display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 23872 | 'Society determines consciousness' is contradictory; society only exists in minds [Weil on Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: In the Marxist formula 'social existence determines consciousness' there are more contradictions than words. Since 'social' can only exist in human minds, 'social existence' is already consciousness. It cannot determine consciousness, which is undefined. | |
| From: comment on K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846]) by Simone Weil - Fragments p.126 | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that society only exists in minds. Many children in Victorian London had never heard of 'London', but that didn't stop it existing. Our problems are often social substrata of which we are unaware. |
| 5277 | Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This slogan is the heart of Marxism. It begs the obvious question of what determines (social) life? Aristotle is at least partly right - that some activities and social organisation are 'unnatural', going against the grain of the human 'given'. |
| 4161 | If a lion could talk, we could not understand him [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations [1952], II.xi) | |
| A reaction: How does he know these things?! We could at least know whether they talked or merely grunted, by studying their correlated behaviour. Cf. dolphins. I think he is wrong. All talk is understandable to a degree, even God's. |
| 7392 | If a lion could talk, it would be nothing like other lions [Dennett on Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: I think that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him. | |
| From: comment on Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations [1952], II.xi) by Daniel C. Dennett - Consciousness Explained 14.2 | |
| A reaction: This is rather more sensible than Wittgenstein's famous enigmatic utterance. |