(Continued from previous post.)
2. Value (quantity)
So, Hegel, by cunning and vague logical operations, passes to quantity. All categories of this transition are based on emphasizing the difference between directly qualitative certainty and that certainty that appears as quantitative.
Diamatics teaches that quantity is the coincidence of qualities at a certain level. That is, strictly speaking, there is no quantity as such in the universe. When we talk about quantity, we are always talking about the quantity of something.
The mystical fog of the Hegelian transition from quality to quantity is precisely connected with the non-recognition of this, although in its logical construction one can see the mediation of quantity by quality. But Hegel did not bring this element of logic to clarity, therefore he preferred the descriptive construction presented above. Almost certainly, this shortcoming is connected with conscious abstraction, the impoverishment of reasoning itself from pure being and nothingness, in which the transition of being-for-itself something to quantity can be represented only on the basis of the opposition of determinateness as a quality (boundary) and determinateness as quantity (boundary indifferent to quality), and when the latter has already gone beyond the limit to infinity. Therefore, Hegel has a monstrously incomprehensible formula for those who did not follow his derivation: quantity is "being-for-itself, which is unconditionally identical with being-for-other ” (NL 197).
Usually, the initial difficulty in understanding Hegelian quantity is due to the obvious presentation of quantity as several things. Naturally, when such an assumption from the sphere of being is applied to some examples from real life, where things not only mentally add up to each other, but also have internal quantitative parameters, this causes difficulty. Therefore, one must understand that being-for-itself, which is unconditionally identical with being-for-other , is an intermediate formulation, even in the system of Hegelian philosophy, suitable only for a certain level of reasoning.
According to Hegel, the quantitative certainty of something is its boundary, which is indifferent to itself and to which something itself is indifferent . We can say that quantity is one of the moments of certainty, along with quality. It arises, firstly, because the infinite prevails over the finite (which is missed by most interpreters of Hegel), and secondly, because qualitative certainty (boundary) exists only as a distinction between something from everything else, which means “existing-for- itself now it is posited in such a way as not to exclude the other, but, on the contrary, affirmatively continue oneself into the last .”
By the way, the fact that Hegel called both qualitative certainty and quantitative certainty a boundary (in the second case, a boundary indifferent to quality) shows that he at least guessed or assumed that quantity is also a quality, simply acting as some kind of sameness.
A simpler and clearer description of the transition to quantity according to Hegel can be represented approximately as follows.
So, we have reached the final something. Its determinateness is its boundary, which, on the positive side, limiting its definition (appointment), acts as an obligation, and on the negative side, linking something with another, acts as a limit. The interrelation of obligation and limit is the finite itself. Further logical movement is possible only in the form of overstepping the limit, because the inner picture of something is completely completed. Going beyond the limit leads us first to bad, and then to true infinity; and we discover that the finite is only a moment of the infinite (perhaps the most important Hegelian thought in the system of the sphere of being). It turns out that it is the infinite that is the true reality.
What can be said about the border in this connection? The boundary must be considered not only as an obligation and a limit, but also as something indifferent to quality in general . It seems to be drowning in infinity, infinity absorbs it, but at the same time, the outlines of something and its qualities remain. The boundary, taken indifferent to quality, is quantity . And now it is necessary to focus only on how quantity relates to quality. To do this, we should look at how many there are, what logical content we can find in it.
Hegel begins his consideration of quantity with PURE QUANTITY - this is such an intermediate category that serves as a guide to further ones. The point is that quantity must first be considered in terms of the indifference of the boundary to something. Such a view gives us the concept of continuity , for nothing else can be said here. Continuity is defined as
“a simple, self-equal relationship with itself, uninterrupted by any boundary and by no exception, but it is not an immediate unity, but a unity for-itself-existing alone” (NL 200).
Something like the continuity of flowing something into another something, and so on ad infinitum. But since the flow occurs from one to another and to many one, this must receive some kind of conceptual expression. Thus, along with continuity, we obtain discreteness. Therefore, in pure quantity one can see the difference between continuity and discreteness and nothing more.
Hegel was a great connoisseur of mathematics, and mathematics had an influence, first of all, on the consideration of the problems of the category of quantity, since quantitative definiteness and spatial forms are its immediate subject. In considering quantity, Hegel is primarily interested in deriving the meaning of mathematical operations.
The course of Hegel's thought is already familiar, the setting of the positive (being) and deepening into the negative as meaningful (nothing), so the assimilation of the category of quantity is much easier.
The category of pure quantity is similar to the category of pure being, it does not give anything except the definition of continuity (analogous to being) and discreteness (analogous to nothing). Thus, everything is both continuous and discrete. Continuity expresses the moment of equality with itself , and discreteness - the moment of inequality with itself .
The unity of continuity and discreteness for us is still quantity. However, the primacy in this unity belongs to continuity, since quantity is derived from being-for-itself something that previously led us to infinity. Here the analogy with being and nothing no longer works, because there we could take nothing and it became being, but here there is already a link between continuity and infinity. This point should not be overlooked and fall into the schematics.
The pure quantity has not yet become a definite quantity, it has no boundary, since we are still looking from the point of view of the indifference of the boundary to something. The mathematical expression of a pure quantity is the abstraction "straight line" and "plane". They are both continuous and discrete at the same time. A straight line is a line of infinite points, and a plane is a surface of parallel lines. Generally speaking, a point in geometry has the same properties, it's just that mathematics artificially assigns it to be indivisible. True, the absolute simplicity, finiteness and compositionlessness of a point will express the next category - continuous and discrete VALUE, namely the unit.
The transition to the value occurs as follows. In pure quantity, the unity of continuity and discreteness is posited only "in the definition of continuity." But what if we consider this unity, “put it down” from the standpoint of discreteness, that is, consider the boundary, which is indifferent to quality, from the point of view of the still existing connection with something? We get a continuous value - it will be a direct quantity.
Let me explain. We have a continuity of pure quantity, which is indifferent to something. But nevertheless, in this continuity there is also a moment of negation - something passes into another something and so on ad infinitum, that is, discreteness is observed. Now we look at the same process from the "back side", from the point of view of discreteness, just as we revealed the certainty of existence, considering everything that follows from nothing. In this case, we get a chain of something continuously passing into each other, that is, some continuous quantity or direct quantity .
In this case, the pure quantity is not mediated, but the magnitude is not direct. The word "immediate" is used here to mean that consideration of a pure quantity has led us to some immediate result, a continuous quantity.
And now Hegel’s cunning and yet another ingenious logical move: since the discreteness we have taken does not lose continuity, that is, it is discontinuity, but uninterrupted , which means that the resulting value is a collection of many alone as equal , “ not many alone in general, but posited as many of some single UNIT ".
So, one more time. Quantity has two moments: continuity and discreteness. We take the quantity from the discrete side and get a continuous value . What at this moment in continuity does this boundary delimit? Units. As a result, we get some discrete value . However, neither continuous nor discrete quantities can be taken separately, they are posited as a single quantity , which has both continuity and discreteness.
Indeed, if you imagine a certain sum not just as a quantity - a term of its constituent parts - but as a unity of continuity and discreteness, then after reflection you will notice that, firstly, the quantity is made up of equal elements (units), and secondly, that this unit is infinitely decomposable into smaller units, thirdly, that beyond this magnitude there is nothing but the same units. Of course, the concept of quantity is still very abstract and not suitable for simple counting, although it covers its mechanics.
“Continuous and discrete quantities are not yet definite quantities; they are only quantity itself in each of its two forms” (NL 218).
Now we have, on the one hand, a pure quantity - a very strong logical category of being that goes to infinity, on the other hand, a direct quantity - a quantity that is not yet a definite quantity, but only an approach to it. We need to dig further into discreteness.
So, we remember that quantity is generally indifferent to quality, but it is still a limit. She is currently delimiting units. Thus, peering into discreteness, we see not only a unit, but also a certain set of units . From whatever side we approach this conclusion, in the end we will have to admit that we have before us a certainty of magnitude (direct quantity). That is, we have received the certainty of something, connected with another, many and infinity, but which is not a quality of something and is indifferent to it. A definite value differs from a pure quantity primarily in that it can be increased or decreased, that is, it has certainty and dynamics in this certainty.
By the way, Hegel correlates the category of pure quantity with the concepts of matter, space and time:
“The absolute is pure quantity—this understanding of the absolute coincides in general with the one according to which the absolute is given the definition of matter, in which the form, although present, is an indifferent determination. Quantity also constitutes the basic definition of the absolute, when the latter is understood in such a way that in it, as absolutely indifferent to difference, any difference is only quantitative. As examples of quantity, one can, in addition, take also pure space, time, etc., since the real is understood as their content, indifferent to space and time ”(EFN 170).
Of course, such a view is inherent in Hegel as an idealist, for he initially denied the axiom of the materiality of the universe.
The most important characteristic of a certain quantity is that it, as a set of units, excludes all other definitions (units), therefore it is a limited quantity (EFN 174).
Hegel liked to explain that a certain quantity is the actual existence of quantity, by analogy with the existence of existence from the chapter on quality. In this sense, pure quantity = pure being, repulsion = pure nothing, continuity (which can also be represented as attraction) = being, and discreteness (as a development of repulsion) = nothing. Therefore, a determinate quantity is a one-sided (in terms of discreteness) taken unity of continuity and discreteness, which appears as immediate and simple. In principle, this is how it turns out, a certain quantity is a completely direct and simple limited number of units. True, if you look closely at the unit itself, it can be decomposed to infinity. Qualitative certainty, however, was not represented by something so crystallized, so this analogy, in my opinion, is conditional.
Logical exercises about the magnitude can also be turned using the numerical axis.
A certain quantity (continuous and discrete quantity), in contrast to a pure quantity, already has a fixed limit in itself , a certainty that limits the units taken. Continuity here is no longer manifested in the endless transition of one something into other somethings, but directly in one, in the unit . Discreteness is manifested in the fact that a certain amount is a set (of one) . Consequently, the unity of continuity and discreteness, in addition to being a certain amount (value), also excludes everything else, limits. Thus, a certain quantity in its final form is a NUMBER.
“The complete positing [of a certain amount] lies in the existence of the boundary as a multitude and, therefore, in its difference from unity. A number is therefore represented as a discrete quantity, but it also has continuity in the form of a unit. Therefore, it is a definite quantity in perfect determinateness, since in number the boundary appears in the form of a definite multitude, which has as its principle one, i.e., something unreservedly determined. Continuity, in which the one is only in itself, as sublated (posited as a unit), is a form of indeterminacy.
Everything according to Hegel is logical: being (pure quantity and continuity) into nothingness (quantitative definiteness and discreteness) is contained in a removed form.
To be continued…
A. Redin
https://prorivists.org/sol/#p10
Google Translator
Don't think I'll post the Q&A, it is at the link, in Russian. As earlier stated, I dunno about the usefulness of this machine translation. I've found Hegel very tough sledding in English and honestly can't tell if the machine is causing problems or not. Goddamn philosophy... why couldn't this be easy like Epicurius?
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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
Epicurus. Photo: Jamie Heath / CC BY-SA 3.0. Parthenon, Athens. (Photo: Weekend Wayfarers / Flickr / CC BY 2.0)
The birth of dialectics in Ancient Greece
Originally published: Counterfire on August 27, 2023 by Sean Ledwith (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Sep 02, 2023)
Marx and Engels both had a lifelong interest in the ideas, events and personalities of ancient Greece. Conventional historians often like to talk about the so-called ‘Greek Miracle’ lasting from about 700-300 BCE in which many of the foundational concepts of the Western world first emerged. Pioneering developments in disciplines as diverse as architecture, drama, philosophy, poetry, political science, and sculpture were made by creative geniuses such as Euripides, Phidias, Socrates and Aristotle who remain the starting points for study in their respective fields. The era also witnesses dramatic political upheavals including the rise of Athenian democracy, its clashes with the Persian Empire and the Spartan state and the climactic hegemony of Alexander the Great.
Marx was intrigued by the philosophical problem of why this era, perhaps above all other pre-capitalist ones, retained its appeal in the modern world:
The difficulty we are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal. Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur? Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the immature stage of the society in which it originated. On the contrary, its charm is a consequence of this and is inseparably linked with the fact that the immature social conditions which gave rise, and which alone could give rise, to this art cannot recur.
Built on slavery
As materialists, Marx and Engels were clear-eyed that the undoubted epochal achievements of antiquity were rooted in a merciless and rapacious system of human slavery which condemned the bulk of the population to grinding misery so that an exploitative stratum, including the aforementioned personalities, had the time and leisure to develop their revolutionary concepts and techniques. Engels writes:
It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and thereby also Hellenism, the flowering of the ancient world. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised.
No miracle
Also as materialists, Marx and Engels understood that the achievements of the Greek Miracle were the consequence of a conjuncture of social and economic forces converging in the Eastern Mediterranean at a particular historical point, and not due to any supposed superiority of Western values, as bourgeois historians in the 18th and 19th centuries had argued. Greece and its associated islands in the Aegean Sea were ideally situated to benefit from the intersection of trade in both goods and ideas that flowed between the neighbouring civilisations of Egypt, Babylon and India as the Iron Age supplanted the Bronze Age round about 800 BCE.
These societies were more economically advanced but their predominantly flat geographical terrain made them vulnerable to top-down control by oppressive and powerful monarchies. As a largely mountainous territory, Greece in contrast, was harder for rulers to establish expansive hegemony and the linked islands developed efficient navies to protect their independence. Money had emerged in Asia Minor during this era, allowing the maritime economies of the Greeks to expand and prosper.
Ionian revolution
Significantly, it was in Ionia on what we call the west coast of Turkey that philosophy first developed. The coastal port of Miletus, in particular, was home to a remarkable sequence of thinkers who collectively created an unprecedented materialist view of the universe; that is to say, one which underplayed or even eliminated religion as a factor in the conception of the natural world. The city, and the surrounding region at this time became the site of intensified class struggle between the new class of merchants and traders who challenged the political power of established control of landowning aristocracies. This added to the intellectual and economic ferment that stimulated the rise of the school of Milesian materialism, pioneered by Thales who lived from about 640 to 546 BCE.
Although our knowledge about him is extremely scanty, ancient sources record that Thales remarkably predicted the solar eclipse that took place in 585, a remarkable testament to the astronomical and mathematical advances that accompanied the expansion of commerce and navigation in the Aegean at this time. Unsurprisingly in light of his location, the foundation of Thales’ materialism was a belief that water is the basis of all things in nature. Like all the Milesian materialists, Thales’ brilliant intuition may seem simplistic to our sophisticated scientific outlook in the 21st century but considering the crucial importance of water in the development of life on Earth and in our own bodies it represents a huge step forward in loosening the grip of religious dogma.
One of Thales’ relatives and pupils, Anaximander, brilliantly anticipated the Darwinian view of evolution many centuries before the great Victorian scientist by highlighting the interaction of quantitative and qualitative change in all living and non-living things: ‘It is the principle of all becoming and passing away; at long intervals infinite worlds or gods rise out of it and again they pass away into the same.’ Common to the Milesians, Anaximander based his supposition not merely on abstract reasoning on close observation of nature, particularly how the fossil record indicated the existence of many species which although long extinct had contributed in some way to the surviving life forms on the planet.
Pristine simplicity
The last of the great early Ionian materialists, Anaximenes, postulated that modulations of air were the primary building blocks of the universe. Again, an inspired guess in light of our current understanding about the critical role of hydrogen in the early history of the universe. Engels neatly observed how the unadorned directness of the Milesians was at once the source of both their greatness and their ultimate limitation:
Here dialectical thought still appears in its pristine simplicity… Among the Greeks–just because they were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature–nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, on account of which it had to yield later to other modes of outlook on the world. But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents.
The Ionian materialists laid the foundations for the next wave of Greek philosophers who overlapped with the revolutionary events in Athens which famously brought the world’s first democracy to power. In 508 BCE a coalition of merchants, small property owners and indebted peasants coordinated an uprising in the city that expelled the Pisastratids, a family of tyrants, and initiated a framework of popular participation and voting which represented the peak of political development in antiquity. The democracy of the following 5th and 4th centuries was limited by modern standards-excluding women, foreigners and slaves-but still was a huge advance on the absolute monarchies which dominated previous societies.
Lenin on Heraclitus
The first of the truly dialectical thinkers to emerge in the Aegean region was Heraclitus who lived from c 540-483 BCE and resided in Ephesus in modern Turkey. His seminal idea about change being a fundamental aspect of reality reflects the intensified class struggle of this crucial era. He is probably the best known of these Presocratic thinkers with his famous aphorism that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ frequently cited even today. Heraclitus explicitly rejected the existence of the gods and proposed fire as the primordial element of the universe: ‘This one order of things was created by none of the gods, nor yet by any of mankind, but it ever was, and is, and ever shall be eternal fire-ignited by measure and extinguished by measure.’
His emphasis on strife or conflict as an essential and ever-present factor in all aspects of nature was a significant influence, centuries later, on the thinking of Marx and Engels about the centrality of class struggle in human societies. Heraclitus writes: ‘We must know that struggle is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.’ Lenin also hailed Heraclitus as one of the trailblazers of dialectics for this underscoring of how the clash of conflicting forces is the dynamo of progress at all levels:
For the One is that which consists of two opposites, so that when cut into two the opposites are revealed. Is not this the proposition that the Greeks say their great and famous Heraclitus placed at the head of his philosophy and gloried in it as a new discovery.
Marx and the Atomists
The most important of the Greek philosophers, as far as the fathers of Marxism are concerned, were Democritus and Epicurus. As a student in Germany in the early 1840s, Marx focused his doctoral dissertation on a comparison of these two great thinkers. At this point in his life, Marx of course was yet to fully develop the theoretical system that would come to be associated with his name, but this work was one of the avenues of thought that would lead him towards revolutionary socialism a few years later. Democritus was the pioneer of atomic theory, writing about 460-370 BCE. Incredibly without any scientific equipment, Democritus speculated that the whole of nature is composed of invisible and indivisible particles of matter which are in constant motion and interaction through the void, which he first described as atoms. Our modern understanding of the sub-atomic world means that the Democritean framework looks simplistic but his fundamental insight about the essential building blocks of nature remains a cornerstone of physics.
From philosophy to politics
Marx recognised the great achievement of Democritus but valued Epicurus, who lived a few decades later, as even more important in his ideas. For the latter, atoms are the unseen components of nature but their activity is not deterministic or mechanistic as Democritus suggested. For Epicurus, autonomy and chance play significant roles in the movements of atoms. As young Marx was inching his way towards a version of historical materialism which emphasised human agency as a force in history, his preference for Epicurus over Democritus becomes comprehensible. As Marx wrote in his doctoral thesis:
The deviation of the atom from the straight line is not an accidental feature in the physics of Epicurus… Just as the atom frees itself from its relative existence, the straight line, by setting it aside, by withdrawing from it, so the whole Epicurean philosophy withdraws from the limitative mode of being, wherever the abstract notion of individuality, autonomy and the negation of relativity in all its forms find expression in it.
This, of course, is not the clearest expression of Marx’s breakthrough emphasis on the self-emancipation of the working class but his promotion here of Epicurus’ more dynamic model of the atom is an embryonic version of what would emerge as the distinctively Marxist belief in the ability of human beings to be the subjects, and not just the objects of history.
https://mronline.org/2023/09/02/the-bir ... nt-greece/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
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Death, the Crisis of Meaning, and Capitalism
SEPTEMBER 4, 2023
By Carlos L. Garrido – Sep 3, 2023
The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
– The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Death as the nexus for the possibility of meaning in human life
In This Life, the philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:
To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost (2019, 44).
Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in book five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity which has detained Odysseus for seven years). In the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return with them.
In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism), where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding” (Kierkegaard 1985, 75).
Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society our dominant mode of experience is having – we are what we have and what we consume (Fromm 1976, 26-7). In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into Cōnsūmere ergo sum (I consume; therefore, I am). The world is turned into a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment – whose real and well-hidden telos is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities –becomes life’s prime want (Mbembe 2004, 394). An Island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good – a heavenly Island.
But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why?
Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but – insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality – it would have also been meaningless.
Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life (1962, 307). It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.
Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.
As Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 masterpiece Troy has Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) say: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
The crisis of meaning and bourgeois finitude
While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.
We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago the acronym that grasped the zeitgeist of the U.S. was ‘YOLO,’ which stood for You Only Live Once. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?
But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor).[1] These are profound crisis at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.
In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, even things like chronic illness, which in many cases can be traced back to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order, are anything but normal – in fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible (Mate 2022, 7). Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world” (Mate 2022, 23). This is, in essence, another form of the same crisis Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century.
In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus in those few hours of the days were – although feeling the lingering affects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements – which studies have shown to take up, on average, four years of our lives – is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst.
Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class, indubitably, is amongst the most indebted in the history of humanity. This form of debt-slavery which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle-classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in the third volume of Capital the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself” (Khrachvik 2024; Marx 1974, 609). This has ushered into world-history a new form of superexploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, super, or doubly, exploited.
How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society (Frankl 1985, 164). But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe these crises?
A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications” (Mate 2022, 8). The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, xii)? Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence in they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt – either consciously or not – the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality-analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities (Garrido 2022, 34-40).
A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions they’re forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the ‘hard’ sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be ‘above’ philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies” (Engels 2012, 213). “Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, 4). A re-grounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and – necessarily – a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails.[2]
Finding meaning in the struggle for a new world
The point which I would like to get across here is the following: the crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of ‘culture’ or ‘individual accountability’. While it manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order.
This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. It merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining ‘cultural’ in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this – to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality.
It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. In the fringes of quotidian society there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in their family life, in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.
However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against a world which systematically produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in the history of our species have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, V. I. Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying.
But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rumble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction (Morris 1884). We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future which obliterates poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature” (Guevara 1969 162).
Footnotes
[1] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article: “Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-ma ... l-garrido/
[2] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones, there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (See: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”). An elaboration of these critiques is beyond the goals of this brief paper, I recommend interested readers to read the article referenced above from more of my work in that area.
References
Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” Public Culture 16(3): 373–405.
Carlos L. Garrido, “Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-ma ... l-garrido/
Carlos L. Garrido, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022).
Carlos L. Garrido, “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis,” Science for the People (September 09, 2022): https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.or ... -analysis/
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).
Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harpers and Row Publishers, 1976).
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Publication, 2012).
Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing In a Toxic Culture (London: Vermilion, 2022).
Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974).
Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1962).
Noah Khrachvik, Reproletarianization: The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024 Forthcoming).
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985).
Willaim Morris, “A Factory as It Might Be,” Justice (May 17, 1884), 2, Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris ... 0fact1.htm
SEPTEMBER 4, 2023
By Carlos L. Garrido – Sep 3, 2023
The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
– The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Death as the nexus for the possibility of meaning in human life
In This Life, the philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:
To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost (2019, 44).
Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in book five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity which has detained Odysseus for seven years). In the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return with them.
In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism), where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding” (Kierkegaard 1985, 75).
Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society our dominant mode of experience is having – we are what we have and what we consume (Fromm 1976, 26-7). In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into Cōnsūmere ergo sum (I consume; therefore, I am). The world is turned into a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment – whose real and well-hidden telos is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities –becomes life’s prime want (Mbembe 2004, 394). An Island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good – a heavenly Island.
But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why?
Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but – insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality – it would have also been meaningless.
Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life (1962, 307). It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.
Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.
As Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 masterpiece Troy has Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) say: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
The crisis of meaning and bourgeois finitude
While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.
We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago the acronym that grasped the zeitgeist of the U.S. was ‘YOLO,’ which stood for You Only Live Once. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?
But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor).[1] These are profound crisis at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.
In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, even things like chronic illness, which in many cases can be traced back to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order, are anything but normal – in fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible (Mate 2022, 7). Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world” (Mate 2022, 23). This is, in essence, another form of the same crisis Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century.
In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus in those few hours of the days were – although feeling the lingering affects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements – which studies have shown to take up, on average, four years of our lives – is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst.
Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class, indubitably, is amongst the most indebted in the history of humanity. This form of debt-slavery which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle-classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in the third volume of Capital the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself” (Khrachvik 2024; Marx 1974, 609). This has ushered into world-history a new form of superexploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, super, or doubly, exploited.
How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society (Frankl 1985, 164). But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe these crises?
A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications” (Mate 2022, 8). The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, xii)? Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence in they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt – either consciously or not – the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality-analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities (Garrido 2022, 34-40).
A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions they’re forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the ‘hard’ sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be ‘above’ philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies” (Engels 2012, 213). “Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, 4). A re-grounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and – necessarily – a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails.[2]
Finding meaning in the struggle for a new world
The point which I would like to get across here is the following: the crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of ‘culture’ or ‘individual accountability’. While it manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order.
This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. It merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining ‘cultural’ in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this – to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality.
It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. In the fringes of quotidian society there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in their family life, in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.
However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against a world which systematically produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in the history of our species have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, V. I. Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying.
But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rumble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction (Morris 1884). We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future which obliterates poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature” (Guevara 1969 162).
Footnotes
[1] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article: “Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-ma ... l-garrido/
[2] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones, there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (See: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”). An elaboration of these critiques is beyond the goals of this brief paper, I recommend interested readers to read the article referenced above from more of my work in that area.
References
Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” Public Culture 16(3): 373–405.
Carlos L. Garrido, “Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-ma ... l-garrido/
Carlos L. Garrido, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022).
Carlos L. Garrido, “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis,” Science for the People (September 09, 2022): https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.or ... -analysis/
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).
Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harpers and Row Publishers, 1976).
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Publication, 2012).
Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing In a Toxic Culture (London: Vermilion, 2022).
Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974).
Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1962).
Noah Khrachvik, Reproletarianization: The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024 Forthcoming).
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985).
Willaim Morris, “A Factory as It Might Be,” Justice (May 17, 1884), 2, Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris ... 0fact1.htm
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
John Dewey
Book review: ‘Pragmatism versus Marxism’
Originally published: Workers' Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores on February 2, 2024 by Cooper Bard (more by Workers' Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores) (Posted Feb 05, 2024)
The Pragmatic viewpoint emerged organically from the special conditions of American [U.S.] historical development. It came to flourish as a normal mode of approaching the world and reacting to its problems because the same social environment that shaped the American people likewise created an atmosphere favoring the growth of pragmatism. It permeated the habits, sentiments, and psychology of the American people and their component classes long before receiving systemic formulation by professional philosophers.
— George Novack
Written by Marxist philosopher George Novack (1905-1992) and published in 1975 by Pathfinder Press, “Pragmatism versus Marxism: An appraisal of John Dewey’s Philosophy” sought to explain the origins, emergence, class basis, and norms of pragmatism, which has been the predominant mode of thought in U.S. intellectual and political life.
“What is pragmatism? First, pragmatism is what pragmatism does. It is the habit of acting in disregard of solidly based scientific rules and tested principles. Pragmatic people rely not upon laws, rules, and principles that reflect the determinate features and determining factors of objective reality, but principally upon makeshift, rule-of-thumb methods, and improvisations based on what they believe might be immediately advantageous,” writes Novack.
Pragmatism, properly considered, is the philosophical outlook of modern liberal reformism, which seeks to reform the U.S. capitalist system into a more egalitarian society. Pragmatism was progressive during the rise of U.S. capitalism, and earnest in its opposition to inequalities, but since the maturation of monopoly capitalism, has adapted itself to the interests of the capitalist plutocracy and U.S. imperialism.
Novack called pragmatism “America’s national philosophy,” not in the sense of being a state-sanctioned ideology, but rather in the fact that pragmatism, as a mode of thought, permeates all thinking about politics, ethics, civil society, history, logic, and physics. Pragmatism and its effects on U.S. life can therefore be found everywhere, from the practice of (capital “D”) Democratic politicians to (lower case “d”) democratic movements, from the reformist concept of “pressure groups” to more radical direct action. Pragmatic logic is even found in nominally “conservative” thought.
“Pragmatism versus Marxism” teaches that the progressive and liberal movements in the United States are equally informed by, and limited by, the outlook of pragmatism. To explain this, Novack references the activism, career, and writings of John Dewey (1859-1952), arguably one of the most influential philosophers in U.S. history and also the grandfather of U.S pragmatism. Throughout the book he contrasts Dewey’s philosophical system to Marxism, on issues of logic, science, history, the class struggle, and the pursuit of knowledge (Novack often uses the terms “Deweyism,” “pragmatism,” and “instrumentalism” interchangeably). Novack also references a large number of U.S. commentators, from politicians to philosophers to activists, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, reflecting on both John Dewey and many aspects of pragmatism.
The first five chapters of the book lay out for the reader a clear understanding of the class origins of pragmatism in relation to U.S. history, particularly as the intellectual expression of a middle-class progressive movement in the U.S. Novack writes, “The ever harsher domination of the capitalist oligarchy [after the Civil War years] encountered resistance all along the way from the mass of Americans.” He continues, “The mainstream of political opposition came from the Populist-Progressive movements, which had its direct social bases in the middle-class elements of the country and the city.” During this time, working-class radicalism was in its infancy and revolutionary voices were exceedingly rare. Often, the working class directly contributed to liberal reform movements against the rising capitalist oligarchy, reform movements under the control and direction of the middle class.
Novack discusses Dewey’s relationship to this progressive movement, his upbringing during the post-Civil-War era, and his education in a university system itself grappling with the residues of puritanism, and from this, the main currents of philosophical and political thought that informed Dewey. The middle chapters of the book contrast Marxism to pragmatism on a number of important philosophical issues, including logical method (dialectics vs. metaphysics), the nature of science (theoretical vs. instrumentalist), the relationship between experience and reality (materialism vs. idealism), and more, as well as the history of the development of logic from the time of Aristotle.
According to Dewey, science is purely the experimental use of instruments to arrive at functional conclusions, but does not reveal anything about the nature of reality. Novack notes that instrumentalism has a place in science, but cannot replace it. He points out specifically how it fails in science, where materialism succeeds.
Here and elsewhere in the book, Novack observes that pragmatism is a logic very conformable for the industrial and financial capitalists, whose social role is to run a business to acquire profits, and have little interest in a systemic worldview in comparison to Marxism. Conversely, he shows why pragmatism is a very poor tool for a working class trying to create the foundations of a new society, and how the Marxist viewpoint on all of these philosophical issues is of vital aid to the working class. This is also true on social and ethical problems, which is the main focus of the latter seven chapters of the book. Novack’s remarks on the pragmatic view of society, in Chapter 10 on “History, Society, and Politics”, are very notable here, for they outline what is essentially the modern liberal/reformist view.
The social order [as Novack quotes Dewey] is composed of “societies, associations, groups of an immense number of kinds, having different ties and instituting different interests. They may be gangs, criminal bands, clubs for sport, sociability and eating; scientific and professional organizations; political parties and unions within them; families; religious denominations, business partnerships and corporations; and so on in an endless list. The associations may be local, nation-wide, and trans-national.”
Novack continues,
This picture of society as a loosely woven tissue of diverse groups without organic relation to one another is superficial and misleading. Society is not the sum of separately functioning groups overlapping and interacting in a haphazard manner. Each historical type of society forms a definite whole in which its component members have a specific connection with one another.
The importance of this today is reflected in the fact that revolutionaries will have to contend with liberal forces who look to society as more or less equal groups who all appeal as “equal citizens” to a government machine that facilitates justice and can inherently be swayed one way or the other. The government machine can be reformed if pressure groups talk to the right politicians—such is liberalism. The revolutionary (and the whole working class searching for answers) must, on the contrary, see the government as an obstacle that serves the capitalist class and that must be smashed.
A similar effect can be seen with the pragmatists’ view of reforming education, which fails because pragmatism is blind to the realities of class exploitation. Novack provides a balance sheet of “progressive education,” in which the good intentions of liberal reformism, its desire to free humanity with education, are clearly on display (as well as the aforementioned pragmatic view of society). But because of pragmatic limitations and their inherent belief in capitalism, they were bound to fail.
Novack also takes a look at John Dewey’s own political record to demonstrate the perfidy of pragmatism. Dewey during peacetime was antiwar, but when war broke out, he was resolutely behind the capitalist governments waging war. Novack contrasts Dewey’s legacy to the ex-pragmatist Randolph Bourne, who (before his untimely death) became a socialist precisely because of the war. In the concluding chapters, Novack brings together the main lines of analysis and the clear differences, in methods, conclusions, and applicability, between Marxism and pragmatism. Why hasn’t the pragmatist view led to the liberation of society? Why, in essence, has liberalism failed? Novack contends that for the U.S. working class to achieve a true and fuller democracy, and to counter the great ethical challenges of the age, they require the tools of Marxism, not pragmatism.
In all, “Pragmatism versus Marxism” is an excellent historical, philosophical, and political treatment of one of the most fundamental and important aspects of thought in the United States, and many of its conclusions are still relevant to the future of humanity today. Novack offered a clear and educational look at pragmatism which modern revolutionaries can benefit from.
https://mronline.org/2024/02/05/150159/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
Dialectics, Science and Naturalism: An Outline
Originally published: Dialectical Systems on August 8, 2023 by Rasmus S. Haukedal (more by Dialectical Systems) | (Posted Feb 14, 2024)
Introduction
The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored it, the latter where ‘pro-science’ but also sought to determine the limits of science within capitalism. 1
This was not meant to undermine the cognitive validity of scientific result. Scientific results are related to society at large yet have inherent dynamics that exists in relative autonomy from this embeddedness. Hence, the dialectical approach to science is neither externalist nor internalist, but about the constitutive dialectics between the internal workings of science and the society in which it finds itself.
Science is not an innocent activity, performed outside society. Lewontin and Levins write: ‘To do science is to be a social actor, whether one likes it or not, in political activity’ (1985: 4). Denying this fact is itself political, and it implicitly provides support to the prevailing system. Yet, even if science has been commodified, it is still highly important. As Richard Levins puts it: ‘When we say that all science is class science, that is not equivalent to saying that all scientific claims are lies. Class science can give powerful and valid insights into the world but within certain boundaries and restrictions’ (Levins 1981: 9).
What is the Purpose of Science?
We could say that contexts constrain but do not determine the cognitive veracity of research. This implies that a dialectical understanding of its relation to society is required. Of course, some contexts are more conducive to scientific progress, but even the narrow confines imposed by market imperatives cannot halt the forward march of science, even if it might slow it down.
Also, views that are ignored for a period, might gain traction when the context changes, and science also contributes to such a change (Kosambi 1957). The relationship between science and society is complex and nonlinear. In line with Desmond Bernal (1939), science is not directly productive—aiming at producing an economic surplus—but reproductive, aimed at the reproduction of the processes that enable our societies to function and survive. In this view, it represents use value instead of exchange value (Lewontin and Levins 1987). It does not imply that science should uncritically contribute to whatever system is in place—suggesting a technocratic view of science, where the scientists are detached from the rest of society. If this happens, science becomes what Lewontin (1991) named a ‘institution of social legitimation.’ This shrinks the freedom enjoyed by the scientist, as she must simply accept the context in which she finds herself.
It also makes the ethical responsibilities and philosophical basis of scientist seem irrelevant (Raju 2022). It makes science more about production that reproduction—more about supporting the status quo ante than questioning it. As such, the scientist is alienated and proletarianised.2 By contrast, the view that scientist have a responsibility, ‘to insist upon the truth’ and to ‘see events in their historical perspective’ (Chomsky 1967), entails that science should seek to further the continued reproduction of society. It should ground the aims of science democratically in the needs of the people, not the interests of the prevailing social and economic system. This is simultaneously a liberation of science:
“Only in science planned for the benefit of all mankind, not for bacteriological, atomic, psychological or other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He belongs to the forefront of that great tradition by which mankind raised itself above the beasts, first gathering and storing, then growing its own food; finding sources of energy outside its muscular efforts in the taming of fire, harnessing animals, wind, water, electricity, and the atomic nucleus. But if he serves the class that grows food scientifically and then dumps it in the ocean while millions starve all over the world, if he believes that the world is over-populated and the atom-bomb a blessing that will perpetuate his own comfort, he is moving in a retrograde orbit, on a level no beast could achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor” (Kosambi 1957)
Such a democratisation also requires scientific literacy. To make everyone a ‘reasonable sceptic’ as Lewontin (1991) says, we cannot glorify science as another religion, nor dismiss it cynically. Science is too important to be left for the experts.
Science is a process; it is about change, not stasis. And it has the capacity to alter the scene on which it emerges. This indicates another aim than short-term profit: ‘The real task is to change society, to turn the light of scientific inquiry upon the foundations of social structure’ (Kosambi 1957). It echoes Marx’s understanding of science as a revolutionary force. If scientists find that the reproduction of society is threatened by the prevailing socioeconomic model, it has an obligation to criticise this society, and their own complicity in its development. If scientists disavow such findings, or delink them from historical and societal context, their analysis becomes too shallow and unsystematic to have any scientific value. Against this, science must seek to understand its conditions of existence scientifically (Raju 2021).
The legitimate critique of positivism or scientism does not warrant dismissal of science as such. Disregarding natural science means undermining the critical potential of the dialectical approach at a time when its resources are direly needed. Instead, we should seek to identify the points at which science turns into ideology—grasping how ‘wrong theoretical assumptions may eventually lead to useful previsions and right performances, until a threshold of accumulating contradictions is reached’ (Bizzarri and others 2017: 13).
The ideal suggested here does not entail making use of scientific results to confirm philosophical concepts, as if philosophy is outside science and untouched by it; nor does it mean passively accepting empirical findings at face value. Instead, it means dealing with tensions in how scientist interpret them and the theories that inform their views. We must unearth how philosophy operates within science and aim to contribute to its further development from the inside. This entails making scientists aware of the theoretical assumptions behind their views and the vagueness that many of them exhibit (Soto and Sonnenschein 2021).
Weak Nature and Metabolic Rift
Does science itself, as one such social institution, and as one set of cultural practices, remain the same within this different kind of naturalism?
(Gallagher 2018: 117)
Let us turn to nature. Lewontin held that the ideological biases of biology ‘prevent a rich understanding of nature and prevent us from solving the problems to which science is supposed to apply itself’ (1991: 15). This introduces a false dichotomy between holism and reductionism which influences the research that is undertaken. Another, dialectical, notion of nature might lead to another kind of science, but this progress is hindered by current scientific ideals, as well as the political-economic dimension of science (Supiot 2021).
The different iterations of the dialectical approach share an emphasis on the idea that nature is not simply a static background for our actions, and that it also does not work on us a mechanical or external manner. Instead, nature is a complex system which is caught up with our activities, even if it also maintains autonomy from these. To concretise, I sketch Luca Illetterati’s Hegelian and Foster’s Marxist understanding of nature.
In The Capital, Marx emphasised that the soil was being robbed for the nutrients necessary to sustain its fertility. He took this to indicate how the current organisation of production, capitalism, causes a rift between the social metabolism and the metabolism of nature, which sustains all life, and this rift can only be amended within another societal system (Foster 2022a). Metabolic rift denotes the breakdown of the relationship universal metabolism of nature and the social metabolism that sustains our society, which ultimately depends on the universal metabolism, ‘the biophysical conditions of production’.
The universal metabolism of nature exists prior to and apart from human activity. It also interacts with and enables the social metabolism, which is a concrete shape of this ecological metabolism. Labour mediates between these metabolisms. While we can affect the universal metabolism of nature, we must grant nature autonomy—not regard it is wholly internalised by society. Nature places constraints upon human activities, and even if we may constrain nature in return, there are limits to how much we can change natural processes without undermining its capacity to sustain our societies.
Contrary to the caricature, Hegel believes that science provides the content upon which philosophy must work, that ‘the empirical sciences […] have readied this material for philosophy by discovering its universal determinations, genera, and laws’ (Hegel 2010: 41). Further, he holds that nature is an enigma that can never be solved. It is not only beyond our conceptual capacities, but beyond itself. Our logical categories cannot deduce the concrete instance of nature because it is too contingent to display these categories reliably. In other words, nature lacks the capacity to control its own becoming (Di Giovanni 2010). Nature is weak because it is riddled with contingency and fails to be a completely logical sphere. Yet it displays a fragmented rationality, through its concrete shapes—which is also why detailed knowledge of its particularities is needed, why philosophy depends on science to provide its content.
Conversely, science requires philosophy to be able to distil the logical principles that are displayed by nature. Philosophy cannot impose categories on science from without but should strive to ‘situate the sciences within their broader non/extra-scientific contexts’ (Johnston 2019: 55) and show how they contain more metaphysics than they are aware of.
Hegel’s view indicates that there is already a rift in nature—pace Foster—before the emergence of a specific mode of production. This rift enables subjectivity to emerge, and it also changes retroactively by this emergence. In other words, subjectivity emerges from within the incompleteness of nature, not as opposite to it. This indicates how knowledge about nature enabled by nature itself.
New Nature, New Science?
The inability to articulate its own conditions of possibility characterises so-called contemplative materialism. Foster says that avoiding the contemplative stance is ‘exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism […] is, in the final analysis, all about’ (Foster 2022b: fn22, 7—8 emphasis original). Emergent levels of organisation, which are interdependent yet autonomous, solves the problem. But if Heron (2021) is right, the notion of ontological incompleteness found in Hegel is also needed the cognise the emergence of the subject that can set itself apart from nature immanently.
The notion of weak nature also suggests why science is simultaneously socially constructed and cognitively valid. It is because the distortions and contradictions we disclose are indicative of the nature of reality itself. It is the inchoate structure of nature that enables subjectivity (as self-determination) and allows us to understand it rationally, even if this understanding can only be aporetic. It is this inconsistency that enables the subject to emerge from within nature. Here, the rift is present in nature before the emergence of modern society, even if our current social system may exacerbate it.
More important than their possible tensions, these approaches share the notion that no level is unconstrained or isolated from others but in a constant and formative interaction with them. Together, part and whole form a processual totality. Teleological causality is actual as it emerges from the interaction between different levels and scales. Dialectics thereby overcomes the mechanistic worldview that undergirds the contemplative stance, which dismisses everything that cannot be explained through efficient causality.
Hence, a dialectical view of nature can provide a richer and more radical understanding of nature, the object of science, and of science itself—in which it includes subjectivity or self-determination as its own self-negation. Nature is beyond itself, not only external to us but to itself, and thus cannot control its own genesis. The same principle applies to science. Secondly, and implicitly, we get a more encompassing notion of causation, not as simple cause and effect but as complex, constitutive and reciprocal. Here, boundary conditions impose constraints that are not only limiting but also enabling (see Longo and others 2012). We are dealing with historical systems, whose space of possibilities are themselves subject to change.
We should not limit the scope of naturalism to the confines deemed acceptable by a narrow conception of science. Instead, we need a naturalism ‘whose very core is the notion of life’ (Illetterati 2023: 188)—a naturalism which explains its own conditions of possibility through this living and constructive relation to the world.
Marx held that there would be a unitary science in the future. It would, however, only be possible after the shackles of bourgeoise society has been lifted, in his view. But this view seems too unilinear, and erects a barrier between ideology and science, instead of admitting that ideology is an inherent part of science—without thereby undermining its cognitive validity. It also undercuts the degree to which science affects the scene on which it appears, and the revolutionary force that science was for Marx. Instead of waiting for a revolution to inaugurate a new relation between the sciences and between science and philosophy the, we should foster a relationship that prefigures a new society and contributes to its establishment.
As we are constituted through our relationship to nature, the breakdown of this relation alienates us both form ourselves and from nature. A renewed concept of nature combats this alienation. It allows us to understand how freedom is ontologically possible and makes us aware of what it at stake if we do not exercise this freedom consciously and responsibly. Not only does it suggest another way to understand natural processes; it also pertains to the becoming and function of science itself, as part of a larger totality. Only within such a totality can the function of science be ascribed. We might never get a truly unitary science, not even if a new society is inaugurated, but we can achieve many advances through attempts at establishing a new naturalism and another mode of interaction between science and society, nonetheless.
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Bizzarri, Mariano, Ana M Soto, Carlos Sonnenschein, and Giuseppe Longo. 2017. ‘Saving Science. And Beyond’, 1.1: 11—15 <https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-5876_1.6>
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Foster, John Bellamy. 2020. The Return of Nature : Socialism and Ecology. (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press)
2022a. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press)
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Heron, Kai. 2021. ‘Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective’, Science & Society, 85.4 (Guilford Publications Inc.): 501—26 <https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2021.85.4.501>
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Notes:
1.↩ This text is more suggestive than argumentative. I will not discuss the historical relation between ecology and Marxism and will only be able to indicate how the dialectical view indicates a more ecological scientific ideal. I will not discuss how dialectical principles can be found within science, nor interpret concrete sciences dialectically. I save this for another, more systematic article. For a discussion, which informed this article, of how the organicist perspective requires a context-sensitive and pluralistic approach, see El-Hani and Reis (2021).
2.↩ Proletarianisation involves a ‘fragmentation of skill’ and ‘specialisation’, which makes the scientist more replaceable and thus left in a more precarious position. Moreover, alienation concerns how ‘the producers do not understand the whole process, have no say over where it is going or how, and have little opportunity to exercise creative intelligence’ (Lewontin and Levins 1987: 202). Soto and Sonnenschein (2021) explain how the process of proletarianisation has affected biology, as new technologies have been introduced and undermined theory, with some even declaring its end.
https://mronline.org/2024/02/14/dialect ... n-outline/
I concetti fondamentali della filosofia di Hegel (II parte) – (La Città Futura)
The Organism as a Subject: Hegel on Nature, Subjectivity, and Interconnectedness
Originally published: Dialectical Systems on September 19, 2023 by Hub Zwart (more by Dialectical Systems) | (Posted Feb 15, 2024)
Introduction
In his thesis entitled Agency and Organisation, Rasmus Haukedal highlights the remarkable mutual relevance of recent theoretical trends in biology and the dialectical approach to (living) nature as developed by Hegel, Engels, and others (Haukedal 2022). As Haukedal explains, a dialectical approach to the phenomena of life moves beyond the logic of binary thinking (of self versus other, subject versus object, cause versus effect and so on) by seeing nature as processes of becoming, i.e., of interaction, interdependency, integration, and organisation. For Hegel, philosophy is the science of scientific experience (“Wissenschaft der Erfahrung”), situating scientific insights in the context of a comprehensive encyclopaedic system while explicating and questioning the unspoken metaphysics at work in scientific research. Thus, dialectics should aim to assess and digest these recent developments from a dialectical perspective.
What these recent biological developments share with a dialectical approach to living nature, Haukedal argues, is that both see the organism as the active agent in its own evolution (p. 8). Both Hegel and Engels consistently argue that, dialectically speaking, causation means interaction (“Wechselwirkung”), seeing the relationship between organism and the environment as a dialectical interplay, as reciprocity, while individuation is never a given, it is always a result (cf. Zwart 2022). Haukedal rightly emphasises this as well: agency is constituted through the interaction of organism and environment (p. 10). The organism is an active subject in its own evolution (p. 11). I italicise the term “subject” here because, in my contribution, I will emphasise the importance of this concept for Hegel’s decisive move away from Kant and Fichte, that is: his move away from philosophical egotism and anthropocentrism, by insisting on the interconnectedness of subjectivity and life. Hegel sees all organisms as subjects. In this contribution, I will zoom in on this aspect of his thinking, while treating Hegelian dialectics not as a finished product, but as an evolving system of thought, a research program to which dialectical scholars are invited to contribute, albeit based on a thorough grasp of Hegel’s dialectical method,—which means, rereading Hegel as an effort to contribute to contemporary scientific debate, while at the same time using these debates to revivify dialectics as a research program (again, interaction).
The Dialectics of Nature
For Hegel and Engels, dialectics is not only at work in the scientific enquiry. Rather, nature as such is inherently dialectical. Dialectics applies both to thinking and being. Heraclitus (the first dialectical thinker, according to Hegel) already emphasised this when he articulated his process ontology, his metaphysics of becoming (“everything flows”). Nature offers an open a theatre for interaction. This is taken up by Hegel who, building on Aristotle’s concept of energeia (“actualising” in the sense of “being-at-work”) develops a dynamical approach to being-as-becoming. This already applies to abiotic nature, for instance when Hegel sees Planet Earth as a semi-stable meteorological system, or the solar system as a theatre of interaction (of reciprocal causation).
The concept of dialectical interaction becomes even more pertinent in our efforts to come to terms with living nature. Everything is in flux; all entities are coagulated interactive processes. From a dialectical perspective, an organism is not a machine-like aggregate of components, let alone a carrier of selfish genes, but a subject. This already applies to plants, Hegel argues, actively modifying and remoulding their (inherently unstable) environment, maintaining themselves by actively engaging with their surroundings. For Hegel, nature is a theatre of adaptation, but as an interactive process, where the organism not only adapts itself to but also actively modifies the environment, e.g., plants adapting the soil to their needs. Natural selection is not a purely negative mechanism, it is relational, offering room for creativity, flexibility, and plasticity of organisms. From a Hegelian perspective, we may see DNA as the concept of an organism (Zwart 2022), but self-realisation on the basis of this concept is an interactive process, imbued with contingency,—DNA is not a blueprint. As Haukedal phrases it, life is an interplay between organism and environment (p. 15). And although the word “and” here still seems to suggest that we see organism and environment as clearly distinguishable, compartmentalised opposites, the dialectical concept of interaction rather invites us to see their relationship as interactive and fluid,—everything flows, everything is fluid, and this also applies to the boundaries between organism and environment, notably on molecular levels of organisation. Let us explore the relationship between life and subjectivity in Hegel’s oeuvre somewhat more in detail.
The Organism as a Subject
Already in the Preface of the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel presents life as a self-realising, self-positing “subject” (p. 23). Initially, as a subject, the living entails negativity and contradiction. Life is disruptive, but—as a process of becoming—it also engenders the subsequent negation of this negativity, resulting in a restoration of unity, not as a step backwards (towards the initial indifferent substance), but as something more comprehensive which has realised itself. In other words, life disrupts an initial situation of indifferent stability (i.e., the first dialectical moment, M1), thereby displaying the destabilising negativity which is inherent in all forms of subjectivity (M2). Yet, via a negation of the negation, the process of becoming will strive to regain a situation of stability, but now on a higher level of complexity (M3), incorporating that which was initially was seen as other, and therefore negated. Life is the process of becoming a subject (often referred to as individuation). And while becoming initially entails conflict and negativity (negating otherness), eventually a more positive outcome, a more positive relationship of interaction is established, so that subjectivity reconciles itself with otherness, seeing otherness as part of a more comprehensive totality. Thus, the concept realises itself—Hegel mentions the development of the embryo as an exemplification of such a process (p. 25). The contradiction between self and other (e.g., organism and environment) is now superseded as an obstacle to becoming (but also as an obstacle to our understanding of the process of becoming).
This is taken up in Part II of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, i.e., his philosophy of nature. Living, organic nature, Hegel argues, is the realm of subjectivity (§ 252). Life is a concrete manifestation, an active “interpretation” of the concept by the organism as a subject (§ 251, Zusatz, p. 37). It is in living beings the subjectivity emerges (§ 248, z p. 29).[1] This applies to the whole organism, however. The organs of an organism are partial entities that cannot exist separate from the organic whole. Initially, there is a contradiction between the organic and the inorganic in the sense that the inorganic seems an inhospitable environment, threatening to destroy the organism, i.e., the living individual, the “subjective” (p. 39). Subsequently, however, this opposition, this negation finds itself negated (the contradiction finds itself superseded) to the extent that the organism manages to “assimilate” the inorganic and embed itself in the environment.
To some extent, this also applies to Planet Earth as such (§ 288). Hegel does not see the planet as a superorganism. Initially, Planet Earth was an abiotic planet, albeit with organic potential. Earth is the subject of a comprehensive whole which, via finite processes of chemistry and meteorology, at a certain point became a biotic planet in such a way that living organisms dramatically transformed the initial abiotic condition, so that Planet Earth as we now know it is the (unfinished) result of a plethora of interactive processes, where organisms (as subjects) contribute collectively to producing and co—shaping their own environment (rather than merely being products shaped by their environment via negative selection).
Special attention is given to crystals (§ 310) as an intermediate stage between the non-living and the living. Hegel considers crystals as instances of inorganic individuality: an individuality which is not yet subjectivity, however, since there is no sentience. Individuality is still drowned in matter. There is no room for creativity or plasticity,—it is mere inorganic being (p. 200).
All organisms are processes (§ 377) through which an idea comes into existence, becomes alive, Hegel argues. Whereas inorganic nature is the non-living, often even the corpse or remains of living systems of the past, it is in plants that subjectivity comes into existence, while it is only in animals that life truly becomes a genuine subject. The organism manages to sustain itself as a process, albeit always at risk of submerging again into chemism and the inorganic. The living is continuously under the threat of what we would nowadays refer to as entropy but, via interaction, the organism manages to sustain this contradiction up to a certain point (as all life is finite). Indeed, the living organism is precisely this union of opposites, where the internal and the external, cause and effect, subjectivity and objectivity come together (p. 339; cf. Haukedal 2022, p. 6).
Subsequently, Hegel discusses three realms: the realm of geological nature, of plants and of animals. Whereas geological nature is the non-living, the soil is at the same time a condition for the emergence of life, while underneath the soil, the remains of enormous forests from previous geological eras, lost worlds of vegetation and wildlife, lie buried (p. 345). In the past, dramatic changes took place in nature, Hegel argues, but in the present, such time-consuming processes are obfuscated by the disruptive impact of human activity on the environment. Micro-organisms (Hegel notably refers to infusoria) are considered as “punctuated” life, as “punctual” and transient instances of subjectivity.
Organic life is the self-sustaining self-realisation of a concept. Although there is subjectivity in plants (responsivity, interaction with the environment, etc.), a plant is not yet a subject in the genuine sense, although elsewhere Hegel argues that plants are subjects, but that their subjectivity is not yet fully realised. Rather, plant life entails perennial production, a combination of assimilation, externalisation, and multiplication. Animals, however, are subjects in the genuine sense, sensitive and self—present, reflecting on themselves via externality. They can relate to otherness through spatial movement, and the animal voice is already an approximation of self—conscious thought. The subjectivity of animals entails negativity, disrupting the environment, disrupting an initial situation of inertness (M1), e.g., by feeding on plants or other animals, which is basically an act of negation (M2), but this contradiction is superseded (again: negation of the negation) once a situation of ecological equilibrium is established (M3).
Let this suffice as a short exploration of the entanglement of Hegel’s conception of subjectivity and life. The core message is that, instead of seeing ourselves as a “subject”, confronted with nature as an “object”, from a dialectical perspective the first crucial step to take is to supersede this opposition (this negation of all subjectivity in nature) and to acknowledge the subjectivity inherent in and at work in nature itself.
Scientific Research as an Ecosystem
Let us now turn attention to the other side of the epistemological theatre, namely the place of science and scientists themselves, as subjects and as organisms. Here again, Hegelian dialectics allows us to move beyond the view of the scientific ego as a subject (the atomistic view of a researcher as a solitary individuals) and to conceptualise research itself as an interactive process, as the realisation of a concept or program, evolving within an academic ecosystem. In Kantian deontology, normativity focusses on the individual researcher, indicating how the autonomous agent should act in accordance with methodological and ethical constraints, but this focus on the individual agent evidently ignores the importance of universities or research institutes as evolving, interactive and co-constructed organisations,—as ecosystems. This for me is the core meaning of the Hegelian term Sittlichkeit, seeing a community (an academic community in this case) as a learning, developing ecosystem, encouraging certain actions and discouraging others, while the activities of all these actors will continuously affect the ecosystem as well (co—creation, “Wechselwirkung”). Thus, a university is likewise an ecological theatre offering a landscape of possibilities for worldmaking activities while at the same time confronting subjects with prohibitions and constraints,—but this evolving tension or contradiction between support and constraint is evidently at work in any social system.
Sympoiesis
When it comes to assessing recent theoretical developments, I will focus on the concept of sympoiesis, introduced by Donna Haraway (2106) to emphasise the sense of embeddedness and interdependency which is also reflected by terms such as symbiosis, but in a more partial and finite manner. According to Haraway, speaking about organisms and the environment, even while emphasising processes of interaction, do not sufficiently allow us to come to terms with the entanglement an interconnectedness of the living. The term literally means “making with” (others) and emphasises that organisms are never alone and that nothing is really self—organising, since entanglement with otherness is always involved. Everything is complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, contingent, historical (p. 58). All living entities are open although in their desire for autonomy individuals may strive for autonomy and closure.
To some extent one could argue that this concept is in accord with the dialectical view of nature with its focus on fluidity, interaction and becoming. At the same time, there is a tension, to the extent that Haraway’s concept entails a turn away from thinking in terms of hierarchy. It entails a horizontalization of process ontology. Hegel’s philosophy of nature still adheres to the idea of a change of being, moving from crystals via plants to animals to human beings for instance, where crystals are “not yet” alive, plants “not yet” genuine subjects and animals “not yet” self-conscious beings in the sense of creating their own symbolic environment.
Take for instance the microbiome. Microbiome research made us aware of the fact that we are ecosystems, rather than individuals, inhabited by millions of microbes who not influence “lower” processes such as digestion, but also affect our mood and cognition. They are part of us, although some fluid boundaries continue to exist. They are extimate, as Jacques Lacan would phrases it: both intimate and other. Hegelian dialectics urges us to incorporate our microbiome in our self—understanding.
In this context, it is interesting to reread how Hegel in his philosophy of nature envisions excrements. On the one hand, he sees excrements of living beings as symptoms of deficiency (§ 365), indicating a lack of adjustment between self and other, organism and environment, as food is only partly digestible. In excrements, the metabolism of life becomes chemistry again, as these organic by—products are bound to decay. Yet, at the same time, Hegel emphasises that excrements are a product. They are not mere negativity, not mere waste (i.e., useless indigestible material) because, in the course of the process of digestion, the organism adds to it and actively expels it. In other words, although Hegel was obviously unaware of insights provided by contemporary microbiome research, everything is a dialectical syllogism, and this also applies to digestion and defecation. Food, the initial substance (M1), is digested, i.e., negated (M2), where bodily fluids trigger the food to decompose, so that the food is for the most part annihilated, but the end result (faeces) is a product as well, a combination of remnants and additives (M3). And on the collective level, excrements are part of the metabolism between human culture and the global environment. Seen from this perspective, global disruptive pollution is a symptom of systemic error, signalling the non—sustainability of the current global metabolism between humans and nature. In the context of global Sittlichkeit, the disruptive impact of waste can no longer be thoughtlessly ignored. And notwithstanding the hierarchical logic of his thinking, Hegel already pointed out that the term waste is a misnomer. Waste is a product, produced by us collectively, so that we are actively involved and responsible. The disruptive contradiction between human society as a superorganism and the global environment in which we are embedded and with which we are profoundly entangled must be superseded. The negativity of environmental disruption and mass extinction must be negated. Here we notice a detrimental dialectical deficit on the level of global Sittlichkeit, however, a lack of coordination and collaboration, a lack of integration and organisation, seeing that most human activity is focussed on addressing the acute symptoms (forest fires, floodings, and so on) rather than on transforming system, i.e., the chains of interactions from which these disasters stem.
Bibliography:
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press
Hegel, G. W. F. (1807/1986). Phänomenologie des Geistes. (Werke 3). Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1830/1986). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II: Die Naturphilosophie (Werke 9). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Haukedal, Rasmus S. (2022) Agency and Organisation: The Dialectics of Nature and Life. Durham University.
Zwart H. (2022) “Love is a microbe too”: microbiome dialectics. In: Bossert, L. and Höll, D. (ed.). The Microbiome and its Challenges for the Environmental Humanities. Endeavour 46, 2022, 46 (2) 10.1016/j.endeavour.2022.100816.
Zwart H. (2022) Continental philosophy of technoscience. Series: Philosophy of Engineering and Technology. Dordrecht / London: Springer Nature.
https://mronline.org/2024/02/15/the-org ... ectedness/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
Lenin speaking in Moscow’s Red Square on May Day, 1919
Defending materialism: Lenin the philosopher
Originally published: Morning Star Online on February 26, 2024 by Nick Matthews (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Feb 29, 2024)
LIKE many of the participants in the Marx Memorial Library symposium Lenin in Britain, held earlier this year (available on the MML website), I learned something new about Lenin.
The session I found particularly fascinating was the one by Robert Henderson. Robert was the former curator of the Russian collections at the British Library and his assiduous detective work in the library archives has helped map what Lenin spent his time doing during his six visits to London between 1902 and 1911.
The title of Robert’s excellent book, “The Spark that Lit the Revolution“, alludes to the fact that Lenin in 1902 had produced the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra (The Spark) at what was then the Twentieth Century Press at 37a Clerkenwell Green. This was despite the challenges of communication with Robert Quelch, editor of the Social-Democratic Federation journals Justice and Social Democrat. Lenin’s English was as poor as Quelch’s Russian.
Since Henderson’s book was published in 2022, he has uncovered yet more information about Lenin’s time in London, which made his talk particularly memorable. Lenin spent an inordinate amount of his time in the British Museum the then-home of the British Library. I found myself becoming particularly fascinated by the time Lenin spent in the library in 1908.
That year on May 22 he signed the library admissions book and spent three solid weeks devouring a range of books on philosophy, history, and economics. Henderson points out that proof of Lenin’s industriousness comes from an unusual source.
The Poet Laureate John Masefield said:
I often saw him in the British Museum reading room and always said to myself ‘I wonder who that extraordinary man is’, for anyone must have seen he was an extraordinary man, certain to make his mark on the world.
Lenin consulted some 200 publications during this time, the end result of this deep study appeared in print the following year, as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy.”
It shows the importance of philosophy to the early movement that Lenin took the time to produce an almost 400-page critique of empirio-criticism. Indeed Lenin was remarkably abusive of his opponents, he refers to them as “pettifoggers,” “fleacrackers” and “buffoons of bourgeois science.”
It may be surprising, but in the late 19th century Marxism had particular traction in Russia among the working class and the intelligentsia. The movement in Russia had a deep seriousness about philosophy and a tendency towards holistic thinking. Philosophy was not considered to be politically neutral.
It was in this context that Lenin was disturbed by the outbreak of a “Machist revisionism” of Marxism in his own party. The man Lenin was taking on was no intellectual slouch. Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was an Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves.
The ratio of the speed of a flow or object to that of sound is named the Mach number in his honour. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and U.S. pragmatism. Through his criticism of Newton’s theories of space and time, he foreshadowed Einstein’s theory of relativity.
From 1895 to 1901, Mach held a newly created chair for “the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences” at the University of Vienna. In his historico-philosophical studies, Mach developed a phenomenalistic philosophy of science.
He saw scientific laws as summaries of experimental events, constructed for the purpose of making complex data comprehensible, but later emphasised mathematical functions as a more useful way to describe sensory appearances. Thus, scientific laws, while somewhat idealised, have more to do with describing sensations than with reality as it exists beyond sensations.
For Lenin, this was “quasi-scientific tomfoolery.” However, setting aside Lenin’s colourful language there is a powerful argument in his book. While no professional philosopher, Lenin took it very seriously and set it in the context of the crisis in the natural sciences of the time that was profoundly philosophical.
Lenin became aware that something different was demanded of Marxism than the previous period had demanded of Marx and Engels. The perception was that modern physics had exposed science as merely a convenient fiction, a process of symbolisation. Opposing this, Lenin welcomed the new scientific discoveries but opposed what he saw as the reactionary philosophical implications that were being drawn from them.
Lenin could see that the majority of scientists were natural materialists. The evidence had demonstrated that the earth had existed prior to man thereby assuming the primacy of matter and therefore sensation and thought as secondary.
If you are interested in these arguments, they are wonderfully articulated in Helena Sheehan’s marvellous 1983 book “Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History” (republished by Verso in 2017). Helena is a great guide to the arguments and the narrative moves quickly despite her getting into the trenches to argue with the protagonists.
Indeed she writes a splendid introduction to the recent reprint of Lenin’s book (International Publishers 2022): “So, what is the enduring value of this book? The integrality of approach is its outstanding feature, insisting on the essential and crucial connection between philosophy and politics.
Both before and after the revolution, even in a rush of events of immediate and world-historical consequence, Lenin always found time to address philosophical debates as the deeper grounding for thinking through everything else.
He stressed the necessity of the defence of materialism and realism against all challenges that would erode the basis for the long and hard struggle on all fronts that would create a socialist future. We still need that approach in our own times.
https://mronline.org/2024/02/29/defendi ... ilosopher/
I read 'empirio-criticism' a few years back, it was tough sledding for this amateur but very rewarding for someone who came to materialism through Darwin(and came to dialectics through ecology). The polemic aspect of the work is a bonus for we who delight in such things, wouldn't want Lenin's sights set on me...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
What is the Dialectical Materialist Ontology?
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on March 19, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted Mar 22, 2024)
Dialectical Materialist Ontology
In his Dialectical Materialism, Henri Lefebvre uses Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Dialectics of Nature to say that “the laws of human reality cannot be entirely different from the laws of nature.”1 A similar sentiment is expressed in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, where Lukács says that it is “self-evident” that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society.”2 Precisely because of this universal character, argued Lefebvre, is that dialectical materialism “acquires the full dimension of a philosophy: it becomes a general conception of the world, a weltanschauung and hence a renewal of philosophy.”3 In the last section we defended the treatment of Marxist philosophy (i.e., dialectical materialism) as a weltanschauung, now let us present its ontological basis.
Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”4 It acknowledges that “movement is itself a contradiction,” and that “contradiction propels movement.”5 These are the basic premises of dialectics pertaining to the ontological constitution of the world. It is important to note, however, that these central premises make it an ontology of becoming, not being. Insofar as being is understood as an unchanging, pure, universal substratum, it is rejected as an explanatory category. If being, however, is understood as a constant “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be,” that is, if it is understood as becoming, then it can be sustained as a foundational category in a dialectical materialist ontology.6 Nonetheless, as Hegel noted, although “the first truth is to be found in becoming,” this first concrete category is still an abstract first step which gives way to a more concrete understanding of the world.7 If we stop here, then, we have merely achieved the position of Greek (more specifically Heraclitan) dialectics mentioned above. Although, as Engels said, “the new age begins with the return to the Greeks—negation of the negation,” this return is mediated by half a millennium of metaphysically framed scientific studies,8 and therefore, it is not a return to the same Greek dialectic, but to a richer (more concrete) one.9 Hence, what is required is not just the understanding that everything is in constant motion and interconnection, driven by internal contradictory forces, but a concrete understanding of the mechanisms and structures through which these changes occur.
The dialectical materialist ontology, as an ontology of becoming, is concerned with the “most general laws” of human and natural “historical development” and “of thought itself.”10 Marx and Engels both agreed that these laws had already been discovered by Hegel, but in a mystified form. For instance, Marx says in a letter to Dietzgen that “The true laws of dialectics are already contained in Hegel, though in a mystical form,” and Engels similarly repeats this by saying that “all three [laws of dialectics] are already developed by Hegel… [but] foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.”11 These ‘laws’ are 1) the unity and struggle of opposites, 2) the transition from quantity into quality and vice versa, and 3) the negation of the negation. It is important to note that Hegel never referred to them as ‘laws’; in his Logic[s] they are merely categories, little different than the plethora of other categories his logical unfolding of the concept introduces. However, the reason behind Marx and Engels’ classification of these Hegelian categories as ‘laws’ lies in the fact they can be seen in every ‘moment’ of the movement of Hegel’s concept, and most importantly, because Marx and Engels ‘re-discover’ them in the movement and interconnection of nature and society and postulate their objective existence as the source for their reflective (subjective) existence in the mind. These three dialectical laws, by being the most universal forms in which change occurs, are also the most abstract, and hence, serve as the base upon which a more concrete understanding of change and interconnection in smaller or larger organic totalities can take place.
It is here where the accusations of simplifying dialectics usually begin. Once these three laws are established, it becomes a game of examples, whoever can fit the schema of these laws on nature, human society, history, or thinking the most wins. In treating these laws as a “sum total of examples,” Lenin argued, “dialectics usually receives inadequate attention.”12 For Lenin the architype for this was Plekhanov, although at times, he argued, “the same is true of Engels.”13 To be clear, the problem is not the examples in themselves, but when dialectics is en toto reduced to a collection of examples. When this reduction takes place, Chris Arthur is right to say that dialectics turns into a “lifeless formalism” which proceeds by “applying abstract schemas adventitiously to contents arbitrarily forced into the required shape.”14 However, one must not confuse this vulgarization of dialectics to mean that one cannot provide examples in nature, society, or thinking that confirm these laws. Like we saw in the previous section, one can hold onto Marxism as a weltanschauung and simultaneously reject vulgarizations of this weltanschauung. Similarly, one can reject the reduction of dialectics to a basket of artificially foisted examples but still use examples to understand objective dialectics. After all, the central difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is the latter’s materialist position that dialectics is the ontological condition of the world, and only when this world is concretely understood does dialectical thinking emerge. It is necessary, then, to use concrete examples from the world to understand the world itself, and hence, grasp objective dialectics subjectively.
The materialist dialectic, therefore, must walk a thin line between two precipices into idealist dialectics: on the one hand, if no concrete examples are used, the ‘dialectic’ would be purely mental, and hence, idealist; on the other hand, if examples are artificially fabricated out of an apriorist dialectical schema foisted onto the world like a cookie cutter, then the ‘dialectic’ one is proposing replicates at its core the same mistake of Hegel’s demiurgos, except at a much more vulgarized level, lightyears away from the genius with which Hegel espoused his. The theoretical panacea and balancing pole necessary to avoid falling into the precipices of idealism is the dialectical method of going from the abstract to concrete. Only in the rigorous process of investigation required for this method can one be sure that their examples are actually in-the-world, and not foisted on it by an abstract dialectical schema. An exposition of this method will have to wait until the following section.
It is this context in which Engels deduces the dialectical laws in his scientific studies, and Marx in his economic studies. The examples they provide are concrete, and (esp. in the case of Engels) usually include comments on how science already accepted (in certain fields) these ‘laws’ but under different names. For instance, in Engels’ letter to Friedrich Albert Lange, he argues that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [is] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.”15 Let me now provide a few concrete examples in which these most general laws of change and interconnection can be observed. Recall that by being the ‘most general’ they are also the most abstract, and hence, each example is in itself insufficiently understood if the only thing one says is how one or another of these dialectical laws is observed in it. To be concretely understood, each of these examples must take the structural appearance of the laws as a mere starting point to the investigation of the phenomenon. The laws work like the study of a townhouse community; by knowing how the outside of each townhouse looks, one has grasped the most general fact in the community. This ‘most general’ fact can then serve as the abstract starting point for the concrete study of the internal structural differences in each household. One cannot claim to know the community by simply knowing the ‘most general’ fact, and similarly, by only knowing the differences in each household one is blind to the ‘most general’ fact that the object of one’s study is not independent houses, but a townhouse community.
The Three Ontological Laws of Dialectics in Political Economy
“The most important aspect of dialectics,” Hegel argued, is the “grasping of opposites in their unity.”16 Similarly, Marx would say in Capital Vol. I that the “Hegelian contradiction [is] the source of all dialectic.”17 Lenin would repeat this by saying that “the division of a unity into two and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.”18 It is thus, with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites that we must begin, for the “condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.”19 It is this law which allows the understanding of the other two, for not only does it “furnish the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything that exists; it alone furnishes the key to the ‘leaps,’ to the ‘interruption of gradualness,’ to the ‘transformation into the opposite,’ to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.”20 Let us now see how Marx observes the functioning of this law in the realm of political economy.
The law of the unity and struggle of opposites can be seen from the dawn of Marx’s Capital with the commodity, the “cell-form of bourgeois society” and “germ of all contradictions.”21 Commodities, as Marx says, have an “internal opposition inherent in them,” namely, they are “at once use-values and values.”22 As Roslyn Wallach Bologh adds, “the commodity is this contradictory relation, a totality of opposing moments: production of exchange value which excludes use value and the realization of exchange value which requires use value.”23 The commodity, the “simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois society,” presents us with a clear example of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.24 Since, as Lenin said, the commodity is the “germ of all the contradictions,” we can see similar examples in more ‘concrete’ categories in Marx’s Capital.25 For instance, merchant’s capital, Marx argues, “presents… a unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks up into two opposing actions—the purchase and the sale of commodities.”26 This cell-form of bourgeois society, as the unity of the opposing forces of exchange and use value (and in its metamorphosis of commodity and money), is the “most abstract form of crisis,” and contains within it (implicitly or in itself) the general crisis of capitalist production, which, in its periodic actualizations, provides the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.”27
In all the contradictions of capitalist production as a whole we have lucid examples of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and, as Marx adds, “the most abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms.”28 In regard to social class, for instance, the capitalist mode of life is marked by the contradiction between the working and the capitalist class. These two classes are both struggling amongst themselves and in unity under capitalism, that is, capitalism contains—not externally, but in itself—two opposing forces whose struggle shapes its development. As Lenin argued, once the understanding of the unity and struggle of opposites is grasped, we are ‘furnished’ with the keys to understand the other laws of movement.
The law of the unity and struggle of opposites, or what is the same, the law of the universality of contradictions, would be enriched by Mao Tsetung’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction.” Here, Mao develops important categories relating to the particularity of contradictions, further concretizing the dialectical materialist ontology and its ability to understand the concrete concretely. The first important categorial development is the notion of principal and secondary contradictions. As Mao notes, “there are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.”29 It becomes an imperative, therefore, to “devote every effort to finding [the] principal contradiction” in whatever complex process one is studying, for “once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”30 Likewise, Mao notes that in any contradiction, i.e., in any unity of opposites, there is always one antipole which is dominant. This is what he calls the principal aspect of a contradiction, it refers to the “aspect which has gained the dominant position.”31 This dominant position is not static, but always subject to change; what is the principal aspect in one moment may turn into the non-principal aspect in another.
Additionally, Mao refines the law of the unity and struggle of opposite by recapturing a distinction Lenin had already noted between antagonisms and contradictions. Lenin argued that “antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same… under socialism, the first will disappear, the second will remain.”32 Mao clarifies this by showing that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.”33 Class societies are bound, sooner or later, to develop “the form of open antagonism” which shifts the class struggle into a moment of revolution.34 In Gramscian terms, these are the moments when the emphasis is switched from the war of position (the battle for hegemony) to the war of maneuver, where the opposites engage in direct frontal attacks. Sometimes non-antagonistic contradictions develop into antagonistic ones, and likewise, antagonistic contradictions develop into non-antagonistic ones.35 Contradictions obtain an antagonistic form in moments of explosion, when “open conflict to resolves old contradictions” takes place and new things are produced.36 Recognizing whether a contradiction is antagonistic or not is fundamental to the process of resolving it. For instance, the working and the capitalist class are in an irreconcilable antagonism, one which can only be solved through the working class’s revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class.
The utopian socialists, for example, did not see the antagonistic character of this contradiction, and therefore, their ‘resolutions’ involved the harmonizing of class distinctions through an appeal to the benevolence of the owners. History has shown that the incorrect assessment of the relationship between the antipoles of worker and capitalist has produced unsatisfactory resolutions which either became relics of the 19th century, or, in the case of similar strategies by the social democrats, sustained the dominance of capital over labor. On the other hand, the contradiction between the peasantry and the working class is not, on most occasions, an antagonistic one; therefore, the resolution must take (and has taken) a radically different form, one which unites the peasantry and the working class, under the leadership of the latter, in the struggle for socialism.
After having grasped the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and how this general law was concretized by Mao, we may examine the law of the transition from quantity to quality and vice-versa. In the transition from money into capital we have an example of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. For money to be transformed into capital, that is, into something qualitatively new, surplus-value needs to be created. For this to happen, it is necessary for a specific amount of money to be turned “into commodities that serve as the material element of a new product,” and further, to “incorporate living labor” onto this “dead substance.”37 If the labor-power incorporated creates only the value necessary for the laborer’s subsistence, i.e., if it produces an equivalent to the exchange value it was bought for, then no surplus could be realized. However, what “really influenced” the buyer [i.e., the capitalist] of labor-power was “the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.”38
To create surplus value, and hence, materialize the use value for which the labor-power was bought (viz., to be a source of “more value than it has itself”), that labor power must be extended beyond the time it took it to produce the amount of value it was bought for.39 As Marx says, “if we compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point.”40 This “definite point” is what Hegel call “nodal points” in his Logic[s], it is the moment when “gradual [i.e., quantitative] increase… is interrupted” and the result is “a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.”41 The quantitative extension of the working day beyond the time necessary to produce the value the labor-power was bought for is how surplus-value arises. A quantitative accumulation of working hours, at a ‘definite point’ [i.e., nodal point], produces a qualitative leap and surplus-value comes about. Quantitative change has resulted in a leap into something qualitatively different. This qualitative leap into surplus-value, “a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production,” creates the conditions for the “metamorphosis of money into capital,” another qualitative leap effected by the transcendence of labor-power beyond this ‘nodal point.’42
There is a plethora of other places where the law of the transition of quantity into quality can be observed in Capital. For instance, Marx says that “not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital;” a “certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be pre-supposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.”43 This is because there is a nodal point at which the variable capital [i.e., labor-power] involved in production turns the owner into a capitalist proper. “The guilds of the middle ages,” Marx argued, “tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum.”44 This fetter presented in the middle-ages prevented the development of the capitalist proper. Only when this fetter is broken can “the possessor of money or commodities actually turn into a capitalist.”45 This transformation occurs “in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages.”46 Marx then explicitly says that “here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”47
These feudal fetters would be eroded as the barbarism of primitive accumulation evolved. As Marx says, “these fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population.”48 This “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” is the “fundamental condition” for the development of the capitalist mode of production.49 Its history is written in the “annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”50 The history of this expropriation, of the usurpation and enclosure of the commons, is the “prelude to the history of capitalism,” and produces “the first negation of individual private property.”51 This first negation establishes, as we saw previously, a qualitatively new mode of production—capitalism. “But,” Marx would go on to famously say, “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.”52 Capitalism immanently creates the conditions were, Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.53
Here we have the clearest depiction, within the lens of universal history, of the law of the negation of the negation. Capitalist private property negates “self-earned private property.”54 It socializes production and creates for the first time ever a “division of labour in the workshop.”55 Its private “mode of appropriation” at a nodal point presents a fetter to the centralized and socialized means of production, immanently creating its own conditions for its sublation [i.e., negation of the negation].56 This is a process which involves the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” and hence, is expected to be “incomparably [less] protracted, violent, and difficult” than the capitalist negation of feudalism.57
As can be seen from the examples in political economy, these dialectical laws are interconnected. The internal contradiction in all things propels universal movement. At times—in the nodal points mentioned above—this movement breaks its quantitative gradualness and undergoes a qualitative leap. All qualitative leaps are negations of that which has undergone a qualitative transformation. These negations immanently create the conditions for their own negation and bring about, in certain nodal points, a negation of the negation. No negation fully annihilates that which it has negated, part of it is always preserved in the qualitatively new it has unfolded into. For instance, capitalism sustains feudal private property but cancels out feudal individualized production; socialism sustains the socialized production of capitalism but cancels out its privatized accumulation. These are, of course, simple examples; but they are nonetheless helpful pedagogical tools to understand the most general laws of movement and interconnection, and hence, to build the base necessary for knowing more concrete things concretely.
(Notes at link)
https://mronline.org/2024/03/22/what-is ... -ontology/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
Martin Heidegger
Why the Left should reject Heidegger’s thought. (Part 1: The Question of Being)
Originally published: Midwestern Marx on March 19, 2024 by Colin Bodayle (more by Midwestern Marx) | (Posted Mar 29, 2024)
Heideggerian thought is everywhere. A list of thinkers influenced by Heidegger reads like a “who’s who” of famous twentieth century philosophers. Foucault said: “For me, Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher.”1 Derrida once called Heidegger “the great unavoidable thinker of the century.”2 Sartre conceived of Being and Nothingness while reading Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” Deleuze acknowledges the influence of Heidegger in the Preface to Difference and Repetition.3 Žižek wrote his first book on Heidegger.4 Many of Heidegger’s students became famous philosophers, including several who significantly impacted political theory: Hannah Arendt would develop the discourse of “totalitarianism” found in liberal philosophy, Leo Strauss would influence the neoconservative movement, and Herbert Marcuse would be a leading thinker for the New Left. It seems surprising that Heidegger should exert this much influence on contemporary thought, given that he was an unapologetic Nazi who began each lecture with “Heil Hitler” during his tenure as rector of Freiburg. One wonders, especially, why he has been embraced by so many thinkers on the Left.
Heidegger scholars have long attempted to separate Heidegger’s philosophy from his Nazism. This separation became increasingly difficult, however, after the Black Notebooks were published in 2014. These personal notebooks offer further evidence of Heidegger’s open embrace of racism, antisemitism, and Nazism. They also show Heidegger developing some of his most famous philosophical concepts directly out of Nazi ideology. In 1933, Heidegger writes:
The Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thoroughness, it would have remained lost in itself and would only with great difficulty have found its way to effectiveness.5
When Heidegger’s collected works were published, evidence of the extent of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement was largely erased. As Richard Wolin points out: “Following the war, Heidegger fabricated and rewrote entire passages, inserting them in earlier texts in order to promote the myth that, during the 1930’s, he had acted ‘heroically,’ as an intellectual and political dissident.”6 Among those “in the know,” however, it was already an open secret that many of Heidegger’s published works had been altered to hide incriminating references to Hitler, fascism, or “world-Judaism.”7
While most leftists have no problem rejecting Heidegger as a person, many ostensibly progressive or left-wing philosophers have nevertheless adopted Heideggerian positions. This includes thinkers who identify as communists like Sartre, Kojève, and Marcuse. There are reasons for Heidegger’s popularity. Heidegger talks about feelings of angst, the struggle to be authentic amid conformity, the weight of future possibilities, and our fears regarding our inevitable mortality. Young people are drawn to Heidegger because they wrestle with these questions, especially given the pressures of capitalist society. As a young person, I too was drawn to Being and Time for similar reasons, leading me to spend almost a decade studying Heidegger’s thought. Although I have broken completely with Heidegger, I wouldn’t deny that Being and Time is a powerful and thought-provoking work of philosophy. Yet there are deep-seated problems within Heidegger’s thinking, contradictions that bubble to the surface when we examine Heidegger’s positions carefully. Criticizing Heidegger is important. Seeds of Heideggerianism are scattered throughout leftist thought, and we cannot simply point to Heidegger’s Nazi roots to unplant them. We must scorch the soil of Heidegger’s thinking with the fires of critique.
Heidegger writes in idiosyncratic jargon, coining a cryptic vocabulary of neologisms based on the etymology of German words. The task of translating Heidegger is a nightmare. Often, his language puts a spell over his audience, warding Heidegger from hasty criticisms. Demystifying Heideggerese takes a great deal of effort, so I have decided to divide this task into a series of articles, touching on some of the main points of relevance in each. My aim in this series is to clarify why Marxists should reject Heideggerian thinking. In the current article, I will be focusing on the most significant aspect of Heidegger’s thought: the question of being. In the next article, I will be exploring his analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. In the final article, I will be examining his critique of technology and modern science.
Heidegger’s Single Thought: The Ontological Difference
Heidegger once claimed that “Each thinker only thinks one single thought.”8 The great philosophers, Heidegger claimed, take one idea and paint all of reality in its colors. If Heidegger had “one thought,” this would be the ontological difference. The ontological difference is the distinction between beings (things that are) and being (their “to be”). According to Heidegger, philosophers have overlooked this distinction. Whenever philosophers have asked about the meaning of being, they have treated being as if it were a being. Philosophy has failed to consider “being itself,” that is, being apart from beings.
The history of Western metaphysics, according to Heidegger, consists of various attempts to explain being through the lens of beings. The Presocratic philosopher Thales, for example, claimed that being was water, interpreting the being of beings in general in terms of a specific kind of being. For Thales, solid objects are frozen liquid, air is just vaporous water, and fire is akin to steam. The being of every being, for Thales, is water. Beginning with Aristotle, Heidegger claims, metaphysics adopts a twofold strategy for explaining the being of beings. First, it uses the being of some special being to explain being in general, then it grounds the existence of all beings in terms of some highest being. For Aristotle, for example, being is understood in terms of motion and this account is grounded in the unmoved mover. Heidegger calls these kinds of explanations “ontotheology” because they begin with an ontology of being in general and then ground this ontology in a theology of the highest being. In the Middle Ages, Heidegger claims, we enter into a new epoch of the history of being. For the Medievals, beings in general are understood as created out of nothing, and the totality of beings are grounded in God, the highest being. Beginning with Descartes, however, philosophy moves away from God and towards the human mind. Now, beings are understood as representations grounded in the human mind or transcendental ego. This modern conception of beings, in fact, somewhat resembles what Marxists would understand by the term “idealism.” The final epoch in the history of being, according to Heidegger, is modern technology, which corresponds to Hegelian philosophy as the complete system of science and the two “inversions” of Hegelianism: Nietzscheanism and Marxism. In modernity, everything becomes an object for technological manipulation with modern science revealing how we can dominate and control nature. The center of this final epoch of ontotheology, according to Heidegger, is the isolated, finite human will, a will that simply wants to keep on willing, subordinating everything to its desire for control and mastery, including the human species itself. Heidegger argues that philosophy and the history of metaphysics ends with the technological interpretation of the meaning of being, covering over the ontological difference and making it impossible for any new philosophical paradigm to emerge.
For both Heidegger and Bill Clinton everything depends on “what is is.” Each epoch of metaphysics, Heidegger claims, operates under a specific interpretation of the meaning of being in general. Yet each epoch also covers over the difference between being and beings. Yet what is the difference between being and beings? We might illustrate this using the example of light. If I turn on the lights in the room, the objects become visible through the light. The objects in the room, however, are not the light itself. The lightbulb, too, is not the light, but the source of the light. In fact, the lightbulb is also made visible by the light. The light itself, however, cannot be made visible by means of light. Instead, we notice that there is light because the objects themselves become visible. The relationship between being and beings, for Heidegger, is similar to the relationship between visible objects and light. We cannot illuminate being by treating it as a being, because being is the “to be” of beings. Being itself is not a being, which means that, strictly speaking, being “is not.” Heidegger thus calls being the presencing of presence, the manifestness of the manifest. He also describes being using contradictory, almost dialectical-sounding language, saying that being is “revealing/concealing.” Just like the light reveals itself by revealing bright objects, but light cannot directly reveal light, being reveals itself by revealing beings yet concealing itself.
The unconcealment of being makes metaphysics possible. Metaphysics and modern science, however, distort this more primordial unconcealment by representing being in various ways. Science, for example, represents beings in terms of their mathematically quantifiable and manipulatable properties. Heidegger claims that this distorts a more primordial unconcealment of being. For Heidegger, we discover being itself in the sheer “thatness,” the fact that something is rather than is not. We discover such unconcealment, Heidegger thinks, whenever we let something be without trying to represent it. Art and poetry accomplish this feat. A painting of a river, for Heidegger, simply aims to present the being of the river, not to quantify the river or measure its force. He writes: “The more essential the work [of art] opens itself, the more luminous becomes the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not.”9 A work of art, by putting its subject matter on display, lets it appear as itself. We are overwhelmed by its strangeness. “Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder.”10 Being, for Heidegger, is the realization that “holy shit, there are things!” This pure givenness, the fact that anything exists at all, this “unconcealment” or “manifestness” is what Heidegger identifies with being as such.
The Contradictions of Heideggerian Thought
Heidegger follows Hegel in recognizing that being is not a being. Yet Hegel draws the conclusion that pure being is empty indeterminacy, a total abstraction, the negation of all determinacy and content. Being, in other words, is nothing. In fact, this is the first dialectical transformation of Hegel’s Logic, the thought of pure being turning into its opposite. Heidegger cannot accept this conclusion. He attempts to avoid this dialectic by making the following argument: The question “What is being?” seems paradoxical, because in asking “what is being?”, we presuppose that we already understand the “is.” Yet we do understand the question, Heidegger says, we just can’t articulate the meaning of “being.” Heidegger thus concludes we implicitly understand the meaning of being, and that we always operate with an implicit understanding of the meaning of being. This understanding of being determines the basis upon which anything can appear or be understood at all. For something to appear, Heidegger claims, it must appear as something, and this requires an understanding of what it means for something to be. From this, Heidegger concludes that we cannot speak of being apart from our understanding of being. In his later language, being is the unconcealment of beings, yet this unconcealment only takes place within the sphere of human existence. Even Heidegger’s term for human beings, Da-sein (literally “being-there”) indicates this, since as Heidegger says, Dasein is “the site that being necessitates for its opening up,” that is, the site where being unconceals itself.11
Does this mean that Heidegger is not really concerned with what actually exists in the real world, but only with the appearance or phenomenon of being? Put differently, is he talking about how we understand being or reality, or about being or reality itself? This question produced a lively debate between the Heidegger scholars Thomas Sheehan and Richard Capobianco.12 This scholarly quarrel, however, is merely a manifestation of a deeper contradiction within Heidegger’s own thinking. Heidegger claims that if Dasein no longer exists, then we cannot speak of “being.” Heidegger writes: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being, that is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care” (SZ, 212).13 By this, Heidegger means that “being” belongs to our implicit or explicit understanding of the being of beings. Human beings, moreover, are finite and temporal, which makes the understanding of being also finite and temporal. Heidegger struggles throughout his entire career to express this point. Consider what Heidegger is saying: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being.” He puts the phrase “(not beings)” in parentheses, yet this implies the statement: “beings are not dependent upon the understanding of being,” or put positively: “beings are independent of the understanding of being.” Yet this statement cannot be correct, since it says: “beings are,” which would seem to be a statement about the being of beings. Heidegger wants to say that the things in the world are independently of the human understanding of being, but they have no being (are not) unless they appear to human beings. These two things cannot both be true. Lukács rightly calls this “epistemological hocus-pocus.”14 From this passage, Thomas Sheehan draws the conclusion that for Heidegger: “Before homo sapiens evolved, there was no ‘being’ on earth… because ‘being’ for Heidegger does not mean ‘in existence.’”15 When Sheehan says “existence,” however, he cannot mean this in any Heideggerian sense of the word, because Heidegger knows no sense of being or existence outside of Dasein’s understanding of being. Nevertheless, Heidegger himself is frequently forced to speak in this contradictory manner about being. He even starts crossing out the word “is” when talking about being.
Heidegger’s Subjective Idealism
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? For materialists, the answer is simple: Of course it does. Sound is a vibration of the air, and the tree landing makes the air vibrate regardless of whether anyone hears it. For idealist philosophers, however, the question is far more complicated. An objective idealist (say, Husserl) would claim that it does make a sound, since if a person were present, they would hear it. No one actually hears the sound, but it would be possible for a mind to hear it. Heidegger takes a far more extreme position than the objective idealists. For Heidegger, the being of the sound depends on Dasein, and we can only speak of its mind-independence if we have already presupposed human beings with an understanding of the meaning of being.
Being, for Heidegger, only appears within the horizon of human finitude and history. He thus writes:
Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true.” From this it does not follow that they were false or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness was possible any longer … The fact that before Newton they were neither true nor false cannot mean that the beings which they point out in a discovering way did not previously exist. These laws became true through Newton, through them beings in themselves became accessible for Dasein (SZ, 226-27).16
Heidegger does not deny the truth of Newton’s laws, yet he claims that we cannot speak of the truth or falsity of these laws until they were discovered by Newton. Beings must be accessible for us before we can speak of their being. Heidegger thus wraps objective truth inside subjective idealism.
Normally, we think of truth as the correspondence between a thought or statement and reality. Heidegger claims, however, that truth as “correspondence” depends on the discovery of truth. We cannot check to see whether an idea corresponds to reality unless we have already discovered reality. Yet only human beings can discover reality, and these discoveries can be lost or forgotten. Heidegger thus says: “The fact that there are ‘eternal truths’ will not be adequately proven until it is successfully demonstrated that Dasein has been and will be for all eternity” (SZ, 227). Heidegger claims there are no eternal truths because if human beings go extinct, all knowledge is lost and so nothing is true. Being and truth die with Dasein. The laws of physics are no longer true if human beings cease to exist.
Heidegger’s history of being and critique of Western metaphysics rests on this basic contradiction within his philosophy. For Heidegger, human history is a series of epochs, each with its own interpretation of the history of being. We cannot escape the horizon of human finitude. Yet because Heidegger eschews the language of consciousness and mind for Dasein, he claims to be speaking of “mind-independent beings.” Beings, he claims, are mind-independent, but their being is Dasein dependent. No Dasein, no being.
Heidegger recognizes that knowledge production is a historical process, one that requires intellectual labor, scientific experiments, and institutions that transmit and preserve this knowledge. On this point, Heidegger is quite correct. Yet the truth or falsity of knowledge does not depend on knowledge production. Truth or falsity is independent of discovery, and beings are whether human beings exist or not. They do not require human beings to be. Heidegger claims to be beyond the subjective and the objective, yet he merely collapses both into the subjectivity of human finitude and history. This Heideggerian framework leads to absurd claims. Consider, for example, the French anthropologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, who claimed that Pharaoh Ramses II didn’t die of tuberculosis because the bacteria wasn’t discovered until 1882. Heidegger does not “solve” the problem of the relationship between mind and world—he collapses all objectivity into finite human subjectivity.
Marxist philosophy cannot ally itself with Heideggerian subjective idealism. The most fundamental commitment of dialectical materialism is the view that a material world exists independently of the mind prior to human consciousness. Compare Heidegger’s view of Newton’s laws to this statement from Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:
Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarin. Today we learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday? Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science… Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.17
On the question of whether there are “eternal truths,” Engels states quite clearly in Anti-Dühring that “certainly there are,” writing:
If it gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for such simple things, it can be asserted that certain results obtained by these [physical] sciences are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their results have this validity.18
Engels is quite careful to acknowledge that even the exact sciences are “swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a swarm of bees,” yet such hypotheses and abstractions are necessary for scientific progress. Many scientific theories are not valid for every single thing in reality, but indeed have a limited or restricted validity. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, cannot explain quantum mechanics, yet our iPhones can still accurately pinpoint our locations by communicating with satellites, a feat that would be impossible without Einstein’s equations. The restricted validity of Einstein’s theories does not falsify the results of our GPS.
Against these common sense positions, Heidegger engages in what Lukács rightly calls a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism.”19 Heidegger claims to be talking about being and ontology, yet he actually is talking about the phenomenon or meaning of being. He thus ends up in a position that is more subjectivistic than the idealisms of Husserl or Kant. Heidegger says he is not a subjectivist because he avoids using the language of “consciousness” or “mind,” yet Heidegger simply reduces all objectivity to human existence and history. Scientific objectivity, truth, and being itself only appear within the human sphere, and if human beings cease to exist (and if there are no “Daseins” on other planets), truth no longer exists.
Heideggerian Thought Today
Recently, some contemporary decolonial theorists have unquestioningly adopted this Heideggerian philosophical framework. Like Heidegger, these thinkers reduce being to our understanding of being. Decolonial theorists like Mignolo and Maldonado-Torres, for example, talk about the “coloniality of being,” yet by “being” they do not mean the actual theft of material resources or the exploitation of labor by the colonizers, but the structure of meaning or appearances. Of course, Marxists should not deny that certain philosophical ideas and epistemological frameworks are indeed influenced by colonialism. For example, Heidegger’s philosophy was influenced by Nazism, a racist and colonial ideology, so if the “coloniality of being” is anywhere, it is in Heidegger’s Eurocentric history of being.20 These decolonial theorists, however, take Heidegger’s framework of the history of being yet rewrite this history so that the meaning of being is somehow determined by colonialism. Everything that takes place after colonialism allegedly corresponds to the “coloniality of being.” When Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am,” this is based in the “I conquer, therefore I am,” a skepticism about the humanity of indigenous peoples and a desire to assert one’s own European identity.21 Since these theorists do not distinguish between being and the understanding of being, they tend to see the “coloniality of being” everywhere (except perhaps in the real material relations of neocolonialism). As Maldonado-Torres writes: “as modern subjects, we breathe [sic] colonialism all the time and everyday.”22 For these decolonial theorists, “coloniality survives colonialism,” meaning the legacy of colonialism primarily exists in certain “colonial” modes of knowing that determine the meaning of being, not in the real continuation of colonial relations of exploitation through neo-colonialism or imperialism (nor the literal colonialism currently taking place in Palestine, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere). The task becomes criticizing ideas for their “coloniality” and trying to produce alternative “decolonized” ways of thinking rooted in non-European epistemologies. The ontological becomes epistemological. The real struggle becomes a war of ideas.
Heidegger frames his history of being in an idealist fashion. He has no understanding of the real driving forces of history. For Heidegger, history is just different paradigms of being, new ways of understanding the meaning of being, different interpretations of the meaning of human existence and the things around us. In each historical epoch, the meaning of being is metaphysically determined, the ontological difference disappears behind an ontotheological metaphysic, and being no longer reveals beings in any other way. If history is determined by various representations of being, then the driving forces of history are ideas and interpretations, not the real events occurring in society and nature. Against Heidegger and those who follow him on his quest for being, I would simply say that after a decade of searching for the meaning of being, I found the answer in Hegel’s Logic. “Being itself” is an abstraction, devoid of all content. The meaning of being is nothing.23
Notes:
1.↩ Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, trans. Alan Sheridan et. al (London: Routledge, 1988), 250.
2.↩ This comment was made by Derrida in an interview in reference to Althusser’s engagement with Heidegger. In the same interview, Derrida criticizes Marxism for failing to engage with Heidegger, stating that “some engagement with Heidegger or a problematic of the Heideggerian type should have been mandatory.” Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154 & 173.
3.↩ Cf. Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xiv.
4.↩ Gabriel Rockhill points out that Heidegger was “the principle reference for the Slovenian anti-communist opposition according to Žižek himself.” See Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02 ... voj-zizek/
For a discussion of Žižek’s relation to Heidegger, see Christopher Hanlon and Slavoj Žižek. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” New Literary History 32:1 (Winter, 2001): 1-21.
5.↩ Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, translated by Richard Rojcewicz. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 81.
6.↩ Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 37.
7.↩ The most notorious example was Heidegger’s 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, which featured the passage “What is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’” Heidegger claimed to have written this line about “global technology” in the original lecture, yet not said it during the lecture for fear of reprisal from the Gestapo. It was later shown, however, that this was fabricated by Heidegger, who went so far as to destroy this page from the original manuscript. Ironically, Heidegger said in his 1953 preface “What was spoken no longer speaks in what is printed.” No doubt. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 222 & xlv. See also Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins, 28-34.
8.↩ Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes Three and Four, ed. by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 4.
9.↩ Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 1973), 190.
10.↩ Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, Basic Writings, 103.
11.↩ Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 228.
12.↩ Sheehan claims that Heidegger was interested only in the meaning of being, or being within a phenomenologically reduced sense. See Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review, 32 (2001): 183-202. Capobianco defends the more orthodox reading of Heidegger’s project in his books Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) and Heidegger’s Way of Being (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
13.↩ References to Being and Time cite the German page numbers. I have used the Joan Stambaugh translation throughout. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).
14.↩ Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981), 493.
15.↩ Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 32(2001): 191.
16.↩ Even in this passage, Heidegger falls into a contradictory way of speaking. Joan Stambaugh highlights this contradiction even more in her translation when she says that the beings revealed through Newton’s laws “did not previously exist,” a violation of Heidegger’s terminology, yet a symptom of his contradictory idealism. In German,
Heidegger uses the phrase: sei vordem nicht gewesen, which Mcquarrie and Robinson render more accurately as “before him there were no such entities.”
17.↩ V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empiro-Criticism,
ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/19 ... #bkV14E042
18.↩ Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... g/ch07.htm
19.↩ Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 496.
20.↩ The connection between Nazism and colonialism was famously highlighted by Césaire, who argued that Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures” previously reserved for those in the global south. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 36. The work of Domenico Losurdo has further explored the relationship between colonialism and Nazism. See Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2015).
21.↩ Maldonado-Torres claims, following Enrique Dussel, that “The Cartesian idea about the division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado.” Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 245.
22.↩ Ibid., 243.
23.↩ I would like to thank Jared C. Bly and Carlos L. Garrido for providing helpful feedback for this article.
https://mronline.org/2024/03/29/why-the ... -of-being/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
‘Too soon to tell’: On revolutionary temporality
Originally published: Philosophy in Crisis on February 13, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Philosophy in Crisis) (Posted Apr 02, 2024)
It is said that Zhou Enlai once, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, replied that it was still ‘too soon to tell’.
We tend to assume that the revolutionary simply fights for the future.
An abstract progressivism looks backwards and sees nothing but a has-been, a completion, a fact, or series of facts, which can be narrated and judged with precision.
For some, history, at best, conditions our present. It creates the potential, the horizon, for what can be actualized in the future. But history is left there, in the background.
For the ahistorical mind and for the abstract historicist the past is past… it is dead. History is, as we Americans say, a done deal. Like a chauffeur, it brought us to our destination, the ‘present’. For this we pay and go our way.
From these frameworks, sharing in their judgement of history-as-dead, a has-been, Enlai’s response is baffling. Cannot the impact of the French Revolution be answered clearly and precisely through the immediate events it produced? How can it be too soon to tell the impact of the revolution which sought to “realize the promises of philosophy”?
Enlai’s response is not a cheap diplomatic answer to the foreign questioner. It expresses a profound insight on the temporality of revolutionary struggles, one not limited to the French Revolution. We are, of course, able to speak about the influence revolutionary movements have had… so far. But, in the final instance, none of these discussions can be conclusive. The question cannot be answered with full concreteness, since the questioned phenomenon is still being disclosed. The ‘impact’ of, say, the French Revolution, is still unfolding. Its meaning is still being fought for.
This gets us to the key insight implicit in Enlai’s response: Revolutions aren’t simply about winning a future, realizing a ‘concrete utopia,’ as Bloch would say. They are, equally, about redeeming the past… they concern themselves with the fulfillment of the goals and aspirations of our ancestors in the struggle.
Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain.
“History is rewritten in various periods,” Adam Schaff writes,
not only because new sources become accessible, but also because the newly appearing effects of past events make possible a new appraisal of the past.
Our construction of a new future is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the past. It allows us to shed light, retrospectively, on new meanings of past events–meanings which were implicit, latent, and which have been actualized through the construction of the new.
For the dialectical materialist, revolutionary temporality is comprehensive–it understands and acts conscious of the interconnected and contradictory character of time. The present is seen as a launching off point for the realization of that which is in-itself, implicit, potential, Not-Yet. It is, also, a launching off point for that which is wrongly treated as a has-been, but which, as we know, is still becoming.
For us, then, the future, past, and present are dialectically interconnected and interdependent. The present and future are determined by the past, but equally so, the past is determined by the present and future. This is, of course, a temporal unity of opposites… an objective contradiction in life. The future is found, as implication, in the past, and the past is found, as realization, in the future.
A one-sided, reifying outlook cannot capture this complexity. An outlook which fears contradictions will be left astray, forced to castrate the temporal dialectic of the world to fit the neat categories in their heads. It is theoretical brumotactillophobia, a deep-seated fear in the dialectical intermingling of categories one hopes to keep purely apart.
Enlai, as a proficient dialectician, was correct in his assessment of the French Revolution. It is still ‘too soon to tell’ precisely because the rational kernel, the progressive demands, of the revolution have yet to be fully realized. These find themselves unactualizable within the bourgeois form of life. They find their realization in the communist form of life, which, for most of the world, exists only implicitly/in-itself, as a hope which drives us to realize its latent potential.
We have a world to win. And when it is won, we’ll secure for ourselves not only the future, but also the past.
https://mronline.org/2024/04/02/too-soo ... mporality/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"
Aldebarán destaca en la Híades
Materialism matters: The role of philosophy in science
Originally published: Advanced Science News on February 20, 2024 by Kieran Schlegel-O'Brien (more by Advanced Science News) | (Posted Apr 16, 2024)
In this first article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at materialism and why it is fundamental to science.
A short disclaimer before we read further: I’m a materialist. Materialism is a branch of philosophy to which the sciences, particularly the physical and life sciences, owe a lot. Materialism posits that the material world–matter–exists, and everything in the Universe, including consciousness, is made from or is a product of matter. An objective reality exists and we can understand it. Without materialism, physics, chemistry, and biology as we know it wouldn’t exist.
Another branch of philosophy, idealism, is in direct contradiction to materialism. Idealism states that, instead of matter, the mind and consciousness are fundamental to reality; that they are immaterial and therefore independent of the material world.
A lot of scientists and researchers don’t necessarily have a conscious philosophy, or else don’t consider philosophy to be particularly relevant to their day-to-day work. But by not having a conscious philosophy, scientists—like anyone else—can unconsciously pick up other philosophies and outlooks in the society around them. This has led to a situation where idealist philosophies, both consciously and unconsciously, are creeping their way back into the sciences, particularly in theoretical physics, leading to false interpretations of the nature of reality and the Universe.
I am not alone in this view. Writing in Scientific American in 2019, science journalist John Horgan wrote:
The so-called pure sciences aren’t so pure either. Prominent physicists persist in promoting glitzy but unconfirmable ideas like string theory, inflation, multiverse theories and the anthropic principle (which holds that the universe must be as we observe it to be because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it). In mind-science, theorists advocate models–based on quantum mechanics and information theory–that make consciousness a fundamental component of reality. Like the anthropic principle, these mind−body theories reflect our narcissistic insistence that we are central to the cosmos.
Ideas like there being no such thing as an objective reality; certain conclusions drawn from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; and the anthropic principle mentioned above, are all examples of idealism within science.
But by rejecting materialism and embracing idealism, the physical sciences cannot progress further. Scientists need to reaffirm that reality exists, it is objective, and it can be investigated and understood. To reject any or all of these assumptions is to fundamentally reject the scientific method. It is therefore time that scientists and researchers reclaim materialism.
The case against idealism
Reading the popular science literature, not a year goes by without a book or article being published that claims—based on the latest experiments in quantum mechanics—sensational theories, such as that no objective reality exists, or our observation of the Universe brings the Universe into being, or even that physical reality itself doesn’t actually exist at all.
Such idealist explanations of experimental results have even gone as far as turning science fiction into serious scientific inquiry, with claims that it is 50% likely that we are all actually living in one big computer simulation. That these ideas are taken so seriously is a symptom of a science facing crisis.
Aside from the most obvious questions which arise from these theories (what was the nature of reality before conscious life evolved? Did nothing exist before conscious life evolved?), another conclusion can be drawn by denying objective reality: If objective reality cannot be known, or is non-existent, then we cannot change the world around us. Some might even go further and conclude that there is therefore no point in trying.
In an age of mass extinction and climate catastrophe, this is dangerously complacent if not outright complicit in the existential threat facing our societies. But by accepting materialism, we accept that we can and must change the world for the better.
Materialism and science
Science and the scientific method are rooted in materialism. The scientific revolution in Europe and North America of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were built on the foundation stones of materialism. In an age of revolution and struggle against the old feudal order, philosophers and scientists began questioning the established ideas of society, including ideas within what would later be known as the natural sciences.
As Frederik Engels wrote of this period in 1883, it was “a time which called for giants and produced giants—giants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning.”
Empiricism became the basic scientific method. It states that knowledge can only be gained by observing, measuring, and experimenting, rather than through things like logic and intuition alone, or indeed through what the Pope told you.
This is very useful to science, and acted as a great impetus to progress and discovery, but it also has its limits. For example, if all we did was rely on our observations of the movement of the heavens to understand them, we could quite easily draw the conclusion that everything in the heavens–the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the stars–rotates around the Earth, which is static. Of course, people did think this for millennia, and who could blame them? The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun went against “common sense” and all the empirical evidence at the time. Furthermore, you cannot feel the Earth moving, so common sense would tell you it must be stationary.
Only with better instruments, more accurate measurements, and new observations did astronomers start to observe things which didn’t quite fit with this geocentric view of cosmology, also known as the Ptolemaic system–after the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy.
But since the Ptolemaic system was also supported by the Catholic Church, going against this model was out of the question as it would mean going against God Himself. At first, rather than realizing the model was wrong, astronomers came up with more and more weird and wonderful explanations for these discrepancies and more and more complicated and cumbersome mathematical models tacked onto the geocentric model to shore it up. This was evidence that medieval cosmology was entering crisis—along with medieval society in general—and something would have to give.
Eventually, the evidence became too overwhelming and the geocentric model came crashing down with the Copernican Revolution, when in the 16th century, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus finally took the bold step in saying what perhaps many were already thinking but didn’t dare say: The Earth and planets orbit around the Sun, not the other way round.
This was a truly revolutionary step forward in thought. The 16th century saw the beginning of the end of absolutism in Europe and dominance of the Catholic Church in peoples’ lives and society at large, and as in all revolutionary epochs, philosophy and science were not immune to the seismic changes taking place within political institutions and economic relations. It is no accident that the centuries spanning the Copernican Revolution and the Enlightenment coincided with the Reformation, the decline and fall of feudalism and absolutism, and the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.
With the heliocentric model of cosmology now firmly in the saddle, and with cosmology and philosophy freed from the ideological grip of the Church, physics and mathematics made great leaps forward, culminating in Newtonian mechanics.
A mechanical materialist conception underpinned this early classical mechanics. The motion of the planets and moons were thought of as similar to that of a mechanical clock, and scientists described the world in this rigidly mechanical sense. Cogs, levers, and pulleys were the main metaphors of the day, and Newtonian mechanics informed us that this perfect, clock-work universe was entirely predictable, so long as the mathematics were there to describe it.
The French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace took this worldview to its logical conclusion when he proposed the idea that if one were to know the starting conditions–location and speed–of all matter in the Universe, right down to every atom, then everything in the entire Universe would be entirely predictable.
We now know that this assumption is very simplistic.
The limits of early materialism
The Universe is not a giant clock-work machine; there are imperfections, there is unpredictability, there is randomness, and a whole other multitude of phenomena that cannot be predicted by mathematics alone (or even predicted accurately at all). Just take weather forecasts as one trivial example.
Just like with the Ptolemaic system, scientists had for a long time seen such observations that threw the mechanical worldview into doubt, and there were detractors right from the start. Unlike what Newtonian mechanics implies, people knew that some things were not reversible. You may be able to boil water, capture the steam, and condense that steam back into water, but if you drop an egg in that boiling water, the egg cannot be unboiled along with it. It has undergone a qualitative change from which there is no going back. And eggs aren’t alone in this. The world around us is full of such change.
This is not to disparage Newton, Laplace, and other scientists of the Enlightenment. Newton, for example, was looking at the movement of the heavens–which at first glance do look perfectly mechanical–and wasn’t spending his time boiling eggs. Their contributions to science were a great and progressive leap forward in our understanding of the natural world but they could only work with the knowledge and means of investigation which were available to them at the time.
It wouldn’t be until the beginning of the last century when classical mechanics, and with it a mechanistic materialist worldview, were supplanted by other paradigm shifts in the forms of perhaps the most well-known theories of the 20th century: relativity and quantum mechanics.
Other new advances, like chaos theory and complexity, also emerged to try and understand the randomness found in a lot of natural systems, and these go a lot further in better describing processes in the natural world than a rigid, clock-work worldview ever could. Of course, in the field of biology, evolutionary theory took a materialist view of life and gave an explanation to how it develops and changes.
Matter in motion
Science therefore acquired a new materialism, one that acknowledged that matter and movement are not forever static and unchanging. Materialism today does not just claim that matter is all that exists, but matter in motion, in a state of constant change. This idea can also be found in philosophy, going right back to ancient times.
But by the end of the 18th century, these philosophical ideas about change had fallen out of fashion in western thought, and in a lot of respects had been forgotten about, buried under the weight of the dominant mechanics of Newton. It took the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, writing in the early 19th century, to “rescue” this and bring it to light again.
Hegel named his philosophy dialectics, a word which up until that point had meant the writing of philosophical arguments in the form of a dialogue, or “dialectic”. Now, with Hegel, dialectics meant a philosophy of change.
In the next article, we’ll see how dialectics, coupled with materialism, can provide a powerful heuristic approach to understanding laws and phenomena of the natural world discovered in the 19th century and beyond.
https://mronline.org/2024/04/16/materialism-matters/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."