The Auto

"All this is rather superficial, however. I think Ernest Gellner nailed the essentially conservative nature of Wittgenstein's philosophy.

"Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy is hardly a notch above Carnap's dismissal of metaphysics as "bad poetry" or Neurath's metaphysicophobia. The notion of philosophy as language on holiday or as bewitchment by language is infantile. Such a view is itself a metaphysical abstraction and bewitchment by language, divorced from history or any extralinguistic investigation of human cognition. Compared to Adorno's socio-historical conception of philosophy, Wittgenstein is a piss-ant.

"Nor does Wittgenstein have anything in common with Marx, whom you consistently misrepresent. For Marx, philosophy was not a linguistic disease, nor did he limit himself to Feuerbach's framework, though Feuerbach did take the decisive historical step of analyzing idealism as inverted consciousness. For Marx philosophy as practiced his milieu was the "dream history" of Germany, not to be summarily dismissed but to be analyzed in its structure and related to its social genesis.

"The task of doing this for our time is infinitely more complicated, for the interrelationships of science, mathematics, logic, philosophical systems and their connection to alienated, inverted consciousness and social being are not simple and obvious, at least not until one develops a framework in which to place them, and even then there remains the long, hard labor of the negative.

"But Rosa knows nothing of this, for 'she' is obsessed with the childish forms of dialectical materialism to date and knows nothing of the Frankfurt School, for instance, which 'she' summarily dismisses for its lack of engagement in class struggle, preferring instead to weld 'her' sectarian politics mechanically to the banalities of analytic philosophy, in concert against the tired old diamat shibboleths.

"Trotskyism + Wittgenstein: a formula for insanity." [The original can be found here.]

Unfortunately, Mr D has not done his homework (again); Gellner's misconceived and demonstrably flawed review of Wittgenstein's work has been shown up for what it is on many occasions; I suspect Mr D is not aware of the latest 'take down' [Uschanov (2002), a related article can be found here], or perhaps any at all. Not to worry, Gellner (that well-known friend of Marxism) has spoken, and that is sufficient for Mr D.

[August 2007: This is now out-of-date. Mr D has added a Wittgenstein and Marxism Bibliography to his site, but oddly enough only after the publication of my Essay. Now, readers can check: up until that Essay was posted, MR D's opinion of Wittgenstein was very low. The passage above confirms that. Why the change? Why create a Bibliography of an author who Mr D says, with no proof, that Wittgenstein was a conservative thinker? How many other conservative thinkers has he honoured in this way?]

This is all quite independent of the rather bizarre claim that Wittgenstein's ideas were "conservative" (given the expert testimony I posted that refutes this slur), especially when this opinion is advanced by someone keen to defend 2500 years of ruling-class forms-of-thought: our very own lover of Hermetic confusion, Mr D.

The comment on Carnap is equally amusing; however, anyone who wants to know the difference between Carnap and Wittgenstein need only do the opposite of Mr D, and read up on the subject (they will find I give more than enough references in the Essay in question).

Those who have read Mr D's other comments will recognise his penchant for 'infantile' name-calling in place of argument. So, it is enough for him to label Wittgenstein's ideas as "infantile" to warrant consigning them to the dustbin. But, Mr D cannot take me on with any arguments (his devotion to Stone Age Logic has more than seen to that); even his abuse is third-rate.

More-or-less the same can be said of Mr D's attempt to boost Adorno; the word "piss-ant" being a technical term known only to adepts in Hermetic Philosophy, one assumes. It certainly puts me in my place.

"But Rosa knows nothing of this, for 'she' is obsessed with the childish forms of dialectical materialism to date and knows nothing of the Frankfurt School, for instance..."

And yet, Mr D knows, because yours truly has told him (and not just him, everyone else, had he bothered to check, here and here) that I purposely ignore philosophical/political dead-ends like this. Now, Mr D can beat his brains out if he wants to do so, trying to comprehend the tortuous prose such work contains -- the deleterious effects of which he has highlighted for us once more -- but I personally grew out of this academic gobbledygook twenty-odd years ago, in my PhD years.

And, oddly enough, Mr D's own laboured attempts to come to grips with the complex arguments found in Analytic Philosophy is sufficient to warn me not to slide back into the theoretical quagmire that has hold of him, for another twenty.

And now we come to the pièce de résistance; complex algebra from a commensurately advanced intellect:

One small question: if my Essays are so irredeemably flawed, superficially infantile and hopelessly banal, why does this super-sized HCD bother with a them?

Or, is the traditional world he inhabits, where the ideas and thought-forms of the ruling-class are held in high regard, crumbling under my relentless attacks?

Just a thought, but it does help explain all the name-calling, the invention, the bile and the baseless assertions.

Put your aluminium foil helmet back on Mr D; plenty more proletarian materialism coming your way.

Cook, D. (1984), 'Hegel, Marx And Wittgenstein', Philosophy And Social Criticism 10, pp.49-74.

Kitching, G., and Pleasants, N. (2002) (eds.), Marx And Wittgenstein (Routledge).

Uschanov, T. (2002), 'Ernest Gellner's Criticisms Of Wittgenstein And Ordinary Language Philosophy', in Kitching and Pleasants (2002). pp.23-47. A longer version of this paper can be found here.

One of Mr D's side-kicks --, a Mr Charles Brown (who grew rather upset with me when I refused to correspond with him for continually sniping at me without bothering to read my Essays), has produced the following devastating response to a point made in Essay Three Part One -- although, it is clear that Mr B is here merely commenting on excerpts posted by Mr D himself:

[I plan to use this prize example in Essay Twelve to show how even academic Marxists and HCDs are rank amateurs when it comes to logic.]

If this were so, then we would be able to argue as follows (this should not be news to Mr B since I demonstrated this point in the above Essay, which he clearly skim-read, or, if our earlier correspondence is anything to go by, did not bother to read before he felt he could comment on it):

And it will not do to argue that "...is identical with a crook" in each case designates a different crook, perhaps along these lines:

C7: George Bush is a crook = George Bush is identical with that particular crook₂.

L8: So: "...is identical with that particular crook₁" = "...is identical with that particular crook₂."

And do not even begin to ask what the "is" in "....is identical with..." means, or you will soon end up where Lenin did (this is also from that Essay Mr CB omitted to read, precisely here):

Despite this, there are several other serious problems with Lenin's reasoning -- ones that require resolution before questions can even be raised about the support his theses gain from what little evidence there is.

Lenin clearly interpreted the "is" in H1 as an "is" of identity (and later perhaps as an "is" of class inclusion), but because it plainly is not one of identity in the vernacular, he was then able to 'derive' several counter-intuitive conclusions from the incongruity he had thus artificially introduced.³⁹ However, instead of concluding perhaps that Hegel's "genius" had misled him -- or that this was not the only way (or even the most obvious or natural way) to interpret such simple sentences -- Lenin proceeded to weave several lengths of dialectical cloth from these few threads of woolly thought.

The fact that the "is" of H1 is not that of identity can be seen from Lenin's own use of it. Consider one of his sentences:

H5: "[T]he opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are identical."

However, if "is" always indicated identity -- and could be interpreted as an expression of the form "ξ is identical with ζ" -- then we should be able to re-write H4 and H6 in the following manner:

[In H7, the verb "are" (from H6), and in H8 the verb "is" (from H6), have been replaced by "are identical with" and "is identical with", respectively.]

It does not take any dialectical logic at all (and certainly no bourgeois prejudice) to see what nonsense results from this 'brilliant' Hegelian insight. Nor is it difficult to foresee the infinite task Lenin's 'analysis' holds open for anyone who tries to say what the meaning of each "is" (or the meaning of each "are") is that recurs in "is identical with" (or in "are identical with") in H7 and H8, now made explicit in H9 and H10:

H10: The individual is identical with identical with opposed to the universal.^39a

Lest someone thinks this unfair to Lenin, they are invited to try to say for themselves what the "is" in "is identical" itself means.

Neutral onlookers can only wish such hardy souls plenty of luck, and hope they are blessed with boundless patience, limitless supplies of paper and ink -- and, of course, plenty more Prozac.

It is worth recalling, though, that the above challenge only arises because DM-theorists insist that the "is" of predication is really an "is of identity" -- that it is the same as "is identical with". In assuming this (again, with no proof), they themselves have to use another "is" to reveal the good news to the rest of us -- as in:

But the middle "is" in H11 cannot -- ex hypothesi, cannot -- be one of mere predication. It, too, has to be one of identity. In that case we obtain:

H13: The "is" of predication is identical with identical with the "is" of identity.

As each alleged "is" of predication is suitably replaced by an "is identical with" that it is supposed to be identical with itself.

On the other hand, those who hold that the "is" of predication is in reality just that (i.e., one of predication) are not faced with such an infinite and morale-sapping task. This is because they seek neither to revise nor to re-write ordinary material language in such Idealist terms, replacing the ordinary "is" with another sort of "is", one that allows metaphysicians to think they can change predicates into the names of abstract particulars as and when it suites them.

So, when genuine materialists say things like "Blair is a warmonger", they are not saying that Blair is identical to a warmonger (which one?), they are merely saying that the description "warmonger" applies to the individual named "Blair". No "is" anywhere in sight.

Bertrand Russell was right when he said (I paraphrase): "The worse a man's logic the more interesting his metaphysics."

Have we reached the bottom of Mr B's barrel? Only he knows, but from his other comments, I suspect we are going to have to dig way below the base of this barrel; we are about to sink a mine shaft.

"CB: If philosophy is mostly 2500 years of claptrap for the bosses, why is it to Wittgenstein's credit that he is a major philosopher?"

This question is just about at the same level as the standard right-wing jibe: "Why don't you go and live in N Korea/Cuba?"

As usual, Mr B spins an idea of dubious worth around in his head until its angular velocity overcomes the forces of good sense, and out it comes.

Had he bothered to read the Essay he criticises (a tactic he said he would abandon), he'd have seen that for Wittgenstein, Philosophy took on an entirely new meaning (just as socialism did when Marx had finished with it): it became a method aimed at exposing the hot air ruling-class theorists like to produce (my description) -- the kind of stuff that still holds Mr B in its thrall.

So, Mr B, here's a piece of advice (but only if you are capable of reaching the end of this sentence before passing judgement on something else completely unrelated to it): try to learn something about a subject (Wittgenstein) before you begin pontificating.