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Due to its messy origins and fringe position in society, dialectics seems way more complicated than it is. Notice how straightforward something like newtonian laws of motion are to grasp for us, since they start from given and static(ally moving) objects and explain how external forces work to alter their pattern of movement. The dialectical outlook turns that whole perspective on its head: its analytical starting point is a mess of chaotic transformation and movement and it attempts to explain how reality has these patterns that allow us to imagine given, static objects in the first place: what forces there are internal to these objects that keep them together and determine how they'd dissolve into something else altogether under different conditions. Under this kind of thought-framework, e.g. gravity isn't an external force that the Earth affects on terrestrial objects, instead the Earth and terrestrial objects form a higher-level system to which gravity is internal and explains why they don't just float apart from each other and form something else altogether. And the same questions have to be answered for those terrestrial objects, the atoms they are composed of and so on, why don't they just dissolve into some primordial mist, why do they combine, separate and recombine in only specific ways in specific conditions. Dialectical thought is just foreign to common, at least western, intuition so that it's hard to explain and grasp. On the other hand e.g. Mao afaik had read considerably less about dialectics than Stalin by the time he started writing about it (lack of Chinese translations and living in literal caves for long periods), he just had a massively easier time intuitively grasping it than European communists did, probably in part because he came from a different philosophical tradition where European philosophy was something new and external. What Marx seems to have ended up doing was to apply Hegel to explain the relation of dialectical thought, which had been developed in all high cultures, to natural reality, and that enabled people like Mao to intuitively fill the gaps in their knowledge and build a materialist dialectics without going through Hegel first. And people in general have a massively easier time grasping Mao than Hegel, maoists are honing their methods to bring dialectics to barely literate peasants and slum dwellers as we speak. Richard Levins has a good short essay called "Dialectics and Systems Theory" about how systems theory helps bring dialectics into the realm of serious testable science while dialectics gives a general method for finding likely qualitative aspects that would explain most of the movement of the system, which is a problem one needs to solve before they can build a quantitative model to test.
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May 30, 2019 16:41
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CSPAN Caller posted:Long post This is exactly what I was talking about! This is like a collection of all the confusions we have accumulated, starting from how Hegel the idealist conceived dialectics as a logic, consequently rejected formal logic as wrong, and then a bunch of confused marxists even jumped onto that bandwagon. Same with the teleology that conceived all historical developments as leading to a type of constitutional monarchy in Prussia, reflected by confused marxists in the conception of all historical developments leading to communism. Dialectics simply is not a way to produce truth, it's a way to analyze the relations between things in order to produce models of reality that can only be verified scientifically. The marriage of the scientific side of marxism to politics obscures things because the political side needs to convince people of things before it can be seen whether they are true or not. And so the mythology of semi-mystical predictive powers was adopted from Hegel, but all such tendencies end up degenerating into failed sects because they rob themselves of methods to tell truth from falsehood. Those predictions of Marx that have been shown correct weren't resting on dialectics, but on regular quantitative science: dialectics helped Marx look for interesting aspects of reality, but calculus was what really allowed him to extrapolate into the future. Materialist dialectics does not operate on logical statements, it operates on processes, so law of excluded middle has nothing to do with it. Formal logic is correct and not disputed by people that don't import too much Hegel into their thought. A materialist dialectical unit is basically a real process that couldn't exist without having two subprocesses that hold each other back. A simplistic example Marx used in Capital was the Moon orbiting Earth: The forward movement of the Moon leads it away from the orbit, while the gravity of the Earth leads toward the Moon crashing into it. The contradiction between these forces is preserved in a state where the gravity of the Earth is just powerful enough to prevent the Moon from escaping while the momentum of the Moon away from Earth is just too powerful to let it crash. The contradiction manifests in an emergent pattern of movement that does not resemble either of its parts but follows from their interaction, and its resolution leads to either new contradictions of the same type as the Moon flies until it ends up in the orbit of some other celestial body, or its resolution as the it crashes into such a body and creates a new one with different physical properties. And obviously the crashing or Moon into the Earth would not be working toward some ultimate goal defined by a "spirit of history" even if it was necessary and therefore eventually happened. It's also a misinterpretation of historical materialism to call the superstructure causally weaker than the base, causal primacy between them is in flux. The determination between them is dialectical determination, that once demands arising within the base raise the superstructure to its next form, it cannot go back in a sustainable manner by its own internal logic, whereas if demands raised within the superstructure change the form of the base, suppose religious sentiments were to restrict commerce, commerce can come back to stay through the internal logic of the base, suppose inefficiency reduces that religious society to fiscal ruin as it tries to compete with its neighbors. uncop has issued a correction as of 12:40 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 12:37
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I'm pretty much thanking on my knees marxists working in semi-quantitative sciences (economics, biology) as well as active maoists, both of whom depend on actually getting results in practice and can't just build a fortress of mystification to defend themselves from critique, for explaining this poo poo to me. Professional philosophers, already established regimes and fringe political sects are enemies of comprehension.
uncop has issued a correction as of 13:18 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 13:13
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CSPAN Caller posted:I think this is a justified reading of Marx. But I'm glad scientists don't refer to interactions of forces as contradictions. The inherited language is unfortunate, but the framework itself is more novel than that. Your "forces" that are supposed to interact are too concrete a concept, when we talk about historical forces it's nothing more than a metaphor, we don't conceive of physical forces and historical forces as operating according to the same underlying logic. And anyway, a force is something one thing affects on another thing, the concept only becomes useful once you've already cracked through the shell of the system and are looking at the parts that animate it, which we are persistently unable to do regarding e.g. history. If you have cracked through and understand the parts, like in illustrative examples, something like dialectics rightfully seems a useless curiosity because it's not going to tell you anything new about the system. Dialectical concepts are highly abstract patterns of interaction that one can look for operating in the exact same way everywhere, recursively on all levels of reality. The reason dialecticians call the world dialectical is that they see these patterns appearing in pivotal positions everywhere, seemingly confirmed even by the abstractions that established science has settled around. I'd say it's entirely healthy skepticism to assume that they are looking at an illusion they themselves produce through cherrypicking and demand to see results separately for each claim, and in any case the truth is concrete so there is so the only wrong kind of abstraction is one that doesn't accurately model reality. But it seems entirely plausible to me that while things clearly are so different that one can't form universal abstractions about them, their interactions are not, and nothing is outside time so everything can be understood as processes defined by their interactions rather than things defined by their properties. And that framework leads to a hopeful view where all unknown things can ultimately be understood through the same process of scientific inquiry of starting from some perceived whole/system, finding its most important subprocesses by looking for sets of definitive contradictory interactions lurking behind nonlinear fluctuations of that whole and then producing time series data to find the levels of correlation between the developments of the subprocesses and the development of the superprocess to find which were actually definitive and how much did they explain when combined. The subprocesses are basically new wholes/systems discovered during that inquiry and can be investigated the same way recursively. And the issue that reality doesn't branch out in an unambiguous tree form is solved through the idea of perceptible things being sets of simultaneous as well as alternating processes rather than mere processes, so while processes don't participate in multiple systems, things can. So at one point I'm Sleeping, later I'm Working, still later I'm Eating and Browsing-SA, and all the while I'm also Breathing. And e.g. Breathing can be split up into multiple simultaneous processes within different systems as I'm simultaneously filling my body with oxygen and depriving the atmosphere of it, and that can be expanded as new systems are discovered. (Contradictory interactions again meaning processes that appear as inseparable parts of the same whole but which hold each other back, so that one's weakening strengthens the other. And let me tell you about maybe the worst piece of inherited jargon of all: the switch between which of the conflicting subprocesses is the more powerful one overpowering the other is called something becoming its opposite. Continuing with the orbit example, an elliptical orbit looks like half the time the satellite is falling toward the body and half the time it's falling away from the body, so momentum overpowering gravity is conceptualized as if it was reversal of falling, gravity switching on and off so that you wouldn't know it was always there unless you already had a consistent theory of gravity and went looking for it. The jargon is philosophically meaningful though: it says we don't discover new things until they come into glaring contradiction with our inductive expectations formed by observing how something was behaving previously. We simply wouldn't discover gravity if everything had permanently fallen onto the same plane and would never rise up to fall again, even if gravity was functional all the same. And BTW this is also how Marx makes the ridiculously prophetic-sounding claim that "mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve": the idea is that it is only able to raise the question of why something isn't like it should be once it has come to expect something through already having experienced it or its logical prerequisites.) uncop has issued a correction as of 11:11 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 10:16
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