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16-03-01 -- Summary Of Essay Three Part One -- Abstraction, The Heart Of The Beast
These are Introductory Essays, which have been written for those who find the main Essays either too long, or too difficult. They do not pretend to be comprehensive since they are simply summaries of the core ideas presented at this site. Most of the supporting evidence and argument found in each of the main Essays has been omitted. Anyone wanting more details, or who would like to examine my arguments and evidence in full, should consult the Essay for which each is a précis. [In this particular case, that can be found here.]
Traditional Thought
In ancient Greece, and for materialist reasons that will be examined in Essay Twelve (summary here), the idea took hold that there was an underlying structure to reality accessible by thought alone, which was in fact more real than the material world around us.
From the record it is possible to show how and why these early thinkers had to invent abstract terms to account for the structure of this unseen world, using jargon that has entered western intellectual life ever since, such as "Being", "Substance", "Essence", and the like. [These terms should not be confused with typographically similar words found in the vernacular.]
We saw in the Summary of Essay Two, that dialectical Marxists are nothing if not traditionalists, keen to impose their a priori theses on nature. This has meant that this ancient approach to knowledge has also been copied by all card-carrying dialecticians: the Greek emphasis on "abstraction" aimed at uncovering "essences" by thought alone.
It is worth pointing out here that the usual philosophical justification for assuming the existence of abstractions is that they account for general features of the world, and thus for our ability to study nature. It is also worth noting that the ordinary use of abstract nouns is not being questioned here, merely their metaphysical misuse.
Linguistic Distortion
The idea that language can and has been distorted for ideological reasons, and that abstractionism is in fact at the heart of this process, is not just the invention of latter-day Wittgensteinian Marxists like myself, Marx and Engels themselves referred to it:
"The ordinary man does not think he is saying anything extraordinary when he states that there are apples and pears. But when the philosopher expresses their existence in the speculative way he says something extraordinary. He performs a miracle by producing the real natural objects, the apple, the pear, etc., out of the unreal creation of the mind 'the Fruit'….
"It goes without saying that the speculative philosopher accomplishes this continuous creation only by presenting universally known qualities of the apple, the pear, etc., which exist in reality, as determining features invented by him, by giving the names of the real things to what abstract reason alone can create, to abstract formulas of reason, finally, by declaring his own activity, by which he passes from the idea of an apple to the idea of a pear, to be the self-activity of the Absolute Subject, 'the Fruit.'" [Marx and Engels (1975), p.75. Bold emphases added.]
"For philosophers, one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they had to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.
"...The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." [Marx and Engels (1970), p.118. Bold emphasis only added.]
One particular form of linguistic distortion that is relevant to the formation of Hegelian, and later 'materialist' dialectics centres around a seemingly innocence form of indicative sentence almost exclusively found in the Indo-European family of languages. This is the subject-predicate form, and a limited sub-category of that, too, where the copula is a cognate of the verb "to be".
Consider an example Hegel himself used: "The rose is red". Here the subject is clearly the rose, and the predicate is what it is said to be, i.e., red. The verb "is" merely connects the two parts of the sentence. As readers will no doubt appreciate, sentences like this are used to describe things, and no one thinks for a minute there is a secret code that has been buried in such sentences by our ancestors, waiting for alert Philosophers to come along and uncover for us.
The logical form of such sentences may be expressed thus: "The F is G", or more simply "A is G", or in a more complex form, "Some F is G", "Every F is G", and so on.
[Here "F" and "G" stand for various sorts of nouns, "A" for a proper name, say. Clearly this is to over-simplify -- but this is a summary!]
From Aristotle's time onwards it became increasingly common to interpret this sort of predication, not as "The F is G", or "A is G", but as "The F is identical with G", "A is identical with G", or as "Every A is identical with G". In the middle ages this re-write became known as the "Identity (or Essential) Theory of Predication". This allowed Philosophers to imagine that predicates were really the names of "Universals", "Forms" or "Essences", which could be abstracted into existence by the mind of those willing to perform the trick -- and who had too much leisure time on their hands to allow them to do it.
To cut a long story short, this is the theory that motivated Hegel, for it now seemed to him that no subject could be identical with the predicate to which it was related. In that case, all such sentences surreptitiously alluded to a contradiction at the heart of thought: the subject both is and is not identical to the predicate term. It never occurred to him to draw the obvious conclusion that this way of looking at this tiny (and unrepresentative) class of sentences, in a minor grammatical aspect of only one family of languages, was not perhaps a clever way of proceeding. The normal descriptive mode of predication was ignored because he wanted to find an allusion to "essences" in language to allow him to discover fundamental truths about "Being" in the comfort of his own day-dreams.
Of course, this approach to discourse had been at the heart of traditional thought since Greek times (in fact it originated in Egyptian/Babylonian myth), whereby language was seen as (or as containing a) secret code that was capable of re-presenting the inner structure of "Being" in the minds of elite thinkers. This is because the 'gods' themselves had called the world into existence by means of language, and they had invented language as a gift to humanity in order to re-present their thoughts to us.
Language was thus seen, not as a material and social product, created in and by collective labour in order to facilitate communication, but as a secret code invented by 'divine beings' to represent their thoughts to humanity (or rather to priests, kings and elite thinkers). That is why deep truths about "Being" could be ascertained by thought alone, and it is also why they could then be imposed on reality.
The trick that bound all this together was the mental process of "abstraction", for this allowed traditional thinkers to access hidden, abstract ideas, inaccessible to the senses, by thought alone. This approach to knowledge has dominated Western (and, in a different, way Eastern) thought ever since. Through Hegel's influence, it now dominates the minds of dialecticians. Small wonder then Marx and Engels said the following:
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.'" [Marx and Engels (1970), pp.64-65, quoted from here. Bold emphases added.]
As it turns out, this ancient thought-form is in fact inimical to DM, anyway. This is because the process of abstraction radically alters key features of language, robbing indicative sentences of their capacity to say anything at all That is because this process changes general terms (i.e., "universals" -- which are outwardly general in form, but which turn out to be either bogus general nouns or reified linguistic functions) -- into abstract particulars named by abstract nouns.
[DM = Dialectical Materialism.]
[A linguistic function is an expression that allows for the formation of true or false indicative sentences when combined with singular terms, quantifier expressions, and the like. For example, the sentence forming operator (i.e., quasi-linguistic expression that can be used to generate indicative sentences), "... is a socialist" yields the value "true" for "Karl Marx", but "false" for "Margaret Thatcher", or "The President of the USA in 2008". Except, linguistic functions are generally represented like this "x is a socialist". The Greek letter gap marker, "x", is essential here, for by suitably defining it (in use), legitimate substitution instances may be specified clearly. An actual gap, " ", (or even "...") will not do, since, of course, gaps cannot be defined. So: " is a socialist" is no good. I have not used "x" since it suggests mathematical connotations, and is anyway used as a quantifier variable. These ideas are summarised here, but that particular author tends to use an "x". (Warning, the latter is not an easy article!) There is no necessity to view language like this, but this way does in fact prevent the bogus moves earlier generations of Philosophers have pulled from being made. There is more on this in Essay Three Part One, here, and here.]
The traditional re-write of such propositions (via the Identity Theory of Predication) in fact prevents language from expressing generality, since it actually destroys predication, and turns general terms into singular expressions -- the names of abstract particulars. This fatally undermines DM-epistemology (which at least pretends to begin with the general to give concrete substance to the particular).
We can see how and why this is so, by examining Lenin's comments on an innocent-looking sentence: "John is a man".
The Gospel Of John: In The Beginning Was The Word "Is"
In his Philosophical Notebooks Lenin attempted to derive the entire dialectic from a single sentence like "John is a man." There, Lenin was quite happy to construct several tall stories on this alarmingly weak foundation, claiming to know what must be the case for all of reality, for all of time from a single sentence (in the thoroughly traditional manner exposed here):
"To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., [sic] with any proposition...: [like] John is a man…. Here we already have dialectics (as Hegel's genius recognized): the individual is the universal…. Consequently, the opposites (the individual is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc. Here already we have the elements, the germs of the concept of necessity, of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say John is a man…we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other….
"Thus in any proposition we can (and must) disclose as a 'nucleus' ('cell') the germs of all the elements of dialectics, and thereby show that dialectics is a property of all human knowledge in general." [Lenin (1961), pp.359-60. Emphases in the original.]
However, John's material insignificance did not prevent stop Lenin from uncovering a host of universal and omnitemporal truths concealed beneath this fictional character's imputed manhood. Thus, from this figment of the imagination, Lenin thought he could derive a number of seemingly eternal and all-embracing super-scientific facts.
["Super-scientific" is a term that refers to fundamental truths about reality that go way beyond anything the sciences could possibly confirm, and which are invented by thought alone, and which are derived from contingent facts about language (in the above manner). They apply to all regions of space and time, and to every possible world. Indeed, in many cases, they seem to delineate the 'logical form' of the world.]
From sentences like these -- all of which were of the subject/predicate form, as noted earlier --, and scarcely giving a thought to the epistemological megalomania this implied, Lenin was able to claim that not just John, but everything in reality must be a UO, and thus that everything in existence must be contradictory. His reason? Simply that John cannot be identical with the universal term "man", a subject cannot be identical with a predicate.
[UO = Unity of Opposites.]
Granted, this is not a very impressive piece of logic, but it is at least quintessentially traditional.
Indeed, as pointed out above, the imposition on reality of 'truths' of this sort, and in this manner, is thoroughly traditional; in DM-circles this goes largely un-remarked upon (and this is still the case even after this manoeuvre has been pointed out to comrades) because not only have all traditional theorists indulged in the sport, they still do. That is precisely what makes DM so traditional: moves like this are part of the philosophical game, as it were; one that was invented and has been played by ruling-class hacks for thousands of years.
To change the image: this is the theoretically-poisoned chalice from which not a single DM-theorist has failed to quaff. In fact, they happily pass it around and commend its contents to others. In this way, therefore, the ideas of the ruling-class have come to rule our movement, too. Dialecticians like Engels, Plekhanov, Dietzgen, Lenin and Trotsky have been quite happy to borrow these alien-class ideas from traditional thought, internalising them and even chiding others for denying that Marxists should buy into what they regard as the only theoretical game in town: a priori Superscience.
Hardly pausing for breath, Lenin was also able to 'derive' several other ambitious theses from this defective understanding of the copula -- i.e., the predicate connective "is", as it appears in sentences like "John is a man". In so doing, he uncritically accepted Hegel's "Identity Theory of Predication", confusing the "is" of predication with the "is" of identity. To be sure, this is a seemingly minor faux pas, but it has alarmingly disproportionate consequences, as we will see.
This allowed Lenin to argue that "John" was at the same time identical with, but different from, all men. But, neither Hegel nor Lenin so much as attempted to justify this innovative grammatical segue, and yet that did not stop them both from extracting substantive metaphysical truths from so diminutive a misconstrued verb.
This manoeuvre was then compounded by the belief that the subject/predicate form had profound ontological implications. This superficial grammatical feature, of just one family of languages (i.e., this use of "is") was now transmogrified from a predicative into a relational form.
[The "is" of identity is (uncontroversially) relational, not predicative. It relates two ideas, words, or concepts (depending on which theory one adheres to). Hence, the identity statement "Cicero is Tully" asserts a relation between two named individuals (or between an individual and himself; "Tully" was Cicero's other name), and is the equivalent of "Cicero is identical with Tully". Because of this segue, propositions of the form "A is G" (i.e., "John is a man") now become "A = G" (i.e. "John is identical with Manhood"), which is just one aspect of the aforementioned medieval "Identity Theory of Predication". Descriptive sentences now become relational -- but where there is a relation, there are objects to be related. This now turns "man" into an abstract object, a particular -- Manhood --, referred to by the abstract noun "Manhood".]
It is thus no surprise then that from this serious misreading of so simple a verb bogus 'contradictions' freely flowed. This supposedly meant -- so this fable went -- that ordinary language must be riddled with paradox (since it so readily created contradictions), and thus that nature must be fundamentally contradictory, too -- and thus that the universe and thought must be universally dialectical. Moreover, it suggested that everything must be interconnected (by various hierarchies of assorted "universals"), that change is powered by 'internal contradictions' (they are internal to sentences, and thus are logically 'internal' to one another), and that necessity and contingency are dialectically united as complimentary aspects of reality. All this a priori superscience Lenin managed to extract from this one sentence! [These details are fully worked out in Essay Three Part One.]
This idea is amplified by comrade Novack:
"This law of identity of opposites, which so perplexes and horrifies addicts of formal logic, can be easily understood, not only when it is applied to actual processes of development and interrelations of events, but also when it is contrasted with the formal law of identity. It is logically true that A equals A, that John is John…. But it is far more profoundly true that A is also non-A. John is not simply John: John is a man. This correct proposition is not an affirmation of abstract identity, but an identification of opposites. The logical category or material class, mankind, with which John is one and the same is far more and other than John, the individual. Mankind is at the same time identical with, yet different from John." [Novack (1971), p.92.]
Here, as elsewhere in traditional Philosophy, the re-interpretation of a seemingly insignificant grammatical features 'permit' theorists to ignore and bypass the clear distinctions ordinary humans (i.e., workers) have built into material language. This then 'allowed' traditional thinkers to blame the vernacular and common understanding for discursive faults that were entirely of their own making.
On this basis, therefore, and on this alone, Lenin felt quite justified in projecting dialectics right across the universe -- and, to rub it in, he did so without the aid of a single confirming experiment, just like the traditionalists mentioned earlier.
This was clearly regarded as a safe manoeuvre since, if discourse itself has dialectics built into it, and because we all have to use language to depict nature, nature cannot fail to be dialectical. In that case, dialectics could now be imposed on reality and the earlier bluff denial that this is never done could safely be ignored. This then provided Lenin with the key to unlock all of reality:
"The identity of opposites…is the recognition…of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature…. The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites…. [This] alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of everything existing…." [Lenin (1961), pp.357-58. Bold emphasis added.]
It is worth noting, that the metaphor of the Key was central to Hermetic thought, a core component of Hegel's thought.
"A key tenet of Hermeticism is the Unity of the Cosmos and the sympathy and interconnection of all things." [Quoted from here.]
The Idealism implicit in all this is not easy to miss: on this view, nature is dialectical because language can be made to say so at the flick of a verb.
In this way, sentences depicting John and his manhood guarantee that nature is contradictory because propositions contain contradictions between their subject and predicate terms (i.e., John cannot be all men).
[However, if the predicative form is merely descriptive, then predication cannot be confused with a reference to all the members of a certain group (in the case, allegedly, all men -- since description is not reference). Aristotle saw through that 'difficulty' 2500 years ago; for him predicates applied to individuals designated by subject terms -- so, as he saw things, there was no "is" anywhere in sight for anyone to magic into an identity.]
In addition, 'innovative' logic of this sort 'showed' that the LOI cannot be used by 'speculative thought' to refer to concrete reality (again, this was supposedly because subject terms are not identical to predicate terms -- this move can be seen in the quotation from Novack, above), and that contingent reality is not only ruled by dialectical logic, the entire world is an interconnected Totality, just as mystics have always claimed.
[LOI = Law of Identity]
Luckily, these amazing facts are easy to discover: no boring, time-consuming experiments and observations are required. Indeed, in a few seconds they can be 'extracted' by means of a 'dialectical analysis' of any given subject/predicate proposition, which 'analysis' shows that every part of reality is implied by, and is linked to, each and every other part. This is because John is identical with but different from a universal, which linguistic fact connects him with universal reality, but in a contradictory sort of way.
Fortunately, there are other superscientific facts that can be obtained from this 'analysis': appearances must contradict underlying 'essences' (since the essential logic of the relation between John and his universal cannot be accessed by the senses, but only by a process of 'abstraction'), and these appearances must contradict underlying "essence" (because sentences about John 'imply' this), and all of reality must be governed by dialectical law --, which, paradoxically, also guarantees freedom of the will. This is yet another DM-contradiction that just has to be "grasped" to be believed -- since John is both contingently and essentially a man, apparently.
However, the best part of this thoroughly traditional tale is that anyone so minded can indulge in dialectics with ease, in the comfort of their own convoluted jargon. Who needs expensive equipment, time-wasting experiments and rigorous scientific training when impressive truths like these can be derived so effortlessly from a few shafted words?
If every journey starts with a small step, this particular mystery tour began with just such a simple misreading of this tiny word (i.e., "is"). Traditional Philosophers (like Parmenides and Plotinus -- and their latter-day clone, Hegel) have been doing this sort of thing for centuries. Of course, over time these linguistic tricks got better, more complex and increasingly baroque, and they changed as ambient class relations required of them, but this linguistic dodge was one of the earliest and most influential of the troupe.
Dialecticians, are thus mere parvenus in this regard; late-comers who have slotted rather nicely into this conservative groove. In fact you can't even see the join.
So, if discourse has dialectics programmed into it, then no language-user could possibly deny the 'truths' that DM-theorists have effortlessly wrung from it. Super-verities like these can now be pulled straight out of Hegel's hat since every single one of his theses is hidden in all our sentences (if they are suitably 'enhanced', that is). DM can now be read into nature (on the pretence that it hasn't -- and then this can be sold as a 'materialist inversion' of Hegel) because any reading of anything must have dialectics built into it. The need for evidence can be waved aside since the seemingly obvious nature of the 'truths' obtained from such linguistic trickery is all the proof anyone could possibly need. Dialectics has thus become self-evident; judge and jury in its own behalf.
Mickey Mouse Science now had a dialectical licence to practice.
This helps account for the relaxed ease with which all dialecticians constantly slip into the a priori mode, and why they all fail to notice when they are doing it -- again, even after this has been pointed out to them.
It all looks so 'obvious', and 'self-evident'.
Abstract Distortion
But, the down-side is that abstraction destroys the capacity language has for expressing generality. It achieves this by turning propositions into lists of names conjoined by the misconstrued identity sign (the hapless "is" again). So, to use an earlier example ("John is a man"); here just as "John" undoubtedly names John, "man" supposedly names all men (as a singular logical category), or the abstract universal, Man. However, both this category and this abstract universal are now singular in nature, having had the generality that the word "man" formerly expressed (in ordinary material language) neutralised. Singular terms, obviously, are not general.
To compound things further, the participle "is" (of the verb "to be") is also transmogrified into a referring expression, only now it acts as the name of the identity relation. So, "John is a man" becomes "John Identity Man."
Clearly, this can't be "John is Identity Man", or even "John is identical with all men", without awkward questions arising once more over the nature of the extra (and this time irremovable) "is" we would thus be forced to use here. Now that "is" cannot be one of identity, for obvious reasons.
[If it were, "John is identical with all men" would have to become "John is identical with identical with all men", as the underlined italicised "is" is itself replaced by an "is identical with". In turn, that bold "is" must now itself suffer a similar fate, and the whole thing would quickly spin off into infinity.]
So, in this case, two Abstract terms are conjured into existence (and, indeed, possibly three, since, as it turns out, John is in fact an abstract collection of all the truths about him, and they are infinite in number), and they are related to one another in an ethereal sort of way, inaccessible to the senses. [Well, can you see the identity here between John and Manhood? Can it be photographed, weighed, timed or painted? This Abstract Particular is thus now thoroughly Ideal.]
Unfortunately, this ancient 'analysis' turns DM-propositions into lists of concatenated names (which somehow name these Abstract Particulars), preventing them from saying anything true or false -- because, of course, lists say nothing. By re-interpreting the "is" of predication as an "is" that names abstract identity, nothing at all can now be said of John, or of anyone else, or of anything else, at all. The use of Hegel's defective logic thus denies all DM-propositions a sense, preventing them from communicating anything whatsoever. In fact, they are not even propositions.
So, despite what they say, dialecticians do not in fact start with general terms in order to extend knowledge, but with the names of abstract particulars. This stalls the dialectical juggernaut on the starting grid.
In Essay Three, Parts One and Two, the process of abstraction is subjected to destructive analysis; not only is it psychologically impossible to carry out -- and in principle impossible to check inter-subjectively --, its results are incomprehensible. And this is because, once again, abstraction undermines generality, producing only the names of abstract particulars wedged into pseudo-propositions, concatenated with other transmogrified names -- which moves prevent language from saying anything true or false, as noted above.
The young Marx and Engels are recruited in support of these claims because of their remarkably similar opinions in this area.
Word Count: 4820
Latest Update: 03/06/08
© Rosa Lichtenstein 2008
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