Do We Need the Dialectic?

[Anonymous]

ALB wrote:

Now that the discussion on the dialectic is over, it seems the position is still the same as it was as set out in 1956 quoted in the opening post to this thread:

Quote:

The subject of dialectics has not received a great deal of attention in the Socialist Party. It may be thought it is of not much concern to us. Nevertheless, all sorts of ideas on the subject have flitted through the Party from time to time. We may not accept Engels's Dialectics of Nature or Anti-Duhring, but at least we have never rejected them.

 Commentary of Mcolome1 And it has remainded the same as it was  brought up by CLR James, Raya Dunayeskaya, Erich Fromm, Luckacs, The School of Frankurt, etc, etc, etc, ( dialectician and non-dialetician will continue for a long period of times arguing back and forward )   therefore, we have been in the right track, we have left the door open to others ideas

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Aren't "the transformation of quantity into quality" and "the emergence of structure" just two different ways of describing the same phenomena?

No. One is a supposed 'law'. The day I see a pile of bricks 'transform' into a wall, just by mere addition, I'll believe Engels.New structures giving new properties is what allows bricks to form walls and produce, for example, 'protection'.The specific relationships between components is the key to understanding. Quantity/quality doesn't stress relationships, just numbers, so it's less useful.Given that we're Marxists, the usefulness of the relational aspect of this theory shouldn't need emphasising.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

I'm not sure I get your meaning, here. 'Quantify' is a human judgement. 'Quantitative change leading to qualitative change' is a supposed 'law of dialectics', according to Engels; that 'law' is what I'm objecting to, not humans making judgements.

I suspect we're all in agreement about said law: saving (moving into the philsoophy of mathematics) whether one exists or not (are numbers real or human constructs, etc.)?

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

ALB wrote:

Aren't "the transformation of quantity into quality" and "the emergence of structure" just two different ways of describing the same phenomena?

No. One is a supposed 'law'.

But that's the opposite of what you just said to YMS:

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

My reading of Pannekoek was that quantity/quality wasn't in nature, but the development of the human understanding of nature.

Yeah, understanding, not nature.

Obviously I don't think it's a "law of nature" any more than Pannekoek would have done. Insofar as Engels thought it was he was wrong. I was merely expressing some support for it as a human description of some observed phenomena with a view to understanding it.

LBird wrote:

The issue is, does using a theory of 'quantity/quality' give a better understanding than 'structures/emergence'?

That's what I was trying to say. Or, rather, does the description (form of words) 'quantity/quality' give a better understanding of some phenomena than the description 'structures/emergence'? If not, why not?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

LBird wrote:

The issue is, does using a theory of 'quantity/quality' give a better understanding than 'structures/emergence'?

That's what I was trying to say. Or, rather, does the description (form of words) 'quantity/quality' give a better understanding of some phenomena than the description 'structures/emergence'? If not, why not?

No.Quantity/quality: merely adding bricks transforms into wallsStructure/emergence: putting bricks into a certain relationship produces new propertiesWe can use the latter to understand all sorts of physical and social phenomena. The former is near to useless.The focus on 'relations' is the key.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

DJP, what do you think of my post 265, which I wrote with you in mind, since you mentioned Bertell Ollman's book and critical realism?

Hi. Looks like it's an interesting one but haven't had the chance to read it properly yet!

[ALB]

Fair enough. I don't feel very strongly about this, though I think quantity/quality works rather well with the effects of an increase or decrease of temperature on H2O. But I suppose this could also be expressed as a relationship between temperature and H2O. I'm not going to get worked up about it as we're not talking about a 'law of nature' but only about a way of describing something.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

Fair enough. I don't feel very strongly about this, though I think quantity/quality works rather well with the effects of an increase or decrease of temperature on H2O. But I suppose this could also be expressed as a relationship between temperature and H2O. I'm not going to get worked up about it as we're not talking about a 'law of nature' but only about a way of describing something.

Well, it's more than mere 'description'.Once comrades get the hang of seeing things as 'structures' (ie. the things in a particular relationship) and that 'structures' have properties that 'emerge' from the relationship, not from the things as individual things which just happened to be heaped together.Quantity/quality isn't as useful for understanding simple, everyday things, and then being able to use the understanding developed with simple things to understand more complex things. 'Structure' works, 'addition' doesn't.For example, adding trees doesn't give one a wood. A million trees don't make a wood, if each tree is 100 yards apart, or if the trees are laid touching each other. That would just be a plantation with a million trees in it, or a woodpile. No emergent properties.But place the trees 10 yards apart, a wood develops because of their closeness giving cover for the development of plant and animal populations, and a whole new ecosystem emerges. The ecosystem is not a property of individual trees, but is an emergent property of the wood. The wood is not just trees, but trees in a particular relationship.Relationships matter. The structure is a new entity. The lesson for studying society should be obvious.1 million trees apart equals 1 million entities.1 million trees close together equals 1,000,001 entities (1 million trees and 1 wood).Structures and emergent properties are a very useful way for understanding the world, both natural and social.Quantity/quality? Nah.

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

Once comrades get the hang of seeing things as 'structures' (ie. the things in a particular relationship) and that 'structures' have properties that 'emerge' from the relationship, not from the things as individual things which just happened to be heaped together[my emphasis).

Actually of course comrades (at least those interested in the subject) have long known this from reading Dietzgen and Pannekoek.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

LBird wrote:

Once comrades get the hang of seeing things as 'structures' (ie. the things in a particular relationship) and that 'structures' have properties that 'emerge' from the relationship, not from the things as individual things which just happened to be heaped together[my emphasis).

Actually of course comrades (at least those interested in the subject) have long known this from reading Dietzgen and Pannekoek.

Hmmmm….. how many comrades still think of themselves as 'an individual'?This notion is, in my opinion, the most powerful within the current ruling class ideology.Almost everybody brought up in bourgeois society, when asked, 'Are you an individual?', will answer 'Yes'.It's far more difficult to cling to this ideological construct once one starts to use Critical Realism's concepts, like 'structure' and 'emergence'.As some have said before, I think Marx's ideas fit far better into this way of thinking, than into Engel's amateur ideas about 'dialectical laws', informed by 19th century positivism. The so-called 'laws' of quantity into quality, interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation, are hocus-pocus.I once asked some SWP comrades how did the membership 'interpenetrate' with the central committee. Blank faces all round. It's an empirical fact that no Leninist party has allowed this Engelsian 'mechanism' to work. It's bullshit for the hard-of-thinking.

[Morgenstern]

I find it hard to see the real problem in this. Materialism means that the mind is material. We don't have an eagle eye view. Thoughts are things, just as trees and rocks are things. So thoughts aren't about anything else – they are their own system. Any attempt to make this thought in the head here congruent with that thing over there, is invalid. Which means, of course, that all philosophy is invalid. What we do have is our own finite system of thoughts which we use to blunder around the universe. It is only contingently related to the world beyond the senses; for example, if you think that hydrochloric acid tastes like ice cream you'll probably die of it, and hopefully won't pass on the dangerous notion. But, to repeat, ice cream in the head isn't an inward picture of a real Ice Cream out there. It is this system of thoughts that is interrelated, both within our own heads and shared between ourselves in our communicative environment. There is a dialectical relationship within our own thoughts, and between ourselves via this shared communicative world. Dialectical here meaning really only that they are in flux and subject to change. Change in two main ways: quantity: a thought can be associated with more or less etc. : and quality, in that our thoughts become unsuitable when stretched beyond their reasonable bounds and have to be replaced by others. Water turns to steam – quantitative change leading to qualitative change – just becausewe stop using one concept and start using anythere. *The world beyond our senses does not care*. The reason we dive into this as revolutionaries is because it explains the development hitherto of our social world and thus how it can evolve further. These are not hard and fast laws but empirical observations – once they are shorn of their mysticism. Hegel's fault was that he took this system seriously, at face value, the law of the heavens, just as Berkeley, in phenomenology, thought that everything must exist because God was watching it, because otherwise as a system his thoughts would collapse. But it doesn't just have to be Hegel. There have been other systems of thought in the past, such as the Kabbalah, which may be interesting and self-revealing, as empirical studies of how we think, once they are shorn of their mystical halo, i.e. the notion that these products of the mind are also somehow out there as real things. Plato's ideal forms would come under the same rubric. So, when we talk about 'quality into quantity' or negating this or that, one could simply use the analogy of operations in a computer program – which in effect they are. We are trying to describe how we collectively understand the world that we have created and continue to create. That's all. The rest of it is fighting battles with the ignorance of the past – those who take this shit *seriously*. If you start trying to hold any part rigid, saying "This part is right, that part is not" or even just asking the question "Is this right?" you are falling into the trap of thinking that mental priducts have existence outside of the mind. It's formalism. The most idiotic and abstract of formalism, of course, is to take a text from a past century in an era of state and publisher censorship and relative ignorance amongst the best of one's peers and to say that only the thoughts that ta revolutionary thinker felt capable of *publishing* are the only valid indicators of what they *thought*. Even for me, living out here, for my poor example: my published statements are extremely rarely evidence of what I actually *think* and much more likely to be chewed over and watered down platitudes that won't get me deported or ruffle the feathers of my merely liberal colleages. But then, hopefully Ross has moved on. If not, could we please box him, as his comrades had to do in the end? We spend so much time entertaining the world's internet tramps and nutters on our various forums. Simon W.  

[LBird]

Morgenstern wrote:

Any attempt to make this thought in the head here congruent with that thing over there, is invalid. Which means, of course, that all philosophy is invalid.

Even through practice, it's invalid?And what about the 'philosophy of praxis', ie, 'theory and practice'?

[LBird]

Morgenstern wrote:

…quantitative change leading to qualitative change…

I've already shown, by using Engels' actual example from Anti-Duhring, that this isn't true.

[Morgenstern]

Talking and writing are no more magical than bricklaying. An architect can draw the finest symmetrical buildings and think, like the masons of old, that he or she has connected with some world soul, or at least that the symmetry of their plans is congruent with the laws of the universe. But in fact they are living in a dream world. The reality is bricklaying, practical, messy, and empirical. Architecture is an abstraction from this, not to some more meaningful plane, but to *less* meaning, like a child's toy car next to a real one, or more aptly a child with a toy steering wheel pretending to drive when their parent drives the real car next to them. Architecture is the sum total of abstracting from the real task of building, through discovery of the 3,4,5 triangle for square corners, and the like. So showing and disproving and philosophising sound very well and good but they are only using words out of place to win arguments, like children's playground games where they shout 'you're dead! No, you are, I shot you first! But my toy gun's bigger!' etc. each trying to persuade the other that their words, and not the other's carry more meaning. Thjere is no external structure of logic to compare our thoughts to, only the structure of brain, communicative environment, and past thought which structures the present. (Mornington Crescent really starts to seem like a fundamental critique of all language use). So, while we pretend to be grey-bearded philosophers thinking the sublime and divine the ways of the world's thought, we are in fact no more than monkeys throwing our own shit at each other through the bars of our cages. We've just moved on from shit to vocal utterances. Sometimes not too far at that. Simon W.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird,I may have been over-reading Pannekoek, it's page 445 in the 1961print:

Panekoek wrote:

It can be remarked that the addition of decimals fundamentally changed the charcter of 'magntitude' [of a star — YMS] From a quality, a class, an ordinal number, it has turned into a quantity, a measure, an amount that can be divide by fractions, a basis of measure.  We cannot speak of a star of the 2,87th magnitude; but we can say it's magnitude is 2.78.

Maybe it was just because I knew he had also written on philosophy, but it does read like the application of dialectic (ish) by a practical scientist.  I have to say the idea that being able to measure numerically seems to be a commonplace of defining the advance of a  science. 

[Author]

Posts