The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.
But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served.

For Engels, the world itself is constantly changing and thus any attempt to separate the ‘objective’ natural world and the ‘subjective’ effort to perceive it through science is mistaken.

Does this mean thought itself, as part of the objective world, can change it? Mostly this depends how we define thought. Obviously thinking about one’s back will not make it grow wings. But if we define consciousness as a holistic process of actual life experience, or as Marx says in The German Ideology: “The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e., as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will…Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men in their actual lifeprocess.” I chose Marx’s use of evolution here on purpose, because this is exactly how Levins and Lewontin expand Engels concept: of dialectics in the natural process itself:

The incorporation of the organism as an active subject in its own ontogeny and in the construction of its own environment leads to a complex dialectical relationship of the elements in the triad of gene, environment, and organism. We have seen that the organism enters directly and actively by being an influence on its own further ontogeny. It enters by a second indirect pathway through the environment in its own ontogeny. The organism is, in part, made by the interaction of the genes and the environment, but the organism makes its environment and so again participates in its own construction. Finally, the organism, as it develops, constructs an environment that is a condition of its survival and reproduction, setting the conditions of natural selection. So the organism influences its own evolution, by being both the object of natural selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection...It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that organisms construct every aspect of their environment themselves. They are not the passive objects of external forces, but the creators and modulators of these forces. The metaphor of adaptation must therefore be replaced by one of construction…-The Dialectical Biologist, p. 104-106

Maybe you will grant that biology is a special science because it deals with living things. But what about the abstract forces of nature? Physics, chemistry, mathematics. Levis and Lewontin make an interesting claim on this issue:

Some may object that some important elements of the outer world are thrust on organisms by the very laws of nature. After all, gravitation would be a fact of nature even if Newton had never existed. But the relevance to an organism of external forces, even of gravitation, is coded in its genes. We are oppressed by gravity, acquiring flat feet and bad backs by virtue of our large size and upright posture, both consequences of the genes we have inherited. Bacteria, living in a liquid medium, do not experience gravity, but they are subject to another "universal" physical force, Brownian motion. Because they are so small, bacteria are buffeted about by the random thermal motions of molecules in the liquid medium; a force which, fortunately, does not send us reeling from one side of the room to the other. All natural forces operate effectively in particular ranges of size and distance so that organisms, as they grow and evolve, may move from the domain of one set of forces to another. –Biology Under the Influence, 233-234

Part of the solution then is to define the object of our analysis. If we are looking at nature by including life into it, than the laws of physics are very much in dialectical relationship with life. Not only is gravity incorporated into the organism, the organism itself evolves so that the laws of nature change within the ontology of its existence. We have already made an interesting discovery, but we haven’t quite gone far enough to say that the laws of gravity themselves change dialectically. This is because this is not the object of analysis for biology and Engels had very little to say about physics. In fact, in his writings on math in the Anti-Duhring, he states:

Like all other sciences, mathematics arose out of the needs of men: from the measurement of land and the content of vessels, from the computation of time and from mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws, which were abstracted from the real world, become divorced from the real world, and are set up against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform. That is how things happened in society and in the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure mathematics was subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection — and it is only just because of this that it can be applied at all.

Basically Engels is creating a concept of pure math which is only interpreted and applied dialectically. When Engels gets into the dangerous territory of confronting abstract nature (and it dangerous, many cult-like Western communist parties have denounced big bang theory, relativity, quantum mechanics because they believed bourgeois ideology falisifies any attempt at discovering truth in science) he retreats to an empiricist concept of dialectical truth as a matter of ideology. As for the questions I raised, it’s clear that the separation of the natural sciences and the separation of natural science and social science is a false one and doesn’t exist outside of ideology. The universe is changing all the time and the laws of physics probably with them over periods of billions of years, it is quite possible in my mind that a human civilization that expanded the entire universe in the way it expands over the whole of the Earth’s ecosystem would have a truly dialectical relationship to the seemingly immutable and objective laws of physics. But this is the stuff for science fiction, what is important is to banish empiricism from science philosophically even while granting that it is a good tool for approximation of the actual conditions of our existence.

Anyway this is not to say Engels is wrong, like I said there are mixed messages. We can for example look at dialectics as a series of levels in which different abstractions have different horizons and different structures. This is exactly how Bertell Ollman describes dialectics:

…there are seven major levels of generality into which Marx subdivides the world...level one is the here and now, level two is what is general to people as a society, level three is capitalism as such, level four is class society as such, level six is the generality of the animal world, and level seven is all of the qualities of nature including weight, extension, movement, etc.-Dance of the Dialectic, p. 88-89

Since this specifically pertains to Marx, these abstractions are specific to an analysis of capitalism and are contingent on the analysis. What is important here is the method of abstraction into levels (or structures) themselves which have their own logic. Thus, dialectics means two things: the dialectical relationship between objects within a structure and the dialectical relationship between structures. Marxist economists Kozo Uno comes to similar conclusion within analysis of capitalism, finding that:

Political economy must study capitalism at three distinct levels. They are (i) the pure theory of capitalism or theory of a purely capitalist society, (ii) the stages-theory of capitalist development through the epochs of mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism, and (iii) empirico-historical studies of actual capitalist economies - Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society p. 172

Obviously, thinking about structuralism helps a lot. While poststructuralism has become the norm within philosophy, I’ve found that within Marxian economics and Marxist science structuralism has become more and more influential (look for example at the rise of falling rate of profit analysis in the last 30 years). That’s a separate issue though, what’s important for our purposes is that we can conceive of dialectics in a way in which the object of Marxian analysis: capitalism as a complete system has its own dialectical logic which immanent to it and is separate from any larger physical or natural structure and at the same time grant that these structures have an immanent dialectical structure of their own and that the interaction between these structures is dialectical (i.e. the structures influence each other. To help illustrate this, let’s look at three structures. The natural world, the social world, and the human investigation in thought of itself and these other structures. The easiest to understand dialectically is thought, this is what we call ideology and is clearly dialectical rather than fixed or empirical. Rather than Althusser, let’s turn to one of the great physicists and a secret Marxist, David Bohm. In his On the Problem of Truth and Understanding in Science, he summarizes his position:

The problem described above seems to arise, at least in part, in the effort to refer truth to something fixed, definite, and final, either a subjective criterion which we are to choose once and for all, to be applied in research, or else an objective truth that is supposed to exist somewhere “out there” in a finished form, and which we are supposed to approach step by step, or to accumulate bit by bit. But it may be that truth is none of these. Perhaps it is something that has no fixed and final forms or limits within it, so that it cannot be known in its totality nor approached nor accumulated nor even referred to some definable criterion by which it can be recognized. Instead, what may happen is that both truth itself and the methods and criteria for establishing it must be understood afresh from moment to moment, because everything is always changing, so that the problem is, in some respects, fundamentally new on each occasion on which the question of truth is to be considered. p.219-220

So of course truth is dialectical, but how does it influence the other structures. Instead of biology, let’s look at math:

If one starts counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 . . . ," the process can obviously continue without end. The set of all the integers in this series, taken together, has an infinite number of elements. This is one example of infinity. Now if we look at the set of points on a segment of a line, it also has an infinite number of elements. By geometrical definition, a point has no dimensions. Therefore, there are an infinite number of points on any segment of a line. So here we have another example of infinity. Is the "infinity" in the endless series of numerals of the same type as the "infinity" of points on a line? Clearly there is an important difference between them. With the series of integers given above, each of the elements in the set can be counted. (We actually count them when we say "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,..." even though we never complete the task.) By contrast, we can never count the points on a segment of a line the way we counted the numerals in the series above. Therefore, perhaps the "infinity" in the endless series of integers is different from the "infinity" of points on a line. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the German mathematician Georg Can tor thought so, and he gave these infinities different "names." A crucial point here is the idea of "naming." After Cantor assigned different names to different infinities, these infinities seemed to take on a reality that they had not earlier possessed…

Not all mathematicians agreed with Cantor. And when one tries to explain these differences of opinion it soon becomes clear that contextual, cultural ("area studies") factors were at work. Two of the most important groups of mathematicians who wrestled with these problems were the French and the Russians, and their predominant viewpoints were connected with their cultures. The French, operating within the tradition of Cartesian rationalism, were very suspicious of transfinite numbers. Do they really exist? How can they be defined? The Russians, relying and expanding on a tradition of the significance of "names" in Russian Orthodoxy, were much more positively disposed toward the new types of infinities…One reason the Russians were more willing to accept the concept of transfinite numbers was that some of them were involved with a heretical sect of Russian Orthodoxy called Name Worshippers (imiaslavtsy) which ascribed a great significance to the act of "naming."

After some history, what happens is exactly what you would expect:

Several of the intellectuals in Moscow who became interested in Name Worshipping just before and after World War I were leading mathemati cians. They included Dmitrii Egorov, professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and for many years president of the Moscow Mathematical Society; and two of his students, Luzin and Pavel Florenskii (1882 1937). All three of these men were deeply religious…At the time of the Bolshevik revolution, Florenskii was living in a monastery town near Moscow, and he was close religiously and intellectually to the Name Worshipper dissidents. He communicated their ideas to Luzin and Egorov and translated them into mathematical parlance. In the early 1920s there was a Name Worshipper circle (imeslavcheskii kruzhok) in Moscow where the ideas of the religious dissidents and the concepts of mathematics were brought together. Participants in the circle included fifteen or sixteen philosophers, mathematicians, and religious thinkers. Sometimes the circle met at Egorov's apartment, and Florenskii presented papers at several of these meetings. Here Florenskii expounded the view that "the point where divine and human energy meet is 'the symbol,' which is greater than itself…

Eventually Egorov, Luzin, and Florenskii were caught and persecuted by the Soviet authorities, but only after Luzin in particular, and his students, had made mathematical breakthroughs. Luzin's religious and philosophical approach helped stimulate in him a profound mathematical originality. He and his students created a new field: the descriptive theory of sets. And the Moscow Mathematical School that Luzin and Egorov created caused an explosion of mathematical research in the 1920s and 1930s that will always be remembered in the history of mathematics. One of the leading French mathematicians in this story, Lebesgue, finally acknowledged that it was precisely "philosophy", what he and his French colleagues tried to avoid in mathematics, that helped Luzin make his innovations. In a preface to Luzin's 1930 book published in French in Paris, Lebesgue wrote that with Luzin "mathematical exigencies and philosophical exigencies are constantly associated, one can even say fused."
- "Soft" Area Studies versus "Hard" Social Science: A False Opposition, Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor p.4-12

This study is not Marxist and consistently erases class and so reduces the complex social totality that informs ideology to religion or culture. But the point it makes is still interesting and the example is pretty cool. Not only does ideology affect how we conceive of the world, and not only does this interaction between society and ideology act in a dialectical way (in the example, the changing history of Russia through the Bolshevik revolution both eliminated the conditions of ‘name worship’ religion and developed the scientific conditions that allowed it to turn to secular questions of mathematics), but ideology itself dialectically affects the objective world.

Of course one could object that mathematicians merely discovered this concept of infinity rather than creating it, but I this misses the point. This concept of infinity not only didn’t exist before it was discovered, but this discovery itself affects the material world. It is mathematical discoveries that allow us to invent things like GPS, computers, rocket ships, medicine, etc. Once we set the horizon of our abstraction (or structure), than it is clear that every element of that structure is in a constantly changing and reflective relation with every other element. It is difficult to imagine this as a dialectical relationship because the laws of the universe that construct math as a structure are vast compared to our tiny society that tries to understand them. But this is a matter of quantity and not quality, which to me is the entire point I’m trying to make. The dialectical structure of these systems and the dialectical way they relate to each other is identical ontologically (i.e. as a structure with certain relationships between elements and rules that make the structure coherent).

So how do we think about structures dialectically? More importantly, how do we change them? Marx gives us the answer:

“But a man who seeks to accommodate science not from science itself (as erroneous as it may be) , but rather from an external, alien standpoint borrowed from external interests, I call "vulgar.” Theories of Surplus Value Part II , p.119

Of course the greatest example is Capital vol. 1, in which the immanent logic of capitalism, in relation to the greater and smaller structures it interacts with, is traced out so that the contradictory aspects of the structure (which are necessarily present because the structure is in motion and thus the relation between elements is unstable) are not only revealed but shown to necessarily overcome the structure in its entirety. One can apply this all the way up to the universe slowly but eventually annihilating itself (at least in the form we recognize it in) all the way down to the individual consciousness (which is constantly changing and is barely recognizable between generations). This is basically the first part of Mao’s On Contradiction and it is no surprise it heavily influenced the French structuralists. Let’s just quote him:

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another.

Basically, once we understand everything as a dialectical structure, we can analyze anything as a structure by studying its immanent logic and contradictory motion. Of course the next question, and the major philosophical response to structuralism, is why privilege one element of the structure over others? Why is one determinate (capitalist production for example) over others. It's pretty obvious that this question makes no sense in our examples of dialectical biology. Clearly natural selection is determinate in the sense that the relationship between elements is mediated by it. This is how Marxists like Jameson approach structures, in which all elements of postmodernism are mediated by the late capitalist relation. But I think western Marxist philosophers, who are afraid of natural science, avoid talking about why this is the case philosophically. Of course for Mao the answer is obvious, he goes into the concept of 'principle and secondary contradiction'. But expanding on that would take an entire new post, one I would be interested in making of people think this one is interesting and not just obvious shit.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (Feb. 29, 2016 04:01:26)

babyhueypnewton posted:

what is important is to banish empiricism from science philosophically even while granting that it is a good tool for approximation of the actual conditions of our existence

That sounds undialectical

gyrofry posted:

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2016/02/introducing-torsion-and-tension-serial.html

that guy is everything wrong with internet maoists

conec posted:

not even sure what you are saying here bhpn. the scientific method doesn`t need to be worked out "dialectically" per se for it to be scientific - so not sure if this is really the "shying away" of scientists. tho, surely it is useful sometimes to use dialectics. but tf? you have to think of this as wearing a mullet. business in the front, party in the back. imo. just one poster`s opinion

mods change my name to dialectical mullet

conec posted:

Urbandale posted:

this is a reminder that lysenko was partially correct - close-planting does provide increased yields under certain conditions

why are there nostalgics all over the west? just accept that soviets failed in some ways and achieved in others. no need to prop up dead guys for the sake of being pro-soviet online. you don`t even speak a word of Russian, I`m sure. you may never even visit the former soviet union. you should try detaching yourself from this identity.

no need to fight in the science thread though. just a lil sick of all tha bullsh`t, that`s all.

lysenko was one of the "achieved in others" imo. stalin sucks tho.

Panopticon posted:

conec posted:

what did Lysenko achieve other than some marginal damage control and endorsement? besides, without Stalin, there is no Lysenko to post about. if you hate Stalin for being an evil dictator or whatever, then you should equally hate Lysenko for his helping hand in the great purge.

what they did or didn't do doesn't matter, objective truth is unknowable. most people believe stalin was a mass murderer, therefore stalin was a mass murderer, and it's not likely people will change their minds about that. most people are ignorant of lysenko though, so lysenko could be a pioneer of socialism unjustly ignored by bourgeois science if we repeat often enough that lysenko discovered epigenetics.

actually most people believe Stalin was a hero, it is simply the first world labor aristokkkracy who believe in fascist propaganda. and they will be reeducated during JDPON