What on earth is the dialectic?

If you involve yourself with radical politics on a theoretical level in any way, then you'll encounter dialectical thinking as surely as you'd encounter objectivism when surrounded by pimply American first-year economists. It forms a philosophical and conceptual background to more radical political writing than any comparable system, but is there actually anything of value to be found in the dialectical method any more?

Granted in Marx's day there were elements of Hegel's dialectic that ran against the grain of contemporary scholarship, like questions of identity and difference, an emphasis on perpective as being epistemically relevant, an emphasis on relations rather than things, and an understanding that quantity and quality aren't always discrete attributes of objects that are in a state of change. However, it seems to me that all of these have now been incorporated into the postmodern mindset through things like structuralism, relativity and systems theory/cybernetics, and that the emacipatory conceptual aspect of dialectical thinking has been lost in a morass of obscurantist philosophical jargon that hides rather than elucidating facts about the world.

My other principle reservation concerns the inauspicious philosophical background to dialectical thinking. Fichte's idea that consciousness wasn't grounded in anything outside itself (the dubious foundation of German Idealism) becomes yet more implausible with Hegel's insistence that only 'absolute' consciousness, rather than any individual consciousness could provide sufficient ground for experience. As Kierkegaard said "Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all."

So my challenge to you is this: show me something dredged from the murky logical depths of this dismal science that demonstrates that its actually worth keeping, some solitary nugget of insight that actually relies on dialectical thinking in this day an age, some reason, in short, to bother with this shit at all. A lot of writers that I respect (two of whom are quoted in the poll) would describe themselves as dialecticians, so whilst I might find some of the methods employed logically repugnant, I do honestly have an open mind on the subject.

Convince me!

Schopenhauer had the right idea: it's best to completely ignore the dialectic, otherwise you get caught up in it. Feuerbach et al spent their entire professional careers trying to escape it.

As in "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity."

Nice turn of phrase, that man

He said that? Nietzsche didn't even bother denouncing Hegel - it's best not to touch the beast at all.

Schopenhauer probably only got nasty because he had a (self-imposed) schedule clash with Hegel, which meant that not a single student showed up for Schopenhauer's lectures.

Ha! I didn't know that.

I know what you mean about the unhealthy fascination that it engenders - you keep staring at it in the belief that there's some revelatory profundity that you're somehow missing, which is more or less what I've been doing recently.

It's like rubbernecking at a conceptual car-crash.

The problem isn't the fascination, it's the fact that the dialectic is all-embracing - every element of reality is explained thereby, whether it wants to be or not. Ultimately all dialectic discussion isn't about their subjects at all, but about the dialectic. Meaningless.

In all seriousness, it *is* the rational proof of the Creator. Or the "Absolute Idea" to use Plato and Hegel's term. But y'all knew that already...

Hegel, it seems to me, was writing about religion from the outset:

The absolute Idea has turned out to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea. Each of these by itself is still one-sided, possessing the Idea only as a sought for beyond and an unattained goal; each, therefore, is a synthesis of endeavour, and has, but equally has not, the Idea in it; each passes from one thought to the other without bringing the two together, and so remains fixed in their contradiction. The absolute Idea, as the rational Notion that in its reality meets only with itself, is by virtue of this immediacy of its objective identity, on the one hand the return to life; but it has no less sublated this form of its immediacy, and contains within itself the highest degree of opposition. The Notion is not merely soul but free subjective Notion that is for itself and therefore possesses personality — the practical, objective Notion determined in and for itself which, as person, is impenetrable atomic individuality, but explicitly universality and cognition, and in its other has its own objectivity for its object. All else is error, confusion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and transitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self-knowing truth, and is all truth.

It is the sole subject matter and content of philosophy. Since it contains all determinations within it, and its essential nature is to return to itself through its self-determination or particularisation, it has various shapes, and the business of philosophy is to cognise it in these. Nature and spirit are in general different modes of presenting its existence, art and religion its different modes of apprehending itself and giving itself an adequate existence. Philosophy has the same content and the same end as art and religion; but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute idea, because its mode is the highest mode, the Notion.

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I find it impossible to read this without the Popper quote coming to mind in its entirety:

The whole development of dialectic should be a warning against the dangers inherent in philosophical system-building. It should remind us that philosophy should not be made a basis for any sort of scientific system and that philosophers should be much more modest in their claims.

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Fruitloop said:

Hegel, it seems to me, was writing about religion from the outset

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See? When I said *exactly* that, in far more accessible language, all the intellectual pigmys on here said I was nuts. They didn't call Hegel nuts, did they? Oh hang on.... But seriously, Hegel is the connection between Luther (the biggest influence on Hegel) and Marx (Hegel's most famous disciple). To anyone who knows anything about the history of thought, it is clear that Marxism is nothing but Lutheranism apres la lettre. Unfortunately, as I discovered, the number of philosophers on here is miniscule, and we are far outnumbered by ultra-materialist scientists. Any ideas as to why that might be? Seriously, its something I've wondered about--there's quite a few here who know their science (Bernie, Laptop, yourself) but since Butcher's departure there is *no-one* who knows philosophy...

Good Intentions said:

The problem isn't the fascination, it's the fact that the dialectic is all-embracing - every element of reality is explained thereby, whether it wants to be or not. Ultimately all dialectic discussion isn't about their subjects at all, but about the dialectic. Meaningless.

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I think this is exactly the problem with starting from totalising and entirely notional conceptions about the world i.e. how can you know that the 'complete picture' that you're looking at is the correct one? Only through knowledge of its part.

There's a salutary lesson in Hegel's refutation of the Titius-Bode Law (that posited a mathematical relation between the distances of the planets) which Hegel rejected on the grounds that

"the study and knowledge of the laws of nature are based upon nothing other than this: we believe that nature has been formed by reason, and we are convinced that all the laws of nature are identical."

His replacement theory, based on Kepler's cosmology, insisted that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter - as far as I can see this was based on the number of holes in the human head. Whether this was due to Hegel's physiology mimicking the actual ordering of the planets in a way that he had failed to recognise, or simply demontrates the difficulty of finding Uranus even with both hands, is still a matter of some conjecture.

This incident seems to me to typify the weakness of Hegel's philosophical method. Whereas the Titius-Bode theory proceeds from observation to hypothesis to discovery, Hegel's hamfisted attempts to impose a rational ordering on the universe come to a grinding halt against the obduracy of facts.

all the intellectual pigmys on here

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is that one of those silly derridian neologisms?

phildwyer said:

See? When I said *exactly* that, in far more accessible language, all the intellectual pigmys on here said I was nuts. They didn't call Hegel nuts, did they? Oh hang on.... But seriously, Hegel is the connection between Luther (the biggest influence on Hegel) and Marx (Hegel's most famous disciple). To anyone who knows anything about the history of thought, it is clear that Marxism is nothing but Lutheranism apres la lettre. Unfortunately, as I discovered, the number of philosophers on here is miniscule, and we are far outnumbered by ultra-materialist scientists. Any ideas as to why that might be? Seriously, its something I've wondered about--there's quite a few here who know their science (Bernie, Laptop, yourself) but since Butcher's departure there is *no-one* who knows philosophy...

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It depends what you mean by knowing philosophy, I suppose. Whilst I can see that the history of thought is a fascinating topic, my own interests lie elsewhere, so my knowledge of philosophy comprises more of a philosophical toolkit of concepts amd methods that have relevance to other topics, both academic and political, than a thorough study of the subject as a whole (German Idealism is admittedly a particular lacuna is this respect, in comparison to analytic philosophy). Much the same could be said for my understanding of science, if that's any consolation.

I do think there is a role for philosophy still, as a corrective to the ideological nature of science and as a study of the efficacy of particular rational techniques, but there has been a tendency for both philosophy and science to exceed their remit in terms of what they attempt to pronounce upon. As to the reason why there are few philosophers about, I think you would have to find it in the political and social makeup of a society where critical thought as a whole is on the wane in favour of a narrow specialism.

phildwyer said:

To anyone who knows anything about the history of thought, it is clear that Marxism is nothing but Lutheranism apres la lettre. ,

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utter garbage. I can't think of anything less 'lutheran' than Marx on Epicureanism.

Fruitloop said:

As to the reason why there are few philosophers about, I think you would have to find it in the political and social makeup of a society where critical thought as a whole is on the wane in favour of a narrow specialism.

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Do you reckon? I suppose that's true now, and I know that studying philosophy (or history, or literature) is now actively discouraged in the UK (not in the USA, this is one of many areas in which the US is more sensible than the UK). Still, there are plenty of people here in their 30's and 40's who, I'd have thought, would have been educated before the applied sciences pushed their way so completely to the forefront. I must say I was a bit taken aback to find that virtually no-one here knew Hegel, and that they thought they could understand Marx without knowing his great predecessor. That's probably why I got a bit annoyed on the Rational Proof of God thread--most of what I was saying would have been very familiar to anyone with a BA in philosophy, and I was horrified to find that level of ignorance on a Leftist list. Well, it was fun to shout at them too...

phildwyer said:

Do you reckon? I suppose that's true now, and I know that studying philosophy (or history, or literature) is now actively discouraged in the UK (not in the USA, this is one of many areas in which the US is more sensible than the UK). Still, there are plenty of people here in their 30's and 40's who, I'd have thought, would have been educated before the applied sciences pushed their way so completely to the forefront. I must say I was a bit taken aback to find that virtually no-one here knew Hegel, and that they thought they could understand Marx without knowing his great predecessor. That's probably why I got a bit annoyed on the Rational Proof of God thread--most of what I was saying would have been very familiar to anyone with a BA in philosophy, and I was horrified to find that level of ignorance on a Leftist list. Well, it was fun to shout at them too...

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yes but just cos Hegel was an idealist it does not follow that Marx was. If anything Marx owed as much to Feuerbach as he did to Hegel.

revol68 said:

yes but just cos Hegel was an idealist it does not follow that Marx was. If anything Marx owed as much to Feuerbach as he did to Hegel.

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Both Hegel and Marx were *dialecticians,* hence neither idealist nor materialist but cogniscent of the fact that all such binary oppositions are mutually definitive.

Fruitloop said:

If you involve yourself with radical politics on a theoretical level in any way, then you'll encounter dialectical thinking as surely as you'd encounter objectivism when surrounded by pimply American first-year economists.

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I haven't actually read the rest of the thread yet, but

phildwyer said:

Both Hegel and Marx were *dialecticians,* hence neither idealist nor materialist but cogniscent of the fact that all such binary oppositions are mutually definitive.

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you do realise that the dialectic for marx is always within the material realm, it's only a muppet who thinks that consciousness is excluded from the material realm. Infact your position is nothing but the flipside of orthodox marxism which see's consciousness as a relfection of materiality rather than an active part of materialism.

phildwyer said:

Both Hegel and Marx were *dialecticians,* hence neither idealist nor materialist but cogniscent of the fact that all such binary oppositions are mutually definitive.

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Bot Marx and Hegel were *German* still very different. Marxs dialectic is a radical inverse of hegels and provides far more insight than just saying they are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

and all of this is the reason why i did ethics rather than history of thought.

revol68 said:

you do realise that the dialectic for marx is always within the material realm, it's only a muppet who thinks that consciousness is excluded from the material realm. Infact your position is nothing but the flipside of orthodox marxism which see's consciousness as a relfection of materiality rather than an active part of materialism.

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Au contraire, consciousness is by definition immaterial. All attempts to argue otherwise, from the metaphysical materialism of Condillac and Holbach, through the dogmatism of Lenin and the reductionism of Foucault and Althusser, to the biological determinism of Richard Dawkins, are clearly and demonstrably rubbish. Once again, the idea/matter dichotomy is mutually definitive. Matter would not *exist* without ideas.

cathal marcs said:

Marxs dialectic is a radical inverse of hegels

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Not true. The only difference is that, by Marx's time, the logical polarity between essential human life and its alienated form of appearance had coalesced into the class opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat. This led Marx into *economic* determinism, which is of course not the same as *materialist* determinism. Hegel's economic analysis is identical to Marx's, he just didn't think the economy was the primary manifestation of alienation, for the very good reason that in his day it wasn't. It isn't in our day, either.

phildwyer said:

Matter would not *exist* without ideas.

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whilst it is true that matter may only become *meaningful* in relation to ideas, by what rationale is its very existence dependent on them?

Your Hegelian idealism is blind to the existence of the material as the ground of unreflected immanence which all thought makes manifest. Marx criticises Hegel by way of Spinoza, and positivist scientism by way of Hegel.

Well, this time dwyer had to resort to nonsense and personal insult to get people to bite.

articul8 said:

whilst it is true that matter may only become *meaningful* in relation to ideas, by what rationale is its very existence dependent on them?

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Matter's phenomenological existence, its existence "for us" which, at the risk of tautology, is the only existence it can have as far as we are concerned, is dependent on the existence of ideas.

Good Intentions said:

Well, this time dwyer had to resort to nonsense and personal insult to get people to bite.

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As if *you* are capable of differentiating between philosophical sense and nonsense! You are but a fool. I advise you to shut up and learn.

phildwyer said:

Not true. The only difference is that, by Marx's time, the logical polarity between essential human life and its alienated form of appearance had coalesced into the class opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat. This led Marx into *economic* determinism, which is of course not the same as *materialist* determinism. Hegel's economic analysis is identical to Marx's, he just didn't think the economy was the primary manifestation of alienation, for the very good reason that in his day it wasn't. It isn't in our day, either.

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How can you have alienation without class opposition? It would seem to imply capital without capitalists, which makes no sense to me unless the locus of your understanding of alienation is situated outside production, in which case it's different to Marx's.

One of the main reasons I started this thread is that I couldn't square the fact that discussions of the validity of the dialectic keep coming back to the issue of Mind vs Matter with the following statement from the intro to RCP:

Instead of seeing that Hegel's Zeitgeist was ultimately a philosophical formulation of the dialectic of capital and that his idealism lay in the perception of an infinite capacity to logically resolve the contradictions within capitalist society, Engels thought the problem was to adapt that dialectic to the analysis of the world. He thus set a pattern, which in some quarters survives to this day, of understanding the dialectic not as a characteristic of capital that working-class struggle seeks to destroy but rather as a universal logic and method to be adopted! Ironically, Engels, and those who followed him, thus preserved in a distorted way the Hegelian vision of a dialectical cosmos -- a vision that can be seen as an optimistic moment of bourgeois philosophy that theorizes capital's tendency to impute and impose its own logic on the world.

Once the dialectic was divorced from capital, once materialism was no longer understood as the working class's ability to destroy capital's idealism but as "matter" in the abstract, once, in short, the dialectical form was divorced from its content, Engels could apply that form anywhere: in the analysis of both nature and human history. In the former case, as Lucio Colletti has usefully shown, the result was little more than a pretentious reworking of Hegel.

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If the above is in fact the case, isn't it a gross misapplication of the dialectical method to attempt to dialectically resolve the mind/body problem, which predates both alienation and capitalism?

phildwyer said:

Matter's phenomenological existence, its existence "for us" which, at the risk of tautology, is the only existence it can have as far as we are concerned, is dependent on the existence of ideas.

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So what you're saying is that our consciousness of matter relies upon our being conscious? Groundbreaking stuff there, phil

In Bloom said:

So what you're saying is that our consciousness of matter relies upon our being conscious? Groundbreaking stuff there, phil

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I prefer to think of it as closer to the 2 year old who covers their eyes and thinks nothing else exists as it is all dependent on them.

As if space dust is dependent on our idea of it.

Tit!

Marx had no time for such idealist wank and hence why he rejected left hegelianism.

phildwyer said:

Matter's phenomenological existence, its existence "for us" which, at the risk of tautology, is the only existence it can have as far as we are concerned, is dependent on the existence of ideas.

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Not surprisingly, I'd agree with this...but I think this way of expressing it leads also to misleading implications.

ie. matter exists for consciousness precisely as an excess which eludes representation by concepts/ideas - matter is nothing other than the non-dialectical, untotalisable kernel which facilitates the necessarily open-ended dialectic,the fragments of irreducible non-identity which resist the totalising ambitions of Geist . [This is Spinoza, Marx, Adorno...]

so, Ideas are necessary for the phenolomenoligcal disclosure of "matter". But it is only in the inadequacy, the failure of ideas/language that this disclosure occurs. To believe that matter and ideas are identical is the door which compels you (and Hegel!) make an irrational appeal to a single divinity.