Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 20:30:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: EPISTEMOLOGICAL & ONTOLIGCAL DIALECTICS -- KEY ISSUES >And i believe Ralph to be correct to distinguish between >subjective and objective dialectics, which i would suggest >correspond to epistemological and ontological dialectics (would >you agree with this Ralph?). Roy Bhaskar, in his article "Dialectics" in the first edition of Bottomore's A DICTIONARY OF MARXIST THOUGHT, distinguishes three basic senses of dialectics: "(a) a method, most usually scientific method, instancing _epistemological_ dialectics; (b) a set of laws or principles, governing some sector of the whole of reality, _ontological_ dialectics; and (c) the movement of history, _relational_ dialectics. All three are to be found in Marx. But their paradigms are Marx's methodological comments in _Capital_, the philosophy of nature expounded by Engels in _Anti-Duhring_, and the 'out-Hegeling Hegelianism' of the early Lukacs in _History and Class Consciousness_..." I would have to say the answer to your question is yes. I don't know why (c) is called "relational", but it was (C) I was cautioning about in my response to Adam. I didn't mean to be wishy-washy about dialectical processes in objective reality, but I think there is a distinction between observing dialectical processes in history and identifying the dialectic as historical development per se. IN the latter case, the dialectic is almost the demiurge of history, something which itself unfolds, which brings in the disturbing notions of teleology and geist. There are ways to get around this, I suppose, but I wanted to be careful. My own proclivity is to identify (b) as being isomorphic with (c), i.e. recognizing the two have a common logical structure, but I am reluctant to directly identify abstract philosophical categories with specific social categories, e.g. to identify Hegel's Absolute as Capital or as Dunayevskaya's New Beginning or New Society, though I am willing to accept the possibility of such fortuitous isomorphisms. My aim was certainly not to cut off the subjective from the objective world, as orthodoxy would have it, but to show, as others have before me, that the attribution of contradictions to objective world depends upon the prior understanding of how contradictory categories arise in thought. I am willing to concede that contradictions in thought determinations reflect real contradictions in the real world, but this is not a simple or obvious reflection, and others who have been cautious about such attributions have been unfairly lambasted as subjectivists, from Jean van Heijenoort to Richard Norman. I think Lenin understood epistemological dialectics, esp. in his summation of dialectics as the breaking apart of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts (1915). Though he is careful to abjure some of engels' inept popularization, sometimes he automatically assumes objective contradictions as the basis of subjective contradictions. I believe as far as any phenomenon complex enough to pertain to human reality is concerned, objective contradictions cannot be wished away, analytical Marxism notwithstanding. The realities as well as the categories used to apprehend it are inherently contradictory. I believe the same may be the case in nature as well, at least as revealed in limit cases (the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large), in the wave-particle duality, the complementarity and exclusion principles, but I would rather not commit myself to such declarations given the amateur status of my "knowledge" in these areas. I would say that some, though not all, marxists, have not thought deeply enough about the contradictory nature of plain old physical motion. Such thinkers as Engels and Trotsky have maintained that simple physical notion is itself contradictory. I'm not saying they are wrong but that they've got it backwards. Even Zeno's paradoxes were understood in a more sophisticated fashion as far back as Aristotle. The fundamental problem comes from freezing motion and viewing it as a succession of states of rest. The contradiction comes in freezing the moment, as we must do for analytical purposes. I am not saying that motion is not contradictory, as I'm saying that the real contradiction is far more interesting, that dialectical contradiction comes into cognition precisely when we try to analyze and break down an indissoluble whole, i.e interrelated phenomena in a process of motion in space and time and development. Finally, I have never sen this in print anywhere, but I have always hoped to write up my thoughts on the distinction between qualitative categories and quantitative expressions relating to contradictions. I believe contradictions are not eliminable from systems of qualitative categories as they are from quantitative formulations. For example, mathematicians succeeded, I think, in removing the logical contradictions from the calculus by the late 19th century, and with progress in the axiomatic formulation of number systems, some even succeed in creating new axiomatic number systems which reintroduced the infinitesimal without the old logical contradictions (Robinson in the 1960s). However, the philosophical categories describing motion, regardless of the mathematical formalization of the continuum, still involve contradictory categories. Another example: I'm not really competent in this area, but I've always suspected that contradiction as a philosophical category is something distinct >from what you find in many-valued logics. All logical formalisms (unless paraconsistent/trasnconsistent logics are an exception) exist to crank out truth values, but whether there are two or an infinite number, the system cannot contradict itself by cranking out two non-compatible truth values in any given situation. I don't know how the various attempts to formalize Hegel's logic compare to formal logics as the mainstream knows them. But I suspect that these questions are qualitative metalogical questions that transcend the particular formalisms of any axiomatic system. It's just a hunch, and I hope I am not spouting gibberish. In any event, there is some good stuff being translated into English that bolsters my contention that analytical philosophy's century-old game of narrowing the scope of philosophy to sweep its own inner contradictions under the rug has come to the end of its weave. We must expose the piecemeal and proud school for the intellectual fraud that it is. The workers movement has got to have it all, not just the bread crumbs of reality and of the cognitive process of reflection and self-reflection. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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