Analytical Philosophy v.s. Dialectical Philososphy

[Raúl Duke]

Usually in the philososphy board I see threads that boil down to analytical (Wittengenstein, etc) philosophy versus dialectical (Hegel, etc) philosophy.

Can someone describe both of these philosophies? (I hope in simple terms, I'm only a beginner)

I want everyone to give their description of their philosophy, and you can use quotes from philosopher to back up your claims. ( so please, if you enter the "debate", which is a possibility that this thread turns into, please describe the philososphy you support in your words, unless you completly agree with anothers description)

I'm not a profet, but I think this thread would boil down into anaytical V.S. dialectical, this is fine as long as long as I can learn from it (so please I beg, use the simplest terms possible)

P.S. Please, do not post against a philosophy until they have been both described, and if you are against a philosophy yet want to describe it first, don't, let the supporters describe first, and than you can describe it.

(I hope this thread can broaden my knowledge of philosophy, instead of confusing me)

P.S.S: In this thread my future posts would be to ask questions about things in the description/posts

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Analytic Philosophy began, by and large, with the work of Gotlob Frege (1848-1925), a mathematics professor who found that the increasingly rigorous proofs (of nineteenth century matematicians) were being crippled by a loose use of language, by an inadequate understanding of basic concepts (like 'number'), and by a logical system that was over 2000 years past its sell-by date -- Aristotelian syllogistic.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/

So, he set out to put this right: he re-laid the foundations of modern logic (in a revolution in this discipline that was as profound as Newton's revolution had been in Physics), redefined number (and in a way that made obsolete over-night practically everything that had been written on this subject in the last 2500 years), and attempted to refashion our understanding of language.

His influence was not felt until Bertrand Russell made his work more widely known (in his 1905 'Principles of Mathematics'), boosted considerably by Wittgenstein in his 'Tractatus', and in his later work.

Even so, it took the efforts of Peter Geach (one of my teachers) and Michael Dummett (a pupil of Geach's too) in the 1950-1970's to make Frege's ideas more universally appreciated.

By then, the work of philosophers like Moore, Ryle, Ayer, Neurath, Schlick, Black, Malcolm, Rhees, Austin, Strawson, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Lewis, Kripke, etc., etc., went on to found this innnovative tradition (many, but not all, of these thinkers were either Marxists or socialists of one sort or another).

This tradition is characterised in several ways: an emphasis on modern logic, rigorous argument, opposition to metaphysics and 'system-building', the highest standards of clarity, an appeal to language (ordinary and/or scientific) to defuse philosophical 'problems', a close connection with advances in mathematics and the sciences, and so on.

Not all the above theorists would either accept or display all these features, and even when they did, not all would be their best exemplars --, but all of the above would feature across the board to a greater or lesser extent in this tradition.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/analytic.htm

Unfortunately of late, this 'movement' has slid back into the metaphysical quagmire from which Frege and Wittgenstein had tried to drag it.

However, as an implacable enemy, I am not best placed to describe the rat's nest that some call 'dialectics'.

All I can say is that the qualities displayed by the analytic tradition are all missing in the other.

Hence, it has been relatively easy for me to trash DM here and elsewhere.

[Raúl Duke]

So analytical philosophy seeked to "reform" or to create a re-understanding of language and they believe that the problems with "loose use of language" created philosophical problems.
So these philosphers defuse these problems by creating a re-understanding of language.

Am I right?

Does that mean that linguistics/language as it were before analytical philosophy redefined/reunderstood it created many philosophical problems?

Dialectics came before analytical philosophy, so it probably had these problems the analytical philosophers talked about. Has dialectical philosophy been able to solve these problems (linguistic problems that cause philosophical problems, etc) after the introduction of analytical philosophy?

I read some of the link and it seem that analytical philosophy was against the meta-physics and/or "system building" of the older philosophies, yet analytical philosophy returned to "the metaphysical quagmire". Why and what is system building?

Ok, I covered the linguistic questions, now the somewhat "mathematical" ones

what is "modern logic" and what is the difference between the "revolutionary"("in a way that made obsolete over-night practically everything that had been written on this subject in the last 2500 years) analytical redifinition of number compared to its other concepts.

and finally a general question:

what philosophical disciplines do analytical philosophy effect/are part of/influences?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


So analytical philosophy seeked to "reform" or to create a re-understanding of language and they believe that the problems with "loose use of language" created philosophical problems.
So these philosphers defuse these problems by creating a re-understanding of language.

Frege merely wished to do this to help settle questions in the foundations of mathematics, not the other things you say.

And recall that the list I gave you merely collects together features spread across the entire tradition; many would not agree that philosophical problems, for example, are 'solvable' by looking at language.

But, for those who did, it was a misunderstanding of how language worked that created these problems, so it did not need to be 're-understood' to fix this.


Does that mean that linguistics/language as it were before analytical philosophy redefined/reunderstood it created many philosophical problems?

Again, for the few analytic philsophers who thought that a misuse of language was at the root of philosophical 'problems', they did not think that this had anything to do with linguistics. [Nothing I have said above, or will ever say, has anything to do with that discipline -- not that there is anything wrong with it, but it has nothing to do this problematic.]

And language can create nothing. We might be able to do so by means of it, but that is a separate issue.

However, this subgroup of analytic philosophers saw metaphysics, as I do, as a sytematic capitulation (by traditional philosophers) to the misuse of the language we already have.

Once we stop doing this, metaphysics will just die.

But, we can speed its demise up, as I try to do (with respect to dialectics, at least), by exposing the confusions upon which it feeds.


Has dialectical philosophy been able to solve these problems (linguistic problems that cause philosophical problems, etc) after the introduction of analytical philosophy?

Well, I am not the one to say, since I am so biased -- but if you want my slanted opinion, dialectical philosophy is too confused to achieve anything --, other than cloud the issues, that is.

It certainly has not tackled the above problems, nor could it.

That would be like, say, George W Bush trying to solve problems in Quantum Mechanics; you'd be lucky if he or it could even recognise the problem, let alone know what to do about it.


Why and what is system building?

This refers to the attempts made by leading philosophgers from the past (or the present) who tried to build a systematic theory of reality. Good examples are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Heidegger....


what is "modern logic" and what is the difference between the "revolutionary"("in a way that made obsolete over-night practically everything that had been written on this subject in the last 2500 years) analytical redifinition of number compared to its other concepts.

Aristotle's Logic was severely restricted in many ways, and was totally unsuited for scientific reasoning, but logicians became acutely aware that it was absolutely useless in modern mathematics. To appreciate the revolutuon, you have to know a little of the jargon, which I am reluctant to post here unless you really want to know the details.

Modern logic is extraordinarily amazing, and is one of the most difficult subjects the human brain has yet invented.

genuinely useless invention: dialectical 'logic'.]

But, no one uses the old logic now; it is of interest only to antiquarians and dialecticians unaware of these revolutionary changes (which are now over 130 years old!) -- which includes about 99% of DM-fans.

But you cannot tell them this; they stopper their ears, and cry 'sacrilege'. They refuse to be told that their 'theory' is based on a garbled version of an ancient and now obsolete logic, they just cannot process that idea; it does not compute. They are in fact like creationists who cannot come to terms with, say, Darwin, but are happy to remain stuck in the ancient past -- you will find them doing precisely that on earlier threads at this site; dinosaurs, one and all!

The redefinition of number you find in Frege did not work, but it changed the way we look at mathematical concepts. Wittgenstein completed this revolution, and his ideas on mathematics are the most radical ever proposed.

I cannot really say more without getting into technicalities.


what philosophical disciplines do analytical philosophy effect/are part of/influences?

I am not sure what this means.

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


Aristotle's Logic was severely restricted in many ways, and was totally unsuited for scientific reasoning, but logicians became acutely aware that it was absolutely useless in modern mathematics. To appreciate the revolutuon, you have to know a little of the jargon, which I am reluctant to post here unless you really want to know the details.

Modern logic is extraordinarily amazing, and is one of the most difficult subjects the human brain has yet invented.

[It was, for example, important in the development of processors (and their logic gates) in modern computing, without which you and I would not be exchanging comments -- so much for its being academic and useless! Aristotelian logic could never do this. Neither could that genuinely useless invention: dialectical 'logic'.]

Indeed concerning the role of modern logic in the development of computer technology, Rosa is actually being very modest here. The design of digital processors is based directly upon the application of Boolean algebra to the design of digital circuitry. That is something that began with the work of Claude Shannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon), who worked out how Boolean algebra could be applied to the design of telephone switching circuits as part of his master's thesis (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173) at MIT. And that's just the hardware side of things. Almost every computer programmer makes at least some use of Boolean algebra in her work. Most programming languages, now a days, have a Boolean data type. All programmers find themselves writing statements involving Boolean "and's" and "or's", as well as "not's" for negation.

However, the examples cited thus far concerning the uses of Boolean algebra in both hardware design and in computer programming by no means exhaust the uses of modern logic in computer technology. The whole theory underlying computer science is built upon an area of modern logic concerned with the study of recursive functions. Kurt Gödel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Godel) developed recursive function theory in order to prove his two incompleteness theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems) . Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing) upon reading Gödel's papers, sought to find an alternative way for proving the incompleteness theorems. As part of this alternative proof, he developed the notion of reducing mathematical algorithms to machines, now known as Turing machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine). According to the Church-Turing thesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-Turing_thesis), any computation that can possibly be performed, can be carried out by a Turing machine. The notion of a Turing machine is mainly a theoretical concept but actual computers can be thought of representing to at least a first-order approximation, instantiations of universal Turing machines. This means that any computer can in theory carry out any computation that can be performed by any other computer, providing that we ignore such issues as computation time, and limitations of memory and disk storage. Thus the theory of Turing machines can help us to delimit the sorts of things that computers can and cannot do and so plays an essential role in theoretical computer science.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

As usual Jim, thank you for those comments.

You will, of course, know that I make somewhat similar points in several of my Essays (even if I am not a big fan of Godel --, and say why I am not there, too).

[JimFar]

Well Kurt Gödel, despite having been a member of the Vienna Circle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle), was both a mataphysical idealist and a theist. In fact he developed a version (http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/cllc/archive/references/Sobel.pdf) of the ontological argument for the existence of God, using modal logic. He was also an extreme paranoid who thought that people were trying to kill him either with poison gas or by poisoning his food. In fact he would only eat food that had been prepared by his wife. When his wife fell ill, so that she could no longer cook for him, Gödel stopped eating, and he quite literally starved himself to death. Gödel was an extremely brilliant guy, but was completely nuts.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim, I was aware of this; yes he was brilliant, but wrong -- I follow Wittgenstein in his view of Godel's results, except I push them further.

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks alot both of you.

In the last posts it seems like analytical philosophy's modern logic as real world application in computer sciences and the like.
Does anything from dialectical philosophy have real world application?
I'm incline to believe no because, according to Rosa, dialectical logic is based on antiquated forms of thinking; yet it does no harm to ask.

Thinking about asking questions.... :huh: Is it just me or are the DM crowd really a quiet bunch when it comes to questions about their philosophy? (this same quieteness happened when I ask what totality was in an earlier thread)

They should speak up more.

Oh well, to re cap.

Frege merely wished to do this to help settle questions in the foundations of mathematics, not the other things you say.
And recall that the list I gave you merely collects together features spread across the entire tradition; many would not agree that philosophical problems, for example, are 'solvable' by looking at language.
But, for those who did, it was a misunderstanding of how language worked that created these problems, so it did not need to be 're-understood' to fix this.



However, this subgroup of analytic philosophers saw metaphysics, as I do, as a sytematic capitulation (by traditional philosophers) to the misuse of the language we already have.

Once we stop doing this, metaphysics will just die.

So its not that we so not understand language or because language creates these problems, instead philosophical problems are caused by misuse of language; usually at the hands of traditional philosophers/metaphyscians.

So according to analytical philsophers: dialecticians are misusing language, which thus creates problems in their philosophy.


QUOTE:
Why and what is system building?

This refers to the attempts made by leading philosophgers from the past (or the present) who tried to build a systematic theory of reality. Good examples are Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Heidegger....

So these systems are like building hypothethical worlds in which so and so's philosophy could exist. I suppose that means that these system-building philsophies have no real life application because they are not even based on reality or under realitie's rules, instead they are based on an hypothetical world. I could be wrong, so I hope someone can clear this up.

In a part of the link Rosa gave me there was a quote saying that Russell and Moore (I think) decided to be like realists and that their decision was like a breath of air. Does this means that analytical philosophy has no systematic theory of reality and instead examines things by "face value" or something of that sort?


QUOTE
what philosophical disciplines do analytical philosophy effect/are part of/influences?

I am not sure what this means.

Maybe I wrote it wrong....What I meant is that since it seems like there are broad philosophies that effect/influnce sub disciplines of philosophy like philosophy of the mind, philosophy of reality, philosophy of politics, etc.

So I was wondering which sub disciplines where effected by the ideas of analytical philosophy.

(If the question still sound like nonsense, than lets forget about it)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does analytical philosophy effect quantum physics and theory?

Heard that some anayltical philosophers went back to metaphysics, is there such thing as anlytical metaphysics?

I heard that there is something called analytical Marxism (also called "No-Bullshit Marxism", I suppose its easier?). What the differences between this style of marxism and the others like dialectical marxism?

Thanks for the replies (hey if there is anyone else who wants to learn about these two philosophies, don't be shy to posts questions here too; this thread is for everyone. :D )

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Does anything from dialectical philosophy have real world application?

Well, you keep asking me for a totally biased opinion: as I indicated earlier, the answer to that is no, except dialectics might seriously cloud the issues.

That is the only effect it could have.


I'm incline to believe no because, according to Rosa, dialectical logic is based on antiquated forms of thinking; yet it does no harm to ask.

Dialectical logic is in fact based not so much on antiquated thinking as it is on a garbled understanding of ancient logic --, but more importantly on a ruling-class way of viewing reality.

More details here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-12.htm


They should speak up more.

They are in fact tired of getting beaten up by me and others like Comrade Red, LSD and Noxion.


So according to analytical philosophers: dialecticians are misusing language, which thus creates problems in their philosophy.

You have to remember that this way of viewing things is accepted only by a tiny minority of analytic philosophers, 99% of whom totally ignore dialectics, because for them (I am guessing here, but this guess is based on my own experiences), dialectics like flat earth theory -- not worth criticising.

Given the dwindling influence on the class struggle of dialectical Marxism, it is not even worth genuine ruling-class thinkers having a go at it any more. The last major thinker to do so was Karl Popper - and he fluffed it anyway.


So these systems are like building hypothetical worlds in which so and so's philosophy could exist. I suppose that means that these system-building philosophies have no real life application because they are not even based on reality or under reality’s rules, instead they are based on an hypothetical world. I could be wrong, so I hope someone can clear this up.

These systems were in fact attempts to explain this world.


Does this means that analytical philosophy has no systematic theory of reality and instead examines things by "face value" or something of that sort?

I would hazard a guess that most of analytic philosophers were either empiricists, logical empiricists, positivists, logical positivists, realists of one sort or another, conventionalists, and the like.

The minority from whom I have learnt the most were none of the above. They rejected all philosophical theories of nature (or of anything), as I do.

In that sense, I am happy to let science (not philosophy) tell us what we need to know about nature, etc.


What I meant is that since it seems like there are broad philosophies that effect/influence sub disciplines of philosophy like philosophy of the mind, philosophy of reality, philosophy of politics, etc.

So I was wondering which sub disciplines where effected by the ideas of analytical philosophy.

Most noticeably the Philosophy of Language, Mind, Science, Mathematics and Logic.

However, as I said earlier, there has been a significant drift back into metaphysics over the last 20 years or so.

And, the standard of work in this tradition is markedly lower that it was a generation ago; much of it now resembles science fiction.

There are notable exceptions to this (the Philosophy of Science still looks reasonably healthy, as do areas of the Philosophy of Mathematics).


Does analytical philosophy affect quantum physics and theory?

Heard that some analytical philosophers went back to metaphysics, is there such thing as analytical metaphysics?

Yes to both.

If you want to find out about the first, visit here (you will see that this area of analytic philosophy is trundling along quite nicely):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/subjects/physics.html

Phil Sc in general here:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/subjects/

Loads of stuff here too:

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html

Scroll down to 'Q'.


I heard that there is something called analytical Marxism (also called "No-Bullshit Marxism", I suppose its easier?). What the differences between this style of marxism and the others like dialectical marxism?

It was an attempt to wed Analytic Philosophy to Marxism, and reached its pinnacle about fifteen years ago. As far as I can tell, it has died out, or is rapidly doing so.

It was not analytic enough, and was scarcely Marxist.

But there were notable exceptions; the early work of Jerry Cohen was first-rate, and influenced my thinking greatly.

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

[JimFar]

Rosa wrote:


QUOTE
I heard that there is something called analytical Marxism (also called "No-Bullshit Marxism", I suppose its easier?). What the differences between this style of marxism and the others like dialectical marxism?


It was an attempt to wed Analytic Philosophy to Marxism, and reached its pinnacle about fifteen years ago. As far as I can tell, it has died out, or is rapidly doing so.

It was not analytic enough, and was scarcely Marxist.

But there were notable exceptions; the early work of Jerry Cohen was first-rate, and influenced my thinking greatly.

All that is certainly true. While I believe that Cohen's No-Bullshit group still meets on an annual or bi-annual basis, it is clear that analytical Marxism has pretty much run out of steam. Most of them have ceased to call themselves Marxists. On the other hand there are still a few people who were part of the analytical Marxists who still continue to regard themselves as Marxists and who continue to do work that is recognizably Marxist. The sociologist, E. O. Wright is one example. Another example is Alan Carling, who has attempted to build upon Cohen's earlier work on historical materialism to develop what might be described as a selectionist or Darwinian interpretation of historical materialism. See Carling's essay,KMTH and the Marxist Tradition: An Essay in Recovery (http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/marxism/2003/Carling.doc), for one example or this book synopsis (http://web.archive.org/web/20040615230744/http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/marxism/carling.htm) for anothe example.

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks again


Well, you keep asking me

My questions were for anyone to answer, specifically the dialecticians. But alas they stay in silence, so I suppose the questions would be for you.

From your essay:

"[M]otion without matter is unthinkable." [Lenin (1972), p.318.]

Is this an example of him trying to explain nature/reality through philosophy?
This statement seems to be false, if my knowledge serves me right; In chemistry I learned that light, which I think has no matter, moves. Light is made of waves and, If I'm correct, photons. Before I learned this I thought that light was electrons and I knew that they (electrons) had a very small amount of mass.
I think that waves have no mass, but I could be wrong.
If I'm right than this proves that:


In that sense, I am happy to let science (not philosophy) tell us what we need to know about nature.

is a valid statement.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It seems that because their is no responses from the other side;would have to agree with the analytical philosophers.

In philosophy I supported Camus's Absurdism (a part of existentialism) but I suppose that this philosophy is at odds with analytical philosophy....Now I don't know what to think about existentialism.

From Essay:


n fact, the modern home of 'monetarist' economic theory (the USA) was also the source of the most determined attacks on Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP). Over the same period, we have witnessed a resurgence of a plethora of right-wing ideas in science (for example, the rise of Sociobiology in the 1970's which later transmogrified into 'Evolutionary Psychology' in the 1990's, and arguably the re-emergence of the BBT). No coincidences these.

[BBT = Big Bang Theory.]

The Big Bang theory is a right wing theory? What other theories opposite of the BBT exist? Which one is the least right wing?

I bet sociobiology is filled with elitist ideas,theories, and scientists.

I'm actually taking Psychology in high school and they mentioned Evolutionary Psychology. Its description didn't seem right-wing but maybe this branch of psychology is filled with right-wing theories and ideas.

Tell me the most right wing theory in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology so that I can believe your statement. Also tell me how BBT is right wing (I really don't understand how sciences can be consider right wing or political....but I'm willing to learn how and why)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Jim, I had forgotten about Wright (and you might want to add Elliot Sober(?) in here too and Allan Wood perhaps), but Carling will be one target in my criticism of High Church Dialecticians (even if he is a maverick member of that coterie) in Essay Twelve when it is published next year some time; some of his work on contradictions shows he is a stranger to modern logic.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Is this an example of him trying to explain nature/reality through philosophy?

It is in fact an attempt to do dogmatic superscience, based on thought alone.


This statement seems to be false, if my knowledge serves me right;

It does not make it that far, for Lenin tries to use words in a way that he himself says cannot be done. If matter without motion is unthinkable, then he cannot think/use these words to deny that alleged fact.


In chemistry I learned that light, which I think has no matter, moves.

But Lenin counts as material anything external to the mind that has 'objective' existence (so he would not have been phased by light/photons) -- which is such a useless 'definition' that it would allow for the possible existence of ghosts, angels and God.

It would also mean that the mind is not material, unless it is external to itself!

This would commit Lenin to dualism.


....Now I don't know what to think about existentialism

It's an attempt to do a priori super anti-science, so it suffers from all the failings of traditional thought -- in that it tries to derive truths from words/concepts, trivial apercu, and fiction. [So, if anything, it is worse!]

It was also an expression of the failings of French Communism -- and amounted to a retreat into despair by certain intellectuals.


The Big Bang theory is a right wing theory?

I did say 'arguably' this, not that I agreed with it. There are plenty of Marxists who question it, mainly for its a priori approach to theory.


What other theories opposite of the BBT exist? Which one is the least right wing?

There are several: the old Steady State Theory, Alfven's Plasma Theory, spring to mind.

I am at work right now, but I will post links tonight to other sites which will fill you in with the details.

I take no position on this since I am not a scientist, but I remain suspicious of scientific orthodoxy, since, in every case in the past, it has backed the wrong horse.


I'm actually taking Psychology in high school and they mentioned Evolutionary Psychology. Its description didn't seem right-wing but maybe this branch of psychology is filled with right-wing theories and ideas.

Read Steven Jay Gould on this and you will see how right wing it is.


Tell me the most right wing theory in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology so that I can believe your statement. Also tell me how BBT is right wing (I really don't understand how sciences can be consider right wing or political....but I'm willing to learn how and why)

The ruling ideas are always those of the ruling-class, so science cannot fail to be affected, since they control its funding, and they control education and the media.

I do not want to get deflected on this, since this is the Philosophy section, not science.

Added later: here are those links I promised:

http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org/

http://home.pacbell.net/skeptica/

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks for the replies


I do not want to get deflected on this, since this is the Philosophy section, not science.

Don't worry; I only wanted to delve into some questions about science mentioned in your essay. I think I got sufficient answers, so the thread won't go towards science.


It is in fact an attempt to do dogmatic superscience, based on thought alone.

So dialectical philosophy doesn't use empirical evidence to support its own claims...
I suppose analytical philosophy makes much use on empirical observations/evidence.
If this is true than it makes analytical philosophy more rational than the other.


It does not make it that far, for Lenin tries to use words in a way that he himself says cannot be done. If matter without motion is unthinkable, then he cannot think/use these words to deny that alleged fact.

Yes, I missed that part but I understood it when I read your essay.
If its unthinkable how could he think about it?
So in analytical philosophy I have to use direct and clear words and well structured sentences that do no get into these same problems that Lenin has in his statement "Motion without matter is unthinkable"


But Lenin counts as material anything external to the mind that has 'objective' existence (so he would not have been phased by light/photons) -- which is such a useless 'definition' that it would allow for the possible existence of ghosts, angels and God.

It would also mean that the mind is not material, unless it is external to itself!

This would commit Lenin to dualism.

Dualism....Thats when you have two versions of the same thing?
His definition is quite useless, I bet he made it up (or some traditional philosophy predecesor) from thought alone. I'm starting to see the failures of dialectics.
(So if there is any dialectician available, the chances of me thinking otherwise are growing slim)
Its true what you said in a earlier post:

I am happy to let science (not philosophy) tell us what we need to know about nature

I agree


Read Steven Jay Gould on this and you will see how right wing it is.


Going to check on his work to see how right wing science can be.


The ruling ideas are always those of the ruling-class, so science cannot fail to be affected, since they control its funding, and they control education and the media.

Very true, even so sometimes a few thinkers like Marx come out of the "box"
I wonder how sciences, education, philosophy, etc would be like once the ruling class are gone....?

P.S. seems like I'm runing out of questions....

Added:
Tried looking for some info about Jay and it said in wikipedia (which could be wrong because it might miss all the points) that he was against the biological determinism of sociobiology...
If you have links that could help me find his "rightness" I would greatly appreciate it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


So dialectical philosophy doesn't use empirical evidence to support its own claims...

It gestures at it, but if you compare the way this is done with genuine science, you will see why I call Dialectical Materialism 'Micky Mouse' science: a smattering of secondary evidence, hackneyed and specially-selected examples are chosen, no primary data, and no attempt to probe the results. In many ways it resembles the way that, say, Creationists use 'scientific' evidence to support the Book of Genesis.

Compare the very best DM text, say Woods and Grant, with genuine hard science, and you will immediately see the difference. [Check out any scientific journal in college, like 'Nature', for example. The difference is stark and unmistakable.]


I suppose analytical philosophy makes much use on empirical observations/evidence.

Well, analytic philosophy is not a science, so evidence does not really enter into it. DM claims to be, so it has to


If this is true than it makes analytical philosophy more rational than the other.

This would be like trying to compare, say, Quantum Mechanics with Astrology -- with DM being the latter of the two.

So, it's not a case of which is the more rational, DM is not the least bit rational; it is mystical hot air dressed up as voodooo science.

But, I might be biased a little here....


So in analytical philosophy I have to use direct and clear words and well structured sentences that do no get into these same problems that Lenin has in his statement "Motion without matter is unthinkable"

Again, you need to get away from the idea that there is a single approach to problems in analytic philosophy; it is not monolithic, but as varied as it can be. How questions like this are handled is as diverse as there are practitioners.

You will however find a wide range of nonsensical statements in analytical philosophy, like Lenin's -- maybe not as sophomoric, but nonsensical all the same, since the majority of practitioners have lapsed back into doing metaphysics once more, as I said.


Thats when you have two versions of the same thing?

It's the idea that there are two fundamental and totally distinct entities in existence, mind and matter.

On Gould, I'll get back to you.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD, on Gould, try here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/reviews/gould_pluralism.html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7782

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/14_02/bio142.shtml

Much of this stuff was fought by us on the left in the 1970-1990's which is why you might not be aware of it.

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks for the links.


DM claims to be, so it has to

Why do DM fans want to claim that it's a science?
Why not just use normal science instead of replacing it with philosophy?


Again, you need to get away from the idea that there is a single approach to problems in analytic philosophy; it is not monolithic, but as varied as it can be. How questions like this are handled is as diverse as there are practitioners.

(Bolds mine)
Thats intersting...(the stuff about the varied and diverse ways to handle questions/problems in analytical philosophy)
Don't worry; I'm slowly getting away from the "single approach" idea
Does dialectical philosophy try to be varied and diverse (non-monolithic)?


You will however find a wide range of nonsensical statements in analytical philosophy, like Lenin's -- maybe not as sophomoric, but nonsensical all the same, since the majority of practitioners have lapsed back into doing metaphysics once more, as I said.

By this statement (and some others in past posts) I deduct that metaphysics is part of dialectical philosophy or a problem similar to it. Whats wrong with metaphysics?


It's the idea that there are two fundamental and totally distinct entities in existence, mind and matter.

Oh...I think I see the problem now...
Lenin called everything outside the mind to exist materialy. So his mind must be of a different sort of "existence", a non-material one. By mind did he mean brain or his though processes? How those this lead to creation of Gods, ghosts, etc (unless they are "inside" your mind?

(I have a feeling that I haven't catched on the dualism concept yet, at least with reference to Lenin's statement.)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Why do DM fans want to claim that it's a science?

Because they hold that philosophy has to be scientific too, or has to be a science.

I suspect it's a bit like the fundamentalists who use the term 'creation science' -- it links the towering reputation of science to their ramshackle 'theory'.


Does dialectical philosophy try to be varied and diverse (non-monolithic)?

It is more varied among academic dialecticians (the ones I call 'High Church Dialecticians'), but the variation among revolutionary, 'materialist dialecticians' (the ones I call 'Low Church Dialecticians'), is very small -- you'd be lucky to get a party card between them.

This is because it has become a mantra (for reasons I explain in Essay Nine); check out Red Che's posts on other threads here; he is a classic example of this 'Hail Mary' approach to DM.

This is a summary of Essay Nine:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-9.htm


Whats wrong with metaphysics?

This is an incredibly deep problem, one that has gone right over the heads of some of the best minds in the last 2500 years. I try to outline my objection to it in that summary to Essay Twelve you read.

Basically, it is an attempt to do supercience (i.e., the endeavour to derive super truths from mere words), and 'discover' industrial strength truths about nature from thought alone, not from actual scientific investigation. Knowledge on the cheap, as it were.

As such it is 100% idealist.


By mind did he mean brain or his though processes? How those this lead to creation of Gods, ghosts, etc (unless they are "inside" your mind?

As far as I am aware, he did not say what he meant; but even if he has have said this, that would mean that the brain cannot be material, unless it is outside itself!

Either way you slice this, DM-theorists who agree with Lenin are screwed: they claim to be monists (i.e., believers in matter only, which they have yet to define clearly), but their theory so far suggests that either they are dualists, or idealists who believe everything is mind.

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

Try this summary of my ideas here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Why%20...Oppose%20DM.htm (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Why%20I%20Oppose%20DM.htm)

It was written specifically for comrades who had only a very basic grounding in Philosophy, or none at all.

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks for the reply

I really have no more questions right now.....but

Could I get a link to essay 12?

Thanks

P.S. Well...the DM crowd stayed quiet......(maybe they have a weakness at describing their own philosophy....)

P.S.S Is Lenin's statement about Das Kapital (saying that you need to learn Hegel's Logic) wrong? (I hope so, I was thinking about reading Das Kapital, being after all Marx's analysis of capitalism etc )

[ComradeRed]

P.S.S Is Lenin's statement about Das Kapital (saying that you need to learn Hegel's Logic) wrong? (I hope so, I was thinking about reading Das Kapital, being after all Marx's analysis of capitalism etc ) Yes, Lenin's wrong. I don't understand a damn word of Hegel's Logic and I understand Das Kapital well.

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks, now I have no worries about giving a shot to understanding Das Kapital.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Could I get a link to essay 12?

Essay Twelve has not yet been published; it will be next year some time. That is partly why I published a summary of it, the link to which was on an earlier thread.

And as far as Lenin is concerned, this is what I have put in Essay Nine, Part One, on this topic (links missing, footnotes at the end of this extract):


Well: Have You Read And Fully Understood The Whole Of Hegel's Logic?

It is pertinent to ask, therefore: How is it possible for DM to be "brought to workers" (as a part of revolutionary theory) if even its best theorists appear to be incapable of 'bringing it to themselves' after over 120 years of trying?

The alarming facts upon which the above allegations supervene are thrown into even starker relief by Lenin's surprising and oft-quoted remark that not a single Marxist up until his day -- which must have included Engels, Dietzgen, Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Plekhanov -- actually understood Marx's Capital, since none of them had fully mastered Hegel's Logic!

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]9

Clearly, Lenin's aside raises serious questions of its own. If professional revolutionaries find Hegel's work impossibly difficult to comprehend (few in my experience bother to consult much of what Hegel wrote, let alone attempt to study the entire Logic -- but, which one (there were two 'Logics'!)?), is it credible that workers themselves can understand the whole of his Logic fully? In which case -- if Lenin is correct --, what chance is there that anyone (revolutionary or worker) will ever make head or tail of Marx's Capital?10

Even worse, Lenin's comments suggest that only a tiny fraction (if that!) of revolutionaries have ever fully understood Marxism (or, at least Capital). Lenin is quite clear: only those Marxists who have "thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic" (emphasis added) can claim to comprehend Capital; short of that they can't. Again, how many revolutionaries have thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic (let alone read it) since Lenin's day? Even professional philosophers find that work daunting, and of those who claim to understand it, the presumption must be that that is an empty boast until they succeed in explaining it clearly to the rest of us.11

Nevertheless, a far more serious and intractable question is the following: How would it be possible to decide if anyone has ever actually understood all of Hegel's Logic?

Plainly, we can't enquire of Hegel what the correct interpretation of his work is. Even Lenin himself failed to provide us with a comprehensive (or comprehensible) account of all of Hegel's Logic. And, as we know with regard to the interpretation of that other (but far less) obscure book -- The Bible --, it is always open for someone to claim that their interpretation is the correct one, while all the rest aren't, with no empirically viable way of deciding between them.

Of course, as we shall see, this is precisely what allows sectarians to impose their own brand orthodoxy on their corner of the militant market.12

Indeed, buried in here somewhere is one of the main reasons for the ideological sectarianism that appears to be endemic in revolutionary Marxism; the Logic is to DM as The Bible is to Theology. In both of these books, a 'correct' interpretation functions as a test of orthodoxy; their use is both a source of mystification and a guarantor of righteousness.

Moreover, as is easy to demonstrate, this fact helps DM-adepts find whatever post hoc justifications they require to 'justify' inconsistent, undemocratic tactical manoeuvring -- or counter-revolutionary activity -- as the need arises. Furthermore, as is the case with other sacred texts -- where priests, theologians and assorted 'holy men' claim exclusive interpretive rights --, in Dialectical Marxism only a few self-selected Dialectical Magi can 'rightly' claim to 'understand' the Logic (and "dialectics"), even if they find it impossible to prove this by explaining it clearly to anyone this side of the Kuiper Belt.

This being so, few among the rank-and-file will feel confident (or foolish) enough to question the theoretical deliverances made on their behalf by the likes of Stalin, Mao, Mandel, Healy, Pablo, Grant, Avakian -- or whoever.13

Another analogy (drawn once more with the numinous) springs to mind here: there would be little point in anyone complaining that the pronouncements and tactical zigzags mentioned above were inconsistent (in themselves or with whatever passed for orthodoxy just the day before); that would only show that the said complainer had failed to "understand dialectics". Consistency is no more to be expected of dialecticians than it is of Doctors of Divinity, and in this case perhaps less. The Deity and The Dialectic move in mysterious and contradictory ways; the Divine Mind is no less baffling than is DM.14

Of course, few scientists would be foolish enough to make similar claims for any of the classics of science -- not even of Darwin's Origin or Newton's Principia --, that only if the latter were studied from end to end, and thoroughly understood, could an aspiring researcher/student claim to comprehend modern science. One guesses that only a minority of scientists have actually read all or most of the classics in their field, but that fact does not materially affect their work.15

Now, even though revolutionary theory is different from other scientific disciplines, that does not mean that incomprehensible philosophical texts must be treated in such a theological way, with every word regarded as required reading, and every syllable understood, before initiation can begin. And yet, Lenin's aside indicates that this is exactly how Hegel's Logic should be viewed by the DM-faithful: only the correct understanding of this intractably obscure work -- in its entirety -- is sufficient to allow novice socialists to proceed to the next level and try to understand Marx's classic, and before they too can presume to spread the Good News.

Of course, this is all rather puzzling since Marx himself never claimed this of his own work.16

Notes

9 Of course, it is entirely possible that Lenin was merely commenting on contemporaneous Marxists, thus absolving Engels. However, what he does say fails to support this interpretation:

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]

This looks pretty clear that in the last fifty years prior to Lenin: "none of the Marxists understood Marx!!" (emphasis added) --, not (note!) "some of the Marxists". In TAR, John Rees suggests that the above comment was aimed at Plekhanov and/or Second International Marxism; this is also possible, but once again, Lenin's use of the word "none" here does not support this view.

Nevertheless, as Rees also says:

"In these fragmentary notes, Lenin formulates some of the most precise definitions of key concepts in Marxist philosophy available anywhere. The dialectic itself, for instance, has never been better explained…." [Rees (1998), p.185.]

High praise like this must mean that at least Engels's account was deficient in some way.

Question: In what way could that be?

Answer: Engels's version of DM was not wedded closely enough to Hegel's Logic.

That can only mean that Engels did not understand Capital!

On the other hand, if the dialectic has never been better explained, and Lenin's book is full of incomprehensible sentences, what does this say about the dialectic? Can anyone explain it in comprehensible terms? Has anyone?

In order to counter such ridiculous consequences, two comrades -- i.e., Woods and Grant -- have argued that Lenin was deliberately exaggerating here. This is, of course, also entirely possible, but it is certainly not the way Lenin has been interpreted by subsequent Marxists.

On this, note Andy Blunden's comments:

"Hegel is the philosophical predecessor of Marx, and we have Lenin's word for it that Marx cannot be understood without first understanding Hegel." [Empson (2005), p.166.]

Naturally, this passage of Lenin's helps account for something that would otherwise be inexplicable: the fascination that Hegel's Logic has exercised on prominent revolutionaries -- including STD's and OT's. If Lenin was merely exaggerating --, or that is how he had been perceived --, this would not have happened.

[STD = Stalinist Dialectician; OT = Orthodox Trotskyist.]

For example, not only do we find a Trotskyist of the stature of Raya Dunayevskaya writing several books in the futile attempt to comprehend Hegel's Logic, we witness her reiterating this famous claim (albeit watered down a tad):

"Here, specifically, we see the case of Lenin, who had gone back to Hegel, and had stressed that it was impossible to understand Capital, especially its first chapter, without reading the whole of the Science…." [Dunayevskaya (2002), p.328.]

And, this is what Bertell Ollman had to say:

"Even from this brief outline, it is apparent that Marx's Hegelian heritage is too complex to allow simple characterization. Hegel never ceased being important for Marx, as Lenin, for example, perceived when he wrote in his notebook in 1914, 'It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapters, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx'" [Ollman (1976), p.35; a copy of this can be found here.]

There is a list of other prominent Marxists who agree with Lenin -- as well as another list of those who do not -- in Burns (2000), p.99, Notes 2 and 4.

Nevertheless, if this is the only way that these remarks of Lenin's can be defused by Woods and Grant (i.e., by claiming that Lenin was indulging in hyperbole), the question naturally arises as to why they took other (even more absurd) statements in PN literally.

[PN = Lenin's [i]Philosophical Notebooks.]

Furthermore, it is worth noting that Lenin himself admitted that he found certain parts of Hegel's Logic impossibly obscure, or just plain nonsense. [Cf., Lenin (1961), pp.103, 108, 117, 229.]

Hence, if correct, this would mean that even Lenin did not understand Capital!

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]

Notice that Lenin did not refer to just 99.9% of Hegel's Logic, but the "whole" of it.

Is this yet another internal contradiction that forces us to change our view of Hegel? Surely it must if Lenin is correct in insisting that "everything existing" (including the existing passage above) is a UO.

[UO = Unity of Opposites.]

"[Among the elements of dialectics are the following:]…internally contradictory tendencies…in [a thing]… as the sum and unity of opposites…. [E]ach thing (phenomenon, process, etc.)…is connected with every other…. [This involves] not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other….

"In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics….

"The splitting of the whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts…is the essence (one of the 'essentials', one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristic features) of dialectics….

"The identity of opposites…is the recognition…of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature…. The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites…. [This] alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of everything existing….” [Lenin (1961), pp.221-22, 357-60.]

Or is this just another "exaggeration"?

Finally, there is no evidence that Marx himself made this claim about his own work -- nor is there any that he had ever thoroughly studied and thoroughly understood Hegel's Logic. This either means that the Logic is largely irrelevant to any student of Capital, or Marx did not understand his own book! [However, on this, see Note 16, below.]

10. While there are two different works commonly called Hegel's Logic (one of which Hegel was in the process of revising when he died -- on this see Carver (2000)), Lenin's notes relate to the Science Of Logic (i.e., Hegel (1999)). However, Lenin was unaware of the important changes Hegel had made to this book. So was Marx. Does this mean that one or both (Lenin and/or Marx) did not understand Capital? It seems they must if Lenin were right. [Again, on this, see Carver (2000).]

This does not, of course, mean that workers cannot understand Capital, but if Lenin were right it would be remarkable if anyone on earth ever could!

11. I, for one, will not be holding my breath. We have already seen one attempt fail badly here and here. More on this in Essay Twelve.

However, the best book I have read so far on this, which attempts to make Hegel comprehensible, is Beiser (2005). Even so, Beiser has to paper over the serious problems there are interpreting Hegel, and has to translate the latter's impenetrable prose into ordinary-ish sort of English to complete the job. Naturally, this just raises the question whether Beiser's Hegel is Hegel's Hegel, or is Beiser's Hegel. And that, like all such questions, is unanswerable.

12. Again, this is not to suggest that the roots of sectarianism are merely ideological, just that it helps considerably if the faithful have an obscure book (or set of books) on which to base their ideas -- for example, such a 'holy book' encourages the need for 'orthodoxy', and that fosters the idea that only certain 'leaders' are 'authorised' to impose the 'right sort' and amount of 'orthodoxy'.

To that end, the more obscure the book, the better. Without doubt Hegel's Logic gets the Gold medal in this regard. [As TV cop Kojak once said (but of something else!), "It sure beats the hell out of whatever's in second place!"]

13. Lest this comment appears to associate the present author with certain well-known anti-Marxists (who seem to say somewhat similar things), it is worth noting that the points made here are specifically aimed at the ideological use of mystification, whosoever indulges in it (and that includes such anti-Marxist critics themselves).

As will be agued in Part Two, if Lenin was guilty of doing this he did so unwittingly; he was clearly unaware of the significance of the ideas that Engels had imported into the movement. The same goes for other great revolutionaries (including Engels himself). My argument is thus not with their sincerity -- nor yet with their revolutionary fervour -- but with their philosophical judgement and their emotional susceptibilities. More on this in Part Two (summary here).

14. Once more, the comments in the text might appear to some to be a re-hash of the hackneyed idea that Marxism is a quasi-religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. As will be argued in more detail in Part Two: only in so far as DM induces revolutionaries to adopt a dogmatic metaphysic is the analogy with Theology at all apt.

So, while Marxism itself is not a religion, Dialectical Marxism is all too uncannily like one.

15. Even if this is incorrect, and it should turn out that most scientists have studied the classics in their field, their practice is certainly not now informed by this fact, and [i]only this fact.

16. In fact, upon learning of the aims of my site, rarely does a dialectically-distracted comrade (mainly those drawn from the HCD-tendency) fail to quote this passage of Lenin's at me, so influential has it become.

[HCD = High Church Dialectician.]

Nevertheless, Marx certainly laid down no such preconditions for understanding his work. In fact, if anything he tended to play down Hegel's influence.

However, so deep has Lenin's myth sunk into the collective Dialectical Mind that that particular comment will elicit immediate disbelief. But it is nonetheless true for all that. And this is why:

Marx himself pointed out (again, in a side remark) that the relevance of Hegel's Philosophy could be summarised in a few printers' sheets:

"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 making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified." [Marx to Engels, 16/01/1858; MECW, Volume 40, p.248; copy here.]

Needless to say, Marx never supplied his readers with such a précis. From this we may perhaps draw the conclusion that in the end Marx did not think Hegel's method was all that significant.

So, despite all the millions of words he committed to paper, he did not consider it important enough to write out these relatively few pages.

Meanwhile, and in contrast, Marx spent a whole year of his life banging on about Karl Vogt, but still he could not be bothered with this 'vitally important' summary.

[That obscure work of Marx's has so far been deemed unfit to publish on the Marx Internet Archive, so poor is it.]

Even had Marx done so, it would still have meant that only a tiny fraction of Hegel's work is relevant to understanding Capital: a few pages!

Attentive readers too will have noticed that Marx says he encountered Hegel's Logic by "accident"; this hardly suggests he was a constant or avid reader of that work. Indeed, he did not even possess his own copy of Hegel's Logic and had to be given one as a present by Freiligrath!

Much has been made of certain references to Hegel in Marx's later work. However, a close reading of these reveals a picture that is different from the standard one retailed by DM-apologists. The scattered remarks about Hegelian Philosophy (outside his analysis of Hegel's political ideas) found in Marx's published works are inconclusive. Cf., Carver's remarks noted above, in Note 6.

Marx himself declared:

"...I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976), p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

His use of the word "coquetted" also suggests Hegel's Logic had only a superficial influence, merely confined to certain "modes of expression", and limited to just a few sections of his great work. And as far as Marx "openly" avowing himself a pupil of Hegel, he pointedly put this in the past tense:

"I criticised the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when is was still the fashion. But just when I was working on the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely as a 'dead dog'. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him."

This is hardly a ringing endorsement, and is equivocal at best; Marx does not say he is now a pupil of Hegel, but that he once was. Of course, it might still have been the case that he was such when the above was written (and this letter [link in the original Essay] supports that view), but there is nothing here to suggest that Marx viewed the connection between his own and Hegel's work as Lenin did.

Now, John Rees has attempted to neutralise this devastating admission (that the extent of the influence on Marx of Hegel's Logic was no more than a few bits of jargon, used only in places, and with which Marx "coquetted"), by arguing as follows:

"Remarkably, this last quotation is sometimes cited as evidence that Marx was not serious about his debt to Hegel and that he only or merely 'coquetted' with Hegel's phraseology, and that he really did not make any further use of the dialectic. That this interpretation is false should be obvious from this sentence alone. The meaning is clearly that Marx was so keen to identify with Hegel that he 'even' went so far as to use the same terms as 'that mighty thinker' not that he 'only' used those terms." [Rees (1998), p.100.]

Well, if this is so, why did Marx put his praise of Hegel in the past tense, and why did he say that:

"...even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976, p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

This is quite clear, Marx himself (not me, not Peter Struve, not James Burnham, not Max Eastman...), Marx himself says that he "coquetted" (hardly a serious use of the Logic!) with Hegelian [i]phraseology, and only in places ("here and there"), confined to "the chapter on the theory of value". This is the extent of the "rational kernel" in that mystic theory: the non-serious use of bits of Hegelian jargon, here and there, and only in one chapter of his most important work!

DM-fans might not like this, but they should pick a fight with Marx for destroying their illusions, not me.

Indeed they do not like this, witness the reception an earlier version of this part of the present Essay received here, and here. Reality is one thing dialectically-distracted comrades are not used to confronting.

Woods and Grant note that Lenin argued that Marx did leave behind a his own version of Hegel's Logic, namely Das Kapital [Woods and Grant (1995), p.76.] but Marx's own words (that he merely "coquetted" with Hegelian terminology) shows that this is more than an "exaggeration" on Lenin's part, it's a fabrication.

However Terrell Carver, a noted critic of the 'orthodox' view (that Engels and Marx saw eye-to-eye on everything, and that Hegel exerted a profound influence on Marx), has back-tracked a little, as far as I can see (in Carver (2000)). But, his reasoning is uncharacteristically obscure. Fortunately, John Rosenthal has neutralised this argument; for more details, see Rosenthal (1998).

Finally, it could be argued that the Grundrisse (i.e., Marx (1973)) is living disproof of much of the above. Well, it would have been had Marx seen fit to publish it, but he didn't, and so it isn't.

But he did publish this:

"...I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976), p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

So, whatever it was that happened to Marx's thinking between the writing of the Grundrisse and Das Kapital, it clearly changed his view of Hegel's Logic -- to such an extent that its phraseology became something with which he merely wished to "coquette".

In that case, Lenin should have said:

"It is possible to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, merely by coquetting with the phraseology of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later anyone who is capable of coquetting will understand Marx!!" [Edited misquotation of Lenin (1961), p.180.]

More details, links and references at:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_01.htm

[stevensen]

rosa remember how u ran away when i challenged u on ur leninism?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Stevensen:


rosa remember how u ran away when i challenged u on ur leninism?

Remember how you prefer to make things up?

[stevensen]

not at al u did not respond to my challenge to u on how u considered urself to be a leninist maybe because there was nothing left for u to quote from

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Stevenson, posting directly from La La land:


not at al u did not respond to my challenge to u on how u considered urself to be a leninist maybe because there was nothing left for u to quote from

Is everyone in La La land as incoherent as you?

Or did you take a course?

[Raúl Duke]

Stevenson, If you are part of the DM crowd; this thread is for describing/explaining philosophies (analytical and dialectical), not to pick up arguments out of the blue, so could you please describe us dialectical philosophy before you start making arguments against analytical philosophy?

P.S. at last, maybe we can hear about dialectics from the DM crowd after all
(just so we can have an equal thread about both of these philosophy, since most posts come from the analytical side until, maybe, now)

[anomaly]

Rosa, are you familiar with the book "Change the world without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today" by John Holloway? In it, Holloway describes a dialectics which seem far more 'earthly' than the type you, or Grant and Woods for that matter, describe.

I don't know enough about dialectics yet to take a definite stance on the issue. However, I think that the notion of change being constant is a true one, therefore such a statement as 'A is and A is not' would be rendered true as well. Dialectics is a difficult thing to describe briefly, but I would say that dialectics first assumes that change is constant, and then looks at objects within the scope of time, in order to arrive at the above statement.

However, too many of these 'dialecticians' extend dialectics, with all sorts of bogus laws and whatnot, in order to make it an all-explaining philosophy of sort. Well, that's just absurd. And it is these types of dialecticians whom I firmly oppose.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Anomaly:


Rosa, are you familiar with the book "Change the world without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today" by John Holloway? In it, Holloway describes a dialectics which seem far more 'earthly' than the type you, or Grant and Woods for that matter, describe.

I have read hundreds of books on this subject, from the classics, to simpletonian account in Woods and Grant, to complex forays (in Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, modern 'Japanese dialectics', Bertell Ollman, Chris Arthur, Tony smith, etc., etc.), to those written by revolutionareis (like John Rees), obscure works you won't have heard about, PhD theses, and much else besides (I will be posting a bibliography of the stuff I have read on this topic sometime later, at my site).

I only mention this because I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked to read just one more book on this terminally-vague 'theory'.

I have to confess that I had not even heard of this book until you mentioned it; but in order to be 100% thorough, I will obtain a copy, and if it has something worthwhile to say, I will critique it in one of my Essays, or indeed, report back here if I think it will help.


However, I think that the notion of change being constant is a true one, therefore such a statement as 'A is and A is not' would be rendered true as well. Dialectics is a difficult thing to describe briefly, but I would say that dialectics first assumes that change is constant, and then looks at objects within the scope of time, in order to arrive at the above statement.

Thanks for that, but I have been reading stuff like this for well over 20 years.

First of all, only a madman would deny change (I know of only a few such idiots in the entire history of Western Philosophy: Parmenides and Zeno, come instantly to mind; possibly Plato, but even he had to admit to it in some form); so this does not distinguish dialectics from most forms of metaphysics.

And, one can admit to change, and reject all philosophies, as I do, and not be a dialectician.

Your schema, 'A is and A is not', is alas far too vague to be of much use, since you do not say what these "A's" are, nor specify any temporal constraints.

As I argue at length at my site, dialectics only seems to work because its theorists are hopelessly vague about what they mean.

And, apart from a few so-called 'Dialetheic' logicians, every dialectician I have so far encountered displays the same terminal failing.

And of the 'Dialetheists', they have to mess about with the meaning of a few key terms to make their ideas 'work'.

They then project the results of such tinkering onto nature as a priori laws, and imagine that they are materialists.

I beg to differ....

[Added on edit: OK, I have just ordered it from Amazon.]

[stevensen]

really? i think the last post on antidialectics made easy is mine without an answer from u. so who is the liar u or me?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Stevensen:


really? i think the last post on antidialectics made easy is mine without an answer from u. so who is the liar u or me?

Look in a mirror, and you will see the liar.

[Raúl Duke]

I seen Stevenson post in other threads about the same thing. (that you are not answering his older question)

Why not just answer him once and for all, so he could stop?
(Unless you already answered him in another thread)

I hope once he gets his answer he could give a shot at explaining dialectics.
(If he doesn't than I would continue to assume that the DM crowd can't even explain their own philosophy, and maybe its true that dialectics is just some gooblygook)

[gilhyle]

Just a few comments on some of your questions

1. Does dialectical philosophy have real world applications ?

Dialectical philosophy claims that it is a constant feature of human thinking that we shift our terms of reference and our forms of analysis to adjust for the limitations of thinking in terms of objects and relations. However, dialectical philosophy does not claim that we do this BECAUSE we hold dialectical philosophical ideas, but rather because of the nature of our participation in the wrorld. Thus, it is primarily a post-factum observation rather than a guide to thought. It does allow the possibility that individuals can be guided by their perception of dialectical logical patterns to see options that might not otherwise be highlighted, but the extent to which awareness of dialectical patterns can itself influence any behaviour or thinking is a contentious issue within the dialectical tradition.


2.Why does DM insist on claiming to be scientific.

Its important to understand that the sense in which dialectical philosophy understands 'science' when using it here is much closer to the approach of Lakatos than the conventional empiricist or popperian views of what science is. Furthermore, it is not DM itself that is claimed to be scientific, but variously Hegelian philsophy or Marxism. The claim of Hegel is different in this regard from that of Marx. Hegel uses the term science as it was used in his time - namely to refer to a disciplined body of study not predicated on belief in the existence of God or in the availability of revealed knowledge. For Marx, Marxism is scientific in the sense of proceeding from what can be achieved rather than what is desired.

As important, if not more important, for dialecticians is the concept of their work as critical.

Dialectical philosophy is a revision of Kantianism. Kant sought to carry out a critique of metaphysical thinking which a) showed why it was flawed and b) showed the extent to which it should be retained. Dialectical philosophy is a variation on this approach. It is based on the view that one cannot just postulate hidden structures in the individual brain which impose metaphysical categories in the process of the formulation of thoughts. One must postulate a real basis for this constitutive behaviour.

What dialectical philosophy then does is to try to come up with a picture of what kind of reality might credibly be taken to create within us the patterns of metaphysical thinking that we display. This brings us to the third essential characteristic of dialectical philosophy - it is speculative. It speculates on an overall picture of reality that is consistent with our patterns of metaphysical thinking. Thus you will find that dialectical philosophy makes heroic leaps, generalises about things without knowing the causal connections etc.

Gotta go....I'll come back to this if its useful

[Hit The North]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2006 10:05 pm
I hope once he gets his answer he could give a shot at explaining dialectics.
(If he doesn't than I would continue to assume that the DM crowd can't even explain their own philosophy, and maybe its true that dialectics is just some gooblygook)
But this raises a question of inequality, given that Rosa, despite mounting an erudite attack on dialectics as a form of explanation , never - almost as a point of principle - offers any explanations - any theoretical maps - of her own.

When asked to provide any, she hides behind phrases like "we need more and better science" or the "material language of the working class". Or when asked what she stands for, she writes, "Historical materialism, purged of Hegelianism" without explaining what that is.

Is that good enough?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Why not just answer him once and for all, so he could stop?

Do you honestly think he wants an answer from me? Can't you se how unreasonable he is -- just like other DM-fans. Straight in with the accusations, abuse and fabrications.

As I noted earlier, he barged in on an earlier thread, and then sulked off, after making all kinds of baseless accusations, and beimg asked to justify them -- which he did not.

So, Like Red Che, I merely wind him up now.

If there was the slightest chance he wanted to debate anything, I'd answer him, but you can see from his incoherence he does not want one.

Quite apart from the fact it was not too clear what he was asking, and I blowed if I can be bothered to find out.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Z:


But this raises a question of inequality, given that Rosa, despite mounting an erudite attack on dialectics as a form of explanation , never - almost as a point of principle - offers any explanations - any theoretical maps - of her own.

As you have had explained to you more times than even you have made a fool of yourself here, since I claim that all philosophical theories make no sense (with dialectics right at the bottom of the heap, and with you incapable of defending it), how can I consistently offer my own?

Anyway, Historical Materialism is enough for me.


When asked to provide any, she hides behind phrases like "we need more and better science" or the "material language of the working class". Or when asked what she stands for, she writes, "Historical materialism, purged of Hegelianism" without explaining what that is.

I am sorry if science is not good enough for you.

We must try to persuade you to become a Marxist one day.


Is that good enough?

It matches your usual low standards, I'd say,

But at least you are consistent.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 17, 2006 12:40 am
Anyway, Historical Materialism is enough for me.

I don't understand how you can make sense of Historical Materialism without dialectics, that is, without analyzing History in all its aspects.

I'm sure you do that, though, the only difference is that dialecticians (as you call them) saw a pattern with some historical occurrences as they did this and invented terminology to match the patterns.

I believe dialectics can be used to analyze History and some other sociological occurrences, but I don't believe it can be applied to man or nature, Engels was wrong on that one in my opinion.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shapur:


I don't understand how you can make sense of Historical Materialism without dialectics, that is, without analyzing History in all its aspects.

One can take an all-round view of things while throwing Hegel out the window; indeed, it is far easier to make sense of history without a single Hegelian concept/piece of jargon to confuse things.

In fact, your other post in this section proves this quite well: concepts/words drawn from Hegel and/or modern French philosophy seriously cloud the issues.

Ordinary language contains more than enough words to handle every conceivable sort of change.

[gilhyle]

I wont comment on the Lenin issue as that would merely bring us into polemic; nor will I say much about Stephen Jay Gould - except to say that in my view the debate about evolution is not as right/left wing as some say and Gould's work needs to be treated with caution. He gets a bit glib when it comes to hard concepts.

Just on the question of logic. If logic is taken to be concerned only with valid inference then dialectical logic is not a logic, since it is not concerned with identifying valid inference. While such a definition has problems at the margin it gets at much of what Aristotelian and Modern Logic are concerned with - but not dialectical logic.

Dialectical logic is a typology of patterns of the use of terms organised in a very different way. It is not concerned to differentiate the valid from the invalid inference. Rather it is designed to organise the catergorisation of thinking by reference to the different kinds of assumptions about underlying reality which are involved. Thus idealist dialectical logic (i.e. Hegel) categorises thinking into thinking which involves the catergory of 1. Being 2.Essence and 3. Notion (a difficult concept to understand - best understood as that concept of what is common to everything which we need to have the other thoughts we have.

Dialectical Logic is neutral on whether the inference in any case is valid. Thus it is closer to modern rhetoric than modern logic. But unlike rhetoric is isnt organised around persuasiveness, but rather around the types of 'metaphysical' categories which are relied on.

It should be noted that dialectical logic is transformed, upended even, as a result of what it thinks the 'notion' involves. Marxism differs radically from Hegel in this regard since it believes the notion can only be articulated from a class perspective.

Thus Marxims believes that reasoning is fractured in modern society, we are not - for Marxism - a community of rational beings capable of effective dialogue and our ability to have an all-inclosuve conception of reality is itself a contentious capacity achieved only by adopting one or other class perspective.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thankyou for those 'thoughts' Gil; nearly as clear as mud, as usual.

[gilhyle]

How do analytical and dialectical 'philosophy' compete/compare.....well they don't.

As to comparing, the key point lies within the originating view of GE Moore in his critique of British Hegelian Idealism when he argued influentially that it was wrong to believe that the relations an object has to its environment are essential to its nature. In this argument, Moore held up the possibility of making a sound distinction between an object and its relations - something that will facilitate the use of modern logic to be precise and accurate in one's propositions about each. The British Hegelians had, arguably, slipped into an untenable view of totality and Moore's (false but forceful) argument used that to found a new philosophical tradition (though Frege proved the heart of the tradition and Moore proved marginal in the end).

The uncomfortable fact for both analytical philosophy and dialectical philosophy is that there is no reliable way to define an individual object separate from its relations and, equally, it is not always and everywhere necessary to grasp the relations of an object to a wider totality to be able to talk about that object. Thus, neither the extreme version of the analytical perspective nor the extreme version of the dialectical perspective is sustainable. The power of analytical philosophy comes from the extraordinary achievement of modern logic which suggested to many (somewhat tangentally, it must be said) that the scope for precise, unambiguous expression in ordinary language is much greater than had previously been thought. By comparison, the abiding attractiveness of dialectical philosophy is the consciousness, as Adorno understood, that something significant lies beyond what can be expressed precisely - because there is always a dependence on a wider totality which can only be captured vaguely.

[As a sidebar...anyone who wants to read a fascinating account of vagueness from within the analytical tradition should look for the book by one of my former teachers, Tim Williamson)

As to competing, Dialectical philosophy is not really practised as a discipline of philosophy within universities (and certainly not otherwise). With the exception of the 'Western Marxist' tradition which is not really Marxist, there is little substantive writing on dialectical philosophy. [What is practiced - currently booming - are academic studies of Hegel, idealist dialectics, and this is a rich and increasingly complicated discipline within the academic practice of the history of philosophy.] There was an academic practice of dialectical philosophy in the USSR which was subject to deeply damaging censorship etc. but which produced in Illyenkov and Oizerman at least two writers worth reading (just). For the most part, it must be said that the project of a dialectical 'Marxist' philosophy (if it ever existed - maybe in the minds of Dietzgen, Plekhanov and the Frankfurt school) is a dead duck. It never happened. The perspective has never been articulated properly and it has never existed as a dynamic tradition - hence, by the way, the impracticallity of producing an assessment and criticism of it.

By contrast analytical philosophy dominates many philosophy departments across the English speaking world and elsewhere. It has been practiced intensely for a hundred years and has a complex history. WHat is true - and Rosa's post alludes to this - is that (beginning in the late 1960s) work in this tradition has become increasingly 'metaphysical'. In other words the detailed working through of the criticism of the use of concepts has been found by many writers within the tradition to leave them with an inadequate outcome and under pressure to produce increasingly speculative intellectual constructions, encased in caveats and health warnings - views (and based on methods) that writers like Wittgenstein would have found quite unacceptable.

But this is what the analytical tradition is built on. It is best seen as a tradition which, rather than speculate on its own fundamental purpose or role, prefers to be judged by the detail of its practice and it is striking that this practice has moved it relentlessly away from its starting points.

That general pattern of distantiation by practice from an initial aspiration to escape metaphysics was repeated in microcosm within analytical marxism which began with a driving enthusiasm to state Marxism clearly without recourse to dialectical mumbo jumbo. They set about this task with great vigour and intense effort........and failed. The price of producing a clear analytical theory of history or class appeared to be abandonment of the aspiration to echo Marx. In other words their practice confirmed the claims of dialecticians that Marxism cannot be expressed faithfully in purely analytical terms. It also produced theories that dont stand up within the academic disciplines of sociology and history.

Now some would still contest that and contest whether any conclusion can be drawn from that experience of analytical marxism, but it has been quite a striking intellectual failure.

I think Rigby's book Marxism and History is one of the best 'second generation' products of this tradition before it completely ran out of steam. It would give anyone who read it a good taste for the approach and its quite thought provoking about the materialist conception of history.

Holloway, btw, is very well known from so-called 'post-fordist' and autonomist tradition. If interested, rather than look at his recent (slightly famous) work I recommend the three volume collection called 'Open Marxism' edited byWerner Bonefeld, Richard GUnn, Kosmas Psychopedis and John Holoway from circa 1992, because it contains various articles on dialectics. Gotta say, I always found their wrtings quite undialectical, they mistake holism for dialectics.

As a final remark, Iwouldn't put too much store by the left wing credentials of the analytical tradition. Sure, Russell was a kind of socialist as have been many others. Members of the Vienna Circle were even close to what might pass for Marxism. But its no more useful to note this than to note that both Geach and Dummet were vigorous catholics.

Also, I see no incompatability between existentialism and analytical philosophy as was suggested at one point.

[gilhyle]

Duplicate

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


As a sidebar...anyone who wants to read a fascinating account of vagueness from within the analytical tradition should look for the book by one of my former teachers, Tim Williamson

An excellent book; clearly you learnt how to be eminently vague from its pages.


As a final remark, Iwouldn't put too much store by the left wing credentials of the analytical tradition. Sure, Russell was a kind of socialist as have been many others. Members of the Vienna Circle were even close to what might pass for Marxism. But its no more useful to note this than to note that both Geach and Dummet were vigorous catholics.

And, of course, Hegel was a coal miner....

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 17, 2006 02:24 pm
One can take an all-round view of things while throwing Hegel out the window; indeed, it is far easier to make sense of history without a single Hegelian concept/piece of jargon to confuse things.

In fact, your other post in this section proves this quite well: concepts/words drawn from Hegel and/or modern French philosophy seriously cloud the issues.

Ordinary language contains more than enough words to handle every conceivable sort of change.
So what you're saying is that you dislike the term "dialectic" but agree with and use the method of "dialectics"?

Is this a terminology issue? If it is I would agree with you, some terms are indeed too difficult and could be made easier, so I invite you to do that. However, isn't that a little intellectually lazy? Disliking a method for the terminology it uses....

EDIT: Also another question I have for you; what is your problem (if any) with Sartre's philosophy, specifically existentialism and his form of dialectics (besides the terminology issue)?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shapur:


So what you're saying is that you dislike the term "dialectic" but agree with and use the method of "dialectics"?

No, the whole shebang is useless.


Is this a terminology issue? If it is I would agree with you, some terms are indeed too difficult and could be made easier, so I invite you to do that. However, isn't that a little intellectually lazy? Disliking a method for the terminology it uses....

The terminology is iredeemably confused, the 'theory' from which it was lifted (Hegelian Idealism) mystical to the core, and not just the shell --, upside down or the 'right way up'.

In short, I reject every single atom of Hegel's ruling-calss 'theory', and its alleged materialist make-over in 'materialist dialectics' -- as I have been making abundantly clear at RevLeft since last winter.


what is your problem (if any) with Sartre's philosophy, specifically existentialism and his form of dialectics (besides the terminology issue)?

It is wind-baggery dressed up as profound insight.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 18, 2006 04:38 pm

So what you're saying is that you dislike the term "dialectic" but agree with and use the method of "dialectics"?

No, the whole shebang is useless.
Well you wrote this earlier:


One can take an all-round view of things while throwing Hegel out the window

"Taking an all-round view of things" is literally what dialectics means when applied to History.


It is wind-baggery dressed up as profound insight.

Ok, I've been reading several books on Sartre and his philosophy, and that sentence means nothing to me.

Could you please elaborate on the issue? Or maybe link to your articles where you wrote about him? Because I'm interested in taking in all sides of the story, and right now I'm leaning towards Sartre's form of humanist dialectics, existentialism and Marxism in general.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shapur:


"Taking an all-round view of things" is literally what dialectics means when applied to History.

I deny this -- note, I said that one can do this without an ounce of Hegel, in fact everything he wrote merely gets in the way of doing this.

So, although dialecticians like to say they do this, they do not -- they adopt a jaundiced view of reality, seen through Hegelian lenses (using a garbled version of ancient logic to confuse things all the more), and they leave out stuff they do not like, stuff that goes along with a genuine all-round scientific view of nature.

[I give scores of examples at my site.]


Could you please elaborate on the issue? Or maybe link to your articles where you wrote about him? Because I'm interested in taking in all sides of the story, and right now I'm leaning towards Sartre's form of humanist dialectics, existentialism and Marxism in general.

I had to read this stuff over 20 years ago as part of my degree; I decided then that only someone armed with a shotgun pointed at my head could ever make me do so again.

You are welcome to continue to study this theoretical morass if you want to (who am I to stop you?).

I have not written on Sartre, nor will I.

I consider it worse than a waste of time; but you are at liberty (naturally) to think the opposite.

[Led Zeppelin]

Rosa, how do you explain this: Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic (http://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/uchida/index.htm)?

Marx himself wrote this:


Originally posted by Marx
In my method of working it has given me great service that by mere accident I had again leafed through Hegel's Logic - Freiligrath found some volumes of Hegel which originally belonged to Bakunin and sent me them as a present.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shapur:


Rosa, how do you explain this: Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic?

Marx himself wrote this:

Forgive me Shapur, but you need to read this thread more carefully; I went through this in detail on page One above:

http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php...opic=58578&st=0 (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=58578&st=0)

Here it is again:


And as far as Lenin is concerned, this is what I have put in Essay Nine, Part One, on this topic (links missing, footnotes at the end of this extract):

Well: Have You Read And Fully Understood The Whole Of Hegel's Logic?

It is pertinent to ask, therefore: How is it possible for DM to be "brought to workers" (as a part of revolutionary theory) if even its best theorists appear to be incapable of 'bringing it to themselves' after over 120 years of trying?

The alarming facts upon which the above allegations supervene are thrown into even starker relief by Lenin's surprising and oft-quoted remark that not a single Marxist up until his day -- which must have included Engels, Dietzgen, Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Plekhanov -- actually understood Marx's Capital, since none of them had fully mastered Hegel's Logic!

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]9

Clearly, Lenin's aside raises serious questions of its own. If professional revolutionaries find Hegel's work impossibly difficult to comprehend (few in my experience bother to consult much of what Hegel wrote, let alone attempt to study the entire Logic -- but, which one (there were two 'Logics'!)?), is it credible that workers themselves can understand the whole of his Logic fully? In which case -- if Lenin is correct --, what chance is there that anyone (revolutionary or worker) will ever make head or tail of Marx's Capital?10

Even worse, Lenin's comments suggest that only a tiny fraction (if that!) of revolutionaries have ever fully understood Marxism (or, at least Capital). Lenin is quite clear: only those Marxists who have "thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic" (emphasis added) can claim to comprehend Capital; short of that they can't. Again, how many revolutionaries have thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic (let alone read it) since Lenin's day? Even professional philosophers find that work daunting, and of those who claim to understand it, the presumption must be that that is an empty boast until they succeed in explaining it clearly to the rest of us.11

Nevertheless, a far more serious and intractable question is the following: How would it be possible to decide if anyone has ever actually understood all of Hegel's Logic?

Plainly, we can't enquire of Hegel what the correct interpretation of his work is. Even Lenin himself failed to provide us with a comprehensive (or comprehensible) account of all of Hegel's Logic. And, as we know with regard to the interpretation of that other (but far less) obscure book -- The Bible --, it is always open for someone to claim that their interpretation is the correct one, while all the rest aren't, with no empirically viable way of deciding between them.

Of course, as we shall see, this is precisely what allows sectarians to impose their own brand orthodoxy on their corner of the militant market.12

Indeed, buried in here somewhere is one of the main reasons for the ideological sectarianism that appears to be endemic in revolutionary Marxism; the Logic is to DM as The Bible is to Theology. In both of these books, a 'correct' interpretation functions as a test of orthodoxy; their use is both a source of mystification and a guarantor of righteousness.

Moreover, as is easy to demonstrate, this fact helps DM-adepts find whatever post hoc justifications they require to 'justify' inconsistent, undemocratic tactical manoeuvring -- or counter-revolutionary activity -- as the need arises. Furthermore, as is the case with other sacred texts -- where priests, theologians and assorted 'holy men' claim exclusive interpretive rights --, in Dialectical Marxism only a few self-selected Dialectical Magi can 'rightly' claim to 'understand' the Logic (and "dialectics"), even if they find it impossible to prove this by explaining it clearly to anyone this side of the Kuiper Belt.

This being so, few among the rank-and-file will feel confident (or foolish) enough to question the theoretical deliverances made on their behalf by the likes of Stalin, Mao, Mandel, Healy, Pablo, Grant, Avakian -- or whoever.13

Another analogy (drawn once more with the numinous) springs to mind here: there would be little point in anyone complaining that the pronouncements and tactical zigzags mentioned above were inconsistent (in themselves or with whatever passed for orthodoxy just the day before); that would only show that the said complainer had failed to "understand dialectics". Consistency is no more to be expected of dialecticians than it is of Doctors of Divinity, and in this case perhaps less. The Deity and The Dialectic move in mysterious and contradictory ways; the Divine Mind is no less baffling than is DM.14

Of course, few scientists would be foolish enough to make similar claims for any of the classics of science -- not even of Darwin's Origin or Newton's Principia --, that only if the latter were studied from end to end, and thoroughly understood, could an aspiring researcher/student claim to comprehend modern science. One guesses that only a minority of scientists have actually read all or most of the classics in their field, but that fact does not materially affect their work.15

Now, even though revolutionary theory is different from other scientific disciplines, that does not mean that incomprehensible philosophical texts must be treated in such a theological way, with every word regarded as required reading, and every syllable understood, before initiation can begin. And yet, Lenin's aside indicates that this is exactly how Hegel's Logic should be viewed by the DM-faithful: only the correct understanding of this intractably obscure work -- in its entirety -- is sufficient to allow novice socialists to proceed to the next level and try to understand Marx's classic, and before they too can presume to spread the Good News.

Of course, this is all rather puzzling since Marx himself never claimed this of his own work.16

Notes

9 Of course, it is entirely possible that Lenin was merely commenting on contemporaneous Marxists, thus absolving Engels. However, what he does say fails to support this interpretation:

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]

This looks pretty clear that in the last fifty years prior to Lenin: "none of the Marxists understood Marx!!" (emphasis added) --, not (note!) "some of the Marxists". In TAR, John Rees suggests that the above comment was aimed at Plekhanov and/or Second International Marxism; this is also possible, but once again, Lenin's use of the word "none" here does not support this view.

Nevertheless, as Rees also says:

"In these fragmentary notes, Lenin formulates some of the most precise definitions of key concepts in Marxist philosophy available anywhere. The dialectic itself, for instance, has never been better explained…." [Rees (1998), p.185.]

High praise like this must mean that at least Engels's account was deficient in some way.

Question: In what way could that be?

Answer: Engels's version of DM was not wedded closely enough to Hegel's Logic.

That can only mean that Engels did not understand Capital!

On the other hand, if the dialectic has never been better explained, and Lenin's book is full of incomprehensible sentences, what does this say about the dialectic? Can anyone explain it in comprehensible terms? Has anyone?

In order to counter such ridiculous consequences, two comrades -- i.e., Woods and Grant -- have argued that Lenin was deliberately exaggerating here. This is, of course, also entirely possible, but it is certainly not the way Lenin has been interpreted by subsequent Marxists. [Indeed, Woods and Grant quote this passage here with no qualifications attached to it.]

On this, note Andy Blunden's comments:

"Hegel is the philosophical predecessor of Marx, and we have Lenin's word for it that Marx cannot be understood without first understanding Hegel." [Empson (2005), p.166.]

Naturally, this passage of Lenin's helps account for something that would otherwise be inexplicable: the fascination that Hegel's Logic has exercised on prominent revolutionaries -- including STD's and OT's. If Lenin was merely exaggerating --, or that is how he had been perceived --, this would not have happened.

[STD = Stalinist Dialectician; OT = Orthodox Trotskyist.]

For example, not only do we find a Trotskyist of the stature of Raya Dunayevskaya writing several books in the futile attempt to comprehend Hegel's Logic, we witness her reiterating this famous claim (albeit watered down a tad):

"Here, specifically, we see the case of Lenin, who had gone back to Hegel, and had stressed that it was impossible to understand Capital, especially its first chapter, without reading the whole of the Science…." [Dunayevskaya (2002), p.328.]

And, this is what Bertell Ollman had to say:

"Even from this brief outline, it is apparent that Marx's Hegelian heritage is too complex to allow simple characterization. Hegel never ceased being important for Marx, as Lenin, for example, perceived when he wrote in his notebook in 1914, 'It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapters, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx'" [Ollman (1976), p.35; a copy of this can be found here.]

There is a list of other prominent Marxists who agree with Lenin -- as well as another list of those who do not -- in Burns (2000), p.99, Notes 2 and 4.

Nevertheless, if this is the only way that these remarks of Lenin's can be defused by Woods and Grant (i.e., by claiming that Lenin was indulging in hyperbole), the question naturally arises as to why they took other (even more absurd) statements in PN literally.

[PN = Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks.]

Furthermore, it is worth noting that Lenin himself admitted that he found certain parts of Hegel's Logic impossibly obscure, or just plain nonsense. [Cf., Lenin (1961), pp.103, 108, 117, 229.]

Hence, if correct, this would mean that even Lenin did not understand Capital!

"It is impossible 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!!" [Lenin (1961), p.180. Bold emphases added.]

Notice that Lenin did not refer to just 99.9% of Hegel's Logic, but the "whole" of it.

Is this yet another internal contradiction that forces us to change our view of Hegel? Surely it must if Lenin is correct in insisting that "everything existing" (including the existing passage above) is a UO.

[UO = Unity of Opposites.]

"[Among the elements of dialectics are the following:]…nternally contradictory tendencies…in [a thing]… as the sum and unity of opposites…. [E]ach thing (phenomenon, process, etc.)…is connected with every other…. [This involves] not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other….

"In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics….

"The splitting of the whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts…is the essence (one of the 'essentials', one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristic features) of dialectics….

"The identity of opposites…is the recognition…of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature…. The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites…. [This] alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of everything existing….” [Lenin (1961), pp.221-22, 357-60.]

Or is this just another "exaggeration"?

Finally, there is no evidence that Marx himself made this claim about his own work -- nor is there any that he had ever thoroughly studied and thoroughly understood Hegel's Logic. This either means that the Logic is largely irrelevant to any student of Capital, or Marx did not understand his own book! [However, on this, see Note 16, below.]

10. While there are two different works commonly called Hegel's Logic (one of which Hegel was in the process of revising when he died -- on this see Carver (2000)), Lenin's notes relate to the Science Of Logic (i.e., Hegel (1999)). However, Lenin was unaware of the important changes Hegel had made to this book. So was Marx. Does this mean that one or both (Lenin and/or Marx) did not understand Capital? It seems they must if Lenin were right. [Again, on this, see Carver (2000).]

This does not, of course, mean that workers cannot understand Capital, but if Lenin were right it would be remarkable if anyone on earth ever could!

11. I, for one, will not be holding my breath. We have already seen one attempt fail badly here and here. More on this in Essay Twelve.

However, the best book I have read so far on this, which attempts to make Hegel comprehensible, is Beiser (2005). Even so, Beiser has to paper over the serious problems there are interpreting Hegel, and has to translate the latter's impenetrable prose into ordinary-ish sort of English to complete the job. Naturally, this just raises the question whether Beiser's Hegel is Hegel's Hegel, or is Beiser's Hegel. And that, like all such questions, is unanswerable.

12. Again, this is not to suggest that the roots of sectarianism are merely ideological, just that it helps considerably if the faithful have an obscure book (or set of books) on which to base their ideas -- for example, such a 'holy book' encourages the need for 'orthodoxy', and that fosters the idea that only certain 'leaders' are 'authorised' to impose the 'right sort' and amount of 'orthodoxy'.

To that end, the more obscure the book, the better. Without doubt Hegel's Logic gets the Gold medal in this regard. [As TV cop Kojak once said (but of something else!), "It sure beats the hell out of whatever's in second place!"]

13. Lest this comment appears to associate the present author with certain well-known anti-Marxists (who seem to say somewhat similar things), it is worth noting that the points made here are specifically aimed at the ideological use of mystification, whosoever indulges in it (and that includes such anti-Marxist critics themselves).

As will be agued in Part Two, if Lenin was guilty of doing this he did so unwittingly; he was clearly unaware of the significance of the ideas that Engels had imported into the movement. The same goes for other great revolutionaries (including Engels himself). My argument is thus not with their sincerity -- nor yet with their revolutionary fervour -- but with their philosophical judgement and their emotional susceptibilities. More on this in Part Two (summary here).

14. Once more, the comments in the text might appear to some to be a re-hash of the hackneyed idea that Marxism is a quasi-religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. As will be argued in more detail in Part Two: only in so far as DM induces revolutionaries to adopt a dogmatic metaphysic is the analogy with Theology at all apt. [In fact, as we will see, the motivation to accept dialectics is not unlike that which motivates religious belief.]

So, while Marxism itself is not a religion, Dialectical Marxism is all too uncannily like one.

15. Even if this is incorrect, and it should turn out that most scientists have studied the classics in their field, their practice is certainly not now informed by this fact, and only this fact.

16. In fact, upon learning of the aims of my site, rarely does a dialectically-distracted comrade (mainly those drawn from the HCD-tendency) fail to quote this passage of Lenin's at me, so influential has it become.

[HCD = High Church Dialectician.]

Nevertheless, Marx certainly laid down no such preconditions for understanding his work. In fact, if anything he tended to play down Hegel's influence.

However, so deep has Lenin's myth sunk into the collective Dialectical Mind that that particular comment will elicit immediate disbelief. But it is nonetheless true for all that. And this is why:

Marx himself pointed out (again, in a side remark) that the relevance of Hegel's Philosophy could be summarised in a few printers' sheets:

"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 making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified." [Marx to Engels, 16/01/1858; MECW, Volume 40, p.248; copy here.]

Needless to say, Marx never supplied his readers with such a précis. From this we may perhaps draw the conclusion that in the end Marx did not think Hegel's method was all that significant.

So, despite all the millions of words he committed to paper, he did not consider it important enough to write out these relatively few pages.

Meanwhile, and in contrast, Marx spent a whole year of his life banging on about Karl Vogt, but still he could not be bothered with this 'vitally important' summary.

[That obscure work of Marx's has so far been deemed unfit to publish on the Marx Internet Archive, so poor is it.]

Even had Marx done so, it would still have meant that only a tiny fraction of Hegel's work is relevant to understanding Capital: a few pages!

Attentive readers too will have noticed that Marx says he encountered Hegel's Logic by "accident"; this hardly suggests he was a constant or avid reader of that work. Indeed, he did not even possess his own copy of Hegel's Logic and had to be given one as a present by Freiligrath!

Much has been made of certain references to Hegel in Marx's later work. However, a close reading of these reveals a picture that is different from the standard one retailed by DM-apologists. The scattered remarks about Hegelian Philosophy (outside his analysis of Hegel's political ideas) found in Marx's published works are inconclusive. Cf., Carver's remarks noted above, in Note 6.

Marx himself declared:

"...I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976), p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

His use of the word "coquetted" also suggests Hegel's Logic had only a superficial influence, merely confined to certain "modes of expression", and limited to just a few sections of his great work. And as far as Marx "openly" avowing himself a pupil of Hegel, he pointedly put this in the past tense:

"I criticised the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when is was still the fashion. But just when I was working on the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely as a 'dead dog'. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Ibid., pp.102-03. Bold emphasis added.]

This is hardly a ringing endorsement, and is equivocal at best; Marx does not say he is now a pupil of Hegel, but that he once was. Of course, it might still have been the case that he was such when the above was written (and this letter [link in the original Essay] supports that view), but there is nothing here to suggest that Marx viewed the connection between his own and Hegel's work as Lenin did.

Now, John Rees has attempted to neutralise this devastating admission (that the extent of the influence on Marx of Hegel's Logic was no more than a few bits of jargon, used only in places, and with which Marx "coquetted"), by arguing as follows:

"Remarkably, this last quotation is sometimes cited as evidence that Marx was not serious about his debt to Hegel and that he only or merely 'coquetted' with Hegel's phraseology, and that he really did not make any further use of the dialectic. That this interpretation is false should be obvious from this sentence alone. The meaning is clearly that Marx was so keen to identify with Hegel that he 'even' went so far as to use the same terms as 'that mighty thinker' not that he 'only' used those terms." [Rees (1998), p.100.]

Well, if this is so, why did Marx put his praise of Hegel in the past tense, and why did he say that:

"...even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976, p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

This is quite clear, Marx himself (not me, not Peter Struve, not James Burnham, not Max Eastman...), Marx himself says that he "coquetted" (hardly a serious use of the Logic!) with Hegelian phraseology, and only in places ("here and there"), confined to "the chapter on the theory of value". This is the extent of the "rational kernel" in that mystic theory: the non-serious use of bits of Hegelian jargon, here and there, and only in one chapter of his most important work!

DM-fans might not like this, but they should pick a fight with Marx for destroying their illusions, not me.

Indeed they do not like this, witness the reception an earlier version of this part of the present Essay received here, and here. Reality is one thing dialectically-distracted comrades are not used to confronting.

Woods and Grant note that Lenin argued that Marx did leave behind a his own version of Hegel's Logic, namely Das Kapital [Woods and Grant (1995), p.76.] but Marx's own words (that he merely "coquetted" with Hegelian terminology) shows that this is more than an "exaggeration" on Lenin's part, it's a fabrication.

However Terrell Carver, a noted critic of the 'orthodox' view (that Engels and Marx saw eye-to-eye on everything, and that Hegel exerted a profound influence on Marx), has back-tracked a little, as far as I can see (in Carver (2000)). But, his reasoning is uncharacteristically obscure. Fortunately, John Rosenthal has neutralised this argument; for more details, see Rosenthal (1998).

Finally, it could be argued that the Grundrisse (i.e., Marx (1973)) is living disproof of much of the above. Well, it would have been had Marx seen fit to publish it, but he didn't, and so it isn't.

But he did publish this:

"...I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker" and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him." [Marx (1976), p.103. Bold emphasis added.]

So, whatever it was that happened to Marx's thinking between the writing of the Grundrisse and Das Kapital, it clearly changed his view of Hegel's Logic -- to such an extent that its phraseology became something with which he merely wished to "coquette".

In that case, Lenin [i]should have said:

"It is possible to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, merely by coquetting with the phraseology of Hegel's Logic. Consequently, half a century later anyone who is capable of coquetting will understand Marx!!" [Edited misquotation of Lenin (1961), p.180.]

More details, links and references at:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_01.htm

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by Rosa [email protected] 26, 2006 03:49 pm
Shapur:


Rosa, how do you explain this: Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic?

Marx himself wrote this:

Forgive me Shapur, but you need to read this thread more carefully; I went through this in detail on page One above:
You didn't mention Uchida's book, you only addressed the Marx quote. How do you explain the book, which basically proves that Marx used Hegel's Logic in writing his Grundrisse?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shapur, Uchida is writing in a tradition that assumes the Logic is important for Capital, when even Marx said it wasn't.

I did not deny Marx used the Logic in writing the Grundrisse (and I also think that this has been greatly exaggerated), but I did observe that Marx did not see fit to publish that work.

So, he clearly changed his mind in the intervening years before writing Capital -- as I note in that long passage.

The 'rational kernel' of Hegel's theory as it appears in Capital is just a few coquetted bits of Hegelian phraseology, and used only in one chapter.

Marx's words, not mine.

So, that is why I ignored Uchida; he needs to read Marx's own words more carefully, as you do too.

[Raúl Duke]

I heard that traditional philosophy is based on a priori knowledege.

Where does analytical philosophy gets its knowledge? Through a postpriori?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

JD:


Where does analytical philosophy gets its knowledge? Through a postpriori

Most analytic philosophy is these days metaphysical I'm afraid.

The opposite of a priori is a posteriori, and those analytic philosophers who do not do metaphysics would say that this sort of stuff is best left to the sciences.

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