Dialectics for beginners (or not)

While I was running today (yes, I'm insane enough to run in this weather), I was thinking about how I might explain dialectics to someone who knows nothing about it. It's actually not that difficult. Most of what follows is from Scott Meikle's Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, though a lot of it comes from things I've read here and there.

Dialectics is a theory about (a) what exists and (b) how it exists. According to dialectics, entities are the sorts of things which exist. They have essences, and those essences are concepts which necessitate the life cycles of those entities.

A lot of words. Let's dig into it a little.

From a dialectical point of view, the basic units of being are entities. This contrasts with atomism, according to which the basic units of being are "atoms" (or quarks or whatever subatomic particles or forces you like). Briefly, atomism is the idea that an entity's being is defined by whatever it is composed of. Let's assume for a moment that there is one, unified theory of all of physics which we have yet to discover. From the point of view of that theory, there is no difference between interstellar dust and a human being. It's all described ultimately by the same laws. Those laws constitute "beingness". There is nothing else to say about being other than what is contained in those mathematical laws.

This contrasts with dialectics. Dialectics starts from an everyday point of view in which things like tables, chairs, supernovae, and days of the week are distinct, real things. To say that a chair can prevent me from falling into the middle of the earth because of quantum chromodynamics is a real, deep insight from the dialectical point of view. It's more than a mere social convention to say that; it's a profound insight into being. However, the macro-reality itself—the medium-sized dry goods like tables, chairs, and stars—exerts its own kind of cause.

To get what dialectics is about, it helps to start with living things. Dialectics isn't a new theory. It's not some weird off-shoot of 19th century thought. It's actually the oldest philosophical theory, going back to Plato, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Buddha, and the Upanishads. The first scientific thoughts about the world all arise in Eurasia along roughly the same line of latitude at roughly the same time. All these thinkers are trying to understand beingness itself, or, what is the same thing for them, living nature. The starting and ending points for them are the same: life.

In keeping with this orientation—and as a means of making dialectics concrete—we could ask: What is a human being?

From an atomistic point of view, there might ultimately be no answer to this question. A human being is a species of living thing, though all biological laws ultimately reduce to physical laws. And the same physical laws govern biological systems as govern non-biological ones. It's all atoms in the void interacting in accordance with very complex mathematical laws. Those laws are abstract, and they're indifferent to their content. It matters little whether we're talking about stellar fusion or getting a suntan. It's all pretty much the same thing.

But dialectics takes a different approach, one more oriented toward common sense. From a dialectical point of view, a human being is not just a species; it is a member of a family, hominidae, which is in turn part of an order, primate, which is in turn part of a kingdom, animalia, which is one of the main branches of life itself.

So whatever it means to be a "human being", to that concept also belongs what it means to (a) be alive, (b) be an animal, (c) be a primate, and (d) be a hominid. The essence of the human is defined, in part, the conceptual hierarchy into which "human" is placed.

Of course, to be a human is more than to be a great ape. According to Aristotle, man is a "reasoning animal", meaning (on one interpretation) he is an animal, but in addition to that he reasons. In a more modern spirit we might add that humans are animals that can know their own thoughts.

What makes up the essence of something is open-ended. One cannot rightfully claim from a dialectical point of view that we have to know, without doubt, the essence of everything. (Quite the opposite.) The point is that macro-entities—the sorts of things we see and deal with every day—are real things, and there is something it really means to be those things. They don't just reduce to their component parts and blend into one another. What something is is its essence, and we can articulate that essence using concepts which are organized into things like genus and species or wholes and parts. Dialectics, therefore, is an essentialist holism.

Now wait a second, you might say. All this sounds very modern—except that we know that living things do not have immutable essences. Human beings did not always exist. They evolved from other life-forms. In fact, they're still evolving—just like every other living thing—in accordance with mechanical laws. So one thing really does bleed into another. Inorganic matter evolved into living matter. Living matter evolved into multicellular organisms. Those evolved into vertebrates and eventually primates. We are primates, and we're evolving into something else. There are no "essences" here, just different states of "matter", whatever that is, transforming into other states of matter.

This is absolutely true, and this is the other insight of dialectics. To be is to be becoming something else.

Think for a moment about what it means to be a human being or really any living thing. Every living thing—or most of them we know about—has a life cycle. It's born, it lives, and it dies. The ancients saw this clearly, and they dealt with it in a number of ways. The essence of any living thing—say, a human being—is just the characteristic way in which it is born, lives, and dies. The Greek word for this was ergon, which we translate as "work". It makes up part of Aristotle's word for being, which was energeia. In other words, to be is to be born, to live, and to die. To be any particular thing is to be born, to live, and to die in the way characteristic of that particular thing. Obviously people are born, live, and die in ways different from how cats or amoeba do it. That's why we say they're different sorts of things.

The ancients did not know about evolution. Neither did Hegel. I'm not going to claim that dialectics somehow entails evolution. It doesn't. But it's not incompatible with it, so far as I can see. In fact, I think that as an ontology, dialectics is more compatible with evolution than atomism. From the dialectical point of view it makes sense to speak about species are real, existing things; and from the dialectical point of view, it makes sense to conceptually specify those beings in terms from their origins (what they evolved from) and their destinations (what they're evolving into).

So there are two directions I could go from here. One would be to talk about society from a dialectical point of view (that is, to talk about society as an organism or something organism-like with an essence); the other is to talk more about humanity itself and its destiny regarding technology. The first path is the typical Aristotlean-Marxist one. The second one hasn't been traversed too much. There are hints of it in Kurzweil's writings. He doesn't deal with things from an explicitly dialectical point of view, but his emphasis on patterns suggests it. I don't think patterns are anything other than essences, that is, concept which are real and which really determine the course some entity follows in its typical life-path. Kurzweil implicitly regards concepts as real. He doesn't seem to be an atomist, in other words, which is part of what drew me into his writings in the first place.

But unfortunately it's late, and this is already very long. Hopefully this gives some idea of what dialectics about. In short, it is essentialist holism. Organic wholes are the things which truly exist. These entities are ultimately their essences. An essence is what a thing truly is. But when we speak of an essence, we really mean the ergon, or the typical life and death of a thing. To be is to have a characteristic way of being born, of living, and of dying. All is in flux, as Heraclitus said; but everything is in flux in its own particular way, as defined by its essence.

Dialectical geekism

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz's article in The Atlantic today, What's Wrong With the American University System, serves as a nice segue from my last post into some more general comments about liberal arts education in a technocratic information society.

[L]iberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.

I'm inclining toward this position, especially since I've found it easy to acquire on my own, for free, the knowledge it took people with CS degrees tens of thousands of dollars to get. Without doubt, there are exceptions; however, it's increasingly the case that knowledge necessary to get technical jobs is available for free on the Internet. You can learn a lot that is practically useful and lucrative as a passionate hobbyist. It seems far more difficult to pick up a comprehensive liberal arts education that way (though I'm sure that's possible for some people, too).

In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about they really what want to do.

What percentage of people really know what they want to do when they're 21 or 22 anyway? I'm 31, and I have to say, I'm overjoyed not to be living out the dreams of 19 year old me! I couldn't imagine being 40 or 50 and living out the plans I made as a kid. It would assume I hadn't learned anything significant enough in that time to cause me to fundamentally change my life, and that prospect seems equally absurd and sad.

How much really valuable research is being done on cancer? When I was at Cornell, Congress announced that they were going to pour a lot of money into cancer research. So a memo went out to the Cornell professors—not just in the sciences, mind you—saying, "Can you take your current research and cancerize it?" There's a lot of that going on. So sociology professors decided to research cancer communications, and so on.

Despite the received wisdom which says the more money we throw at a problem, the more likely it is to be solved, I think the above is more likely true. Solving technical problems is not as easy as increasing funding. Often it seems that problem-solving follows its own trajectory, and too much funding can actually hurt an endeavor. This might seem unrelated, but consider the following quote from Ben Goetzel's article on AI in February's H+:

We were also intrigued to find that most experts didn’t think a massive increase in funding would have a big payoff. Several experts even thought that massive funding would actually slow things down because “many scholars would focus on making money and administration” rather than on research. Another thought “massive funding increases corruption in a field and its oppression of dissenting views in the long term.” Many experts thought that AGI progress requires theoretical breakthroughs from just a few dedicated, capable researchers, something that does not depend on massive funding. Many feared that funding would not be wisely targeted.

One might think, "Yeah, but what does AI research have to do with cancer research?" Medical research is becoming more like an information technology every year. And the remarks about excessive funding leading to corruption and unwise administrative decisions is generalizable to any field. I don't know if this is true. Again, it's just a quote from an anonymous source. But it seems plausible enough and echoes what Hacker and Dreifus are saying.

Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is.

I found this to be my experience when teaching. I was a difficult teacher with plenty of quirks and arbitrary biases. Nevertheless, the reactions of students at the end of each semester were usually positive. They enjoyed being challenged. Challenging a student is different from giving them a hard time. You challenge a student when you engage their mind and help them elevate themselves to a new, more comprehensive perspective. I won't say I was great at this, but given their reactions, I would say I was better at it than the teachers in the impoverished, inner city school districts they were coming from.

All of this raises the question: whither liberal arts education in a technocratic info-culture? I think a liberal arts education has a central role to play in our civilization: that of drawing the mind to a more comprehensive, rational perspective on the whole ethical and political project of our civilization. It's the movement from "How?" type questions (technical solutions to problems) to "Why?" type questions (having to do with the relative to ultimate worth of what we're doing). If one of the main problems with the geek mentality is a tunnel vision which excludes the relevance of things like fairness, justice, and reciprocity, the remedy is to situation our technical pursuits within the broader context of the project of grounding and building the secular institutions of modern society. In other words, I see the point of liberal arts education as similar to the role Hegel assigned philosophy. For this reason I'll playfully call what I'm suggesting "dialectical geekism". (I also like the kitschy allusion to dialectical materialism.)

The Logic of the Commodity

Marx’s aim in the first chapter of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is to interrogate a theory according to which the essence of the commodity consists in its possessing use-value and exchange-value. Something has use-value insofar as it satisfies a particular want or need, and it has exchange-value insofar as one could exchange a quantity of it for a quantity of another thing, irrespective of the particular wants or needs it satisfies. For example, the use-value of a pair of shoes is that they are worn to protect the feet from damage by the ground, they’re comfortable, and they’re fashionable. By contrast, the exchange-value of a pair of shoes is the proportion in which they can be exchanged for another use-value. One pair of good shoes has the same exchange-value as 100 tins of shoe polish or 1/100 a Cadillac. Use-value is primarily (though not solely) a qualitative aspect of the commodity, determined by the particular physical properties it has which satisfy particular physical needs. Exchange-value is primarily (though not solely) quantitative in nature. As Marx says, “Considered as exchange-value, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided the two are available in the appropriate proportion. The exchange-value of a palace can be expressed in a definite number of tins of boot polish.” According to the theory Marx is interrogating, since we now know what use-value and exchange-value are, and since use-value and exchange-value make up the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a commodity, then we now know what the essence of a commodity is.

One might object that Marx's starting point is arbitrary. We have no good reason to believe that use-value and exchange-value make up the essence of a commodity. Indeed, the only support Marx offers in favor of this view is a quote by Aristotle. Marx's starting point succumbs to the fallacy of appeal to authority. Clearly everything that follows from here is invalid.

Yet Marx’s starting point is only provisional. His purpose is not to show that the commodity in fact is use-value and exchange-value simpliciter. Indeed, as Marx proceeds to show in the first chapter and even more emphatically in the second chapter, this view of the commodity as being composed simply of use-value and exchange-value is rife with contradictions, and so the initial appearance the commodity gives off of being composed of exchange-value and use-value cannot be in fact what the commodity is. By developing this inadequate, abstract account of the commodity through its series of contradictions, we can finally arrive at what the commodity in fact is. Therefore, at least for right now, it is not necessary that this account of the commodity be absolutely true, only that it be prima facie true.

So assuming at least provisionally that the commodity really has two aspects, use-value and exchange-value, it follows that the labor that produces the commodity must also have two aspects, one qualitative, the other quantitative. A shoe has use-value because it is made of leather, rubber, and thread, materials capable of withstanding the normal wear and tear of walking. The labor required to make a pair of shoes consists in cutting and shaping rubber and cutting and sewing leather. This labor is qualitatively different from the kind of labor that goes into making a jacket, a car, or even a pair of sneakers. Just as when we consider commodities in terms of their respective use-values each appears qualitatively different from another, so too does the labor which creates the commodity qua use-value appear qualitatively different from other forms of labor which produce other use-values. Therefore, qua use-value, a commodity is materialized particular labor.

Yet in order to consider the commodity solely in terms of its exchange-value, we have to abstract completely from its use-value. It does not matter that shoes are for walking and palaces are for habitation by princes; considered solely in terms of their exchange-value, we can measure the value of a palace in terms of pairs of shoes. But this means we must abstract from everything qualitative in the commodity, including the labor that produced it. “As exchange-values in which the qualitative difference between their use-values is eliminated, they represent equal amounts of the same kind of labour. The labour which is uniformly materialised in them must be uniform, homogeneous, simple labour; it matters as little whether this is embodied in gold, iron, wheat or silk, as it matters to oxygen whether it is found in rusty iron, in the atmosphere, in the juice of grapes or in human blood.” Just as when we consider commodities in terms of their respective exchange-values each commodity appears to represent an identical, quantitative proportion to other commodities, so too does the labor which creates exchange-value appear as mere concatenations of identical units of simple labor. Qua exchange-value, a commodity is materialized abstract, general labor.

At this point one might object that Marx’s argument for the exchange-value of the commodity rests upon the validity of the labor theory of value. Classical political economists came up with the labor theory of value in order to explain the value of commodities in terms of the labor-time that was contained in them, but allegedly neo-classical economics has since shown that the labor theory of value is incoherent. Surely we cannot trust anything Marx says beyond this point, because his entire theory of value is infected by an antiquated notion of value.

And yet again it is necessary to point out that the essence of the commodity Marx is constructing here is not the one Marx intends to hold to without qualification. Marx adopts this model not because he thinks it is the correct model of the commodity.; on the contrary, he adopts it in order to show that it is inherently contradictory and therefore cannot be a self-sufficient description of what the commodity in fact is. Again, all that is required at this point is that the essence of the commodity appear prima facie true, not that it in fact be absolutely true. This is not the foundation upon which Marx intends to construct his theory; rather, it is the view of the commodity which appears (or appeared in Marx’s time) to be immediately correct and which Marx intends to show is in fact not true in the unqualified sense in which its proponents take it to be. That the commodity is simply use-value and exchange-value, individual labor and general labor, is assumed from the start in order to expose its contradictions and lead us to a more concrete, more adequate account of the essence of the commodity.

With that in mind, let us now more closely examine this account of the commodity, specifically as it appears in action. Assuming the commodity really is just the unity of use-value and exchange-value, could it ever fulfill the function of an actual commodity that we find out in the world, like a loaf of bread? That is, if the loaf of bread were just use-value and exchange-value, materialized particular labor and materialized general labor, would the bread in fact ever be eaten or exchanged? If not, then we know this cannot in fact be what a commodity is like. It must be like something else.

Immediately after producing the commodity, the commodity is both a use-value and not a use-value. It is a use-value insofar as it has properties that potentially satisfy human needs, but it is not a use-value insofar as the one initially in possession of the commodity will not use it to satisfy his needs. For example, if the bread in the bakery were tasty to the baker, he would eat it. But if he ate it, it would not be a commodity, since commodities are produced to be exchanged for other commodities of equal exchange-value. Instead, the bread is a means of exchange for the baker, a means to his livelihood. It is something he can sell. The “use” of the bread to the baker is that it can be sold. So at this point, no one has yet regarded the bread as a use-value. The commodity in the shop has yet to become a use-value.

To become a use-value, the commodity has to encounter the particular need it satisfies (in this case, hunger for bread). So to become a use-value, the commodity has to switch hands, say, from the hands of the baker to the hands of the man who wants to make a sandwich. In order to switch hands, it must be exchanged. In order to be exchanged, the commodity must be an exchange-value. In order to be an exchange-value, both parties involved in the transaction have to abstract from its use-value and consider it purely quantitatively, in terms of its price. Marx calls this abstraction from all use-value of the commodity the “alienation of the commodity”. Only by means of alienation (by not considering it a use-value at all) does the commodity become a use-value (since that is the condition under which it can be exchanged and fall into the hands of someone who will use it). Only by abstracting from the use-value of bread (i.e., that it can be eaten) does the bread ever really become eaten. So under capitalism, only by being exchange-values do commodities ever become use-values.

Our view of the commodity has already undergone significant revision from our first take on it. We initially regarded the commodity as simply being the unity of exchange-value and use-value. Use-value was something a commodity had by virtue of its ability to satisfy human wants and desires, and this ability seemed to be based solely in its immediate, physical properties. But when we look at actual commodity production and exchange under capitalism, we find this is not the case. In fact, the commodity is not a use-value at the beginning of its existence but rather has to become one by means of exchange. Only once the commodity has passed into the hands of the consumer does it finally become a use-value. Therefore, what initially appeared to be a freestanding property of the commodity is actually a property that is “mediated”. It is a property that comes into being only by means of a social process in and through which it is “alienated” from itself.

At this point it appears as though a commodity becomes a use-value only by means of being an exchange-value, but we have already seen that a commodity has exchange-value only because it is materialized labor-time. Yet the particular commodity (say, our loaf of bread again) only comes into existence and subsists in this world by means of particular labor. The loaf of bread is not “just any” loaf of bread. It is this particular loaf of semolina wheat bread on this particular shelf of this Italian bakery in Hoboken, NJ. A loaf of bread is materialized individual labor, not materialized universal labor-time. But the commodity has exchange-value only insofar as it is materialized universal labor-time. Therefore, the commodity is not yet an exchange-value.

Now our view of the commodity has undergone yet another shift. A moment ago we treated the commodity as though just by virtue of sitting in the baker’s shop, it was an exchange-value, and by virtue of being an exchange-value, it could become a use-value. But now it appears as though the commodity is not immediately exchange-value, either. The commodity has yet to become exchange-value. But the commodity which has yet to become an exchange-value or a materialization of universal labor-time (in this case, a loaf of semolina wheat bread in a shop in Jersey), is a particular existing object. Bakers don’t create “just any” loaves of bread. All loaves of bread which are to become exchange-values are particular, actually existing loaves of bread, produced by particular people under particular circumstances. This is the only sort of thing that can have a price. But what we have just described is a use-value. So only something which is a use-value can become an exchange-value.

Our analysis of the commodity as the unity of exchange-value and use-value has led us in a circle. To be exchanged, commodities must have exchange-value, but commodities don’t immediately have exchange-value just by virtue of existing in the baker’s shop. They have to become exchange-values. To become exchange-values, commodities must be materialized universal labor-time. The only thing that can embody universal labor-time is a particular thing, a use-value. But commodities are not immediately use-values, either. In order to be use-values, they have to be exchanged. But to be exchanged… etc.

Our analysis of the commodity has led us not only to a circle in which exchange-value and use-value presuppose one another; it has also led us to a contradiction. As use-values, commodities are inherently unequal with one another. A bottle of water does not fulfill the same exact need as a loaf of bread or even a different bottle of water. And yet as exchange-values, commodities must be equal to one another, since it is possible to express the value of a loaf of bread in terms of the value of a bottle of water. To become equitable (to become exchange-values), commodities must first become unequal: to become an exchange-value, a commodity has first to be a use-value. But once the commodity becomes a use-value, it cannot be exchanged, since being a use-value includes being qualitatively different from other things. But qualitatively different things are not equitable (and so cannot be exchange-values). But to become unequal (use-values), commodities have to be exchanged, since the commodity is not immediately a use-value (to its producer). The commodity only becomes a use-value in the hands of its consumer. So in order to be unequal (use-values), commodities have to be equal (exchange-values) and vice versa. This is the contradiction inherent in the commodity considered as the unity of use-value and exchange-value.

At this point Marx invites us to ask ourselves what would have to change in this account of the commodity in order to allow the commodity to be what it purports to be. Let’s imagine for a second that the commodity already made the salto mortale, that it made it through the process of exchange and passed from the baker’s hands into the hungry man’s stomach. What would have allowed that to come about? The answer, says Marx, is money.

Money resolves the contradiction inherent in the commodity by allowing the commodity to transform from a use-value into an exchange-value and vice- versa. This is because money is a commodity that itself serves as a “universal equivalent” or a “universal commodity”. Its use-value is that it is a measure of the exchange-value of other commodities. The commodity starts as a use-value in the baker’s shop. The baker attaches a price to the commodity. This price is a hypothetical exchange-value of the commodity, what Marx refers to as a nominal price. The baker takes the bread to market with this nominal price in the hope of attracting money with it. Once the exchange takes place, the nominal price transforms into a real price, i.e., the bread is exchanged for actual cash. The commodity has “proved” it was really that price. (If it doesn’t get exchanged, nothing was proved.) The bread has now proved itself to really have this abstract value attached to it (its real price), and as a result, the particular labor which went into the production of the bread proves itself to have really been in fact abstract general labor. Contrariwise, from the side of the consumer, the bread is now able to prove itself as use-value.

Without any details (I’ll provide them in a future post), this account of how money resolves the contradiction inherent in the commodity is murky, but it is still possible to get the general idea of what has happened. The commodity was allegedly the simple unity of use-value and exchange-value. These were purported to be two properties immediately inhering in the commodity, apart from any complex social process. Yet we saw that if we assumed this to be the case, we were forced to assume that one and the same thing was both particular and general at the same time and in the same respects. Money did not fully eliminate this contradiction. On the contrary, one and the same object (the loaf of bread) is still both particular and general. Yet it is no longer particular and general at the same time and in the same respect. Money comes between these two properties of the commodity so that the commodity can be exchange-value at one point, use-value at another. Therefore the essence of the commodity is not simply use-value and exchange-value, but neither is the essence simply not use-value and exchange-value. The essence of the commodity is revealed in the process of exchange. This is the “social metabolism” of the essence of the commodity, and it requires money.

Kant and Positivism

Bourgeois philosophy similarly fails to synthesize and grasp the totality and to get at the concrete, historical conditions of possibility of our existence. This is seen most perspicaciously where bourgeois philosophy is at its most radical and “critical”: in the thought of Kant. While the skeptic accepts the rationalist standard of knowledge (representation of mind-independent reality) but denies its possibility, Kant denies the rationalist standard of knowledge, limiting philosophical reflection to knowledge of the conditions of the possibility of experience. In this turn toward the transcendental (subjective, a priori) conditions of the possibility of knowledge lies Kant’s radicalism. And yet Kant’s philosophical enterprise exemplifies the antinomies of bourgeois thought because it stands in the same relationship to reality as do the special sciences.

In his “Copernican” turn, Kant displaces the conditions of knowledge from nature or from God on to the knowing subject. So instead of talking about substances represented, we're going to talk about representations and the (universal, necessary, and subjective) conditions of representation. Instead of talking about categories as predicates of objects, we're going to talk about categories as (universal and necessary) forms of the thinking of objects. Instead of talking about God as the maker of the underlying order of the universe, we're going to talk about the subject (universally and necessarily) ordering the manifold of perception. All these processes of representing, categorizing, synthesizing, etc., are universal and necessary (and hence a priori) conditions of the possibility of having experience of objects. This is precisely what Kant means when he uses the term “transcendental”.

Now in making this shift, Kant is arguing that the subject of knowledge (considered formalistically, that is, from a universal, abstract perspective) brings to the knowing situation specific forms of knowledge that serve a foundational role for the knowing situation. Therefore, those forms of knowledge are conditions of the possibility of knowledge. For Kant, these are space, time, and the categories. What the object is outside of its subjection to these forms of knowledge, we cannot know for certain, since the application of those forms is the sine qua non of something being an object of knowledge in the first place. So Kant doesn't deny that ultimate reality outside of these forms exists; he just denies that such an object is accessible to the kind of knowledge that we finite knowers have.

Given this shift, it is easy to see why the upshot of Kant's Copernican turn is the denial of our ability to know things as they are in themselves. We can never know the material, causal substratum of our concepts—the content of our categories and empirical concepts—since that's a mere "X" lying outside our forms of knowledge. And we can never know "totality", the ultimate object of philosophical knowledge, because the application of our categories is always restricted to mere appearances. We have to "bracket in" both of them.

In restricting knowledge to appearances, to what appears within the horizon of human cognition, Kant suppresses totality. This is the subject of the Antinomies of Pure Reason: every attempt by reason to ascend from a mere synthesis of appearance according to the understanding to a final synthesis of all conditions of the understanding by reason has to result in dialectical illusion. Furthermore, Kant brackets in the material (or immaterial) substratum of thought—the ultimate source of the content of our categories and empirical concepts—and he makes the categories into brute products of our unintelligible spontaneity. So you get a double-bracketing of totality and self. This corresponds to the third moment of the positivism effect, or the idea that the underlying, concrete reality lies methodologically and in principle beyond our grasp.

Since what we know we only know by virtue of applying our categories to the knowing situation, what something is before it enters into this knowing situation must be a mere "X", an indeterminate, value-neutral "given". This corresponds to the first moment of the positivism effect, according to which the data of the social sciences are "natural", value-neutral givens.

Finally, since according to Kant we are barred from knowing the subject of knowledge (the spontaneous self), the ultimate object of knowledge (totality), and the material basis of knowledge (the thing in itself), knowledge can perfect itself only through methodological refinement. This barring of knowledge from self-consciousness corresponds to the second moment of the positivism effect.

The opposite of Kant’s position would be to argue that objects cannot remain inviolate in their givenness. That is, concepts can't be empty universals under which we subsume irrational particulars. That's the first moment of the positivism effect. But to reverse this means that the phenomena themselves, the "data" of our experience, can't be value-neutral, "natural", mere givens. The reality we confront as standing over and against us has to include some determinacy of its own outside whatever our formalistic methodology tells us about it, and there must be some way for us to disclose that determinacy as well, for it to enter into our experience. This means that our concepts must be able to penetrate into the objects themselves with no irrational remainder. In other words, the content of the experience must also be determinable through and through.

Furthermore, this material basis cannot enter experience by means of a contemplative, knowing relationship without falling back on a representational, subjective point of view. The radicalism of Kant’s position lies in his account of agency: we know by virtue of our activity (acts of synthesis and the like). Yet Kant attempts to understand this agency through a representational framework. That is what ultimately makes his position bourgeois and contemplative. So by saying that in knowing we're active, Kant says we're embodied agents in the world, but then he withdraws that when he tries to make it function within a representational framework. If we can only know what we have made, if this is some version of maker's knowledge, then we need a more serious understanding of human beings as makers or determiners of the world. We need that framework of radical activity but now liberated from the contemplative stance, from a representational framework. That's what's at stake in the idea that the unity of the world is not the unity of judgment (since judgment is a way of representing) but is rather a unity of action and deed. It is at this point that Kantian critical philosophy meets dialectics as exemplified in Hegel’s account of Lordship and Bondage.

Marx's "Method" (work in progress)

Like the rest of the introduction to the Grundrisse, the third section is both abstract and difficult. Nothing in Capital is as hard to slog through, simply because Marx is presenting here in vague outline what he intends to fill in later. Nevertheless, some of what he says here is intriguing, and it's gotten me thinking about the subject of Marx's so-called "method".

My thesis is that almost none of what Marx says here is important. It's misleading to believe that reading this will prepare you to read Marx's Capital. If Marx felt it was necessary to introduce his readers to his method before presenting to them the arguments of Capital, he would have included a methodological introduction, like many philosophers before him had done, and as many bourgeois economists today, Paul Samuelson included, do. But Marx deliberately did not include an introduction in any of the editions of Capital. The theoretical introduction of the Grundrisse does not make it into the final copy of Capital. Granted, he remarks in the Afterward to the second German edition that he is "inverting" Hegel's dialectic, standing it up on its feet, but there's no systematic exposition of this approach that would put it on the same level of scientific precision as one encounters in the body of the work.

At times Marx makes it appear as though there is a Marxist "methodology" separate from the actual concrete phenomena he analyzes in his work. Engels did much to extend the so-called “dialectical method” from the sphere of political economy and generalize it into a broad account of both nature and society. Lenin was highly influenced by such formalistic accounts, and no one less than Trotsky wrote an essay on the "ABC's of Material Dialectics".

The problem with presenting such a method as a fact accomplished prior to the science itself is that it is susceptible to skepticism. As such, there have been both socialist and bourgeois critics of dialectical method. None other than Eduard Bernstein, Engels's personal secretary, attempted to rescue scientific Marxism from the mysticism of Hegelian dialectics in his 1899 The Preconditions of Socialism (see chapter 2 especially). Since traditional, orthodox Marxists see dialectics as providing the teleological framework through which to understand the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its “supersession” by communism, it's no accident that Bernstein's rejection of dialectics goes hand-in-hand with his embrace of reformism. Socialism will not come about as a result of the inevitable collapse of capitalism, according to Bernstein; rather, socialism will occur under capitalism once the proletariat attains for itself a more just share of surplus. Bernstein adds the Marx stamp of approval to this position at the beginning of his book when he quotes Marx as saying, "Hence the Ten Hours' Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of the principle." The realization of the political “principle” of Marxism is none other than the concrete condition under which the life of the proletariat as a class is made empirically more tolerable through the larger portion of surplus distributed to working individuals. (Bernstein's socialism has been the most influential, far surpassing Lenin’s.) Bourgeois critics usually find nothing but either metaphysics or mathematics in Capital. The metaphysics they dismiss without further adieu, and so they spend the rest of their time pointing out what a buffoon Marx was for having improperly formulated labor as a series of simultaneous equations rather than linear equations, etc. Outside of metaphysics, there is nothing but positivism.

The assumption shared by both socialist and bourgeois critics of Marx's method is that the rejection of dialectical formalism entails empiricism. Reformist socialists like Bernstein, who see in dialectics nothing more than the imminent, messianic coming of communism, are led through their rejection of it to assume that the only scientific socialism worthy of the name must concentrate exclusively on improving the concrete living conditions of the working classes, increasing their share of distribution, and expanding their consumption. But the Bernsteinian approach is similar in essential ways to the approach of bourgeois economists who also reject "metaphysics" in favor of what is observable and measurable. Moreover, bourgeois economists since Adam Smith have long argued that free markets negotiated by owners of private property would yield the fastest possible growth of production. This in turn would enable social peace and a rising standard of living. Nowhere has Smith's prophecy enjoyed more relevance than in the United States, whose working class has reaped the benefits of increased consumption since the 19th century. By concentrating almost exclusively on improving the standard of living of the proletariat, reformist socialists in the tradition of Bernstein have played directly into the hands of the bourgeoisie. They have demanded from capitalism the one thing capitalism has turned out to be very good at providing. (For more on this, see Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, "Exploitaton, Consumption, and the Uniqueness of US Capitalism”, Historical Materialism, volume 11:4 (209-226).)

All of this might lead one to believe that one must either embrace materialist dialectics as the proper method of political economy, or one must embrace the method of bourgeois economics or reformism. But Marx did not understand things this way. He neither begins Capital with a systematic statement of his methodology, nor does he advocate bourgeois economics or reformism. How does Marx proceed, then, and what makes his way of proceeding differ from the method of bourgeois economics generally? If we answer this question, we can figure out what it means that Marx has a "dialectical" way of proceeding, but going the other way will never help us. That is, we can't understand Marx beforehand by figuring out what "dialectics" is and then reading the book. The latter would assume that Marx has a method which he is then going to apply to the object, economics, the way a biologist might have a scientific method which she then applies to a living thing. But as it turns out, Marx questions the relationship between thought and its object that is assumed by this approach. Adopting a thoroughly Marxist perspective will require one not only to see capitalism differently, but also to see the relationship between thought and object überhaupt differently.

To begin, we might consider two ways in which we can "ground" our inquiry: in facts or in abstractions. In the third section of the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx refers to the former as "concrete particulars" and the latter as "abstract ideas". In political economy, an example of a concrete particular might be something like division of labor, the price of a commodity, exchange, etc. These are all observable, simple, measurable phenomena. An example of an abstract idea might be population, society, etc. These are things which, if we abstract from the particular things determining them like classes, etc., are very general ideas which we could apply to a vast multiplicity of human organizations.

Two questions arise from this dichotomy: (1) where do we begin, and (2) what is the foundation upon which political economy rests? Do we begin from very simple phenomena like exchange or actual consumption of goods in one place and build up general theories by means of an inductive method, or do we start from general ideas like society and population, things which are common to all societies, and derive possible ways of being social or being economic out of them? That's the question of beginning. But what are the basic laws or categories we're going to produce by means of this method? Will they belong only to particular societies, or can we generalize them to all societies? What can we say about the people who participate in societies? Do they have properties belonging intrinsically to them? Can we base our economics on those properties? In general, what are the basic, most foundational predicates for economics, and what grounds their universality and necessity?

Many believe Marx proceeds in a basically inductive, linear fashion. According to this interpretation, Marx starts with an observable fact (the existence of commodities) and breaks that fact down into its atoms: use-value, exchange-value, and value. He disregards use-value as irrelevant. Exchange-value on its own is incapable of telling us anything about capitalism. This leads him to construct a proper foundation for his analysis of capitalism: the labor theory of value. This is the building block upon which he will construct everything else, the Archimedean point from which we can learn everything we need to know about capitalism. This in turn is founded upon Marx's insight that all history is the history of class struggle. The labor theory of value is true, because it expresses class relations under capitalism. (See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Chapter 1.)

The great thing about this interpretation of Marx—aside from the fact that it turns Marx into a convenient popinjay for bourgeois economists and, therefore, for undergraduates—is that it fits in nicely with the way we expect theorists to proceed. Marx begins with a visible phenomenon—the commodity—and analyzes it into its components. He proceeds by means of analysis to discover a secure principle upon which to base the rest of his inquiry, and he uses that foundation to construct a theory of capitalism. Because Marx proceeds in such a straightforward, linear, analytical fashion, it's easy for us to see right away that Marx's foundation, his theory of value, is wrong. He's going to base the rest of his theory on a wrong foundation, so we can stop right here and not bother ourselves with the rest of what he says.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, Marx never argues that the commodity, the value theorem, or anything else serves or can serve as the foundation of a critique of political economy. It's true that Marx considers the commodity to be the material embodiment of use-value, exchange-value, and value, and that we have to understand these concepts if we're going to understand anything at all about capitalism. And yet, in order to fully understand these concepts, according to Marx, we already need to know the inner logic of capitalism itself. So what appears at first to be an a priori beginning to the inquiry, or what appears at least to begin with some elemental "givens", is actually no "beginning" at all in the strict sense of the term. Marx begins in medias res, in the middle of things. (See Harvey, ibid.)

What appears as an origin or a given is really a result of a complex process, and it is the job of the critique of political economy to reproduce in thought the complex process that brought about this result. Yet we cannot reconstruct this process simply by looking at the order in which phenomena arise in time. As Marx argues in the third section of the introduction to the Grundrisse, although phenomena like money and property appear at the beginning of civilization, their character under capitalism is entirely different. Therefore, no foundation in history, as a mere concatenation of events in the order in which they occurred, is available to us. Furthermore, we cannot reconstruct this process by going back to a more fundamental principle (like some take the labor theory of value to be), because, according to Marx, the only way we can understand anything else going on in capitalism is by means of the inner structure of the commodity. And those atoms themselves which make up the commodity—use-value, exchange-value, and value—cannot be understood except in relation to one another. So we cannot understand what exchange-value is abstracted from use-value and value. We cannot understand value without thinking about it in terms of exchange-value and use-value. We cannot understand use-value except in terms of exchange-value and value. No concept can be understood in isolation, as the foundation of all the others.

So in answer to the question—Does Marx begin from concrete particulars (like actual commodities or particular events in history), or does he begin from abstract ideas (like the labor theory of value or Hegelian metaphysics)?—we reject the premise. The premise is that there is any "given" one can begin from. But it is the very idea of a "given" which Marx rejects. Theoretical insight into capitalism comes about not through the linear construction of a theory on a foundation but rather through the process of thinking the relations that make up the capitalist mode of production.

We must use insights garnered from one standpoint to throw light upon another. Looked at from the perspective of use-value, capitalism will look one way. Then we shift perspectives and look at it from the point of view of value, and it looks another. Then we move to another perspective, keeping in mind what we already saw, and applying it to this perspective. In light of what we see now, we revise what we already saw in order to come to a fuller understanding of what capitalism and its contradictions are.

We don't make our account of capitalism concrete by having the right starting point. The concrete comes about as a result of moving between perspectives and revising our current and previous interpretations in light of what we have already seen and are currently seeing. This is why in the third section of the introduction to the Grundrisse, we come to that which is concrete not at the beginning, but only by breaking down population and building it back up again. Then and only then is population “determinate”. But this is a result of analysis, not a given.

And this is the way people normally go about learning things. It's rare that one perspective on the world turns out to be entirely wrong, and even if it is wrong, we don't simply throw away what we had. Rather, we revise our beliefs on the basis of the shortcomings of our previous view on things, and we come up with a new account of the phenomenon that takes into account and makes up for our previous errors. In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel called this process of learning "determinate negation". It is the essence of dialectics, and it is something nearly every reasonable person practices on a day-to-day basis.

Although rejecting the “myth of the given” gets us out of the dichotomy of empiricism and mysticism, it is still not enough to bring us to a concrete understanding of Marx’s actual dialectical procedure. This is because one can reject foundationalism but still reject dialectics. Indeed, most forms of pragmatism follow just such a path. Since Marxist praxis is often confused with pragmatism, a closer look at pragmatism will help us see better what is distinctive in dialectics.

Philosophical pragmatism has taken a few forms, but in general it is the view that the truth consists in the agreement qualified scientists reach about some phenomenon or proposition—or—the test of truth is its practical value for the achievement of human ends. Pragmatism differs from positivism in its assertion of the unity of fact and value. We can form no conception of philosophical “Truth” abstracted from human values. There is no cognition that is not relative to the human, practical perspective. Pragmatism follows dialectics in its rejection of foundationalism—we cannot base our theories on “sense particulars” or static universals, because what counts as a particular or a universal is relative to what we value collectively or what “works” best for our purposes. It also follows dialectics in its insistence upon seeing an underlying relation between people where there appears to be a relationship between things. However, it differs from dialectics where it insists that cognition remain at the level of apparent reality, at the level of what we can manipulate or what simply works. Any philosophy that asks us to accept the role of science as the careful recording of facts chooses to leave the world mystified. By subjectivizing the relationship between subject and object, it leaves the question of our historical development aside, and so it becomes the willing instrument of the prevailing system of power.

By contrast, dialectics starts from a recognition of our own partiality rather than a methodological distrust of our means of getting at “Truth”. The partisanship of critical philosophy—Marx’s included—stems from its goal: the reconstruction of society on the basis of non-exploitative relations between persons. Self-directing, self-conscious human beings will be at the center of this society, not objects. And this brings us to the positive core of dialectics: the idea that the perceived world itself is a product of human activity. What we call “nature” is in fact humanized nature.

Therefore, to call Marx's dialectical way of proceeding a "method" is misleading. There really is no positive doctrine here, nothing that is accepted at the beginning as an accomplished fact, and certainly nothing on the order of what Engels referred to as the "unity of opposites" or the "negation of the negation". We can define dialectics negatively as the rejection of a "given". Positively, the core of dialectics consists in the idea that the world of perception is a product of human activity. There is nothing our senses or our intellects are in touch with immediately, tout court. We can adopt foundational or transcendental perspectives provisionally as a means of getting inquiry off the ground, but, as Wittgenstein says, we climb up the ladder only to throw it away when we're done. There is no beginning which in and of itself is not already a result. We start in the middle of things, trying to figure out what is going on around us. We can achieve a scientific perspective on capitalism, but we achieve that orientation as a result of the inquiry, not as something at the beginning.