From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Tue Nov 15 2005 - 13:33:19 EST
---------------------------- Original Message ------------------------ Subject: Marx on Chance in History From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@tiscali.nl> Date: Tue, November 15, 2005 1:23 pm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To my knowledge, Marx did not write the statement as quoted. However, GWF Hegel wrote: "In all necessity (Notwendigkeit) is an element of the accidental (Zufalligen)", which I think Engels quotes in one of his musings about dialectics. "Zufall" also means coincidence. The idea here is, that a process occurring otherwise by necessity may be accompanied or mediated by accidental circumstances which might either advance, retard or modify the process somewhat, without however annulling the necessary movement of events. However, the distinction between the necessary and the accidental aspects might only be identified in retrospect, and to a certain extent this distinction depends on one's own vantage point or the context. Viewed from another perspective or context, what seemed mere accident or coincidence might well be understood as a necessary occurrence in some sense. In general, Marx and Engels seemed to take a rather contemptuous view of magic, both in the sense of rejecting superstitious belief and in the sense of believing that there was a rational, causal explanation to be found for apparently magical phenomena. Thus, we might experience something as "wondrously magical" precisely because we cannot explain the whole concatenation or confluence of events involved (e.g. "it happened like magic"). In this sense, "magical" comes close to "mystical". Personally I do think there is a magical or mystical aspect of life, but a lot depends on how you view it, or when you are receptive to it, i.e. whether you are able to cognize something imaginatively, in order to appreciate the miracle of its occurrence. And often people are not so receptive, because they're too busy with what they deem "necessary". Obviously, if things happen by pure chance (the "magic of the moment") there might not be much we can do about them. Hence the ideological use of the concept of chance: things happen randomly, but we cannot do much about them or explain them, at best we could have a probabilistic guess. Thus, our understanding of chance might affect our perception of what we can and cannot change with our actions. Jurriaan
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