On Dialectis

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Axel, for some reason I did not notice these comments of yours:

You were proven wrong in this aspect.  Sorry.

Which was in reply to this:

You even tried to persuade us that Stephen Gould said the opposite of what your own quotation of his words actually said....]

Your memory seems to be going; this was in reference to a debate between you and LSD at RevLeft, where he argued you had misread Gould's own words, and even though he quoted them at you several times you still persisted in misreading them.

I was not involved in that specific debate (even though on the same pages I took you to task over other things, like the egregious logical errors in 'Reason in Revolt').

http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=48119&st=50

and later pages.

And finally:

You also baselessly accused me of being a male chauvinist just for opposing your anti-dialectical philosophy.

What I was objecting to was the way you seemed to make all this so personally so quickly, and how you questioned my motives from the start (with fantasies like those you aired here), and how my attempt to defend myself forcefully was mocked by you constantly.

The only explanation I could come up with (and I freely admit I could be wrong) was that you could not handle a forceful woman, and a working class trade unionist at that.

I apologise if that is wrong, but the case for your defence gets weaker with each of your outbursts.

[Morag]

Rosa: thanks for the explanations, and I've been chipping away at the essay in between work and hassles, but a few more questions now:

Am I correct in stating that the majority of your argument (discussed so far) is based on the linguistic expression of dialectics, and that this is strengthened by the idea that language (and philosophy) is the tool of the ruling-class, which dialecticians used to form diamat, which is therefore flawed and doesn't allow for revolution? If so, then aren't we all kind of screwed?  I mean, I understand where your going with this, because its something that most people have to deal with. However, the other option would be what?

I guess what I'm saying is that, while I'm sure I have either misinterpreted what you've said so far or butchered it terribly to understand it, I really can't see what the importance is, other than dialectics uses the language and terminology and logic which the people who formed it understood.

I claim dialecticians have bought into this thought-form, and produced a version of ruling-class ideology (all this forms the major part of Essay Nine, summary link below), saddling our movement with a divisive theory (which parially accounts for the spectacular failure our movement has witnessed over the last 100 years or so, since the working class will never be 'seized' by a theory based on ideal thought-forms, which helps fragment our movement, again for reasons I explain in the Essays at my site (like Essay Nine)  -- making Marxist parties small, insular (you can see this in Axel/comrade V's remarks), divisive and profoundly unreasonable).

Actually, the massive majority of the working-class, not just in the Indo-European world, but everywhere, has been seized by a idealistic theory- religion. And as a working-class person, I've never felt that diamat kept me down, or was preaching from the status quo.

I mentioned Descartes not because his wording had convinced me that he was right, but because I followed the same line of reasoning he had and had come to the same conclusions, independently. Therefore, his "word-juggling" had nothing to do with my understanding of his idea. And while I accept that the use of 'ruling-class' logic in the development of dialectics is not the ideal situation, but what else were they going to do? Start from scratch? Who was it who said that the man who can't draw from three thousand years of experience is living hand-to-mouth?

Anyway, the tone of this is to be interpreted as friendly, though I should point out that I'm quite fond of Volkov.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Morag, thanks again for those questions.

I concentrate on the language dialecticians use since they fall into the same traps traditional philosophers fall into of thinking they can derive truths about essential aspects of reality (that supposedly underlie the world, and provide it with a 'rational' structure, inaccessible to empirical research or confirmation) from language alone. If this were true, evidence would be unnecessary, and science would be an empty exercise.

Now a properly constructed Historical Materialism will not do that, since it will be based on the material language of everyday life and of the sciences (it will differ from the Historical Materialism you already know only at the margins, i.e., it will have had all the mystical Hegelian jargon removed; everything else will be the same: the class struggle, the crises of capitalism, workers' struggles, the revolutionary overthrow of the system, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc., etc.).

So, we are not 'screwed' as you put it.

dialectics uses the language and terminology and logic which the people who formed it understood.

Well, again, I show that:

1) they did not understand it (not because it was too difficult, or because they knew too little), but that there was nothing there to know, anymore than there is anything there to know in, say, the Christian Trinity (which, incidentally, had the same source in ancient Hermetic Philosophy (links below)).

2) the logic they use is entirely bogus, and based on a garbled understanding even of Aristotelian logic (and confined only to Indo-European languages). I show this in Essay Four.

3) DM-terminology resists clear explication -- it is empty of content. All my Essays show this.

Actually, the massive majority of the working-class, not just in the Indo-European world, but everywhere, has been seized by a idealistic theory- religion.

Absolutely, but this has nothing to do with ordinary material language, since for every religious, mystical and ideologically compromised sentence utterable there exists its negation in ordinary language.

So, you can easily say in ordinary language: belief in God is untenable, or there is no afterlife, or the pope is not the vicar of christ, etc. etc.

And ordinary language also prevents any of the traditional ideas of philosophy (including the things you find in DM) from being expressed in comprehensible language (i.e., they all fall apart into nonsense when examined, as I repeatedly show at my site).

How and why that is so I try to explain in Essay Twelve (a summary of which can be found in my last response to you).

[The point about non-Indo-European languages is that they do not share the same grammatical structure as Indo-European (for example, these other language have no subject-predicate form, so Lenin’s attempt to derive the whole of DM from a subject-predicate sentence cannot apply to those languages even if it were a legitimate derivation to begin with.]

And as a working-class person, I've never felt that diamat kept me down, or was preaching from the status quo.

And I am sure working class people feel the same about religious language.

I mentioned Descartes not because his wording had convinced me that he was right, but because I followed the same line of reasoning he had and had come to the same conclusions, independently.

As indeed have others, but the errors you all fall into derive from the same source, hence the numerous 'independent' re-discoveries of his 'proof'.

1) It isn't a proof since it is possible to use his systematic doubt to destroy his conclusion. For example, Descartes takes it for granted that all his words retain their meaning from moment to moment (he would say he was appealing to concepts, or 'clear and distinct ideas', but even to think or say that you need words). Once you extend his doubt into this area everything falls apart. Now there is a way around this, but it isn't one Descartes can use.

2) He relies on the existence of God so he can trust his 'clear and distinct' ideas not to mislead him.

3) The common error others fall into (as did Descartes) is to assume that knowledge can be had by looking inwards (and this is a criticism a socialist should appreciate, committed as he/she should be to the social nature of knowledge). The words D uses have their meaning assigned socially, in material practice (but he immediately applies them in ways that undermine their collective meaning), and he uses jargon (of no determinate meaning) that he borrowed from medieval Christian theorists. So, the meaning of words like 'think', 'I' and 'am' are not established by the individual, nor can they use them (meaningfully) as they choose. Of course, you can use any word any way you like, but you cannot pretend to mean anything by them if you do. Try saying 'I' to yourself and mean 'the soul' which is what D meant by it. Or, try saying 'think' and mean 'what a thinking substance does' which is what D meant. Once our words are severed from their material roots, they become devoid of meaning, and it is in this solipsistic 'inner world' that this happens. Now class society makes us all think like this, like isolated atoms (this is especially true in modern bourgeois class society, hence it is not a coincidence that this 'argument' of D's appeared at or near the beginning of capitalism), which explains the desire to look inward for proof, and hence the ubiquity of this way of thinking.

But it cannot work, since it is based on a misuse of the material language of everyday life. It is in this open arena, wherein we are all socialised, that our words gain the meaning they have. We are not at liberty to determine the meaning of words ourselves (not least because the meaning of the word ‘meaning’ is socially-conditioned itself). We are taught what our words mean in a public domain, in collective life together, and in collective labour. A reversion to this bogus inner private world is only suggested to us by the fragmentation inflicted on us all by capitalist society; we all end up with an inner bourgeois (a mini-Descartes) in the head, who is only happy if ‘it’ can prove ‘its’ own existence from ‘its’ privatised resources.

Private ownership in the means of mental production appeals to atomised human beings because the ideology we all are brought up with forces this on us against the grain of our collective socialisation. This is how ruling-class ideas rule us. We all have an inner bourgeois in the head.

And that is why I constantly return to this social resource, material language, as a counterweight to bourgeois thought. It is open, democratic, social and materially-grounded in collective practice and communal labour. Indeed, as Marx/Engels noted, it was an invention of collective labour millennia ago.

Which is why it has to be distorted to make the ideas of the ruling class 'work'.

The ideas of the ruling class rule because in our fragmented state we begin to think as social atoms, as mini-Descartes, and adopt their world-view: that truths about nature can be had from thought alone, and not from empirical science. So we all indulge in our own amateurish ‘philosophising’. In that way, we are easy prey to the belief that ideas themselves are paramount, and that philosophy can deliver to us a special, privately accessible superscience of the world. But if it could, the world would be Ideal.

Start from scratch? Who was it who said that the man who can't draw from three thousand years of experience is living hand-to-mouth?

No need to, we have thousands of years of collective knowledge to fall back on, these days systematised in empirical science. This is admirably well catalogued in:

C Conner, A People's History Of Science. Miners, Midwives, And "Low Mechanicks" (Nation Books, 2005).

As to Axel/V: I have nothing against the guy, in fact (as I have pointed out to him) when it comes to politics, we probably agree over far more than we disagree.

But, when it comes to defending his opiate (DM) he becomes intensely unreasonable (and that is not unconnected to the role that DM plays in the psychology of comrades sold on it -- it acts as a form of consolation: Marxism is highly unsuccessful (Trotskyism is even more unsuccessful, I wish it were otherwise, since I am a Trotskyist), but history is on our side, the dialectic tells me so).

You can find the rationale for this in the link to the summary of Essay Nine I posted in my last reply to you.

Links:

The Hermetic origins of Hegelianism are detailed here:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm

Hegel was brought up in the Lutheran religion, in the Pietist tradition, which was heavily influenced by Jakob Boehme, the foremost Hermetic thinker of post medieval times.

He even admits this himself:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpboehme.htm

Engels was also brought up in the Pietist tradition.

The nature of Hermeticism is outlined here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism

It has been a popular thought form for all manner of ruling class figures and theorists for thousands of years. It forms the core beliefs, for instance, of the Masons.

The similarities between Hermeticism and DM are easy to see here:

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion.htm

The Kybalion (co-authored by three Masons) is apparently the third most important book of Hermeticism

The closest similarities between the two can be seen here:

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion10.htm

http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion4.htm

All this was noted by one comrade, who failed to draw the correct conclusions:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/magic.htm

I analyse all this here (in summary, the full Essay will be published in the next year or so):

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-7-14.htm

I.e., in the last third of the above summary.

[Volkov]

Axel, for some reason I did not notice these comments of yours:

You were proven wrong in this aspect.  Sorry.

Which was in reply to this:

You even tried to persuade us that Stephen Gould said the opposite of what your own quotation of his words actually said....]

Your memory seems to be going; this was in reference to a debate between you and LSD at RevLeft, where he argued you had misread Gould's own words, and even though he quoted them at you several times you still persisted in misreading them.

I was not involved in that specific debate (even though on the same pages I took you to task over other things, like the egregious logical errors in 'Reason in Revolt').

http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=48119&st=50

Actually, LSD, the redstar2000 puppet, never addressed further points I made about what Gould stated, nor did he take into account CYM's refutation of your nonsense.  You are not very good at understanding sentence context. 

and later pages.

And finally:

You also baselessly accused me of being a male chauvinist just for opposing your anti-dialectical philosophy.

What I was objecting to was the way you seemed to make all this so personally so quickly, and how you questioned my motives from the start (with fantasies like those you aired here), and how my attempt to defend myself forcefully was mocked by you constantly.

The only explanation I could come up with (and I freely admit I could be wrong) was that you could not handle a forceful woman, and a working class trade unionist at that.

And again, you baselessly made this charge.  You clearly cannot refute anything, so you have to baselessly accuse them of being male chauvinists. 

I apologise if that is wrong, but the case for your defence gets weaker with each of your outbursts.

Outbursts?  Who was the one typing in insults like "Red Cheap," "Excuse1917," "Che y Spliffed," etc.?  You have not even proven that you are a Marxist.  Your denial of change through contradictions is tantatmount to denying the existence of the class struggle, and that is very anti-Marxist right there.  I am convinced that you have not even understood what Marx and Engels stated when it came to dialectics.  You had to restort to four dimensional objects to "disprove" punctuated equlibrea, and you still insist that we think that lightbulbs can change themselves (CYM showed this was wrong).  You don't even understand dialectics.  You are attacking a strawman.  Anyone with dialectical knowledge knows this.  She does not even know Hegel's discoveries (three dialectical laws, discovered where formal logic breaks down, etc.).  Does she even know what he was stating?  It is not even possible to explain things like the Cambrian Explosion without resorting to dialectical aspects.  According to Rosa, water gradually cools into a gel, and then gradually becomes ice. ::)

Dialectics is Rosa's scapegoat.  For her, the panacea to the problems of the working class is the removal of dialectics and replacing it with pre-Hegelian formalism! ::)

Any dialectcian could easily refute Rosa's site.  Of course, it would be a waste of time for us to do that.  Rosa's attacks on dialectics are nothing new, and she has no influence amongst the working class (her playing the "high priestess" of science is not going to sway anyone).  It would be a waste of time to write an encyclopedia of 10,000 volumes refuting her site.  That is probably why the more experienced comrades of this site are not paying any attention to her.

Historical Materialism also involves the observation of dialectical aspects in history.  A fact that totally evades her.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Axel/Volkov: I dealt with much of this on page two of this thread.

Actually, LSD, the redstar2000 puppet, never addressed further points I made about what Gould stated,

I think if we read what LSD actually posted, alongside your rather weak replies, we can all make our own minds up.

And I rather think LSD is his own person, as I hope you are.

nor did he take into account CYM's refutation of your nonsense. 

Why are you still being abusive?

As noted above, I responded to this on page two of this thread.

I think you should read things more carefully, and try to detect what I actually say, not what you think I say:

You clearly cannot refute anything,

Well, since you are still a stranger to logic, you would not know.

You have not even proven that you are a Marxist.

Once more, I went over this on page two of this thread: the upshot of which was that neither have you.

I would never call you a non-Marxist, and I invited you to show, if you can, a few ounces of non-sectarianism by refraining from saying this of me.

Yet again, all this has been responded to on page two of this thread:

Your denial of change through contradictions is tantamount to denying the existence of the class struggle,

Not so; communists (in France in the 1790's, and elsewhere) were committed to the existence of the class-struggle long before Hegel put pen to misuse. And Marx got his main ideas about historical materialism from the Scottish Historical Materialists (Ferguson, Millar, Hume and Smith), with none of that mystical stuff thrown in. In fact, all that mystical Hegelian/Hermetic stuff gets in the way.

Speaking for myself, I merely wish to rid Historical Materialism of these mystical Hermetic ideas (ones you seem to be quite fond of)  -- so that Marxism can become fully scientific at last.

[The links I posted on page two should show you what a mystical crock you DM-fans have accepted.]

you have not even understood what Marx and Engels stated when it came to dialectics.

Well, you keep saying this, and I keep responding that no one understands DM, so I am not much different in that regard (I just point out that this ‘Emperor’ has no clothes on).

Now, Axel, if you are the very first person in history to understand dialectics, perhaps for once you can stop moaning and explain these sacred truths to the rest of us.

[Why do I expect yet more bluster and/or silence on this? Perhaps because I have been asking this of Axel/Volkov since the winter….]

You had to resort to four dimensional objects to "disprove" punctuated equilibria,

Well, I did not advocate this, I merely presented CYM with a recent version of Darwinian theory he seemed to know nothing about (as you seem not to, either) which rather made his ideas look subjective.

He failed to respond to this (except he made the same incoherent noises like you to cover his ignorance), even though I quoted the most authoritative recent textbook on this topic in support.

So, if you are not up-to-date, as CYM is not, don't blame me. I can’t help you if you refuse to learn new science.

And I managed to argue CYM to a standstill on other fronts, too,  and not just this; which I notice you are still ignoring (perhaps because you have no response, as he had none).

As to Hegel's 'discoveries' (which he dreamt up in his armchair, or even ‘Ivory Tower’, as you like to call it (or as Woods and Grant call it, and you just copy their ideas)):

She does not even know Hegel's discoveries (three dialectical laws, discovered where formal logic breaks down, etc.).

Well, if you count something made up as a 'discovery' then I suppose George W Bush can claim the US military have found WMD in Iraq.

We can all dream stuff up. If you think this is a scientific advance, that just advertises your gullibility, Axel, nothing else.

And Hegel’s logic does not even work (which you would know if you read my Essays, as you would know too that I know about these so-called 'laws' -- but as we know, you don't read stuff that threatens your cherished ideas (your opiate), or ones that will let all the hot air out of the mystical theory you hold so dear).

On this basis, you could say that Christians 'discovered' the Trinity, and Lewis Carroll 'discovered'  the Jabberwocky.

According to Rosa, water gradually cools into a gel, and then gradually becomes ice.

Well, it forms slowly, as you would know if you stopped to think for yourself. But, as I note, there are many examples of solids that do not change nodally: plastic solidifies and liquefies slowly (no nodal point there), so does metal, rock, glass, chocolate, and a host of other things. I have told you about these before, but you just ignore stuff that does not fit in with your tidy non-scientific ‘theory’.

So the nodal aspect of Engels's Law is not all that sound.

Again, you keep saying things like this:

Dialectics is Rosa's scapegoat.  For her, the panacea to the problems of the working class is the removal of dialectics and replacing it with pre-Hegelian formalism!

Despite the clear wording at my site, and despite my having told you countless times I do not think this. If you are trying to put people off my ideas any old how, I can understand your unfair tactics. DM-fans always do this (hence my forceful language at times; after 20 odd years of this sort of fabrication, one does tend to get a little tetchy).

But, if you want to 'win' an argument by fibbing, that says more about you than me.

Anyhow, DM is one of the reasons why you are so unreasonable; this being the latest example.

And you say things like this, too (and have been doing so for months):

Any dialectician could easily refute Rosa's site.

Since you have only read, at most, a few paragraphs at my site (which amounts to perhaps a thousand words out of the 350,000 posted), and you then fail to ‘refute’ me (even though you keep saying how easy it is), I think we can conclude that in your self-imposed state of ignorance, you cannot do this.

Prove me wrong. It’s easy, according to you.

Now you begin the familiar Axel-Bluster:

Of course, it would be a waste of time for us to do that.

Well, it's a good job Trotsky did not argue this way when confronted with Burnham.

You have been saying this sort of thing for months; if you had used that time to argue against me, and not wasted it inventing new slurs to throw at me, and if it were as easy as you constantly say, you would have done it.

You can't. The fact that you do not do so shows this to be so.

Again, prove me wrong.

That is probably why the more experienced comrades of this site are not paying any attention to her.

More bluster.

Trotsky would have been ashamed of you lot.

I think, however, you are in something of a state of panic; you can't refute me, they can't, but here I am, at the heart of the torchbearers of the Fourth International, a site associated with ‘The Defence of Marxism’ and you can’t defend your most basic ideas.

Calling you ‘pathetic’ would be praise indeed.

I rather think you have a sickening feeling in the pit of your non-dialectical stomach that I might be right, or, at least, you know too little philosophy (and no logic at all) to be able to take that task on.

Perhaps then dialectics is the mystical rubbish I claim it is.

Once more, put your mouth where your bluster is, and prove me wrong.

[Volkov]

How to prove Rosa wrong:  Read and understand Marxism, in addition to observing reality! :D

Also, calling you non-Marxist is not sectarian; it something that derives from objective examination of your thinking.  You have not even proven yourself to be a Marxist.  Over 90% of your revleft posts are rantings and links to your essays.  I have yet to see you utter a single word on things like the Marxist theory of the state, the class struggle (oh, wait, you deny its existence!), planned economy, overproduction, etc.  You are a single-issue activist that does nothing but rant all day long.  Do you even leave the computer when you are not eating, sleeping, or at work? 

Anyway, I think that your posts are a waste of time to go over.  I think that the experienced dialecticans can draw the correct conclusions from your evasiveness, lack of understanding of the subject at hand, attacking a strawman, etc.  You may influence some young teens here and there, but you will not influence one single Marxist.  It is also rather absurd of you to think that the utopian socialists were more advanced in ways than Marx/Engels and Lenin/Trotsky were.    If you were actually understanding the subject of your attacks, in addition to actually bringing forth something that makes sense, people would spend lots of time debating with you.  But since you are not doing as such...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

As if to prove me right, Axel/Volkov now blusters this:

How to prove Rosa wrong:  Read and understand Marxism, in addition to observing reality!

Which is exactly how Trotsky dealt with Burnham (I think not).

it something that derives from objective examination of your thinking.

Which you haven't yet done, on your own admission.

So, you have subjectively branded me a non-Marxist.

Which means you are a born again sectarian.

I would never judge you in ignorance, like this.

 

You have not even proven yourself to be a Marxist.

Neither have you.

But once again, I would not be so sectarian as to assert, in ignorance, that you were not.



And now, a major crime exposed by this super sleuth:

Over 90% of your revleft posts are rantings and links to your essays.

So?

I have yet to see you utter a single word on things like the Marxist theory of the state, the class struggle (oh, wait, you deny its existence!), planned economy, overproduction, etc. 

Well that is because you have not read my Essays.

If I were to act in a similar manner, after having read, say, just a page or two of Woods and Grant's book, and were then to say the same sort of thing, in almost total ignorance of these two comrade's views, you would be rightly annoyed, and would take me to task for it.

But it's OK to do this to me, is it?


And why do you keep asking this sort of thing (I have answered it several times)?

 

Do you even leave the computer when you are not eating, sleeping, or at work? 

I do not waste time like you. I hold down a full-time job, act as unpaid trade union rep, and have found time to do something unique in Marxist history, which, even if you think it totally misguided and incorrect, has never been done before (despite your constant assertions, all made in ignorance, that there is nothing new at my site).

And what have you to offer: bluster, more bluster and fabrication.

I hope you are proud of yourself.

I am sure Trotsky would not be impressed.

Exhibit A for the prosecution, kindly provided by Mr Bluster himself:

Anyway, I think that your posts are a waste of time to go over.  I think that the experienced dialecticians can draw the correct conclusions from your evasiveness

Which is exactly what Trotsky said to Burnham, isn't it?

You may influence some young teens here and there, but you will not influence one single Marxist.

Wrong, I have and continue to influence older Marxists, ones who are not as unreasonable, or wilfully ignorant, as you.

But even if you were right, how would that bear on the validity of what I say? Would you accept this as a way of assessing any other scientific theory, that its opponents were not influenced in any way by it?

If you did, and on that basis, you would then have to reject, say, Galileo’s work. His opponents even refused to look down his telescope - which is the sort of 'head in the sand' approach that has dominated your response to me over the last few months. You refuse to even look, but are quite happy to assert, in ignorance, the sorts of this you again do here.

It is also rather absurd of you to think that the utopian socialists were more advanced in ways than Marx/Engels and Lenin/Trotsky were. 

Well, I wasn't referring to utopian socialists, but merely communists from earlier generations who saw the class struggle exactly as Marx did (and who, according to Lenin influenced him), and they did so without an ounce of dialectics.

So, your assertion about the centrality of dialectics to a recognition of the class struggle (and that I cannot believe in it if I reject all this Hegelian mysticism) is refuted by these communists.

That was a very simple point; I am surprised you could not grasp it.

 

If you were actually understanding the subject of your attacks, in addition to actually bringing forth something that makes sense, people would spend lots of time debating with you.  But since you are not doing as such...

Once again, and for about the tenth time, since neither you, nor Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor...., actually understand the dialectic (this is not because it is too difficult, nor because they were not intelligent enough, it is because, like the Christian Trinity, there is nothing there to understand, as I show in extensive detail at my site)), then this is an empty comparison.

You have not shown you understand it; why you can't even mount a weak defence of it.

Yet again, Axel/Volkov: put up, or shut up.

[Although, knowing you, we can expect more bluster.]

http://www.anti-dialectics.org

[SecurityManKillJoy]

All philosophies need to at least be considered in order to create as strong of an abstract basis for understanding concrete reality as possible. We might talk about the shortcomings of metaphysics or idealism or philosophy and its ruling-class history in general, but they still need to be understood and at least made use of in some way, even if we do not connect it with our 'main' materialist empirical way of thinking.

Dialectics of course can be fossilized into looking at nothing but pure change and thus become one-sided. Or it could be reduced to three laws and only those three laws dogmatically followed.  So we can go back to formal logic, and this is really what dialectics advocates: going back to formal logic to look at specific, unchanging conditions, but then seeing the general way in which they corellate at the same time. And of course formal logic is very important for phenomenon such as computer programming, but this man-made language used to better control electricity also has to be used alongside a qualitative understanding on how the electricity flows and the mechanical motion that the programming data causes which creates new electron interrelations for certain tasks to occurr. Or at least something along those lines; I don't know exactly how such processes work.

We still have to consider how things interpenetrate and how things change in order to have a basis  in order to resolve the reactions they make and the effects that come from these reactions or 'contradictions' in order to make as qualitative of a unity as possible between all forces of the universe over time, using whatever power we have to help in that goal. But if things simply aren't in unity, we cannot use pure mechanical formal logic to understand them or else we are going to only percieve reality in only one way, that is in relative unity at all times. Even if things are in unity, they are probably only that way due to certain patterns of movements and reactions. Thus we might break matter into quality and quantity to better understand the reactions between matter and recognize how parts change themselves in the reactions and produce new conditions, but this is by all means not the only method of going about that task.

No language such as formal mathematics or dialectics can be used alone because of their always leaving out certain considerations, but then again not all of them can be eclectically combined together. Dialectics, however, in combination with materialism all on its own tends to combine smoothly many ways of thought, including some objective  idealism in order to make itself well-rounded, cutting out that which directly cannot be reconciled. However even these 'irreconcilable' viewpoints have to be at least considered, and of course it all has to be tested in reality.Then again it all must be used to better interpret reality as well and not merely tested in it, even if some ways of thought  supposedly 'distort' reality.

Given this, I do not understand why anyone would be so vehemently against any mode of thought. Of course attacks on certain ways of thinking help the process of the creation of new ideas tremendously, but with all respect to Rosa and other hard-working peoples that have written much, it simply isn't worthwhile to attack a mere method so much or, on the other hand, become so hostile to views against that way of thought. What matters is applying a method, and if this has shortcomings it deserves correction, but still consideration and use, even if it is a bourgeois ideology which most people do not have access to or cannot understand fully, or if it doesn't correspond to reality given what we know at the moment. It still deserves consideration, even if we use a central method of thinking that never could be reconciled with the other viewpoint.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

SecurityMKJ, thank you for those comments, but it is reasonably clear from the things I have posted here why I am so opposed to certain 'modes of thought', as you put it.

All philosophies need to at least be considered in order to create as strong of an abstract basis for understanding concrete reality as possible

Why do we need an abstract understanding of reality? How do you know that there is one?

The problem with abstract ideas is that they imply that reality itself is ideal. [Without minds to form them there would be no abstract ideas, but what in reality do they 'reflect'? They either reflect nothing at all (so why form them?) or they reflect the product of some mind (so reality is ideal).]

Quite apart from that, abstract ideas undermine a general account of anything. This is because the process of abstraction turns general words into abstract particulars; it turns, say, the predicate "...is a dog" into the definite description "the concept dog", which is no longer general, but particular -- or just into "dogginess", which is now a name of an abstract particular. This would destroy our capacity to provide a foundation for science, since it torpedoes our ability to speak generally of things and processes.

So, we do not need philosophy at all, just good science.

I criticise philosophy so much because I trace its origins back to the attempts made by aristocratic/ruling-class theorists in ancient Greece who sought to provide a 'rational' account of reality to justify the hierarchical nature of nature (whih on its own implies that nature is Ideal), as a way of providing a rationale for class oppression. This set of theories were based on thought alone, hence were Ideal. Philosophers since then have basically done the same sort of thing, only with increasing sophistication.

We still have to consider how things interpenetrate and how things change in order to have a basis  in order to resolve the reactions they make and the effects that come from these reactions or 'contradictions' in order to make as qualitative of a unity as possible between all forces of the universe over time, using whatever power we have to help in that goal.

Dialectics cannot do this since none of its ideas hold together under close scrutiny (I set my site up to prove this, so you will need to read my essays to see why I say this, or my summary essays, if you want the 'short version' -- links below.)

Sure we need science to explain reality, but dialectics is not even poor philosophy. It is based on a mystical view of reality (wherein things 'contradict' other things and processes, when, of course, only the product of minds can contradict (i.e., "gain-say" -- which is what the word means) anything else, and on a defective understanding of formal logic.

The latter, we are told is based on something called the ‘law of identity’ (an idea, for example, which cannot be found in Aristotle, and did not exist in the West until at least the seventeenth century). But even if Formal Logic were based on this bogus law, it would not prevent it from handling change; this is because if anything is identical with anything else then they will both change at an equal rate.

Moreover, formal logic can handle change but drawing inferences from propositions that express it (that is, ones that are qualified by tensed verbs); this logic is called Temporal Logic (links below). Even the old, obsolete logic could handle change (I prove this at my site)  -- the old logic was superseded anyway by mathematical logic invented by logicians between 1850 and 1920. Dialecticians are in general ignorant of these changes in logic, since, in my experience, they just repeat the assertions made by other dialecticians about logic, and never check. The book by comrades Woods and Grant is just one of the latest to do this.

But if things simply aren't in unity, we cannot use pure mechanical formal logic to understand them or else we are going to only percieve reality in only one way, that is in relative unity at all times. Even if things are in unity, they are probably only that way due to certain patterns of movements and reactions. Thus we might break matter into quality and quantity to better understand the reactions between matter and recognize how parts change themselves in the reactions and produce new conditions, but this is by all means not the only method of going about that task.

Again, we just need science to help us do this; dialectics cannot assist in this regard for the reasons I noted above. In fact, it is such a confused branch of thought, dialectical materialsim does not even make the reserve list of philosophies that could help science account for the universe and how it changes (not that science needs such help). [I do not include Historical Materialism here, since it is a science which I fully agree with.]

You can find much more on this at my site; summary essays are posted here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/essay_sixteen%20Index.htm

Dialectics and Formal Logic are examined here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2004.htm

The idea that change is produced by ‘internal contradictions’ is completely dissected here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2005.htm

and here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2008_01.htm

Trotsky’s (and thus Hegel’s) criticisms of the Law of Identity are themselves pulled apart here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2006.htm

The so-called ‘three laws’ of dialects are shown to be at best hopelessly wrong or at worst thoroughly confused, here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2007.htm

The validity of philosophical abstraction is criticised here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2003_01.htm

and here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2003_02.htm

The origin of traditional philosophy (and why all philosophies are radically confused) is summarised here (the full Essay has yet to be posted; it will appear over the next year):

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-12.htm

The pernicious effect of this mystical doctrine on Marxism is summarised here (again the full Essay will be published later this year):

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20016-9.htm

You can find details of about modern logic here:

http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/03-XX.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic

And about the logician who almost single-handedly reconfigured logic (post 1879), here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/

Temporal Logic here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-temporal/


Different branches of modern logic here (scroll down):

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html#l


My site is at: http://www.anti-dialectics.org

Recall that my site is only about 1/3 complete. It will take a year so so to finish.

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Why do we need an abstract understanding of reality? How do you know that there is one?

The problem with abstract ideas is that they imply that reality itself is ideal. [Without minds to form them there would be no abstract ideas, but what in reality do they 'reflect'? They either reflect nothing at all (so why form them?) or they reflect the product of some mind (so reality is ideal).]

Quite apart from that, abstract ideas undermine a general account of anything...

...So, we do not need philosophy at all, just good science...

I criticise philosophy so much because I trace its origins back to the attempts made by aristocratic/ruling-class theorists in ancient Greece who sought to provide a 'rational' account of reality to justify the hierarchical nature of nature (whih on its own implies that nature is Ideal), as a way of providing a rationale for class oppression.

What I mean by abstract is to use visual data we have, but to draw some constructions and conclusions that are not readily apparent through what we are observing and might be impossible to observe. Really, I think pure empiricism and using nothing but what is observed is one-sided, and has just as ruling class of an origin as any kind of thought (that is, mostly the ruling class can afford to have scientific observational equipment, etc.). The abstract probably doesn't exist in reality, but it still allows us to better understand how we might deal with reality, and all philosophy is based on reality in some way anyway, or else a person would have no starting image to create ideas out of.

But if you would like to use science alone because it keeps idealizations from occuring, then I can only agree somewhat, because I really think this has to be substantiated with other systems, whether we can immediately see this organization in the observed material or not. I will not try and argue with a twenty year veteran, but I think these additions still help in understanding any phenomenon, whether it risks getting turned into a bastardized idealism or not.

Dialectics cannot do this since none of its ideas hold together under close scrutiny (I set my site up to prove this, so you will need to read my essays to see why I say this, or my summary essays, if you want the 'short version' -- links below.)

Sure we need science to explain reality, but dialectics is not even poor philosophy. It is based on a mystical view of reality (wherein things 'contradict' other things and processes, when, of course, only the product of minds can contradict (i.e., "gain-say" -- which is what the word means) anything else, and on a defective understanding of formal logic.

Personally, I simply substitute the word 'contradiction' for 'reaction', and any other muddy terms like 'unity of opposites' can be transformed into the word 'reaction' and we may interpret these reactions in varying degrees, in absolute and relative form, of objective and unconscious opposition, or in conscious forms of opposing ideas. They are just easy words to describe observations and don't require complicated terms, and I don't think they absolutely require being translated into formulas. But I have not studied formal logic so much; it is simply too many equations to memorize for me. All formal logic in general seems overly mechanized in those formulaeic forms and sometimes suffers from birthing formulas out of formulas, and this is why it seems one-sided all on its own, but I digress.

However I did read your essay some months ago  on the three dogmatized laws of dialectics and it influenced me.  I have not had time to read much else though, but I will attempt to try and memorize more on formal logic.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Security:

Really, I think pure empiricism and using nothing but what is observed is one-sided, and has just as ruling class of an origin as any kind of thought (that is, mostly the ruling class can afford to have scientific

I agree, but I am not advocating empiricism, or any 'ism' (since I think that all philosophies are bunkum).

As to your visual analogy, I am not sure it will give you all you want of it, or indeed anything at all. It really depends on the details, which, when you fill them in, I will be able to comment.

The abstract probably doesn't exist in reality, but it still allows us to better understand how we might deal with reality, and all philosophy is based on reality in some way anyway, or else a person would have no starting image to create ideas out of.

Well, this is the traditional tale we have been told since ruling-class Greek thinkers dreamt this idea up 2400 years ago, but scientists do not use 'abstractions'; what they do is appropriate the technical language of earlier generations, modify or abandon it, and set up their own new terminology, with new rules on how to use it and how to process the data they collect (etc), the better to account for nature.

Since no one can access the abstractions anyone else uses (they are private to each individual, of necessity -- that is even if they exist, which I deny -- what in fact happens is that philosophers (and this includes amateur philosophers) use words in quirky ways, which they call 'abstractions' since they are all working in the same idealist tradition), no scientist can use them.

What they do use is a publicly accessible language linked to practical and technical skills (interpreted by whatever theories they are using), allied to the current level of the productive forces in society (of course, there is much more to it than this, but to list all the factors involved would be tedious -- I try to say much more in Essay Three Part Two at my site).

As far as Formal Logic is concerned, you do not really need to study it to be a good revolutionary, it just helps you see through the demonstrably erroneous things dialecticians (like Woods and Grant) say about it.

Your substitution of 'reaction' for 'contradiction' is interesting, but I am not sure that it alone will do. In fact ordinary language has literally thousands of words to help us account for change, 'reaction' being one of them; here are a few more:

Vary, alter, adjust, amend, mutate, transmute, modify, develop, expand, swell, flow, differentiate, fast, slow, rapid, hasty, melt, harden, drip, cascade, fade, is, was, will be, will have been, had, will have had, went, go, going, gone, lost, age, flood, crumble, disintegrate, erode, corrode, flake, tumble, cut, crush, grind, shred, fall, rise, spin, oscillate, rotate, wave, quickly, slowly, instantaneous, suddenly, gradually, rapidly, sell, buy, lose, win, ripen, rot, perish, grow, decay, more, less, fewer, steady, steadily, jerkily, slowly, quickly, very, extremely, exceedingly, intermittent, continuous, continual, push, pull, jump, break, charge, assault, dismantle, replace, undo, reverse, repeal, quash, hour, minute, second, instant, destroy, annihilate, boil, freeze, thaw, liquefy, evaporate, solidify, condense, protest, challenge, expel, eject, remove, overthrow, expropriate, defeat, strike, revolt, riot, march, demonstrate, rebel, campaign, agitate and organise….

Naturally, it would not be difficult to extend this list until it contained literally tens of thousands of words all capable of depicting countless changes in limitless detail. It is only a myth put about by Hegel and dialecticians that ordinary language cannot express change. On the contrary, it performs this task far better than the incomprehensible and impenetrably obscure jargon Hegel invented in order to fix something that was not broken.

http://www.anti-dialectics.org

[SecurityManKillJoy]

Of course, I do not completely use the word 'reaction' alone. It simply works best for objective phenomenon. It is also simply a good replacement for the pure logician's term 'contradiction.'

At any rate I have forgotten about how limited the three laws really are; I was going to talk about that. They do look limited when the actual structure is plainly listed, and it didn't occur to me for a long time that they were so limited and reduced into three. I don't think it was quite intended that way, because I have been interpreting them quite differently and perhaps with more added to them, and I never realized that they were officially more limited.

To me they make sense, but of course they need to be reworded and added onto when the plain structure is exposed, which I was always doing because I never took it all literally or read all of the official structure that Engels put down. So I was actually shocked when I was reading his real structure because it was nothing like I was concieving before. Sorry if the below sounds too mystical, hard to read or basic and doesn't aid in anything at all, but that is basically how I have always used dialectics as an organizational system.

The 'law' of quantity aiding in making changes of quality makes sense, to me anyway, but I was naturally adding onto this a 'law' of quality into quality and didn't realize that Hegel or someone did not say anything like that. That is, for example, two qualities of atoms can react such that they either keep qualitatively changing themselves until they reach relative unity with each other in some way and/or they create more processes outside of themselves through affecting other systems that may aid in creating the relative unity or simply create more chains of reactions.

Of course this could also be used for more than two substances or more than one process that the reaction ends up creating outside of the initial reaction. Then we can add quantity into quality; that is, the quantity of all the qualities of particles relatively internal to each atom also helps in determining how the reaction will take place. One atom alone also has its qualities determined by the amount of particles it is made up of in general, whether it is in a state of reaction or not. We may also make a distinction between mechanical and chemical interactions, and how one can lead into or 'transform' into another.

As for 'internal contradictions', I automatically was thinking of it in terms of relativity when I first read about it, but it wasn't bluntly called internal contradiction when I first read it. That is, we can think of the 'contradictions', 'oppositions', etc., in varying degrees, and they may be relatively called internal if we compare them to relatively external systems of reactions, and we can see how these separate systems of reactions influence each other. Or we may absolutely combine them into one big internal or external group of many interrelations. But of course we reach a limit where we cannot internalize or externalize anything anymore unless we use the construction of infinity.

So for me, these "laws" actually have always seemed more robust to me. However I was also influenced by your point about location having to do with influencing qualities of molecules or something along those lines, such as the arrangement of the particles helping in determining a reaction and the qualities of an atom, so things like that have to be added into the general system if we are to still use the system. Location does not have to be converted into quantity either to artificially fulfill the 'law' of quantity into quality as well, but might rather go under quality aiding in creating new quality or some other conception.

These are my interpretations on two of the 'laws'. If we don't take the  structure so literally and add onto them so we don't try and force processes into one of the structured laws, I think they can aid in better understanding processes by dividing them up into parts, &c., no matter what vocabulary is used.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Secirity, I do not know why you are trying to make these 'laws' work; at best they are merely trite rules of thumb that only seem to work in a few cases (and then, only if the terms that are used are ill-defined). No Physicist, for example, would accept, say, Newton's 2nd law if it rarelty worked, and then only if the terms used were ill-defined (as I already noted is the case in dialectical materialsm).

We do not need them in science (there are much better laws to account for change, etc.), and we certainly do not need such defective mystical ideas in historical materialism.

On 'internal contradictions', I suggest you read Essay Eight Part One at my site, and then Essay Eight Part Two when it is published in early June.

[SecurityManKillJoy]

I'll read that (I believe I did read part of it some months ago), but I'll stop discussing now. I simply wanted to promote more open-mindedness and what I have thought on dialectics, and how to use it so nobody twists it onto nature. For me it is simply setting down a variety of relatively dual pheonomenon, abstract or concrete but always based on reality in some way, and understanding how they interpenetrate rather than keeping them all alone and understanding them beyond an unchanging mathematical formula. The again there's also other considerations such as the 'law' of combined development, of uneven development, etc. But of course nobody will be convinced so I don't want to  get into a big arguement over it like other people.

Thank you for making replies, though. I really have considered and modified my own system based on some of your work in the past, but for better or for worse, I'm not going to stop using the method and these guidelines. They simply help me to break down a law of movement like the Pauli exclusion principle  and thus make it easier to understand.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Security, as usual, your comments are appreciated:

I simply wanted to promote more open-mindedness and what I have thought on dialectics,

I take the opposite view; because of its origins in mystical hermeticism, dialectics is guilty until proved even more guilty.

But, it is not just dialectics that I am prejudiced against: all forms of philosophy are capable of being put through the same sort of mangle (I only do this in my Essays when they overlap with issues relevant to dialectics). However, other philosophical theories are vastly superior to dialectical materialism (in view of the fact that the latter is so vague and imprecise), but they can all be shown to be comprised of nothing but ruling-class hot air (or 'houses of cards' as Wittgenstein called them).

"abstract or concrete but always based on reality in some way..."

Well, Wittgensteinian philosophers have worked out alternative interpretations of what it is that scientists do that allows their theories to work without them lapsing into metaphysical mysticism, or into empiricism, where 'abstract ideas' etc are given a materialist make-over so that they do not imply Idealism (as they now do).

To be sure, their ideas need much development, but I hope to contribute to this in my thesis.

So, we do not need these mystical terms of art ('the abstract' and 'the concrete') to make sense of nature scientifically. And I would go further, these terms actually prevent us investigating nature scientifically, and hence interfere with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism (for reasons I spell out in Essay Three Parts One and Two).

They simply help me to break down a law of movement like the Pauli exclusion principle  and thus make it easier to understand.

Now the usual way this is handled in metaphysical realism makes it sound as if lifeless, unintelligent objects and processes in nature can control each other intelligently (i.e., under the operation of a mathematical law of some sort).

The Wittgensteinian method cuts through all this, and prevents us from seeing nature as governed by a cosmic will of some sort (which on the traditional view sees objects and processes 'obeying'  laws (which they could only do if they were intelligent), or regards them as capable of 'determining' what other things should or should not do -- of course, only something with a mind can 'determine' anything).

You can find more details here:

www.iep.utm.edu/l/lawofnat.htm

But the author in this case is not a Wittgensteinian.

A copy of his book can be found here:

www.sfu.ca/philosophy/physical-law/