I’d like to chalk it up to issues stemming from translation, but yeah I have a love-hate relationship with Marx’s writing style. I’m waiting to see if the new Capital translation coming out next month makes it easier to get through.
No, at least some of the issues are in the original German as well.
I’m honestly not sure why philosophers, while claiming to use logic, refuse, or at least, refused 100 years ago to structure their works the way mathematicians do, with very clearly outlined definitions and propositions.
A major issue is that the amount of propositions and definitions is immensely huge. If you want the type of philosophy you’re asking for, it’s just analytical philosophy. But that loses a ton of its value. Marx was writing at a time when most people who would read his works had some familiarity with the argument style of the German idealists and were familiar with Kant and Hegel. The definitions, propositions, and argument structures that are missing are culturally defined and flexible, purposefully.
And I believe this is a strength. Playing with language as it exists is useful to convey an idea. Using “is” to mean equal in content or form next to each other is a great use of language for philosophy though it’s inherently “contradictory.” But isnt that precisely the point of his dialectic?
Making something too abstract (and here I mean, further from the way that one’s rationality works on a daily basis) takes one further from what can be understood and be useful. Analytic philosophy (the pure analytic stuff, don’t catch me with that claim that Marx was half-half) is mostly shit for this reason. Maybe it’s possible to be as analytically rigorous and still make useful philosophy, but I’m yet unconvinced.
None of this is saying it’s easy to understand or something, but the difficulty and working through the flexibility to find a complete concept is part of the philosophy itself
I apologise if I come off as hostile. I did employ some sarcasm and I suppose I am harsh on not using language in a clear way when communicating complex messages, but I hope this will not register as me having any animosity towards you.
A major issue is that the amount of propositions and definitions is immensely huge
Every time I engage with a work of philosophy, it ends up being a lot less dense than the works of math that I deal with on a daily basis, and yet, the works of philosophy lack the relevant outlining.
Furthermore, philosophers seem to be supposed to have their terms compiled in various encyclopediae, but at least the Stanford one, and the one on marxists.org are incomplete and often don’t actually provide the definitions in their entries.
I maintain that philosophers have no excuse and are/were just being lazy and non-rigorous.
In the case of Marx, he could have started ‘Capital’ or ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ with something like ‘economists recognise something called “commodity”. Understanding of what a commodity is, and what its properties are, will be important for this study. [\newline] Definition: A commodity is…’ and then provide a definition for what a commodity is, then give the relevant definitions for use-value, exchange-value, etc.
Also, I do have an issue with the non-outlined definition of what Marx calls a commodity, as he contradicts it very quickly, as soon as he tries to claim that things with use-value can be non-commodities, that all commodities have exchange-values, and also that commodities are themselves use-values and exchange values (which means that terms ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’ are synonymous, despite that clearly not being the intention), etc. Very poorly written, which makes understanding what is meant by that harder.
The definitions, propositions, and argument structures that are missing are culturally defined and flexible, purposefully
That just reads as if they aren’t defined and the reading has to be vibes-based, basically, and the reader has all the freedom to project what they want onto the text, which happens very often.
Furthermore, this introduces the issue that it’s impossible to be reasonably sure that you understood the author correctly, as everybody can just project what they want onto the text, and there isn’t going to be any way to disprove many of such claims.
And I believe this is a strength
It requires the reader to reread the same piece of text multiple times in order to make a bunch of what are essentially vibes-based guesses on what the author actually meant, instead of just having complex messages clearly communicated to you the way, for example, mathematicians manage to just fine.
Using “is” to mean equal in content or form next to each other is a great use of language for philosophy though it’s inherently “contradictory.”
But how is it good in any way for the purpose of conveyance that something is actually a property of something else?
You are making a statement that is false, and ask the reader to do additional work to decipher what it is that you actually meant instead of just directly and clearly communicating what you want to say.
Furthermore, a commodity is obviously not ‘equal in content or form’ to its use-value and/or to its exchange-value, at least on the very simple basis that a commodity may or may not be a material thing (i.e. it may be a good or a service), while use-value and exchange-value are non-material things, so this argument doesn’t work in this particular case.
But isnt that precisely the point of his dialectic?
I very much doubt that the point of his dialectic is to make false statements and obscure meaning of messages in written speech.
I apologise for the sarcasm, but I genuinely do not see how his dialectic is relevant.
Making something too abstract (and here I mean, further from the way that one’s rationality works on a daily basis) takes one further from what can be understood and be useful
I’d argue that making unclear statements with deliberately-obfuscated meanings of words when supposedly talking about complex topics is far worse than being direct and clear in your messaging.
Like, for how many people do you think his text is understandable? One moment he’s saying that a commodity is ‘a commodity, in the language of the English economists, is “any thing necessary, useful
or pleasant in life”, an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term’/‘A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties
satisfies human wants of some sort or another’, but then a few sentences later he goes, ’ We cannot tell by looking at it that the diamond is a commodity. Where it serves as an aesthetic or mechanical use-value, on the neck of a courtesan or in the hand of a glass-cutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity’ (taken from ‘A Contribution to the Critique…’), which contradicts what he previously said, including that a commodity simply has to satisfy a need, and it’s not even explained why a diamond is not a commodity in those examples - it clearly satisfies a need in both cases. Furthermore, what does it mean for something to have a use-value, but to also not actually
I maintain that clear language, even if used in complex ways is much more understandable when communicating complex ideas than trying to use words in a faux-colloquial way in ways that contradict each other within the same piece of text.
Imagine if math textbooks said things like ‘an angle is its cosine, and its cosine is something that is realised in the length of one of some triangle’s sides’, or ‘a limit of a sequence of real numbers is something which the real numbers get closer and closer to’. Good luck divining what is actually meant and actually calculating a cosine of an angle and a limit of a sequence in accordance with the actual definitions if all you are given is this stuff that is not actually representative of those in any way.
Maybe it’s possible to be as analytically rigorous and still make useful philosophy, but I’m yet unconvinced
On that note, I am yet to actually find any use in philosophy, no matter how hard I try to engage with it. Every time I attempt to study it to change my mind, I am hit with works that can’t properly use even their own terminologies, and disciplines where the argument ‘god is the most perfect imaginable being, and a perfect being has to exist, therefore god exists’ arguments are considered seriously (despite the fact that they can be very easily and rigorously refuted).
And yes, you might contradict me and bring up Marx, but I’d argue that actually useful stuff from Marx doesn’t require understanding of philosophy, and a relevant work could be made from the standpoint of, for example, economics.
I’d also like to argue that there isn’t really much use in a field that makes claims that are both not rigorous from the standpoint of logic, and also not tested empirically.
If you would like to challenge me on this stuff, I’m all ears for examples of results from philosophy that are employed in practice, which couldn’t be achieved within a different field (I’d argue that communist ideologies could just be developed through understanding of economics, without much input from philosophy), and which are not things that are employed in order to harm the working class (like, for example, nationalist philosophies used by states that engage in colonialism, in order to justify colonialism).
And no, I do not think that the field of ethics has any sort of serious applications, as things like courts of law do not actually work in accordance with morality - they work in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class, the wishes of the people responsible for the courts directly, and the sources of law and their interpretations (I’d argue, in that order), the latter of which is not the same as a system of ethics.
I will have to put reading your sources into a backlog, though, as I still have a lot of very dense stuff to go through in order to start working on academic research that I want to get published.
but the difficulty and working through the flexibility to find a complete concept is part of the philosophy itself
Can philosophers please stop deliberately obscuring the meaning of what they write?
The difficulty to understand what they write is an artificial element of their works, as far as I can see, i.e. it can be reduced by a lot if they simply start writing with more clarity, using practices that are already widely-adopted elsewhere.
EDIT: A word that I forgot when writing all that: ‘literal’/‘literally’. I think that philosophers should, like academics of other fields, write their works literally. There are reasons why mathematicians don’t make another Yevgeniy Onegin with their every work.
