully commit to monist Materialism [5] -> I went through a little confusion around what "eclecticism (Materialism)" was or could be but after reading one of the early followers of Marx and Engels I think I just read into this too much thinking it was some specific thing when really, what typically goes on in Marxism is popular philosophers generally start in Idealism because it's something of the primary form of human thought and communication and then Marxists shift into Materialism but some people don't get all the way there and those people have eclectic materialism.
I used to refer to a materialism that got all the way out of Idealism/eclecticism and gave no independent agency to ideas, products, or recorded culture as "Hyper-Materialism"... until the only reason I stopped was finding the word Aufhebung and realizing, that expresses the same concept so much more clearly after you've properly read about it. so now I consider "sublation" / Aufhebung / monist Materialism / "Hyper-Materialism" / "post-ification" / violet Materialism all the same idea that I just unnecessarily had two or three names for in the early drafts. now I realize, this is just Materialism, really. "Hyper-Materialism" is Materialism and eclectic materialism had me fooled for a bit thinking it was just a second slightly worse Materialism rather than something it could be okay to tear apart and expose. - eclectic materialism / Rational persons regard themselves as belonging to both the world of understanding and the world of sense (Kant) [6] -> Kant is putting the Ideal or the psychological on one plane and the material on another and then going along acting like both of them exist.
Truth predicts human arguments
/ Objective truth is the predictive observation of reality, reached by the correct methods, which lies outside two opposing consensuses and accurately explains not just why one consensus is worth opposing but how it is that two accounts or consensuses come to oppose each other (meta-Marxism) / (9k)- Objective reality is that which remains outside an individual person's perspective five million times / Objective reality is that which remains outside one individual person's perspective (sublation), and remains outside an individual person's entirely different perspective some five million times or so; this is not to imply that a Liberal-republican party expresses a million perspectives if it contains a million people, but rather just one; this is to imply that objectivity is compromised by all party structures that consolidate people together, all elections, and perhaps all anarchist meetings; this is to imply that ideology does not exist due to biases (whether 'conditioning' or wrong material models) but instead exists because people who are concentrated into the same group must concentrate onto the same models or plans of action in order to be able to take action at large scales
- Ideology exists because people wish to take action but they cannot take action at large scales as individuals so they must concentrate many people together around the same answers to material questions; democratic centralism creates a form of ideology purely because it reduces many perspectives down to one perspective -> this is not to say democratic centralism is bad, but instead to say that unlike Engels says, ideology is unavoidable.
this is very important for having a productive argument with Trotskyists. if you can firmly establish that all Marxisms are ideology as soon as they contain democratic centralism, then it's harder for Trotskyists to claim that Stalin's Marxism is an incorrect "ideological" view of the world but theirs isn't. if Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism both contain democratic centralism, they are both ideologies, and because they concentrate many people onto one decision, they both inherently have the potential to be wrong. democratic centralism cannot be taken as the engine of objectivity in and of itself, because as a process it threatens to cloud actual objective observations unless you can show you've arrived at objective observations another way. the good news is that is possible, but a lot of the time the easiest way to do it is with individuals rather than groups. this can create a weird paradox: Stalin is inherently more objective than a Trotskyist group in that he is not committed to other people's perspectives, but Stalin is inherently less objective than a room of several theorists with different vantage points because objectivity increases as it is placed outside a greater number of conflicting perspectives.
from here you can start to see one of the only coherent justifications for Liberal-republicanism: that supposedly, if every party contained experts on what was true, a conflict between ten bourgeois parties would surely bring everyone closer to reality. that's the problem, though: Liberal-republicanism hardly ever commits its parties to finding truth versus becoming popular, and rarely maintains that many separate parties. I hate to say it but in concept Trotskyism is a good design compared with Liberal-republicanism because each individual party hopes to find truth and hopes to join together across the world onto a single overall consensus without making everything about alliances before what is accurate. it has more potential to solve the problem of devolving into "post-truth" arguments than Liberal-republicanism. the big problem is just that it doesn't know how to look outside itself and regard every Marxism as making mistakes. it doesn't know how to zoom out on the Soviet Union and regard the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as just another contradiction. and so it doesn't know how to actually come up with an objective material model on that point as opposed to just shouting over Stalin's Marxism that it's the better one. if it could do that, capitalism would end. all of this would be over.
Sublation on bodies of philosophy
post-ification
(outdated meta-Marxist term) -> so, when Marx talks about sublation for bodies of philosophy, that's basically the same thing as the "post-" or "meta-" transformation I was clumsily trying to describe in older MDem drafts. the major difference was Marx laser-focused in on Hegel and I was more scattershot with what kinds of philosophies I guessed needed to be 'sublated'; I tended to pick up a lot of things that already falsely claimed to be Materialist and tear into those, rather than specifically into Idealism that clearly implied itself to be Idealism. I think this originated from capitalism itself covering the world in false Materialism, in these absolute mountains of things that are supposedly objective but aren't, and me getting terribly tired of all that. most Marxism was not really begging for "meta-Marxist critique", it was pretty good, but the false Materialism of things like Trotskyism and secular animism (anarchism) and Carl Sagan thinking that the Cold War was just one big science experiment (which was left horribly uncontrolled and plagued by muddy explanations in its initial logical arguments, if you ask me) were enough to drive me up the wall into provisionally declaring absolutely all of philosophy to be materially inaccurate. after a while I came back down from the ceiling with the decision that Marxisms in general were probably fixable despite a few deep problems but almost everything that wasn't a Marxism needed to be turned inside out as quickly as I could get through it. which birthed this ontology project. meta-Marxism is a very no-nonsense Marxism that keeps the best parts of every Marxism that have held up in explaining real historical processes but prepares to do a materialist inversion on everything else.meta-Marxism's Materialist biases
/ (9k) -> so I've apparently had a quirk of often referring to entryism as "anarchism" or "Gramscianism" (or sometimes "Existentialism") mostly because those movements have a terrible propensity to vulgarize into generic entryism. ...
it's interesting to now be able to catch exactly what kinds of biases the violet-Marxist method realistically has. every form of Marxism has slight biases toward what it will try to find in everything: Trotskyism tries to find 'the Stalinist bureaucracy' ... Althusser's articles are weirdly obsessed with this purported process of corporations programming people not to resist that Western-Marxists call "ideology". and violet Marxism, swinging all the way to the other end, seems to be slightly biased toward thinking everything has underlying material objects or processes that may or may not be there, picking up "mirages of Gramscian movements". I honestly don't think that's a bad bias to have. I mean, sometimes you actually find underlying processes, and it is possible to take a wrong hypothesis and tear it apart to be left with only the underlying material explanations of things that actually make sense. ...
- the only good form of eclecticism / the only useful or explanatory form of eclecticism -> in a way, I aspire to find this. I think if you follow the concepts in Theses on Feuerbach well enough you get eventually there — you just build a solid foundation of understanding things through Materialism and then you analyze literally whatever you want and watch the bounds of the Marxist corpus bizarrely expand to a size you didn't think possible.
- Preserve contradictions for the sake of "violet interlock", the moment when all pieces of the system are understood through the same Materialism and all become incorporated into the same faction or body of philosophy, not just because contradictions are "inherently good to have"; preserve non-Marxist philosophies when they have valid Materialist or hypothetical-materialist insights; preserve the history of seemingly dubious factions when it is instructive to mainstream Marxism; preserve seemingly dubious factions themselves when they can be actively incorporated into a Marxist movement or federation but not when they cannot -> the reason I bend over backward to try to save Trotskyism although I'm not really a member. I'm for saving whatever out of the flawed philosophies that exist is actually expressing Marxism. [7] the problem: nearly nothing in the United States comes close to that criterion. the raw conditions producing workers are about the only thing ever that could meet it and Trotskyism is about the second least far from Marxism. so I say: preserve the contradiction between mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism as long as they are improving their theory and slowly and painfully getting closer to a Fourth International. don't hear them just to hear them, try to get both Marxisms to hear each other in order to assemble a complete picture of history.
In biology
- sublation in context of biological evolution [8] -> this is part of why Archaeopteryx is the mascot of the wiki
Fearmongering
- sublation fearmongering -> I swear this is an entire genre of fiction.
- The act of requiring everyone in a given population to tolerate a particular demographic identity forever is Totalitarian / (9k) -> people fear Marxism because when the population begins sublation and takes on new policies that the bourgeoisie will be phased out through steps like the NEP or simply not allowed any more, these transformations will be "extreme" and they will lead to Totalitarian control of people who for whatever reason are having problems with the transformations. ... in the same way, any transformation that is one-way and 'permanent' can bring on a similar panic.
Mistaken uses of sublation
forbidden sublation
(Trotskyism) -> the motif of Trotskyists trying to take a material process and appropriate it for the purpose of creating Trotskyist parties, but the material process in question is almost certainly not a good thing. right now the only example of this I'm aware of is countries outside the Soviet Union setting up resistance groups inside (the Moscow Trial transcripts say the Gestapo set up a few of these, and I find that believable considering that any country would have done that, the United States liked to do similar things through the CIA), and Trotskyists attempting to "appropriate" these resistances to supposedly build a new Leninist revolution.
Related
Ideology codes
- (none)
Subpages
- Ereignisse 5-17 ('future events') - in which I attempt to learn some German but I absolutely do not get the sentences right