Date: Sun, 18 Jul 1999 11:25:59 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: BHA: Re: Diffraction Post one



Thanks for your encouragement, Gary.  I myself thought too
that my questions were pretty good.  But I am sure that
there are some booboos in there too, and I would be
delighted if someone went through the trouble of challenging
and improving what I wrote.  Here is another one:


Q6:  What does Marx's critique of Hegel have to do with the
"unholy trinity"?

A: RB tries to organize the various strands of Marx's Hegel
critique, in a proleptic manner (p. 96, literally:
forward-reading, i.e., using categories which Marx himself
had not yet arrived at), around the three axes (alpha)
epistemic fallacy, (beta) speculative illusion, and (gamma)
ontological monovalence.  RB says this on p. 87, and I am
skipping the details right now how which Hegel-critique can
be fitted into which category.  I could imagine this to be a
nice project for the class: collect all the places where
Marx criticizes Hegel, and each student can pick one of
these places and argue how this specific critique can, in
DCR terms, be subsumed under either alpha or beta or gamma
or some combination thereof.  The punch line is: alpha,
beta, and gamma are equivalent to what RB calls the unholy
trinity of irrealism (epistemic fallacy, ontological
monovalence, and primal squeeze), i.e., Marx's critique of
Hegel is not merely one of Hegel's idealism but covers all
aspects of his irrealism.



Let me say something here about my idea of an answer to
Question 5.  Hegel is guilty of ontological monovalence
because all his sublations are preservative.  I.e., nothing
ever gets lost.  He does not have the concept of absence,
i.e., he does not have a trash can into which he could stuff
the things that disappear.  If you are not allowed to tear
down but can only add this also makes you conservative,
at best a reformist.


But Marx is not immune to the mistake of ontological
monovalence either.  Marx did not foresee correctly that the
destruction of capitalism would create an immense void,
which can be filled in many different ways, and that the
question how to fill this void is an important political
issue.  I.e., we need what RB calls William-Morris type
positive concrete utopianism.  Marx opposed utopias.  He
must have thought that socialism springs like a phoenix from
the ashes of capitalism.  This is what RB calls Marx's
"residual actualism" (p. 345), and we suffer under this
theoretical error to this day.


Hans E.




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