Here are Rosa's most important ideas in summary.
Charles
^^^
Essay Sixteen: Summary
This Essay contains an outline of the most important ideas found at this
site. The vast majority of the minor -- and all of the subsidiary -- issues
have been omitted. Each point is developed more fully in the corresponding
Essay, where background details and substantiation can be found.
Essays Two, Three And Ten
These three Essays focus on several of the main features of DM-epistemology,
which, despite pretensions to the contrary, is surprisingly conservative.
The reasons for saying something as controversial as this will become clear
as the argument advances -- but first an apparent digression.
Ruling-Class Forms-of-Thought
For over two thousand years traditional Philosophers have been playing on
themselves and their audiences what can only be described as a series of
complex verbal tricks. Since Greek times, metaphysicians have occupied
themselves with deriving a priori theses solely from the meaning of a few
specially chosen (and suitably doctored) words. These philosophical gems
have then been peddled to the rest of humanity, dressed-up as profound
truths about fundamental aspects of reality, peremptorily imposed on nature
-- often without the benefit of a single supporting experiment.
In fact, traditional theorists went further; their acts of linguistic
legerdemain 'allowed' them to uncover Super-theses in the comfort of their
own heads, doctrines they claimed revealed the underlying and essential
nature of existence, which were supposedly valid for all of space and time.
Unsurprisingly, discursive magic of this order meshes rather well with
ambient ruling-class forms-of-thought (for reasons that are explored in
detail in Essays Twelve and Fourteen (summaries here and here), chief among
which is the belief that reality is rational.
Clearly, the idea that the world is rational must be forced onto nature
since nature is not Mind. Nevertheless, it is far easier to justify the
imposition of a hierarchical and grossly unequal class system on
'disorderly' workers if ruling-class ideologues can persuade one and all
that the 'law-like' order of the natural world actually reflects, and is
reflected in turn by, the social order from which their patrons just so
happen to benefit --, the fundamental aspects of which none may question.
Material reality may not be rational, but it is certainly rational for
ruling-class "prize-fighters" to claim it is.
Radical talk -- Conservative Walk
Even before the first dialecticians put pen to misuse, they found themselves
surrounded on all sides by ideas drawn from this ancient tradition. Clearly,
they faced a serious problem: if they imposed their ideas on nature in like
manner, they could easily be accused of constructing a comparable form of
Idealism. On the other hand, if they didn't do this, they wouldn't have a
'philosophical' theory of their own to lend weight to, and provide a bedrock
for, their claim to lead the revolution. Confronted thus by traditional
styles-of-thought (which they had no hand in creating, but which they were
only too happy to appropriate), DM-theorists found there was no easy way out
of this traditionalist minefield -- or at least none that managed to keep
their theory the right side of immaterialism.
Their solution was simple and effective: ignore the problem.
This is not to deny that dialecticians are aware of the Idealism implicit in
traditional thought; on the contrary, but their excuse for ignoring its
pernicious influence on their own ideas is that the materialist flip they
say they inflicted on Hegel was deemed capable of changing theoretical dirt
into philosophical gold. However, flip or no flip, their own thought is
still thoroughly traditional in style: it is dogmatic, a priori, and couched
in jargon lifted straight from the Philosophers' Phrase Book. Even though
few DM-theorists deny that traditional Philosophy itself is predominantly
Idealist, not a single one has avoided copying its conservative approach to
a priori knowledge.
So, despite the fact that dialecticians constantly claim that DM has not
been imposed on nature -- for that would surely brand their theory
"Idealist" -- they all invariably end up doing exactly that, imposing their
theory on reality. In so doing, they merely underline the fact that
traditional thought has found a new batch of converts among erstwhile
radicals.
Hence, in spite of frequent claims to the contrary, Marxist Philosophy has
from its inception been remarkably traditional, if not disappointingly
conservative. Instead of trying to bury traditional theory, dialecticians
have in fact done the opposite, indirectly praising it by emulating it.
The Gospel Of John: In The Beginning Was The Word "Is"
For instance, in his Philosophical Notebooks Lenin attempted to derive the
entire dialectic from a single sentence like "John is a man." [Lenin (1961),
p.359.] There, Lenin was quite happy to construct several tall stories atop
this alarmingly weak foundation, claiming to know what must be the case for
all of reality, for all of time.
However, John's material insignificance did not prevent Lenin from
uncovering a host of universal and omnitemporal truths concealed beneath
this fictional character's imputed manhood. Thus, from this figment of the
imagination, Lenin thought he could derive a number of seemingly eternal and
all-embracing scientific facts. Indeed, from sentences like these (all of
which were of the subject/predicate form -- a highly limited form of
discourse, anyway), and scarcely giving a thought to the epistemological
megalomania this implied --, Lenin was able to claim that not just John, but
everything in reality must be a UO, and thus that everything in existence is
contradictory. His reason? Simply that John cannot be identical with the
universal term "man", a subject cannot be identical with a predicate.
[UO = Unity of Opposites.]
Granted, this is not very impressive logic, but it is at least eminently
traditional.
Indeed, the imposition on reality of 'truths' of this sort is thoroughly
traditional; in DM-circles this goes largely un-remarked upon (and this is
still the case even after this manoeuvre has been pointed out) simply
because not only does everyone do it, they always have. That is precisely
what makes DM so traditional: moves like this are part of a philosophical
game that was invented and has been played by ruling-class hacks for
thousands of years.
To change the image: this is the theoretically-poisoned chalice from which
not a single DM-theorist has failed to quaff. In fact, they happily pass it
around and commend its contents to others. In this way, therefore, the ideas
of the ruling-class have come to rule our movement, too. Dialecticians like
Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky have been quite happy to borrow these
alien-class ideas, internalising them and chiding others for denying that
Marxists should buy into a single one of them.
Hardly pausing for breath, Lenin was also able to 'derive' several other
ambitious theses from a defective understanding of the copula -- i.e., the
predicate connective "is", as it appears in sentences like "John is a man".
In so doing, he uncritically accepted Hegel's "Identity Theory of
Predication" (a logical dodge invented by post-Aristotelian logicians, and
one that was also quite popular with medieval theologians), confusing the
"is" of predication with the "is" of identity. To be sure, this is a
seemingly minor faux pas, but it is one that has hugely disproportionate
consequences, as we will see.
This allowed Lenin to argue that "John" was at the same time identical with,
but different from, all men. But, neither Hegel nor Lenin so much as
attempted to justify this innovative grammatical segue, and yet that did not
stop them both from extracting substantive metaphysical truths from so
diminutive a misconstrued verb.
This manoeuvre was then compounded by the belief that the subject/predicate
form -- as found almost exclusively in Indo-European grammar -- had profound
ontological implications. This superficial grammatical feature of just that
family of languages (i.e., this use of "is") was now transmogrified from a
predicative into a relational form.
[The "is" of identity is relational, not predicative. So, because of the
above slide, propositions of the form "NN is F" now become "NN = F", which
is just one aspect of the aforementioned medieval "Identity Theory of
Predication".]
It is thus no surprise then that from this serious misreading of so simple a
verb bogus 'contradictions' freely flowed. This supposedly meant -- so this
fable went -- that ordinary language must be riddled with paradox (since it
implied contradictions so readily), that nature must therefore be
fundamentally contradictory, that the universe and thought are universally
dialectical, that everything is interconnected, that change is powered by
internal contradictions, and that necessity and contingency are
dialectically united as complimentary aspects of reality. All this a priori
superscience Lenin managed to extract from this one sentence!
"To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., [sic] with
any proposition...: [like] John is a man.. Here we already have dialectics
(as Hegel's genius recognized): the individual is the universal..
Consequently, the opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are
identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the
universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the
individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every
universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual.
Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects.
Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every
individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of
individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc. Here already we have the
elements, the germs of the concept of necessity, of objective connection in
nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the
phenomenon and the essence; for when we say John is a man.we disregard a
number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the
appearance, and counterpose the one to the other..
"Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as a 'nucleus' ('cell')
the germs of all the elements of dialectics, and thereby show that
dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general." [Lenin (1961),
pp.359-60, pp.359-60. Emphases in the original.]
This was later amplified by comrade Novack:
"This law of identity of opposites, which so perplexes and horrifies addicts
of formal logic, can be easily understood, not only when it is applied to
actual processes of development and interrelations of events, but also when
it is contrasted with the formal law of identity. It is logically true that
A equals A, that John is John.. But it is far more profoundly true that A is
also non-A. John is not simply John: John is a man. This correct proposition
is not an affirmation of abstract identity, but an identification of
opposites. The logical category or material class, mankind, with which John
is one and the same is far more and other than John, the individual. Mankind
is at the same time identical with, yet different from John." [Novack
(1971), p.92.]
Here, as elsewhere in traditional Philosophy, a seemingly insignificant
grammatical 'enhancement' 'permits' theorists to ignore and bypass the clear
distinctions ordinary humans have built into material language. This then
'allowed' them to blame the vernacular and common understanding for
discursive faults that were entirely of their own making.
On this basis, Lenin clearly felt quite justified in projecting dialectics
right across the universe -- and, to rub it in, he did so without the aid of
a single confirming experiment, just like the traditionalists mentioned
above.
This was clearly regarded as a safe manoeuvre since, if language itself has
dialectics built into it, and since we have to use it to depict nature,
nature cannot fail to be dialectical. In that case, dialectics can be
imposed on reality and the earlier bluff denial that this is never done may
now safely be ignored.
The Idealism implicit in all this is not easy to miss: on this view, nature
is dialectical because language can be made to say so at the flick of a
verb.
In this way, sentences depicting John and his manhood guarantee that nature
is contradictory because propositions contain contradictions between their
subject and predicate terms (i.e., John cannot be all men).
[However, if the predicative form is merely descriptive, then predication
cannot be confused with a reference to all the members of a certain group
(in the case, allegedly, all men -- since description is not reference).
Aristotle saw through that 'difficulty' 2500 years ago; for him predicates
applied to subject terms -- so, as he saw things, there was no "is" anywhere
in sight to magic into an identity. More details in Essay Three Part One.]
In addition, 'innovative' logic of this sort showed that the LOI cannot
apply to concrete reality (again, this was supposedly because subject terms
are not identical to predicate terms), and that contingent reality is not
only ruled by dialectical logic, the entire world is an interconnected
Totality. Luckily, these amazing facts are easy to discover: no boring
experiments or observations are required. No, in but a few seconds they can
be extracted from a 'dialectical analysis' of any given subject/predicate
proposition, which 'analysis' shows that every part of reality is implied
by, and is linked to, each and every other part. This is because John is
identical with but different from a universal, which linguistic fact
connects him with universal reality, but in a contradictory sort of way.
Fortunately, there are other superscientific fact that can be obtained from
this 'analysis': appearances must contradict underlying 'essences' (since
the essential logic of the relation between John and his universal cannot be
accessed by mere appearances, but only by a process of 'abstraction'), and
all of reality is governed by dialectical law --, which, paradoxically, also
guarantees freedom of the will. This is yet another DM-contradiction that
just has to be "grasped" to be believed -- since John is both contingently
and essentially a man, apparently.
[LOI = Law of Identity]
However, the best part of this thoroughly traditional tale is that anyone so
minded can do a little dialectics with ease, in the comfort of their own
convoluted jargon. Who needs expensive equipment, time-wasting experiments
and rigorous scientific training when impressive truths like these can be
derived so effortlessly from a few shafted words?
If every journey starts with a small step, this particular mystery tour
began with just such a simple misreading of this tiny word (i.e., "is").
Traditional Philosophers (like Parmenides and Plotinus -- and their
latter-day clone, Hegel) have been doing this sort of thing for centuries.
Dialecticians, are thus mere parvenus in this regard; late-comers who have
slotted rather nicely into this conservative groove. In fact you can't even
see the join.
So, if discourse has dialectics programmed into it, then no language-user
could possibly deny the 'truths' DM-theorists have effortlessly wrung from
it. Super-verities like these can now be pulled straight out of Hegel's hat
since every single one of his theses is hidden in all our sentences. DM can
now be read into nature (on the pretence that it hasn't -- and then this can
be called a 'materialist inversion' of Hegel) because any reading of
anything must have dialectics built into it. The need for evidence can be
waved aside since the seemingly obvious nature of the 'truths' obtained from
such linguistic trickery is all the proof anyone could possibly need.
Dialectics thus becomes self-evident; judge and jury in its own behalf.
This helps account for the relaxed ease with which all dialecticians slip
into the a priori mode, and why they all fail to notice when they are doing
it -- again, even after this has been pointed out to them.
It all looks so 'obvious'.
A Priori Dogmatics -- The Only Game In Town
This style-of-thought was invented by ancient Greek theorists who spoke,
wrote and thought as if reality was actually rational and linguistic --
i.e., the product of Logos. Ever since then, every branch of traditional
Philosophy has more or less done likewise, but in its own idiom, as each
Mode of Production dictated the content, but not the form. This tradition
has provided the back-drop and created the theoretical climate-of-opinion
that sets the limits to, and fixes the parameters of, 'acceptable thought'.
Hence, and since then, if a theory isn't based on some form of word-juggling
-- the more baroque the better --, it isn't 'proper' Philosophy.
Dialecticians have naively swallowed this ancient marketing ploy. This is
why so many of them express genuine incredulity when it is suggested to them
that Marxism does not need a philosophy of any sort, shape or kind -- never
mind the one they lifted from Hegel. DM-fans are so neck-deep in this
tradition (which sees a priori knowledge as the only legitimate goal) that
they can't help but defend it against radical attacks (like those mounted
here).
Small wonder then that Marx declared that the ruling ideas are always those
of the ruling-class. [Dialecticians superficially accept this saying, but
point the finger at everyone else, scarcely noticing the origin of their own
a priori theses in Hermetic thought.]
Lenin thus calmly concluded that the principles he had uncovered while
reading Hegel's Logic -- and after tinkering with a few simple sentences --
governed the "eternal development of the world." [Lenin (1961), p.110.]
Furthermore, and despite the fact that dialecticians repeatedly tell us that
their theory is not a "master key" to all that exists, Lenin let the
metaphysical cat out of the linguistic bag when he declared that:
"[t]he identity of opposites.alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of
everything existing." [Ibid. p.358.]
One minute DM is not the key; next it is. One minute we are told dialectics
must not be imposed on reality; next it has been. All DM-theorists indulge
in this pragmatic contradiction: first they disarm the reader with an open
declaration that dialectics has not been imposed on reality (their favourite
way of making this point recently is to say that DM is not "a royal road to
truth"), then, sometimes on the same page or in the next paragraph -- or
even in the very next sentence -- they proceed to do the exact opposite,
claiming that this or that DM-thesis is universally true throughout all of
space and for all of time.
For example, Engels felt bold enough to claim that:
"Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be..
Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter.
Motion is therefore as uncreatable and indestructible as matter itself."
[Engels (1976), p.74.]
Exactly how Engels knew this to be true of all matter and motion in the
entire universe, and for ever, he sadly kept to himself.
Similarly, Lenin felt moved to "demand" that nature be regarded
dialectically because he was able to reveal (and presumably he knew this by
non-physical means) that the universe actually works this way:
"Dialectical logic demands that we go further.. [It] requires that an object
should be taken in development, in 'self-movement'." [Lenin (1921), p.90.]
Naturally, after reading this, the only conclusions possible are that either
the word "imposed" meant something different in Lenin's day, or he was
taking the dialectical piss.
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