There is no such thing as capitalism.

[John K]

Maybe. The essence of abstractions is in their vagueness.

I remember @John K talking about this in some other context (Taoism maybe). Anything that can be defined absolutely has to be non-material, considering all material is mutable. But at the same time, any absolute definition can still be understood relatively.

The reference from the Tao Te Ching is

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 11

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.​

Lao Tzu is clearly not saying that windows and wheels are indistinguishable but that the shaped void within them is a necessary functional part of them. He leaves us to extrapolate this idea to ourselves and our social, psychological and spiritual situations.

The terms capitalism and communism seem to me to have the same sort of reality as (say) deer and cow. These are receptacles that can be used as templates for testing specific examples to see if they match. I can immediately tell the difference between instances of each of them (as well as recognising their similarities as representative animals, so there is a hierarchy of abstraction). At a naive level, the individuals have an obvious concrete existence and I can’t see the possibility of denying the reality of communism without pondering a similar denial of the classes of cow and deer.

Obviously there isn’t a particular communism in the same way that there is a particular cow. We see particular instances of it though, expressed in the way specific countries structure and manage their societies. This seems to me to be the manifest equivalent of a cow in communist terms. It’s like the hoary old joke - if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck ... then we not only identify what the beastie actually is, but implicitly affirm the abstraction ‘duck’ too.

There could be a fuzziness around the concepts of capitalism and communism that make them less well defined than the class of duck. Mind you animals don’t have clear type boundaries either- I remember seeing two water birds on the canal near us that were exactly like the local ducks but twice their size. They were probably a type of goose that doesn’t normally come our way but they were much smaller than the geese we see regularly and had the shape of ducks not geese.

In the end, does any process of abstract individuation lead to something that is real? I suspect that this is one of those issues that has to be resolved at the axiomatic level rather than by a process of logical analysis. In other words choose your own truth / philosophy on this one? Does it matter, because the function of the terms in day to day usage operates the same way regardless?

 

[Roses In The Vineyard]

Just wondering if anyone here kinda dies inside while watching this. For me it is a sad Pepe.

 

[Ren]

Maybe. The essence of abstractions is in their vagueness.

Just to pursue this for a bit (if you're interested), do you think essence is a concept we can't do without?

Or can we use Ockham's Razor and get rid of it as unnecessary to a lean metaphysics?

 

[Ren]

@wolly.green

Any thoughts on the responses you've gotten so far?

Where were you going with your OP? Any particular direction you'd like us to go?

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

Just to pursue this for a bit (if you're interested), do you think essence is a concept we can't do without?

Or can we use Ockham's Razor and get rid of it as unnecessary to a lean metaphysics?

If essence is something like Kantian thing-in-itself, then I find it at the same time important and useless. Important because it does have epistemic significance, but this might be just the 5 in me speaking with some intellectual vanity - for practical purposes, you still function the same regardless of your knowledge of that process. Which is why it's useless, as we can only ever make judgments based on how a thing appears to us at any given moment. When I was speaking of the essence of the cup it was misleading, as the essence would have to be represented by the totality of the cup, including its present and absent parts that give it its function. This is all in accordance with John's answer.

Whether metaphysics should be simplified is also somewhat misleading, as any metaphysical argument would be incomplete by the merit of making it from within the system, and therefore already too simple. In this case I'm for more simplicity rather than less, as simplicity generates complexity, and complexity generates a childlike wonderment that bids to explore and solve the world when it sees something as inexplicably magical in an otherwise mundane object like a train. When modernity removed metaphysics altogether, it introduced layers of complexity to be untangled by science. The key difference here is that there is nothing eternal in this approach. It's not about ideals anymore, only knowledge. As knowledge accumulated, so did boredom as man grew too large and the world too small. Here's the advent of nihilism, blanket depression and mass existential crisis. All the 'important' things are left to the professionals because we are not educated enough for them, and everyone too educated to see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in a wild flower.

I don't know how to rekindle the interest in metaphysics, but I do know that almost all of the most insightful and wise people who love life, choose to see God in everything. I'm on a roll with Chesterton, so I'll leave with this:

Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man with singularly small views. There is nothing large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children. It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones. The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them. Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban.

 

[Krypton]

There could be a fuzziness around the concepts of capitalism and communism that make them less well defined than the class of duck. Mind you animals don’t have clear type boundaries either- I remember seeing two water birds on the canal near us that were exactly like the local ducks but twice their size. They were probably a type of goose that doesn’t normally come our way but they were much smaller than the geese we see regularly and had the shape of ducks not geese.

I think this is true, especially with communism. Many market socialists, anarcho-communists, etc. would (at least claim to) have a completely different vision of society than say, Stalin.

Similarly, capitalists are often conflated with neoliberals and/or conservatives, but social democracy, even of the Bernie Sanders type, is still capitalism. And when you compare the capitalism in Sweden to the capitalism in, say, the late 1800s U.S., or many modern day third world countries, you get very different things.

While I agree generally with the idea that labels aren't meaningless, the labels of capitalism and communism are way too broad, and used in ways that essentially render them meaningless.

 

[Ren]

Whether metaphysics should be simplified is also somewhat misleading, as any metaphysical argument would be incomplete by the merit of making it from within the system, and therefore already too simple.

I don't think it's necessarily misleading. Assuming all metaphysical discourse is circular, you can have a circular argument which is still better than another circular argument because it is more parsimonious with equivalent descriptive power.

If essence adds nothing to description/explanation, either because it is too vague/opaque or because other concepts already fufill the same role, then maybe we don't need essence at all. So I guess my question was: do you think that the concept of essence captures something about entities that other concepts, such e.g. function, don't already capture.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

If essence adds nothing to description/explanation, either because it is too vague/opaque or because other concepts already fufill the same role, then maybe we don't need essence at all. So I guess my question was: do you think that the concept of essence captures something about entities that other concepts, such e.g. function, don't already capture.

But if essence is too vague how can I know what other concepts capture it?
Function is close enough I guess. I would say essence is something that fundamentally does not change, but its manifestation can differ over time. Like history moving in specific paradigms but different means points to an essence in humanity, but does not pinpoint it. Or that any action of a man stems from instinct (I had a developing theory that there is no such thing as a logical decision in people). From an evolutionary perspective that could be considered a function. This is one of those things that would require an entire book to discuss the specifics to make sure they can be applied universally to any object.

 

[Ren]

ut if essence is too vague how can I know what other concepts capture it?

Haha, well you might have disagreed with me that it is vague, I don't know.

This is one of those things that would require an entire book to discuss the specifics to make sure they can be applied universally to any object.

Agreed.

 

[Tamagochi]

Capitalism and other social organizational systems do not exist as things but they do exist as ideas. Like family, justice and other social constructs.

Objective measurement is a big problem actually. For example wages earned and GDP: we get a sense that they are constantly on the rise but if you convert them to gold standard, they are actually falling for the past 20 years. And you have to work more years to buy a house than 50 years ago. Scandinavian countries like Denmark constantly score highest on subjective happiness levels but they are also top consumers of prescribed antidepressants in the world. Cuba can boast high level of economic equality but the average citizen is poorer than a lower class worker in US.

 

[larry806q]

Since I am tying up bandwidth anyhow.............1. If there is actually no difference and 2. the inference is that Socialism/Marxist is "better" how does that explain the refugee caravans that start out in Venezuela and points south headed to the U.S.? Would it not follow human nature, if the stated thesis is accurate, that the American population would be forming the caravans and heading to Venezuela?

 

[Icedream]

I was going to throw my own two cents in, but Hos and Ren have already said what I wanted to say, in better language than I could ever use.

 

[Roses In The Vineyard]

Since I am tying up bandwidth anyhow.............1. If there is actually no difference and 2. the inference is that Socialism/Marxist is "better" how does that explain the refugee caravans that start out in Venezuela and points south headed to the U.S.? Would it not follow human nature, if the stated thesis is accurate, that the American population would be forming the caravans and heading to Venezuela?

The woke marxists are divorced from reality ignoring the harsh reality their religion has created elsewhere in the world unfortunately the young have been indoctrinated into supporting this so r.i.p to what few freedoms there are while the bulk of the population is squeezed from all sides losing what little they have.