To clarify: you are the one requesting philosophy, including Marx, is done in some other way. I am explaining the value of the way it’s done relative to your preferred method. I also have a math background, I’ve taken all the classes. Your idea of rigour is misplaced, though useful in maths. When a good philosopher writes, they’re not speaking in riddles, it’s maintaining the proper amount of specificity to not err in range of a claim while writing a NEW IDEA for the first time in the way that will lead the reader to understanding it in its totality, not within the framework which the reader had before the work. The form of an argument in math can be simplified and more easily rigorous because there are standards assumptions of number theory and such. There is no such basis in philosophy which one doesn’t need to argue for simultaneously with the arguments at higher levels. Analytic philosophy assumes dialectical claims impossible “a=b and a=/=b”. If we’re talking about form and content, you may be able to use set symbols to get your point across, but set theory doesn’t have an easy way to represent that a is in the set of b but also partially defines b through its own inclusion, and itself is different after its inclusion, as well. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but the fact that the terminology isn’t agreed upon by all makes your idea of rigour very difficult. It’s not just context, it’s arguing about what types of assumptions are even allowed and how those relate in new usages.
I do not believe that you got a 1 line definition to learn cosine and that that was sufficient. It had to be explained how taking the opposite side instead wasn’t correct, that we’re dealing with triangles with 1 right angle (because you, like other kids, probably thought about that possibility for at least a bit), how it won’t change with the size of a triangle, how it was often not a rational number but that that’s fine, etc. It’s drawing the entire playing field and the limits and all related concepts as they relate to it at once. Otherwise you wouldn’t have learned it. Not just context, but underlying connections and to the context and about how the context shifts once you know this!
If you read Capital as a communist having read many other works, it seems unnecessarily long and doesn’t just directly state what you know he wants to say, like hearing a teacher explain to a 12 year old what a cosine is for the first time. When you read it as a non-knowledgeable person on the topic, it’s confusing and contradictory, and yet he seems to be claiming those things are simultaneously true…that is also how kids feel hearing about cosine for the first time. Capital isn’t even the best one here for this example, I’d go with German Ideology. It’s riddled with the same difficulties, but I will stick to Capital for discussion’s sake.
When you work within the framework of other economic disciplines, disproving Marx is absurdly easy. Claim that value is circular logic and that Marx can’t describe how price and value relate. Outside of the framework he’s building, this is obvious. But he’s simultaneously trying to introduce that framework, and just placing definitions that he makes up doesn’t lead the reader to understand his definition. It takes some lines (in Marx, some pages) to get the concept as he is introducing it into the mind of the reader. He also pre-empts as many counter-arguments as possible for even more rigour every time he introduces a concept (this is how Germans wrote works then).
Your example of Marx contradicting himself is a great example. He’s walking through every way that a commodity can be seen so that he can distill precisely what about it makes it a commodity. Is it that it has use-value? Partly, but that doesn’t capture it completely, so then we go to exchange to flesh out it’s more useful and true form to the topic at hand. It may be that you call a stick you found something with “use-value” but that use value has no way to connect to exchange as value, because exchanging it doesn’t make it value in and of itself either. He doesn’t say “that’s not true!” About his own claims, because he means to say that “of course this is true, and this is true also, because I’m stemming from Hegel’s methods where any other way to claim this is more confusing than this way, because the truth doesn’t lie between these facts but in their interaction and movement in exchange!” Remove it from that context and it’s a dumb claim. If you think we’re too removed from Hegel for this method of writing to be useful, find another person who tries to translate it to modern day language, or do it yourself. It’s useful and good work, but I’ve not found too many good translations to modern language and understanding. I’m not going to clip parts of Capital for you, sorry. Maybe another day but its nice weather and I’m reading something else.
I was not calling you a STEM-Lord, I was claiming that the reason that you think what you think is similar to the reason STEM-lords can’t handle philosophy and end up anti-intellectual in the reactionary sense. Your example of taking philosophy and comparing it to engineering is an obvious case of this. Marx wasn’t writing so that anything could be recreated, what would someone even be recreating??? No, he was convincing people of the way that history relates to the present and future and material reality relates to us and our creative labour.
To clarify: you are the one requesting philosophy, including Marx, is done in some other way. I am explaining the value of the way it’s done relative to your preferred method. I also have a math background, I’ve taken all the classes. Your idea of rigour is misplaced, though useful in maths. When a good philosopher writes, they’re not speaking in riddles, it’s maintaining the proper amount of specificity to not err in range of a claim while writing a NEW IDEA for the first time in the way that will lead the reader to understanding it in its totality, not within the framework which the reader had before the work. The form of an argument in math can be simplified and more easily rigorous because there are standards assumptions of number theory and such. There is no such basis in philosophy which one doesn’t need to argue for simultaneously with the arguments at higher levels. Analytic philosophy assumes dialectical claims impossible “a=b and a=/=b”. If we’re talking about form and content, you may be able to use set symbols to get your point across, but set theory doesn’t have an easy way to represent that a is in the set of b but also partially defines b through its own inclusion, and itself is different after its inclusion, as well. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but the fact that the terminology isn’t agreed upon by all makes your idea of rigour very difficult. It’s not just context, it’s arguing about what types of assumptions are even allowed and how those relate in new usages.
I do not believe that you got a 1 line definition to learn cosine and that that was sufficient. It had to be explained how taking the opposite side instead wasn’t correct, that we’re dealing with triangles with 1 right angle (because you, like other kids, probably thought about that possibility for at least a bit), how it won’t change with the size of a triangle, how it was often not a rational number but that that’s fine, etc. It’s drawing the entire playing field and the limits and all related concepts as they relate to it at once. Otherwise you wouldn’t have learned it. Not just context, but underlying connections and to the context and about how the context shifts once you know this!
If you read Capital as a communist having read many other works, it seems unnecessarily long and doesn’t just directly state what you know he wants to say, like hearing a teacher explain to a 12 year old what a cosine is for the first time. When you read it as a non-knowledgeable person on the topic, it’s confusing and contradictory, and yet he seems to be claiming those things are simultaneously true…that is also how kids feel hearing about cosine for the first time. Capital isn’t even the best one here for this example, I’d go with German Ideology. It’s riddled with the same difficulties, but I will stick to Capital for discussion’s sake.
When you work within the framework of other economic disciplines, disproving Marx is absurdly easy. Claim that value is circular logic and that Marx can’t describe how price and value relate. Outside of the framework he’s building, this is obvious. But he’s simultaneously trying to introduce that framework, and just placing definitions that he makes up doesn’t lead the reader to understand his definition. It takes some lines (in Marx, some pages) to get the concept as he is introducing it into the mind of the reader. He also pre-empts as many counter-arguments as possible for even more rigour every time he introduces a concept (this is how Germans wrote works then).
Your example of Marx contradicting himself is a great example. He’s walking through every way that a commodity can be seen so that he can distill precisely what about it makes it a commodity. Is it that it has use-value? Partly, but that doesn’t capture it completely, so then we go to exchange to flesh out it’s more useful and true form to the topic at hand. It may be that you call a stick you found something with “use-value” but that use value has no way to connect to exchange as value, because exchanging it doesn’t make it value in and of itself either. He doesn’t say “that’s not true!” About his own claims, because he means to say that “of course this is true, and this is true also, because I’m stemming from Hegel’s methods where any other way to claim this is more confusing than this way, because the truth doesn’t lie between these facts but in their interaction and movement in exchange!” Remove it from that context and it’s a dumb claim. If you think we’re too removed from Hegel for this method of writing to be useful, find another person who tries to translate it to modern day language, or do it yourself. It’s useful and good work, but I’ve not found too many good translations to modern language and understanding. I’m not going to clip parts of Capital for you, sorry. Maybe another day but its nice weather and I’m reading something else.
I was not calling you a STEM-Lord, I was claiming that the reason that you think what you think is similar to the reason STEM-lords can’t handle philosophy and end up anti-intellectual in the reactionary sense. Your example of taking philosophy and comparing it to engineering is an obvious case of this. Marx wasn’t writing so that anything could be recreated, what would someone even be recreating??? No, he was convincing people of the way that history relates to the present and future and material reality relates to us and our creative labour.