logicp_writings/new/Hegel_OS_notes.md

Introduction

Praxis

• Theory combined with practice

Problematize

• Negative thinking mediated through activism to become positive

Perfected Society

• Contained within our society and unearthed through alchemy
• Hence why Communism doesn't need to know how

Kant

Transcendental Idealism

• Beyond the sensory (understands the innate modes of processing)
• Space/Time are our intuition
• We cognize objects as they appear as per our sensibilities

Origin of Dialecticism

• Developed by Kant
• Logical critique of concepts like metaphysics
• Synthetic concepts are empty without intuition
• Transcendental Idealism
• The fact of our having to synthesize a model in order for something means that we miss it entirely. Must transform the thesis through its antithesis to produce a synthesis which overcomes the antithesis

Hegel

Young Hegelian

• Progressives who want to use dialecticism to unearth the better world (Marx)

Old Hegelian

• Ultra conservative
• Believe the spirit responsible for reality is expressed as the State
• The individual's supreme duty is to the state

Marxists and Hegel

• Hegel was first to take the dialectic as a theory of logic and apply it to the world through critique of Christianity
• Objective idealism
• Used his applied dialectics towards materialism

Triads

• Hegel: Abstract, Negative, Concrete (challenge abstract with its negative and you will discover a concrete, applicable form of it which can be used to change society)

Application

• Ideas shape and generate the spirit which composes itself in reality as the state. Change society through the dialectic.
• Parxis begins with Hegel

Engels Marx joined critique of Hegel

• Dialectic was too idealist
• Engage inexorable facts instead of pure thought
• Political economy
• Retain historicism - development of thought proceeds in parallel with development of world history. History is the test of the thoughts preceding it.

Historicism

• The dialectic moves history
• Theories concentrate themselves - dialectic to dialectic.
• History is the creation of an epic. Through materialism, we have a connecting point for the logical method.

Critique of Dialectic Part II

• Marx believed his dialectic to be the direct opposite of Hegel's.
• Hegel: Thinking transforms the real world. Real world is an external phenomenal form of the idea
• Marx: The ideal is the material wrold reflected by the mind, translated into thought.
• Flipping Hegel's dialectic over to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell
• Framing Hegel's dialectic as abstract in a new dialectic, to produce dialectical materialism
• This constitutes progression of history, fulfilling Hegel's historicism

Dialectic

Modern Marxist View (marxists.org)

• Hegel able to explain universal connection and mutability
• Whole world (natural, historical, intellectual) represented as a process
• Radical young followers of Hegel loved his powerful tool for critique.
• Criticized Christianity
• Holy Family is just a heavenly image of an earthly family, thus criticizing Christianity is no better than the Christians criticizing culture.

Progression of Dialectic

• Hegel's "absolute idea" just another name for God.
• Hegel's theory of the dialectic was that it works because thought in mind transforms the material world
• Feurbach rejected this and insisted that ideas were a reflection of the material world, and thus rejected the Dialectic
• Marx and Engels, fans of Feurbach, opposed him on this and wanted to champion a Dialectic that was free of the original rigidity in the sense that it had to express pure thought. This could be done by applying the dialectic to the dialectic, challenging its limits and finding a synthesis for the material world.

Idealism

Images and thoughts not a reflection of the world, but originated as ideas from eternity before the world, whose realization composes the structure of our world. Feurbach - thoughts are the opposite and passively reflect the material world.

• Marx/Engels believed thoughts were the product of labour, and that the contradictions of thoughts reflect the contradictions of society.
• Dialectics are not imposed on the world from the outside, but through the struggle in thought and practice by humans performing labour.
• "Stand Hegel on his head"

Failed predictions (failure of Marx)

Assumed that, through the dialectic process, Socialism and Communism would be unearthed, but it was only attempted in peasant regions, like Russia. Hungary didn't even work.

• Something wrong, so Neo-Marxists invent a new theory

Neo-Marxists

Interested in creating a new theory using the dialectic: `The Dialectic of Enlightenment"

• Critical Theory is, in fact, the application of the precise dialectic that's been continuously transformed through subsequent dialectics
• Put Hegel back upright again
• Less materialism, more human -> culture (not pure idealism, like Hegel)
• Sometimes called Cultural Marxism, or Cultural Hegelians

Not Hegel

• More politically active, like Young Hegelians
• Didn't want to make the same mistakes Marx criticized of Hegel
• Ideas from Freud and new Social Science
• Attack culture which upholds society and prevents revolutions

Critical Theory

• Horkheimer becomes first chair of Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt school)
• "Critical Activity. Less in the sense it has in the idealistic critiques of pure reason than in the sense that it has in the dialectical critique of political economy."
• Political Economy: Marx describing the political economy
• Essential aspect of the dialectical theory of society
• Horkheimer wished constructed an analysis and published a book "The Dialectic of the Enlightenment" to reintroduce Hegel's dialectic by critiquing the Enlightenment and suggesting that:
  • Reason produces unreason
  • Rationality turns into irrationality

Dialectic of Enlightenment (book)

• Self-destruction of western reason a fateful dialectic
• Domination of internal/external nature and society.
• Dialectically-mediated qualities of real and intellectual life
• Paradox: Myth is already enlightenment and brings us back to mythology.
• Reason leads to domination. Liberation from external nature is achieved through power relationship of second degree.
• Repression of internal nature (Marcuse) and social domination already exist in myth.
• Repressed nature leads to Fascism
• Domination of nature through advancing instrumental thought hollows out reason and reverts to new mythology resurrecting relationship to nature and violence.

Marcuse

• Enlightenment the advance of thought was aimed at liberating humans from fear
• Devolves into domination and reason is a tool of domination
• Thesis: Enlightenment/industrial society conceptually justifies itself but fails to conjure away the increase of misery, leading to madness.
• Rationality becomes irrationality by the dialectic of enlightenment
• Synthesis is needed, and Critical Theory is the tool to get it

One Dimensional Man

• Dialectical thought understands tension between ought and is
• Analyze tension for a normative vision of perfected society
• This thought is an ontological condition and the structure of being
• Dialectic of ought and is to produce the concrete from the abstract. This becomes activism.
• Is = analytical. Ought = activism

Dialectic of the New Left (putting it into practice)

• Laws of thought become laws of reality if thought understands immediate experience as the appearance of the true forms of reality: ideas
• Analyze reality through terms which envision its subversion in order to realize truth
• Dialectic as subversive activity. Confronting reality's negations forces us to look for synthesis or tear away the constructs of the current society to reveal perfected society.
• These thoughts inspired Black Feminists

Peeling Away Contradictions

• Repressive Tolerance
• The whole determines the truth
• Metaphysical axiom that high level reveals low level. Done through dialectic.
• Quote says the structure and function determine every particular condition (parts from the whole).
• Every progressive movement can become its opposite if it's forced to accept the rules of the game.
• Lack of equality rationalizes asymmetrical application of rules

Dialecticism of Tolerance

• Tolerance meets intolerance to produce repressive tolerance
• Leads us to future where we can have true tolerance
• Pre-censor to prevent wrong-think
• Against cognitive liberty

Essay on Liberation

• Dialectics of democracy
• Self-gov of free people currently impossible
• Corporatism produces anti-democratic forms in the fight for democracy
• Opposition becomes extra-parliamentary
• Movement which preserves rights is subverted by majority's manipulated interpretation of justice
• Synthesis - Ideal Democracy (perfect equity)

Subversion of Language

Democracy against argument of pseudodemocracy implies "ideal" adjective without it being declared. Democracy coming to mean Communism.

Recap

Hegel -> Young H -> Marx -> Marxists -> Neo-Marxists

Praxis of Praxis

Those who habitually think dialectically also habitually pursue dialectical synthesese of their own dialectic repertoire.

Post-Modernists

Theodore Adourno

• Negative Dialectics book (post-Hegel)
• Post-modernism associated with Foucault, Derrida, Leotard.
• Acknowledge the failure of Marx/Hegel's synthetic projects
• Deconstruct to reveal negative (Derrida)
• Inevitable cynicism

Example (Table)

N Legs, Material, Shape - no true table, couch is even table

Foucault

• Progress, categories, science, knowledge, truth
• Break down restructions to expand potentialities
• Shun positive projects (synthetics)

CRT and Woke

• Black Feminist Thought book (Patricia Hill Collis)
• - Proto-Critical Race
• Marcuse inspired Black Liberationist movements (Angela Davis)
• Black Feminist Thought (1990)
• - Dialectic of being an oppressed group within activism
• Understand black women's oppression as a collectivity within Social Justice
• Create Solidarity through Intersectionality

Dialectic of Activism

• Dialectics of oppression and activism constitute US Black Feminist thought
• Social Justice elusive for society as long as it is for black women
• Groups in conflict over their competing social injustice

Belle Hooks

• Knowledge of revolutionary politics to see theories as important
• Revolutionists seek contradictions in society they wish to change
• Arrive at correct ideology to mobilize revolutionary social forces
• Analyze contradictions (Geist), project vision (Idealism), Relate to social force (perfect ideology)

Kimberle Crenshaw

• CRT is intellectual response to colour-blindedness
• Colourblind ideology assumes it stands outside economic and racial power, thus continues dialectic in contemporary era

Current Line

Hegel -> Y Hegel -> Marxists -> Neo-Marxists -> Black Feminism

• Get Children to think Dialetically
• Critical Pedagogy - Critical Theory applied to Education Theory and Education Contents
• Gramsci - infiltrate pillars of culture (5) incl education

Critical Education

Giroux

• Take students outside their frame of reference to question facts
• Place object of study in system of relationships that give it meaning
• Social contextualization of information

John Dewey

• State is completed objective spirit, externalized reason of man, reconciles law and liberty
• Make interest of the law the motive of the individual

Allison Bailey

• Tracking Privilege (Neo-Marxism in classroom)
• Critical thinking judges claims/evidence/sources, but fail to examine assumptions about daily life.
• Illogical and unexamined living
• Heteronomous interest means critical thinking isn't critical
• Marcuse also said: Fails to examine logic of daily life
• Critical Pedagogy rooted in Neo-Marxian Critical Theory Frankfurt School. Claims are expressions of power perpetuating social inequality.
• Teach students to identify how power shapes understanding to resist and transform injustice
• Interrogate politics of knowledge and question means of determining epistemic adequacy

Audrey Lords

• The tools can beat master at his own game, but not dismantle the house.
• Those adept with the tools restore order that assures their comfort

Implications for Pedagogy

• Critical Pedagogy based on Neo-Marxism
• - Teach emancipation and empowerment

Dialectic Thinking

• Henri Giroux: "... must be taught to think dialectically"
• Not indoctrination-focused, but on teaching a way of thinking which continuously reprograms concepts dialectically

CRT

Critical Race Theory: An Introduction

• Essentialism vs anti-essentialism
• "And so the dialectic progresses"

Woke Structural Determinism

• The Woke synthesis
• Hypothesis: societal structure determines lived experience
• Essentialism obfuscated by social constructivism
• Race social construct sociopolitically imposed by whiteness ∴ essential in that system.
• Lived experience becomes essential in the power structure
• Both race essentialist and race anti-essentialist

In Greater Depth

• Positionality: the logic of organized society
• Progression of intersectional groups is dialectic progressing through history
• Intersectionality critiques marginalized activists and turns them into oppressors:
• - Female feminists are racist
• - Black liberationists must confront sexism and misogyny
• - Everyone has to confront homophobia and transphobia
• - Competing systemic oppression
• Intersectional synthesis => solidarity

Marcusian Eugenics

• Biologically change mankind to need liberation
• Liberated man can tolerate liberation

Solidarity

• Evoke guilt of marginalized identities so they too are committed to addressing oppression outside of themselves
• Classic woke (Race/Queer): tear it all down
• Intersectionality: put it back together

Back to Hegel

Outside Europe

• Manifest Destiny as destruction of natives was narrative championed by Young Democrats, who came about in parallel to Young Hegelians
• Steven Douglas, avowed Young Hegelian

Aufheben (how it works)

• 2 fold meanings:
• - To keep and destroy
• - preserve and put end to
• Delight in speculative thought: find in language words that have speculative meaning

Negation Process

• Negative in the dialectic triad (antithesis)
• Refute by aufheben: S("The sky is blue") => Not At Night!
• Deliberately miss the point by removing the concrete sense / certainty that it was ever correct
• Begs for synthesis
• Speculative: into mirror (reflect on ideas and compare to their abstract meaning)
• Reflect X with its opposite: "It's racist to say you're not racist"

Understanding the Whole

• Particular can only be understood through the whole (high level vs low level)
• Accomplish by speculation
• Speculation through aufheben heats contents of ideas to refine understanding
• Marcuse said: "Peeling off the power of the current era so the seed within can sprout" (Seed of gold within all base metal -> alchemy)
• This is the underlying idea of Hegelian thought

Speculative is Mystic

• All the related ideologies are gnostic
• Positionality -> special insight under standpoint epistemology
• People who know the secret have special knowledge -> path to reason/vernunft
• Gnostic reason until absolute reason (mysticism) at end of history

They're All Gnostics

• CRT is race gnosticism
• Struct Determ equals racial knowledge through standpoint epist
• Special knowledge allows for speculative insights which leads to the mystical

Features

• Multi-meaning words present as gnostic knowledge
• Systemic thinking as opposed to simple understanding
• Marx: scientific socialism as "science"
• Communism as a precondition to Freedom and Democracy
• Diversity is the only acceptable way of thinking
• Racial consciousness to mitigate racism
• Segregate to desegregate or decolonize

Lenin

• Focused on sublation (vulgar aufheben)
• Supercede, put an end to, but simultaneously maintain and preserve

Marcuse

• Affirmative culture causes people to believe they are happy when they are not
• Abolition of culture (Aufhebung der kultur)

Woke Genesis

• Horkheimer and Lukach, Gramsci's prison notebooks, Frankfurt school
• Attack culture instead of ideas (Hegel) or the material (Marx)
• Lukach
• - Aufhebung of the economy as an end in itself
• - Socialist economy: Aufhebung of the autonomy of the economy
• - Hegel weaponized to seize power and dominate economy/society
• Marcuse: designate target to overcome without speculating the end
• Communism doesn't know because perfection beneath the flaws

Destroy All The Things

• Culture, Statues, Men + Women, Heterosexuality, Mothers, Dr. Zeus, Cultural touchpoints we relate to, The curriculum (decolonize), Ghostbusters and Star Wars, Cultural References
• Dialectic fire where aufheben heats the ideas which purifies them

Metaphysics

Faith and Tradition

• Hegel's theosophy to speculate about reality
• Mystical insight into the absolute idea
• Ideas perfected when aware of their perfection
• Speculative idealism as a means to reach absolute idea at end of history / mysticism

Corroboration

• Gramsci: "Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity"
• Bella Dodd: "Communism is like a religion" without a God. "It is your duty to bring it into every phase of your life, it becomes a part of you, it affects your entire thinking."