File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-10.220, message 229


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.


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