In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God

John I

Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.

Martin Heidegger

The second quote reads like typical Heideggerian nonsense, and yet the first part of the quote contains some truth. Heidegger was responding to Jean Paul Sartre's philosophy, a philosophy which Sartre summarized in a retort to Descartes. Descartes had himself expressed “essence precedes being”, to which Sartre had responded “being precedes essence”, a secular affirmation of existential freedom against the sacred fatalism of essentialism. However, such cute reversals of statements do little to solve philosophical problems.

The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism.

A small note about “notation”. When I label a statement by a number, all this means is that the statement is in some sense “important”. It will generally be a premise or a conclusion of an argument. When the numbered statement is followed by a decimal, this means either an interpretation or elucidation of the statement , or it can mean some connected statement.

Practical Ontology and Pragmatist Epistemology:

What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality. A practical ontology means:

1 ) the furniture of reality is just human practice

In Gadankin’s essay there are a number of propositions educed to this effect:

Early in Marx’s intellectual career, it is already clear he rejected the objectivist understanding of theory ... For Marx, there is no objective external world and objective representations of that world. There is only human practice.

But then we get another statement:

“In other words, Marx is fundamentally rejecting the humanist approach to man. He is not saying man is this, he is saying man is everything… Marx is not attributing a specific human nature to man, but, by saying everything is mediated through human practice…”

Now, this may not be what Gadankin believes, since he attributes such beliefs to Marx. But given he is trying to give us the True Marx, which he may try to dodge by stating that the True Marx is no Marx, and that he is himself a Marxist, I think it is safe to say that he believes whatever he attributes to Marx. But of course then, his beliefs are in contradiction or he is equivocating or eliding certain premises to escape the contradiction.

1) means for Gadankin either:

1.1) “there is only human practice” = “everything is human practice”.

1.2) “everything is mediated by practice”.

One must be chosen, for under certain construals the conjunction of the two statements forms a contradiction. Say we take “everything” in 1.2) to mean “there is something besides practice”. Then to affirm both 1.1 and 1.2 is to affirm there exists only human practice and something besides human practice, i.e., whatever human practice mediates. This is evidently a contradiction. There are three obvious ways to resolve this contradiction.

A) You can affirm that “practice is mediated by practice”. This is mere verbiage, a non-solution, but perhaps Gadankin can develop it.

B) Or, one could argue that one has slid the meaning of "practice" between the two cases, in which case there is equivocation. Given that the term is used 148 (!!!) times by Gadankin and never defined, only he and God finally know what it means.

C) Finally, there is the Kantian route. One can affirm that there exists a human-independent world (broadly noumena or thing-in-itself) but that human knowledge is only of the human-dependent world (broadly phenomena or thing-for-us). In another paper, I will repeat and try to elaborate the criticism for why this Kantian route is in fact epistemically unsound or unstable, arguments I develop from David Hillel-Ruben’s work but which have a deep lineage in Hegel and other German Idealists.

Furthermore, I find the premise of a pragmatist ontology as stated to be entirely unclear and a commitment to a certain kind of metaphysics. The term “practice”, or its sexier conjugate “praxis”, is probably the most abused term in the Marxist lexicon (along with “dialectics”) and never really elucidated in any of Geese’s works on science, where it is taken to be the philosopher’s stone and the secret to all philosophical enigma.

It seems bizarre to speak of “practice” as a privileged citizen of reality, i.e., to make statements like “everything is practice”. In a rather obvious sense, plenty of things are not “practices”. Electrons are not practices, mountains are not practices, etc. They are generically just entities. Furthermore, in its nominal form, the term “practice” or “praxis” sounds very impressive. But think of a concrete example, e.g., the statement “I build a house”. “To build a house” is a practice; the term “practice” names, in more general form, something humans do. To build a house is a practice, to play guitar is a practice, to write philosophy is a practice, to contradict oneself is a practice.

Let us further focus on the concrete example. Unless I am the house, I must recognize there is something else (besides me). The practice of “building a house” names an action, and an action is a relational term, i.e., there are two terms entering into the relation and the relation itself. Now, unless all practice is self-action, a practice designates a relation, an action, between a human and something else (which could also be another human). That relation can be symmetric or asymmetric, causal or non-causal, etc.; it does not matter in the most general syntactical sense. So to say “everything is practice” is to also include statements of the form “everything is an action between a human and something else” (whether they are human or non-human). So, we then have to admit there is actually something besides the relation itself, besides a practice, notably the things entering into the relation, and unless one is an egregious solipsist, that something else cannot necessarily just be oneself. So not everything is practice, or the world is not the set of practices. Unless there is some idiosyncratic meaning of “practice” which Gandankin wishes to stipulate, this statement “everything is practice” is either a metaphysical position which denies all relata, so only relations exist, or else it is hopelessly ambiguous.

As for the pragmatist epistemology Geese obviously like USian-style pragmatism. I too find pragmatism interesting, and it brought to the fore questions previously lacking or untreated in philosophy and the philosophy of science. But in its crudest forms it is obviously false, or at a minimum easily defeated, and can be deeply dangerous. The vulgar pragmatist states:

2) Something is true just in case it is useful

It takes absolutely no philosophical schooling to know this is a statement that on all accounts is easily defeated. There are plenty of true statements that are useless. And there are plenty of useful statements that are false. For instance, say I count the number of hairs on Trump’s stupid head , call that number X. The statement:

3) Trump has X number of hairs on his head

Is obviously true, but as far as utility goes, it is useless (some smart ass might argue it could be used for political effect to stir up the anti-bald or coiffe-hating mob, but the specific statement I choose matters not). Now, take the statement:

4) Adam and Eve ate an apple in the Garden of Eden

This is most certainly false. It can be given allegorical content, but taken literally, Adam and Eve never existed, and they never ate an apple because a snake-version of the devil told them to. However, as a piece of the doctrine of original sin, it most certainly has been a useful statement where and whenever Christianity was used as an ideological apologia for class rule.

I believe, for Geese, that a pragmatist epistemology is above all distinct from such conventional pragmatism. From what I glean, this is a pragmatist epistemology about science. Scientific knowledge is not fundamentally propositional or representational. Scientific knowledge is fundamentally non-representational or agential. Given we have no stable understanding of what they mean by practice, I won’t broach these claims. But coupled to this is the more meaningful affirmation made in the recent article by Sarkozy :

Peirce makes a similar move as Heidegger’s when it comes to the scientific truth of an object. For him, the question isn’t about how closely that truth conforms to details of its objectification, what Heidegger might call its apprehension through the “empty mastery” of science. Instead, he introduces a hypothetical community of inquirers to define the metric for what counts as true. Instead, he introduces a hypothetical community of inquirers to define the metric for what counts as true. Peirce’s maxim is that something is true only if it is a fact that we would settle on after concluding a collective investigation, with the process of investigation being hypothetically infinite. So, truth is whatever would be agreed upon after eons and eons of inquiry by a competent community of inquirers.

So we get above a truth-theory of science now:

5) Scientific knowledge is true based on what is agreed upon by an ideal set of collective inquirers under ideal conditions.

6) The truth-conditions of scientific knowledge are agreement by the collective community

Logically, this inquiry should be eternal. Since scientific knowledge is, as far as we know, never final, it is historical and constantly changing (though the character of that change contains continuity and discontinuity). So in fact, according to this logic, since no inquirer is perfect and no inquirer or collection of inquirers is eternal, no science is strictly true. The truth of some such piece of scientific knowledge becomes contingent upon a specific history of its discovery and agreement. This is a problem from the point of view of the history of science for 1) there is no ideal community, 2) there have been agreements on what was “fact” that turned out to be bunk, and 3) only the extra-personal intervention of disconcerting phenomena unsettled what was (wrongly) considered fact.

With this, Peirce acknowledges that there are always humans involved in the consideration of science and the treatment of facts. In this way, he historicizes science and treats it as a “matter of concern.” This should come as no surprise. To consider something a scientific fact is indeed a human practice in and of itself, and it is one that always involves the many. It isn’t that one scientific mind, in isolation, discovers something true by its own merit, by its conformity to the standards of science, and then, magically, that truth becomes science for the rest of us. Even in the case of the rare genius, there must be a confluence of opinions to elevate the findings of the rare genius from research to facthood. What is true, according to Peirce, has a positive limit placed squarely in the practices of human beings, rather than a negative limit of being absolutely and objectively true and nothing more beyond that, whether human beings are investigating the matter indefinitely or not.

The point is this: for Sarkozy, scientific knowledge is about something human-dependent, and the truth of this or that scientific theory, or statement, or fact, is a function of human action. The truth-conditions of scientific knowledge are conflated with the epistemic conditions under which humans discover and believe knowledge of phenomena. Something being the case becomes a necessary tie between human understanding and the world at large. I promise, and others must hold me up to it, that I will further criticize these anti-materialist and anti-realist positions in depth in an upcoming paper (woe is me I must find the time), but needless to say just because they substitute “practice” for “mind” this does not absolve them of the idealist position, i.e., that the fundamental workings of the world are determined by human activity whether it be mental or (whatever this means for humans) non-mental, manual, practical. And beyond the strictly philosophical problems of pragmatic idealism, such a species of idealism, or in fact any idealism, is thoroughly ill-equipped to defend the status of science, much less criticize it in a principled manner, faced with the onslaughts of irrationalism, obscurantism, and pseudo-mysticism.

I will say this about “pragmatism” writ large: the neopragmatism of a Hilary Putnam or Robert Bramdon is very interesting. I think a non-representational defense of materialism and scientific realism is a needed development, and one of the things that is special about Marxism is that there is a thread in the classics of what I will call an activist conception of knowledge that can inspire such a non-representational defense or account of science. The epistemic conditions under which we come to develop our understanding of nature crucially include our “interventions” into the world, our tinkering that elicits responses that are not under our control, responses that can therefore surprise us. The sketches of this activist conception can in part be found even in analytical philosophy in the works of Rom Harre, and Ian Hacking amongst many others. It must be further elaborated, and the representational and non-representational aspects harmonized.

Political Implications of Pragmatic Idealism:

In Sarkozy's article, the author attempts to come to grips with the political consequences of this pragmatist idealism. Their concern is to defend the status of science in a contemporary world where irrationalism and science denialism proliferate. The ideas which circulate today are no longer quirky philosophical or even respectable opinions that can be tolerated. They are dangerous, and philosophy must live up to the task of dismantling them and of helping produce a pedagogy which banishes them. As I write, deregulation of agribusiness has produced an outbreak of cyclospora, making a number of items dangerous for consumption. However, the worst example of such deadly anti-scientific ideas is climate change denialism. How does Geese propose to fight these ideas? Peep the following passage:

And so, Latour’s solution for bringing a pulse back to critique relies on transforming what he calls “matters of fact” into “matters of concern”. The fact goes from an ‘object’, bare, cold, measured, and final to a “thing”—gathered, assembled, and coalesced. When a fact is objectified, it leaves room for the alienated consciousness of conspiratorial thinking to take hold. But if, from the outset, we treated this fact as a ‘thing’, then we center the reality of the situation, the human actors behind it and the concerns of those actors, the various histories and genealogies that determine its understanding…

For example, we can look at global warming. When the fact of global warming appears in its objectified form, a debate with two poles emerges around it. The positivists vigorously defend its existence while conspiracists vigorously attack it. But what if, from the outset, global warming appeared as a “matter of concern”? Our perspective would maintain its facthood while simultaneously illuminating the matter for all concerned actors by asking questions such as "Which populations are most affected by global warming?" …“Are they the only recognized institution for reporting on global warming, or do other such conflicting institutions exist?” And so on.

I do not think this distinction between “thing” and “object” is in any way real or useful; it is pure nitpicking, a clumsy distinction analogous to that between a social and a natural object, instantiated in Marx qua use and exchange value. Furthermore, in no way, shape or form is an object of science “bare” or “cold” or “final”. One does not dedicate one's life to understanding an object of science, a phenomenon, if one feels nothing but indifference to it. Rather, one is animated, ideally, by passion and wonder. But what is most risible is the notion that when a fact is considered “objectified” (read mind-independent), it allows conspiratorial thinking. To the contrary, when a fact is taken to have probative force because it is not the item of human election, it instead demands agency, interpellating an agent to live up to moral exigencies dictated by the moment. The paramount example today is climate change: the world is dying, the world calls for us to save ourselves and it.

The deeper problem is that Geese will be unable to provide simple or trustworthy arguments to convince the non-believer to care about climate change (unfortunately, many of these beliefs have extra-rational sources or causes and so therefore argumentation alone will not suffice) for the simple reason that what constitutes a fact is human-dependent and human-determined.

Once you make the truth of scientific knowledge a function of human action, then concretely some class, or community, or persons must be “responsible” for the truth of that scientific knowledge. The truth of some such piece of scientific knowledge becomes contingent upon a specific history of its discovery and agreement by such and such persons located in such and such a position in the social structure. And once you do that, enmity or class hatred naturally, and in fact rationally, enters into the assessment of the truth of scientific knowledge. This class and political hatred is, in fact, I hypothesize, the genuine cause of anti-scientific or conspiracy thought. You open yourself to the typical and in fact really effective forms of anti-intellectualism that deny climate change, i.e., some community of nerds, or a gaggle of annoying liberals, is telling us things are changing, things are the case, rather than the tragic fact that they are the case and that the community of nerds just happens to be poised to understand it because of historical and class reasons.

When you do not properly separate those truth-conditions of matters of fact (the truth-conditions being just that things are a certain way independent of human election) from matters of concern (which is a matter of human election) you admit the possibility that a concern is not warranted, for it is not a fact (I can choose that such and such a fact is true since it was simply the effect of a community determining it so, and I do not trust that community).

Materialism as Best Defense:

There is a much simpler way to defend the facticity of climate change. Let us spell out the issue. Why care about facts, e.g., matters of fact? What is the character of “facthood”? Why is a “human-centric” conception of facthood a problem? How does such a conception leave us defenseless against a piece of irrationalism like climate change denial? One must be concerned about something that is the case?

I can be concerned that gremlins are in fact responsible for depleting my broken communist bank account. But people will rightly suggest there are no such things as gremlins and that I in fact have to live with my financial situation. No matter of fact, no right to be concerned. A matter of fact must in this case be about how nature works, its mechanisms, laws, structures, etc., and how human interactions with this world, exhibiting their own social dynamics, have produced the phenomenon of climate change. This matter of fact does not go away because I choose it to. We are not born into a natural world where its fundamental workings, mechanisms, and rules are of our choosing. We, as the human race under the conditions of capitalism, have tinkered and played with those workings and, in doing so, unleashed the worst. There are certain kinds of matter of fact that hit us all with a certain extra-human probative force, creating for us certain obligations that any reasonable person must live up to, extending beyond humans and compelling us like a snake-charm. Climate change is one such matter of fact: a matter of fact that threatens the existence of the human race as we know it.

We have a physical theory grounded in statistical mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum theory for greenhouse effects. We have physical theories for the way currents and streams work grounded in classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics, etc. We have physical theories for conditions of life and structure of organisms, for the establishment of equilibrium and change in ecologies, of their dynamics under extra- or pre-human conditions. We have come to know these theories through painstaking intervention outside the scene of theory, e.g., through observation, experimentation, through development of technology. Theory and non-theory have established an incredible loop: Non-theory leading to theory and theory to non-theory. It is that same hard-earned knowledge that allows us to understand why and how the world is breaking down. And it is also those mechanisms, structures, and dynamics that we have discovered that are the cause of why and how the world is breaking down. They are breaking down not because we care or because some collective of ideal inquirers (which would naturally privilege expertise) on an infinite timeline tells us to care, but because the world really is breaking down whether we like it or not.

Politically, the masses must be better educated on science, and what it means to assess scientific knowledge on its own merits, by its own protocols, given the authority to question it intelligently, but nonetheless participating in the endeavor of determining how things really are. Only then, in the ideal, would denying the existence of climate change be moot. Some moron goes: oh well, climate change is just science, some theory or whatever. To which our noble proletarian responds: yes, our theories, which approximately track how things go, allow us to understand that human action changed the composition of the atmosphere, that the increase in carbon has intensified the greenhouse effect, and that there are also related changes in streams and currents. The effect will be ecocide. This is not just because we care; this is because it is the case and we care because it is the case.

Once you affirm pragmatic idealism, it opens one up to the counter-attack that since science is an agreement amongst mostly nerds and that it is not a matter of concern to the layperson. We Marxists should be and by majority have been special sorts of materialists. This means we affirm, at a minimum, the existence of a fundamental mind or human-independent world and that natural scientific knowledge is about this mind-independent or human-independent world. Scientific knowledge is approximately true, and this means it tracks, in a sense to be deeply scrutinized, how the world really is. Why do we affirm all this? Because such a philosophy is the simplest argument for the success of science, i.e., success defined not only by predictive or explanatory power but by technological efficacy and effect of this knowledge on history. Every other philosophy makes this success a coincidence or miracle .

Knowledge about climate change is true because climate change is a reality we can comprehend, and we have scientific knowledge to that effect. Furthermore, scientific knowledge being true is not a matter of election by some nerds. The proletariat must be educated to the position of affirming what is true in scientific knowledge and seeing what it points to as being the case and why. Materialism is the best defense of the science we need. It is the best because it is true and because politically it provides the simplest defense of science. There is a further political complication here, or better yet, a question about an epistemic community. The community of nerds may affirm that such and such is the case. But the layperson may reject that and simply retort that it was chosen by the community of nerds. Fundamentally, the authority of expertise, the authority to sieve what is real from what is not, must rely on an act of trust by the layperson, i.e., the layperson must trust that the conscientious scientist has but relayed what nature taught her and made no self-serving election. But in the real world, this means the layperson must see the scientist in some way as either a neutral or, better, an ally, i.e., not an enemy. But the truth is that scientists have a certain class position and culture. In terms of class position, they are of the professional class; they monopolize skill to leverage better labor conditions (although this is fast changing), and some even have highly bourgeois backgrounds that allows them to traverse years of foregone normal salary for study. When they exit studenthood, their work is often paid for by either the worst parts of the state, e.g., defense, security, etc., or by those most merciless aspects of capital, e.g., big pharma, tech, agribusiness, etc. If scientists wish to be heard, they must organize themselves, and they must make clear that they are not enemies of the people. To make clear they are conscientious seekers after the truth, they must make clear they are responsible members of society, and even better, champions of the working class. Otherwise, do not expect trust; do not expect people to respect your authority; earn it.

Anything is so Anything Goes

It is a rare thing for a philosophy to so closely mesh with politics, i.e., for a philosophy to be ideology and justify, or rationalize a political orientation. There have been all sorts of combos of philosophy and politics in the Marxist tradition, and this ideological role of philosophy is often subtle and sometimes tangential. There have been many flavors: Christians, empiricists, Machists, existentialists, and the list goes on and on. In a certain sense, Geese are systematic. Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God.