Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 09:46:28 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: SCIABARRA ON  DIALECTICS


On Wed, 7 Aug 1996, Ralph Dumain wrote:
> >Nearly
> >every thinker manifests different methodological orientations in
> >different aspects of their thought.
> I would also like to hear more about this. 
	Well, given the five methodological orientations that I discuss
(or will discuss at length in my forthcoming TOTAL FREEDOM), I think that
depending upon the topic, or the audience that is being addressed, even
dialectical thinkers have a tendency, sometimes, to sound like strict
organicists (or neutral monists).  Of course, the mistake comes if we take
such one-sided expositions as the full-cloth of the thinker's system.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of monistic formulations in say, Marx and
Engels, that lend credence to those who see these thinkers as strict
or vulgar economic determinists.

> Chris continues with a
> particular example:
> 
> >Hegel, for instance, can be very dialectical in his
> >understanding of transcending opposites, but his philosophy of
> >history is more a manifestation of neutral monism (or strict
> >organicity)
> By neutral monism, do you mean geist or expressive totality, which
> links all social/cultural phenomena in a given society as a single
> organism without giving a priority to material factors or
> acknowledging behavior that escapes totalization?  If so, I
> suspect you are correct.  
	Yeah, that's how neutral monism shows up in idealism; but those
whom Marx condemns as vulgar materialists engage in the same kind of
monism... they tend to see ALL worldly factors as expressions of material
conditions -- in some cases, they are not neutral monists, but
reductionist monists.  The neutral ones may see several factors at work in
the world, all of which are expressions of a single basic principle.  The
reductionists usually accept the dichotomies defined by dualists, and
reduce ONE sphere to an epiphenomenon of the other.

> >in which he, Hegel, takes a SYNOPTIC vantage point on the whole.
> >Dialectics demands a CONTEXTUAL vantage point, not the kind of
> >God-like omniscience that Hegel seems to demand.
> This statement definitely requires an explanation!
	Well, when dialecticians study the whole, they cannot study the
whole QUA whole -- which is why Ollman is so adamant about the need for a
process of abstraction.  We study the whole in pieces, chewing and
digesting each piece and its connections to the whole and to the other
pieces of the whole.  We don't reify the abstraction, we simply view the
whole through the LENS of the abstraction.  And we move onto other
abstractions, with a subtle change in vantage point, slowly deepening our
understanding of the systemic and dynamic aspects of the whole under
investigation.  More mystical approaches that posit the march of history,
seem to suggest that the thinker has some kind of inner knowledge or
omniscient vantage point on the social whole and its dynamic development
over time.  Such strict organicist approaches recognize internal relations
to their benefit, but seem to suggest that one cannot analyze any part of
the whole without understanding EVERY part of the whole -- and this is
usually achieved at the "end of history" appropriately.  I can't wait that
long to engage in social critique!  :)

> >(I would suggest that this kind of SYNOPTIC vantage point
> >sometimes rears its ugly head in the Marxist theory of history
> Do you mean in the Stalinist conception of history?
	Well, those aspects of the materialist conception of history that
seem to wholly transfer the Hegelian theory to a materialist context seem
to suggest the same teleological-synoptic perspective on the development
of humanity, at least those presentations of it that are vulgar and
simplistic.  I know that the materialist theory is much more complex than
that, but there is a kind of intellectual hubris at work when some on the
left insist that socialism is inevitable.  One cannot stand outside the
social whole and judge it from such an external, non-contextual position.

> (And there's a contradiction in Chris, for Rand is a strictly
> metaphysical, undialectical, and ahistorical thinker.)  Chris, I
> don't want to hear one word you have to say about Rand, but my
> mouth is watering for elaboration of some of the points above.

	I won't say a word on Rand -- except that my presentation of her
theory as genuinely dialectical is the subject of my book, AYN RAND:  THE
RUSSIAN RADICAL (Penn State Press, 1995), information on which can be
found at my website http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc
	<Capitalistic commercial break...>
					- Chris
=================================================Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ph.D
Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics
INTERNET:  sciabrrc-AT-is2.nyu.edu
http://pages.nyu.edu/~sciabrrc
=================================================


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