What should be the Marxist take on the concept of "wisdom"? How should Marxists understand what "wisdom" is, how it's formed/gathered, how it plays out, etc.?
Does wisdom have a class component? Is it solely determined by history/material conditions or is there a deeper, universal wisdom? Is there a "Marxist wisdom" just like how there is a "Greek wisdom", "Jewish wisdom", "Buddhist wisdom", etc.? Have any Marxist thinkers written on this subject? I'm legitimately curious.
Okay.
It’s just retarded philosophical terminology.
If Marxist wisdom is anything, it's class consciousness.
Some wisdom obviously is universal, and some of it is relative.
It isn't as nationalistic as you seem to be making it out to be though.
If you want Marxist epistemology, try Lukacs, Althusser, Jameson, Hegel, and Marx himself.
Could you elaborate on every point you're making? If you are trying to demonstrate something, you're not doing a very good job of it by being super vague and undescriptive. Wisdom is a pretty deep concept in many religions and philosophical schools of thought. Simply reducing it to "class consciousness" seems way too narrow.
No.
Vague questions deserve vague replies.
What, do you want me to just give you a book written by a Marxist who is also a virtue ethicist? Beyond Virtue.
Class consciousness and historical materialism are the reductions of knowledge that are the basis of Marxist theory. If you don't like them, I have some bad news for you. That isn't to say that wisdom and knowledge can't be other things, but in a Marxist framework they are also fundamentally the result of historical-material condition and class struggle.
Nibba get out of here. You're talking to principled scientific socialists with hard understandings of HistMat, not some Catholic school teens.
Of course my question is "vague" because it's a broad subject which needs to be open for discussion.
I'm not sure I'm buying this. I've been an MLM for six years now and I don't agree with a class reductionist model. It leaves too many questions unanswered or answered poorly.
Mao had a love of ancient Chinese wisdom. He was actually a huge fan of the I-Ching and used it during his military campaigns despite banning it after taking power.
Marxism has no "theory of knowledge." Marx wasn't a materialist or class reductionist, nor was he ever consistent with his methodology.
Read Althusser.
Read Marx.
Older Marx was.
I agree with most of Althusser's readings of Marx, but it still doesn't answer the question of wisdom and how Marxists ought to approach the subject. I also agree assuming Marxism is "class reductionist" is pretty laughable (it's like comrades are agreeing with anarchist strawman arguments against us). So where does that leave us?
Better question: who would Marxists say is a wise person? Someone who…?
You can't really believe in such a thing as wisdom without believing in some kind of divine force like God or Krishna. Since Marxists are materialists they can't believe in wisdom, just intuition.
?
There is no difference between "wisdom" and "common sense." If you want the Marxist definition of both see Gramsci.
Every tradition sees wisdom as a higher form of knowledge instilled by God or gods.
Zizek is an embarrassment to philosophy TBQH.
You only say that because you're an anti-eurocentricist ethnocentrist Buddhist Heideggerian Deleuzian.
Except the philosophical one, which I think is what we're talking about here?
TANKIES ON SUICIDE WATCH.
Marxist wisdom:
Understanding political economy and looking at how it manifests under new historical conditions. Most importantly, studying history itself, struggling with it without applying ready-made formulas that avoid the difficult path. Like Hegel laboured to teach us, the understanding is itself the process, not the finished result. Historical materialism is a vedy useful lens, but using its handy structure to avoid struggling with the raw chaos of historical data is the fault of many Marxists.
What was Hegel's concept of wisdom?
Hegel believed in the slave-master dichotomy.
I think.
So wisdom for the slave is different from wisdom for the master? Makes sense.
Well marxists also believe that the economy and people are inseparable.
Change the economy and the people change.
There is a reason why marx and engels had long hair and that was because employers expect you to be clean shaven.
The people that tattoo their face, the bum that plays music in the corner, the trannies…
Those represent the spirit of marxism as they go against the norms of the employers.
I guess the wisdom would be to live your life as if employers weren't a consideration.
another wisdom is class struggle.
Marxism teaches that as long as there is capitalism there will be class struggle.
That's why its up to everyone to organize and demand things through direct action.
I don't believe wisdom can be reduced to economic class. What about wisdom which transcends class?
Well you already got your answer
Source for that quote?
Many times stories are used to teach and carry on local wisdom. What kinds of wisdom stories would comrades teach their kids?
Well I would suppose a leftist parent would encourage a less authoritarian approach, encourage more sharing a democratic decision making and encourage them to explore their interests.
Treating family like a democracy is stupid.
Most american families are like that anyways.
Parents used to beat their kids.
Parents still do.
I'm talking more about how the family reproduces ideology, which is inevitable given as to how nearly every institution around us reproduces ideology in some form.
I don't understand what you're saying?
Like story books?
Ok how about the story of the mouse worker.
There once was a mouse worker that worked in a cheese factory.
The mouse and his mouth coworkers all day making cheese for the mouse boss.
At the end of the day the mouse boss would give them a little piece of cheese in return.
One day the mouse workers got fed up and took over the cheese factory and they all shared the cheese.
The end.
lol.
I'm sorry.
Anal Water pls go
Does he sitll post on here?
Literally who?
No, he stopped a long time ago
new
So who is he? Is he idpol if he hates materialism?
Nah, but that was an AW talking point so I felt compelled to shitpost.
Just a retarded hegelian idealist.
What's wrong with Hegel?
Nothing wrong with Hegel, there was definitely something wrong with AW.
What was wrong with him exactly?
AW was a namefag who used to come and participate in threads that focused on the topics of philosophy and the philosophy of science. He won a huge amount of ire from the community late last year when, although he was already known as a somewhat disagreeable pedant, he made a series of posts decrying the physical sciences as operating upon conditional axioms (that their truth value was based upon social convention rather than natural proof) and proceeded to argue for a 500+ post thread about this - nearly all of the responses on both sides being practically essay-length. Shortly after this, he made a point of making a video in which he called out Zig Forums for 'dogmatism and pretending at erudition and reading theory'.
At this point, he had merited a considerable animosity, and though he vigorously decried the values and state of the board, he continued to return to get in long spates over his preferred topics with the users here. The video was actually forgotten fairly quickly as AW manifested a new and much more intense hostility to anyone questioning his personal interpretation of Hegel. The problem there was that he would refuse to interact with any of the critiques of his detractors (wanting them to argue solely within the bounds of Hegel, no philosophers before or after), and stubbornly deny any arguments offered. He claimed to represent the whole canon of Hegel, to make it extremely simple. It was during this era that someone made an edit of Jason Unruhe's site to include a declaration against AW (which the article referred to as Anal Water), and that pushed him out of a number of threads.
I only remember so much because I was in the last thread he posted in, which was devoted to Althusser, Lacan, Badiou and other structuralist thinkers. He remained in this thread for an extended period of time, peddling his usual bile, until he was met with the accusation from four or so different anons that he was practicing a monistic (or complete essence) interpretation of Hegel which denied him the use of Hegel' universalism. Seems like a fucking dork thing to get upset about, but he went ballistic and quit the thread after insulting us one last time. Never came back after that. In all candor, I sometimes want him back as he knew a lot and it prompted debate and engagement with theory; however, most people just remember a conniving and narcissistic guy who hated the idea of being intellectually honest and held a grudge against the board because he was being a retard
So his interpretations of Hegel were faulty and he went apeshit over anyone calling him out on it?
What were his politics? Leftcomm?
It was more like he posted all his sources from Hegel, but couldn't interact with any material outside of it without resorting back to Hegel. He genuinely couldn't discern what was wrong with his postulations.
As for his politics, I think he was a socdem or something middling - though who knows, there was also an accusation made at the time that he was deliberately faking his own politics to make trouble and get people to fight
Hegeltards are either SocDems, neocons, or fascists. I have yet to encounter a truly leftist Hegelian.
Leftist Hegelians usually make use of more than just Hegel. Anyone who is a PURE Hegelian any longer, you'd be right to be skeptical
They believe in continual, linear progress right? Makes sense a "pure Hegelian" would just be a socdem or turn to the right.
There's still a great degree that Marxist philosophy of history relies on in Hegel, but a unilinear conception of history is definitely not one of them
How do we know Marx's conception of history is unlinear though?
Forgive me, I worded that in an unclear manner - Marx does not use unilinear theory of history
That's what I thought. He and Engels dun goofed by relying on the "periods" of history tropes which were common in their day.
How? He says a lot of things the modenr left won't.
This. Kids need two parents.
They need more than two parents if even one of them is working.
Stop this autistic muh nuclear family shit
Shamelessly bumping since I'd like to revive this convo. Let's brainstorm a Marxist theory of wisdom.
The relation of Marxism to the whole enterprise of western philosophy is something that occupies me a lot, so I have some thoughts on this.
Regarding "wisdom", I personally think it's unrealistic to hold that concepts like wisdom and virtue should be abandoned because they're not part of a strict materialist analysis. Some people seem to hold a very vulgar totalizing view on Marxist philosophy, like it offers the final view on everything and that historical materialism supersedes all other forms of investigation. I think this is simply naive for anyone that's well-read in the history of philosophy to any extent ; philosophical problems aren't going to be considered "solved" when they haven't since Plato just because we've applied the maximum amount of Marxism into them.
To be quite clear, Marxism IS a very wide framework of understanding, uniting history, political economy, social theory, economic theory and so on - as a "paradigm" it's very likely the best thing we have. But if we consider what the purpose of it is - the establishment of a communist society - I would say it's a philosophy that doesn't claim logical & ontological truth of its system in the traditional way. It's a philosophy of practice, which ideally seeks to abolish itself as a paradigm once it has no reason to exist. We focus on materialist analysis because it's what is required to revolutionise society, pragmatically it becomes the primary goal since deviation from that goal muddles our revolutionary theory and strategy to progress. But let's imagine that we've all succeeded and communism is a global mode of production - what would Marxism be then if not another historical tendency that can be analysed as arising from a specific form of life? For sure, it would be a hugely important tendency that alters the practice of philosophy in such a society, but at that point we would still write philosophy about wisdom, virtue, aristotelian metaphysics and whatever else.
Having said all that though, I do think that Marx is unique in the history of philosophy because with him we find a fundamental break in considering it a self-sufficient way of thought. Though opposing tendencies existed in the early 19th century, it was still the order of the day to "complete" the system of philosophy, to exhaust its possibilities from within. In my view this is no longer possible with Marx, because his project was precisely a philosophical project during which he realized the internal necessity to transform it into a sociological project. "Theses on Fauerbach" is fascinating for this reason - Fauerbach's book was a philosophical work on religion, but where it lacks is exactly in not specifying his categories as socio-historical categories. Reading early Marx in general there's the sense that at some point he realised the need to study political economy in order to substantiate his undeveloped intuition which was still in the realm of german philosophy. I'm not aware of anyone before Marx having figured this out - Aristotelians were very aware of practical philosophy but it remains in the realm of a "separate discipline", not understood as a socially conditioned immanent critique in the processes of history itself.
My views exactly, which is why - even though I am a Maoist - I am deeply skeptical of the hard materialism which most Marxists apply.
Anal Water (Antonio Wolf) used to make lengthy posts claiming most of Marxism was wrong because his "superior" Hegelian philosophy said so, claimed Hegel had the solution to everything in philosophy and anyone who isn't a Hegelian is de facto wrong about everything, and advocated for "pragmatism" in politics which for him means voting Democrat (because, according to him, anything more radical is "illogical" or whatever).
He wasn't worth anyone's time.
Can we keep talking about this?
Anal Water's problem was he was a slave to his method. Don't let this happen to you.
I think this is true as well, he almost serves as a cautionary tale
TBH fam, I have never encountered a Hegelian who didn't go full potato eventually.
Lukács and Althusser go against each other quite a bit.
That's a very narrow view of Marxism.
IMO wisdom is just the conclusions made by those who have much experience in the world we live in, and it is both useless and invaluable. It is useless if you follow it blindly, but invaluable if you consider the conditions in which it was birthed and draw comparisons to your own life.
...
Yeah and that's what I don't get about him. Why spend your entire existence trying to defend Hegel's views/method when most of modern philosophy has since rejected him? I've also noticed he gets into Twitter spats a lot.
This never happened. It wasn't even last year, this was almost two years ago and it was like 10 posts in which I said things I had said long before I read Hegel. That's where that one weirdo who thought my reddit posts on Einstein were some big smackdown despite the fact that he nor any of the other scientific realists here have any clue what it meant. The thread you're referring to was the materialism vs idealism debate where some other Idealist person also argued against some Leninist diamat moron. That thread wasn't that long either, but man it caused a lot of mad.
Check my channels, no such thing exists. I did write a blog post about how retarded this board is.
How new are you? I was never kind to the morons here when they said things I knew were wrong.
I demanded coherency, cogency, and systematicity faithful to the concepts being used. This isn't Hegel specific, it's just about rigor. Sorry that invoking random shit smacked together does not in fact constitute a good argument, let alone a true one. The best debaters I encountered here were Leftcoms and communizers (who actually read), that one Deleuze-Lacan guy, and virtually no one else. The problem with people who argue against me was not that they weren't Hegelians, it was that they were plain bad at arguments filled with fallacious logical jumps or plainly ignorant critiques of things which they did not understand and misrepresented, hence almost all arguments missed the point.
…you do know I was one of the main pushers of that meme, samefagging threads to push it?
That wasn't the last thread I was in at all. This was a few months before I quit coming here, and the argument of that thread was semantic which is why I quit. How do you win a definition game in which both sides refuse to accept what the other is defining? You don't, you're an idiot to think some kind of rational debate is going to solve that. I quit because it was a pointless argument since the rest of you know fuck all and have no basis to judge who is telling the correct conception, and while I know they're wrong it's pointless in this board.
So, you have a fucking bad memory, literally confuse events, have no clue what they were actually about… and I'm intellectually dishonest? Ooooook comr8 ;)
Good. I would also add:
I thought you quit for the reasons in your post?
I see no need to boil settled waters, friend. I am actually happy to see you around, as hopefully it will mean an increase in the quality of philosophy discussion. How's your dog?
You'll be in front of the firing line.
It was about quitting that thread, you dingus.
I just came by to make that single response, I'm not back on this board.
And you're a slave to your beliefs. On the intellectually respectable scale you're just above religious people who just believe the bible.
Clearly you never listen to when I've read other theorists and don't say anything unless they mention Hegel, in which case they get Hegel wrong and I'm not saying they're wrong because they disagree with Hegel. Not everyone is as dumb as you.
I bet you don't even know about Bohmean mechanics.
The truth of what I did on this board exists and remains regardless of the lies and strange revisionary delusions you misrember about me. I would say I wish that you were liars, but sadly I think you all really do believe your false memories about events. How you all do this is beyond me, but you are a significant population in this world and unfortunately people believe you in their ignorance.
oh. well, thats too bad. Thanks for coming through, anyways.
"Wisdom" is a bullshit bourgeois concept.
The closest would be someone with a "completed personality" as Vaziulin puts it. Read the logic of history