At 08:14 PM 3/10/2005 -0500, chris wright wrote:
Justin, as I have no idea what you mean by dialectic, this is difficult to make heads or tails of. Are you looking for a methodology? I know this is not popular, but dialectic is NOT a method. A method has at its base an assumed separation of first order and second order reasoning, i.e. empirical fact and its theorization. A methodology involves having a 'theory of' something, something external to whomever does the theorizing. As is clear from the very opening Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel opposes this, and so too does Marx, as is self-evident to a careful reading of his works.
I'm not sure what this means, though I recognize the Hegelian reference. All three of us would probably agree there is no general (dialectical) method external to the subject matter and applied from outside. This is especially so with respect to the history of inept dialectical interpretations of nature, which usually proceed in just this manner.
However, I'm disturbed by your wording:
"something external to whomever does the theorizing." All science--all attempts at objective thought--aim at being external to the whomever who does the theorizing. Without the separation of knower and known we are back to pre-Enlightenment divine right of kings and popes.
Modern natural science begins with astronomy and physics, the mathematical description of nature and a rethinking of the nature of forces. Aside from the theological and political disturbances this created, there was also a disturbance in philosophy, which necessitated a realignment, for example of subject and object, material and mental substances. However, this is a change outside science proper. Philosophy is a different animal from science--and the philosophical image of science is different from its content. This was already true of Newtonianism, which spread as an intellectual phenomenon in ways outside of its manifest scientific content, analogous to ideas about cosmology, quantum mechanics, evolutionism, computing, chaos, etc. spread in the culture today.
Without the subject-object distinction, there is no science, only superstition, and to the extent that Hegelianism denies this, it is unscientific, pace the efforts of Hegelians to whine about Kantianism, dualism, etc.
The real problem comes when the scientific world-picture evolves to reinsert the human being and ultimately the cognizing subject back into it. This is what we now call the social or human sciences, though there is no hard and fast separation in the cognitive realm. This is precisely the point at which the young Marx (1844) intervenes. Remember, the division of the universe into primary and secondary qualities (which replaces the old distinction between essence and appearance or whatever the complementary concept is), enables a separation between the structure of matter in se and its processing by our particular sensory apparatus, the brain, and finally its subjective experiencing. This, not Goethe's crapola, was the route to progress in science.
However, in what Marx would call the reconstruction of the concrete (what the Poznan School refers to as scientific idealization), we come to the point where the conscious subject re-enters the scientific world picture, and here is where everything becomes a mass of confusion. Now once some of the Soviet philosophers who survived several decades of misdeeds tackled this problem again (from the 1960s on), they came up with more sophisticated formulations than earlier. (It would be interesting to know what the survivors of these survivors say a decade and a half after the end of the Eastern European Stalinist regimes. I should e-mail Lektorsky and ask him.)
This is also where emergent materialism comes in. Most of the stuff I've read, while conservative in most matters of reductionism, draw the line at the problem of consciousness (and one would have to add social institutions, which are manifestly incomprehensible in physicalist terms, pace Neurath), and concede that here is where the concept of emergence is likely indispensable.
You seem unaware that that split is implicit when you say what one needs is "to know the subject matter in detail and have imagination." Either you are engaging in bald empiricism, as if facts just gave themselves up for us or you are separating empirical statements from their theorization.
It is now a commonplace in philosophy of science, after the failure of neopositivism, that empirical statements and theoretical notions are not neatly separable (theory-ladenness). Some philosophers still maintain there still are real observations. (This is where I left off reading the journal PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE in the 1980s.) So you're not saying anything drastic at this moment in time.
The first is also common to Nietzsche when he says that there are only appearances.
Well, this is true only for those philosophers of science who take a phenomenalist position. And in this sense the irrationalist Nietzsche adopts positivist ideas, as positivism and lebensphilosophie are interdependent in spite of their mutual hostility.
In the latter, you assume a stance outside the object which is theorized, as if there was nothing involved in it becoming an object for you. In asking after the truth of the statement "A rose is red", you would assume the distance of the asker from the question. And indeed the "scientific method" seems predicated on this separation.
Thank goodness!
However, it is not clear that this separation is valid. Nor that even within the question's confines that we can assume that we know what a "rose" and what "red" are. The problems with this appear on the margins of many phenomena, for example how one defines the dividing line between species, such as distinguishing between moths and butterflies. Or asking what constitutes "life" or the line between living and dead.
But this has nothing to do with the subject.
More interestingly and obviously, if we ask after the truth of the statement "Stalin murdered the Old Bolsheviks", one has not only to ask whether or not Stalin had people put to death, itself an obvious fact, but what constitutes 'murder'.
Now you are switching gears. "Murder" is not merely a physical fact but a social interpretation.
This is what is referred to as "reflexivity", akin I think to what Hegel called the positing of presuppositions. The fact and the theorization of the fact must be simultaneously interrogating each other. The theory must be open to factual contradiction and the facts must be opened up as containing theoretical presuppositions in regarding them as facts.
Nothing controversial here.
Dialectic is concerned with an opening up of categories to reflecting upon their own presuppositions. Such reflexivity means that not only is the truth of the statement "The rose is red" open for discussion, but the categories of Truth and the person asking the question, i.e. dialectic is always to some extent ad hominem.
You started out good, but you end up in the wrong place.
It is exactly scientific methodology which hates ad hominem, as if there are were a purely external, objective reality that could be reached by adequate knowledge of the subject matter and imagination.
That's the goal, insofar as the object of the investigation is not the perceiving, conscious being. The question of whether we as cognizing subjects add something to this external reality by means of our own epistemic devices is a valid concern, but it doesn't negate the goal.
If "scientific method" concerns itself with the person putting forward the argument at all, it does so in a merely external manner, claiming that so-and-so is a liberal or a conservative. It does not, and of course neither do many Marxists, tease out the interrelations between the theorist and the theory. Marx however, in his critique of political economy, does exactly such things, not by a psychological profile, but by showing how that person enunciates a set not merely of ideas, but an ideology.
Now you are switching gears, again. But let's be clear about what we mean by the role of the theorist. (Alvin Gouldner has a lot to say about this.) The role of the theorist becomes crucial when the object of investigation is society itself, as many have emphasized (Gouldner, Markovic, etc. -- A lot of stuff on my web site pertains.) But your characterization here lacks clarity.
What is more, dialectic is not merely reflexive, but practically reflexive. In other words, the resolution of problems posed in theory are not merely resolved in theory, but must be resolved in social practice.
This is a subtle point. Don't mess it up.
It is one thing to theorize, it is another to see that theorization work out in practice. From the point of view of science, one would think this is obvious. Scientists constantly test their theories and ideas and even their methodologies.
Right, and Justin will agree with you, as a pragmatist.
What they do not posit is their own practice within total social practice.
Natural scientists need not do this, but social scientists must, on pain of otherwise falsifying the nature of the object of study. It's not clear that Justin as pragmatist would recognize such a distinction.
This is what Lewontin, Rose, Kamin, Gould, et al tend to do in some of their best
work.
How so?
The dialectic is not per se in nature, but in our interaction with nature, as social beings. You might refer to Lewontin's work on the Human Genome project, Gould's Mismeasure of Man and other work. But the point really is not that they are talking about dialectics all the time or the supposed "laws" of dialectics (enumerated in a triad by Engels and in 14 different laws by Lenin.) Looking for those trappings misses the point.
Well, this is an interesting point, as well as defining your interests. But you need to enunciate how these folks use dialectic.
In that, you are still looking for the trappings of 1900 mechanical Marxism and as such are not even able to see dialectic at work in contemporary thinkers. In looking for the stereotype, you have no idea what the real article looks like. That is a hindrance.
Well, we were all discussing diamat and the dialectics of nature, which was made central to Marxism as it should not have been. Engels had a good historical reason to pursue this line of enquiry, but the Soviets had quite another interest in making it the foundation and starting point of Marxism. The cart actually came before the horse (or is the it the other way round), and the ontology was created after the fact and then made first. Althusser--who both balked at and remained trapped within marxism-leninism, noted this curious historical fact.
Not only is dialectic practically reflexive, it involves immanent critique, which in short is taking ideas and practices on their own terms and showing how their seemingly fixed and law-like categories are in fact spatio-temporal and social, ie historical.
I think I get this, and from this perspective, diamat is completely irrelevant to Marxism.
That does not make them wrong in the traditional sense, but it does make them open and fluid, rather than fixed. It is that fluidity, the ceaseless flux of life that no theory can ever adequately grasp (paraphrasing Hegel, btw, not Nietzsche, for whom Life was itself a metaphysical category), which immanent critique seeks to restore. And it does require the imagination and detailed factual knowledge you claim, but it allows that the facts themselves are not self-evident, that they too are points of contention.
This is why "social science" is not natural science.
Marx, for example, does not approach political economy with a theory of his own, but takes it at its own word, takes its object as his object and allows it to be staked on its own contradictions. There is no external point of view from which an adequate critique can take place. To apply another standard to the object than that of the object's own standard is a regression to a metatheory, which one must justify and that will then need justification, in an infinite regression of metatheories.
I think this is one way in which Marxism transcends philosophy of the social sciences in se, which can be differentiated as well as likened to philosophy of natural sciences (i.e. as structured theories). I'm willing to go along with pure philosophy of (social) science to a point, but then there's more. You should read Gouldner and Markovic on this, to begin with.
I'm not sure Justin, though pragmatist, goes this far.
Metatheory--Are you alluding to Gunn here? (And what would Popper say about this, if he understood it?)
This brings us to the last aspect, which is that there are two distinct kinds of abstraction present in the work of Marx and Hegel: empiricist abstraction, or abstraction from (concrete conditions, the totality of relations, environmental variables, et al) and determinate abstraction, or abstraction into. In the latter, abstractions matter as not merely an intellectual process, but as determinate processes. Class is an abstraction and so is Value, but both are determinate, that is they have an impact in the world and are real in a way that some supposedly concrete things are not. Now, this does not mean that empiricist abstraction is wrong, but that it functions at a rather lower level of thought. For example, labor in general is an empiricist abstraction. We abstract from all the forms of labor, all of the relations in which labor is embedded and say that all peoples in history have labored and that labor is essential to the interchange between humanity and Nature. However, if we want to understand actual labor in capitalist society, we must grasp labor in its specific forms, both as concrete kinds of labor and as labor producing a specific kind of product, i.e. not merely a thing, but as produced by and producing certain kinds of social relations which are both abstract and far more real than their mere materiality.
IMO, it is the unique combinations of these that constitute critical aspects of dialectic that are not found in whole elsewhere. I am not, of course, going into the serious treatment of determination via negation, rather than through positive ascription nor the question of movement through contradiction.
I think you should elaborate on this as a distinct topic.
There are also problems of causality and totality involved. Hegel and Marx both posit those as internal to
practically reflexive, immanent critique. For example, totality is
posited not as knowable, but in the idea that all things are related,
that the natural and the social constitute a complex whole in which
isolation and reduction (the core of much of scientific method, a la
Cartesian Reductionism, as addressed in The Dialectical Biologist by
Lewontin and Levin) are abstractions.
I'm not clear on this. Again, revolutionary praxis--pertaining to the "object" of human studies--is a different matter from studying organic chemistry. You are getting at a distinction without being clear as to what the distinction pertains to.
Now, you may indeed find one or another of these present in some way in different philosophical systems, but alone each is incomplete. The whole of these is only found in the dialectical approach, and it ends up being a very radical approach, which to the seeker of method appears as no theory at all. It misses all of the things that seem to make a proper theory of something. But as dialectic does not seek to apply its own categories to something, but to investigate the object from within its own logic.
This almost gels. But you could say something similar about the relation of philosophy and science in general. Philosophy can't really add anything to science from outside. Science works from inside. In a sense philosophizing about the results of science should do something analogous. But dialectic presumably is something different from this, or else we wouldn't have the concept of 'dialectic.' Dialectic in your discussions always involves human agency. That's essential, and thus clarity as to how this works is also essential.
As Guy Debord pointed out quite succinctly, "EVEN THE STYLE of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities molded by those canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction." (Society of the Spectacle, Para. 205)
Here is where revolutionary praxis--with or without Debord--differs from the social role of bourgeois social science, even where they take on a social democratic service role. (I could say some words about my experience with Popperians, but not now.)
What then does this have to do with Ralph's specific concerns? Certainly, dialectic has inspired some scientists in their work explicitly, but what is more important is that their work develops in a dialectical fashion. Again, since dialectic is not a methodology to apply, so much as an approach to take, I am not looking for it to apply o daily scientific practice except as it may bring an increased attention to the scientist in the process of science, of asking "Whose science?" and "Science for whom?" And if in answering that, the scientist says, "Why, for humanity" is that any less an ideological statement than "Why, for profit"? It would be in asking not merely about the "objective merit" of such and such a method, but of the foundations of each method, of its blind spots as well as its strengths. In a world in which science has been put to rather inhuman use, there is no reasonable way to separate scientific research from its effects and to pretend to a 'pure science' is exactly the kind of empiricist abstraction "science in general", shorn of all determinate form as social practice, that is so popular in philosophy of science,
Well, to me this is all a distraction. I really don't care about 'whose science' when the question is: (a) the actual substance of scientific theories, and (b) the natural sciences insofar as the properties of human beings are not their object domain. You question the separation, of course, but I see no value in seeing unity without seeing distinction. And this is what Engels in his better moments recognized as well. He refers to dialectic as analysis and synthesis, and says synthesis without analysis is empty verbiage.
it seems (here I am judging by the expositions on this list of Carnap, Quine, logical positivism, Popper, et al, since my familiarity is not with formal philosophy of science so much as my layman's knowledge of biology, "chaos" and "complexity" theory primarily in physics via Ilya Prigogine and reading Kuhn.)
Well, I think all these folks were totally clueless about what we're discussing here, totally clueless. And that includes Popper, who is in own way rebelled against the impoverished philosophies of neopositivism, Wittgenstein, etc.
None of which precludes anyone from doing novel scientific research. Dialectic would be completely misguided if it believed that one required conscious dialectic to do anything novel intellectually. If that is the critique you are making, then it is a false critique.
I've not yet seen an indication that Justin even recognizes these philosophical issues, though I also have not seen him explicitly deny them. I am sure you have not yet grasped my perspective. To be sure, it remains to be worked out at an adequate level of concreteness. From what I know of the entire Hegelian tradition as it shows up in the English language, there is a big hole in it where the natural sciences, mathematics, and modern logic should be. (My guess is that there is more of substance in German.) The bullshit divide between "analytical" and "continental" philosophy (which is now being bridged in mostly suspect ways) does not adequately capture this distinction. As it happens, the philosophy profession and academia (in the USA at least) in general is organized to prevent any real synthesis from being effected. It's an inhuman torture chamber that strangles the life out of the grad students who might create something new.
I'm trying to do something different. Justin was partially correct in characterizing it as an historical-sociological reconstruction of philosophy. There's more to it, but here I will only be able to model the contours of what I would like to accomplish, as I lack the technical competence to make it come about at this point. However, keeping abreast of the historical reconstructions now under way is very useful. But here is where imagination--the X factor--comes into play. There's something terribly lacking in academia and it takes imagination to see what it lacking. Academic ghettoes are also ghettoes, in their own way. We have to see what they do to their inhabitants. Tear down the walls, tear the roof off the sucker, tear the roof off the mother sucker.
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