Talk:Essence/Archives/2013

Anti-rationalists added
What I thought lacking and think so still is a brief run-down of how Plato's essence and Aristotle's essence stretch out through all Western thought up to the 19th c. I'll leave that, though, to the folks who study it more than I.  However, I added in the existentialism and Marxism as anti-Hegelian reactions that attacked Hegel at his weakest spot: essence. The Kantian critique (which would make us talk about phenomenology, noumena, and a bunch of other very messy things) I will not mention. I wish, though, that someone good with Spinoza could talk about that corner of the essentialist project. Geogre 03:10, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Marx
Marx definitely used essentialist criteria in early works such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Many scholars would argue he continued to use essentialist reasoning. This section is dangerously misleading. I'll provide support and clarify it soon.--Bkwillwm 07:08, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Removed. Adapted.--Bkwillwm 08:41, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

The article claims that Marx was a "follower" of Hegel and that Hegel was Marx's "master." I thought that Marx had never read very much of Hegel's obscure pronouncements and had only referred to Hegel's so–called "dialectic" because the name sounded impressive. Am I wrong?Lestrade (talk) 21:30, 3 March 2011 (UTC)Lestrade


 * He claimed to be turning Hegel upon his head by creating a materialistic instead of an idealistic theory of dialects of history. So whatever the details of his reading of Hegel, he certainly seems to have seen himself as strongly influenced by Hegel on the one hand and the classical economists (materialists) on the other.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:59, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

016 Here is a quote from Rosa Lichtenstein's webpage that implies Marx's loose association with Hegel's writings: See (10) Note 16

"I criticised the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just when I was working on the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely as a 'dead dog'. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that 'mighty thinker' [Hegel] and even, here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted [toyed, trifled] with the mode of expression [Hegelian Dialectic] peculiar to him." Marx, Capital, Vol. I, (Author's Preface to the Second Edition, January 24, 1878) Penguin, 1976, pp.102-03. Merely in order to be contrary, Marx "avowed" [publicly declared] himself to be a Hegelian scholar and used Hegelian Dialectic in a few passages of Capital merely to show that Hegel was not a 'dead dog.' Lestrade (talk) 21:57, 4 March 2011 (UTC)Lestrade

---

In fact Marx put his declaration (that he was a pupil of that 'mighty' thinker, Hegel) in the past tense. And it's surely possible to call someone a 'mighty thinker' and almost totally disagree with them. For example, I think Plato is a 'mighty thinker' but I disagree with him almost completely. Moreover, on the very same page of the Postface to the second edition of Das Kapital (to that of the quotation Lestrade posted above), Marx added a summary of 'the dialectic method' which contained no trace of Hegel at all:

"After a quotation from the preface to my 'Criticism of Political Economy,' Berlin, 1859, pp. IV-VII, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:

"'The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has.'

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?" [pp.101-02 (Penguin edition). Bold emphases added.]

In the passage that Marx quotes, not one single Hegelian concept is to be found -- no "contradictions", no change of "quantity into quality", no "negation of the negation", no "unity and identity of opposites", no "interconnected Totality", no "universal change" --, and yet Marx calls this the "dialectic method", and says of it that it is "my method". So, Marx's "method" has had Hegel completely excised --, except for the odd phrase or two, here and there, with which he merely "coquetted". In that case, once more, Marx's "dialectic method" more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the Scottish Historical School (of Ferguson, Millar, Robertson, Smith, Hume and Stewart).

By the way, the link you added is out-of-date. It should be this:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2009_01.htm#Marx-And-DM--11

Rosa Lichtenstein (talk) 03:57, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

how does this article contrast with substance theory?
Seems worth asking. There is also an article called Accident (philosophy)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Add ousia to the list of what appear to be over-lapping articles. Can someone give any good reason not to merge them?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Buddhism Contribution made by 149.254.51.40
I found the contribution made by 149.254.51.40 to be unclear and it actually adds nothing to the original text, except to make a claim that there are two (unsourced) dominant lines of interpretation within Buddhism, one of which was the one originally presented - the second of which was not expounded or described by 149.254.51.40. Moreover, the contribution did not appear to be willing to distinguish between the philosophical meaning of essence and it's use as a synonym to mean 'the heart/root of' something outside of any philosophical binding. For those reasons I have expunged the contribution from the article. I am very willing to discuss this further.

Regarding the original current text, I am aware that it also needs sources. They will be provided shortly. (20040302 (talk) 11:44, 22 May 2011 (UTC))


 * In additiona, the contribution made above conflated 'Buddhism' with the views of the Madhyamaka, which were all that was expressed in the original (and current) section. (20040302 (talk) 11:49, 22 May 2011 (UTC))