logicp_writings/new/Hegel_OS.md

Requires Praxis

Praxis is what you have when you combine theory, Hegelian Reason as we're going to see, critical theory, postmodern theory, woke theory, Theory Put into practicecombined with being put into rpactice activism on behalf of theoretical or ideological model

negative thinking and do activism on behlaf of it. ngeative thinking becomes positive, because it prevents us from going into calamities that are contained within a seed of the future that can possibly be blossomed

Perfected society - we have the seeds of it and wej ust have to peel away the problems and the other society emerges

Communims doesn't know how -> alchemical

We see that to understand both leftism and also Hegel's relevance to that, we have to grapple with the dialectic. This

OPerating System

the operating system behind leftism at least since hegel's time leftism from the progressive school of thought that followed him young hegelianism Young Hegelianism distinguished from old hegelianism it's difficult to decipher Hegel radically different interpretations of him exist, erupting in the later years of and death

Differences Between Young and Old Hegelianism

• young = progressive
• old = ultra conservative

briefly: philosophy describing emergence of a perfected state through perfection of ideas young hegelians looked at worl dthey lived in and said we're no tthere yet Prussians all sorts of contradictiosn in our experience old hegelians, conservatives, looked at state they live in and said aha we're already there dialectic had already achieved what it aimed to be

Prussia

already had realized itself and emerged in prussia at the time, which demanded that history had ended.. History. No change is needed from this historical high-point. Mid 19th century Prussia

• Young Hegelians are distinguished because they looked at this old hegelian idea and said NO there's too many problems there
• Karl Marx was a Young Hegelian, and influenced by other thinkers too

Dialectic Origins

Kant develops the Dialectic, Ficta developed it further, then Shelling and Hegel, etc.. Nevertheless, Marx was a young Hegelian, and we can understand the centrality of the dialectical application to Marx by going to the Marxist.org glossary. (Great resource to see how the Marxists themselves want their own people to think about their own terms)see how the marxists ddefine their own terms. The woke are different from the Marxists, but this gives us historical insight

Marxist description of Hegel

• MOST Important representative of classical german philosophy
• represented an objective idealism and a brilliant investigator of the laws of dialectic, and he was the first to apply
• Dialectical application is what Marx turned into Dialectical materialism
• the mode by which Marxism progressed and though their article of faith (dialectical materialism)

Kant established the structure of the dialectic, developed further by Ficta, and then through both hegel and shelling, Marx was able to take these ideas and put his own spin on it

• Hegel took the theoretical Dialectic and made it practical: the first to consciously apply, and he did this ironically or not ironically
• abstract - negative - concrete
• Take the abstract, challenge it against its negative, to arrive at a concrete applicable form - apply it to the changing of society

Philosophical

Kant performed a philosophical endeavour - something going on like how Socrates would have engaged Kant and Ficta who really initiated the philosophical idea compare the ideas against one another and find the flaws to find what we're missing and achieve a better understanding philosophers use this approach - a dialectical approach that's abstract on the other hand, hegel had this idea that we'd use this to create a better society

Applicable

change society using the dialectic and studying the ideas and the shape of the state and the spirit that it generates he figured out how to apply it so he brings the laws of dialectic into application - Praxist begins with Hegel Marx renames it after having adopted it and doing a number of things to it CENTRAL TO MARXISM - this dialectic central to all of the left, since marx, is Marxism so the dialectic is the underriding operating system for the past 200 years

Engels/Marx according to Marxist.org

taking fom Marxist.org - > they quote Engels and Marx on this idea Engels wrote in his review of Marx's critique of poltiical economy - "The Hegelian method, on the other hand, was in its existing form quite inapplicable." "it wasn't good enough - even the now applied form of the dialectic is still too unapplicable it was essentially idealist - the elaboration of a world outlook that was more materialist than any previous one"

hegels method took as its point of departure pure thought built here the starting point should be inexorable facts Marxist Communism vs Hegelian dialectic we're not engaging at the realm of pure thought, but at inexorable facts came from nothing through nothing to nothing this was by no means appropriate here in this form (the here and now the political eceonomy0 nevertheless all of the available material - it was the only piece that could be used as a starting point (for what Marx wantaed to do). It had not been criticized or overcome. Fell into oblivian because Hegelian school hadn't the slightest idea of what to do with it. We had to subject the method to growing criticism. What distinguished Hegel's thought from that of all other Philosophers was the tremendous sense of the historical upon which it was based. Abstract and idealist as it was in form, yet the development of his thoughts always proceed parallel with the development of world history. The latter is the test of the former."

Historicist

Dialectic is the thing that is moving history.

"If by the real relation it was inverted and stood on its head, nevertheless, the real content entered everywhere into the philosophy, all the more so since Hegel, in contrast to his disciples, did not parade ignorance, and was one of the finest intellectuals of all time. He was the first to show development and inner coherence in history, and while today much in his philosphy of history might seem peculiar to us, the grandeur of his fundamental outlook is admirable even today."

"regardless of who you compare him with, his phenomenology, aesthetics, history of philosophy - magnificent conception of history prevails and everywhere the material is treated historically in a definite, even in if abstracted interconnection with history."

Theories concentrate themselves - what we need to do is to take Hegel and concentrate him through critique. (Apply the dialectic to the dialectic). Critical Theory was to come later.

"This epic making conception of history was the direct theoretical premise for the new materialist outlook, and this alone provides a connecting point for the logical method too. Since this forgotten dialectic has lead to such results, even from the standpoint of pure thinking, and had in addition so easily settled accounts with all preceding logic and metaphysics, there must be at any rate have been more to it than sophistry and hair-splitting." Schopenhaur woudl have criticized it as sophistry.

"But the criticism of his method, with all of its official philsophy, had fought shy of and was no trifle".

Big fan of historicism and that Hegel brought forward very important ideas, such as the Dialectic, but it wasn't correct in its formulation. If it's standing on its head it has to be righted. (Marx wrote that).

Marx critiques Hegel's dialectic

"My dialectic is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, ie the process of thinking (which under the name of the idea), he even transforms into an independent subject. The demi-urgos of teh real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of the idea. "

For Hegel, there's the idea, which is what's going on for rea, and then the world becomes an image of the idea."

Marx says "That's upset down". We ahve to look at the real world and go from there.

The ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx might be right about this)

"The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hand by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of workign in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him, it is standing on its head. It must be turned right-side up again if you are to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

• Dialectic central, but Marx and Engels not happy with how it's been formulated (focusing on the ideal instead of the material).
• The structure of Hegel's dialectic applied to Hegel's dialectic. Framed as the abstract, as Hegel did to Kant's formjulation of dialectic.
• Has to be made more material

Dialectical materialism for Marx, through dialectic of the dialectic. A new view, which is the progression of history (according to Marxist.org)

Dialectic Focus

Central to Engel, Hegel and Marx. Feuerbach tutored Marx on Dialectics. Operating system of the left operates on itself to evolve itself.

Hegel to Kant Marx and Engels to Hegel => receive dialectical materialism -> the essence of Marxism

Dialectic (on Marxist.org)

"It was hegel, who was able to sum up this picture of universal connection and mutability of things in a system of logic which was the foundation of what we today call. As Engels put it "The whole world, natnural historical intellectual, is represented as a process - that is, as in constant motion, change, transformation, development - and the attempt is made to trace-out the internal connection, that makes a continuous whole of all of this movement and development."

It was in the decade after Hegel's death in the 1840s, when Hegel's popularity was at its peak in Germany, that Marx and Engels met and worked out the foundations of their critique of bourgeoious society. Hegel's radical young followers had in their hands a powerful critical tool, the dialectic, with which they ruthlessly criticized Christianity, the dominant doctrine of the day (something Hegel's was interested in as well, wanted to establish a folk-based German religion which escaped the Orientalism of Christianity which he felt had been foisted upon Germany inappropriately. The young hegelians really felt this way and ruthlessly criticized Christianity using the dialectic).

However, one of these young Hegelians, ludwig feurbach, pointed out that holy family was after all only a heavenly image of the earthly family, and that by criticizing theology with philosophy, the younger hegelians were only doing the same thing as the Christians. Hegel's absolute idea was just another name for God. For Feurbach, ideas were a reflection of the material world and he held it to be ridiculous that an idea could determine the world. Feurbach had declared himself a Materialist.

Marx and Engels began as supporters of Feurbach. However, very soon, they took up an opposition to Feurbach, to restore the HEgelian Dialectic that had been abandonned by Feurbach. To free it from the rigidity of the idealistic Hegelian system and place the method upon a materialist basis."

The dialectic applied to the dialectic itself - amazing.

"Hegel was an idealist - to him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but conversely, the processes and the things in their evolution were only their realized pictures of the idea. Existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down and completely reversed the actual connections between things in the world.

Thus, for Marx and Engels, thoughts were not passive and independent reflections of the material world, but products of human labour. The contradictory nature of our thoughts had their origin and contradictions within human society. This meant the dialectics was not something imposed upon the world from outside, which could be discovered by the activity of pure reason, but was the product of humna labour changing the world. Its form was changed and developed by people and could only be understood by the practical struggle to overcome these contradictions, not just in thought, but in practice."

Hegel puts forth this dialectic which he has dialectically derived from Kant, and using the vehicle of the young Hegelians, we now have Marx and Engels trying to turn this materialist, and they actually are, in fact, dropping in a dialectic on the dialectic again and transforming it into something else, and the thing which comes out of this is the dialectical materialism which, Marx said, stands Hegel on his head. We have firmly established the line from Hegel, to the young Hegelians, to Marx and Marxism and the Marxists themselves, obviously, still support this because they write about this in this particular way on their website today.

The operating system of the left, up from hegel to mArx is dialectic, and it in fact takes the dialectic and concentrates it into a form which is Marxism - which is the dialectically enhanced dialectic. This is where Marxism comes from, and it has to be stressed tha tthe entire operating system of the left, frmo the 1840s and 50s when Marx and Engels start writing this stuff down, and Marxism becomes a thing, especially the Russian revolution of 1917, the entire operating system of the left really becomes marxist. Up through probably the 1960s, when finally the failures of communism become undeniable. When finally Kruschev spekas and reveals as the Premier of the Soviety Union how horrible STalin's regime was. How opposite it was to what people claimed it was. How what Walter Durante at the NY claimed it was. The propagandists got the Pulitzer prize, like Nicole Hannah Jones today. We have established it that far.

It turns out that even though we have this disillusionment with Marxism in the 1920s, we have this frustrating among many communists that the Russian revolution worked, but that no other revolutions were working. THe hungary revolution failed. No other revolutions are sparking.

Marx's prediction that this would happen in big industrial centers like NY, LA, Chicago, berlin isn't coming to pass. Only in BFE peasant Russia. Tried in Hungary but they couldn't do it.

Somethign is wrong and the Neo-Marxists invented a new theory. They are very interested in the dialectic and they, in fact, make it central to the project. The talk about it all the tim and make it the titles of their books, like "The Dialectic of Enlightenment".

Critical theory is, in fact, the application of the precise dialectic that's now been dialectically moved again from where Marx was. It's been said that the Critical Theorists, where Marx said that Hegel was standing on his head, they put Hegel back upright. Marx wanted to turn him upside down by making it too materialist and not realistic enough to help people actuall yoperate. They didn't take it back to the idea, as Hegel did, they took it into the realm of culture. That' swhy they're often called Cultural Marxists, but it's actually more accurate to call them Cultural Hegelians. Cultural Dialecticists?

They're not applying it in the Kantian sense, they're not applying it in the strict Hegelian sense (dialecticized into dialectical materialism). They're now criticizing that and bringing the critique to Marx himself and putting it in the realm of culture, and in doing so they're doing it in this new way where the dialectic has been applied to itself repeately to come up with something new. They're also becoming more politically activated again, like the young Hegelians were. They're dipping back to when Marx was his most "Young Hegelian" - some Marx critiques suggest Marx lost his way when he came to Das Kapital - Communist Manifesto was better. When he started getting int oreading Kapital, he was already 'off his rocker' smelling his own farts etc and got it wrong. They wanted to put Hegel back into Marx, but without making the same mistakes that Marx criticized of Hegel.

They also wanted to work Freud in, social science, and some other things. But they wanted to figure out how to attack culture, having decided, following people like Gramsci/Lukach, that culture upholds society and prevents these revolutiosn to the end of history (to communism). It's a very politically activated sense for the Neo-Marxists.

The case, here, is that this is the fundamental operating system of Leftism. It drives their vehicle. It's how the left thinks, moves and achieves its goals.

The most recent manifestation are also of this operating system, as it's come down for the last 200 years (from the metaphysics of Hegel).

Horkheimer

The first chair of the frankfurt school institute for Social Research - wrote on traditional and critical theory (defining it for the first time).

"This activity (Critical Theory) is called Critical Activity (Ruthless Criticism of everything that exists, to realize his own vision being imagined into the world). Less in the sense, it has, in the idealist critiques of pure reason (not Kant) than in the sense that it has in the dialectical critique of political economy (Hegel)."

In particular, though, Political Economy was that phrase we saw from Marx, describing political economy that Engels was commenting on. Hegel through Marx.

"It points to an essential aspect of the dialectical theory of society, Horkheimer concludes".

Horkheimer, first leader of the Frankfurt school, is really where Critical Theory comes from. The seat of Neo-Marxism. This arose when he, in conversation with some others, envisioned the idea of creating, for the critical left, a great analysis and, eventually, book on the dialectic that would restore something of Hegel from Marx. Marx's failures were critical to understanding that task - we had to criticize him through dialectics (his materialism). He produces, in 1944-47, a book with another Neo-Marxist called the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Considered to be the real comprehensive treatment of Critical Theory - the first real statement of Neo-marxism and what NeoMarxism is about. The Dialectic of the Enlightenment - explaining that the enlightenment unleashes its own dialectic which turns reason into unreason and rationality into irrationality.

From the book

"In the book of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimr and Adourno make the case, in the words of an editor from one of its editions, philosophical fragments edition", it's an afterward where he describes what's going on with the dialectic of enlightenment.Self-destruction of western reason is seen to be seen in a historical and fateful dialectic. Domination of external nature, internal nature and society. Enlightenment, which split these these fears apart, is traced back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth are not seen, therefore, as irreconilable opposites, but as dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life.

Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology. This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. Reason appears as inextricably entangled with domination. Since the beginnings of history, liberation from the compulsions of external nature has been achieved only by introducing a power relationship of second degree. Both the repression of the internal nature of human drives (Marcuse likes this), and social domination are already at work in myth. Finally, Fascism, and the modern culture industry, are the forms taken by a return of repressed nature. (Freudian aspects as well).

In the service of an advancing rationalization of instrumental thought modeled on the domination of nature and serving its purposes, enligthened reason is progressively hollowed out until it reverts to the new mythology of a resurrected relationship to nature. To violence."

This is what the dialectic of enlightenment is arguing, according to this editor.

Enlightenment to Marcuse

"Enlightenment understood in the widest sense is the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear, and installing them as natures, yet the whole enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity."

Enlightenment has devolved into domination, reason has become a tool of domination (precursors of post-modernism here in 1944-47).

This book culminates at the end with a cheerless proclamation with a thesis in the progress of industrial society, which is supposed to have conjured away the law of increasing misery - it had itself brought into being "the concept would justify the whole". The human being, as a person, as a bearer of reason, is going under. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is culminating objectively in madness.

Rationality becomes irrationality by the dialecticic of enlightenment. The thesis meets its antithesis - ratioanlity is becoming irrationality, so a synthesis which escapes this is going to be needed. This is what tehy call for, and Critical Theory is the tool to do it. The Neo-Marxists are completely on board with the concept of Dialectic. The Neo-Marxists are going to become the things which lead up to Herbert Marcuse, the father of the new left, which takes over where the old left (the marxists). We already see this trajectory of relying, still, on the operating system of the dialectic. Marcuse talk sabout the dialectic all the time.

One dimensional man (most famous book - 300,000+ copies in the first year): "Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between is and ought. First, as an ontological condition pertaining to the structure of being itself, however the recognition of this state of being, its theory, intends from the beginning a concrete practice."

We have to understand, through the analysis of critical tension (of what is and ought) - normative vision of a perfected society. This is something very important. Dialectical thought takes this an ontological condition that pertains tot he structure of being itself.

Language of Hegel - abstract meeting its negative and resulting in a concrete practice. Activism. Which will lead us to the new multidimensional analysis which uses Critical Theory to achieve what it's trying to do - have both is and ought, not just is as its analytical mode (two dimensional).

This dialectical thing is the essence of Critical Theory. Up to Marx, this was called Dialectical Materialism. The Dialectic of Hegel (derived from Hegel) is the operating system of the Old Left. With Marcuse we have the birth of the New Left, also relying on this dialectic. It's no longer central tot he old left, and whatever remnant goes forward out of the death of communist regimes (horrors of communism, crisis of faith in communism), and the old left leading back to the Old Marxists, but also to the new left which arose in its wake, largely starting in the years leading up to and launching off the Vietnam War.

What does this look like in practice?

Marcuse's Dialectic of the New Left

A few examples from his writing, but here's one in One Dimensional Man.

"The laws of thought are laws of reality, or rather, become laws of reality if thought understands the truth of immediate experience as the appearance of another truth, which is that of the true forms of reality - of the ideas. Thus, there is contradiction rather than correspondence between the dialectical thought and the reality. The true judgement judges this reality not on its own terms, but in terms which envision its subversion, and in the subversion reality comes into its own truth."

Marcuse is recommending a very subversive approach in application. The dialectic becomes a subversive activity, in the sense that it's something where we get in and undermine that which exists by confronting that which is with its negations. Thesis will meet antithesis in a subversive way, and this will force us to look for some synthesis, or force us to start tearing away the constructs of current society so the seed of the perfect society can blossom (Marcusian thought). Multidimensional or two dimensional thought at least.

Marcuse's ideas were paradigmatic of the post-war (WW2) Critical Theory school that inspired the Black Feminists. It's the second generation Critical Theory that then becomes the roadmap to developing the woke that we live in today.

Peeling Away Contradictions

Repressive Tolerance: "According to a dialectical proposition, it is the whole which determines the truth." Hegelian idea that you need to understand the whole to understand the particulars - metaphysical axiom. The dialectic is how you approach doing this.

"This is not in the sense that the whole is prior or superior to its parts, but in the sense that its structure and function determine every particular condition and relation".

This is pure Hegelianism. You are trying to extract the whole from the particulars. Similar to peeling away the problems of society so that the Utopian society can emerge. So that the seed can blossom or bloom.

"This, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree that they are willing to accept the rules of the game. Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practice. Tolerance stands subject to overriding criteria, its range and its limits cannot be defined in terms of their respective society."

Dialecticism of Tolerance

She is demanding the dialectical treatment of tolerance, where tolerance is going to meet intolerance, thesis meets antithesis, and the synthesis is going to be a repressive tolerance, or a liberating tolerance, that's going to be tolerance that's not actually tolerant, but that's going to lead us toward a new and better-liberated future. Tolerance gets the dialectic applied to it, and you get this totally tilted playing field , which is the logic of the world today. Conservatives must be censored, in fact they must be PRE-censored - not enough that they lose freedom of speech, they have to lose the freedom to even think the thought - stop the idea from even entering their mind. Cognitive liberty put under threat by repressive tolerance. In the Neo-marxist era, we are now talking about the dialectic being still central - the operating system continues - the dialectic on tolerance.

Essay on Liberation:

"The Dialectics of Democracy If democracy means self-government of free people with justice for all, then the realization of democracy would presuppose abolition of the existing pseudodemocracy."

Thesis, democracy, antithesis, pseudodemocracy because there are actually systems of power. Justice for all? well, not everyone gets justice, so we don't live in a democracy, we live in a pseudodemocracy (antithesis), so we need a synthesis of this.

In the dynamic of corporatism, the fight for democracy thus tends to assume anti-democratic forms, and to the extent to which the democratic decisions are made in parliaments on all levels, the opposition will tend to become extra-parliamentary. The movement to extend constitutionally professed rights and liberties, the daily life of the oppressed minorities, even the movement to preserve existing rights and liberties will become subversive to the degree to which it will meet a stiffening resistance of the majority against an exaggerated interpretation and application of equality and justice."

This logic is playing exactly right now under these so-called equity and racial and other social justice movements. So what do we have?

Thesis: democracy antithesis: pseudodemocracy (because of power dynamics). Synthesis: Ideal Democracy (Marcuse wrote about this elsewhere. Communists also refer to this - position themselves as ideal democracy because, for them, if everybody's not perfectly equal (same money and opportunity) you can't have true democracy, because certain people can't speak up as much, they aren't going to be able to get the polls as readily, won't have the same ability to participate or the same access. Not a true democracy until there's perfect equity).

They subvert language -> democracy meets this argument (its antithesis), so we have a synthesis of an "ideal" democracy, but the adjective gets dropped so that when these people speak of democracy, or tolerance, they mean not regular tolerance, but discriminating tolerance. Democracy presupposing that we're in a communist-like situation before it counts. This is how their language games are constructed. This is why they have so much double-speak.

The neo-Marxists are certainly going to have been tied up with this idea of the dialectic, regardless of how much they associate with Marx. The dialectic is applied to the dialectic in a reflexive pattern which concentrates it.

Recap

Hegel -> Young Hegelians -> Marx -> Marxists -> Neo-Marxists Constant thread, throughout this dialectical engine, applied to itself to create its new iteration. Overarching project, or underlying operating system of leftism has been the Dialectic.

Theodore Adourno

1966 - Post modernism emerging in France. Adourno writes a book called "Negative Dialectics". It seems to be the case that these guys have gone Post-Hegelian. The Critical Theorists are normally called Neo-Marxists, the post-modernists describe themselves as Post-Marxist -> they've given up on a Marxism. They retain much of the same underlying ethos, but they don't believe it works and they become negative and disparing and create an upsidedown world version of it that just is cynical.

Publishing of Negative Dialectics, extraordinarily critical of Hegel, Foucault is Critical of Hegel, but Derrida is VERY critical of Hegel. Leotard a bit in the Post-modern condition. We see this shift with some thinkers. Post-modernists and Adourno undergo a shift to a post-Hegelian structure. To go Post means to have retained the essential core of the approach, while deciding that the specific projects that had been launched on that core must have been done incorrectly and have failed. So you abandon the specifics while retaining the essential core.

In a sense, in later writings by Adourno the Post-Modernists seem anti-Hegel, but they're not really - they're post Hegelian. Disparing of the idea of the synthetic project, but not disparing of the idea of colliding thesis and antithesis. If you read Derrida's Deconstruction, or Foucault's ideas where you expose the contradictions and the progress of history. The contradictions of progress. The contradictions of calling anything knowledge at all. These are still Thesis / antithesis colliding projects. But these guys aren't looking for a Synthesis. They don't want that final 3rd step. They're post-Hegelian where hey've adopted the dialectical core, but abandonned the idea that a synthesis is necessary. Adourno - Negative Dialectics Derrida - deconstruction

PostModernists

Get to particulars, rather than come to some new synthetic whole Synthesis for post-hegelian thought is a fool's errand. That's why the Marxist projects failed. Adourno: Instead we need a negative dialectic Derrida: Deconstruct everything Another example might be with a living room table:

Kitchen table

• 4 legs
• wood
• round

Coffee table

• 3 legs
• metal
• curvy triangle

Kitchen island

• Wood
• no legs
• Block with wheels under it

Flat surfaces = tables The couch can be a table!

We can attack the idea of tables because they are different from one another, but we call them table. Let's leave it them at their particulars.

General thrust of the dialectic remains. We still collide ideas with their opposites, their antithesese, their contradictions, their negatives (Hegelian frame). But we don't need to put the broken pieces back together, because we're extra cynical. Adourno thinks he has the ticket for a good future, but the post-modernists tend to be more cynical.

Negative Dialectic doesn't have any clear examples of what the solutions are.

Foucault

Gives his critiques that the Hegelian approach might be good or bad, the dialectic might be good or bad. The underlying of the project is still Hegelian in that it attempts to reveal the internal contradictions in ideas like: Progress, Category, Science, Knowledge, Truth.

Break down restrictions and expand potentialities. Similar to Marcuse: expand the range of being human into achieving liberation.

Postmodern - disparing. Let's not even try to do anything positive

Positive projects which came out of the dialectic project are in the synthetic aspect of the project. This is being abandonned, whereas Marcuse is still into it. All of the leftists are still operating very strongly in this Hegelian Dialectical frame.

Woke/CRT Uses it too

Patricia Hill Collins gets into this in "Black Feminist Thought". Proto-critical race theory. Black feminism, and there's a link with Marcuse who inspired much of the black liberationist movements to think in Critical Theoretical ways, but it was picked up by the black feminists (Angela Davis, his PhD student).

At the birth of woke, in 1990, in the pinnacle book of Black Feminist Thought with the same title, we read: "Black Feminism remains important because US Black Women constitute an oppressed group. As a collectivity, US Black women participate in a dialectical relationship, linking African American Women's oppression in activism (oppression and activism have to be related dialectically). Dialectical relationships of this sort mean that two parties are opposed and opposite. As long as black womens' subordination within intersecting oppressions of race, class,gender, sexuality and nation persist, Black Feminism as an activist response to that oppression will remain needed. In similar fashion, the overarching purpose of US Black Feminist thought is to resist oppression. Both its practices and the ideas that justify it. If intersecting oppressions did not exist, Black Feminist thought and similar oppositional knowledges would not be necessary. As a critical social theory, black feminist thought aims to empower Black African American women in the context of Social Injustice, sustained by intersecting oppressions. Since black women cannot be fully empowered unless intersecting opprressions themselves are eliminated, Black Feminst thought supports broad principles of social justice that transcend US Black womens' particular needs."

Dialectical Relationships. Dialectical thinking. already core to understanding how Black Women as a collectivity (political group) are related to all the other axes of oppression and how they are to understand their own oppression, and how these oppressions bang up against each other and compete against ecah other and clamor for attention. The goal is to create solidarity ( to be affected through Intersectionality). The next book after this one is "Intersectionality" (1993?).

Dialectic of Activism

"This dialectic of oppression and activism, the tension between the suppression of African American Womens' ideas an d our intellectual activism in the face of that suppressison constitutes the politics of US Black feminist thought."

The DIALECTICS of oppression and activism constitute US Black feminist thought. More important, understanding this dialectical relationship is critical in assessing US Black Feminist thought, its core themes, epistemological significance in connections to domestic and trans-national black feminist practice, is fundametnally embedded in a political context that has challenged its very right to exist.

Historically, while they often disagreed on its expressions, some US Black women were profoundly reformist, while more radical theinkers bordered on the revolutionary. African American women intellectuals who were nurtured in social conditions of racial segregation, strove to develop Black Feminist as Critical Social Theory. Regardless of class, all were somehow affected by Intersecting oppressions of race, gender and class. The economic political and ideological dimensions of US black women's oppressions suppressed the intellectual production of individual black feminist thinkers. At the same time, these same social conditions simultaneously stimulated distinctive pattern of US black women's activism, but was influenced by individual black women thinkers. Thus, the dialectic of oppression and activism, characterizing US black womens' experience, with intersecting oppressions, also influenced the ideas and actions of black women intellectuals."

A twisting and concentrating line from Hegel to Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought. The dialectic being applied to itself as it goes.

"As long as social justice remains elusive for African American women, it is likely to evade US society overall. Therefore, the need for Black Women's activism mos tlikely will persist, but while the dialectical relationship linking oppression and activism remains, the changing organization of intersecting oppressions, as well as the contours for activism requiring resistance demand a dynamic black women's activism and an equally vigorous US black feminism."

Theory and practice have to both be put into play. Marx derived the idea of praxis, theory put into practice, from these same ideas.

"Thus far, this volume has synthesized two main approaches to power.One way of approaching power concerns the dialectical relationship linking oppression and activism, where groups with greater power oppress those with lesser amounts. Rather than seeing social change or lack of it as preordained and outside the realm of human action, the notion of a dialectical relationship suggests that change results from human agency. Because aAfrican american women remain relegated to the bottom fo the social hierarchy from one generation to the next, US Black women have a vested interest in opposing oppression. This is not an intellectual issue for most American women, it is a lived reality. As long as black womens' oppression persists, so long will the need for black feminist activism. Moreover, dialectical analyses of power poitn out that when it comes to social injustice, groups have competing interests that often generate conflict."

Black feminism - one of the key intellectual roots/pillras/theories within Critical Race Theory and Critical Social Justice theory. Its engine is dialectical. Hegel - Feurbach - Marx - NeoMarxists - Marcuse - Black Feminism.

The operating system of leftism - old and new.

Belle Hooks

The same reliance on dialecticism can be seen in Belle Hooks.

Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center: "Women need to know that ideas and theories are important. Absolutely essential for envisioning and making a successful feminist movement. One which will mobilize groups of people to transform this society. Ironically, lack of knowledge about revolutionary politics leads women to see ideas and theories as unimportant."

"Revolutionists seek to change reality to make it better. Therefore revolutionists need not only the revolutionary philosophy of dialectics, but they need a revolutionary ideology, body of ideas, based on analyzing the main contradictions of the particular society they are trying to change, envisioning a higher form of reality in which this contradiction would be resolved, and relating this resolution to a social force or forces responsible for and capagble of achieving it." (A Critical Theory)"

"It is only after oyu've arrived at the correct ideology that it makes sense to develop your revolutionary politics." That is, the programs necessary to mobilizing and organizing the necessary revolutionary social forces.

If your ideology is wrong, misdirected or limited, then all the best programs from militant activity msut be absolutely clear about this sequence - from revolutionary philosophy to revolutionary ideology to revolutionary politics."

The dialectic is at the heart of this. Belle hooks in 1984 about the centrality of the dialectic. What is described here is literally the Hegelian dialectic. "Revolutionary ideology - body of ideas based on analyzing the main contradictions of the society (Geist), projecting a vision of a higher form of reality (idealism) in which this contradiction would be resolved, and relating this resolution to a social force or forces responsible for and capable of achieving it."

A revolutionary politic requires a perfect ideology.

Kimberle Crenshaw

Obvious in Unmasking Colourblindness in the Law: lessons from the formation of critical race theory (3rd chapter in 2019 "Seeing Race Again"). Becoming racists.

"This essay revisits the history of how CRT emerged as an intellectual respones to colour-blindness. In the context of institutional struggles over the scope of equality and the content of legal education. It exemplifies how in the aftermath of a groundbreaking challenge to the social order, institutional actors from across the political study embraced a gradual strategy of integration premised on the assumption that the colourblind meritocracy stood outside of the economic and racial power. Emergence and continued significance of CRT in relation to colourblind ideology is the reflection of the cross-international traveling of resistance. The conditions of possibility that seed insurgent knowledge nad the continuity of these dialectics in the contemporary era."

The line

Hegel - young hegelians - marxists - neo-marxists - black feminism. Their goal is to get children to think dialectically. Heart of the critical pedagogy project, which is Critical Theory applied to the Theory of Education and the Contents of Education. Hegelian dialectical mode. Totally dominated the institution of education, following gramsci's indication that education is one of the 5 pillars of culture that must be infiltrated and overturned from within.

Critical Education

"Students argued Giroux "need to learn to be able to move outside of their own frame of reference, so they can question the legitimacy of a given fact, concept or issue". Furthermore, he contended marshalling the support of MArxist literary theorist Frederic Jameson students "have to learn how to perceive the very essence of what they are examining by placing it critically within a sysstem of relationships that give it meaning". For Giroux it was important that contextualization of information be embedded in a pedagogy that takes seriously the social relationships of the classroom."

John Dewey

"The state is then the completed objective spirit. The externalized reason of man, it reconciles the principles of laws and liberty, not by bringing some truce or external harmony between them, but by making the law the whole of the prevailing interest in controlling motive of the individual"

We haven't touched on Hegel's statism yet, but it's relevant and tied to Critical Education. This stuff was written before 1900 where an idea of the Hegelian view of the state - the completed objective spirit - was something that you get to it is via the externalized reason of man through the dialectic. The whole dialectical project is here.

Also, before Giroux, was Michael Apple. Repeatedly talked about the need for dialectic in education.

More recently: Neo-Marxism and Allison Bailey.

Allison Bailey

Hypatia 2017 Tracking Privilege: Preserving Epistemic Pushback Brings to the front that Critical Pedagogy is based not just in Giroux's belief of the dialectic, but the belief that Neo-Marxism should be brought into the classroom.

"The Critical Thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment and recognizing when arguments are faulty. Assertions like evidence, truth claims, appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to examine the assumptions, commitments and logic of daily life. The basi c problem is irrational, illogical and unexamined living."

Marcuse says you're not living that unless you're a Critical Theorist. Unless you're approaching the world from Critical Theory, you're stuck in irrational, illogical, unexamined living that fails to examine the assumptions, com/mitments and logic of daily life."

You're caught up in his heteronomous interests. Critical thinking isn't really critical thinking.

"In this tradition, sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly. Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions, rooted in the Neo-Marxian literature on Critical Theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the Critical Learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in regards to social justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but expressions of power that function to reinscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step towards resisting and transforming social injustices."

The dialectic, where the theory has to be wedded to practice to generate praxis.

"By interrogating the politics of knowledge production, this traditional also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy."

Audrey Lords classic metaphor: The tools of the critical thinking tradition, for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity, cannot dismantle the master's house, they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change. They fail because the critical thinker's toolkit is commmonly invoked in particular setttings at particular times to reassert power. Those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort. They can be habitually invoked to defend our epistemic home terrains.

Implications for Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy for her is based in Neo-Marxism. Echoes Marcuse virtually perfectly, and talks about teaching people to think in ways that are emancipatory and empowering, in perfect line with the dialectic process as outlined by Marcuse.

In education we see this again under Critical Pedagogy. The woke doesn't find it enough to use the dialectical method as its operating system, it must install that OS in children. They don't use education to indoctrinate, they use education to program and reprogram. They're not teaching you to accept a particular doctrine uncritically (though it happens), they are teaching you to think in a particular way (Dialectically). Explicitly stated by Henri Giroux - father of Critical Pedagogy: "In other words, students must be taught to think Dialectically".

This is the heart of the interrelated worldviews seeking to "liberate" the world. It comes from Hegel. The first to consciously apply it (in the words of the Maxists on Marxists.org).

Quick recap

Critical Race Theory - An Introduction: "And so the dialectic progresses" This piece was framed out in essentialism vs anti-essentialism (philosophical program). The section in which this phrase appears is in a section in the book analyzing how Critical Race theory interacts with the ideas of essentialism and anti-essentialisms. Obvious thesis / Antithesis. Its thesis antithetical in its construction. Essentialism vs its negation.

So what is the woke synthesis, as forwarded by Critical Race Theory? Structural determinism. Structure of society. Hypothesis of structural determinism is the doctrine that the structure of society determines an essential lived experience, that's not essentialist because it nevertheless hides in a social constructed mode of thought.

Race, under CRT, is a social construct. It can't be essential to the person, dodging essentialism, but it's articulated by Crenshaw that race is sociopolitically imposed by white supremacist society so that the lived experience of being a particular race in that system becomes essential. Race is not essential, in the sense that we believe in social constructivism, but the experience of being a race in a particular power structure where that race is imposed by that power structure, does define what it means to be a person in that identity category. Patrician Collins said thte same thing about Black Women. Your lived experience becomes essential.

Via the dialectic, CRT gets to be race essentialist while claiming it's race antiessentialist. Very hard to pin down if it's race essetnialist or not, because it's taken essentialism/anti-essentialism, collided them in the dialectic, producing a new thing that's hard to fight called Structural Determinism.

Structural Determinism

Structural Determinism is the logic behind how they organize society. When they say things like positionality must be consciously engaged, or intentionally engaged (Robin D'Angelo), that's what they're talking about. Taking structural determinism into account.

It allows them to be essentialist while claiming anti-essentialism, and it keeps people from seeing what they're doing and identifying how they're actually racist. By claimining an imposed lived experience that people aren't allowed to buck. So they hit a dialectical synthesis of these two ideas. This is what's going on whent he dialectic progresses until another deeper intersectional group is found. The dialectic is constantly progressing through an arc of history.

The entire concept of intersectionality is also a huge dialectical machine. Turns critique into itself by taking already so-called marginalized activist groups and dialectically attacks them. Feminists have to confront their racism. Black liberationists have to confront their sexism and misogyny. Everyone has to confront their homophobia or transphobia. Intersectionality becomes the synthesis of the otherwise competing forms of systemic oppression.

Solidarity becomes the synthesis of these competing forms, or in this case, it becomes intersectionality.

Marcuse said we need to biologically change mankind to want and need liberation, and that this would be done by changing them biologically to get a new type of man, liberated man, who can tolerate and usher-in liberation.

His eugenics is another topic, but the point is that the dialectical critique is: Aufheben der kulture. To create solidarity, allegedly, by evoking the guilt of the so-called marginalized identities in that they are ignoring the oppression of other people.

Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, etc as means to tear everything down, Intersectionality is the means to synthesize and put it all back together. The dialectical synthesis of the competing forms of systemic oppression. And it gives an analytical framework, allegedly, for working that out and establishing a hierarchy which is an inversion fo what Patricia Collins called the Matrix of Domination.

Inception outside of Europe

The core of the progressive thought for 200 years has been this dialectic. That's the point to drive home with all of this: Hegel unleashed it in an applicable form and this became the main OS of teh "left" since.

The dialectic is the OS of leftism, has been since the young Hegelians took it up in the 1820s/30s right up until today.

The concept of Manifest Destiny, often charged by the Left as being catastrophe which destroyed native americans - it wasn't exactly a conservative metanarrative. It was championed by the Young Democracts. Parallel to the Young Hegelians, adopted their philosophy etc. They used these ideas, including manifest destiny in the 1830s/40s in the US to what a lot of people see as calamity. As a final capstone to that line, Steven Douglas who lost a debate to Abraham Lincoln, was an avowed hegelian and young hegelian as well. This was happening in the US, not just Europe, in terms of thought and activism.

How it works Aufheben

To keep and to destroy.

Hegel was fascinated by this idea of keeping and destroying. He writes in the "Science of Logic":

"Aufheben constitutes one of the most important concepts in philosphy. It has a 2-fold meaning in the language. It means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it means to decease and put an end to. It is a delight to speculative thought, to find in the language words which have in themselves a speculative meaning."

This was Hegel talking about his fascination with the term Aufheben. I'm going to make the contention that Aufheben is the negation process. When HEgel lays out abstract, negative, concrete - it is the negative process. The Antithesis process.

I derived an example from a friend Emmy on Twitter who pointed out:

1. I might say that the Sky is blue
2. A straight negation might be to say "no it's not blue", or you could negate by implication by saying "it's green, it's red, it's grey"
3. Aufheben would say: "Not at night". "Not when it's raining".

It has a feeling of deliberately missing the point. You didn't tear down the blue, you can keep it, but you have torn down the concrete sense that the idea was right in the first place. Instead you reach a synthetic view of the sky that's more complicated. It's only blue during daylight hours, etc.

This is an annoying tool that the dialectic proceeds upon. Since he uses this word speculative over and over, it's important to point out that he was a "Speculative idealist" as a philosopher. Speculative means looking into a mirror. Speculum is a mirror in latin (sort of). Hegel meant: the way to understand ideas is to reflect upon them, and the purpose of reflecting upon the ideas is to recollect what is known about them in an abstract sense.

It's also to divide the concrete from facing its idea and the negation at the same time. Aufheben is speculative in that it contains a place where you have the thing and its opposite reflecting back on one another at the same time. Aufheben is, in a sense, an autological word that is aufhebening itself. (Germenglish. Aufhebening).

This is going to be key to moving into the trajectory of Hegel's metaphysics. He has a metaphysical assumption that the particular can only be understood through the whole, and speculation is how you accomplish that. The recovery of teh whole through a speculative thought process of recollection and remembering is going to be able to be achieved through exAMINING the particular and their antitheses through the dialectic. This is the objective of philosphy, or reason (vernoomft). This makes Hegel hermetic, and hermetic means an alchemist. This is his philosophical orientation, because the alchemy is achieved through the dialectic, which is the fire which heats the contents of ideas in its alembic and gives rise to their refined or synthetic understanding. It's the process in which ideas are to be refined alchemically - kept and destroyed. Marcuse refers to this as peeling off the power of the current era so that the seed within can sprout. Heremtists believe, for example, that seeds of gold exist in all the base metals. So if you just get the base parts to peel away, then the seed of gold will sprout and blossom nad the base metal will turn into gold.

This is the underlying idea of Hegelian thought. So when we say it's a hermetic or alchemical faith, this is what we're talking about.

Important to realize that what HEgel actually means by speculative is having Mystical Content. It's Mystical, mysticism. It's going to open the door to a lto of things for Hegel that he already was: Heremticism, alchemy, gnosticism.

This is why all these ideologies can be thought of as gnosticism. Race gnosticism, for example, in CRT. Structurally-determined lived experiences have special insight under standpoint epistemology that gives them to ability to undesrtand things and have racial knowledge. That's gnosticism, that's racial or ethnic gnostisticism, and this is because the Hegelian faith is itself gnostic. They're open to being gnostic because it's speculative, which means mystical. The people who know the secret are the gnostics, tehy understand the mysticism, they have the special knowledge, and for Hegel he defines this as having reason, or vernoomft.

We will see this develop as we go on into metaphysics. Hegel is already thinking metaphysically and he's thinking alchemically about the progression of society. The catechism of his religion is the dialectic through keeping and destroying, aufheben.

Features

Words are given more than one meaning (democracy, tolerance). Alchemically developing separate meanings to words so you can talk in two ways at once. The ones who understand the language are the gnostics. In modern parlance, the systemic way of thinking and understanding the world, as opposed to understanding the words or the concepts in a more simple way.

Marx did this with the term "science". Science was used to mean scientific socialism (espoused that socialism scientific). Marxism and his communism which he labelled as scientific.

Communists did this with Freedom, Democracy and Tolerance. They made Communism a precondition for all of these things.

We see this also with speculative meanings - invite gnosticism into the understanding of words. You can do this with Diversity, Racism, Segregation, Decolonialization - sophist's double speak characteristic of Hegelian ideologies.

Lennon

Sublation (vulgar translation of Aufheben). Supercede, put an end to but simultaneously maintain and preserve.

Marcuse

Talks about it in Essy on the Affirmative Character of culture.

"It is the real miracle of the affirmative culture: people can feel happy even if they are not. If the culture has entered a western thought only as an affirmative thought the abolition of its affirmative character will act as an

..........

They need a revolutionary idea, that is a body of idea

"As long as social justice remains elusive for african american women, it is likely to evade US society overall" - Just asserted based on whatever. "Therefore, the need for Black Women's activism most likely will persist, but while the dialectical relationship linking oppression and activism remains (Praxis), the changing organization of intersecting oppressions, as well as the contours of activism required for resistance, demand a dynamic black women's activism and an equally vigorous US BLack feminism" - Theory and practice both have to be put in play.

Lines are very straight from Hegel to Marx to this.

"Thus far, this volume has synthesized 2 main approaches to power. One is the dialectical relationship linking oppressiona nd activism where groups with greater power oppress those with lesssser amounts. Rather than seeing social change as preordinated and outside the realm of human action, the notion fo ad ialectical relationship suggests that change results from agency. Because African-american women remain at the bottom of the hierarchy from one generation to the next, US BLack women have a vested interest in opposing oppression. Not an issue for most women, it is a lived relality."

Dialectical analyses of power point out that when it comes to social injustice, powers have competing interests that often generate conflict."