Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 22:18:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: DIALECTICS, INTERCONNECTION, ENGELS


>Ralph, you said Engels was doing philosophy of science, but I
>have very little background in that area, and I'm not sure that
>I get just what in DN would be called phil-sci.  Would you mind
>expanding on that?

I can't.  I haven't touched DIALECTICS OF NATURE for a decade a
half, except for packing or unpacking it.  But isn't the whole
thing philosophy of science?  What else could it be?  Engels
surely wasn't claiming to be doing science directly.

>Also, to the extent that "dialectic" means "interconnected", to
>say that everything is interconnected seems trivial and useless
>by itself.

Not only trivial, but false.  If everything were connected to
everything else, then astrology would be true.

The universe as a whole is a lot to bite off, so let's select one
particular phenomenon or system and take a look at that.
Delimiting the boundaries of a given phenomenon, say a social
system in time and place, may itself be problematic, but let's
deep-six that issue and posit a social system.

Even within a social system,one must be wary of saying everything
is connected to everything else.  Such an assertion is dangerous
and harmful.  It is what Lukacs or one of the Frankfurters called
the 'expressive totality', or the notion that every single event
is a branch off of a central motivating force or theme.  This is
what Hegel called geist and is the root of everything reactionary
in his system.  No social entity is ever that unified.  The
concrete totality, as opposed to the expressive totality of
mystical holism, posits a pattern of interconnections that really
do constitute a differentiated whole, not just a posited
ideological whole (e.g. all of the nonsense you read about
"western civilization").  To the extent to which the events that
occur within the bounds of a given society constitute a social
system, to that extent you have a social totality.  Now how does
one analyze that totality?  One physically cannot take it apart
like your toaster to see what parts constitute the mechanism.
Only the power of abstraction can draw the distinctions in such a
phenomenon which cannot be physically divided into pieces.  But
there is more.  The various categories as separate categories
cannot be discretely added up to reconstitute the whole, and in
some cases, the categories only make sense in relation to one
another, or do not hold up as fully discrete categories.

Hopefully it should be evident that this is a far greater concern
for social and cultural phenomena than it would be for most
studies in natural science areas, unless one were studying the
individual character and life history of a particular organism,
perhaps.  But whether you are analyzing a society or watching a
play (what's the difference?), it is that one particular
interconnected set of relationships that matter.  Therefore, it is
not surprising, as many historians, sociologists, and
psychologists have admitted, one can often get a far better
portrait of society from its literature or drama than one could
possibly get out of an array of statistical data.

All of abstract thought consists of the process of analysis and
synthesis.  In this respect dialectics is no different except when
especial attention is to be paid to the procedure by which we
analyze and then reconstitute the whole.  Dialectics is not just
interconnection, but an especially intimate type of
interconnection.

>The interesting bit, the kind of puzzle that I think scientists
>are pursuing within biology for instance, is to figure out what
>exactly the nature of the interconnections are, what are the
>patterns of interconnections, which ones are most determinant,
>why they take the form that they do, etc.

Precisely to the point.  Moreover, scientists are not so stupid
that they have to be taught this by dialecticians.  However, we
have not yet discussed any examples that do require the attention
of marxist philosophers, the kind where the spontaneous reasoning
of scientists fails due to ideological considerations and
misapplications of scientific methodology (which, you can be sure,
will almost always involve the use of statistics.)  I shall return
to this topic in a future post.

You are going to be very frustrated in trying to get adequate
explanations of dialectics, for they are few and far between.  If
you think Engels is a pain, wait until you deal with people that
are alive now.  You're not going to get much out of Adam, and
after reading Barkley's nonsense about fuzzy logic and the
Japanese, I fear the worst.  One must understand that the
political parties of all tendencies have done an absolutely
miserable job on this topic -- CP-ers, Trotskyists, Maoists --
they are all an embarrassment.  They mean well, they have a vague
sense of their topic and a somewhat clearer sense of its import --
but they are so badly miseducated they just can't grapple with the
issues involved.  Nor do they have any understanding of how logic
and mathematics have evolved over the past century.  Here we have
yet another unfortunate instance, with serious consequences, of
the ghettoization of the left.  But you can't just blame the
left's amateurishness.  The piecemeal crowd never taught anybody
outside their own professional circle anything, so if they don't
like what they see, they have only themselves to blame.


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