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that one acquires from others. If Descartes could have emptied himself of all previously acquired knowledge, and the techniques which are part of that knowledge, he would also have had to dispossess himself of the twenty- one rules which he sets out in his Rules For the Direction of the Mind. Men learn from others that ‘If we are to understand a problem perfectly, we must free it from any superfluous conceptions, reduce it to the simplest terms, and by a process of enumeration, split it up into the smallest possible parts’ (Rule XIII). This is not an innate truth with a biological basis; it is one we learn, for there is nothing inconceivable in the idea that the best way to understand a problem is by drawing as many links as we can between it and superfluous conceptions. Thus, to dispossess oneself of all that one has been taught is to dispossess oneself of the rules which one could use to acquire new knowledge for oneself. In such a case, Descartes literally would not have known what to do next. Replacement or correction of socially transmitted knowledge by the individual presupposes the existence of socially transmitted goals and techniques which give correction and replacement their intelligibility. No justificationist programme which is to begin with individually acquired certainties only, independent of all other knowledge which is to be based upon it, can account for the need for the ineradicable presence of some social transmit in all knowledge acquisition or replacement. Everything can be replaced, but piecemeal only, while one preserves something of the social transmit that provides the anchor for the lever of replacement. If the idea of rejecting all that one has received by way of social transmit is the Scylla of individualist conceptions of knowledge, there is a related Charbydis which lurks within some idealist and neo-idealist theories of knowledge. Their social conception of knowledge (or values) becomes far too strong, so that an individual can reject nothing of what he has been taught, can obtain no critical distance from any of the beliefs he has acquired from his social environment. He has become trapped inside a form of life. Much of what Hegel says suggests this difficulty, for example his remarks on the fate of a man who tries to be better than the ethical level reached by his society. So too, this difficulty is suggested by some of the things Kuhn says about those poor unfortunates locked within a period of normal science, or is suggested by the fate of the linguistic innovator according to a strict ordinary language philosophy. It is thus important to get the social and individual mix right in a theory of knowledge. A man must as a matter of fact receive a social transmit: ‘The solitary and isolated hunter or fisherman who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as a starting point, is one of the unimaginative fantasies of eighteenth century romances ct la Robinson Crusoe . . . This is an illusion and nothing but the aesthetic illusion of the small and bigRobinsonades’.26 The biological transmit is insufficient. Robinson Crusoe, supposing he had never had any human contact, would never have developed very far epistemologically,. regardless of how fine a specimen he may have been biologically. But, although a social transmit is necessary in order to initiate the process of learning and knowledge acquisition, once the process is in working order the transmit can be jettisoned. A man can usually correct what he believes to be in need of correction or modification in what he has been taught. This commonplace, as I have called it, has a special relevance to the development of a theory of ideology. Ideologies are tissues of beliefs, especially about man and society, which individuals acquire in various ways, either 'naturally’, because reality appears to be as the ideology says it is, or ‘artificially’, through the propagation and reinforcement of such beliefs by various social mechanisms. However, having received those ideological perspectives, individuals are not incapable of correcting and changing them. In all societies (except full communism) we expect men to be the recipients of ideologies in some measure or other. The class nature of all societies, the division of labour, and the remnants of these even in a society in transition to full communism, insure that in some measure truth will be distorted in the social transmit. But men are not necessarily trapped within these distortions. Sometimes, theories of ideology can be stated in ways which neglect this truth. For example, Franz Jakubowski claims that ‘a false consciousness must therefore correspond to a particular social situation, to a position in society from which correct knowledge is impossible’ [my emphasis].27 Jakubowski quotes Max Weber, who seemed to have the same sort of 'bondage to a point of view’ in mind, but applied it equally to Marxism as well as other class outlooks: ‘The materialist conception of history is not some kind of taxi, which one can get into or out of at will; once inside, even the revolutionaries themselves are not free to leave it’. Finally, Jakubowski says again: 'Ideology as false, partial consciousness corresponds to a particular position in society from which a correct, total understanding is impossible.’28 It is true that Marx’s own formulations often suggest the view that, given that a man occupies a certain place or position in society, he must hold a certain ideological position. How else, it might be asked, are we to comprehend Marx’s well-known dictum in the Preface to The Critique of Political Economy, that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ [my emphasis]? ‘Determines’ seems to carry the implication that a man could not have had any alternative consciousness. Marx’s other expressions for this relationship between social or class position and ideology or consciousness tend to be highly metaphorical, and ‘weaker’ in the sense that they do not have the strong, determinist flavour generally associated with a verb like ‘determines’. Elsewhere in the Preface for example, Marx speaks of consciousness reflectingov being appropriate to the mode of production. Such formulations do not carry the same suggestion that men are trapped within the views which are transmitted to them. Indeed, it is not really clear at all that Marx’s use of ‘determines’ carries this suggestion. One writer has reminded us that Marx's concept of determination may not be the same as ours.29 Marx’s concept has a specific location within the philosophical tradition of Spinoza and Hegel, and carries essentially the idea of a limitation. To determine is to make determinate, to give something determinations, properties, and thereby to delimit more specifically what kind of thing it is. If we take Marx’s use of ‘determines’ in this sense, we can interpret Marx as saying that mode of production or social and class position tends to limit or constrain the range of beliefs which individuals are likely to find plausible and hence to adopt. In this sense a mode of production, or a specific position in it, acts as a ‘blinker’ which tends to close off from view various alternative beliefs. On this ‘limitation’ reading of the way in which being determines consciousness, which I think is a perfectly natural one given Marx’s intellectual formation, any trace of the suggestion that a man is trapped inside an ideology vanishes. Marx provides us with a social conception of knowledge, but one which avoids trapping individuals inside the social knowledge (or ideology) which they receive, by allowing for the possibility that they may be able to extricate themselves from it. As we shall see when we come to discuss the essence and appearance distinction, what Marx does think necessary is that social being, under specific conditions, does appear in a certain way. But it is not necessary that men take those appearances for reality, although it is natural that they should tend to do so, and hence it is not necessary that they hold ideological beliefs about themselves and the society in which they find themselves. They can come to know that such appearances are not indicative of what their situation essentially is, and however naturally tempting such appearances may be to men, there is no necessity that they succumb to them in forming their beliefs, however likely it may be that they will do so. Marxists often remark, and rightly so, that the fundamental difference between Marxism and many (but not all) other philosophies is that Marxism makes absolutely central to its outlook the social practice of man. But what does this claim amount to and precisely which are the ‘many other’ philosophies which do differ from Marxism in this respect? It is probably not necessary today, as it sometimes has been in the past, to point out that whatever the centrality of praxis means for Marxists, it cannot be identified with pragmatism, the doctrine which identifies truth and usefulness. In whatever other ways Kolakowski misinterprets Marx in the article of his which we have been discussing, he certainly gets right the distinction between pragmatism and Marxism: ‘we are . . . entitled to consider the first pragmatists advocates of the philosophy of individual success that for so long nourished the mind of the New World in its rapid economic development. One can find some of James’ [the pragmatist philosopher] formulas duplicated almost literally in the writings of Henry Ford.’30 Similarly, we agree with Ludovico Geymonat’s insistence that the praxis that is central to both Marx and Lenin’s theory of knowledge does not constitute a variety of pragmatism: I! is often maintained that an explicitly or implicitly pragmatist orientation is to be found in many of Marx's writings and even in some pages of I,enin. According to this point of view, the realism ascribed to Lenin represents nothing more than a dogmatic residue inherited from Engels . . . We of course have no intention of denying that Lenin often makes reference to practice as the criterion for distinguishing what is true and what is false. The crux of the matter, however, is whether practice is taken simply as a confirmation o{ the objectivity of certain 'relative truths’, or whether the use of practice as a criterion is taken to be a denial of the existence of any purely theoretical source of truth.11 Geymonat distinguishes, then, between the view that practice is a criterion of truth, a way of telling the true from the false (or the meaningful from the meaningless), and the view that practice is a definition of truth (or meaningfulness), only the latter of which is pragmatism, Geymonat argues that only the former, but not the latter, can be attributed to Lenin, and his conclusion should be extended to deny the attribution of pragmatism to Marx as well, There are remarks in Marx’s writings which suggest that the former view, that practice is a criterion of distinguishing between the true and the false, which Geymonat ascribes to Lenin, was Marx’s position too. The second of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ claims that ‘in practice, man must prove the truth . . But whether or not these remarks justify the ascription of this position to Marx, by itself this would seem to fall far short of making the notion of practice central to one’s philosophy. Surely the centrality of praxis means something more than this. The way in which practice is central to Marxism is that it makes the social practice of men its central object of study. Marxism is literally the study of praxis, because praxis is its object. ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism ... is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object . , . but not as human sensuous activity, not practice’. Human sensuous activity is the object of Marxism, The study of such activity, of human labour, and especially (but not only) the ‘concrete’ study of it as it is shaped and formed within specific modes of production, is its main concern. We said earlier that philosophy differed from the special sciences in being not a priori but rather more abstract. Moreover, we said that the object of philosophy, its field of study, was the sciences and their results, for which philosophy served as a ‘general summing-up’. Human praxis, and the material conditions in which it occurs, is the object of Marxism; Marxism is the object of study of Marxist philosophy. The purpose of a Marxist philosophy is to ‘sum up’the general results of the study of man and his material environment, and it is this purpose which explains the abstract character that Marxist philosophy, like any philosophy, is bound to assume, Marxist philosophy makes the study of praxis its object of study. There is, then, room for an abstract Marxist philosophy of praxis and scientific studies of particular concrete forms of praxis. From this perspective, I think we can argue that there is nothing intrinsically ideological or non-scientific about studying praxis from an abstract point of view, so long as it is tempered and formed by the results of concrete study. There is nothing intrinsically ideological or ‘unscientific’ about Marx’s early philosophical writings, simply because they arc philosophical. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, for example, Marx is not doing science but philosophy, and there is nothing ipso facto wrong in that. Philosophy may not be science, since it is rather a ‘general summing- up’ of science, but the fact that it is strictly non-science does not make it unscientific. Indeed, we argued earlier that materialism, which is a philosophy and not strictly a science, was itself a ‘scientific’philosophy, in the sense of being a philosophy which was continuous with the sciences and ‘summed up’the methodology and outlook of the sciences. The interesting question about the philosophy of Marx’s ‘early’ works can only be whether or not such studies are rooted in the scientific studies of concrete forms of praxis. If there were to be any epistemological ‘break’ in Marx’s work, it could only be that Marx leaves off doing a priori philosophy for a posteriori philosophy.32 It is true that Marxist philosophy makes practice central inanother way. In addition to the study of practice being its (abstract) object, it is a practical philosophy, a philosophy of action as well as a philosophy about action. ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. ’ But the aspect on which I wish to focus here is the way that Marxist philosophy makes practice central in the sense that it studies practice, rather than in the sense in which it is itself a practice. Which philosophies can and which cannot study practice? Marx makes it clear that there is a sense in which Hegelian idealism also can study activity, for he says in the first thesis concerning Feuerbach that ‘the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism.’ Marx, however, goes on to criticise this study of activity by idealism, since it was a study developed ‘only abstractly since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such [my emphasis]’. Hegel’s study of activity was only abstract, unrooted in concrete elaborations of activity. Thus, the activity Hegelian idealism studied could never be the social activity of men, but only the activity of Man as such. The underpinning for such an abstract study could never come from ‘below’ but only from ‘above’—the activity of Man could only be underpinned by a study of the activity of Absolute Spirit, Idea, or whatever. ‘To begin with, they [the followers of Hegel] extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-consciousness”, later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as "species” “the Unique”, "Man”, etc,’33 Marx makes it clear that ‘the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism . . .’ is that it could study objects but not practice at ail, whether concretely or abstractly. This, let us suppose, was true of Feuerbach. But why does Marx extend these remarks to all 'hitherto existing’ forms of materialism? Why should this be a plausible criticism of non-Marxist materialism in general? It is clear that Marx uses ‘materialism’ very widely. It may be that my interpretation will not cover all those theories which Marx labels ‘materialist’ in that well-known section of The Holy Family entitled ‘Critical Battle Against French Materialism’. But I think that, when Marx criticises ‘all hitherto existing’ materialist doctrines, he is thinking primarily of reductive materialism. He cites Gassendi, Hobbes, Bacon, Holbach, La Mettrie, as well as others, and he does seem to have principally in mind those forms of materialism which would deny the irreducibihty of human activity. The world and everything in it is, at bottom, matter in motion, and then human activity can be reduced to, understood as, a particular sort of motion of a special sort of matter. But why then couldn’t reductive materialism take human practice as its object of study? There is no reason why one should require that the object of study be an irreducible object. Suppose, as a reductive materialist would insist, human practice could be reduced to matter in motion. Thus, suppose ‘I made a chair’ could be reduced to a set of statements about the physical motion of certain bits of matter. Can’t reductive materialism stilt derivateiy study human practice? Sometimes reduction is confused with elimination. The reductive materialist does not eliminate human practice, but only shows that it can be reduced to, understood as, a form of matter in motion. Human practice is not eliminated, but only seen to be a derivative phenomenon. Reductionist analyses explicate, rather than extrude what is analysed from the world. Why should Marx, or anyone who wishes to study human practice, object to this? Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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