Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:51 pm

anaxarchos
02-10-2007, 05:09 PM
We come to the end of the this particular topic with Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philospohy as a Whole which comes from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For the 26 year old Marx, this was the beginning of his thinking. It is presented in whole, but it's not that long. For him, this marks the transition from the Hegelian Marx to the Marxist Marx (although, later in life, he said, "I am not a 'Marxist'").

http://www.malaspina.com/jpg/marx.jpg

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /hegel.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /hegel.htm)


XI| (6) This is perhaps the place at which, by way of explanation and justification, we might offer some considerations in regard to the Hegelian dialectic generally and especially its exposition in the Phänomenologie and Logik and also, lastly, the relation (to it) of the modern critical movement.[42]

So powerful was modern German criticism’s preoccupation with the past – so completely was its development entangled with the subject-matter – that here prevailed a completely uncritical attitude to the method of criticising, together with a complete lack of awareness about the apparently formal, but really vital question: how do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic? This lack of awareness about the relationship of modern criticism to the Hegelian philosophy as a whole and especially to the Hegelian dialectic has been so great that critics like Strauss and Bruno Bauer still remain within the confines of the Hegelian logic; the former completely so and the latter at least implicitly so in his Synoptiker (where, in opposition to Strauss, he replaces the substance of “abstract nature” by the “self-consciousness” of abstract man), and even in Das entdeckte Christenthum. Thus in Das entdeckte Christenthum, for example, you get:

“As though in positing the world, self-consciousness does not posit that which is different [from itself] and in what it is creating it does not create itself, since it in turn annuls the difference between what it has created and itself, since it itself has being only in creating and in the movement – as though its purpose were not this movement?” etc.; or again: “They” (the French materialists) “have not yet been able to see that it is only as the movement of self-consciousness that the movement of the universe has actually come to be for itself, and achieved unity with itself.” [Pp. 113, 114-15.]

Such expressions do not even show any verbal divergence from the Hegelian approach, but on the contrary repeat it word for word.

||XII| How little consciousness there was in relation to the Hegelian dialectic during the act of criticism (Bauer, the Synoptiker), and how little this consciousness came into being even after the act of material criticism, is proved by Bauer when, in his Die gute Sache der Freiheit, he dismisses the brash question put by Herr Gruppe – “What about logic now?” – by referring him to future critics.[43]

But even now – now that Feuerbach both in his “Thesen” in the Anekdota and, in detail, in the Philosophie der Zukunft has in principle overthrown the old dialectic and philosophy; now that that school of criticism, on the other hand, which was incapable of accomplishing this, has all the same seen it accomplished and has proclaimed itself pure, resolute, absolute criticism that has come into the clear with itself; now that this criticism, in its spiritual pride, has reduced the whole process of history to the relation between the rest of the world and itself (the rest of the world, in contrast to itself, falling under the category of “the masses”) and dissolved all dogmatic antitheses into the single dogmatic antithesis of its own cleverness and the stupidity of the world – the antithesis of the critical Christ and Mankind, the “rabble”; now that daily and hourly it has demonstrated its own excellence against the dullness of the masses; now, finally, that it has proclaimed the critical Last Judgment in the shape of an announcement that the day is approaching when the whole of decadent humanity will assemble before it and be sorted by it into groups, each particular mob receiving its testimonium paupertatis; now that it has made known in print its superiority to human feelings as well as its superiority to the world, over which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, only letting fall from time to time from its sarcastic lips the ringing laughter of the Olympian Gods – even now, after all these delightful antics of idealism (i.e., of Young Hegelianism) expiring in the guise of criticism – even now it has not expressed the suspicion that the time was ripe for a critical settling of accounts with the mother of Young Hegelianism – the Hegelian dialectic – and even had nothing to say about its critical attitude towards the Feuerbachian dialectic. This shows a completely uncritical attitude to itself.



Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude (of the others).

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;

(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory;

(3) His opposing of the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, teh self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows:

Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance (in logic, from the infinite, abstractly universal) – from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in a popular way, that he sets out from religion and theology.

Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology).

Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite – restoration of religion and theology.

Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself – as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself.

The positive position or self-affirmation and self-confirmation contained in the negation of the negation is taken to be a position which is not yet sure of itself, which is therefore burdened with its opposite, which is doubtful of itself and therefore in need of proof, and which, therefore, is not a position demonstrating itself by its existence – not an acknowledged ||XIII| position; hence it is directly and immediately confronted by the position of sense-certainty based on itself. [Feuerbach also defines the negation of the negation, the definite concept, as thinking surpassing itself in thinking and as thinking wanting to be directly awareness, nature, reality. – Note by Marx [44]]

But because Hegel has conceived the negation of the negation, from the point of view of the positive relation inherent in it, as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of the negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being, he has only found the abstract, logical, speculative expression for the movement of history, which is not yet the real history of man as a given subject, but only the act of creation, the history of the origin of man.

We shall explain both the abstract form of this process and the difference between this process as it is in Hegel in contrast to modern criticism, in contrast to the same process in Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums, or rather the critical form of this in Hegel still uncritical process.



Let us take a look at the Hegelian system. One must begin with Hegel’s Phänomenologie, the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy.

Phenomenology.

A. Self-consciousness.

I. Consciousness. (a) Certainty at the level of sense-experience; or the “this” and “meaning”. (b) Perception, or the thing with its properties, and deception. (g) Force and understanding, appearance and the supersensible world.

II. Self-consciousness. The truth of certainty of self. (a) Independence and dependence of self-consciousness; lord-ship and bondage. (b) Freedom of self-consciousness. Stoicism, scepticism, the unhappy consciousness.

III. Reason. Reason’s certainty and reason’s truth. (a) Observation as a process of reason. Observation of nature and of self-consciousness. (b) Realisation of consciousness through its own activity. Pleasure and necessity. The law of the heart and the insanity of self-conceit. Virtue and the course of the world. (c) The individuality which is real in and for itself. The spiritual animal kingdom and the deception or the real fact. Reason as lawgiver. Reason which tests laws.

B. Mind.

I. True mind, ethics. II. Mind in self-estrangement, culture. III. Mind certain of itself, morality.

C. Religion. Natural religion; religion of art; revealed religion.

D. Absolute knowledge.

Hegel’s Encyklopädie, beginning as it does with logic, with pure speculative thought, and ending with absolute knowledge – with the self-conscious, self-comprehending philosophic or absolute (i.e., superhuman) abstract mind – is in its entirety nothing but the display, the self-objectification, of the essence of the philosophic mind, and the philosophic mind is nothing but the estranged mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement – i.e., comprehending itself abstractly.

Logic – mind’s coin of the realm, the speculative or mental value of man and nature – its essence which has grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence unreal – is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking.

Then: The externality of this abstract thinking ... nature, as it is for this abstract thinking. Nature is external to it – its self-loss; and it apprehends nature also in an external fashion, as alienated abstract thinking. Finally, mind, this thinking returning home to its own point of origin – the thinking which as the anthropological, phenomenological, psychological, ethical, artistic and religious mind is not valid for itself, until ultimately it finds itself, and affirms itself, as absolute knowledge and hence absolute, i.e., abstract, mind, thus receiving its conscious embodiment in the mode of existence corresponding to it. For its real mode of existence is abstraction.



There is a double error in Hegel.

The first emerges most clearly in the Phänomenologie, the birth-place of the Hegelian philosophy. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts ... They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which these objects are estranged and which they confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher – who is himself an abstract form of estranged man – takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) ||XVII|[45] thought – of logical, speculative thought. The estrangement, which therefore forms the real interest of the transcendence of this alienation, is the opposition of in itself and for itself, of consciousness and self-consciousness, of object and subject – that is to say, it is the opposition between abstract thinking and sensuous reality or real sensuousness within thought itself. All other oppositions and movements of these oppositions are but the semblance, the cloak, the exoteric shape of these oppositions which alone matter, and which constitute the meaning of these other, profane oppositions. It is not the fact that the human being objectifies himself inhumanly, in opposition to himself, but the fact that he objectifies himself in distinction from and in opposition to abstract thinking, that constitutes the posited essence of the estrangement and the thing to be superseded.

||XVIII| The appropriation of man’s essential powers, which have become objects – indeed, alien objects – is thus in the first place only an appropriation occurring in consciousness, in pure thought, i.e., in abstraction: it is the appropriation of these objects as thoughts and as movement of thought. Consequently, despite its thoroughly negative and critical appearance and despite the genuine criticism contained in it, which often anticipates far later development, there is already latent in the Phänomenologie as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works – that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world.

In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man – for example, the realisation that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness, that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man’s essential powers put to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world – this appropriation or the insight into this process appears in Hegel therefore in this form, that sense, religion, state power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, theological, speculative mind.

The human character of nature and of the nature created by history – man’s products – appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind – thought-entities. The Phänomenologie is, therefore, a hidden, mystifying and still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man’s estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint. The “unhappy consciousness”, the “honest consciousness”, the struggle of the “noble and base consciousness”, etc., etc. – these separate sections contain, but still in an estranged form, the critical elements of whole spheres such as religion, the state, civil life, etc. Just as entities, objects, appear as thought-entities, so the subject is always consciousness or self-consciousness; or rather the object appears only as abstract consciousness, man only as self-consciousness: the distinct forms of estrangement which make their appearance are, therefore, only various forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. Just as in itself abstract consciousness (the form in which the object is conceived) is merely a moment of distinction of self-consciousness, what appears as the result of the movement is the identity of self-consciousness with consciousness – absolute knowledge – the movement of abstract thought no longer directed outwards but proceeding now only within its own self: that is to say, the dialectic of pure thought is the result.|XVIII||



||XXIII| [46] The outstanding achievement of Hegel’s Phänomenologie and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus first that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the outcome of man’s own labour. The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species-being, or his manifestation as a real species-being (i.e., as a human being), is only possible if he really brings out all his species-powers – something which in turn is only possible through the cooperative action of all of mankind, only as the result of history – and treats these powers as objects: and this, to begin with, is again only possible in the form of estrangement.

We shall now demonstrate in detail Hegel’s one-sidedness – and limitations as they are displayed in the final chapter of the Phänomenologie, “Absolute Knowledge” – a chapter which contains the condensed spirit of the Phänomenologie, the relationship of the Phänomenologie to speculative dialectic, and also Hegel’s consciousness concerning both and their relationship to one another.

Let us provisionally say just this much in advance: Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy. [47] He grasps labour as the essence of man – as man’s essence which stands the test: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man’s coming-to-be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man. The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour. Therefore, that which constitutes the essence of philosophy – the alienation of man who knows himself, or alienated science thinking itself - Hegel grasps as its essence; and in contradistinction to previous philosophy he is therefore able to combine its separate aspects, and to present his philosophy as the philosophy. What the other philosophers did – that they grasped separate phases of nature and of human life as phases of self-consciousness, namely, of human life as phases of self-consciousness – is known to Hegel as the doings of philosophy. Hence his science is absolute.



Let us now turn to our subject.

“Absolute Knowledge”. The last chapter of the “Phänomenologie”.

The main point is that the object of consciousness is nothing else but self-consciousness, or that the object is only objectified self-consciousness – self-consciousness as object. (Positing of man = self-consciousness).

The issue, therefore, is to surmount the object of consciousness. Objectivity as such is regarded as an estranged human relationship which does not correspond to the essence of man, to self-consciousness. The reappropriation of the objective essence of man, produced within the orbit of estrangement as something alien, therefore denotes not only the annulment of estrangement, but of objectivity as well. Man, that is to say, is regarded as a non-objective, spiritual being.

The movement of surmounting the object of consciousness is now described by Hegel in the following way:

The object reveals itself not merely as returning into the self – this is according to Hegel the one-sided way of apprehending this movement, the grasping of only one side. Man is equated with self. The self, however, is only the abstractly conceived man – man created by abstraction. Man is selfish. His eye, his ear, etc., are selfish. In him every one of his essential powers has the quality of selfhood. But it is quite false to say on that account “self-consciousness has eyes, ears, essential powers”. Self-consciousness is rather a quality of ||XXIV| self-consciousness.

The self-abstracted entity, fixed for itself, is man as abstract egoist – egoism raised in its pure abstraction to the level of thought. (We shall return to this point later.)

For Hegel the human being – man – equals self-consciousness. All estrangement of the human being is therefore nothing but estrangement of self-consciousness. The estrangement of self-consciousness is not regarded as an expression – reflected in the realm of knowledge and thought – of the real estrangement of the human being. Instead, the actual estrangement – that which appears real – is according to its inner-most, hidden nature (which is only brought to light by philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness. The science which comprehends this is therefore called phenomenology. All reappropriation of the estranged objective essence appears therefore, as incorporation into self-consciousness: The man who takes hold of his essential being is merely the self-consciousness which takes hold of objective essences. Return of the object into the self is therefore the reappropriation of the object.

Expressed in all its aspects, the surmounting of the object of consciousness means:

(1) That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing.

(2) That it is the alienation of self-consciousness which posits thinghood.[48]

(3) That this alienation has, not merely a negative but a positive significance

(4) That it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for self-consciousness itself.

(5) For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, or its annulling of itself, has positive significance – or it knows this futility of the object – because of the fact that it alienates itself, for in this alienation it posits itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-self, posits the object as itself.

(6) On the other hand, this contains likewise the other moment, that self-consciousness has also just as much superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.

(7) This is the movement of consciousness and this is therefore the totality of its moments.

(9) Consciousness must similarly be related to the object in the totality of its determinations and have comprehended it in terms of each of them. This totality of its determinations makes the object intrinsically a spiritual being; and it becomes so in truth for consciousness through the apprehending of each one of the determinations as self, or through what was called above the spiritual attitude to them. [49]


As to (1): That the object as such presents itself to consciousness as something vanishing – this is the above-mentioned return of the object into the self.

As to (2): The alienation of self-consciousness posits thinghood. Because man equals self-consciousness, his alienated, objective essence, or thinghood, equals alienated self-consciousness, and thinghood is thus posited through this alienation (thinghood being that which is an object for man and an object for him is really only that which is to him an essential object, therefore his objective essence. And since it is not real man, nor therefore nature – man being human nature – who as such is made the subject, but only the abstraction of man, self-consciousness, so thinghood cannot be anything but alienated self-consciousness). It is only to be expected that a living, natural being equipped and endowed with objective (i.e., material) essential powers should of his essence have real natural objects; and that his self-alienation should lead to the positing of a real, objective world, but within the framework of externality, and, therefore, an overwhelming world not belonging to his own essential being. There is nothing incomprehensible or mysterious in this. It would be mysterious, rather, if it were otherwise. But it is equally clear that a self-consciousness by its alienation can posit only thinghood, i.e., only an abstract thing, a thing of abstraction and not a real thing. [50] It is ||XXVI| clear, further, that thinghood is therefore utterly without any independence, any essentiality vis-á-vis self-consciousness; that on the contrary it is a mere creature – something posited by self-consciousness. And what is posited, instead of confirming itself, is but confirmation of the act of positing which for a moment fixes its energy as the product, and gives it the semblance – but only for a moment – of an independent, real substance.

|| Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects – because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history.

<Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.>

Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.

A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.

||XXVII| A non-objective being is a non-being.

Suppose a being which is neither an object itself, nor has an object. Such a being, in the first place, would be the unique being: there would exist no being outside it – it would exist solitary and alone. For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another – another reality than the object outside me. For this third object I am thus a different reality than itself; that is, I am its object. Thus, to suppose a being which is not the object of another being is to presuppose that no objective being exists. As soon as I have an object, this object has me for an object. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous thing – a product of mere thought (i.e., of mere imagination) – an abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to be an object of sense, to be a sensuous object, to have sensuous objects outside oneself – objects of one’s sensuousness. To be sensuous is to suffer.

Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being – and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential power of man energetically bent on its object.

<But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species-being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing. Therefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, and neither is human sense as it immediately is – as it is objectively – human sensibility, human objectivity is directly given in a form adequate to the human being.>

And as everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin – history – which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of origin it is a conscious self-transcending act of origin. History is the true natural history of man (on which more later).

Thirdly, because this positing of thinghood is itself only an illusion, an act contradicting the nature of pure activity, it has to be cancelled again and thinghood denied.

Re 3, 4, 5 and 6. (3) This externalisation of consciousness has not merely a negative but a positive significance, and (4) it has this meaning not merely for us or intrinsically, but for consciousness itself. For consciousness the negative of the object, its annulling of itself, has positive significance – i.e., consciousness knows this nullity of the object – because it alienates itself; for, in this alienation it knows itself as object, or, for the sake of the indivisible unity of being-for-itself, the object as itself. (6) On the other hand, there is also this other moment in the process, that consciousness has also just as much superseded this alienation and objectivity and resumed them into itself, being thus at home in its other-being as such.



As we have already seen, the appropriation of what is estranged and objective, or the annulling of objectivity in the form of estrangement (which has to advance from indifferent strangeness to real, antagonistic estrangement), means likewise or even primarily for Hegel that it is objectivity which is to be annulled, because it is not the determinate character of the object, but rather its objective character that is offensive and constitutes estrangement for self-consciousness. The object is therefore something negative, self-annulling – a nullity. This nullity of the object has not only a negative but a positive meaning for consciousness, since this nullity of the object is precisely the self-confirmation of the non-objectivity, of the ||XXVIII|abstraction of itself. For consciousness itself the nullity of the object has a positive meaning because it knows this nullity, the objective being, as its self-alienation; because it knows that it exists only as a result of its own self-alienation....

The way in which consciousness is, and in which something is for it, is knowing. Knowing is its sole act. Something therefore comes to be for consciousness insofar as the latter knows this something. Knowing is its sole objective relation.

It [consciousness] then knows the nullity of the object (i.e., knows the non-existence of the distinction between the object and itself, the non-existence of the object for it) because it knows the object as its self-alienation; that is, it knows itself – knows knowing as object – because the object is only the semblance of an object, a piece of mystification, which in its essence, however, is nothing else but knowing itself, which has confronted itself with itself and hence has confronted itself with a nullity – a something which has no objectivity outside the knowing. Or: knowing knows that in relating itself to an object it is only outside itself – that it only externalises itself; that it itself only appears to itself as an object – or that that which appears to it as an object is only itself.

On the other hand, says Hegel, there is here at the same time this other moment, that consciousness has just as much annulled and reabsorbed this externalisation and objectivity, being thus at home in its other-being as such.



In this discussion all the illusions of speculation are brought together.

First of all: consciousness, self-consciousness, is at home in its other-being as such. It is therefore – or if we here abstract from the Hegelian abstraction and put the self-consciousness of man instead of self-consciousness – it is at home in its other being as such. This implies, for one thing, that consciousness (knowing as knowing, thinking as thinking) pretends to be directly the other of itself – to be the world of sense, the real world, life – thought surpassing itself in thought (Feuerbach)[51]. This aspect is contained herein, inasmuch as consciousness as mere consciousness takes offence not at estranged objectivity, but at objectivity as such.

Secondly, this implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has recognised and superseded the spiritual world (or his world’s spiritual, general mode of being) as self-alienation, nevertheless again confirms it in this alienated shape and passes it off as his true mode of being – re-establishes it, and pretends to be at home in his other-being as such. Thus, for instance, after superseding religion, after recognising religion to be a product of self-alienation he yet finds confirmation of himself in religion as religion. Here is the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism: this is what Feuerbach designated as the positing, negating and re-establishing of religion or theology – but it has to be expressed in more general terms. Thus reason is at home in unreason The man who has recognised that he is leading an alienated life in law, politics, etc., is leading his true human life in this alienated life as such. Self-affirmation, self-confirmation in contradiction with itself – in contradiction with both the knowledge and the essential being of the object – is thus true knowledge and life.

There can therefore no longer be any question about an act of accommodation on Hegel’s part vis-à-vis religion, the state, etc., since this lie is the lie of his principle.

||XXIX| If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness, then what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness, but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it. I therefore know my self-consciousness that belongs to itself, to its very nature, confirmed not in religion but rather in annihilated and superseded religion.

In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject.

A peculiar role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation, i.e., affirmation, are bound together.

Thus, for example, in Hegel’s philosophy of law, civil law superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, the family superseded equals civil society, civil society superseded equals the state, the state superseded equals world history. In the actual world civil law, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc., remain in existence, only they have become moments – modes of the existence and being of man – which have no validity in isolation, but dissolve and engender one another, etc. They have become moments of motion.

In their actual existence this mobile nature of theirs is hidden. It appears and is made manifest only in thought, in philosophy. Hence my true religious existence is my existence in the philosophy of religion; my true political existence is my existence in the philosophy of law; my true natural existence, existence in the philosophy of nature; my true artistic existence, existence in the philosophy of art; my true human existence, my existence in philosophy. Likewise the true existence of religion, the state, nature, art, is the philosophy of religion, of nature, of the state and of art. If, however, the philosophy of religion, etc., is for me the sole true existence of religion then, too, it is only as a philosopher of religion that I am truly religious, and so I deny real religious sentiment and the really religious man. But at the same time I assert them, in part within my own existence or within the alien existence which I oppose to them – for this is only their philosophic expression – and in part I assert them in their distinct original shape, since for me they represent merely the apparent other-being, allegories, forms of their own true existence (i.e., of my philosophical existence) hidden under sensuous disguises.

In just the same way, quality superseded equals quantity, quantity superseded equals measure, measure superseded equals essence, essence superseded equals appearance, appearance superseded equals actuality, actuality superseded equals the concept, the concept superseded equals objectivity, objectivity superseded equals the absolute idea, the absolute idea superseded equals nature, nature superseded equals subjective mind, subjective mind superseded equals ethical objective mind, ethical mind superseded equals art, art superseded equals religion, religion superseded equals absolute knowledge.[52]

On the one hand, this act of superseding is a transcending of a conceptual entity; thus, private property as a concept is transcended in the concept of morality. And because thought imagines itself to be directly the other of itself, to be sensuous reality – and therefore takes its own action for sensuous, real action – this superseding in thought, which leaves its object in existence in the real world, believes that it has really overcome it. On the other hand, because the object has now become for it a moment of thought , thought takes it in its reality too to be self-confirmation of itself – of self-consciousness, of abstraction.

||XXX| From the one point of view the entity which Hegel supersedes in philosophy is therefore not real religion, the real state, or real nature, but religion itself already as an object of knowledge, i.e., dogmatics; the same with jurisprudence, political science and natural science. From the one point of view, therefore, he stands in opposition both to the real thing and to immediate, unphilosophic science or the unphilosophic conceptions of this thing. He therefore contradicts their conventional conceptions.

On the other hand, the religious, etc., man can find in Hegel his final confirmation.



It is now time to formulate the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic within the realm of estrangement.

(a) Supersession as an objective movement of retracting the alienation into self. This is the insight, expressed within the estrangement, concerning the appropriation of the objective essence through the supersession of its estrangement; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective essence through the annihilation of the estranged character of the objective world, through the supersession of the objective world in its estranged mode of being. In the same way atheism being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretical humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation – which is itself, however, a necessary premise – does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.

But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world created by man – of man’s essential powers born to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real emergence, the actual realisation for man of man’s essence and of his essence as something real.

Thus, by grasping the positive meaning of self-referred negation (although again in estranged fashion) Hegel grasps man’s self-estrangement, the alienation of man’s essence, man’s loss of objectivity and his loss of realness as self-discovery, manifestation of his nature, objectification and realisation. <In short, within the sphere of abstraction, Hegel conceives labour as man’s act of self-genesis – conceives man’s relation to himself as an alien being and the manifestation of himself as an alien being to be the emergence of species-consciousness and species-life.>

(b) However, apart from, or rather in consequence of, the referral already described, this act appears in Hegel:

First as a merely formal, because abstract, act, because the human being itself is taken to be only an abstract, thinking being, conceived merely as self-consciousness. And,

Secondly, because the exposition is formal and abstract, the supersession of the alienation of becomes a confirmation of the alienation; or, for Hegel this movement of self-genesis and self-objectification in the form of self-alienation and self-estrangement is the absolute, and hence final, expression of human life – with itself as its aim, at peace with itself, and in unity with its essence.

This movement, in its abstract ||XXXI| form as dialectic, is therefore regarded as truly human life, and because it is nevertheless an abstraction – an estrangement of human life – it is regarded as a divine process, but as the divine process of man, a process traversed by man’s abstract, pure, absolute essence that is distinct from himself.

Thirdly, this process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject only comes into being as a result. This result – the subject knowing itself as absolute self consciousness – is therefore God, absolute Spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates – symbols of this hidden, unreal man and of this unreal nature. Subject and predicate are therefore related to each other in absolute reversal – a mystical subject-object or a subjectivity reaching beyond the object – absolute subject as a process, as subject alienating itself and returning from alienation into itself, but at the same time retracting this alienation into itself, and the subject as this process; a pure, incessant revolving within itself.

First. Formal and abstract conception of man’s act of self-creation or self-objectification.

Hegel having posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness, the estranged object – the estranged essential reality of man – is nothing but consciousness, the thought of estrangement merely – estrangement’s abstract and therefore empty and unreal expression, negation. The supersession of the alienation is therefore likewise nothing but an abstract, empty supersession of that empty abstraction – the negation of the negation. The rich, living, sensuous, concrete activity of self-objectification is therefore reduced to its mere abstraction, absolute negativity – an abstraction which is again fixed as such and considered as an independent activity – as sheer activity. Because this so-called negativity is nothing but the abstract, empty form of that real living act, its content can in consequence be merely a formal content produced by abstraction from all content. As a result therefore one gets general, abstract forms of abstraction pertaining to every content and on that account indifferent to, and, consequently, valid for, all content – the thought-forms or logical categories torn from real mind and from real nature. (We shall unfold the logical content of absolute negativity further on.)

|| Hegel’s positive achievement here, in his speculative logic, is that the definite concepts, the universal fixed thought-forms in their independence vis-à-vis nature and mind are a necessary result of the general estrangement of the human being and therefore also of a human thought, and that Hegel has therefore brought these together and presented them as moments of the abstraction-process. For example, superseded being is essence, superseded essence is concept, the concept superseded is ... absolute idea. But what, then, is the absolute idea? It supersedes its own self again, if it does not want to perform once more from the beginning the whole act of abstraction, and to satisfy itself with being a totality of abstractions or the self-comprehending abstraction. But abstraction comprehending itself as abstraction knows itself to be nothing: it must abandon itself – abandon abstraction – and so it arrives at an entity which is its exact opposite – at nature. Thus, the entire logic is the demonstration that abstract thought is nothing in itself; that the absolute idea is nothing for itself; that only nature is something.

||XXXII| The absolute idea, the abstract idea, which

“considered with regard to its unity with itself is intuiting (Logic § 244), and which (loc. cit.) “in its own absolute truth resolves to let the moment of its particularity or of initial characterisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflection, go forth freely from itself as nature” (loc. cit.),

this whole idea which behaves in such a strange and bizarre way, and which has given the Hegelians such terrible headaches, is from beginning to end nothing else but abstraction (i.e., the abstract thinker), which, made wise by experience and enlightened concerning its truth, resolves under various (false and themselves still abstract) conditions to abandon itself and to replace its self-absorption, nothingness, generality and indeterminateness by its other-being, the particular, and the determinate; resolves to let nature, which it held hidden in itself only as an abstraction, as a thought-entity, go forth freely from itself; that is to say, this idea resolves to forsake abstraction and to have a look at nature free of abstraction. The abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuiting, is indeed nothing else but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. This entire transition from logic to natural philosophy is nothing else but the transition – so difficult to effect for the abstract thinker, who therefore describes it such a far-fetched way – from abstracting to intuiting. The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom – the longing for content.

(The man estranged from himself is also the thinker estranged from his essence – that is, from the natural and human essence. His thoughts are therefore fixed mental forms dwelling outside nature and man. Hegel has locked up all these fixed mental forms together in his logic, interpreting each of them as negation – that is, as an alienation of human thought – and then as negation of the negation – that is, as a superseding of this alienation, as a real expression of human thought. But as this still takes place within the confines of the estrangement, this negation of the negation is in part the restoring of these fixed forms in their estrangement; in part a stopping at the last act – the act of self-reference in alienation – as the true mode of being of these fixed mental forms; * —

[* This means that what Hegel does is to put in place of these fixed abstractions the act of abstraction which revolves in its own circle. We must therefore give him the credit for having indicated the source of all these inappropriate thoughts which originally appertained to particular philosophers; for having brought them together; and for having created the entire compass of abstraction as the object of criticism, instead of some specific abstraction.) (Why Hegel separates thought from the subject we shall see later; at this stage it is already clear, however, that when man is not, his characteristic expression cannot be human either, and so neither could thought be grasped as an expression of man as a human and natural subject endowed with eyes, ears, etc., and living in society, in the world, and in nature.) — Note by Marx]

— and in part, to the extent that this abstraction apprehends itself and experiences an infinite weariness with itself, there makes its appearance in Hegel, in the form of the resolution to recognise nature as the essential being and to go over to intuition, the abandonment of abstract thought – the abandonment of thought revolving solely within the orbit of thought, of thought sans eyes, sans teeth, sans ears, sans everything.)

||XXXIII| But nature too, taken abstractly, for itself – nature fixed in isolation from man – is nothing for man. It goes without saying that the abstract thinker who has committed himself to intuiting, intuits nature abstractly. Just as nature lay enclosed in the thinker in the form of the absolute idea, in the form of a thought-entity – in a shape which was obscure and enigmatic even to him – so by letting it emerge from himself he has really let emerge only this abstract nature, only nature as a thought-entity – but now with the significance that it is the other-being of thought, that it is real, intuited nature – nature distinguished from abstract thought. Or, to talk in human language, abstract thinker learns in his intuition of nature that the entities which he thought to create from nothing, from pure abstraction – the entities he believed he was producing in the divine dialectic as pure products of the labour of thought, for ever shuttling back and forth in itself and never looking outward into reality – are nothing else but abstractions from characteristics of nature. To him, therefore, the whole of nature merely repeats the logical abstractions in a sensuous, external form. He once more resolves nature into these abstractions. Thus, his intuition of nature is only the act of confirming his abstraction from the intuition of nature [Let us consider for a moment Hegel’s characteristics of nature and the transition from nature to the mind. Nature has resulted as the idea in the form of the other-being. Since the id .. ] – is only the conscious repetition by him of the process of creating his abstraction. Thus, for example, time equals negativity referred to itself (Hegel, Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. p. 238). To the superseded becoming as being there corresponds, in natural form, superseded movement as matter. Light is reflection-in-itself, the natural form. Body as moon and comet is the natural form of the antithesis which according to logic is on the one side the positive resting on itself and on the other side the negative resting on itself. The earth is the natural form of the logical ground, as the negative unity of the antithesis, etc.

Nature as nature – that is to say, insofar as it is still sensuously distinguished from that secret sense hidden within it – nature isolated, distinguished from these abstractions is nothing – a nothing proving itself to be nothing – is devoid of sense, or has only the sense of being an externality which has to be annulled.

“In the finite-teleological position is to be found the correct premise that nature does not contain within itself the absolute purpose.” [§245].

Its purpose is the confirmation of abstraction.

“Nature has shown itself to be the idea in the form of other-being. Since the idea is in this form the negative of itself or external to itself, nature is not just relatively external vis-à-vis this idea, but externality constitutes the form in which it exists as nature.” [§ 247].

Externality here is not to be understood as the world of sense which manifests itself and is accessible to the light, to the man endowed with senses. It is to be taken here in the sense of alienation, of a mistake, a defect, which ought not to be. For what is true is still the idea. Nature is only the form of the idea’s other-being. And since abstract thought is the essence, that which is external to it is by its essence something merely external. The abstract thinker recognises at the same time that sensuousness – externality in contrast to thought shuttling back and forth within itself – is the essence of nature. But he expresses this contrast in such a way as to make this externality of nature, its contrast to thought, its defect, so that inasmuch as it is distinguished from abstraction, nature is something defective.

||XXXIV| An entity which is defective not merely for me or in my eyes but in itself – intrinsically – has something outside itself which it lacks. That is, its essence is different from it itself. Nature has therefore to supersede itself for the abstract thinker, for it is already posited by him as a potentially superseded being.

“For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature’s truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature.” [§ 381].

“As the abstract idea, revelation is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature; as the revelation of the mind, which is free, it is the positing of nature as the mind’s world – a positing which, being reflection, is at the same time, a presupposing of the world as independently existing nature. Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as the mind’s being, in which the mind procures the affirmation and the truth of its freedom.” “The absolute is mind. This is the highest definition of the absolute.” [§ 384.] |XXXIV||


Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects – because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both. We see also how only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history.

<Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.>

Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:51 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
02-10-2007, 05:38 PM
OK, I've been reading and rather than throw more shit against the wall here, maybe you can answer this one question.

We are dispensing with cause and efffect where you have one body (the actor) communication 'information' to another, passive, receiver..right? Instead you have the interconnectedness of all things and things that are jointly constrained.

Close?
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:53 pm

anaxarchos
02-10-2007, 06:00 PM

Very close... And very different from contemporary "thinking". I always wondered why the "organic thinkers" never stumbled across all this stuff.

Take a look at the last thing I posted ("Part II"). We are now free falling back down to earth, qnd quickly at that, from the lofty "Heights" we started from.
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:54 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
02-15-2007, 01:22 AM

The book I mentioned above, the reason I picked it up in the first place was that it has a foreward by a (reasonably) prominent physicist who argues against the Big Bang. It appears that the book is online also now through Marxists.org

Very, very interesting stuff, although I am not fundamentally sold that your conclusions follow from your line of reasoning.

I give you this though

everything that references the universe is part of the universe (by definition) hence the universe is self-referential

whatever motivates the universe is part of the universe (by definition) hence the universe is self-motivating

That is a powerful pair of statements.

I am thinking about this though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_velocity

It seems to me that a superluminal phase velocity would come very close to producing the 'Platonic Ideal' you abhor so much but in a way that strips away all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Sort of a snapshot of the universe if you will.

Also, I think I disagree about the book not being a good jumping off point for beginners. I found it very helpful without mystifying the whole thing. Maybe it lacks a bit in historical grounding though, I can't say.
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:56 pm

anaxarchos
02-15-2007, 01:34 PM

You are not going to suceed in pulling me into this discussion. Hegel is bad (obscure) enough. If you want my 2 cents, the "philosophical" discussion in America today is basically on rediscovering materialism (even crude materialism - pre-Hegelian). You can think of me as a basically "back-to-the-roots" conservative kinda guy.... :wink:
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:57 pm

Kid of the Black Hole
02-15-2007, 10:43 PM

You and Mike both, right?

I guess part of my difficulty is I have a stigma in my own mind attached to the word 'materialism'. Not in the mundane sense but in the sense you are using it. It seems to me to be reductionist which is the opposite of where you are going so I guess I need to hash that out somehow :)
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:59 pm

anaxarchos
02-15-2007, 11:12 PM

Descartes->Newton... Newton->Descartes... Is that all they are teaching these days?

REDUCTIONIST????!!

Nah, man... back to the books.

Since we are talking about Hegel, the next actual stepping stone from Hegel back to Materialism is this guy:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... Ludwig.jpg
Ludwig Feuerbach

and then, Marx... and then the revolutionary opponents of Marx... (and then, the floodgates open).
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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 11, 2022 10:38 pm

The Poverty of Western Philosophy in the Service of Hegemonism and Militarism
June 11, 19:32

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The Poverty of Western Philosophy in the Service of Hegemonism and Militarism

Philosophy considers itself the science of wisdom, but the philosophers themselves - highbrow intellectuals - in practice show wisdom no more than ordinary cooks and taxi drivers. Philosophers' predictions almost never come true, and their theories do not have a decisive impact on social development. The authors of the philosophical doctrines that really changed the world were not professional philosophers, they created the theory in the midst of political and military practice. In short, history shows that armchair wisdom is a fascinating thing, but in many ways dubious.

However, despite this, great philosophical minds enjoy reverence in the information space, it is customary to listen to them. There are quite a few famous philosophers in Europe, but two truly iconic figures are Slavoj Zizek and Jurgen Habermas. They represent the flower of Western philosophical thought and are always critical of capitalism, imperialism and the many evils of the Western way of life and thought. However, they are not marginal and not revolutionaries who put truth above personal well-being, therefore, on decisive, key political issues, they occupy positions in which it is easy to read helpfulness to those on whose money they philosophize comfortably.

The beginning of the special operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine was a turning point not only in the political and economic spheres of Western society, but also in the spiritual. The phase of the more or less “calm” struggle of the United States for the preservation of world hegemony was replaced by the stormy course of the military operation in Ukraine, which involved literally all Western countries. Moreover, inside the Western world, following the growth of militarism, there is a sharp turn from the liberal-democratic atmosphere of freedom of opinion and discussion, which the West has boasted for decades, to frenzied hysteria and neo-McCarthyism. Now, if you are not against Russia, you are an enemy of society. And you can't be silent. Are there many prominent intellectuals in the West who put forward the slogan of the defeat of their own government? So Zizek and Habermas were not averse to beating the drums of war.

Although Žižek traditionally focuses on cultural issues and is considered a follower of Freudian-Marxism (a pathetic imitation of an all-encompassing current of thought that speculates on certain provisions of Marx's theory and Freud's theory), his opinion on the current political situation seems to be significant. Zizek always writes and speaks outrageously, fervently, his philosophy is more like detective novels than a fundamental study of society and the human soul. The accuracy of the categorical apparatus and terminological accuracy are not to him. He is a product of the era of clip consciousness and comics. Žižek is very popular among the educated youth, who, without having a high philosophical culture, are desperately striving to intellectually rise above the masses of the people. His position plays an important role in the political orientation of young Western humanitarians.

What did Zizek say about the fascist nature of the Ukrainian regime, the expansion of NATO, the militarization of the West, the criminal transformation of the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder? It is easy to guess that nothing smart. On the contrary, he compares Ukraine... to a woman being raped.

“Russia has shown that if it does not get consent to sex from Ukraine, then it is ready to commit rape, accusing Ukraine of provocation to commit rape.”

That is, his entire “philosophical position” is focused around one fact that the Russian Federation began the hostilities. The current political process had no context, no past, present and future prospects, there are no hidden mechanisms, everything is on the surface. The reason for the special operation is declared to be "the desire for sex", that is, the desire to master Ukraine. There is no point in talking about the obscene "Freudian" metaphor, it clearly demonstrates the cultural level of the philosopher.

“As is the case with real rapists,” Zizek writes further, “rape testifies to the impotence of the aggressor. This impotence is palpable now in that the act of rape began with the direct penetration of the Russian military into Ukraine.”

In short, a big and strong man with impotence powerlessly pounced on a fashionista in a short skirt. That's the whole philosophy. A person has been dealing with questions of wisdom all his life, but when it comes down to it, his judgments are indistinguishable from the Instagram bleats of some Galkin.

Žižek not only offers outrageous metaphors to the public, but also actively criticizes anti-American arguments:

“Now some who call themselves leftists are blaming the West... The argument is well-known: NATO slowly surrounded Russia, fomenting “color revolutions” in its near abroad and ignoring the country’s reasonable fears , attacked from the West in the last century.

There is, of course, some truth in this. But talking only about this is tantamount to justifying Hitler, who accused the Treaty of Versailles of injustice. Even worse, it means recognizing that the great powers are entitled to spheres of influence that all others must obey for the sake of global stability. Putin's assumption that international relations is a great power contest is reflected in his repeated claims that he had no choice but to intervene militarily in Ukraine.

If Žižek believes that international politics is definitely not a competition of world powers, what then? Other works and speeches by Žižek on the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, on the US policy in Europe on the principle of "divide and conquer" come precisely from the concept of US imperialism, that is, the competition of world powers. See how quickly and painlessly philosophers change their shoes in the air when it smells of roast.

By the way, it is very possible to “justify Hitler” about the injustice of Versailles, but not from the point of view, as Zizek understands it. The fact is that the monstrous conditions of the Treaty of Versailles became the natural cause of a new world war and had a significant impact on the prospect of a character like Hitler coming to power in Germany. Smart people, after the announcement of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, wrote that it would only guarantee a small respite before a new war.

Even Stalin was ready to justify Hitlerism to a certain extent:

“Can the Nazis be considered nationalists? No. In fact, the Nazis are now not nationalists, but imperialists. While the Nazis were engaged in collecting German lands and reunifying the Rhineland, Austria, etc., they could be considered nationalists with certain justification. But after they seized foreign territories and enslaved European nations - Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Serbs, Greeks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Balts, etc. and began to achieve world domination, the Hitlerite party ceased to be nationalist, for from that moment on it became an imperialist, predatory, oppressive party.

In other words, while the Nazis were collecting German lands, they were nationalists and they can be justified in this just because of the conditions of the Versailles Peace. This is the difference between the philosopher Stalin and the philosopher Žižek: the former considers processes concretely, in development, while the latter adjusts the facts to predetermined answers. Hitler in the Western information space was still frightening, although Churchill or Truman differ from him only in the not so large-scale consequences of the bloody policy. And just the philosophical mind should fix it in the first place.

Zizek does not shy away from banal fakes. So, when it comes to Ukrainian fascism, he retorts this delicate question for Westerners with Putin's well-known weakness for the philosopher Ilyin. For all the controversy of this figure and this passion for Putin, Zizek's passages look simply ridiculous:

“Is the problem really in Ukrainian fascism? The question is better addressed to Putin's Russia. Putin's intellectual guiding star is Ivan Ilyin, whose work is again being published and distributed to state apparatchiks and conscripts.

That is, according to Zizek, in the General Staff of the Russian Federation, Ilyin's books are on the tables, and with Ilyin's articles in their bosoms, Russian soldiers go into battle "to rape Ukraine." This is not even fake propaganda, but natural Hollywood cranberries from a world famous philosopher.

Commenting on the goals of the Russian special operation, Žižek resorts to the same polemical device, throwing accusations against Putin:

“When Putin talks about ‟denazification” in Ukraine, we should keep in mind his support for the ‟National Association” Marine Le Pen in France, the ‟League” Matteo Salvini in Italy and other relevant neo-fascist movements".

Even assuming that Putin does indeed support Le Pen and Salvini, and indeed does so for ideological reasons, and not because, for example, they oppose the Americanization of Europe and the growth of NATO, equating these politicians and their parties with the swastika-tattooed "Azov"," to Aidars”, “Pravoseks” and other “defenders of Ukraine” looks, to put it mildly, strained. What, the "League of the North" or the "National Front" shelled peaceful years for years? They have torture prisons on their balance sheets, but hundreds of tormented corpses?

Zizek is least of all interested in the situation of the Ukrainian people, the struggle of Donbass, the opinion of the Russian people, the nature and essence of the Ukrainian regime, the interests and goals of American policy in the region. He, as the most proficient propagandist, "dances" from a single thought about "Putin's imperial vision." All theory, all philosophy has been reduced to the insipid concept of the struggle between good and evil and the absolute role of the sinister personality in history.

Habermas is a more serious figure in philosophy in the sense that his works are more focused on the professional community. In the German press, he is called the main philosopher of Germany, no more, no less the heir of Kant, Hegel and Marx. He is a representative of the so-called Frankfurt School, neo-Marxism. This is a philosophical trend that arose in opposition to the classical communist doctrines, primarily in opposition to Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, that is, the practice of real socialist construction. The theoretical research of the representatives of the "Frankfurt School" had a decisive influence on the formation of the modern ideology of Western democracy, which quickly resulted in the well-known totalitarianism of the left-liberal "agenda" with the cult of the rights of minorities, the struggle for the environment, grassroots democracy, etc.

Philosophers of the Frankfurt School have always been warmed by the authorities of the Western countries, primarily because their critical philosophy threatened the Western world order only in words. Even when, in 1968, the whole of Western Europe was blazing with protests from students and workers, inspired, among other things, by toothless criticism of the "Frankfurters", philosophers themselves, including Habermas, dissociated themselves from the unrest, accusing student leaders of left-wing fascism.

At one time, Habermas was expected to be devastatingly critical of NATO's military intervention in Yugoslavia, but he spoke in an absolutely herbivorous spirit about the inadmissibility of NATO's arbitrariness, emphasizing the "humanity" of the aggressor.

“Allied air strikes seem to be different from traditional warfare,” the philosopher wrote. - In fact, the "surgical precision" of the bombings and the principle of preserving the civilian population have a high legitimizing value. All this means a rejection of the total conduct of war, which determined the physiognomy of the outgoing century. However, what the TV shows us every evening allows us to understand that the population of Yugoslavia understands what is happening only as a war.

The essence of Habermas's position was that military aggression in Yugoslavia is justified, but it is ugly to attack an independent country:

“Nineteen undeniably democratic countries ... enjoy the power of interpretation and decision-making, a competence that, while true today, should be at the disposal of independent institutions. So far, they are acting paternalistically. There are significant moral grounds for this.”

Habermas regarded the American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in a more negative light, realizing that the American air strikes were precisely targeted on the heads of civilians as well. However, his whole protest against wars came down to lamenting about the impossibility of bringing Bush to the Hague Tribunal and the futility of the UN Security Council because of the US veto. Much space was devoted to the nuances of international law and the moral underpinnings of American policy in his reasoning, but there was no room for an analysis of either the actual goals of the United States, or the nature and essence of the regimes that they overthrew, or the interests of the peoples under attack. In short, the “classic of German philosophy” did not go further than ordinary journalism in terms of the depth and elaboration of his works.

After the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, some of our media hurried to tell that Habermas did not take sides in the conflict, recognized NATO's actual participation in the conflict and praised Scholz's restraint. The fact that Habermas speaks from a position of neutrality is just the usual author's trick, which is perfectly mastered by the venerable philosopher.

Thus, for example, he writes:

“The rational background against which these emotions are seething throughout the country is a self-evident bias against Putin and the Russian government, which unleashed a large-scale aggressive war in violation of international law and violates international humanitarian law through its systematically inhumane military actions. ".

It may seem that the indication of bias against the Russian Federation is an element of at least an attempt to consider the situation objectively. But it's not. Habermas criticizes the most aggressive political circles in Germany from the point of view that Russia is a nuclear power and it is deadly to openly participate in the conflict. He criticizes the calls of "Putin to The Hague" not because they are wrong, but because they are unrealistic.

The main message of Habermas's article is that Ukraine must not lose, otherwise the European "social and political way of life will be destabilized from the outside."

Habermas does not speak clearly about the essence of the conflict between the West and Russia, but actually offers the reader arguments from the arsenal of the civilizational approach. So, he writes:

“How then can one explain the debate that has flared up within the country over the repeatedly confirmed policy of solidarity between Chancellor Scholz and Ukraine, which is considered agreed with partners in the EU and NATO? In order to sort out these issues, I will leave aside the debate about continuing the policy of détente against the unpredictable Putin, which was successful until the end of the Soviet Union and even after it, and now turned out to be a serious mistake; and also the mistake of the German authorities, who made themselves dependent on the import of cheap Russian oil, even under economic pressure.”

That is, the policy towards Putin, in his opinion, is a continuation of the policy of detente towards the USSR. Whereas in reality the mechanics of relations between the West and the socialist camp led by the USSR and the mechanics of relations between the West and the Russian Federation are fundamentally different. Not to mention the scale of these two historical forms of confrontation. In the first case, we had, first of all, the rivalry between two different socio-economic systems, moreover, quite closed and self-isolated, and in the second case, there is competition in the homogeneous space of the world market economy and political architecture.

Of course, in American anti-Sovietism and anti-communism, there was also a moment of national and even racial hostility. But the degree of denigration of non-Slavic socialist countries and pressure on them during the Cold War was similar to the USSR, and in terms of the number of ducks and cranberries in Western propaganda, some Stasi will give odds to both the KGB and the NKVD. Thus, earlier the purely anti-Russian and anti-Russian moment in the politics of the Cold War was concomitant to the ideological confrontation, but now it has become dominant.

But the "Marxist" Habermas did not notice anything of the kind, for him both the USSR and the Russian Federation are something like an ominous Mordor that needs to be contained. According to the philosopher, the Russian special operation was "a disappointing response to the West's refusal to negotiate on Putin's geopolitical agenda."

The 92-year-old philosopher with youthful enthusiasm and enviable sycophancy supports Scholz, calling his approach "politically responsible, comprehensively informed and balanced." Let me remind you that the essence of this approach is to arm Bandera Ukraine, while buying gas and oil from Russia and being ready for peace negotiations.

Habermas keeps quiet about Ukrainian fascism, NATO expansion, the problems of Donbass. In terms of content, his article is not much different from the publications of freelance Western journalists.

It's funny, but the American magazine Politico, due to the active support of Scholz, ranked Habermas among the Germans who sold their souls to Russia. The American press does not even try to understand the German discussions and everyone who "shows restraint" en masse ranks among the enemies of the United States.

The works of Zizek and Habermas are united primarily by the anti-historical and anti-scientific denial of the objective fact of the civil war in Ukraine, which has been going on since 2014. From here follows a whole cascade of questions and problems that are hushed up, distorted, turned inside out. In short, philosophers, as propagandists, have fully integrated into the "general line" of the new cold war.

What is it - banal venality, fear of going against public opinion or the failure of their philosophical doctrines? I think it's a little bit of everything. However, if you look closely at the content of the philosophy of these "wise men", it is clear that the justifying nature of their position on the actions of the West is not at all surprising. A superficial, speculative, outrageous philosophy divorced from life naturally leads to political unscrupulousness.

(c) Anatoly Shirokoborodov

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7672349.html

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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 08, 2022 2:53 pm

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A. Sergio Barroso: Hegel no olho de Lênin – a tradição dialética (A. Sergio Barroso: Hegel in Lenin’s eye – the dialectical tradition) (Photo: DEMOCRACY OBSERVATORY)

From Hegel to Lenin
Originally published: RedSails.org on June 30, 2022 by Humphrey McQueen (more by RedSails.org) (Posted Jul 08, 2022)

As Lenin prepared to understand the First Great Slaughter of the twentieth century, he spent from September to December 1914 absorbing Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1813). Humphrey McQueen begins a six-part exploration of why Lenin thought he had to do so. This first installment, Dialectical Reasoning: ‘The Science of Interconnectedness’1 shows why Hegel is still not ‘a dead dog.’

Without German philosophy […] particularly that of Hegel, German scientific socialism — the only scientific socialism that has ever existed — would never have come into being. Without the workers’ sense of theory this scientific socialism would never have entered their flesh and blood as much as is the case.
— Frederick Engels, 1875.2


How often do we hear: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’?3 Known as ‘Thesis Eleven,’ Marx’s challenge comes at the end of a couple of pages of rough notes in preparation for a 65-page chapter on Ludwig Feuerbach in The German Ideology.4

How often is ‘Thesis Eleven’ seized on as an excuse for not undertaking research and critical analysis? How many of those who sprout that slovenliness go on to read those pages? Marx warns why such tasks are essential: ‘There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.’5

This six-part series highlights that there never is a choice between interpreting and changing. That rule applies to every action by everybody. At one extreme, some people are refusing vaccination because that is how they interpret the word of their god. As revolutionaries, we historical materialists cannot interpret the world with any degree of accuracy without changing it. Equally, we learn how better to change the world to achieve socialism as we learn how better to interpret our contributions to the changes we effect and affect. The mindless militancy of megaphone Marxists has no place in weaving tactics into strategies.

In Imperialism, Lenin had to interpret socio-economic conflicts at a moment of maximum tumult. The object of this inquiry differs from both the substance and pace of change taken up in two of his previous analyses. The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) sought the outcome of socioeconomic changes running over four decades, which he interprets in order to ground strategies for revolutionary change. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) covers a similar time-period but for interplays between discoveries in the natural sciences and speculative philosophizing about their significance. Here, Lenin rebuts challenges to materialist dialectics. Parts Two and Three in this series will examine those works to see why, in 1914, he turns to Hegel’s The Science of Logic as one more weapon in his campaigns against the Great Slaughter and its effects. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) will be the subject of Part Two, while Part Three begins from his The Development of Capitalism in Russia(1899) as a side road into the monopolising stage of capitalism, which Bukharin, and then Lenin, call Imperialism. Part Four turns our attention towards approaching that stage as one of revolution and counter-revolution with the varieties of fascism as open class dictatorship into the early 1950s, before contrasting that phase with the covert ones in today’s surveillance state. Part Five tracks the momenta of monopolising capital from the Second Great Slaughter across the dominance of the U.S. corporate-warfare state into the mid-1970s. Part Six ponders whether Monetarism, Globalisation, Financialisation, Neo-Liberalism and rentierism have been phases leading into a higher stage of monopolising capitals.

An Hegelian turn

Lenin’s turning to Hegel’s The Science of Logic in September 1914 has two broad sources. The more obvious one is the link to Marx and Engels starting from their polemics against the Young Hegelians, The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (published 1932). Although the latter work let them ‘settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience,’6 they never sought to exorcise the Geist(‘Spirit’) of Hegel’s dialectical method. Indeed, they return to its logic throughout their lives.7

For instance, while drafting A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (CCPE) (1859), Marx tells Engels how he is

discovering some nice arguments. E.g. I have completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded. What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic at which I had taken another look by mere accident, Freiligrath having found and made me a present of several volumes of Hegel, originally the property of Bakunin. If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 sheets [i.e. 32-48 pages] making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified.8

That time never came. Even though Marx mentions Hegel only twice in A Contribution…,9 we can construe his intentions for that pamphlet from his long unpublished ‘Introduction’ to A Contribution. Its ‘Preface’ stayed silent on class struggle in order to evade the censor.10 That absence is used to misrepresent Marx as a technological determinist, denying his materialist dialectics in the ‘Introduction.’11

When Marx expands A Contribution into the opening chapters of the first volume of Capital (1867), he remarks that he has ‘coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to Hegel.’ He had done more than to flirt with the prose style of the ‘dead dog.’12 Three instances of Hegel’s hand can be deciphered from the following brief passage, which will be broken up to insert the influences in italics:

It is in the world market that money first functions to its full extent as the commodity whose natural form is also the directly social form

Forms move between physical and class relationships since no category is fixed or impermeable;

of realisation of human labour in the abstract.13

‘abstract’ means to abstract from particulars, not to float above them;

It is only as world-money that money’s mode of existence becomes adequate to its concept.14

Only when a form is fully developed can it come into full agreement with its Concept.

Hegel’s treatment of forms, the abstract against the concrete, and the Concept will be taken up below.

Given the intricacies of so much of what Marx carries forward from Hegel, it is no wonder that Lenin exclaims

…it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!15

Or is it truer to say that no one had fully understood the opening three chapters? How many do today? How many get beyond them?

On not reading Hegel

Jokes about Marxists who never finish even the first volume of Capital are legion. The ‘Received Opinion’ is that ‘Marx is unreadable.’16 That conventional wisdom is applied in spades against Hegel. Where the allegation proves true for either, the reasons are quite different.

When we encounter passages in Marx which demand our total attention we are being invited into the complexities of accumulation for the social reproduction of capital on expanding scales.17 His account is no more complicated than the object of his critical analysis. A further obstacle to get around is that Marx had not been able to bring all of volumes II and III to the polished state of his revised editions of the first volume. As editor, Engels decided to interfere as little as possible so that we might receive Marx in his own words. One result is that we encounter convoluted syntax; pronouns which do not always refer to the closest previous nouns; sentences with parenthetical clauses inside parenthetical clauses; and too few full-stops, paragraph breaks and sub-headings.

Hegel is another matter. He will write pellucid prose for page after page, embellished with wit. Then he whacks us with a paragraph in which his vocabulary is comprehensible only to those who hope that they already know at what he is driving:

215. The Idea is essentially a process, because its identify is the absolute and free identity of the notion, only in so far as it is absolute negativity and for that reason dialectical. It is the round of movement, in which the notion, in the capacity of universality which is individuality, gives itself the character of objectivity and of the antithesis thereto; and this externality which has the notion for its substance, finds is way back to subjectivity through its immanent dialectic.18

Such rolling conundrums are why Lenin could describe a segment on ‘Subjectivity’ in The Science of Logic as the ‘Best means for getting a headache.’ Yet he accepted that he would have to go over and over the passage until he grasped its significance.19 The patience of nine cats is called for if we are to reveal the ‘rational kernel’ of the ‘notion’ as boundless activity, the punctum saliens [starting point] of all vitality.’20 Hegel finds movement everywhere.

Far from all of Hegel’s Logic and The Science of Logic is burdened with self-referential terminology, and so does not need to be ‘translated into prose,’ as Marx quipped in 1843.21 For instance, we can savour Hegel’s illumination of the pre-Islamic religions of Persia in Phenomenology of Spirit.22

A minor hurdle to understanding what Hegel intends by the ‘Idea’ is the two meanings we give to ‘Idealism,’ with or without a capital-I. In philosophy, capital-I Idealism refers to how one perceives the world and how we come to know about it. Those Idealist treatments of being (ontology) and of knowledge (epistemology) are as distinct from being ‘idealistic’ in an ethical sense as Marx’s philosophical Materialism is remote from the pursuit of worldly goods, or any of the Deadly Sins.

The ‘Idea’Plato was an Idealist, but not all Idealists are Plato. Hegel certainly wasn’t. He saw himself closer to Aristotle who approaches the Idea through its actualities in the world as shown in his lectures on generation, insomnia and physics. ‘Knowing’ and ‘Being’ go hand-in-hand for Hegel and Aristotle.23

For them, the Idea is always being realized in this world. Their treatment of ‘Form’ differs from Plato’s Ideal Forms which are pre-existent and unchanging. For Plato, all the beds and tables made by us humans are poor copies of the Ideal Forms of the bed-in-itself and the table-in-itself.24 Hegel pictures the world moving in the opposite direction. Human action is how the Idea manifests itself over time so that the Absolute can attain Perfection.25

In 1814, while still a school teacher, Hegel confides his ambition to a friend:

You know that I have had too much to do not merely with ancient literature, but even with mathematics, latterly with the higher analysis, differential calculus, to let myself be taken in by the humbug of Natural Philosophy, philosophising without knowledge of fact and merely by force of imagination, treating mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as Ideas.26

If his ‘Idea’ is more than a ‘fancy,’ more than some flight of the imagination, in what ways does he connect the Idea to the external world? His answer goes some way towards a materialist explanation despite his framing the issue within the unfolding of a god-centered purpose. His god realizes its Perfection through the interactions of ‘Necessity’ and ‘Freedom,’ which become possible only by ‘the activity of man in the widest senses.’27 Far from Hegel’s accepting that god will remain in the end what it had been at its beginning, he pictures god as a work-in-progress. That work requires human activity without our becoming aware of its purpose.

Confirmed Christians will be as perplexed as dyed-in-the-wool atheists to read that ‘the vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object…’28 Hegel has human beings bring the Absolute into full agreement with his Concept of it, or as he would say, of itself.

By attending to the labour required for those processes, Hegel moves some way towards history as ‘sensuous human activity,’ as social practice. For historical materialists, if humankind has an essence it is our remaking ourselves as individuals and as a species through activities, mental and physical.

Drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel also proposes that the creation of needs plays its part in the transition from ape to man:

An animal’s needs and its ways and means of satisfying them are both alike restricted in scope. Though man is subject to this restriction too, yet at the same time he evinces his transcendence of it and his universality, first by the multiplication of needs and means of satisfying them, secondly by the differentiation and division of concrete need into single parts…29

Marx’s anthropology explores how ‘historically developed social needs … become second nature,’ forming a human type ‘as rich as possible in needs.’ He locates that expansion within the need that capital has to expand by realizing the value present in commodities of every kind, whether boots, bibles or brandy.30

On the contrary

No assumption about Hegel’s logic is more widely known and misunderstood than his use of dialectics in regard to ‘contradiction.’ The Philosophy 101-version has a thesis being overtaken by its antithesis to end in a synthesis. And that’s all you need to know about the ‘contradiction,’ comrade.

Generations of Hegel scholars have pointed out that no such formulation is to be found in his writings.31 To get beyond that simplification, we need to attend to two issues: (a) with what kind of ‘contradiction’ are we dealing?; (b) how do the three parts of the dialectic act on each other?

First, the English word ‘contradiction’ derives from ‘contra-‘ as ‘against,’ and ‘-diction’ meaning ‘to speak.’ The Formal Logic of Aristotle includes a Law of the Excluded Middle. Propositions which assert direct opposites cannot both be true at the same time. If A = A, A cannot equal non-A. The sentences that ‘Porter is a rapist’ and ‘Porter is not a rapist’ contradict each other.32 Confined to the realm of propositions, Porter is either a rapist or he is not. A contra-diction between utterances tells us next-to-nothing about any issue of substance.

Secondly, the components of Hegel’s triad do not encounter each other like billiard balls colliding only to bounce off in their own directions. Each element has its inner movements; when the elements come into contact they interpenetrate; they go on in their new forms to repeat the circuit.

A rigid dichotomy of ‘Dead or Alive’ — of either A or non-A — has no place in describing the animate world. Although we speak of death being instantaneous from a stroke, dying is always a process, with vital signs ebbing away, while our hair and nails keep growing for weeks, underpinning the belief in vampires as the living dead.33 Engels rejoices in the confirmation of an egg-laying mammal — the ‘Australian Paradox’ — the platypus: ‘one rigid boundary line of classification after another has been swept away in the domain of organic nature.’34 Were that not the case, the evolution of species would require divine intervention.

Although the laws of physics apply to living matter, we must never collapse the social into the physical. Engels wrote to Marx about a Russian agronomist who ‘went astray after his very valuable discovery, because he sought to find in the field of natural science fresh evidence of the rightness of socialism and hence has confused the physical with the economic.’35

No keener account of contradiction exists than Mao’s On Contradiction (1937). Were one not a materialist, one could suppose than he had channeled Marx to provide ‘2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified.’36

Mao explores the ways in which material actualities find expression through shifting levels within principal and secondary contradictions, each with its principal and secondary aspects. He had honed this method in his 1927 Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan which he conducted at the same time as the launch of the Autumn Uprising there and setting up the first revolutionary base. With whom was it possible to form alliances?, and on what terms? These, indeed, were matters of life or death.

Some contradictions are antagonistic, like those with the comprador bourgeoisie and the invading Japanese Militarists. Both require class violence to resolve. Disputes with a national bourgeoisie can be handled by other forms of struggle. Later in the war against the Japanese, it became possible to form alliances with their imperialist rivals. In 1937, the Communists were fighting on two fronts. Inside the Party were those who could not see how to unify theory and practice; and, at the same time, the Party had to develop tactics and strategies against Generalissimo Cash-my-cheque and the Japanese militarists. By the end of that year, the Nationalists and the Communists agreed to concentrate their forces against the invaders. Hence, the Party’s need to distinguish principal from secondary contradictions were hourly events. In addition, what was possible in Shanghai was not the same as in the mountains of Yunan. What was possible at harvest time there was not the same as in winter.

Late in February 1957, four months after Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin, Mao further develops distinctions between antagonistic and non-antagonistic conflicts in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.”

In unifying interpretation with change, Mao rescues the rational aspect from Hegel’s mystification of the dialectic. His emphasis on the levels of contradiction allows for their simultaneous operations at different speeds and intensities. Accepting their multiplying and mutating contexts makes it possible to extract the concrete from the abstract.

Abstract/concrete

Hegel’s treatment of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ reverses everyday usage where a piece of data is prized as ‘concrete,’ whereas even a generalisation is suspected of being ‘abstract,’ a mere ‘theory,’ not grounded in everyday experience and lacking the endorsement of ‘common sense.’ For Hegel, it is the stand-alone datum which is abstract. It becomes ‘concrete’ only in its several, multiplying and mobile contexts. He illustrates his counter view of the concrete with an example from Aristotle: ‘The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand, e.g. when hewn from the body is … a hand in name only, not in fact.’37 He extends this treatment of the ‘concrete’ past the manual to the domains of thought:

Hence the meaning to be attributed in what follows to ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ in respect of the will must each time appear from the context, which supplies the data for inferring their position in relation to the will as a whole.38

Although Hegel is here soaring beyond the physical, he never abandons his commitment to empirical investigation. Accordingly, to treat contradiction or dialectic as disconnected propositions is itself anti-dialectical.

It is not that a maxim such as ‘One divides into two’ is wrong as far as it goes but that it is mechanical because it is used in the singular. To be open to dialectical reasoning, the constituents of a contradiction must interact.39 Like the actualities of existence, they never all do so at the same moment, at the same pace, or with the same intensity as each other. Take the key conflict of labour versus capital. The agents of capital buy timed units of labour-power which is subsumed into variable capital, the sole source of added value. Closely related to that circuit is how use-value and exchange-value combine to be the commodities in which surplus-value is present.

A Logic for the New Science

Hegel’s logic does not deal primarily with statements about the world. Rather, he is concerned with how it operates. To provide answers, he has to explain how exactly the dialectic works. In line with Aristotle, he insists on activity for his theory of knowledge as much as for empirical investigation. Their combination carries our perceptions towards greater degrees of relative truth regarding the actualities outside our heads.

By 1811, Hegel has convinced himself that Formal Logic had long been a dead end for the advancement of knowledge. He sets out to develop an alternative:

a knowledge of the facts in geometry and philosophy is one thing, and the mathematical or philosophical talent which procreates and discovers is another: my province is to discover that scientific form, or to aid in the formation of it.40

He composes The Science of Logic and the shorter Logic because he recognises that human understanding needs a method which can catch up with 2,000 years of social upheaval and earthly revelation. Thinking about logic had not taken a step forward since Aristotle, leaving it all the more in need of a thorough overhaul; for when Spirit has worked on for two thousand years, it must have reached a better reflective consciousness of it own thought and its own unadulterated essence.41

Here again is Hegel’s Idealist terminology. Yet he is as adamant in his rejection of Kant’s ‘Idealism’ as he is of Aristotle’s Formal Logic. In support of his rejection of both, Hegel is heir to a long if interrupted approach, one stretching back to the first astronomers and to Aristotle’s investigations of the physical world before Medieval theologians petrified his legacy into their Scholasticism.

The practices to which since only the 1830s we have given the collective noun ‘science’ got a fresh start from new generations of European astronomers — Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho and Marx’s hero, Kepler. Francis Bacon spelt out the new order in 1620 by exhorting his readers to seek truth in the book of nature, as Aristotle did, and not rely the edited versions of his lectures.42 ‘Further Still!’ displaced ‘No further!’ in the explorations of nature while the method for making sense of them, singly or collectively, remained stuck at ‘No Further!’ (non plus ultra). Logic had been mummified.

Mathematics

Mathematicians offered one means to regularize the discoveries of science that were bursting through the straightjacket of Formal Logic.43 In 1637, Rene Descartes’s integration of algebra and geometry provided a means to describe the physical world. Fermat and Blaise Pascal laid foundations for probability theory to bring chance within the orbit of order.44 Newton and Leibniz devised the calculus in the early 1700s to track how incremental changes could result in a qualitative transformation.45

All five kept god as integral to their thinking — Pascal’s ‘Divine Wager.’ In 1774, Euler rattled off ‘a+ bto the power of n over n = x‘ as a proof that god exists. The break was proclaimed in 1812 when Laplace tells Napoleon that he has no need for the god hypothesis in his Celestial Mechanics.46

Although Hegel studied the calculus, he never got far beyond thinking of mathematics as limited to quantity and measure, and so never expected to integrate his Logic with the equations of Euler, Gauss, Laplace and Lagrange that were making sense of a world in flux.47 Marx, by contrast, will cover 1,000 pages on the calculus to help him conceive how one mode of production could become a qualitatively different one;48 specific to the capitalist mode, he had to explain how simple reproduction became accumulation for reproduction on expanding scales, and to understand how that metamorphosis leads through over-production to crises as booms turn into busts, only to clear the way for renewed cycles of reproduction on expanding scales.49

Discovering discovery
Despite Hegel’s aversion to mathematics as a rival to Speculative Philosophy, through his writings we meet a ‘mighty thinker’ who has absorbed Adam Smith on commercial society, along with the impact of the English, American and French Revolutions, someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of several millennia of human endeavor, and is cognizant that ‘common sense’ is being discarded throughout the life and other physical sciences.

Even a random selection of the discoveries and technological innovations between his birth in 1770 and the 1813 publication of The Science of Logic shows why he set out to replace Formal Logic with a method adequate to the comprehension of those social and scientific upendings: oxygen against phlogiston, bringing an end to the epoch when alchemy had seemed necessary; the identification of nitrogen; Dalton’s atom; parts of the brain for different functions; heat as motion; electricity’s relation to magnetism; the age of the earth beyond the Biblical 6,000 years and the solar system formed out of gases, so that the universe was no longer quite as god had created it out of nothing. In technologies came bleaches for textiles, Whitney’s gin, gas lighting, canned food, inoculation and steam-powered transport.

Hegel does not follow Aristotle, Goethe or von Humboldt in experimentation. Indeed, he advises astronomers to study his Logic and not to waste their time seeking an eighth planet (Neptune). The library is his laboratory and so he is remembered as a philosopher of science, of history and of the law.

Philosophy: Theology
These days, Departments of Philosophy are debating societies. That marginal role is at odds with their glory days when ‘Natural Philosophy’ had been synonymous with ‘science’ as the quest for understanding in every sphere. As late as 1835, Andrew Ure could call his account of Britain’s economy, The Philosophy of Manufactures. The limited role we give to ‘philosopher’ today is one more measure of how materialism has triumphed over god-bothering and other kinds of speculation. Notwithstanding countless reversals, the Idealists have never stopped conjuring up new forms of a soul in which consciousness can dwell safe from the messiness and massiness of the being and doing that make thinking possible.

To refer to Hegel as a ‘philosopher’ is licensed by the title of two of his major works, The Philosophy of Right and The Philosophy of History. Yet Hegel saw himself as a Theologian even while under attack from those whom we today would characterize as a Fundamentalist wing of Prussian Lutheranism, the Pietists. Those true believers had no better understanding of his Theology than we might on first hearing that he saw himself as the Historiographer of the Absolute.

Hegel summarises his job description in the concluding sentence of The Philosophy of History:

…what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His work.50

Thus, Hegel’s Absolute is the Artificer, the Being behind everything that happens, and not just the Architect behind creation.51 This view of the world might become a tad clearer if we ‘translate’ its terms into those of historical materialism:

…what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without human labour,’ but is essentially our work.

We extracted a ‘rational kernel’ by breaking through Hegel’s mystical carapace. To do so involved more than standing him on his head.

When the Young Hegelians, including Marx and Engels, took up Feuerbach’s criticisms of Hegel’s god-centered universe, they had none of the difficulties we endure in deciphering his terms. They had been weaned on its assumptions and vocabulary. Engels, for instance, spent his free time between the ages of eighteen and twenty composing Lutheran hymns.52 Next year, he penned attacks on Schelling’s promotion of a mystical Christianity against Hegel’s version of the Absolute, to which he still adhered. Then, in 1841, Satan said: let Feuerbach be — ‘and all was light.’

The title of the pamphlet that Engels wrote in 1886, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy, should be the ‘Outcome’ (der Ausgang) rather than ‘End,’ since Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegelian Idealism was both the outcome of Idealist traditions but also a starting point for the historical materialism developed by Marx and himself. Hegel, of course, is no closet historical materialist. Yet neither is he an Idealist in the manner of the Platonists or the Pythagoreans whose current followers contend that only numbers are real.

No break is completed in an instant. In 1843, Marx acknowledges that ‘we continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we may “operate critically” against it, and within it.’53 Today’s historical materialists are no longer stuck there. Rather, we have to make an effort to think theologically if we are to extract the ‘rational kernel’ from within Hegel’s system. One barrier to our coming to grips with his Philosophical Idealism is that, as atheists, we have trouble of thinking in terms of any kind of god, souls and miracles.

Hegel’s version has nothing to do with an Old Man with a Beard who maintains a personal interest in each of us. Hegel’s god realizes itself through four Epochs of human activity, which he names the Oriental, the Greek, the Roman and the German, each with a geo-physical basis.54 If his schema of Epochs and Worlds seems to foreshadow Marx’s modes of production, by now it should be obvious that their approaches have different dynamics. Hegel’s determinants are physical and cultural against the Marx’s critical analysis of social reproduction which draws on plundering the wealth of nature. In addition, the two systems also have different dynamics for their inner motion. Hegel accepts that ‘the Spirit’ must manifest itself through human action. For Marx and Engels, our deeds are entirely of this world, taking effect through struggles between and within social classes.

It ain’t necessarily so
After Galileo had seen through the Milky Way in 1610, researchers in every field faced the same question: how are we to make sense of a world which does not align with ‘common sense’? As Marx puts it: ‘It is one of the tasks of science to reduce the visible and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement.’55 The fashioning of that method has both conceptual and empirical components. We have to get beyond appearances without wafting off into New Age humbuggery.56

Hegel insists that what we have ‘to investigate and grasp in concepts’ are ‘not the formations and accidents evident to the superficial observer…’57 Rather, ‘the great thing is to apprehend in the show of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent…’58 Hegel thus prepares a way for us to think ourselves out of Kant’s claim that we could never know a ‘thing-in-itself’ because all we can know of externals are our sensations. That limit condemns us to second-order conclusions.

Hegel’s method had to be demonstrated and not just elaborated in writing. Only social practice could break through the surface to the inner motion.59 For instance, two years before his death from cholera in 1831, new generations of microscopes allowed researchers to see inside cells, identifying a nucleus by 1839 and then mitochondria by 1890.60 William Perkin’s production of coal-tar dyes in 1857-8 allowed Engels to gloat: ‘If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself.”’61

However, more is demanded of dialectical reasoning than an initial lifting of the veil. How are we to make sense of the little we can glimpse beneath the level of appearance on our first step? To proceed, we have to re-examine the phenomenal level in light of what we have learnt of inner motion. Better informed, we delve again and return to the surface in a ceaseless spiral towards ever higher levels of never more than relative knowledge. If all goes well, each circuit should yield a richer understanding not only of appearance, and of inner motion but also of the interplays between them, in short, of dialectical contradictions and inter-connectedness.

No matter how much we learn, our knowledge remains relative. One reason is that the objects of our inquiries are not standing still. The universe expands. Climates change. Viruses mutate. We are White Rabbits, forever running late in our investigations of nature. In social domains, our situation is worse because it is better: better because human history is the product of our labour; worse because the divisions of labour and of capital divert thinking about our practices into self-interested explanations.

For Marx and Engels, a dialectical context is one of structured dynamics, not of dynamic structures, neither static structures nor unfettered dynamics as in the randomness of chaos. ‘Chance and caprice,’ along with ‘zig and the zag,’ appear in their accounts of human activity,62 but within patterns and regularities. Since they never are, ‘Every law is tendential,’ as Marx reiterates, ‘all other things being equal.’63 Dialectical reasoning dispels Formal Logic.

More than a conclusion
No one need study Hegel’s The Science of Logic as thoroughly as Lenin did before venturing into his Imperialism. What is impermissible is either to pass judgement on it, or to expect to act out its politics, without the modesty of pondering why Lenin decided he had to absorb Hegel’s 800 pages in order to interpret the impact from the Great Slaughter. Change and interpretation were never alternatives for him. The practice of his politics indicates how to integrate them.

For us to begin to interpret the changes during the 100 and more years since 1914-16 will leave us grappling with more of Capital than its first chapter. Success in practice and theory will follow by recognising why Lenin needed to deepen his appreciation of Hegelian dialectics if he were to understand even those fifty pages.

More telling than Lenin’s self-criticism is his encouragement of ‘the workers’ sense of theory’ in the wake of the chaos from four-and-a-half years of revolution, intervention and civil wars. He calls on the Bolsheviks for more than action, action and again action. To make any change effective in laying the foundations for socialism, he proposes that

…the editors and contributors of Under the Banner of Marxism should be a kind of ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics.’64

Of course, this study, this interpretation, this propaganda of Hegelian dialectics is extremely difficult, and the first experiments in this direction will undoubtedly be accompanied by errors. But only he who never does anything never makes mistakes.

Sources on Hegel
Hook, Sidney, From Hegel to Marx Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962).
James, C. L. R., Notes on Dialectics Hegel, Marx and Lenin (London: Allison & Busby, 1980).
Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).
Pinkard, Terry, Hegel A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).65
Plekhanov, George, The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 96-102, 136-40 and Appendix I.
Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies, volume 2, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), chapter 12.66
Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).67

(68 Notes at Link)

https://mronline.org/2022/07/08/from-hegel-to-lenin/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 08, 2022 2:30 pm

What was wrong with Dr. Freud?
No. 05/57, V.2021

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The philosophy and ethics of Nietzsche, in particular his naturalistic approach to man - the explanation of social processes from the point of view of animal nature , had a considerable influence on many representatives of culture and art at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. The creator of psychoanalysis, S. Freud, having taken care of building a general theory of psychology, took advantage of Nietzsche’s developments, although he noted that psychoanalysis is devoid of the serious influence of Nietzscheism, in particular, the transcendent cynicism of the “superman” that Nietzsche sang.

Freud himself referred more to Schopenhauer, from whom he got the idea of ​​the importance of sexual desires in the minds and behavior of people. In general, Freud explained the analysis of the unconscious in the human psyche, from which consciousness grows, as follows:

“Our conscious actions flow from the substratum of the unconscious, created especially by the influences of heredity. In this substratum are innumerable hereditary remnants that constitute the race's own soul."

He set the task for psychoanalysis - "the discovery of the unconscious in mental life." Freud planned to solve it with the help of a "psychological blow", as a result of which the unshakable boundaries of the human "I" in the conscious part of the psyche will be determined. And beyond these boundaries, where the unconscious dominates, the human "I" should not take on more than it can bear. In other words, a person cannot control, for example, his sexual desires, and through this he must understand that his "I" will never achieve complete control over the unconscious.

Freud described the entire sphere of human psychic phenomena as follows: the “It” area is all instinctive and primitive; the area of ​​"I" - all rational and conscious; the area of ​​"Super-I" - everything moral and ideal.

The unconscious "It" is completely immoral. In it, Freud distinguishes two main instincts: sexual - the desire for life - and its opposite - the thanatos instinct, the desire for death. The first is the source of creation, the second is the source of destruction. And since the unconscious dominates a person's life, these two instincts are actively manifested in the sphere of consciousness or in the "I" ("Ego").

The conscious "I" tries to be moral, but this mental sector is a field of dubious rationality of the mind, a small zone controlled not by instincts, but by thinking that comes from the conditions of reality.

"Super-I" acts as a force that suppresses the instinctive in a person. The most adequate synonym in Russian is conscience. Freud considered it the reason for the emergence of civilized relations in society, linking it with culture, morality, and religion. At the same time, the "Super-I" is no less aggressive than the unconscious "It", since the social norms of morality are harsh in relation to a person, to his "Ego". According to Freud, the highest being, or god, severely limits and punishes a person.

According to Freud, the goal of life is happiness. Happiness in a positive way is enjoyment, in a negative way it is the avoidance of suffering. In the real world, the human "I" is opposed by the animal "It" and the social "Super-I", which simultaneously force the individual to act both automatically and consciously. Thus, suppressing his instinctive aspirations, provoking mental tension, cultivating a sense of guilt, inciting a struggle between selfishness and altruism.

Pointing to the opposition between the desire for individual happiness and the desire for unity with the human collective, Freud transfers this conflict from the individual to the whole society, without offering any solution to the problem, except for the remark that the struggle between Eros and Thanatos is most likely of an all-encompassing character.

Thus, in a philosophical sense, Freudianism made a gap between the rational and the irrational, between reason and affects, trying to prove that, having lost faith in God, humanity is obliged to discard faith in reason.

Describing the aggressiveness of mankind, Freud argued that its root is hidden in the human psyche, in the unconscious that the individual has left from the animal. And even in a society of high culture, the propensity for aggression only loses one of its tools, but in itself, as an indestructible feature of human nature, remains unshakable. Not seeing the salvation of mankind from aggressiveness either in the general prosperity of society, or in its high culture, or in the creative aspirations of people to live, showing their inclinations and spiritual impulses, Freud sees in psychoanalysis one of the main means of therapeutic treatment of human hopelessness from the animal nature:

“Men have won control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with its help they could easily destroy each other down to the last man. People know this, and this is where much of their current unrest, their unhappiness, their anxiety comes from. We must expect, however, that the other of the two "heavenly powers" - the eternal Eros - will make an effort to defend itself in the fight against an equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee the outcome of the struggle?

Concluding that it is necessary to fight against ignorance, religious prejudices, and for the strengthening of science, Freud urges society not to indulge in the illusion that the animal nature of man can ever change, that man is generally capable of finally separating himself from the animal kingdom. Freudianism as a whole focuses on the fact that humanity has nothing to be proud of.

Nietzscheanism, Schopenhauerianism and Freudianism have the same social roots - a decaying bourgeois culture as a result of the insolubility of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production . Not recognizing the inevitability of the replacement of capitalism by communism, reactionary thinkers have tried and are trying to justify the vices of class society by the nature of man himself.

Naturally, "psychoanalytic ethics" immediately became one of the most influential trends in bourgeois science. Those in power appreciated Dr. Freud's "contribution" to science, finding in it "proof" of the class verdict: you are poor because you are stupid.

So what was wrong with Dr. Freud?
His first mistake is that nowhere in psychoanalysis can one find evidence that all the misfortunes of a person stem from his natural needs and drives. Having put this idea at the basis of their research, Freud and his followers simply adjust reality to suit their interpretations.

In reality, man, as a social being, is shaped by society. What relations dominate in society, approximately the same ways of interaction are reproduced by its members. However, precisely because a person has a mind, and is not a slave to natural inclinations, he is able to change, raising the level of his consciousness and transforming social relations. Attractions, as atavisms of instinctive behavior, can give a certain direction to the actions of the individual, but they do not form the behavioral programs of a person. They are shaped by society. And the more developed a society, the less room for instincts and the wider and deeper the influence of scientific knowledge. Marxism considers the atavisms of the human psyche from the position of historical materialism, through the prism of social activity, through its development,

The second mistake of Sigmund Freud lies in his incorrect assessment of the role of labor in human life. They say that every culture is based on forced labor and on the rejection of desires. But even in the modern Russian Federation, where the masses of people serve as an object of exploitation, one cannot see only coercion in labor.

In fact, labor is not only a natural human need, but also a way of existence of society in general. Thanks to the development of the way of human survival in the world to the level of the emergence of productive forces, man rose above nature. Subsequently, with each new stage of social development, social consciousness grew, the organization of labor improved, and the material and cultural life of society improved. And, consequently, the animal nature of man faded away. In exploitative societies, the creative force of labor, transformed into the dead, impersonal force of money, ekes out a miserable existence, creating the illusion of unconditional dependence on coercion.

The third mistake of the founder of psychoanalysis stems from his belief that "man is a wolf to man", allegedly proven by all history and experience of our existence. But this belief is doubtful, since the validity of this maxim is not absolute and is more inherent in the society of the capitalist mode of production. Exactly where the bankers and oligarchs rule, the struggle for "a place in the sun" and the dream of getting rich are the stimulus of human behavior. And in a society where there is no private ownership of the means of production, the struggle for a separate existence loses its leading role, which means that

"man is now - in a certain sense definitively - separated from the animal kingdom and from animal conditions of existence passes into conditions that are truly human."

Despite the existence of the Stalinist USSR, Freud did not want to consider the opening prospects for a society where the landlords and capitalists lost power, where property became public property, and the anarchy of production gave way to the scientific plan. Therefore, the main mistake of Dr. Freud is the representation of human nature only in accordance with the relations of bourgeois society. It is no coincidence that his psychoanalysis became an apology for this society.

D. Nazarenko
08/05/2021

https://prorivists.org/57_antifreud/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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