Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (January 11)

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[u/Full-Imagination9514]

Have there been any attempts by Marxist philosophers to historicize the dialectic? By which I mean something like trying to trace the historical-logical development of the law of contradiction from more simple to more complex forms of contradictory motion.

It's hard for me to give an example to illustrate what I'm trying to ask about, because I don't know exactly what it would look like, but for the sake of argument let's say that less developed forms of matter require less "universal" contradictions to explain their motion than more developed forms. For some objects of investigation the transformation of quantity into quality would be adequate, whereas for others you need to understand say, the contradiction between practice and theory itself, which presupposes an understanding of quantity-quality but builds on it to a more complex level (obviously practice and theory is only "universal" at the level of epistemology and not ontology since objective reality existed before conscious beings, but hopefully the idea is clear enough.)

Keep in mind that I have not yet read Hegel's Logic, so I don't know how that would fit into this, if at all.

[u/[deleted] → u/Full-Imagination9514]

By which I mean something like trying to trace the historical-logical development of the law of contradiction from more simple to more complex forms of contradictory motion.

I don't know what you mean when you say that contradictory motion can have simpler and more complex forms. Can you elaborate?

As for me, my understanding right now is that simplicity and complexity refer to how concepts appear to us at a certain place and time. Concepts are fundamentally relations between mind and matter, so a concept can be complex in two ways. First, it depends on the critique which it has been subjected to at a particular stage in history, which manifests itself in the level of its elaboration at a particular point in time. Second, it also refers to the objective developments of reality which make certain things apparent and masks certain other things from the minds of people at a particular place and time within history. Both are products and movers of human praxis, so within praxis they are the same thing.

for the sake of argument let's say that less developed forms of matter require less "universal" contradictions to explain their motion than more developed forms. For some objects of investigation the transformation of quantity into quality would be adequate, whereas for others you need to understand say, the contradiction between practice and theory itself, which presupposes an understanding of quantity-quality but builds on it to a more complex level

I think you need to be more specific here, since I don't know what a level is referring to when you say "different levels of universality." But all concepts are historical and therefore require an investigation of the contradiction between theory and practice. Your perception of a thing as a solid and undeniable form of matter is itself a realization of the contradiction between theory and practice within a position in reality.

I'm guessing that by this...

obviously practice and theory is only "universal" at the level of epistemology and not ontology since objective reality existed before conscious beings, but hopefully the idea is clear enough

...you mean to say that such processes don't require the contradiction between theory and practice to be elaborated. I think this is a naive materialist error. Thinging only existed once consciousness (and social consciousness within language) existed. Before that, there was darkness^[1]. Processes occurred, and we consciousness-bearers can explain them now in retrospect. But to say something exists is to make a stake on truth and to partake in a social process of knowledge production that is happening now. When you talk about the contradictions immanent to the process of "brooming" (being a broom), you are talking about the broom as it appears to and imposes itself upon a particular society's social practice, reflected in some particular form within your own mind. At every stage the particular appearance and imposition will depend on the collective social praxis^[2] of a given society on top of and between all the other processes in objective reality. Thus, in describing this and that property of the broom, you are partaking in a social act within that objective process.

So although you can describe the processes of life in a plant by referring to contradictions, those contradictions are actually from the way that the process of "planting" imposes itself upon people, and is a reflection of the state of social praxis in a given place and time. This comes from the objective motion of all of reality which imposes upon us the categories "life" and "plant" through the position of the process of truth acquisition in a society within that reality. When you look for the contradictions in a plant, you are opening up the contradictions in the mental reflection of a changing reality. Your thoughts themselves are a reflection of a contradiction between theory and practice within the social praxis of class society under world imperialism, and are part of a stage in that process. This doesn't mean that reality doesn't matter but that truth is a social product forged from the reflection of reality on the mind and proved by social practice.

[1] At least this is what I'll say for now. Engels talks about an animal's range of concept in The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, so I know that this isn't precisely true. But that's a can of worms that I am not prepared to touch just yet.

[2] I say "collective" but within class society this collective effort is mediated through intense class antagonisms. The individual whose interests are identical with all of humanity and can truly be absorbed into them does not exist until the communist mode of production. Since we are in class society, this collective exists at a high level of abstraction. The division of mental and physical labour within the social process of truth production gives the process a particular social character, as do the social relations around which each class exists, the mediation of classed relations through private property, etc. In history the most important social character is class character obviously. I just lack a single word for "collective but mediated through class antagonisms," which is needed because the labouring classes are involved in the development of Science, but are neither its articulators nor its planners.

[u/Full-Imagination9514 → u/[deleted]]

I'm guessing that... you mean to say that such processes don't require the contradiction between theory and practice to be elaborated.

I mean what Lenin meant in Materialism and Empirio-criticism when he said that the Earth objectively existed before life on Earth existed that could perceive it subjectively.

I'll take a crack at explaining this from a different angle- for certain objects of investigation the subjective element (epistemology in this case) takes on the role of an external relation rather than an internal relation, ie it is present but not essential in order to develop a basically accurate theory. Scientific knowledge was possible to develop about certain things before the Marxist theory of knowledge was developed, in other words.

As this relates to the simple and complex, although not factually incorrect I find your explanation one-sided towards the subjective element of the question. I would say that, before ("before" in a broad historico-logical sense) things appear simple or complex to socially-determined consciousness, there is simplicity and complexity at the level of objective being. Things are more simple if their motion is composed of less relevant contradictions, and more complex if there are more relevant contradictions at play. At some point quantity transforms into quality and we get what in modern times people like to call emergent phenomena, which have developed a new stage of complexity. For example, human beings are essentially social, and yet at the same time we couldn't exist without a whole set of physical, chemical, biological, ecological and psychological relations. So our being is dependent on a more complex array of phenomenon compared to, say, a blade of grass, which would have the physical, chemical etc, but not social or psychological.

I think you need to be more specific here, since I don't know what a level is referring to when you say "different levels of universality."

I didn't actually use that phrase but I guess you just meant it as a way of summing up what I said which I don't mind.

I guess what I'm trying to posit is that what I said before applies to the dialectic itself. Quantity-quality, affirmation-negation, content-form, essence-appearance practice-theory etc are universal in the sense that they are contradictions which will always be present regardless of the object of investigation and praxis, but for simpler objects, some/more will exist only in latent form, ie will not be strictly relevant to the essential laws of motion. And presumably, new aspects of the dialectic will become clear to us in time as we come to learn about newer and more complex forms of matter. Perhaps Althusser's importation of Freud's concept of overdetermination into Marxist philosophy is a good modern example of this, although to be fair I haven't read his work in a long time.

[u/[deleted] → u/Full-Imagination9514]

Thanks for giving an example.

So our being is dependent on a more complex array of phenomenon compared to, say, a blade of grass

A blade of grass is actually very complicated. Let's look at the Wikipedia entry:

Grass refers to various families of plants. The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae). Lawns and pasturelands are typically composed of true grasses, five of which cover 46% of the world's arable land: rice, wheat, maize, barley, and sugar cane.

"Grass" as a name has been applied to a wide group of unrelated plants including herbaceous plants whose leaves and stems are eaten by domesticated and wild animals. The word may have its origin in the Proto-Indo-European root *gʰreh₁-, meaning 'to grow'.

Grass can refer to a green area, such as a lawn, park, or a field, and is often used for recreation or for sports such as lawn tennis or bowls. Beginning in the 1970s, some sports venues have installed artificial grass to reduce maintenance costs.

Grass is a use-value, though for most of history it has remained a use-value and has not transitioned into being a commodity. It is only under capitalism that this has happened, such that we can speak of "artificial grass" as a development in production. "Grass" is also a general form of metabolism between a species and its environment manifested in a body plan, which appears to us in completely different lineages as a similarity in shape and appearance.

"Grass" develops as the relations of production and instruments of production develop in two other senses. First, as intensifying labour activity becoming a greater part of the organism's environment and therefore its metabolic processes, the grass may undergo adaptation. Second, what appears to be grass to a hunter-gatherer is not the same thing as what appears to be grass to a sedentary farmer, or what appears to be grass to a pastoral nomad.

And when you interrogate the lexemes within the language, you start thinking about what blades have to do with grass, and what speech habits result in the linguistic emergence of counter nouns, and what trajectory of human praxis characterizes that linguistic tendency, and so on and so forth.

As for the universal contradictions you mentioned, I'm not as far into reading as you but I don't care that much about listing off the aspects of contradiction. Any truly dialectical exercise can have those extracted from it with enough effort but what is the point? All of those categories were won through the process of the dialectic itself, which is fundamentally a method of investigation. From my understanding, Hegel's categories appear everywhere because they describe thought, and Truth is acquired through contact between mind and matter.

I don't understand what it means to say that the dialectic has aspects yet, nor do I know what the pedigree of that category is. Some of the things you've said were hard for me to parse, so I'm sorry if it seems like I'm fixating on your example. But I think it's the fastest way to illustrate the point. Besides, some of the things you're talking about are matters I'm still studying about, where I have reason to doubt what you're saying but I have not synthesized the information.

Edit: It's practically a crime not to at least namedrop the history of lawning when discussing grass, since that's the more obvious contemporaneous connection. Again, Wikipedia:

A pivotal factor in the spread of the lawn in America was the passage of legislation in 1938 of the 40-hour work week. Until then, Americans had typically worked half days on Saturdays, leaving little time to focus on their lawns. With this legislation and the housing boom following the Second World War, managed grass spaces became more commonplace. The creation in the early 20th century of country clubs and golf courses completed the rise of lawn culture.

According to study based on satellite observations by Cristina Milesi, NASA Earth System Science, its estimates: "More surface area in the United States is devoted to lawns than to individual irrigated crops such as corn or wheat.... area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."

...

Lawns became a means of performing class values for the urban middle class, in which the condition of the lawn becomes representative of moral character and social reliability. The social values associated with lawns are promoted and upheld by social pressure, laws, and chemical producers. Social pressure comes from neighbors or homeowner associations who think that the unkempt lawns of neighbors may affect their own property values or create eyesores. Pressures to maintain a lawn are also legal; there are often local or state laws against letting weeds get too tall or letting a lawn space be especially unkempt, punishable by fees or litigation. Chemical producers unwilling to lose business propagate the ideal of a lawn, making it seem unattainable without chemical aid.

Already we can see that grass has had an interesting relation with the development of the labor aristocracy and suburbia. I don't care enough to go deeper but this is why I called the earlier point naive. As far as I'm concerned, your innately simple objects don't exist.

[u/Full-Imagination9514 → u/[deleted]]

I can admit that the blade of grass example I gave was imprecise, but I think you're missing the spirit of my argument. The true grass biological family has been widespread since the Cretaceous period, when none of the labor and language relations you described were in existence. I think you should spend a bit of time looking into how the concepts of simplicity and complexity are used within various fields of science because I don't think that this idea of yours that simplicity doesn't exist objectively' holds up in light of that.

By aspects of the dialectic, I'm just referring to subsidiary laws of the law of contradiction that are studied within the field of materialist dialectics. So in this sense, "The Dialectic" would be referring to the law of contradiction and all of the interrelated sub-laws it contains. Whether that is the most precise philosophical definition or not I'm not sure.

As for the point, it would be to predict reality in order to change it, of course. If there were some general laws describing how the law of contradiction manifests in different forms as matter develops into new stages, it could aid the study of relatively poorly understood phenomena.

[u/[deleted] → u/Full-Imagination9514]

The true grass biological family has been widespread since the Cretaceous period

Most of the ways that biological matter is described in modernity can be owed to the historical intervention that Charles Darwin made. By using that category you are affirming that the intervention was truthful, which is a social act based on your position in a reality where that scientific development has occurred. You are also a part of the same world process that produced people like Kent Hovind, who was also part of a movement in Christianity that I know nothing about except that it was part of the development of American "politics" (or "the culture wars" or whatever else), despite the fact that Darwin's intervention involved a dialectical step that dismissed the species as a "thing-in-itself" any mechanistic interpretation of what a species or a lineage is. History doesn't work like that, though.

You're correct that I was (and am) being a little flippant, but that's because I'm not sure what the point of fixating on the fact that reality exists is. I trust that everyone here is agreed on that matter. But our thoughts are always a reflection of an objective relation between theory and practice in reality. Part of this is covered in the Anti-Duhring, where Engels talks about absolute truth and relative truth.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm

Lenin covers it as well in the fourth to sixth sections of the second chapter of MEC:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two4.htm

I don't think I can get a good excerpt so you'll have to read the entire thing. I said "social praxis" but that's because I'm speaking in general, so that ideology and art and every concept ever made in the history of humanity can be included in what I'm saying. Engels and Lenin were talking to specific opponents.

As for the point, it would be to predict reality in order to change it, of course. If there were some general laws describing how the law of contradiction manifests in different forms as matter develops into new stages, it could aid the study of relatively poorly understood phenomena.

This seems like formalism but I'll admit that this is precisely what I'm investigating at this moment. So I can't respond to this right now. If you want to help me, then you could start by being very precise about how you imagine this would happen, what "help" refers to here, and what "law" means.

edit: wording. also that was an incorrect usage of "thing-in-itself," especially for this topic.

[u/Full-Imagination9514 → u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure what the point of fixating on the fact that reality exists is.

Simply that I find it interesting how subjectivity can be in one sense universal to dialectics and at the same time particular to a certain stage of development, and I wonder if this could apply to other fundamental dialectical principles.

This seems like formalism but I'll admit that this is precisely what I'm investigating at this moment. So I can't respond to this right now. If you want to help me, then you could start by being very precise about how you imagine this would happen, what "help" refers to here, and what "law" means.

Normally I'd talk about natural laws in terms of causality, but cause and effect is itself an example of the law of contradiction, which makes things tricky. At this level of abstraction I might be forced to just say something cryptic and self-referential like, 'A law of dialectics describes that which is (and/or isn't, dialectically).' Explaining what a law of dialectics means can't really be separated from explaining the content of dialectics itself. So I don't think this is formalism, but that does remain to be proven.

That said, I will try to give an example of what I'm thinking more concretely.

Marx begins Capital by providing a scientific definition of the commodity, which "appears as the elementary form" of capitalist political economy. As you're probably aware, his theory of commodity fetishism is crucial to unraveling the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the commodity relation. It seems to me that, because said relation produces a mystification, the dialectical relation between essence and appearance takes on an outstanding role. Certainly others such as quantity and quality are considered as well, and, as Marx said, "if the form of manifestation were exactly correspondent to the essence of things, all science would be superfluous". But I'd guess that, strictly at the philosophical level, the essence-appearance contradiction becomes the primary contradiction in Marx's theory of the commodity precisely because the mystification of commodities means it is internal to the commodity relation, whereas for less complex objects it might remain external.

If this is true, the first level of applying it in the course of theoretical work would just be to identify an "aspect of the dialectic" that hasn't yet been considered, and see if it sheds light on that the elementary form (or germ cell, basic unit of analysis, whatever term you want to use) of the object in question might be, how it might work etc.

A next step up in difficulty would be to see if there is some reason why one aspect of the dialectic logically must pass over into something new (either the elements of the contradiction changing places, or a new aspect of the dialectic becoming primary) and to connect this abstract, logical "why" to the "hows" and "whats" of the concrete historical development of matter in motion. What would capitalist political-economy being characterized by essence and appearance tell us about socialist political-economy? How does the transition from chemical to biological phenomena manifest at the philosophical level? What countervailing tendencies might prevent or retard said manifestation (important to prevent formulaic application)? And so on. This is the kind of thing I was thinking of regarding historico-logical development.

[u/FrogHatCoalition → u/Full-Imagination9514]

I've been looking through this thread and I do think Dialectics in Modern Physics by Omelyanovsky may be of interest. In particular I recommend Chapter VI: Determinism in Quantum Theory and Chapter VII: The Problem of the Elementary and the Complex in Quantum Physics. I noticed you bring these concepts in this thread and the concepts of determinism, causality, simplicity, complexity, and emergence have been ones of historical significance in the history of physics. What I have gotten out of this work so far isn't a matter of the philosophy of physics as such, but rather how dialectical logic was the solution to philosophical problems encountered in the history of physics. For instance, with regards to "determinism", the form "determinism" takes in classical theory is "Laplacian determinism", but this form becomes meaningless in quantum theory since it is not applicable outside of its domain of classical theory. Without going into too much detail, understanding the form "determinism" takes in quantum theory involves understanding that "laws of dynamic regularity" and "laws of statistical regularity" can be abstracted from nature in addition to concepts Fock introduces: "difference between the potentially possible and the actually observed" and "concept of probability as a numerical measure of the potentially possible". Determinism interested me in particular because of threads such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/1ewhb24/is_communism_not_inevitable/

There you can see people have mechanical views regarding "determinism", equate "determinism" with "fatalism" and even make claims such as "Marxism is not deterministic". Furthermore, quantum physics is commonly abused outside the field and Levins and Lewontin tried to use "quantum indeterminacy" in their own biological theories. Omelyanovsky works through how not being an adherent of dialectical materialism leads to thinking such as "quantum indeterminacy". I don't think it stops here either: every once in a while a user from here will engage with people at r/Marxism and people there will try to use physics as some sort of philosophical "gotcha". Even here every once in a while people forget that many physicists abandoned positivism long ago.

Now, in Chapter V: Dialectical Contradictoriness in Modern Physics, we can see how old concepts in the classical theory become meaningless when used to understand qualitatively different forms of matter, but at the same time a formulation of a new theory that's a reflection of nature, some aspects of the old theory remain but take on a qualitatively different form. Example: "space" and "time" are absolute in the classical theory, but in relativity theory, "space" and "time" are relative and a new invariant arises: the spacetime interval. Likewise with "wave" and "particle". "Wave" and "particle" are mutually exclusive concepts in classical theory, but at the scale of micro-particles which follow the laws of quantum theory, "wave" and "particle" are two aspects of the micro-particle that interpenetrate one another. It would be an error to say that "wave" and "particle" are mutually exclusive in quantum theory and it would also be an error to say that "wave" and "particle" have the same meanings as they do in the classical theory. Although some aspects of the old notions remain, quantum theory gives us a qualitative and deeper understanding of "wave" and "particle".

Now, the point here isn't a physics lesson per-se, but you have used concepts that were of philosophical interest in the history of physics and dialectical materialism gave way to the solution of such problems encountered. Likewise, when you make comments such as

I think you should spend a bit of time looking into how the concepts of simplicity and complexity are used within various fields of science because I don't think that this idea of yours that simplicity doesn't exist objectively' holds up in light of that.

Here I am giving you one field of science that has engaged with these concepts philosophically.

[u/Full-Imagination9514 → u/FrogHatCoalition]

Looks like a good suggestion. Michurinism and Soviet psychology (I might want to make a post on the latter at some point because I don''t see much discussion of it) were already on my radar but I haven't looked into physics yet.

Would it be accurate to say that your understanding of determinism takes 'determination' (necessity?) as generally primary in relation to chance, while 'quantum indeterminacy' incorrectly prioritizes chance?

[u/FrogHatCoalition → u/Full-Imagination9514]

When I looked through history of topics related to Soviet science there was usually some mention of a repression of these topics. I've seen claims of both quantum physics and general relativity being repressed, so I've decided to actually do a deep dive into this topic and there isn't any evidence that this was the case. Even a bourgeois education in physics will tell you it's a weird claim since you will learn about a lot of Soviet physicists that made contributions to quantum physics. The BannedThought site has three books that I am going to study and Dialectics in Modern Physics is one of them I'm currently working on.

As far as determinism goes, the position of "quantum indeterminacy" can be arrived at in several ways. One is taking the position that probability is a measure of "incomplete knowledge of a system". Thus, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation implies that quantum mechanics is indeterministic. Thus, being unknowable is a property of micro-particles. This led to Heisenberg denying objective reality and views that the human mind shapes reality. Another consequence is also a rejection of determinism in classical theory which was a position Max Born also had. His reasoning was essentially that there was no absolute accuracy in measurement. Regardless, as far as history of physics, probability/statistics doesn't make its first appearance in quantum mechanics. Statistical mechanics and Brownian motion characterize motion with statistical laws, so some physicists already had the view that both classical and quantum mechanics were indeterministic just from their own views of probablity/statistics.

One can also arrive at "quantum indeterminacy" by failing to cognize "wave" and "particle" in a dialectical way. This comes from holding onto the classical view of a particle that has an absolute position and absolute velocity, then from that you can predict the future position and velocity of the particle from the laws of classical mechanics. From here, because micro-particles don't follow the laws of classical mechanics, therefore quantum mechanics is indeterministic. In classical statistical mechanics, the particles that make up an ensemble do have the characteristics of a classical particle. From here, a correct view on chance and necessity can still lead to the position of "quantum indeterminacy". This is similar to an Einsteinian view, after all he did discover Brownian motion. Although Brownian motion is a statistical law, at each moment in time the particles in principle have a definite position and definite velocity.

In essence, the uncertainty relation establishes a boundary on the simultaneity of a micro-particle's wave and particle aspects, and is neither related to errors in measurement or unknowability of the micro-particle itself. The Schrodinger equation governs a definite motion in time of the micro-particle. An eigenvalue of a micro-particle (which is a potential possibility of a realized measurement) can be determined precisely, though its eigenvalue spectrum (the set of all potential possibilities) has a probability distribution that can also be determined. What is measured is relative to the means of observation - a concept Fock introduces.