The collapse of the USSR was such a horrific disaster for the world at large. There's literally nothing to stop the US and the West on their genocidal rampaging and imperialist destruction. Cuba has suffered the consequences of the collapse the most. Be there a hell, Gorbachev and Yeltsin are there.
reading Evald Ilyenkov + Kozo Uno together so I can open my dialectical third eye and ascend
Literally my goat
ilyenkov is literally my goat
Apparently everyone forget what the “materialist” bit meant
That I’m one of the first really revolutionary-minded marxists to actually latch onto enactive cognition, which cites Hegel and various marxists on the regular, is a huge condemnation of our theoretical and philosophical groundings. Why spend another year rehashing old western marxist beefs?
We all know the “three sources & component parts” of Marxism, but I’d argue that there is a fourth. That being the natural sciences, which Marx and Engels always made a concerted effort to engage with. You can argue all day about their success, but if reality isn’t dualistic, neither are dialectics
I’ve been on a big enactive cognition kick which is clearly infecting my reading of Hegel because I see Hegelians give hot takes about Marxism and materialism and just think “oh this person doesn’t know enactive cognition exists”
I really need to finish Linguistic Bodies because I want to better understand all the recent Hegelian enactive papers.
An Enactive Account of Labor - Andrea Gambarotto
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmP...
Two new open-access articles from Andrea Gambarotto and collaborators:
Enactivizing dialectics: from individual to social normativity and back (w/ Thomas van Es): link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Habit: a Hegelian-enactive dialogue (w/ Ezequiel A. Di Paolo): link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The phrase “bringing forth a world” is not incorrect per se but it is misleading if interpreted literally, as anyone is wont to do. The world exists, if not “independently” from us per se, then certainly in our absence.
judging by some of the papers on realism that I’m seeing in enactive circles, it would probably do them a lot of good to read “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” and replace the occasional word or phrase with something appropriately sensorimotor-ish.
I wonder how many philosophers and theorists have seriously examined their epistemological presuppositions in light of enactive cognition
It’s very funny how many Marxists still insist Engels was wrong to see dialectics in science, meanwhile scientists have been using dialectics for decades and are only doing it more and more
I’m not saying one should return to humanist marxism as defined, I have my critiques there too (it never escapes the subject/structure divide enactivism and Marx both escape either), but it certainly seems more practically close to modern science than anti-humanism.
That I’ve seen someone who I consider generally pretty intelligent call Ilyenkov a “humanist” as an insult more or less confirms my suspicion. There are unexamined epistemological presuppositions here. Talk about needing a symptomatic reading.
Anti-humanism sought to purge Marxism of everything which did not fit with the representational epistemology which dominated science at the time. In so doing, it epistemologically froze itself, digging its own grave (and setting the stage for poststructuralist idealism)
It becomes clear, when performing that thought experiment, that Marx’s critique of political economy would be self-contradictory without an enactive and deeply historical view of humans and their capacity for labor. The very view anti-humanism calls unscientific and humanist.
The “epistemological break” is not a break of epistemology, but of scale. When you read labor through enaction, you get something remarkably close to a labor theory of value, just with the word “enacted cognition” instead of “labor.”
Marx was, himself, a proto-enactivist, which lines him up with modern science, and yet it is precisely his ideas which align with enactive cognition which anti-humanists call “humanist” or “idealist.” That’s the whole reasoning for the “epistemological break” thesis.
My thing with anti-humanist Marxism is that it claims to be the “science” Marxism is supposed to be in opposition to humanism, and yet in light 21st century science on the topic of cognition, its claim to scientific accuracy is unsustainable. Enactive cognition ensures that.
This isn’t to dismiss western marxist philosophy altogether by any means, just that it, as a rule of thumb, has a very clear limitation in terms of presupposed cognitive models
Further thought: Marx was the first true enactive thinker of western philosophy (pre-marxist eastern philosophy already has a long tradition of proto-enactivism). This makes computational or representational cognition revisionism. It betrays Marx’s methodology
Vygotsky and Ilyenkov have both been cited by name by enactivists. Tran-Duc-Thao has an extremely enactive phenomenology. Mao was all about practice being the source of knowledge. Kim Il-sung’s political philosophy was undeniably 4E too, despite Juche’s anthropocentrism.
Thought: The difference between western marxists and eastern marxists is that the former had representational views of cognition (the subject/structure dualism they insisted exists is inherently representationalist) whereas the latter had proto-4E views of cognition.
