Dialectic
Verso
London · New York
First published by Verso 1993
© Roy Bhaskar 1993
All rights reserved
Verso
UK: 6 Mead Street, London W1V 3HR
USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001-2291
Verso is the Imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 0-86091-368-6
ISBN 0-86091-583-2 (pbk)
British Library Catagoguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Catagoging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by MHL Typesetting, Coventry
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
For Sheila
Abbreviations xvi
1. Introduction: Critical Realism, Hegelian Dialectic and the Problems of Philosophy — Preliminary Considerations 1
§ 1 Objectives of the Book 1 2
§ 2 ‘Dialectic’: An Initial Orientation 3
§ 4 Four Degrees of Critical Realism 8 9 10 11 12 13
§ 5 Prima Facie Objections to Critical Realism 14
§ 6 On the Sources and General Character of the Hegelian Dialectic 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
§ 7 On the Immanent Critique and Limitations of the Hegelian Dialectic 23 24 25 26 27
§ 8 The Fine Structure of Hegelian Dialectic 28 29 30 31 32
§ 9 Epistemological Dialectic and the Problems of Philosophy 33 34 35 36 37
2 Dialectic: The Logic of Absence — Arguments, Themes, Perspectives, Configurations 38
§ 1 Absence 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
§ 2 Emergence 49 50 51 52 53 54 55
§ 3 Contradiction I: Hegel and Marx 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 (68a) (68b) 69 70 71
§ 4 Contradiction II: Misunderstandings 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85
§ 5 On the Materialist Diffraction of Dialectic 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
§ 6 Dialectical Arguments and the Unholy Trinity 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111
§ 7 Dialectical Motifs: Tina Formations, Mediation, Concrete Universality, etc. 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133
§ 8 On the Generalized Theory of the Dialectical Remark, the Failure of Detachment and the Presence of the Past 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151
§ 9 Dialectical Critical Naturalism 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 (166) 167 168 169 170 171 172
§ 10 Towards a Real Definition of Dialectic 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 (185) 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 (196) 197 198 199 200 201 202 203
3. Dialectical Critical Realism and the Dialectic of Freedom 204
§ 1 Ontology 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213
§ 2 The Dialectic of Truth 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223
§ 3 On the Emergence and Derivability of Dialecticized Transcendental Realism 224 225 226 227 228 229 230
§ 4 1M Realism: Non-Identity 231 232 233 234 235 236 237
§ 5 2E Realism: Negativity 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249
§ 6 Space, Time and Tense 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257
§ 7 Social Science, Explanatory Critique, Emancipatory Axiology 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269
§ 8 3L Realism: Totality 270 271 272 273 274 275
§ 9 4D Realism: Agency 276 277 278
§ 10 The Dialectic of Desire to Freedom 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 (298)
§ 11 Dialectical Critical Realism and the Dialectics of Critical Realism 299 300 301 302 (303) 304 305 306 307
4. Metacritical Dialectics: Irrealism and Its Consequences 308
§ 1 Irrealism 308 309 310 311 (312) 313
§ 2 The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321
§ 3 Contradictions of the Critical Philosophy 322 323 324 325
§ 4 Dilemmas of the Beautiful Soul and the Unhappy Consciousness 326 327 328 329
§ 5 Master and Slave: From Dialectics of Reconciliation to Dialectics of Liberation 330 331 332 333 (334) 335
§ 6 The Metacritique of the Hegelian Dialectic 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343
§ 7 Marxian Dialectic I: The Rational Kernel in the Mystical Shell 344 345 346 347
§ 8 Marxian Dialectic II: The Mystical Shell in the Rational Kernel 348 349 350 351 352 353
§ 9 Metacritical Dialectics: Philosophical Ideologies — Their Sublation and Explanation 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 (364)
§ 10 The Consequences of Irrealism 365 366 367 368 369
§ 11 Diffracted and Retotalized Dialectics 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377
§ 12 Dialectic as the Pulse of Freedom 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385
Glossary 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406
Name Index 407 408
Subject Index 409 410 411 412 413 424 415 416 417 418 419
Let this be said, then; and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, both itself and the others, both to themselves and to each other, all in every way both are and are not and appear and do not appear. Very true.
PLATO
This struggle [between the infinite and the finite] is a conflict defined not by the indifference of the two sides in their distinction, but by their being bound together in one unity. I am not one of the fighters locked in battle, but both, and I am the struggle itself. I am fire and water …
HEGEL
In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to the bourgeoisie and their doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negative, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state; in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well, and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.
MARX
This book is the site of an encounter between a dialectically developed critical realism and Hegelian and Hegelian-inspired dialectic in the context of the multiple crises besetting humanity, rationality, the social (and, to an extent, the natural) sciences, Marxism and socialism. While it is, on the whole, a preservative generalization and enrichment of hitherto existing critical realism, it is a non-preservative sublation of Hegelian dialectic. The terms of the critical realist dialectic are non-identity, negativity, totality and transformative praxis or agency, in comparison with the Hegelian trio of identity, negativity and totality. However, my accounts of negativity and of totality are radically different from Hegel's. These four terms correspond to four moments or levels of development of the new system of dialectical critical realism and may, if one likes, be very loosely aligned with the four chapters of the work. Dialectic extends and deepens critical realism's characteristic concerns with ontology, existence and causality, science, social science and emancipation into (obviously) the realms of negativity and totality, but also the fields of reference and truth, spatio-temporality, tense and process, the logic of dialectical universalizability and on to the plane of ethics, where I articulate a combination of moral realism and ethical naturalism, which allows me to make the transition from the form of judgements to the content of a freely flourishing society. Moreover, the arguments I employ in this book for a dialecticized transcendental realism and critical naturalism can all be derived from positions which do not already presuppose (although they may entail — in some cases, transformed) scientific practices. Dialectic necessarily incorporates an exercise in the problem resolution, critical diagnosis and explanation of causally efficacious irrealist philosophies. For it is my contention that, properly conceived, critical realism and dialectic mutually presuppose one another. In addition to considering dialectic historically and systematically, I have treated it, amongst a variety of other modes, as the logic of argument, the method of immanent critique, the dynamic of conflict, the node of change and the axiology of freedom. All my arguments converge on a position which has very radical implications. Dialectic is essentially to do with the absenting of constraints on absenting absences or ills (which may also be regarded as constraints). This presupposes, inter alia, the critique of ontological monovalence, or a purely positive account of reality, which I show to be totally flawed. Apart from what I have said here, I would make only the rather immodest claim that this is the only system of dialectical philosophy I know to sustain an adequate account of negativity and, a fortiori, since this is the linchpin of all dialectics, I hope of dialectic itself.
I must acknowledge my debt to Sheila Duncan-Bruce, to whom this book is dedicated, and whose tragic loss occurred during its writing. Second, I must thank Colin Robinson, amongst others, at Verso, for his friendship and support during a difficult time, for his patience and the prompt publication of the book. Third, I must yet again express my deep gratitude to Sue Kelly for absolutely invaluable secretarial assistance. I must also acknowledge my appreciation of Justin Dyer's meticulous copy-editing. Next I owe an immense and immeasurable debt to the growing world-wide and interdisciplinary band of critical realists and those interested in it for stimulation, debate and encouragement. Some names picked almost at random must stand in for a comprehensive list that would be impossible to compile: Michael Sprinker, Kurt Bayertz, Joe Urbas, Alan Chalmers, Doreen Massey, Tony Lawson, Gerry Webster, Trevor Pateman, Ed Soja, Margaret FitzSimmons, Terry Eagleton, Chris Morris, Charlie Smith, Peter Manicas, Mario Bunge, Helena Kozakiewicz, Veronique Havalange, Noam Chomsky, Roy Edgley, Tom Bottomore, Charles Taylor, Anita Craig, Sue degg, Andrew Sayer, John Levering, Ülker Seymen, Yilmaz Öner, Jan van Dijk, Tomás Ibáñez, Björn Wittrock, Peter Wagner, Erik Wright, Barry Barnes, Margaret Archer, Terry Lovell, David Will, Guglielmo Carchedi, Bertell Oilman, John Searle, Jeffrey Isaac, Norman Geras, Gregor McLennan, Rom Harre, Gregory Elliott, Rajani Kanth. … I stress again that this is a sample not a list and I am only too conscious of the contributions of those omitted. The new geographers within this network played a decisive role in the formative process of this book, as did those who persuaded me to take post-structuralism more seriously. The influence of both groups will be felt. Finally I would like to offer my warmest appreciation to those many, many friends whose solidarity has nurtured and sustained me during the writing of this text. Of these I can only specifically mention here a few — Ted Benton, Andrew Collier, Androulla Karaviotis, Judit Kiss, William Outhwaite, Kate Soper and, above all, Hilary Wainwright.
ROY BHASKAR
May 1993
RTS2: A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn, Harvester Press, Brighton 1978 (Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989) (1st edn, Leeds Books, Leeds 1975)
PON2: The Possibility of Naturalism 2nd edn, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead 1989 (1st edn. Harvester Press, Brighton 1979)
SRHE: Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Verso, London 1986
RR: Reclaiming Reality, Verso, London 1989
PIF: Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1991
N.B.: ‘C’ stands for Chapter throughout the book.
1M = First Moment
2E = Second Edge
3L = Third Level
4D = Fourth Dimension
EA = Extrinsic Aspect
IA = Intrinsic Aspect
ID = Intransitive Dimension
TD = Transitive Dimension
TMSA = Transformational Model of Social Activity
T/P = Theory/Practice
N.B.: These terms, which are used throughout the book, are explained in the text and the Glossary.
What is developed in this work is neither Hegelian dialectic nor, to my knowledge, any other pre-existing form of dialectic, but a critical realist dialectic. A major point of reference throughout this book will certainly be Hegelian dialectic, and in the course of it I hope to realize Marx's unconsummated desire ‘to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence’ — though it will take more than two or three printers' sheets — ‘what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same time mystified’,1 as well as to clarify the exact relation between Marx's own dialectic and Hegel's one. But I will be discussing a variety of other dialectical (and anti-dialectical) modes, including Aristotelian dialectic, Kantian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction.
A work of this kind — a dialectical critique of purely analytical reason — can claim no more — or less — than dialectical consistency. For the moment this may be exemplified by what I have elsewhere characterized as developmental consistency2 — the kind of consistency shown by connected theories in an ongoing research programme in science; or in nature by the development of a tadpole into a frog or an acorn into an oak — a consistency redeemable only in the course of, and at the end of, the day. Moreover, this book makes no claim to completeness — and that for immanent dialectical reasons too. Indeed it stands in the closest possible connection to the texts that will immediately follow it: Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx will elaborate the central historical argument of the book and provide a more detailed critical hermeneutics of those four thinkers, Plato Etcetera will resume the critical diagnosis and metacritique of the western philosophical tradition sketched in this study, and Dialectical Social Theory will engage at a more concrete level with the implications of the book's argument for social theory, geography and history.
This book has as its main objectives:
1. the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism — understood as consisting of transcendental realism as a general theory of science and critical naturalism as a special theory of social science (which includes the emancipatory axiology entailed by the theory of explanatory critique);
2. the development of a general theory of dialectic — or better, a dialectic — of which the Hegelian one can be seen as an important, but limited and highly questionable, special case; and one which will moreover be capable of sustaining the development of a general metatheory for the social sciences, on the basis of which they will be capable of functioning as agencies of human self-emancipation;
3. the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of western philosophy, in its various (including hitherto dialectical) forms, including a micro sketch of certain nodal moments in the history of dialectical philosophy, capable, inter alia, of casting light on the contemporary crisis of socialism.
I shall contend that these objectives are intimately related, and especially that there are direct and immediate connections between the critical realist development of dialectical motifs and themes and the resolution of the problems, sublation of the problematics and explanation of the problem-fields of contemporary philosophy. To put this in a nutshell, most philosophical aporiai derive from taking an insufficiently non-anthropocentric, differentiated, stratified, dynamic, holistic (concrete) or agentive (practical) view of things. More generally, philosophy's current anthropomorphizing, actualizing, monovalent and detotalizing ontology acts, I shall argue, as a block on the development of the social sciences and projects of human emancipation — for this ontology currently informs much of their practice. For the transformation of this state of affairs dialectical critical realism — i.e. the development of dialectic in its critical realist form — is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Philosophy, for its part, being out of joint with reality, is necessarily aporetic. We shall see in C3 how dialectical critical realism can begin to remedy this, but I hope the import of these remarks will soon be plain. This book represents an attempt to synthesize what I take to be the most fruitful aspects of the dialectical tradition (or traditions), most of which have come down to us through the mediation of Hegel, with the contemporary critical realist research programme — to, I think, their mutual advantage. But the structure of the resulting dialectic is very different from the Hegelian one. At the beginning, in this new dialectic, there is non-identity — at the end, open unfinished totality. In between, irreducible material structure and heteronomy, deep negativity and emergent spatio-temporality. In this work, I want to show that it is possible to think and act dialectically without necessarily being a Hegelian — or, if you prefer, vice versa.
In its most general sense, dialectic has come to signify any more or less intricate process of conceptual or social (and sometimes even natural) conflict, interconnection and change, in which the generation, interpenetration and clash of oppositions, leading to their transcendence in a fuller or more adequate mode of thought or form of life (or being), plays a key role. But, as we shall see, dialectical processes and configurations are not always sublatory (i.e. supersessive), let alone preservative. Nor are they necessarily characterized by opposition or antagonism, rather than mere connection, separation or juxtaposition. Nor, finally, are they invariably, or even typically, triadic in form. To what may such processes, to the extent that they occur, be applied? Obviously to being, in which case we may talk about ontological dialectics, or dialectical ontologies which may operate at different levels. Then obviously to our thinking about reality — epistemological dialectics; and insofar as knowledge circulates in and/or out of what it is about — relational dialectics. Equally obviously to our practice — practical dialectics. Clearly, within these generic categories a vast variety of distinctions can be made, specifying more concrete or roughly parallel (e.g. ethical, aesthetic) dialectics. Equally clearly, dialectical processes may occur in our thinking about our thinking about reality, e.g. in the philosophy of science, so that one may talk of a meta-epistemological dialectic, and so on recursively. For critical realism all dialectics, insofar as they occur, are also ontological dialectics, though with respect to any, for example, epistemic investigation we may and perhaps must think of a distinct ontic field (into which the epistemological investigation may itself be reflexively incorporated). Similarly, all social dialectics are also practical dialectics, even though in the case of, say, structural analysis one may and perhaps must abstract from human agency. In respect of science, ontological, epistemological and the class of meta-epistemological dialectics may be mapped onto what I have called the intransitive, transitive and metacritical dimensions.3 (For critical realism, relational dialectics, however thorough-going, can never abolish the existential intransitivity of the relata.) All these terms have a subject/topic ambiguity. Thus one might hold epistemological dialectics to be engaged with the dialectic of epistemology rather than the dialectic of what it is about, e.g. science. In this book I will be concerned with both kinds of dialectics, the former belonging to what I will style meta-critical dialectics, which includes the relations between the two kinds.
Like Hegel, I take dialectic to be a logic of content and not just form. And, like him, I take this to centre on the norms of truth and freedom (mediated in practice by wisdom). That is, I take both to have a certain dynamic to them, a dynamic which I hope to describe. More fully I will show that truth, for example, must be understood as grounded, dynamic, totalizing and context-sensitive, corresponding to the four moments of the critical realist dialectic that I shall shortly outline. But instead of talking immediately of truth and freedom, and respecting the geo-historical specificity of both, I will talk about knowledge as specific kinds of beliefs (of different types) and of emancipation from specific kinds of constraints. To the extent that I abstract from content in the earlier portions of this book, particularly in the exposition of Hegelian dialectic, this is for the sake of didactic clarity alone.
In previous works I have shown how science itself presupposes a critical realist ontology of the world as structured, differentiated and changing. And I have argued that the chief metaphilosophical error in prevailing accounts of science is the analysis, definition or explication of statements about being in terms of statements about our knowledge of being, the reduction of ontology to epistemology which I have termed the ‘epistemic fallacy’.4 As ontology is in fact irreducible to epistemology, this functions merely to cover the generation of an implicit ontology, on which the domain of the real is reduced to the domain of the actual (actualism) which is then anthroprocentrically identified with or in terms of sense-experience or some other human attribute. Operating hand-in-hand with this overt collapse, engendered or masked by the epistemic fallacy, is its practical counterpart, the ideology of the compulsive determination of knowledge by being — for instance, in the guise of reified facts or hypostatized ideas — in what I have characterized as the ‘ontic fallacy’.5 The epistemic fallacy can be traced back to Parmenides.
But Parmenides also bequeathed another legacy to philosophy: the generation of a purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of reality, in what I am going to nominate the doctrine of ontological monovalence. In this study I aim to revindicate negativity. Indeed, by the time we are through, I would like the reader to see the positive as a tiny, but important, ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity. In particular, I want to argue for the importance of the concepts of what I am going to call ‘real negation’, ‘transformative negation’ and ‘radical negation’. Of these the most basic is real negation. Its primary meaning is real determinate absence or non-being (i.e. including non-existence). It may denote an absence, for example, from consciousness (e.g. the unknown, the tacit, the unconscious), and/or of an entity, property or attribute (e.g. the spaces in a text) in some determinate space-time region, e.g. in virtue of distanciation or mediation, death or demise, or simple non-existence. It connotes, inter alia, the hidden, the empty, the outside; desire, lack and need. It is real negation which, as we shall see, drives the Hegelian dialectic on, and it is our omissive critique of Hegel — his failure to sustain certain crucial distinctions and categories (including in the end that of absence itself) — that must drive the dialectic past and beyond him. But real negation also connotes a process of mediating, distancing or absenting, i.e. it has a systematic process/product bivalency or homonymy. In fact, as we shall see in the next chapter, it also signifies both process-in-product and product-in-process, so that it has a fourfold polysemy. How could one argue for the importance of real negation in, for example, science? Writings — books, research papers, experimental records — provide striking examples of it. Consider a book in a library. It typically involves an absent (and possibly dead) author, an absent reception necessary for its presence in the library, and absences — spaces inside and in between sequences of marks — necessary for its intelligibility, its readability. Again experimental activity involves a real demediation of nature, preventing or absenting a state of affairs that would otherwise have occurred, so as to enable us to identify a generative mechanism or complex free from outside influence or with such interference held constant. These may, if one likes, be taken as transcendental deductions of the presence of real negation in science, as conditions of its possibility. Real negation — think of empty spaces and absent x's where x stands in principle for any entity or feature. Of course what is absent or void at or from one level, region or perspective may be present at another. This is what I shall refer to as the ‘duality of absence’.
Transformative negation refers to the transformation of some thing, property or state of affairs. Such a transformation may be essential or inessential, total or partial, endogenously and/or exogenously effected. Like real negation it has a process/product bipolarity: it can refer to the outcome or the means whereby it is brought about. All cases of transformative negation are also cases of real negation but the converse is not the case. They all involve the cessation or absenting of a pre-existing entity or state. A special, and highly important, case of transformative negation is radical negation, which involves the auto-subversion, transformation or overcoming of a being or condition. It is, of course, important in the human domain to distinguish negating processes from self-negating processes and self-negating from self-consciously negating processes. All these species of negation — real, transformative and radical — have a systematic structural/empirical — or better, real/actual — ambiguity which I shall discuss in due course. Transformative negation, especially of the radical kind, is what Hegelians call ‘determinate negation’, but this is a misnomer — for real ≥ transformative ≥ radical negation may all be more or less determinate — that is, they may be fully determinate (think of the negation of the raw material in a finished automobile) or indeterminate in various degrees; or they may be ‘fuzzy’, duplicitous or otherwise other than determinate. In Hegelian dialectic real, transformative, radical and determinate negation are all identified, resulting in a linear self-generating process, e.g. of the unfolding of the concept in the Logics, but it is important to keep them distinct and see their identification as an important but limiting case.
If real negation is the most all-encompassing concept — extending from non-existence to metacritique — it is in transformative negation that the key to social dialectics lies. Indeed its schema is given by the transformational model of social activity which I have elaborated elsewhere and which will be suitably dialecticized and generalized in C2. Radical negation, for its part, is obviously the pivotal concept in self-emancipation and this connects with ‘radical’ in a more familiar sense. Moreover, to the extent that we are dealing with a self-contained totality, all transformative negation, that is to say change, will tend to occur as a result of or take the form of radical negation(s), as is arguably the case with global interdependence today.6 The orthodox Platonic analysis of negation and change in terms of difference not only conflates substantial with formal relations7 (change is paradigmatically substantial) but also overlooks the fact that differentiation typically presupposes change. This is not to deny that there is equally a case for a category of difference, e.g. established by distinct emergent domains or by sheer alterity or otherness (that is, real determinate other-being), not analysable in terms of change, i.e. without recourse to a unitary origin, a case forcibly prosecuted by Derrida. In rather the same way the implicit supposition behind the doctrine of ontological monovalence is that any instance of real negation can be analysed in purely positive terms. But Pierre's absence from the café doesn't mean the same as his presence at home (although the latter entails the former — which is equally entailed by his death) any more than it means the same as Jean's occupying his customary place.*
* In an earlier publication in which I introduced the terms real and radical negation, their definitions were transposed.8 I now call the notion of absence, including non-existence, ‘real negation’ because, as I have just argued, it is the primary concept and embraces that of transformative negation including self-negation. Moreover, conceptually, it extends our ontology synchronically, irrespective of over what space-time span the indefinite synchronic is defined, so that it does not depend essentially upon process. I should also mention that in my exposition of what I now call real negation I confused the epistemological question of our criteria for the reality of absence with the ontological question of whether, for example, a thing is, quite independently of us, absent (distanciated or non-existent), not there. I also failed to notice that our criteria for ascribing reality to absences need not be causal, but can be perceptual — as in Sartre's example,9 where I see Pierre's absence from the café (when I am expecting to meet him), or as in the case of simple non-existential proofs in science, which will be discussed in C2. This was because I was tacitly thinking of non-being (or more generally absence) as necessarily involving depth, thus overlooking the simplest species, where it involves merely spatio-temporal distance. Anthony Giddens has given some currency to the term ‘distanciation’.10 However, it seems to me that in his work it sometimes means (a) stretching (and thereby extending presence or embedding) and sometimes simply (b) distancing (and thereby absenting and possibly disembedding). I shall make use of this term, and exploit this duality of meaning to connote the play of absence and presence, e.g. in the conceptual distanciation that occurs in analogical, metaphorial or metonymic work in the transitive process of science, which executes a crucial role in the epistemological dialectic.
The chief result of ontological monovalence in mainstream philosophy is to erase the contingency of existential questions and to despatialize and detemporalize (accounts of) being. I shall be concerned with a variety of other modes of negation besides the ones I have already referred to. One may be briefly mentioned here — subject negation. This refers primarily to a subject in the process of formation or dissolution (e.g. in Hegelian logic passing over into its ‘predicate’). As such it is clearly a variant of transformative negation, but I am going to extend its meaning to cover cases of non-transformative and non-trivially transformative real negation (e.g. non-existence and simple space-time distanciation without any other significant change) and counterpose it polemically to the prepositional and predicate negations of standard logic. For it will be vital to my vindication of negativity that one can refer to absence, including non-existence; or, if one prefers to put it this way, that reference is not, contrary to the tradition from Plato to Frege, tied to positive existence. This, I will show in C2. Non-being, within zero-level being, exists and is present everywhere.
I shall also be occupied with negativity and negation in many other senses of the verb to ‘negate’, including ‘deny’, ‘reject’, ‘contradict’, ‘oppose’, ‘exclude’, ‘marginalize’, ‘denigrate’, ‘erase’, ‘separate’, ‘split’, ‘sunder’, ‘cancel’, ‘annul’, ‘destroy’, ‘criticize’ and ‘condemn’, and with their interconnections. But my primary emphasis will be on the categories of real, transformative and radical negation of determinate and indeterminate kinds. One other preliminary matter before I pass on. Real determinate negation, absence or non-being, is not equivalent to Hegel's nothing, which entirely lacks determinacy, and any sort of depth. Negativity, although it is the dynamic of Hegel's system and is in fact in the guise of contradiction greatly exaggerated by Hegel, is never developed or even simply retained — it is always cancelled and positivity restored. Seeing this is one of the merits of the young Hegelians. One of the few philosophers to pay serious attention to categories of negativity is Sartre, but it should be said straight away that my real negation is not equivalent to Sartrian nothingness but more to his négatité; though, as I have defined it, it is not intrinsically related to human activity.
More generally, in this work, I shall be showing how critical realism, hitherto focusing — in what I shall call its first or prime moment (which I shall abbreviate to 1M) — on the concepts of structure, differentiation, change, alterity (as in the transitive/intransitive distinction — epistemic/ontic non-identity within ontology), transfactual efficacy, emergence, openness, etc., must be meshed with the characteristically dialectical categories, arguments, themes and pabula expressed in the ideas of negation, negativity, becoming, process, finitude, contradiction, development (which need not be progressive and may just be regarded as directional change including regression, retrogression and decay, in a thing or kind to at the limit fragmentation, chaos and/or collapse), spatiality, temporality, mediation, reciprocity and many more — including such figures as the hiatus, chiasmus and pause — at what I will call a second edge (abbreviated to 2E) of development. 1M suffices for, e.g., an adequate account of science which abstracts from space, time and the process of change, which posits ‘principles of difference’ or ‘metaphysical inertia’. At 2E, which is the narrowly dialectical moment in a four-sided dialectic, the very principles of indifference are called into question and difference, and we have ‘metaphysical (neg)entropy’. This is the moment of cosmology, of human geo-history, of personal biography, laborious or routinized work but also of joyful or idle play. At a third level (abbreviated to 3L) of development we have the characteristically totalizing motifs of totality, reflexivity (which is its inwardized form), concrete universality and what I will call ‘concrete utopianism’, subjectivity and objectivity, autonomy (practico-epistemological duality, consistency and coherence), reason and rationality including phronesis or practical wisdom, and the unity of theory and practice. This is at once the inner truth or pulse of things and the spot from which we must act, the axiological moment and (if there is such) metaphysical alethia. I will postpone thematizing it until after a consideration of the (very different) Hegelian totality. But 3L is not the end of the matter. A fourth dimension (4D) is required — for the critical realist totality is radically open. So we must return to practice. But this is not as a Nietzschean forgetting, but as active and reflexive engagement within the world in which we seek to achieve the unity of theory and practice in practice. Each level in this dialectic is preservative. 4D presupposes 3L presupposes 2E presupposes 1M. (This does not mean that every category at 2E is instantiated in some employment of a 3L category. Thus one can have dialectical connection without contradiction.) We are left with non-identity, structure, negativity, finitude, essentially transformative change, holistic causality and phronesis at the end — in agency. But agency is, of course, in a sense already there at the outset in the phenomenologicality of science, so we can say, if we like, that the end is implicit in the beginning,* but if we go along with this rather Hegelian way of speaking, we must see the agency as a radically transformed transformative praxis, oriented to rationably groundable projects — ultimately flourishing in freedom.
* Thus I have previously argued that ontological realism (in the intransitive dimension) is consistent with and necessitated by epistemological relativism (in the transitive, geo-historical process of science), which is in turn consistent with and practically entailed by judgemental rationality (in the axiologically irreducible, intrinsic aspect of, or normative moment in, science).11 Even more simply, one might cite the ontological arguments of transcendental realism as exemplifying 1M; the meta-sociology of the transformational model of social activity (which is also the logic of the transitive dimension of science) as prefiguring 2E; the naturalistic ethics entailed, or at least facilitated, by the theory of explanatory critique as intimating 3L; and the emancipatory axiology so situated as indicating 4D. But, as we shall see, this historical sublation is not entirely preservative insofar as the moments of critical realism are affected by its dialectical deepening which is also a cross-fertilization.
What is the characteristic error at 3L which stands to 2E and 1M as ontological monovalence and actualism respectively do? It consists in ontological extensionalism — or what could also be called ontological partiality or ‘externalism’, where external is to be taken in the sense of the denial of internal relationality. A relation aRb is internal if and only if a would not be what it is essentially unless it were related to b in the way that it is. Partiality is, of course, closely related to separability, which goes back to Aristotle's definition of substance taken up in crucial respects by Descartes, and in Aristotle derived perhaps ultimately from the Platonic theory of predication. The canonical, and also extreme, version of ontological extensionalism is provided by Hume's famous dictum that things ‘seem conjoined but never connected’.* (This is an extreme formulation because it denies even necessary relationships between externally related things.) Besides denying internal relations, other modes of extensionalizing thought and/or practice consist in hypostatizing the moments or aspects of a totality, treating space-time as independent of the system of material things, conceiving morality as independent of the network of social relations (and in particular denying a fact to value and theory to practice link), failing to recognize (and/or being indifferent to) identities-in-differences or unities-in-diversities and/or differences-in-identity or diversities-in-unity, abstracting from specifying differentiations, e.g. by subsuming a particular under a universal without mediation, failing to see the tri-unity of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity (e.g. within language or experience) but then equally failing to articulate this tri-unity as formed within an always already existing social world into which we are ‘thrown’ and as occurring only within an over-reaching material objectivity, of which the social world is a contingent, emergent but cosmically ephemeral outcome. Let us just consider for a moment the thought-reality relationship. A philosophical ontology can be detotalizing or partial in at least four ways: (1) it can objectivize reality, e.g. by extruding thought from it; (2) it can subjectivize reality, e.g. by failing to locate thought within a non-ideational and mediated reality encompassing it; (3) it can split reality, e.g. on eidetic/sensual (Platonic), phenomenal/noumenal (Kantian), or social/physical (hermeneutical) lines; and/or (4) it can adopt some combination of these expedients. Let us take a concrete case — that of Humean empiricism, dominant in mid-twentieth-century philosophical, scientific and social thought and present in that of Kant, Hegel and much post-Nietzschean post-structuralism. We can see its characteristic error at 1M to lie in anthropomorphizing and actualizing reality, at 2E that of positivizing and deprocessualizing (de-spatio-temporalizing) it, at 3L that of subjectivizing it and at 4D, in a characteristic and necessary inversion,13 reifying and fetishizing that part of it which is the product of human practices. If we write dr as a domain of the real, da as the domain of the actual, d+ as the domain of the positive, ds as the domain of the subjective, empiricism can thus be seen to rest on an illicit generalization of the special case dr ≥ da ≥ d+ ≥ ds ≥ de where the latter is identified in terms of human experience, and where human sense-experience is conceived as a product or function of reified facts, i.e. de = df. More generally I shall be arguing that western philosophy, including most dialectical and specifically Hegelian thought, is characterized by a disemancipatory anthropocentricism/morphism, marked by ontological actualism, monovalence, extensionalism, subjectivism (in its post-Cartesian period) and de-agentification (a denegation of human agency).
* ‘All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we can never observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected.’12
These levels of deepening of critical realism should not be hypostatized. What they specify are co-present and systematically ‘intermingle’ in reality. Furthermore, although, as in Hegel, it is the second moment — of negativity — that is the narrowly dialectical one, each of the others and the whole are implied in it as a system. Moreover, there are dialectics specific to each level. Thus the dialectics of 1M are typically dialectics of stratification and superstructure-formation or superstructuration, including emergence. The typical dialectical figures here are what I shall call the dialectical comment, which I shall write as dc', and dialectical reason (dr'), which I shall explicate in relation to Hegelian dialectic. I shall later link these figures to a characteristic pattern of problem-generation, resolution and critique in science and philosophy and to the theme of theory/practice inconsistency, which I shall see as essential to dialectic generally and pivotal to the emancipatory spiral of transformist politics and (counter-)ideology. Dialectical reason includes, in metacritical analysis, displaying the common or dialectical grounds (dg') of apparently opposed but mutually complicit dialectical counterparts or contraries, as, I shall argue, in the Kantian opposition between knowledge and faith, or more generally between anthroporealism and transcendent — which I shall rigorously differentiate from transcendental — realism, or between empiricism and idealism. This includes the logic of what Derrida has called ‘supplementarity’,14 and what Freud called ‘compromise formation’. Metacritical dialectical reason also isolates the duplicities and dialectical paralogisms generated by philosophies of identity including Hegel's own. At 2E the dialectics are characteristically dialectics of change, including interchange (reversal), and transition. Determinate transformative negation, though it is present in some guise in all dialectics, comes to the fore here, but the most distinctive figure at 2E is dialectical process (dp') — as when, for instance, we are incessantly forced to revise our descriptive, taxonomic and explanatory vocabularies in the light of unexpected, and possibly recursive, epistemic and/or ontic change.
At 3L the characteristic figure is dialectical totality (dt'), as when separated phenomena come to be seen as aspects of a unified (or disunified) whole. Hermeneutics provides a good initial heuristic for understanding what it is to think in this dialectical mode. In a painting it is not only that the parts cannot be understood except in relation to the whole and vice versa but — and this is the clue to Hegelian totality — they mutually ‘infect’ each other — the whole is in the part, as my body is in my writing hand. This is what Althusser meant by ‘expressive totality’,15 though he vastly underestimated the extent to which Marx not just in his exploratory work but also in his systematic writings used, in Pareto's graphic image, words ‘like bats’.16 Nor can we say that this was necessarily wrong — it is merely a particular kind of totality. Montage, and pastiche generally, and entities like the British Working Class in February 1992, provide examples of very different sorts of totalities. Let me give a concrete example of a 3L dialectic — the Lefebvrean dialectic of centre and periphery,17 where this is to be understood partially literally in terms of the globalization of capitalism and culture and partially as a metaphor for the dialectic of power and resource flows between an increasingly integrated and homogenized ‘centre’ and an increasingly marginalized and fragmented periphery, in the ‘south’, in the ‘north’ and in the ‘south-in-the-north’ — and in the physical, social and psychic peripheralizations therein. At 4D the dominant pivotal figure is dialectical praxis, which I shall write as dφ. Relating it to the immediately preceding example, the dialectic here calls for the retotalization of the periphery in the mutual recognitions of identities-in-difference and unity-in-diversity, mediated therefore by mutual recognition of differential (personal, social, local, etc.) identities and involving a degree of recentrification (psychic, social, local and global) in a transformed transformative praxis for the retotalization of the human race. This would involve a non-preservative dialectical sublation (ds') of the pre-existing state of affairs.
Sublations, generally, as species of determinate transformative negations, may be totally, essentially or partially preservative. Within and outside these categories further important discriminations may be made, e.g. a transformative negation may preserve what is held to be of value in, even though it is not essential to, the sublated social form. But sublations are not, of course, the only dialectical result (dr°). Results include stand-offs, the mutual undoing of the contending parties, the preservation of the status quo ante, retrogression and many other outcomes besides sublation. Nor does it make sense to talk of an Aufhebung in many types of what may be properly called dialectics — e.g. in social life, of Verstehen (per se), of structure, process and agency, of presence and absence or of embedding and disembedding in space and time and from space in time and vice versa, or of overlapping, intersecting or disjoint spatio-temporalities. These involve polarities or more complex figures that may figure in sublations or generally outcomes, but, as part of the transcendental parameters of any conceivable social life, are not themselves sublatable, or so it would seem reasonable to suppose. Of course a dialectical outcome or result, of any of these characteristic modes, is only spatio-temporary; the potential starting point for a new round of real transformative negation.
By the end of this chapter the very different topologies of the critical realist and Hegelian dialectics will become apparent. But it should perhaps be said here and now, if it is not already obvious, that, although I will show their connections, my 1M, 2E and 3L do not correspond to the Hegelian moments of understanding, dialectic or negative reason and speculative or positive reason shortly to be discussed. They encompass different types of dialectic, within each of which (dialectical) negativity has a role to play; and the movement or dialectic of critical realism as a whole (which, of course, includes 4D), to be articulated fully in the chapters to come, traverses and envelops all these phases or levels. Nor do the moments of dialectical critical realism match the tetrapolity of analytical, dialectical, totalizing and practical reasoning. For a start, 4D consists not in practical reasoning but in (reasonable) practice — not the same thing at all. Moreover, critical realist dialectical reasoning comprises all these modes of reasoning and practice and their unity. In particular there is a dialectic of dialectical and analytical (or formal) reasoning in the course of which discourse moves in and out of the domain of formal reasoning, be it of a deductive or, for example, inductive type, in which meanings and values remain fixed (or stable in their indeterminacy), which is of great importance in science, philosophy and everyday life. Furthermore, dialectical critical realism is dialogical — discursive, inter-subjective through and through. This will become plain when I discuss the communicative dimension of what I have called the ‘social cube’ (which is really a space-time cubic stretch or flow) in C2.9. In this way critical realist dialectic incorporates an important range of historical connotations to the word, to be introduced in §6 and thematized in C2, which Hegelian dialectic, rooted in a post-Cartesian monological philosophy of consciousness, however aware of its social matrix, lets slip — a point that Habermas has not been slow to stress.18
There is one other preliminary matter that should be dealt with here before I turn to Hegelian dialectic. It may be contended that critical realism is, or began as, a philosophy of — and for — science, even if it is conceded that it is not a scientistic philosophy.19 How then can I treat of theory generally, or by what right do I identify it as a subset of the domain of the real, or indeed envelop in my critique philosophies — including epistemologies — which do not purport to be about science? Let us consider the last objection first. There is an important grain of truth here. There is indeed a big difference between science and everyday knowledge, which the philosophical tradition has — at least in its post-Lockian period — tended to conflate or otherwise obscure, the significance of which I will bring out anon. But I think, and would like to show, that science provides a hidden ‘analogical grammar’20 for the metacritical analysis of philosophies — at any rate at 1M. (At 2M, 3L and 4D the wider social context is more important, though we should never underestimate the power buried in the human psyche-soma.) Correspondingly, transposing philosophical theses of an epistemological kind into their presuppositions about and implications for science can be extraordinarily illuminating. In particular it affects a concretization (itself a dialectical development) of these, which makes it easier to identify exactly what their insights, aporiai, tensions and effects are. A parallel recasting of ethical positions and arguments into social theoretic positions can be equally illuminating. To turn to the first objection now, it is the case that the transcendental arguments used to establish critical realism were in the first instance thrown up by existing reflections on (theories of) science, of which they constituted an immanent critique. But in C3 I intend also to derive (dialectical) transcendental realism both without recourse to science and by taking up the challenge of Heideggerian existential phenomenology. There I will consider science precisely as engaged concernful human activity with Dasein exploring its Umwelt with its equipment (language, pre-existing, yet not necessarily articulated, knowledge and tools), constituting a ‘referential totality’ ready-to-hand; that is, I will in effect treat science as an existential (employing categories). I will also consider the extent to which dialectical transcendental, more generally critical, realism can be generated by reflection on the presuppositions of the pathology of everyday life.
Finally, I should make it explicit that I do not see science as a supreme or overriding value, but only as one among others to be balanced (in a balance that cannot be wholly judged by science) in ergonic, emancipatory and eudaimonistic activity. Nor do I think the objects of science exhaust reality. On the contrary, they afford only a particular angle or slant on reality, picked out precisely for its explanatory scope and power. Moreover, alongside ethical naturalism I am committed to moral realism and I would also like to envisage an adjacent position in aesthetics, indeed viewing it as a branch of practical philosophy, the art of living well. A last word here. Starting with knowledge as a systematic phenomenon I reject that cognitive triumphalism, the roots of which lie in the epistemic fallacy, which identifies what is (and what is not) with what lies within the bounds of human cognitive competence. Reality is a potentially infinite totality, of which we know something but not how much. This is not the least of my differences with Hegel, who, although a more subtle exponent of cognitive triumphalism, Prometheanism or absolutism, nevertheless is a conduit directly connecting his older contemporary Pierre de Laplace to Lenin and thence diamat and the erstwhile command economies of the omniscient party states. But Hegel was a much more subtle exponent of cognitive triumphalism, as we shall in due course see.
There are two principal inflections of the dialectic in Hegel: (α) as a logical process of reason; and (β), more narrowly, as the dynamo of this process, the method, practice of experience of determinate negation. But to understand both one must go back to the roots of this most complex — and hotly contested — concept in ancient Greek thought. Here I will be dealing briefly with material that I will treat in C2 in more thematic and historical detail.
Derived from the Greek dialectikē, meaning roughly the art of conversation or discussion — more literally, reasoning by splitting into two — Aristotle credited Zeno of Elea with its invention, as deployed in his famous paradoxes — most notoriously, of motion. These were designed to vindicate the Eleatic cosmology by drawing intuitively unacceptable conclusions from its rejection. But the term was first generally applied in a recognizably philosophical context to Socrates' mode of argument, or elenchus, which was differentiated from the Sophistic eristic, the technique of disputation for the sake of rhetorical success, by the orientation of the Socratic dialogue towards the disinterested pursuit of truth. Plato himself regarded dialectic as the supreme philosophical method and the ‘coping-stone’ of the sciences — using it to designate both the definition of ideas by genus and species (founding logic) and their interconnection in the light of a single principle, the Form of the Good (instituting metaphysics). At one and the same time dialectic was the means of access and assent to the eternal — the universal-and-necessarily-certain — and such Forms or Ideas were the justification for the practice of dialectic. In this inaugural moment of the western philosophical tradition, fundamentalism, classical rationalist criteria for knowledge and dialectic were indissolubly linked. Aristotle's opinion of dialectic, which he systematized in his Topics, was considerably less exalted.21 For the most part he regarded it as a mere propaedeutic to the syllogistic reasoning expounded in his Analytics, necessary to obtain the assent of one's interlocutors but, being based on merely probabalistic premisses, lacking the certainty of scientific knowledge. This last was, however, dependent on the supplementation of induction by nous or that intellectual intuition which allowed us to participate in the divine, i.e. knowledge as Plato had defined it (although Plato had not claimed to achieve it), the true starting points (archai) of science. There are places, however, where Aristotle took dialectic, as the method of working from received opinions (endoxa) through the discussion and progressive probative augmentation of conflicting views and aporiai, as an alternative way of arriving at archai.22 If he had taken this course consistently, Aristotle, however, would never have satisfied Platonic criteria for knowledge (epistēmē rather than doxa), never have got beyond induction. The first great achieved identity theorist was already caught in a vice between Plato and Hume — a vice that was to determine the subsequent trajectory of western philosophy: historical determination by rationalist epistemology, structural domination by empiricist ontology.
The sense of conversational interplay and exchange, involving the assertion, contradiction, distinction and qualification of theses, was retained in the practice of medieval disputation. It was this sense that was probably most familiar to Kant, who also took over the Aristotelian conception of dialectic as relying on premisses which were in some measure inadequate as well as the analytical/dialectical contrast. For Kant, dialectic was that part of transcendental logic which showed the mutually contradictory or antinomic state into which the intellect fell when not harnessed to the data of experience. By a turn to transcendental subjectivity, Kant combined, or seemed to combine, the satisfaction of rationalist demands on knowledge with empiricist criteria for being — but only at the price of leaving things-in-themselves unknowable. Kantian dialectic showed the inherently limited nature of human cognitive and moral powers, the resulting inherent impossibilities, as well as the conditions of possibility of human (non-archetypal, non-holy) intelligence and will. For Kant this was enlightenment, but it entrained a systematically sundered world and a whole series of splits, between knowledge and thought, knowledge and faith, phenomena and noumena, the transcendental and the empirical, theory and (practical) reason, duty and inclination, this world and the next (splits which were also interiorized within each term separately), as well as those expressly articulated in the antinomies. These dichotomies were to be only weakly (albeit influentially) repaired in the teleologies of the Critique of Judgement.
This spread of connotations of dialectic includes, then, argument and conflict, disputation, struggle and split, dialogue and exchange, but also probative progress, enlightenment, demystification and the critique of illusion.
Hegel synthesized (α) this Eleatic idea of dialectic as reason with another ancient strand, (β) the Ionian idea of dialectic as process — in (γ) the notion of dialectic as the self-generating, self-differentiating and self-particularizing process of reason. This second (Ionian) idea typically assumed a dual form: in an ascending dialectic, the existence of a higher reality (e.g. the Forms or God) was demonstrated; and in a descending dialectic, its manifestation in the phenomenal world was explained. Prototypes of these two phases are the transcendent dialectic of matter of ancient scepticism, in which the impermanence of the sensate world, or the existence of error, or of evil, is taken as a ground for positing an unchanging or completely true, or perfectly good, realm — logically, of the forms, theologically of God; and the immanent dialectic of spiritual diremption of neo-Platonic and Christian eschatology from Plotinus and Eriugena to Silesius and Böhme, which sought to explain why a perfect and self-sufficient being (God) should disclose itself in the dependent and imperfect sphere of matter. Combination of the ascending and descending phases results in a quasi-spatio-temporal pattern of original unity, loss or division and return or reunification (graphically portrayed in Schiller's influential Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind) or a quasi-logical pattern of hypostasis, actualization and redemption. Combination of the Eleatic and Ionian strands yields the Hegelian absolute — a logical process or dialectic which actualizes itself by alienating, or becoming other than, itself and which restores its self-unity by recognizing this alienation as nothing other than its own free expression or manifestation — a process that is recapitulated and completed in the Hegelian system itself.
The three principal keys to Hegel's philosophy — spiritual monism, realized idealism and immanent teleology — can now be cut. Together they form the pediment to it. The outcome of the first dialectical thread in Kant was a view of human beings as bifurcated, disengaged from nature and inherently limited in both cognitive and moral powers. Hegel's generation, as we shall see in C4, experienced the Kantian splits, dichotomies, disharmonies and fragmentations as calling for the restoration of what Charles Taylor has nicely called an ‘expressive unity’23 — lost since the idealized ancient Greek world — that is, in philosophical terms, for a monism — but one which, unlike Spinoza's, paid due heed to diversity, which would be in effect a unity-in-diversity, and to the constitutive role of subjectivity; that is, one which preserved the legacy of Luther, Descartes and the Enlightenment formulated in the great Kantian call to ‘have courage to use your own reason’24 or radical autonomy from ‘self-incurred tutelage’,25 and that was firmly predicated on the achievements of the critical philosophy. For Hegel the problem of elaborating a non-reductionist and subjective monism gradually became tantamount to the problem, posed by the ascending phase of the second dialectical thread, of developing a complete and self-consistent idealism. Such an idealism would, in fusing the finite in the infinite, retain no dualistic or non-rational residues, thereby finally realizing and vindicating the primordial Parmenidean postulate of the identity of being and thought in thought, underpinned by a progressivist view of history. Neither Fichte nor Schelling has been able to accomplish this. In Fichte, the non-ego or otherness of being, although originally posited by mind, remained as a permanent barrier to it; so that the principle of idealism became a more Sollen or regulative ideal. Schelling, on the other hand, genuinely transcended dualism in his ‘point of indifference’ uniting man and nature, but less than fully rationally. For Schelling, this identity was achieved only in intuition, rather than conceptual thought, with the highest manifestation of spirit art rather than philosophy, so that the Parmenidean principle remained unrealized in thought. By contrast, in the Hegelian Geistodyssey of infinite, petrified (natural) and finite mind, the principle of idealism, the speculative understanding of reality as (absolute) spirit, is unfolded in the shape of an immanent teleology which shows, in response to the problem of the descending phase, how the world exists (and, at least in the human realm, develops) as a rational totality precisely so that (infinite) spirit can come to philosophical self-conciousness in the Hegelian system demonstrating this. Absolute idealism is the articulation and recognition of the identity of being in thought for thought.
In this logical process or dialectic the problem of reunification of opposites, transcendence of limitations and reconciliation of differences is carried out in the characteristic figure of what I shall call ‘constellational identity’. In this dialectical inscape, which qualifies the monism of Hegelianism, the major, typically idealist, term (thought, the infinite, identity, reason, spirit, etc.) over-reaches, envelops and contains the minor, more ‘materialist’, term (being, the finite, difference, understanding, matter, etc.) in such a way as to preserve the distinctiveness of the minor term and to show that it, and a fortiori its distinctiveness, are teleologically necessary for the major one. The effect of the Hegelian perspective or Ansicht is, on Hegel's own account, ‘more than a comfort, it reconciles, it transfigures the actual which seems unjust into the rational’.26 ‘To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords.’27 ‘The dissonances of the world’ thus appear, in his friend the poet Hölderlin's words in Hyperion, ‘like the quarrel of lovers. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife, and everything that is separated finds itself again’ — in the movement of self-restoring sameness or self-reinstating identity, which is the life of absolute spirit.
Hegel conducts four principal types of demonstration of this life:
1. the introductory educative dialectics of The Phenomenology of Spirit in the medium first of individual experience and then of collective culture;
2. the systematic ascending dialectic of the Logics in the abstract sphere of the categories;
3. the systematic descending dialectics of the philosophy of nature and spirit; and
4. the illustrative historical dialectics of Hegel's various lecture series, mainly in the realms of objective and absolute spirit.
The motor of this process is dialectic more narrowly conceived. This is the second, essentially negative, moment in what Hegel calls ‘actual thought’, which drives the dialectics of (1)–(4) on. It is styled by Hegel as the ‘grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative’.28 It is not the case, according to Hegel, that a concept merely excludes its opposite or that the negative of a term (or proposition) simply cancels it. If this were so then Aristotle's criticisms of Platonic diairesis and Kant's of pre-critical metaphysics would indeed entrain the anti-speculative implications they themselves drew. Rather, to the contrary, from the vantage point of reason, as distinct from the understanding, a genus always contains, explicitly or proleptically, its own differentiae; and, in a famous inversion of the Spinozan maxim ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’, negation always leads to a new richer determination — this is transformative negation — so imparting to categories and forms of life an immanent dynamic and to their conflict an immanent resolution rather than a mutual nullification. Although the principle of the mutual exclusion of opposites, entailing rigid definitions and fixed polarities, is adequate for the finite objects grasped by common sense and the empirical sciences, the infinite totalities of reason (which, of course, constellationally embrace the former) require the dialectical principle of the identity of exclusive opposites. And Hegel's central logical claim is that the identity of opposites is not incompatible with their exclusion, but rather depends upon it. For it is the experience of what in non-dialectical terms would be a logical contradiction which at once indicates the need for an expansion of the universe of discourse or thought and at the same time yields a more comprehensive, richly differentiated or highly mediated conceptual form. It is this experience in which dialectic proper consists as the second member of a triad composed of the understanding, dialectic (or negative) and speculative (or positive) reason, representing the principles of identity, negativity and rational totality respectively. I will go into the fine structure of this dynamic shortly. On this interpretation, the dialectical fertility of contradictions depends upon their analytical unacceptability. (Hence any dialectical logic must incorporate an analytical one as a special — and vitally generative — case.) From the achieved vantage point of (positive) reason the mutual exclusivity of opposites passes over into the recognition of their reciprocal interdependence (mutual inclusion): they remain inseparable yet distinct moments in a richer, more total conceptual form-ation (which will in turn generate a new contradiction of its own). It is the constellational identity of understanding and reason within reason which fashions the continually recursively expanding kaleidoscopic tableaux of absolute idealism.
Dialectic, then, in this narrow sense, is a method — or better, experience — of determinate negation — which enables the dialectical commentator to observe the process by which the various categories, notions or forms of consciousness arise out of each other to form ever more inclusive totalities until the system of categories, notions or forms as a whole is completed. And in a still narrower sense — in which it is the second member of the understanding-dialectic-reason (U-D-R) triad — it is the truth, theory of or comment on (dc' in the terminology introduced in §4 above) the experience or practice of the phase (notion, etc.) immediately preceding it, yielding or showing a contradiction — in effect a theory/practice inconsistency — which speculative reason (dr') will resolve, only, of course, for the resolution in turn to be susceptible to a further dialectic probe. Now it is clear enough that if we stay at the level of the understanding we will not find or recognize contradictions in our concepts or experience — in general it takes an effort or quantum leap — in what we may call a σ transform — to find the contradiction(s), anomalies or inadequacies in our conceptualizations or experience — and another quantum leap — which we may call a τ transform — to resolve them. And Hegelian dialectic is just this method or practice of stretching our concepts to the limit, forcing from and pressing contradictions on them, contradictions which are not immediately obvious to the understanding (hence the need for the σ transform), and then resolving them, a resolution which is not immediately obvious either (hence the need for the τ transform). (This is one of the reasons why Hegelian dialectic is so difficult to understand; and a respect in which Hegel's talk about the self-development of the concept, as if it were automatic [understanding-like], is at the very least disingenuous.) From this perspective Kant's great merit is that he advances, at least in the case of the antinomies, to the level of dc' (he makes the σ transform), but fails to take the further leap into speculative reason, fails to resolve them (to make the τ transform), so falling back as a (transcendental idealist) philosopher of the understanding. But in fact Hegel does not think that the U-D-R scheme exhausts the matter. I should hasten to add that the σ and τ transforms are my own gloss on Hegel. He thinks the understanding, which at one point he characterizes as an ‘almighty power’, is a great advance on the pre-reflective reasonableness of ordinary life which readily tolerates contradictions without finding anything problematic in them, so there is need for a transition from pre-reflective thought, what I shall call the ρ transform, to the understanding before we are in a position to engage in ordinary (non-speculative) science or philosophy. It was, of course, to this pre-reflective reasonableness that the later Wittgenstein was always trying, but never quite able, to return. Hegel also thinks that we have to ‘return’ to life, but after (dialectical and speculative) philosophy — in post-philosophical wisdom (in what I will call the υ transform). So we could schematize the whole process as in Figure 1.1.
For Hegel, then, truth is the whole, the whole is a process and this process is reason (dt' as dp' as dr'). Its result is reconciliation to life in (Hegelian) freedom. Error lies in one-sidedness, incompleteness and abstraction. Its symptom is the contradictions it generates and its remedy their incorporation into fuller, richer, more concrete, inclusive, englobing and highly mediated conceptual forms. In the course of this process, the famous principle of dialectical sublation (ds') or Aufhebung is observed: as the dialectic unfolds, no partial insight is ever lost. In fact the Hegelian dialectic progresses in two basic modes: (α) by bringing out what is implicit, but not explicitly articulated, in some notion or social or conceptual form (what I will term ‘teleonomic push’); or (β) by repairing some want, lack or inadequacy in it (‘teleological pull’). Both are instances of real negation in my terms, but only (α) is consistent with a rigorously ex ante, autogenetic process/progress of a kind to which, however we interpret him epistemologically (on which in a moment), he is certainly in his dialectics committed. Both may, moreover, be said to involve some theory/practice inconsistency, at least insofar as the notion or form makes, implicitly or explicitly, some claim to completion or adequacy, as the category Being from which the Logics start may be said to do. Truth is, however, not only the whole but a norm against which the adequacy of any particular reality to its notion and its stage in the development of the notion or reality (i.e. the idea in its otherness and return to self-consciousness) can be assessed. ‘Dialectical’, then, in contrast to ‘reflective’ (or analytical) thought — the thought of the understanding — grasps concepts and forms of life in their systematic interconnections, not just their determinate differences, and considers each development as a product of a previous less developed phase, whose necessary truth or fulfilment it, in some sense and measure, is; so that there is always some tension, latent irony or incipient surprise between any form and what it is in the process of becoming. In short, Hegelian dialectic is the actualized entelechy of the present, comprehended (and so enjoyed) as the end of everything that has led up to it.
It is now possible to make some systematic connections between the Hegelian dialectic and the argument we have developed so far, and to comment further upon the former. I shall distinguish (α) Hegel's global dialectics, of the kind discussed in §6(α), from (β) his local dialectics, of the sort schematized by the U-D-R movement of thought and from, within this, the dialectical moment proper (γ). The general character of any U-D-R movement or transition is that of a preservative determinate negation. Now this has the very interesting property of representing a non-arbitrary principle of stratification, structuration or superstructure-formation, which I shall explore later. Suffice it to say now that, properly transposed and situated, it forms the kernel to the solution of an important class of philosophical problems (those turning on the absence of an analogue of dr' or dg' at 1M) as well as being an interesting ontological figure in its own right (forming, for instance, an analogue of real material emergence). Within any U-D-R movement, the dialectical moment proper (dc') reports and speculative reason (dr') remedies a real negation or absence in the base concept or form at, let us say, level L1. The dialectical movement to the resolution at L2 consists in a transformative negation of a determinate and preservative type (in consciousness or experience of that at L1). But I have said in §3 above that all transformative negations are also real negations (though the converse is not the case). In virtue of what is this transformative negation a real negation? It absents the absence in L1. (This is the sense in which determinate negation is the negation of the negation.) It does this by dialectically bracketing and retaining or incorporating the base concept, say e; the lack, inadequacy or internal incoherence within e, identified in D; and the tension, inconsistency or contradiction between e and what it is meant or trying to be (or implicitly is), identified in the probing comment, and a fortiori the theory/practice inconsistency between the base concept and its comment, in what is in effect a continually unfolding process within a permanent memory store. In this expanding warehouse of reason, each successive operation is in principle bracketed and retained.* Hegelian determinate negation constitutes, then, at once a transformation in the consciousness of the dialectical observer and an expansion of the existing conceptual field. Both are (in principle) additive and cumulative: nothing except absence itself is lost.
* Negations do not nullify and contradictions do not spread within this system — because to say of something that is false does not remove it (it has been said) and to say of a pair or more that they are contradictory is not itself contradictory (their contradictoriness is bracketed and negated at a higher level and in this simple way — which bears obvious analogies with the theory of types in standard logic — both the contradictions and their determinate negation are retained).
The Hegelian totality is constellationally closed, completed. Hegel's, like Aristotle's, is an achieved identity theory, but, unlike Aristotle's, it incorporates the sequence of stages (or conceptual shapes) leading up to it as moments within it and is in fact nothing but this movement of shapes including the finalizing consummating stage, the self-consciousness of spirit as (absolute) spirit in the Hegelian system itself. Speculative philosophy — and its social matrix, rational history — is constellationally finished, at an end. It is at a plateau. There remains a future, of course, but this can be grasped by the understanding — it does not require dialectic or speculative reason. This is the constellational identity of the future within the (Hegelian) present. Now, whatever Hegel says about the autogenetic development of the concept, it is clear as noonday that very few of Hegel's local dialectics take the (α) teleonomic push form, that is, satisfy the requirements of rigorous ex ante progress. It is the failure of concepts and forms to meet the requirement of the posited end — the absolute idea as absolute spirit — this lack and this teleology, that pulls the Hegelian dialectic forwards. It is generally only retrospectively, ex post, that a stage can be seen to be deficient. If Hegel's local, and by extension global, dialectics did satisfy the ex ante requirement, then the dialectical comment that issues from the σ transform (dc') and the speculative reason issuing from the τ transform that resolves it (dr') could both — and together — be said without qualification to constitute immanent critiques — dc' of the base concept or form (at L1) and dr' of that and dc'. As it is, we have to qualify this, and to distinguish accordingly between (α') genuinely auto-subversive (ex ante radical and so determinate transformative) negations and (β') merely retrospectively situatable (ex post) ones. (In the latter case the critique is really transcendent, not immanent.) And accordingly we might distinguish between good and bad radical negations. Of course, as the Hegelian totality is constellationally closed, all the contradictions, whether teleonomically or teleologically generated, are internal ones — and neglect of external contradictions, and more generally constraints, has been a damaging feature of Marxian social theory in the Hegelian mould, one which the foil, say, of Aristotelian dialectics may help to correct. This question of the autogenesis of the dialectical movement is closely bound up with the linearity of the Hegelian dialectic. Once again Hegel's theory is at odds with his practice here. His dialectics are not in fact logically, as distinct from textually, linear: they job around all over the place, affecting an incessant variety of perspective switches motivated by Hegel's desire not to just illustrate his dialectics but also to absorb and treat more and more phenomena dialectically in a continuing — and in principle open-ended — process of dialectical suction. Nor is there any reason in principle why dialectics of a Hegelian (or non-Hegelian) type should be linear. They could consist in recursively unfolding matrices, Gestalten or any of a variety of topological modes. Surface linearity does, however, seem imposed by the requirements of the textual, especially narrative, form — in what I have elsewhere called ‘continuous series’.29 (Derrida's use, and concept, of spacing is in fact a conscious attempt to overcome this.) These issues of autogeneticity and linearity are related to, but in principle distinct from, the epistemological status of Hegel's dialectics. There are three main interpretations: (a) that they are, or purport to be, totally self-generative and autonomous, dependent on no external subject-matter — the realization of the dream of intellectual intuition from Aristotle to Fichte in a hyperintuitive30 and parthenogenetic process, including — in the transition from Logic to Nature, i.e. in the alienation of the absolute idea — a moment heterocosmic with the creation of the world by God; (b) that they are, or purport to be, the dialectical treatment of various subject-matters, most notably those treated by previous philosophers, which Hegel has thoroughly (and perhaps totally) assimilated and critiqued and is now dialectically expounding — this is the transformative or re-appropriative interpretation, most notably formulated as a critique of Hegel's own self-understanding (or representation) of his practice by Trendelenburg; (c) that they are simple phenomenological descriptions of a dialectic in the real or at least of the notion as conceptually understood reality — an interpretation that obviously fits the Phenomenology and the historical lecture series best and which has been most persuasively and influentially argued by Kojève.31 I shall return to these issues later.
Corresponding to the distinction just made between good and bad radical negations (and immanent versus transcendent critiques), I want to distinguish between good and bad totalities. Good totalities are, though this is not their only characteristic, open; bad totalities are, whether constellationally or otherwise, closed. Now this is the exact opposite of Hegel's point of view. For him an open totality would conjure up the spectre of an infinite regress — it would be a ‘bad infinite’. But why should an open totality involve an infinite regress? An infinite regress implies more of the same, that significant changes (and even the principles of change) might not change, which is just what the concept of an open totality denies. Later I will show that totalities in general are and must be open. But for the moment let us stick with Hegel. Even if it is admitted that there is some kind of inadequacy or lack in an open totality (tautologically, a lack of completion), there is no inadequacy or lack in the thought of an open totality, which is what is at stake here. This thought can even, and perhaps must, be constellationally contained within the present (itself an indefinite boundary zone between past and future). Of course, Hegel's realized idealism, his principle of identity, will not allow him to accept this; there must be no mismatch — rather an identity — between totality and the thought of totality. But if truth consists in totality and the conformity of an object to its notion, it is clear that the concept of an open totality must be more true (complete and adequate) than the concept of a closed totality, because it is more comprehensive, englobing and contains the latter as a special case.
As I have described it, the real work of the dialectic is done by the σ transform which identifies the anomaly or lack in e (at L1) and the τ transform which remedies it at L2. I shall show in §9 how this U-D-R process can illuminate the epistemological dialectic in science, just as the non-arbitrary principle of stratification (logically) or superstructure-formation (spatio-temporally) involved in Hegelian preservative dialectical sublation illustrates analogous principles in nature and society. I shall also be arguing in C2.6 that although Hegel's global and crucial local dialectics fail, dialectical arguments are a perfectly proper species of transcendental argument belonging to the wider genus of retroductive (ascending)–explanatory (descending) argumentation in science. Dialectical arguments (and, for instance, the ontological necessities [and contingencies] they can establish) are no more the privilege of absolute idealism than transcendental arguments are the prerogative of Kant. I shall further argue that in the theory/practice inconsistency which the dialectical moment proper (dc') reports he has identified the most basic form of critique (in philosophy, science and everyday life): immanent critique. Unfortunately, locally and globally theory/practice inconsistency (which I shall sometimes abbreviate to T/P inc.) or incoherence is always for Hegel resolved in thought, in theory. The practice therefore remains. Transformative negation is confined to thought. There is no 4D in Hegel, rather the transfiguration of actuality in the post-philosophical reconciliation or υ transform. Once again Hegel is untrue to his theory of truth. If reality is out of kilter with the notion of it, it is reality which should be adjusted, not its truth. The unity (or coherence) of theory and practice must be achieved in practice. Otherwise the result is not autonomy, but heteronomy and the re-appearance of a Kant-like rift. Even the thought of the unity of theory and practice (in theory or practice) must be achieved in practice. Hypostatizing thought not only detotalizes reality, it also detotalizes the thought of reality. Here once more the Hegelian totality is revealed as incomplete. This amounts, of course, to an immanent critique of Hegel: his totality is incomplete, his theory inconsistent with his practice and the master concept which drives his dialectics on (for the most part teleologically) — lack or absence (in my terms, real negation) — is not preserved within his system. Positivity and self(-identity), the very characteristics of the understanding, are always restored at the end of reason. Hegelian dialectic is un-Hegelianly-dialectical.
It is also a special case. Within the σ and τ transforms — as at the actual or notional moment D which mediates them — we have moments of indeterminate and underdeterminate negation. (The same applies mutatis mutandis in the case of the ρ and υ transforms.) Linear radical negation — the production of an outcome as a result of a self-negating process alone — is clearly untypical: as we move in the Logics from simple to more complex categories (and the same holds true in Hegel's other textual dialectics), more and more determinations are brought in — and we shall see later that Hegel's doctrine of the speculative proposition, for example, can be heuristically fruitful in social science — but these determinations are always still internal or radical ones, or at the very best constellationally internal. More generally, it is clear that real transformative negations in geo-history are very really of the (even essentially) preservative, i.e. additive (superimpository), type. Indeed, insofar as every notional or social form — including those occurring in the universality of thought — is finite (i.e. insofar as the premisses of Hegel's dialectic of determinate being or ‘matter’ is true), all space-time beings are ‘vanishing mediators’.32 However, in an Hegelian Aufhebung, is not error (partiality, one-sidedness) lost? Hegel will perhaps want to say that the erroneous has been retained as a partial aspect of the truth, but either the error has been cancelled in the coming-to-be or fruition of the end or nothing has been cancelled and Aufgehoben loses its threefold meaning — to annul, preserve and sublimate — and the whole Hegelian project is without point or rationale, for, at the very least, a lack of reconciliation to actuality must be lost. In fact in any genuine (materialist) Aufhebung it is clear that something has to be lost, even if it is only time ([neg]entropy). On the other hand, it is equally obvious that processes occur in geo-history which are not, at least with respect to some determinate characteristic and within some determinate space-time band, negating but purely accretory, cumulative engrossments or developments. Generally one cannot say a priori whether the geo-historical outcome or result (dr°) of a process of a Hegelian-dialectical type will
(a) consist of the resolution of the contradiction, inadequacy or lack (dr†);
(b) consist in a rational or reasonable resolution of it (dr');
(c) consist in a rational resolution which conforms to the Hegelian form of radical preservative determinate negation (dr'') — a form which, in its concrete employment, only makes sense if one is prepared to distinguish between essential, significant or valuable characteristics and those which are not
(d) and affords us reconciliation to life (dr'''), let alone
(e) encourages mutual recognition in a free society (dr'''').
Waiving this last for the moment, we can say that Hegelian dialectic identifies what is patently a limiting and special case of a more general schema which can be written as
dr° ≥ dr† ≥ dr' ≥ dr'' ≥ dr'''.
Any general theory of dialectic will have to be able to situate the conditions of possibility and limits of non-resolutary results, non-reasonable resolutions, non-radical-preservative-determinate-negational reasons, and non-reconciliatory radical preservative determinate negations.
A few more preliminary points are called for before we grasp the nettle of ‘the positive in the negative’ of Hegelian dialectic. I have hitherto advanced two slightly different (but, in the Hegelian scheme itself, mutually implicative) interpretations of (γ), or the dialectical moment proper. On the one hand, I have said it gives, or is, the theory of the practice, experience or form preceding it — i.e. dc' as in effect (T1[P1]). On the other hand, I have said it reports a theory/practice inconsistency, or more general lack or inadequacy within it, i.e. dc' as (–T1[P1]). In the first moment, dc' as D1, it expresses the theory legitimating the metacritical statement which it articulates in the second, dc' as D2. D2, like D1, is a type of dialectical comment insofar as it isolates at a (notional) meta-level within the transition between L1 and L2 what is true of but not contained in L1, explicitly articulating an internal rift within L1 between the practice P1 and its own self-consciousness or theory as expressed at D1, viz. T1. This is the general form of the figure of practico-[axio-]epistemological inconsistency. But there is also a third inflection to the dc'. This is to see it as expressing an inconsistency between the theory of the practice at L1 expressed in the dialectical comment and the theory of that practice prior to the comment, i.e. at L1 itself. And we could write the D3 form as T2 (L1)/T1 (L1). It will be important to differentiate these nuances subsequently in differentiated and non-idealist contexts, when the dc' will vary as ideology to ideology-critique (the former taking the (T1[P1]) form, the latter (–(–T1[P1])), for in ideology-critique the metacritique, which isolates the absence that drives the dialectic on, constitutes a critique both of the theory and of the theory–practice ensemble — hence the double negation. So we really need to modify the central sector of Figure 1.1 as shown in Figure 1.2.
Second, the actuality to which we return in the υ transform is not quite the same as the actuality we left in the ρ transform. It is now a (rationally transfigured and comprehended) world in the Hegelian Ansicht. (And metacritically — but this is also Hegelian Nachdenken [after-thought] — it could be added a world transformed in part by the Hegelian practice itself.) Third, as I have been interpreting it, the ρ, σ and τ transforms (and in critical realist dialectic the φ transform in 4D, and even, metacritically in Hegelian dialectic, the υ transfiguration) are all determinate negations (with indeterminate and, in principle, multiply-including non-radically and non-linearly determined, fuzzy, duplicitous, polymorphous and indeed a variety of other possible declensions or aspects). But, to reiterate, this terminology is my own, not Hegel's, and the determinate negation of e at L1 is just dr', including the case where dr' = dc' (in which the notional σ and τ transforms are not distinguishable).
It should also be said that the U-D-R schema, which Hegel himself employs, is an abstract idealization of Hegel's actual practice. In many cases there is no obvious tension or inadequacy in a conceptual form. In some instances (as just mentioned) dc' = dr', i.e. what is resolved is an incoherence within a single concept (the dyadic case, on which it is clear that, if Hegelian dialectic is to be both rigorously ex ante and consistently linear, it must ultimately rest or continuously employ); in others, the resolution is between two opposed concepts, coupled in a non-identity relationship (the famous triadic paradigm, the classic dr' as ds'); in yet others, the resolution is of an incoherence or partiality within or a contradiction or anomaly between a whole cluster of concepts (the polyadic case, which we can subsume under the formula dr' as dt'). In some instances there is an immediate resolution (dc' as dr'), in others the resolution is motivated by a whole sequence of aporetic or antinomial phases (reiterated σ transforms). In some dialectical sequences or rounds the originating element is just the final resolving concept of the preceding round; in others the transition between local dialectics is mediated by more global considerations; in others still there is no very obvious or at best a (e.g. globally mediated) tenuous connection. Where there is no (obvious, or at least immanent/teleonomic) failing in a conceptual or social form, there may just be a perspectival switch (including reversal), a deepening, a concretization, a pun or a joke. No attempt to fit Hegelian dialectics into a unitary mode will work — although the Being-Nothing-Becoming and Unity-Difference-Unity-in-Difference heuristics can illuminate. However, it is noteworthy that the former is radically undermotivated and that the latter is not a local dialectic. Moreover, I agree entirely with Findlay when he remarks that ‘whatever Hegel may say in regard to the presence of contradictions in thought and reality’ (a presence, I hasten to add, which dialectical critical realism will vindicate, though situate), he is in practice concerned with ‘the presence of opposed, antithetical tendencies … which work in contrary directions’.33 In fact we shall see that it requires critical realism (and in particular its non-actualist and non-monovalent ontology) to show the rationale of, and sustain, Hegel's own logical innovations.
Sticking for the moment with Hegelian exegesis it is clear that, irrespective of the three epistemological interpretations outlined in §7, the Hegelian autogenetic moment is meaning-dependent and self-particularizing, breaking with the form—concept and concept-instance distinctions of Kantian transcendental analytic. It is also clear that Hegel is committed to the speculative identity of process and totality (dp' as dt') at the point of completion. Now from the consideration that the Hegelian determinate negation is simultaneously both a transformation in the observer's consciousness and an expansion of the whole conceptual field it follows that the latter can only be held in the mode of ‘negative presence’ — what I am going to call, following Kosok's path-breaking study, ‘negative referral’.34 Now in any determinate negation, whether of the Hegelian conceptual sort or the critical realist metatheoretical (distanciated and transformationalist) gloss on its type, there is and must be both a moment of indeterminacy (prior to the result) and a point of transition (the moment of its becoming). If we say of N that they are not moral, we leave it open whether they are immoral or amoral (or indeed neither). ‘Not moral’ is the indeterminate negation of ‘moral’. Ontologically, indeterminate negation, say at the σ or τ transforms, precedes determinate negation, both at each moment in the process and at the end, conceived as the formation of a comment or result. It is a moment of genuine contingency, openness, multi-possibility (and doubt), closed by the ensuing greater determinacy or determination. But epistemologically, in Hegelian dialectic, given the dominance of teleological pull over teleonomic push and the speculative identity of process and product, we can in general abstract a moment of indeterminacy only retrospectively, after we know the result. The ontological and epistemic orders are reversed in this in principle four-tiered structure of Hegelian local dialectic. What about the transition point itself? Take a triadic dialectic, where (–e) is the determinate negation of the originating conceptual or social form e, and o is the sublation of (e) and (–e). In principle it seems that we have a choice: either (α) we can say neither (e) nor (–e) apply in the transition state or boundary zone, rejecting the law of excluded middle and/or bivalence, assigning a third value (e.g. ontologically, indeterminate/ underdetermined/fuzzy; epistemologically, undecidable); or (β) we can say that both (e) and (–e) apply, thereby rejecting the law of non-contradiction. In Derridean rejection of ‘identity theory’ the first option is characteristically taken. In the former case we seem to sacrifice completeness (there is no reference to either determinate element in the boundary zone); in the latter case completeness is achieved (there is reference to both), but we seem to sacrifice consistency. In the Hegelian cumulative memory store, completion must be (constellationally) attained — the Hegelian totality is (allegedly) full — so Hegel must take the second option.
But it is the way in which he takes it that is interesting. The contradiction between the positive contraries (e) and (–e) becomes a signalling device for (as well as the purportedly autogenetic mechanism of) the expansion of the conceptual field or universe of discourse. The erstwhile positive contraries are retained, but now in a negative mode (i.e. in the mode of negative presence — that is, as negative sub-contraries), in the formation of o. This is the transition point within the transition zone, the moment of determination which is the negation of the non-identity relationship (e) ↔ (–e) in which the mutually exclusive elements were coupled, which are thereby both preserved as negative presences. In this way completion (local totality) is attained as a result of contradiction; identity reinstated after non-identity. This last is the constellational identity of identity and non-identity: the envelopment of non-identity by identity for the sake of the preservation/restoration/achievement of identity. This process — of the transmutation of positive contraries into negative sub-contraries — explains what I meant earlier when I said that the dialectical fertility of contradictions depends upon their analytical unacceptability and illustrates the ‘dialectical bracketing’ to which I later referred.
Three consequences follow from this (δ) node within the Hegelian dialectical moment proper, (γ) or D. First, in the expanded field, the erstwhile contraries are reinstated in their full distinctiveness, yet they remain inseparable moments of the totality which both transcends and encompasses them. Second, such dialectical opposites illustrate one way in which the traditional table of oppositions can be completed, for if contraries do not permit both (e) and (–e) and sub-contraries neither (e) nor (–e) and contradictories do not permit either, dialectical opposites permit both35 — though, and this remains crucial, not at the same time. But there is a simpler way of completing the table of oppositions, and one on which — if Findlay and I are right — Hegel's practice actually depends. In a multiply determined result the exercise of two or more tendencies are invoked to explain the outcome. They are, now simultaneously (but not at the same ontological level), both really present (i.e. transfactually efficacious) and actually absent (i.e. not manifest or ‘realized’); and insofar as they are tendentially opposed or negating they are at once positive contraries and negative sub-contraries (they cannot both be actualized but they can both be present); and, insofar as they have a common causal ground or condition of existence (dg'), they share the dialectical characteristic of being distinct yet inseparable. Critical realism can in this way vindicate, generalize, critically situate and show the limits of (Hegel was an arch expressivist-kinetic-actualist) Hegel's logical insight. The third consequence is the reinstatement of the principle of identity. In general Hegel wants to assert all of the following: ‘A is A’, ‘A is (i.e. passes over into) not A’, ‘A is B’ (the determinate result of the transition) and ‘A is A after all’. There are two ways of looking at this last proposition. On the one hand, it is only because A remains self-identical throughout the generative process of the local dialectic (β) that we are able to climb via B to C and thence to CN. On the other hand, from the perspective of the achieved summit of the global dialectic (α), all the steps that are climbed are explicit — no longer implicit. Their inadequacy and lack is cancelled in the Hegelian retrospective return, though it is not forgotten — held in negative presence (but not positive absence — real negation) — in the cumulative memory store of the climb, contained in-and-for-itself at the summit. At this point their logical-rational-spiritual necessity in the chain of things triumphantly shines out: the Eleatic (Parmenidean) face glowing in the Ionian (Heraclitean) fire.
It is now time to redeem my earlier promise and show how dialectic and more especially dialectic of a recognizably Hegelian provenance, albeit one refashioned in critical realist terms, can cast light on central concerns and problems of philosophy. First, let us consider the structure of the U-D-R local dialectic sketched in Figure 1.1 and the non-arbitrary principle of stratification it in principle affords. I want to interpret the schema illustrated in Figure 1.3 as essentially the schema for the epistemological dialectic in the sciences; and the ρ and υ transforms as standing for the relational dialectics in and out of science. Very concretely the ρ transform corresponds to the long training a scientific neophyte must undergo before being able to ‘do’ science; the U stands for the practice of normal science in something like Kuhnian terms; the σ transform for the gradual or sudden emergence of major anomalies or contradictions in the existing theoretical paradigm, or research tradition or programme. At this point a negative comment — dc' — on the practice of the pre-existing community becomes possible and inevitable, revealing at the very least some lack or inadequacy in it (real negation) and some inconsistency between its own self-understanding and the way it is (T/P or practico-epistemological inconsistency or incoherence). This — D — is the epoch of scientific revolution — with the node within the node (the δ moment) coming from the hint of the restoration of consistency by an expansion of the pre-existing conceptual field, a process only notionally completed at R after the τ transform. In general the epistemological dialectical resolution will involve retroductive-analogical thinking, utilizing paramorphic model-building or other condensations (so that the transformative negation is not an exclusively radical one) and heavily reliant on absented, distanciated and transformed pre-existing knowledge (Bachelard's ‘scientific loans’). The determinate result of this labour of transformative negation (in the transitive process of science) will be the identification of a new level of ontological structure, say S2, described in a new theory T2 capable of explaining most of the significant phenomena explained by T1 (at U) plus the anomalies at D, albeit in its own (T2's own) terms. The phenomena at S1 identified by T1 are ‘saved’ (for the most part) — this is the preservative aspect; theory at T1 is negated, falsified (the aspect of indeterminate, excluding negation) and transformed into something that could not be predicted and had to be won, fought for, achieved in a labour culminating in the determinate negation and replacement of T1 by T2. As science is a social and inter-subjective affair this may involve, besides (and in) work, what is in effect a life-and-death struggle for prestige and recognition, accompanied by reconciliation, at least in the next generation, as the scientific community coalesces around the new paradigm. This now initiates, in principle, the possibility, which may always be circumscribed or practically closed for any number of circumstantial reasons, of a new infra-scientific local dialectic exemplifying my open totality (Hegel's ‘infinite regress’). In the meantime there are a variety of interpretations that can be put on the υ transform. It can be seen under the aspect of applied science or technology, immediately involving social—natural relations, and/or under the aspect of the (re-)appropriation by the lay community of the skills and knowledge forged in the intra-scientific domain from which the latter is emergent. The ρ transform for its part can be seen not only as scientific training, but also as spanning a whole series of extra-scientific inputs, most notably the social matrix, itself embedded in nature, in which science occurs. More radically, under the sign of the new sociology of science, this whole epistemological dialectic could be interpreted as a ‘doxological’ dialectic in which the ρ and υ transforms were conceived as pervasive in their impact and knowledge/doxa as inextricably coupled to power in the manner of Foucault or alternatively symbolic capital in the style of Bourdieu.
How plausible this will strike the reader I do not know. But Hegel himself would probably have been horrified. Science, for him, was a matter of the understanding — what he meant by ‘science’ was what we now mean by philosophy, and I would not be unwilling to apply my model there too. But the years separating us from Hegel have seen revolution upon revolution in the sciences and the idea of negatively rational or dialectical (γ) and positively rational or literally speculative thought is at least now not at all out of place therein. There is something like a logic of scientific discovery,36 which I am calling the epistemological dialectic here. Of course this will be highly subject-specific and context-sensitive, matters which will occupy us later on.
Before I consider one of the implications of the potentially non-arbitrary principle of stratification or superstructuration implicit in Hegelian dialectics, let me step back a bit to dwell on the notorious problem-field of induction. I should say at the outset that I will treat it only in 1M terms, a 2M treatment will be given in C2. The problem of induction in its simplest form is the problem of what warrant we have for supposing that the course of nature will not change. On the ontology of transcendental realism, the stratification of nature provides each science with its own internal inductive warrant. If there is a real reason, located in the nature of the stuff, and independent of the disposition concerned, such as its molecular or atomic structure, then water must tend to boil when it is heated. In the epistemological dialectic sketched, this explanatory reason is obtained as a result of the τ transform to dr', when the identification of a new level of structure S2 is sufficiently confirmed for science — a process in motion — to take this as a starting point — a fact, for a new dialectical round. It is inconsistent with this reason/explanation that water should tend to freeze, blush shyly or turn into a frog. But it remains the case that in an open world any particular prediction may be defeated, so transcendental realism allows us to sustain the transfactuality (universality) of laws in spite of the complexity and differentiation of the world, e.g. so as to enable us to infer the mediated efficacy of tendencies in extra-experimental contexts, thus resolving the metacritically identifiable problem of what I have termed ‘transduction’.37 An ontology of closed systems and atomistic events and a sociology of reified facts and fetishized conjunctions are conditions of the possibility of the traditional problem of induction and conditions of the impossibility of its resolution. Closely connected with this problem are the problems of distinguishing a necessary from an accidental sequence of events, of subjunctive conditionals and of Goodman's and Hempel's paradoxes. All these stem from the absence of a real (non-conventional) reason, located in the nature of things, for predicates to be associated in the way they are. In virtue of his genetic constitution, if Socrates is a man, he must die. Turning too on the absence of a principle of stratification is the traditional problem of universals. If there is something, such as the possession of the same atomic or electronic configuration, which graphite, black carbon and diamonds share, then chemists are rationally justified in classifying them together — the reason is that structure. On the other hand/ there is nothing of any deep ontological import that all greengroceries possess in common — in such a classificatory context a resemblance, rather than a realist, theory works best (and, of course, critical realism can accommodate and explain this fact, too). In general, theoretical science is concerned only with what kinds of things there are, insofar as it illuminates their ways of acting (the generative mechanisms of nature); and it is concerned only with what things do, insofar as it illuminates what kinds there are (the structured entities of nature). This is the dialectic of explanatory and taxonomic knowledge within the epistemological dialectic in science.
Also belonging to the same problem-field are the Platonic self-predicative and, as I shall show in C4, the twentieth-century self-referential paradoxes. Thus Plato tries to account for some instance of blueness in terms of its participating in the Form ‘blue’ as distinct from, say (as of course he could not say), its reflecting light of wavelength 4400Å, i.e. invoking a new level or order of structure. This is also the clue to a rational theory of truth, as we shall see in due course. When we know why something is true our assumption that it is true is grounded, in a way in which it is not when we are only subjectively empirically certain of it. The absence of a non-arbitrary principle of stratification is the critical diagnostic key to many other philosophical aporiai, or so I shall argue in C4.2. Thus it is easy to find immediate and direct homologues of the problem of induction — e.g. Kripke's interpretation and generalization of Wittgenstein's private language argument;38 or analogues of it — for instance, the Hobbesian problem of order as thematized in the history of sociological theory. To repeat my forewarning, this is only a 1M resolution — at 2E the course of the deep structure of nature may indeed change, but to this backgammon is hardly an appropriate response. It should be already clear that dr', conceived as the outcome of an irreducibly empirical and heteronomous dialectic in science, involving the transformative negation of T1 by T2 and the identification of a new level of ontological structure S2 capable of resolving the aporiai (dc') of T1, saving, explaining, grounding and very probably redescribing the phenomena of the base structure S1, can at the very least be illuminating. Once again Hegel would have been horrified by this result. The rational necessity arrived at is not deployed by Geist, it is not intrinsically related, but contrafactually related, to human subjectivity, and it remains non-constellationally contingent whether it is ever actualized. But in this book I am into the business of denying Hegel exclusive property over his insights. Dialectic neither began nor ended with Hegel.
I hope I have made a prima facie case for connecting critical realism, (especially Hegelian) dialectic and essential concerns of philosophy. These connections will become explicit in the course of Dialectic, together with their implications for social theory and practice. In particular my critique of Hegelian dialectic will be systematized in C4 in the course of a sublation of the traditional problem-fields of philosophy. Dialectic will be diffracted and retotalized.
In C1.3 I argued that real negation > transformative negation > radical negation of a determinate, indeterminate, fuzzy, duplicitous and a mélange of other genres. In C1.6 I claimed that it is real negation or the absent, whether in the guise of the inexplicit (as in the case of teleonomic push) or the merely incomplete (teleological pull), that drives the Hegelian dialectic on/ and that will drive the dialectic past him. Incidentally the epistemological dialectic sketched in C1.9 can function as the Hegelian dialectic normally operates, by simply overcoming incompleteness — e.g. by augmenting generality or depth without prior anomaly.1 However, the more typical case here will be that where an inconsistency, caused by a relevant conceptual or empirical lacuna, generates the move to further completeness — in a Gödelian dialectic of:
absence → inconsistency → greater completeness
in principle without end.
Real negation is most simply first considered as the presence in some more or less determinate region of space-time (comprising, as a relational property of the system of material things, an objective referential grid) of an absence at some specific level or context of being of some more or less determinate entity, thing, power, event, aspect or relation, etc. Consider as a paradigm a stapler missing from a desk drawer, or a tool from a workbench. I want to focus here for ease of exposition on simple determinate non-being within a determinate locale, which, relative to any possible indexicalized observer on any possible world-line, is existentially intransitive, whether or not the absence is positively identified, or even identifiable. But the argument may be easily extended to deal with less determinate kinds. Thus the region may be not only as large or small as is naturally possible but Indefinite and/or open. And the entity may be, if it is present, hidden and perhaps necessarily unobservable to creatures like us, whether prosthetically aided or not. The absence may be deep or superficial, real but not actual. The region may be totally empty, constitute a level-specific void or just not contain x. x may be never anywhere (as in simple non-existence), sometimes somewhere else (as in finite or limited existence) or just spatio-temporally distant (as in the ‘duality of absence’ and, we can add, ‘presence’, mentioned in C1.3). The absent thus includes, but is not exhausted by, the past and outside. And it may be more or less systematically (e.g. causally) connected to the presence or absence of other determinate beings. At the boundary of the space-time region it may be difficult to say whether x is present or absent or neither or both (or both neither and/or both); and, if ‘present’ and ‘absent’ are treated as contraries, we are once more confronted with the spectre of rejecting the principle of non- contradiction or excluded middle or both. Note that the possibility of action/passion at-a-distance and/or across (possibly level-specific) voids — in effect, non-substantial process — provides another ground for regarding real negation (absence) as the more basic category than transformative negation (change). I will postpone treating complications that derive from the fourfold polysemy of real negation, noted in C1.3, viz. (a) as simple absence (our focus here), including nothing; (b) as simple absenting, e.g. through divergent distanciation or substantial or non-substantial process (with or without transformation), (c) as process-in-product, e.g. as in the existential constitution of the nature of an absence by its geo-history; and (d) as product-in-process, e.g. in the iterable or non-iterable exercise of its causal powers. Similarly for those that derive from the phenomena of emergent and/or divergent (or possibly convergent) spatio-temporalities of causally efficacious absent things.
Someone may ask ‘what is being negated in real negation?’ In the case where x has been absented from a domain of being, whether by transformation and/or by distanciation, the propriety of this way of speaking may perhaps be granted. But where x is altogether absent from being, as in never anywhere existence, if the reader wishes to substitute ‘non-being’ for ‘real negation’ I have no objection. For it is my intention to maintain in this section (1) that we can refer to non-being, (2) that non-being exists, and that (3) not only must it be conceded that non-being has ontological priority over being within zero-level being, (4) but, further, non-being has ontological priority over being. In short, negativity wins. My aim in vindicating negativity in what may seem a prima facie paradoxical way is to foreground the contingency — both epistemological and ontological — of existential, not least human existential, questions which the tradition of ontological monovalence screens. I shall contend that this exercise is necessary for that emancipation of dialectic for (the dialectic of) emancipation that is the aim of this work.
My first objective is to argue, against Plato and Frege, that reference does not presuppose existence; more specifically, that it does not presuppose either factual existence or positive factual existence. I want to differentiate within the class of ontics — understood as the intransitive objects of specific epistemic inquiries — positive existences or presences, which I shall dub ‘onts’, from negative existences or absences, which I shall nominate ‘de-onts’. Next I am going to identify the ontic content, i.e., if you like, the referential force, weight or charge of a proposition with what Hare has called its ‘phrastic’, and to make modified use of his further terminology of ‘neustics’ and ‘tropics’.2 As I shall employ his triptych, tropics — initially introduced to register mood — demarcate domains of discourse, e.g. to distinguish the fictional, I, and the factual, F; neustics convey attitudes such as acceptance, rejection or indecision, written as √, x and / respectively; while phrastics express the ontic content of a proposition, the state of affairs it describes or is about, which may be positive or negative, represented as (e) and (–e). A (positive or negative) affirmative factual claim typically occurs at the moment at which (in what I will characterize in C3.2 as the dialectic of truth) ‘referential detachment’ — informally the ontological detachment of the referent from the (inter-subjective/social) referential act (reference), initially justified by the axiological need to refer to something other than ourselves — becomes legitimate and necessary. The argument for referential detachment is the argument for existential intransitivity and, in science, is the ground for the argument for the stratified, differentiated and changing ontology which critical realism has hitherto deployed. And to speak of the ‘ontic content’ of a proposition is merely to indicate the ontic or referential aspect of the ‘referential—expressive’ duality of function which is a necessary component, or so I shall argue, of an adequate theory of truth. But I should also hereby give notice that I will be working with a much more general notion of ‘referent’ and ‘reference’ than the ontologically extensionalist mainstream countenances. On my position, one can refer not only to existent (or non-existent) things, but also to such things characterized in particular ways. Thus we can refer to laws, powers and tendencies; to totalities, relations and aspects; to intensions, intentions and actions (or inactions); and to our discourse about all of them. To refer is just to pick something out for discussion and/or other action, and thus there are no more a priori limits on what we can designate than there are on what we can discuss. This does not abolish the distinction between the activities of reference and predication, but merely enables us to say (predicate) things about everything we normally do and necessarily must.
I have argued elsewhere that we can refer within, as well as (of course) to, fictional discourse. Typically this will presuppose an operation on a tropic. Thus the staging of Macbeth will convey the ‘conversationally candid’ implication, to invoke Grice's convenient expression, that Macbeth did not exist, and in referential and other acts in Macbeth we characteristically suspend our belief in that implication. Within the realm of factual discourse, the rejection of a proposition, say to the effect that caloric exists, depends upon an operation on a neustic, denying, in the transitive dimension, the existence, in the intransitive dimension, of caloric or whatever. Let us pass now to real negation. To assert that Pierre is not in the cafe or that the Titanic sank or that Fred's golf balls were lost or that Sara couldn't keep her date with Jemma or that Sophie missed her cue in the matinée presupposes a factual neustic in the transitive dimension, but the ontic content of the proposition — that which we reject or accept and what it is that, in (groundedly) accepting, we referentially detach from our speech acts — is now, unlike the case of caloric, negative. Real negation involves an operation on the phrastic (–e), and the negativity is now explicitly ontological. But patently I can refer to, as I can perceive (or be in a position to infer), Pierre's absence, just as readily as I can refer to the denial of caloric's existence or to Macbeth's fictionality. All three convey negative existential import. But, as I have set up the sequence, they do so in three different ways. The tropic fictional operator ‘I’ implies, but is not the same as, the neustic rejection of an existential proposition, which in turn implies, but is not the same as, phrastic de-ontification. There are at least three different modes in which things may be said not to be (and I want to assert the logical propriety of fictional and factual, I and F, acceptance and rejection, √ and x, and being and non-being ( ) and (–) operators) — although, of course, there is only one sense in which things are not. F √ (–e) gives the fine structure of the simple factual positive affirmation of Pierre's death.
Real negativity, understood most simply as absence, or, qua process, absenting, and a fortiori the critique of ontological monovalence, is vital to dialectic. Absenting processes are crucial to dialectic conceived as the logic of change — which is absenting. Absenting absences, which act as constraints on wants, needs or (more generally) well-being, is essential to dialectics interpreted as the logic of freedom. And the whole point of argument, on which dialectic has been most traditionally modelled, is to absent mistakes. The absence concerned may be transfactual or actual, in process or static, internally related in a totality or isolated, an inaction or not (cf. 1M–4D).* The dialectical comment (dc') typically isolates an absence (which the resolution repairs), indicating a theory/practice inconsistency or irrelevance, and advising against its dialectical (critical realist) universalizability.** In dialectical critical realism the category of absence is pivotal to 1M–4D links. Thus a 1M non-identity or alterity may generate a 2E absence causing a 3L alienating detotalization or split-off resulting iii a fragmented impotent self — or to a transformed transformative totalizing praxis absenting the split, or, let us suppose, a reconstituted unity-in-diversity, diagrammatized in Figure 2.1. This is just one example of malign/benign 1M–4D links, in which 2E absence/absenting is the key mediation between 1M non-identity, 3L totality and 4D agency, which has as its prototype the absenting of absence manifest in the satisfaction of desire. More generally, dialectics depends upon the positive identification and transformative elimination of absences. Indeed, it just is, in its essence, the process of absenting absence. Moreover, I shall show in C4.2 how the key to the critical diagnosis and rational resolution of the problems of philosophy, generated by 1M destratification or homology, 3L detotalization, 4D de-agentification and 2E positivization, lies in the repair of the absence of the concepts of structure and heterology, concretion, relationality and totality, agentive agency and, above all, absence itself. Reference to absence is quintessential to non-idealistic dialectic. Hence my polemical reference in C1.3 to ‘subject’, as distinct from traditional predicative and prepositional, negation. Later I will connect the concept of, if you like, referential negativity to developmental negation, the critique of the presupposition — which I shall call ‘fixism’ — of fixed subjects in the traditional subject-predicate prepositional form (which presupposes the rigidity, and hence arbitrariness, of definitions), Fischer's notion of necessary as distinct from impossible contradiction (contradictio in subjecto rather than in adjecto), expressing the idea of a subject in process of formation and the possible uses of the Hegel-derivative ‘speculative proposition’ in social science.
* Statements about transfactualities should not be confused with statements about negativities, although the classes intersect. The dr /da distinction gets its force from the tact that a tendency (which may be positive or negative) may be exercised without being actualized in a (positive or negative) outcome. The dr/d+ distinction stems from the consideration that things, their causal powers, their processual and possibly mediated exercise and their results may be absent (negative) as well as present (positive). That said, it should be clear that the concept of a tendency absent from actuality presupposes the critique of ontological monovalence; and that absenting processes are, in open systems, all tendencies, so that the distinctions are interdependent. Indeed the elision of natural necessity, the epistemic fallacy and ontological monovalence I shall declaim as the unholy trinity of irrealism. (The pun is intentional: holes—voids—constitutive absences.)
** For the moment this may be regarded as transfactual, processual-directional-developmental, concrete, agentive (agent-specific or actionable) and transtormative — a formula I will later both explain and qualify.
An extreme case of absence is never anywhere existence. This can be expressed in the form of a non-existential proposition, e.g. in science. Popper holds such propositions to be unfalsifiable, and so ‘unscientific’. Despite the fact that counter-examples abound in science (phlogiston, the aether, Vulcan), this is normally taken as gospel. However, in real science, individuals, particulars and universals are always already known under some more or less precise description, tied, when existential questions become pertinent within the specific context of inquiry, to definite demonstrative and recognitive criteria of existence — which they may simply fail to satisfy. Moreover, fallibilism itself depends upon the idea of identifying and remedying mistakes. This entails at the very least (leaving aside the not necessarily trivial sense in which error may be said to consist in the lack of truth) registering the recognition of error in the speech act of denial, which is absentive, and upon comprehending error as paradigmatically dependent upon absence; and its correction the repair, that is, the absenting, of the absence. Dialectic is at the heart of every learning process. Furthermore, it is easy to see that in any world in which human agency is to be possible, the human agent must be able to bring about a state of affairs which would not otherwise have prevailed (unless it was over-determined). Sophia acts, and so absents. That is, to put the matter in (anti-)Kantian terms (and so as to show the quiescence and de-agentification implicit in transcendental idealism), the human agent must be able to effect the source of the ‘given’. So ontic change (and hence absence) must occur in a world containing human agency. Hence epistemic change must be possible and necessary too. Moreover, both meta-epistemic change (to accommodate change in change about beliefs) and conceptual change (to enable change in definitions) must be possible and necessary also. We begin to envisage dialectic as the great ‘loosener’, permitting empirical ‘open-texture’, in the manner of Waismann, and structural fluidity and interconnectedness, in a Marxian-Bakhtinian fashion, alike (and their distinction to boot). Again, unless Sophia sees herself necessarily acting and so absenting, she cannot reflexively situate (and hence detotalizes) herself. That is to say, she in practice alienates and reifies, and hence absents herself and/or her agency, in a way for which she cannot consistently account. Not to admit absence to our ontology (in that very admission) is to commit performative contradiction, the basic form of theory/practice and reflexive inconsistency, and self-referential paradox.
To this it might be argued that there cannot be a complete parity at the transcendental level between the positive and the negative. Fictional disclosure is dependent upon a matrix of factual discourse, in which neustic crosses are cradled by axiologically necessary ticks, in which in turn absences are only identifiable via the network of positive material things. To this objection there are a number of ripostes. First, the identification of a positive existent is a human act. So it involves the absenting of a pre-existent state of affairs, be it only a state of existential doubt. This may be taken as a transcendental deduction of the category of absence, and a transcendental refutation and immanent critique of ontological monovalence. Second, the material world operates as a referential grid for the identification of positive and negative existents, onts and de-onts, only in virtue of their mutual exclusion relations, that is to say, in virtue of their differences in space and changes in time. Only in a state of eternal all-pervasive token monism would the category of absence not be necessary for the deduction of coherent concepts of space and time (which would be really redundant). Such a monism would make all becoming, including acts of identification, impossible. In any event we know it to be false. More important is to note the connection between causality and absence. All causal determination, and hence change, is transformative negation or absenting. All causes are in space-time and effects are negations. Later I shall make much of the point that causality must be grasped as intrinsically tensed spatio-temporalizing process. For the moment we need only record that there is no substance without causality, no material system without its changes. This can also be regarded as a transcendental refutation of monovalence and token monism (which must detotalize the monist). The identification of positive existents depends upon a changing (and therefore at least ontologically bivalent) world.
At this point, having registered the connections between space and difference and time and change, I want to digress slightly to comment upon the difference between change and difference. Both categories are essential (and presuppose absence). But (a) change cannot be analysed in terms of difference, as the analytic tradition from the late Plato has been wont to do, any more than (b) difference can be analysed in terms of change, the converse fallacy of the dialectical tradition from at least Plotinus.
(a) Change cannot be analysed in terms of difference because it presupposes the idea of a continuing thing in a tensed process. If the ontologically monovalent tradition dates from the Parmenidean ‘one’, mediated by the Platonic exegesis of negation as difference, it is completed by the Kantian error of supposing that one can always replace statements about negativities or their derivatives by ones employing purely positive predicates. But Pierre's absence from the café does not mean the same as Genet sitting in his place or Pierre's playing football instead of meeting Sartre, (b) Difference cannot be analysed in terms of change because it includes the idea of two or more non-identical tokens, which cannot be necessarily reduced to a unitary origin (which would have to be the single unique origin of everything to yield the required result). More to the immediate point, to allow at least two (and by an extension of this argument, an indefinite number of) non-identicals is transcendentally necessary for our discourse to achieve referential detachment, that is, to be able to talk about something other than itself or even to talk about itself at all. Intransitivity is as transcendentally irreducible as I will later argue tense to be. Of course none of this is to deny that differentiating changes and changing differences occur. (In the meantime the reader should be forewarned that in this chapter [and indeed throughout this book], I will be conducting a side polemic against monism, reductionism and. fundamentalism, including the ideas of unique beginnings, rock bottoms and fixed foundations, all of which smack of anthropic cognitive triumphalism, which I will connect to centrism and endism as endemic to irrealist dialectics as well as the bulk of analytics.)
My third response to the objection claiming ontological priority for the positive is to argue that a world without voids (absences), that is, a ‘non-clumpy’ material object world, in which, as on the classical Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, action is by continuous contiguous impact — in its canonical atomistic form, of condensely compacting particles (a conception which Newton never eschewed*) — would be a world in which nothing could move or occur, as it presupposes an impossible conjunction of atomicity, rigidity and immediacy. That is to say, in effect, non-atomicity (and hence constitutive absence) and/ or action-at-a-distance (and hence across voids) are transcendentally necessary features of an intelligible material object world.**3 Transmission of energy, like information in inter-personal communication, is possible only by (substantial or non-substantial) travel across, at the very least, level-specific gaps. This being granted takes me to my fourth argument against the ontological dominance of the positive. If a totally positive material object world — a packed world without absences — is impossible, there is no a priori reason to exclude the opposite — namely a total void, literally nothing. Negativity is constitutively essential to positivity, but the converse does not follow. Leave aside the Heideggerian question of why there is something rather than nothing. There could have been nothing rather than something. Of course this is a counterf actual. Beings exist. But by transcendental argument, non-being is constitutively essential to being. Non-being is a condition of possibility of being. No non-being is a sufficient condition of impossibility of being. But there is no logical incoherence in totally no being. Dialectical arguments establish the conditions of possibility (dr') of the conditions of impossibility (dc') of some initially established result or posit. Now, employing a strategy of ‘dialectical detachment’ from our initial premiss — positive existence — in the metacritical end-game, we can argue that not only is a total void possible, but if there was a unique beginning to everything it could only be from nothing by an act of radical autogenesis. So that if there was an originating Absolute, nothing would be its schema or form, constituted at the moment of initiation by the spontaneous disposition to become something other than itself. Similarly, if there was a unique ending to everything it would involve a collapse to actualized nothingness, absolutely nothing. In sum, complete positivity is impossible, but sheer indeterminate negativity is not.***
* The Michelson-Morley experiment was designed to determine the velocity of the aether relative to the earth.
** This has a philosophical social analogue in what Lovejoy, thinking especially of Leibniz but equally applicable to Hegel, has called ‘the principle of plenitude’,4 but which could perhaps be more aptly labelled ‘the principle of repletion’. Its inapplicability to a world dominated by scarcity (more precisely the combination of scarcity and waste), characterized by enormous inequities and subject to absolute ecological constraints should not need remarking.
*** It is customarily presupposed in cosmological discussion (a) that our cosmos is unique (so to speak, synchronically, diachronically, laterally and transcategorially); therefore (b) that its beginning was the unique beginning of everything — and in particular of matter, energy, space and time, the concepts of which therefore cannot be employed for or outside it; (c) that the cause of its beginning cannot be considered without antinomy or vicious regress; or (d) insofar as it can be it must be of a monadic-fissuring type, rather than as is characteristically the case in known infra-cosmic geneses, viz. beginnings of a dyadic/polyadic-fusing kind5 (e.g. as involving an asymmetric compression of pre-existent forces); and finally (e), worst of all, that if there was a unified theory capable of explaining the physical development of the cosmos, perhaps after the earliest moments of time, this would ipso facto yield a ‘GTOE’ — Grand Theory of Everything.6 These assumptions bear the heavy imprint of philosophical anthropocentrism, monism, verificationism, actualism, reductionism and cognitive triumphalism. (b) goes against the Lucretian dictum ‘nil … fieri de nihilo’ and the Hobbesian maxim that ‘nothing taketh a beginning from itself’. Particular or absolutist monistic ontification is illicit. In respect of (c), note a polyadic-fissuring genesis of a Schillerian dialectic would give it a minimum five-term structure, without allowing for indeterminate or subsequent multiple negation.
Within the world as we know it, non-being is at least on a par with being. Outwith it the negative has ontological primacy. Let us linger within the everyday world. Let me also concede the force of the point that, while the converse is equally the case, without positive being we could not know negative being; and even, recognizing the counterfactuality of the hypothesis explored in the previous paragraph, conceive of non-being as contained within a base or zero-level being. Why, it might be enquired, do I want to talk of non-being in referring to such prosaic facts as Jemma not keeping her date with Jacques? To say that Jemma or Pierre or the rain or food or self-esteem or the aether is not (is lacking) in some determinate context of discourse is to designate a real absence at some level, perspective, aspect, context and/or region of space-time. ‘Is’ and ‘real’ discharge the burden of ontology; ‘not’ and ‘absent’ denote negativity. To admit that real absence exists and real absentings occur is tantamount to conceding that non-beings, i.e. de-onts, are, happen, etc. We thus have the theorem: ontology > ontics > de-onts. In §6 I shall argue that it is inconceivable that ‘ontology’ does not refer and in C4 I shall examine the origins of the dogma of ontological monovalence and its generative role in the aporiai of irrealist philosophy in its analytical, hitherto dialectical and post-Nietzschean forms. Its effects include, as I have already suggested, the deproblematization of existential questions (as the 1M denial of natural necessity deproblematizes essential ones), securing the transmission of a pre-posited positivity from knowledge to being, dogmatically reinforcing the former as hypostatized ideas or reified facts, disguising the human agency involved and absenting (and alienating) scientists and laypersons alike from their products. The transmission of positivity from knowledge to being, covered by the epistemic fallacy and then reflected back in its ontic dual, takes place at a posited or hypothesized point of subject-object identity, abolishing intransitivity in what is in effect a point of categorial duplicity, which is actualistically generalized into eidetic eternity. Eliminating absence, most sharply experienced in contradiction and remedied by greater completeness or totality, eliminates change and error alike. Monovalence is the ideology of categorial (including epistemological) stasis. Once more, precisely the same result is achieved by the absenting of alterity, and thus the difference between change and error too. The epistemic fallacy, ontological monovalence and the actualist collapse of natural necessity (and possibility) are of a piece: the unholy trinity of irrealism.
Conversely, welcoming negativity and later totality and agency alongside 1M non-identity, depth and transfactuality to our ontology situates some very interesting possibilities. What is present from one perspective, at one level, in some region may be absent from, at or in another. Presences and absences may be recursively embedded and systematically intermingled in all sorts of fascinating ways. They may stretch forward temporally, spread outwards spatially, spiral inwards conceptually, mediate, switch or transfigure each other relationally, perspectivally or configurationally, structurally sediment, abstract, concretize, contradict and coalesce themselves. Once we specifically thematize causal efficacy, emergence, tensed spatializing process, totality and sui generis social forms, all sorts of topologies become possible: hidden depths, tangled loops, inverted hierarchies, mediatized, virtual and hyperrealities; holes-within-wholes (and vice versa), binds and blocks, intra- as well as inter-action; juxtaposed, elongated, congealed, overlapping, intersecting, condensed spatio-temporalities; intertwined, dislocated and punctured processes. We shall explore some of these in due course. As it is, consider the crucial impact that the symptomatic silence, the telling pause, the vacuum, the hiatus or the generative separation possess. Or remember the effects of the non-occurrences, the undone or left alone — the letter that didn't arrive, the failed exam, the missed plane, the monsoon that didn't occur, the deforestation of the Amazonian jungle, the holes in the ozone layer, the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, the spaces in the text, the absent authors and readers it presupposes, both the too empty and the too full. Absences, immediately or on reflection, all.* There are intervals, voids and pauses, desire, lack and need within being; and such absences and their tendential and actual absenting are, or so I {ER:599} am arguing, transcendentally and dialectically necessary for any intelligible being at all.
* The ‘too full’ reveals, in the human world, an absence of continence, balance or justice: the jewel of wisdom in the Aristotelian doctrine of the ‘mean’.
The official motive force of the Hegelian dialectic is, as we have seen, the contradiction that leads to the expansion of the universe of discourse or conceptual field by the positive identification and elimination of absences, including its former incompleteness in some relevant respect. But before I come to contradiction, I want briefly to broach the topic of emergence. This is a 1M category of non-identity but is (a) specifically ontological while (b) falling within the generic Hegelianesque class of stratificational dialectics. In emergence, generally, new beings (entities, structures, totalities, concepts) are generated out of pre-existing material from which they could have been neither induced nor deduced. There is a quantum leap, or nodal line, of (one feels like saying) the materialized imagination — or even, with Hegel, reason — akin to that occurring in the σ or τ transforms of the rudimentary epistemological dialectic of C1.9. This is matter as creative, as autopoietic. It seems, if it can be vindicated, to yield a genuine ontological analogue of Hegelian preservative determinate negation. It consists in the formation of one or other of two types of superstructure (only the first of which has generally been noted in the Marxist canon), namely, by the superimposition (Model A) or intra-position (Model B) of the emergent level on or within the pre-existing one — superstructuration or intrastructuration respectively. There is no reason why the two models should not be used in complementary fashion, say in the concept of the intrinsic superstructure. These do not exhaust the formal possibilities, especially once one allows extraneous, contra-punctual and transvoid action, emergent and divergent (and generally detached) spatio-temporalities and disembedding mechanisms, including the disembedding of time from space (as in an aeroplane flight) and the disembedding of space from time (as in telephone reception). But they are the most obvious ones. Emergence presupposes the rejection of the ancient antagonism of (normally physicalistic) reductionism and (typical spiritualistic) dualism alike, neither of which can sustain a concept of agentive agency, presupposing intentional materially embodied and efficacious causality; and both of which posit the non-phenomenality of intentionality. It acknowledges irreducible real novelty, while rejecting a transcendent cause for it — what Hegel, with medieval Christendom and Kant (especially) in mind, will pejoratively refer to as a ‘beyond’ or Jenseits.
However, before I praise emergence, I must bury Hegelian versions of it. In the real world, whether we are dealing with conceptual, social (concept-dependent, but not -exhaustive) or entirely natural (extra-conceptual) terrain, ontological dialectical processes are not generally the product of radical negation alone, let alone that of the linear kind to which Hegel leans. For our world is an open-systemic entropic totality, in which results (dr° in the symbolism of C1.7) are neither autogenetically produced nor even constellationally closed, but the provisional outcome of a heterogeneous multiplicity of changing mechanisms, agencies and circumstances. Moreover, in real emergence the processes are generally non-teleologically causal, only socio-spherically conceptual; and the higher level (ultimately, in Hegel, absolute spirit or, to borrow Charles Taylor's felicitous expression, ‘cosmic Geist’7) does not posit, but is rather formed from, the lower level.8 Furthermore, whether the outcome is, macroscopically, a new type of structure, or, microscopically, merely a token, or a structuratum, to employ Andrew Collier's useful distinction,*9 it normally remains heteronomously conditioned and controlled by the lower-order one — onto or into which it has been super- or intra-posed. Again, real emergence has an inverse that does not figure in the entelechy of the Hegelian scheme, viz. disemergence, the decay, demise or disjoint detachment of the higher-order level. Further, emergence may involve a substantial degree of non-preservative, rather than simply additive, superstructuration. And the result may be internally complex and differentiated, consisting in a ‘laminated’ system,10 whose internal elements are necessarily ‘bonded’ in a multiplicity of structures (perhaps composed of their own structural hierarchies and sub-totalities). Such systems may be decentred, asymmetrically weighted, and contextually variable, as in the case of the Dennettian-Joycean self, composing an internal pluriverse (to purloin Delia Volpe's redolent term11), populated by a plurality of narratives, in internal discordance and even palpable contradiction.12
* The concept of a structuratum, is, however, homonymous, between an ontological instance of a structure or a concrete individual or singular, which will normally be the condensate of, or of the effects of, a multiplicity of disjoint, and even contradictory, structures or of their ways of acting (generative mechanisms or causal powers). It will characteristically remain heteronomously conditioned, dependent upon and influenced by the levels out of which it has emerged, even where it is causally efficacious on them, as clearly society is on nature and agency on inanimate and animate matter alike.
Indeed emergence, which I treat in C3 as an example of the dialectic of the real and the actual, establishes distinct domains of difference qua alterity — real determinate other-being. Such domains have to be understood in their own terms before (α) any scientistic synchronic or (β) historicist diachronic explanatory reduction can be contemplated. Thus (α) chemical phenomena had first to be classified, described and explained in a dialectic of sui generis chemical principles before any explanatory reduction to physics became feasible,13 while (β) the tradition of neo-Platonic-eschatological-Hegelian-vulgar Marxist thought has been plagued by assumptions of originarity, uni-linear directionality and Ideological necessity of an empirically and conceptually untenable kind. It is best to take specific cases in this neck of the philosophical woods. To comprehend human agency as a causally and taxonomically irreducible mode of matter is not to posit a distinct substance ‘mind’ endowed with reasons for acting apart from the causal network, but to credit intentional embodied agency with distinct (emergent) causal powers from the biological matter out of which agents were formed, on which they are capable of reacting back (and must, precisely as materially embodied causally efficacious agents, do so, if they are to act at all), but from which, in an open-systemic totality in which events are not determined before they are caused,14 neither such beings nor the transformations and havoc they would wreak on the rest of nature could have been predicted ex ante. On such a synchronic emergent causal powers materialism, reasons (that are acted on) just are causes. Against dualism, we can say that it is in virtue of our complex biological constitution that human agents have the powers we do; while denying, against reductionism, that a power can be reduced to its material basis or condition of possibility any more than the acceleration of a car is the same as its engine. Contemporary reductionist materialisms both face insoluble aporiai and sneak dualism (of a disembodied linguistified neo-Kantian kind) in by the back door.15 For instance, the very statement of eliminative materialism appears inconsistent with its project — a self-eliminating act. At the time of its utterance such a statement transforms the material world, yielding a performative contradiction or theory/practice inconsistency again. And in a non-solipsistic (or non-token-monist) world, central state materialism cannot account for the understanding of meaning which mediates two or more neuro-physiologically distinct states in inter-subjective transactions, whether they consist in buying a bunch of bananas or enunciating central state materialism itself.
This is just as well. For accepting the causal efficacy of reasons enables us to make sense of the programme of experimental science. For in an experiment scientists co-determine an empirical result which, but for their intentional causal agency, would not have occurred; yet which at the same time potentially affords us epistemic access to the real, transfactually efficacious, but normally empirically counterfactual16 causal structures of the world.17 (Transfactual thus underpins counterfactual truth.) This furnishes us with a transcendental deduction of emergence, at least for the human realm, which at the same time functions as an immanent critique of scientistic reductionist materialism. But it is furthermore of philosophical significance in two respects. First, insofar as it is inconsistent with the ontological actualism, regularity determinism and spatio-temporary block universalism (which I shall henceforth shorten to blockism) with which reductionism has normally been associated. Thus, for instance, determinism, as it is normally understood, viz. in the Humean-Laplacean manner, such that knowledge is possible so that ‘the future is present to our eyes’, can be seen to rest on a naive actualist ontology of laws (the antinomies of which will in due course be fully exposed), and is posited on supposing that because an event at time tk was caused (say, at tj) to happen, it was bound (e.g. at ti) to happen before it is caused — a confusion of ontological determination with epistemological predeterminism, unwarranted in an open system constituted by irreducible alterities — other-beings, as important to the critique of irrealist dialectics as non-beings are to irrealism generally.* Second, it is significant in that it links 1M causally efficacious determination to 2E transformative negation (and the critique of actualism to that of monovalence). In a moment I am going to connect causal efficacy with what I am going to call a ‘rhythmic’ defined as a tensed process in space-time. And just as causal powers are processes-entified-in-products, we could say causality is transformative negation in processual (rhythmic) determination. It could be asked why are the pivotal concepts of change and agency being neglected? They are not. For agency is intentional causality and consists in efficacious absenting. Nor is 3L being left out of the picture. For an absenting alienation, absented alienation, splitting detotalization or split-off can exercise a causal effect, and in §7 I shall systematically discuss the intra-active and mediating holistic causality typical of a totality.
* To those reductionists — tendentially type monists — who would deny the phenomena of emergence, contemporary ecological findings come as an awesome warning. For they show the extent to which industrialized humanity has been intervening in (increasingly socialized) nature, and will suffer from its recoil.
In a multi-determined, multi-levelled, multi-linear, multi-relational, multi-angular, multi-perspectival, multiply determined and open pluriverse, emergence situates the widespread phenomena of dual, multiple, complex and open control. Thus typically, in our zone of being, higher-order agencies set the boundary conditions for the operation of lower-order laws. Thus in contemporary capitalist society it is economic considerations which explain when, where and how the physical principles engaged in engineering are put to use (or held in abeyance). This principle also offers keys to the unravelling of the old Marxian conundrum of the ‘superstructures’. On Model A we can readily say that it is the relations of production which determine the boundary conditions for the operation and development of the forces of production, and similarly for the relationship between polity and economy. On Model B, in which we envisage the superstructure as infrastructure, that is, formed within the base level, we can argue that it is the latter which provides the framework principles for, or conditions of possibility of, the ‘higher’ level which may complexity, be supervenient on or relatively autonomous from the base level or, one could say, the totality or whole in which it is interiorized. Thus, deploying Model B, the politics of the new world disorder or the spread of postmodernist culture can be seen as occurring within the context of global capitalist commodification, both figuratively and literally — and, as already remarked, there is no reason why these models should not be deployed concurrently.
Emergence entails both stratification and change. So far I have concentrated on emergent entities and causal powers. But if, as I have already argued, all changes are spatio-temporal, and space-time is a relational property of the meshwork of material beings, this opens up the phenomena of emergent spatio-temporalities. There are two paradigms here, both instantiated in reality: (α) they could be relata of a new (emergent) system of material things and/or (β) they could be new (emergent) relata of a pre-existing system of material things. In either event they establish new ‘rhythmics’, where a rhythmic is just the spatio-temporal efficacy of the process. (In a Wittgensteinian family circle, process can then be regarded as spatialized tensing, the mode of becoming [as absenting] or [plain] absenting of effects.) A rhythmic may be transfactual or actual, positive or negative (i.e. an inefficacy), intra-active or inter-active, agentive or not (corresponding to 1M—4D). If a substance is paradigmatically a thing, a rhythmic may be substantial or non-substantial (where the non-substantial is aligned under the class of non-being-mediated). If it is non-substantial, then the causal rhythmic of a process must, and even if it is substantial it may (cf. [β] above), be reckoned to be a sui generis causal power of space-time itself. Space-time thus takes on, potentially, a fivefold character as: (a) a reference grid, (b) a measure, (c) a set of prima facie mutual exclusion relations, (d) a potentially emergent (cf. [α]) property, perhaps with causal powers of its own, and (e) a generally entropic process. Eventually I will want to tie space, time and causality very closely, around the theorem of the reality and irreducibility of (always potentially spatializing) tense and the potential and typical spatio-temporality (and hence processuality) of all causal efficacy in the definition of process as the mode of absenting which is the becoming and begoing of effects.
In the meantime, for those who doubt the propriety of such a close linkage (and emphasis on spatio-temporal process), just ponder the extent to which emergent social things (people, institutions, traditions) not only presuppose (that is to say, are dependent on) but also are existentially constituted by (as a crucial part of their essence) or merely contain (as part of their proprium or accident, to drop into scholastic vocabulary for a moment) their geo-histories (and, qua empowered, possibilities for their spatialized futures). In the same way I will argue, when I come to totality and holistic causality, that emergent social things are existentially constituted by or contain their relations, connections and interdependencies with other social (and natural) things.18 This is 3L territory. For the moment I want to stick with 2E spatio-temporalities. Constitutive geo-history displayed in contemporary rhythmics or in the processual exercise of accumulated causal powers and liabilities is only one of several ways in which in §8 I will consider the phenomena of the presence of the past (and outside). But just ponder the extent to which although we may live/or the future, we live, quite literally, in the past.19 Generally the phenomenon of emergent spatio-temporalities situates the possibilities of overlapping, intersecting, condensing, elongated, divergent, convergent and even contradictory rhythmics (causal processes) and, by extension, space-time measures (overthrowing, inter alia, the idea of a unitary set of exclusion relations).
In exemplication of this phenomenon let me dwell on intersecting and overlapping spaces and times — see Figure 2.2. The last case in the figure shows how discrepant spatio-temporalities can often, but not always, be coordinated either by reference to some explanatory significant loco-periodization or, as here, by reference to a zero-level or base space-time, established by some conventionally agreed (not necessarily physically basic) dating and locating system. As a final example consider the amazing and putatively contradictory juxtaposition or condensation of differentially sedimented rhythmics one can find in a city like Los Angeles20 or New Delhi, where temples, mosques, traditions, religious rites, weddings, inter-caste conflict, electric cables, motor cars, television sets, rickshaws, scavengers and disposable cans coalesce in a locale.
Indeed specifically conceptual emergence, e.g. as in the σ and τ transforms of the epistemological dialectic sketched in C1.9, generally depends upon the exploitation of the past or exterior cognitive resources (once again, Bachelard's ‘scientific loans’) constituting so much conceptual bricolage. But it may also be effected by means of a perspectival switch, the formation of a new Gestalt, level or order of coherence without any additional input.21 Emergence is, of course, also necessary for the intelligibility of the actual working of the Hegelian dialectic, which operates merely by filling in, or absenting the absence of, what is from a higher-order perspective a level-specific void. And although in the end Hegel cannot sustain it, this, as Marx famously remarked but insufficiently explained, does give the basic form or essence of many, if not all, dialectics. Emergent entities are, of course, as already remarked, one kind of totality, constituted by the internal relationality of their aspects. This raises the question of the limits or boundaries of an emergent totality. Is it, for instance, an organism, upon whose ‘internal teleology’ so much of the plausibility of Hegelian ontology intuitively rests; or is it rather the organism in its Umwelt or environment constituted at least in part by the various ‘affordances’ the environment offers for the organism in question?22 In general one can resolve the problem of the individuation and articulation of an emergent entity and its various aspects only by reference to the explanatory power of the theory which a particular découpage permits. This, in turn, will depend to a degree upon our explanatory purposes. However, this does not subjectivize explanation in science (or everyday existence), for what I will call the ‘reality principle’ (invoking its Freudian ancestry) imposes its own stratification on science and lay life. Dialectical critical realism sees totalities within totalities (but studded with blocks, partitions and distance) recursively. But they are by no means all, or normally, of the Hegelian, pervasively internally relational, let alone centrist, expressivist and teleological kind. Rather they are punctuated by alterities, shot through with spaces, criss-crossed by traces and connected by all manner of negative, external and contingent as well as positive, internal and necessary determinations and relationships, the exact form of which it is up to science to fathom. Similarly, as we shall now see, not all dialectical connections are contradictory and not all dialectical contradictions are or depend upon logical contradictions in the way I have argued Hegel's paradigmatically do.
In C1.9 I isolated the motive force that logical contradiction plays in Hegelian dialectic (at least in theory) in heralding the expansion of the existing conceptual field. But by juxtaposing Marx to Hegel I want to show that logical contradiction is not the same as dialectical contradiction, although the two classes intersect. Moreover, by no means all dialectics depend upon contradiction, and even less violate the logical norms of identity and non-contradiction. First I want to examine contradiction in its widest compass.
The concept of contradiction may be used as a metaphor (like that of force in physics) for any kind of dissonance, strain or tension. However, it first assumes a clear meaning in the case of human action, which may then be extended to goal-oriented action, and thence, by a further move, to any action at all. Here it specifies a situation which permits the satisfaction of one end or more generally result only at the expense of another: that is, a bind or constraint. An internal contradiction is then a double-bind or self-constraint (which may be multiplied to form a knot). In this case a system, agent or structure, S, is blocked from performing with one system, rule or principle, R, because it is performing with another, R'; or, a course of action, T, generates a countervailing, inhibiting, undermining, overriding or otherwise opposed course of action, T'. R' and T' are radically negating of R and T respectively. As the Hegelian and Marxian traditions have a propensity for internal as distinct from external contradictions, it is worth pointing out that external constraints (not generated by a common causal ground [dg']) may nevertheless hold between structures which are internally related, i.e. existentially presuppose one another.
External contradictions — constraints — would appear to be pervasive — indeed, exemplified by the laws and constraints of nature (such as the speed of light), to be established by the mere fact of determinate spatio-temporal being. But, of course, it does not follow from the condition that every being is constrained, that every particular constraint on a being is absolute or necessary. This should go without saying. Only a blanket actualism would deny it. How about internal contradictions? Their possibility is directly situated by the phenomena of emergent entities (which is why I interposed my discussion of §2), internally related grounded ensembles and totalities generally. However, leaving this aside, it could be argued that for the very fact of change to be possible, even if the source is exogenous, there must be a degree of internal ‘complicity’ within the thing to the change: that is, in that it must, in virtue of its nature, be ‘liable’ to the change, so as not to be impervious to its source, and so must possess a counter-conative tendency in respect of the condition changed, which may be more or less essential to the thing's identity. (By definition in such a case — of change, not demise — it must also possess a conative one.) Only unchanging, ultimately eternal, things would lack such a tendency, and such things would seem to have to be or contain everywhere everywhen — a Spinozan monism or Leibnizian monadism. In any case this establishes the most basic kind of existential contradiction: finitude. Spatio-temporal location may seem an external constraint, but insofar as it is the fate — condition of being — of such things to perish, i.e. to be limited in extent, it must be reckoned an internal contradiction, even though their extent and duration be entirely contingent. When we turn to human life, existential contradiction may assume the mantle of standing oppositions between mind and body, fact and fancy, desire and desired, power and need, Eros and Thanatos, master and slave, self-determination and subjugation.
Formal logical contradiction is a type of internal contradiction, whose consequence for the subject, unless the terms are redescribed and/or the discursive domain is expanded (as happens in Hegelian dialectic), is axiological indeterminacy: ‘A and -A’ leaves the course of action (including belief) indeterminate, or, at least if relevance, contextual, spatio-temporal and normic constraints are imposed, underdetermined; and so subverts the intentionality, and, ceteris paribus, the rationality, of any praxis that would be founded on, or informed by, it. Such axiological indeterminacy in the intrinsic, intentional or normative aspect of social life is quite consistent with a determinate intransitive result, especially if the agent must act — that is to say, if what I have elsewhere described as the ‘axiological imperative’23 applies — for consistency and coherence are not the only generative or causal factors at work in social life (this is the constellational identity of the intrinsic within the extrinsic24 or, loosely, the rational within the causal). To suppose that they are is to make the epistemic fallacy of logicizing being, into which Hegel falls. The inverse, Kantian, mistake is to extrude thought from, detotalizing, being. Against this, it is important to understand that when logical contradictions are committed, they are real constituents of the Lebenswelt. Moreover, they may be consistently described and explained, as the intransitive objects of some epistemic inquiry (say into the state of secondary school mathematics in Essex in 1992). What could be more symptomatic of partial, monovalent (and, if I may say so, complacent) thought than to deny the occurrence of logical contradictions in (social) reality?
Dialectical contradictions are, like logical contradictions, also a type of internal contradiction. They may best be introduced as a species of the more general category of dialectical connections. These are connections between entities or aspects of a totality such that they are in principle distinct but inseparable, in the sense that they are synchronically or conjuncturally internally related,25 i.e. both (some, all) or one existentially presuppose the other(s). Here we are in the domain of what I have elsewhere called intra- rather than inter-action,26 which may take the form of existential constitution (cf. p. 54 above), permeation (presence within, i.e. ‘containment’) or just connection (causal efficacy) — either in virtue of spatio-temporal contiguity or across a level-specific void. The connection may be absolute, epochal, structurally periodic, conjunctural or momentary. Dialectical connections, including contradictions, may hold between absences and absentings as well as positive instances and processes, and the causal connections and existential dependencies may be transfactual or actual. Real dialectical contradictions possess all these features of dialectical connections. But their elements are also opposed, in the sense that (at least) one of their aspects negates (at least) one of the other's, or their common ground or the whole, and perhaps vice versa, so that they are tendentially mutually exclusive, and potentially or actually tendentially transformative. Are dialectical contradictions necessarily radical in my terms? This depends upon the — ideally, real — definition of the contradictions. If what is negated is the ground of the negation or the totality then they are necessarily radical; if not, not. The case where one of the poles of a contradiction is the ground itself corresponds to the dyadic mode of the Hegelian dialectic, as the negation is then not only necessarily radical but also linear. But any number of aspects of a totality may be so related (as in the polyadic case of the Hegelian dialectic). Such a radically negating ensemble is thus multi-linear. Both Hegel and Marx were biased towards internal, radical and linear negation — a fact partly explained by the narrative presentational form, or sequential flow or ‘continuous series’ of the nineteenth-century expository text (as a comparison between Capital and Marx's notes and letters bears out).
Dialectical contradictions are not per se logical contradictions. But logical contradictions can also be dialectical contradictions insofar as they are grounded in a common mistake, whether the mistake is isolated or not. (The importance of this for the metacritical dialectics of discursively formulated or practically expressed philosophical ideologies will become clear in C4.) Dialectical and logical contradictions, as two species of internal contradiction, intersect but are not coterminous. However, we can describe the logical contradiction as dialectical only when the mistaken ground is isolated, and can do so coherently (without at least a degree of axiological indeterminacy) only when its contradictoriness is removed — which is precisely, on my exegesis, what Hegel intends to do, and sometimes succeeds (brilliantly) in doing.
Dialectical contradictions may be more or less antagonistic, in the sense of expressing or representing or even constituting the opposed interests of (or between) agents or collectivities; and, if antagonistic, they may be partial or latent or rhythmically dislocated, and manifest to a greater or lesser extent in conflict, which in turn can be covert or overt, transfactual or actual, as well as being conducted in a variety of different modes. Of course there are contingent (and within the contingent what should really be distinguished as a distinct class, the accidental) in addition to necessary, and external besides internal, contradictions, thus one has
[1] connections ≥ necessary connections ≥ dialectical connections ≥ dialectical contradictions;
[2] constraints ≥ internal contradictions ≥ dialectical contradictions ≥ logical dialectical contradictions;
and
[3] dialectical contradictions ≥ antagonisms ≥ conflicts ≥ overt struggles;
while of course
[4] real negation ≥ transformative negation ≥ radical negation ≥ linear negation.
[3] is not supposed to rule out non-dialectical, e.g. purely external or contingent, conflicts. On the other hand, it is a mistake to think of conflicts as ‘more’ empirical than contradictions. The contradiction between contending parties in the law courts may be palpably visible, while deep conflict may never show itself in experience. Hence all the relevant concepts possess a 1M real/actual and 2E real/present contrast. Suppose one distinguishes power1, as the transformative capacity analytic to the concept of agency, from (the transfactual or actual) power2 relations expressed in structures of domination, exploitation, subjugation and control, which I will thematize as generalized master–slave(-type) relations. The poles of such antagonistic dialectical contradictions, exemplified by the famous contradictions between capitalist and worker or the looker and looked at or master and slave itself, are typically differentially causally charged. One should note, however, that this is seldom completely one-sided and always potentially reversible — as in Foucauldian counter-conduct or strategic reversal. (Power1 includes power2 of course.) In such cases one may talk of a dominant and subordinate pole; and more generally of the primary and secondary (etc.) aspects of a contradiction or contradictions in a totality. Indeed unless, more generally, there were structural asymmetries in a multi-angular pluriversal context, it would be difficult to conceive, against inertial drag, causes of change, let alone of directionality, in geo-history. The grounds, structures or mechanisms which generate real dialectical contradictions may themselves form recursively (geo-historically variable componential), hierarchical, power2-dominated, complexes or totalities. Furthermore, any of the figures I have just discussed may induce secondary, tertiary or multiply proliferating elaborations or connections of dialectical or non-dialectical kinds.
In the social world all the figures, from constraint to conflict, will be concept- or meaning-dependent. It is important to stress that this holds for formal logical contradictions too. These are entirely dependent upon (normally tacit) semantic and contextual considerations. We only assume ‘A’ and ‘-A’ are contradictory because we take for granted that the successive occurrences of the grapheme ‘A’ are tokens of the same type. But a sceptic could easily deny this, asking what semiotic, hermeneutic or other considerations have prevented the nature of A from changing, and in many cases be right to do so.
‘Materialist’ dialectical contradictions of the type defined above, such as those identified by Marx in his systematic dialectics, describe (dialectical), but do not suffer from (logical), contradictions. The mechanism is not in general teleological, but even when it is, its teleology presupposes causality (a lesser form for Hegel). The practical resolution of the contradiction here is the non-preservative transformative negation of the ground, which is the problem, not the solution. This involves what I am going to call ‘transformed transformative totalizing transformist praxis’ (dφ') in the struggle, presaged upon Marx's analysis of the dialectic processes (dp') of capitalism, for a sublation (ds'), traditionally known as ‘socialism’, of the replaced social form. Of course Marx's analysis may contain logical contradictions — as a line from Böhm-Bawerk to Roemer has contended — but then it is just straightforwardly faulty, a faultiness which may in turn be dialectically explained. The co-presence of absence and presence, that is, the combination of actual absences and real presences (tendential, transfactual) of opposites (at different levels), i.e. of negative sub-contraries and positive contraries, enables the traditional table of oppositions to be satisfied simultaneously prior to, rather than in the switch occurring in, the resolution. Moreover, Marx's dialectical contradictions cannot be said to constitute an identity, but at most a grounded unity, of opposites.27 (One might be tempted to contrast here the Kantian independence, Hegelian identity and Marxian unity of opposites.) Marx's concern is with the dialectical explanation and practical transformation of capitalism, not with the transfigurative redescription of, and reconciliation to, Das Bestehende (the actually existing state of affairs).
None of this is to deny that Marx's systematic ontological and programmatic relational dialectics of the capitalist mode of production presupposes a critical epistemological dialectic of an Hegelian C1.9 kind: that is, an immanent critique of the pre-existing political economy of his day, involving the identification of contradictions, and more generally aporiai, anomalies and absences (such as that of the distinction between labour and labour-power, an absence readily explained by the commodification of the latter), entailing the characterisic nodal (dc') and resolutionary (dr') transforms of a process which, insofar as it inaugurated a research programme, it would be surprising if it did not require further development and deepening.28 But in terms of C1.8, D3 — ideology-critique — is now distinguished from D1 — the ideology or self-understanding of the form or practice in question. This becomes part of Marx's explanandum, as in the case of his identification and description of commodity fetishism. Moreover, once a research programme has been initiated, dialectical detachment from the latter can occur, so that the ongoing metacritique of capitalism, identifying new defence mechanisms and causal tendencies and explaining them, need not be entirely immanent (radically negating in character*). However, to be effective, a radical relational dialectic, dependent upon the causal efficacy and conditioning** of ideas, presupposes a hermeneutic which takes agents to the point where immanent critique, registering theory–practice inconsistencies (cf. D2), is possible. In any event, there is now an internal rift within the conceptual realm, comprising a conflict of reasons, mobilized around what I am going to call hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles in the context of generalized master–slave power2 relations.
* Thus to use the terminology I introduced in SRHE, pp. 25-6, one can say MC2 (explanatory critique) > MC1 (the identification of an absence corresponding to real negation) > immanent critique.
** It is important to remember this is an axiom of materialist thought, itself bearing Hegelian credentials (according to which objective spirit formed the humus out of which absolute spirit grew).
Let us accentuate the philosophical contrast between Hegel and Marx by elaborating the way the logical contradictions of Hegelian dialectic differ, as species of internal contradiction, from the real dialectical contradictions of materialist analysis and critique. The driving force (in principle) of Hegelian dialectic is the transition, paradigmatically of the elements (e) and (–e), from positive contraries simultaneously present and actual (thereby continually violating the principle of non-contradiction, as Hegel both does and says he does) into negative sub-contraries now simultaneously actual and absent, but retained as negative presences in a cumulative memory store, as the dialectical reader's consciousness or the path of history moves on to a new level of speculative reason. At this stage they are now retrospectively redescribed as moments of a transcending totality. Contradiction has cancelled itself. And they are now, in what we could call Hegel's analytic reinstatement, restored to their positive self-identity. No longer contradictory, they now illustrate what I have just adumbrated as ‘dialectical connection’. Hegelian dialectic, when it is contradictory, is logically contradictory but not dialectically determinate; conversely, when it has become dialectically determinate, there is nothing contradictory about it at all. That is to say, when the elements are contradictory, they are not per se dialectical; but, when they are dialectical, they are no longer opposed. Hegelian dialectic is the continual transition from the one state, ‘understanding’, to the other, ‘speculative reason’; it is this transition and everything is always in it. But it is never simultaneously dialectical and contradictory. The materialist dialectic is. It involves a simultaneity of grounded (transfactual) presence and (actual) absence, of practical (existential) inclusion and mutual (tendentially transformative) exclusion. It is this which makes it genuinely dialectically contradictory in a stratified ontology that pre-exists the discourse that describes it.
There is no need, however, to deny Hegel the accolade of articulating dialectical contradictions if we reject, as I shall argue we should, a punctualist view of time. We can then say that what Hegel achieves, i.e. the co-presence of absence and presence, within an (actualist) extended temporal stretch in the mode of succession in time, Marx accomplishes instantaneously within a (transfactually) extended structural depth, in the mode of ontological stratification. Breaking free from both actualism and spatio-temporal punctualism allows for a vastly expanded table or matrix of opposition, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.
Allowing for the embedding of presence and absence, past and present, inside and outside, essence and appearance, transfactual and actual, in a combination of ontological stratification and internally tensed distanciated space-time (or set of such rhythmics) situates the possibility of a new, genuinely multi-dimensional and dynamic logic. Adding the possibilities permitted by 3L intra-active totalizing relationality, enabling the embedding of, for example, containment and separation and 4D transformative praxis, enabling the embedding of, for example, agency and power, spreads the canvas even wider. However, reverting to my main point here, and simplifying, while Hegel describes the contradictions of the sundered world at the dawn of the age of modernity (which Kant prefigures) in a non-contradictory and reconciliatory way, Marx attempts to explain the contradictions of that world (giving it a real definition as capitalist) in order eventually to change it. This could be summed up by the formulae:
[5] HD = Logical contradiction → dialectical connection → transfigurative redescription [ → analytic reinstatement].
[6] MD = Dialectical connection → dialectical contradiction → transformist praxis → practical resolution.
Now to complicate matters. Hegel is a deeply ambiguous figure. He is both — Hegel Mark I — the first practitioner of a new socio-geo-historicist mode of thought and expressly interested in change (before 1806), and — Hegel Mark II — the last great metaphysician who (almost) succeeds in realizing the traditional goals of philosophy within an immanent metaphysics of experience (after 1800) and increasingly fearful of change. (Note the discrepant times.) Of Hegel Mark II we could echo Marx on Proudhon: ‘Although there has been history … there is no longer any.’29 Indeed this is a potent motif of the philosophical tradition — one which could be provisionally and partially identified as the normally unconscious and characteristically aporetic normalization of past, and denegation of present and future, change. Of course Hegel does not believe that the geo-historical process has totally stopped. Hence he refers to Russia and America as lands of the future. But these belong to what I will call the ‘demi-actual’. The future is demi-present: constellationally closed. Like Rorty, he believes the ‘last conceptual revolution has occurred’30 — and for Hegel the concept spelled Begriff just is ‘conceptually understood reality’. It is important to appreciate that Hegel ‘Mark I’ and ‘Mark II’ correspond to or designate moments of real history (not just phases of his intellectual career). But this does not prevent Hegel Mark II presenting brilliant diagnoses of real, including non-logical, dialectical contradictions, as witnessed by his remarkable analyses of the contradictions of civil society which he never sublates. Moreover, we have already noticed the normic nature of Hegel's real dialectical practice (see C1.8 — p. 30 above). So Hegel moves closer to Marx. But Marx also steps nearer to Hegel. For his analysis of the capitalist mode of production does not remain at the level of the Hegelian ‘understanding’ but takes the form of a critique of political economy, engaging σ and τ transforms of the latter, identifying conceptualized forms (value, commodity, money) as diagnostic clues to the inner workings of his intransitive object of inquiry. So a fairer representation of the true nature of Hegel's and Marx's real dialectical practice might be as suggested by the schema in Figure 2.4. It should perhaps be stressed here what is implicit in [5] and [6] above, viz. that the sequential orders of the Marxian and Hegelian dialectics typically differ, viz.:
[8] HD: Logical contradiction—transition—dialectical connection —reconciliatory theoretical result.
[9] MD: Dialectical connection—dialectical contradition—dialectic praxis—transformative negation—resolutionary practical result.
Hegel's resolution is in theory. Marx's is in practice. But this must not be misunderstood. The resolution of all contradictions, including logical contradictions, is practical both in the sense (a) that they consist in the transformative negation of the pre-existing (contradictory) state of affairs and (b) that, qua actions, they are moments of social practices (e.g. typesetting, mathematics). The further senses in which there are differences at stake between Hegel and Marx depend (c) upon some social schematization or theory — a practice, of course — differentiating, for instance, manual from mental labour and/or (d) the different orientations of theoretical and practical reason — with the former concerned to adjust our beliefs to the world and the latter to adjust the world to our will. Following Hegel we can distinguish theoretical reason (drt'), practical reason (drp') and absolute reason, that is, their unity, coherence or consistency (dra'), which is to be achieved for dialectical critical realism in the Cartesian product of senses (a) and (d), viz. practically oriented transformative negation (dφ'), rather than recapitulative redescription — a concept which, in the end, Hegel cannot sustain, in virtue of his constellational closure of dialectical praxis and reason alike.
Theory/practice inconsistency, which is entailed by, though it does not entail, a dialectical comment (dc'), is of special interest for a number of reasons. First, because of its immediately auto-subversive, self-deconstructive, performative and radically negational character. Second, when set in the context of hermeneutic-hegemonic struggles over power2 or the practical transfinity of generalized master–slave relations, because of its significance as a form of immanent (and so necessarily non-arbitrary or ad hominem) critique, insofar as it turns on an agent or community rejecting in its practice what it affirms in its theory and/or expressing in its practice what it denies in its theory. Third, because a cumulative series of theory/practice inconsistencies, in which each phase brings out, precisely, as the scotoma or blind spot of the previous phase, the point of its greatest ex ante strength as in fact its greatest weakness (the dck' as the drj' of the dci' [of the dri'–1]) constitutes what may be called an Achilles' Heel critique (as in the sequential parthogenetic process of Hegelian dialectic phenomenology), which is of the greatest moment in the history of philosophy and science alike.* Fourth, because insofar as a theory or practice violates an axiological necessity, it immediately generates a most interesting kind of compromise form, to be explicated in §7. Fifth, because it shows the subject involved to be internally riven, alienated and/or untrue to itself. Sixth, because of its lack of dialectical universalizability, again to be treated subsequently.
* So we can extend the theorem on p. 62 above: MC2 > MC1 > immanent critique > AH critique.
I now want to insist on the practical nature of all theory and the quasi-propositionality of all practice, insofar as it is dependent upon, but not exhausted by, its conceptual, and thus belief-expressive aspects (‘actions speak louder than words’).** This immediately generates the theorem of the duality of theory and practice, in that by means of a transcendental perspectival switch, each can be seen under the aspect of the other. Consequences of this are that a theory or practice may be immediately, or more normally mediately, theory/ practice inconsistent; and that theory/theory inconsistencies or logical contradictions proper may be seen under the aspect of theory/practice or practice/practice contradictions, which I will call quasi-logical contradictions and axiological inconsistencies. Moreover, it follows from the quasi-propositionality of practice that practical or theory/practice inconsistencies will yield at least axiological underdetermination; and from the practical character of theory that insofar as theory/theory contradictions violate axiological necessities they will entrain the compromise form referred to in the previous paragraph, which may be provisionally regarded as necessitated by what I earlier called the reality principle. Note that this does not abolish either (α) the intransitivity of, or (β) the characteristic difference in orientation or ‘direction of fit’ (sense [d] above) between, theory and practice — generating the important dialectical figure of the non-identity, alterity or hiatus-in-the-duality — or (γ) their respective locations in some social schematism (sense [c]). It follows from this that, even if dialectical connections, as defined above, are regarded as necessary for a configuration to be said to be ‘dialectical’,
1.q there is no a priori reason why all dialectics should be social, and hence conceptualized;
2. neither is there any reason why all social dialectics should involve contradictions, whether dialectical, logical or both;
3. there is no necessary reason for believing that all dialectical contradictions involve quasi-logical contradictions or axiological inconsistencies, although there are good grounds for supposing that they will be frequently ideologically mediated by such;
4. only a sub-class of dialectical contradictions involve logical contradictions;
5. all these types may be described and potentially explained (in the intrinsic aspect of science) without contradiction; and finally
6. only epistemological dialectics necessarily breach, at certain critical moments, the formal principles of identity and non-contradiction.
In short most, if not all, dialectics are consistent with adherence to the norms of formal logic (as illustrated in Figures 2.5 and 2.6). This result will be qualified subsequently by consideration of the interconnection between epistemological and other dialectics and the effects of the illicit epistemo-logicization of reality in §10 but it is important to insist on it now. Dialectical critical realism will situate, but not just negate, ‘logic’.*
** Of course the best conceptualization will often be a hotly contested matter, especially in the context of power2 relations.
* This is perhaps the point to remark that in characterizing dialectic as ‘the logic of absence’ in the title of this chapter, I am exploiting a more generic sense of ‘logic’ than that captured by commitment to the principles of identity and non-contradiction — the sense employed in this passage.
Insofar as theory is practical, it will depend (analytically) upon some prior piece of practical reasoning, e.g. about the efficacy of the practice in arriving at an adequate description of the world. But this depends upon theory, which incorporates theoretical and practical reasoning alike. And insofar as practice is quasi-propositional, it will depend (analytically) upon some anterior theoretical reasoning, e.g. about the nature of the world that the practice is designed to change. But this depends upon practice, which also encompasses both theoretical and practical reasoning. And so we have the lemma of the duality of theoretical and practical reasoning, mediated by the transformative character of theory and the conceptuality of practice. Once again this does not annul their distinction. The upshot of theory is belief about the world; that of practice, action on it. That theory will express our will and depend upon our wants, and practices will express our (concrete axiological31) judgements and depend upon our beliefs. Figure 2.7 is designed to illustrate this. (These two aspects, expression or manifestation and dependency, are different. In the former case theory manifests, qua practice, the upshot of practical reason; and practice manifests, qua quasi-propositional, the outcome of theoretical reason. In the latter case, theory merely existentially presupposes, but is not also, the practical reason upon which it depends; and similarly for practice.)
In the Marxist tradition dialectical contradiction has been most frequently characterized in contrast to either (α) exclusive or so-called ‘real’ opposition or conflict (Kantian Realrepugnanz32) on the grounds that their terms mutually presuppose each other, so that they comprise an (existentially) inclusive (as well as tendentially exclusive) opposition; and/or (β) formal logical opposition on the basis that their relations are meaning-(or content-)dependent, not purely formal, so that the negation of A does not lead to its annulment, but to its transformative replacement by a new, richer form B. Associated with the first contrast is the theme of the ‘unity of opposites’, the trademark of Marxist ontological dialectics from Engels on. At the level of social theory this motif most often reduces to internal relationality of antagonists in a structure of domination (with conflicting, mutually exclusive, interests — ultimately one in the preservation, the other in the abolition, of that structure). Associated with the second contrast is the conception of immanent critique as central to the project of radical negation, which is the hallmark of Marxist relational dialectics from Lukács on, with the emphasis on the causal efficacy (as distinct from mere material-infrastructural conditioning) of ideas. In both traditions dialectical contradictions are held to be characteristically ‘concrete’, in comparison with their ‘abstract’ analytic contrasts, a distinction I examine in §7.
In Marx's works the terms ‘contradiction’ (Widerspruch), ‘antagonism’ (Gegensatz) and ‘conflict’ (Konflikt), which I have differentiated above, are often used interchangeably. But if some conceptual consistency is imposed, it can be said that in Marx's mature economic writings the concept of contradiction is deployed to denote inter alia: (a) logical inconsistencies or other intra-discursive theoretical anomalies, which are related to or can be perhaps reduced to the concept of logical contradiction; (b) extra-discursive (although, of course, generally conceptually mediated) non-dialectical oppositions, e.g. supply and demand as comprising forces of relatively independent origins interacting in such a way that their effects tend to cancel one another in notional, momentary or enduring equilibria, which approximate to the Kantian Realrepugnanz; (c) structural or synchronic or local-period-ized dialectical contradictions intrinsic to a particular social form; (d) geo-historically specific dialectical contradictions that bring into being a social form and/or crises in the course of its development which are then resolved in the process of transformation which they help to cause. Contradictions of type (d) involve forces of non-independent origins operating so that a force F itself tends to produce or is itself the product of conditions stemming from a ground, namely social form S which simultaneously or subsequently produces a countervailing force F', tending to frustrate, subvert, overcome or otherwise transform F and/or the social form that grounds it, that is, to radically negate them. Such geo-historically specific contradictions are exemplified by those which arise between the relations and forces of production, and particularly between the increasingly socialized nature of the relations and the definitionally private character of the forces. These rhythmic contradictions are grounded for Marx in structural ones of type (c), such as between wage-labour and capital or between the use value and the exchange value of the commodity, which provide ab initio the formal conditions of their possibility. Such (c)-type contradictions are then in turn geo-historically explained (so that we have a meta-ontological dialectic of [c] and [d] types) in terms of (e) an original generative separation, split or alienation of the immediate producers from the means and materials of their production. This generates an alienation from their labour and from the planes of their material transactions with nature, their social interactions with each other, the network of social relations in which they produce, and ultimately themselves. The prototype of dialectical generative separation is the Hegelian ‘Beautiful Soul’ alienated from her community, but it is given a specific dialectical meaning in Marx. (c)-(e) contradictions are all real dialectical ones.
The identification of (a)s, corresponding to the moment of dc' in the critique of political economy, is of course a part of the real (non-preservative) transformative negation of it, at the level of drt'. (b)s are simple external contradictions, although it is always possible that a more totalizing analysis at what I have called the ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ margins of inquiry33 (and will rehearse in §7) may always reveal them to be internally related. In respect of the thematization of the concept within Marxism it should be noted that dialectical contradictions of types (c)-(e) both constitute real inclusive oppositions, in that their terms existentially presuppose one another (cf. α), and are systematically and intrinsically related to mystifying forms of appearance, such as the value or wage forms (cf. β). These dialectical contradictions neither violate the principle of non-contradiction — for, as already stressed, they may be consistently described; nor are they scientifically absurd in any fashion — for the notion of a real inverted, or otherwise mystifying, conception of a real object, perhaps the result of the ensemble or ground containing the very phenomena mystified, may be readily accommodated within a critical realist stratified, non-monovalent, totalizing ontology of the sort to which Marx is committed in his mature work, though never able fully to develop. Yet there is a long line of criticism in Marxist, as well as non-Marxist, thought (which begins with Bernstein and reaches its apogee with Colletti) which claims that the notion of dialectical contradictions in reality is incompatible with one or more of formal logic, coherent discourse, scientific practice or materialism. This is not so. For dialectical, as other species of, contradictions, whether simply within being (cf. α') or between being and thought within being (cf. β'), may be straightforwardly consistently described and scientifically explained. It is only if logical, which may sometimes also be dialectical, contradictions are committed, as distinct from described, that the norm of non-contradiction is infringed, and provided logic is included within reality, not detotalized, exteriorized, split off or hypostatized (in Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian manner), its fetishistic or otherwise categorically mystifying character betrays no absurdity in the critical discourse in contrast to the conceptualized reality described. It is thus quite incorrect to argue, as Colletti does,34 that any scientifically legitimate concept of contradiction must reduce to Kantian Realrepugnanz or non-dialectical, merely external, opposition. This is the legacy of Colletti's Humean-Kantian empirical realism. Hegel's conceptual realist gloss merely embellishes it and, as we shall see, leaves its structure intact. In particular lacking the concepts of non-logical natural necessity, non-self-cancelling contradiction and an open totality, real negativity and (post-Hegelian Mark II) transformative change disappear from Hegel's own theoretical horizons. Hegel loses not absence, but the concept of absence, and with that the essence of the dialectic itself.
In this section I wish to fasten upon the dialectical fertility of logical (and other) contradictions. The most creative response to contradiction is to redescribe the alternatives in the context of a transformed (and in general more complete or totalizing) problematic or practical ensemble. In the course of the argument I want to explain why Hegel regards contradiction as ubiquitous, and the sense in which he is right and wrong to do so; and to criticize in turn the unreflected use of the principle of non-contradiction as a definiens for reality. Logic does not determine the nature of being, but at best establishes what the world must be like if we are to perform certain operations successfully. I shall be considering species of contradiction as problematic axiological choice situations, and the latter as belonging to the wider class of nodal, turning, connecting, branching points, limits and situations; and I shall be looking at a variety of types of response to them. I shall be arguing, inter alia, that it is wrong to confuse axiological under-determination — a function of structure in an open totality — with axiological indeterminacy. The former includes freedom of choice, which is presupposed by the concept of autonomy as self-determination; whereas the latter implies a situation in which there is a complete absence of grounds for choice, and hence of the possibility of rational agency. I will reconnect these issues to the essential themes of dialectic, and, eventually, to the metacritique of the western philosophical irrealist tradition.
There are seven main philosophical errors conjugating around contradiction, and especially logical contradiction, which I will summarily list before commenting on each in turn. They are:
(a) to logicize being — by using the principle of non-contradiction as a criterion — or, in Hegel's case, contradiction as a postulate — for defining reality;
(b) to detotalize being — by refusing to admit the existence of contradictions (logical ones included) in reality;
(c) to belittle or otherwise obtund the significance of contradictions — either as bases for criticism and/or as harbingers, indeed dynamos, of change;
(d) to acquiesce to, rather than try to resolve (or more generally seek an appropriate response to), contradictions;
(e) to imagine triumphalistically that such resolutions are always possible, even if only in principle;
(f) to assume that once a system contains a contradiction, contradictions must spread universally and inexorably throughout it; and
(g) to be intimidated by, or fight shy, of them.
These errors, though not consistent, are not unconnected: they form a dialectical ensemble.
(a) It is both idealist and anthropomorphic, and readily explained in terms of the epistemic fallacy, to use non-contradiction as axiomatic of reality. It is at most an intrinsic norm of thought, whose dominion, in describing the rough epistemological dialectic of C1.9, I have already implicitly contested, a line which will be further pursued in §10. However, a novelty of my exegesis of Hegel is that it is a norm that he covertly accepts, while seeing it ubiquitously violated as the mechanism that powers his dialectic to its final glaceating repose. Both Aristotle and Hegel pan-logicize being. But while Aristotle* comprehends it as necessarily non-contradictory, Hegel comprehends contradiction as the geo-historical motor (Mark I) and the mechanism of the replication of the constellational closure of geo-history (Mark II), which I have already referred to as his ‘analytic reinstatement’ — for which reason is merely a nominal disguise, and which betrays Hegel as the supreme non-dialectical dialectician; so that we could say that not only does Hegel cloak his rational kernel in a mystical shell, but he also drained his rational insight of its dialectical rationality, depositing an analytical skeleton in a dialectically empty cupboard sheening a mirror reflecting a transfigured self-portrait for the observer's admiring gaze.
* This is to leave aside the aporiai of matter and accident — the return of the unformless or unactual, that is, of the open systemic repressed, which Hegel will constellationally close in his notion of (in my terms) the ‘demi-actual’ — that is, the irrational = unactual existent — Krug's pen, the number of species of parrot (in short, whatever his system cannot rationally transfigure/explain).
What Aristotle and Hegel share is the epistemic fallacy (the primordial failing of western philosophy), the hypostatization of thought, a commitment to the principle of (subject–object) identity (which in Hegel transmits the flux in thought to things), a kinetic actualism, a pervasive teleology, an all-encompassing absolute and, ultimately (at least for Hegel Mark II), an onto-logic of stasis, of congealment, accompanied by the more or less complacent eternalization of the power2-saturated status quo. However, whereas Aristotle displays a stable hierarchy of forms, in the knowledge of which we can, in some unreciprocated way, participate in the self-thinking thought of God, Hegel unfolds a dynamic totality in which the absolute overcomes its self-diremption in the human medium of his philosophy, for which God is a mere Vorstellung, or picture-image. In the totalizing process of reason every momentarily stable structuratum is continuously dissolved and immediately replaced structurally in the ‘Bacchanalian revel’ which is the infinite life of cosmic spirit. It too is a causa ens sui, an unmoved mover, self-identical-and-eternal, but only realized in its unfolding expressive embodiment in the course of geo-history (and its petrified presupposition, nature), finally recognized and completed in the constellational closure of absolute idealism. In this system Geist manifests itself as process — at first (Mark I) directional, but now (Mark II) completed — and the necessity of the process in the generation and overcoming of (logical) contradictions at transition points or moments. However, as everything existing is continually in process — at first (Mark I) uphill, but now (Mark II) on a plateau — and process is continuous, every moment is a transition point, both itself and not-itself, in the self-becoming (Mark I) or self-replication (Mark II) of its teleologically propelled end. And so logical contradiction is ubiquitous, everywhere and everywhen, expressing logically spiritualized (or spiritually logicized) necessity. The flip side of this is the incessant self-cancellation of contradiction, so that of this continuous play of actualized spiritualized necessity we could say ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. This is Hegel's analytical reinstatement masked as dialectical connection; and manifest as cognitive triumphalism, expressivist centrism, rationalizing finalism and coagulating endism. It is worth emphasizing that this was both his express intention (to achieve reconciliation with actuality and so avoid the alienated fate of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ he himself experienced in the 1790s) and, as we shall see, its subsequent historical impact in the post-Hegelian eclipse of reason.
At this point I am going to ‘tack’ from my main line in (a) to ask to what extent an immanent despiritualized Hegelianism Mark I might provide a coherent world view? The case for such a (let us say) Xegel is this. Unless things were in contradiction, that is, subject to contradictory forces and processes, nothing would change. But we know change is pervasive. Hence contradiction must be, too. It is there when an animal feels hungry, fights and assimilates its prey. It occurs when it breathes and when it dies. It is present as constraint, as what I called ‘inner complicity’ and the variety of other types I have described. The case against Xegel is triplex. First, even if contradiction is pervasive, it by no means follows that logical contradiction is. It is, contra (a), quite as wrong to treat some regulative principle of thought as a constitutive definiens of being, whether that be done in Aristotelian, Leibnizian or Hegelian style, as it is to make the converse mistake of (b) of absenting, splitting off, alienating or distanciating thought from (the rest of) being, whether this strategy be pursued in Platonic, Cartesian or Kantian manner.
This ushers in my second point. For two limits can be transcendentally established. (1) There must be sufficient stability of kinds and individuals, of structures and structurata, of mechanisms and their instances for intelligible praxis, sense-perception or identifiable (presupposing re-identifiable) entities to occur. The world must be such that it can be to a degree consistently described and acted upon (at least within our zone of being). (2) But by the same token there must be sufficient differentiation and transformative change for the same phenomena — and, in particular, the negating (absenting) agency presupposed by scientific practice — to be, or have become, possible. The world must be such that it cannot always be consistently described and acted upon for problematic axiological choice situations, nodal points and indeterminate negations, as well as less abstract entities such as emergence and structural change, to occur. Thus at the transition point of the identity of a particular or kind (and such transition points must occur, for, for instance, a token-reflexive statement reporting a change in beliefs, or for emergence or for spatio-temporal divergence to be possible) we have 2E occurrences of the problem of induction (in which we have to think the coincidence of identity and change), the 1M resolution of which was sketched in C1.9. Metacritically we are situated within limits. There must be sufficient constancy in, for instance, trans-cosmic laws and fundamental constants, such as the speed of light, for change — from dialectical development to entropic dissipation — to be identifiable. And there must be sufficient change, such as radical transformative negation in science, for such constants to become to be known. Neither Parmenidean nor Heraclitean caricatures can apply. Similar considerations apply in the 3L domain of totality. A scientific experiment presupposes a continuous causal nexus but consists in the real demediation of nature. All this means that we may have to accept the co-existence of ‘universalist’ postulates, such as ‘cosmic time’, ‘Machian inertia’ and perhaps the butterfly effect and ‘relativist’ postulates, such as rapidly diverging world-lines, and a changing (both in the large and in the small) domain of the knowable as well as radical epistemic relativity (including in philosophy). If contradiction is conceived merely as constraint then of course it is ubiquitous. But contradiction conceived as constraint and as radically negating transformative tendency, respectively, instantiates two different kinds of concept.
The third point against Xegel is this. Science in general is concerned only with explanatory and/or taxonomically significant changes, paradigmatically structural changes. And it will seek the cause of such changes in terms of explanatory and taxonomic, more basic and enduring mechanisms and kinds. Of course there may be change too at this level and we are faced with a putative regress in depth. However, it is neither (α) epistemologically nor (β) ontologically vicious, (α) We are always ‘thrown’ into an epistemological dialectic — as we are ‘thrown’, at every level, into life, establishing at once our material embodiment, our spatio-temporal being and our perspectival relativity — which precedes us, at some specific point, with established facts, determinate problems, a preset agenda and research programme, into which we in turn will project or throw ourselves. We never start from scratch (the mistake of fundamentalism — be it the Cartesian cogito, the conventionalist cogitamus or the pragmatic facimus) or finish with nothing (non-constellationally significant) to do (the mistake of endism). The epistemological regress is resolved in practice by the fact that science is a pre-existing, ongoing social affair. (β) Insofar as we come up against an ontological limit, beyond which it seems that we cannot advance, so that all that we can get in our ‘referential totality’, in particular our sense-extending equipment, is for it to be affected (perhaps contextually, holistically and/or stochastically) in certain more or less determinate ways, then it is mandatory on science to posit a deeper level of reality, if we are to avoid invoking miracles as the causes of the changeable detectable effects in our experiential Umwelt. The most ontically basic level for us would just consist in the constellational identity of a thing's nature with its causal powers, including its tendencies to manifest itself to us in the ways it does (where its nature ‘overreaches’ those powers). But suppose it is field-like and merely just consists in its powers, whether manifest or not, then the ultimate entities would have to be said to consist in the dispositional (rather than constellational) (self-)identity of their natures with their powers, and a realistic interpretation would still be saved.35
But the argument of this chapter is that, within the metacritical limits situated above, (1) change is irreducible and (2) the causal efficacy of a process constitutes, or rather manifests itself as, its spatio-temporal rhythmic. From (2) follows the constellational identity of causality, whether substantial, exercised or not, and space-time (in potential process). But we know that our universe is an entropically expanding emergent one so that change must be occurring. Some of the ultimata must consist in (a) the dispositional identity of things with their changing causal powers, so that in a dialectical kinetic pluriverse to be is not only just to be able to do, but to be able to become; and (b) their causal powers must be exercised, so that the constellational identity of (embodying the distinctions between) structures, mechanisms and spatio-temporal processes manifests itself in the rhythmic identity of those changing causal powers with their spatio-temporal exercise. In short, for at least some ultimata, being is becoming, whether manifest or not. These identities do not abolish the categorical differentiations between the concepts. Nor is it at odds with the argument for the ontological priority of the negative in §1. In the first place, for change at the level of the ultimata to occur there must be at least one radically negating kind or two or more kinds. In either case two or more principles are involved (so Parmenidean purely positive token monism is ruled out); if the ‘inner complicity’ argument holds, then even ordinary multiple determination presupposes internal contradiction; and, tautologically, change as transformative negation involves absence/absenting. In the second place, were we to embark on a horizontal regress back to a unique beginning of everything this could only be, as a non-monistic case of creation ex nihilo, by an act of spontaneous radical autogenesis out of nothing, retrospectively endowed with the capacity to produce something out of itself (i.e. dispositional autogenesis), involving the paradox of backwards causation* (with which Hegel's system may indeed be fairly charged**) and the self-contradiction of being something with a disposition to the transformative negation of nothing at all. There are no such prima facie problems with absolute edges (or spatial envelopes or endings without temporal posteriors). Note, finally, that I am not claiming that our ultimata are the ultimata (or ur-stuff), or that we can know them or that if we did we would be able to explain, less predict, much else.*
* If et2 caused et1 then et1 would have to be endowed with the liability to be produced by et2 when at t1 it could not have possessed it (as it was only brought into being at t2).36
** Cf. ‘how can there be a conceptual recollection of the manifestation of the absolute, if this manifestation is a consequence of its conceptual recollection? In sum, Hegel claims that the actual is brought into being by discourse that can only occur after the actual presents itself. So far as I am aware this is a contradiction which has no Aufhebung.’37
* It is worth stepping aside for a spot of critical realist scholasticism. The concept of dispositional identity is a linear descendant of that introduced at RTS2, pp. 182 and passim. There I also distinguish my normal concept of tendency1, a power whose exercise was normically qualified (or, to put it more affirmatively, one whose exercise was transfactually efficacious) from a tendency2, a power whose intrinsic enabling conditions were satisfied, i.e. a power ready to be exercised. But if one includes extrinsic enabling conditions and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic releasing and between releasing and stimulating conditions, then we can compose a matrix of possible concepts of tendencies — from the satisfaction of intrinsic and extrinsic enabling conditions (a tendency3 prone to be exercised) to that plus the satisfaction of intrinsic stimulating or releasing conditions (a motivated tendency4) or the satisfaction of extrinsic but not intrinsic releasing conditions (a lapsed, lagged or late tendency5). Corresponding to the four moments of the concrete universal I shall analyse in §7 we can also distinguish further concepts of tendency. Thus we might want to distinguish a tendencya as transfactually efficacious from tendencyb which qualifies the directionality of the process (including a process of argument, where we might want to employ the concept of contradiction) and tendencyc which designates the mediation of a determination and a generic tendencyd which includes the effects of the others plus conjunctural influences. All these must be differentiated from the concepts of a tendency which is realized in all normal circumstances — tendencye.
So much for Xegel, who epistemologizes being, exaggerates the extent while diminishing the depth of change (and contradiction) and posits an impossible heterocosmic affinity38 between a self-creating god and a radically closed autogenetics, most obviously in his Science of Logic. Back to Hegel. It is a (deep but) contingent fact that the world reveals ontological stratification — of many layers of depth, in many different dimensions (a fact more obvious to us today than in Hegel's time, but which was even then just as transcendentally necessary for science, whether that of Newton or Goethe, Kant or Laplace). Now Hegel is not just a Humean empiricist. He has a concept of necessity which he is prepared to apply to changes and their connections and interrelations. But his ontology is only two-tiered (just as his presentational dialectic tends to be linear and dyadic), not multi-tiered and multi-angular. More importantly, the necessity it endows is spiritual-logical, not natural, a necessity which further manifests itself actualistically and in essential relation to human subjectivity. It is a necessity which manifests itself in the evanescence and transitoriness of being and the bad Aufhebung of the self-mediation-cancellation or -transcendence of contradiction, viz. in his analytic reinstatement. The lack of a concept of natural necessity reflects what I am going to call the ‘primal squeeze’ within irrealism of the missing moments of scientific theory (TD) and natural necessity (ID), squashed between the realms of metaphysics (reason, the a priori, intellectual intuition or [religious] faith) and commonsense (experience, the a posteriori, induction or [once again but now conventional] faith). I return to Hegel in §5.
There are two more problems to discuss under (a). First, there is the important consideration that there is no way of getting at — in the sense of grasping — reality independently of thought. So, it might be claimed, we cannot help but logicize being. However, I shall be arguing to §8 that, granting this, there is no case for putting intransitivity under erasure. Negatively, by parity of argument, the erasure, which is an existentially intransitive operation, must erase itself. Positively, a meta-reflexively totalizing situation of what may be called the post-Kantian predicament, involving a stratified conception of the self and a distanciated concept of space-time in ontology, particularly when supported by a materialist sociology, allows us to think about being without logicizing it. Second, there is the Leibnizian point that the principle of non-contradiction is necessary for the derivation of coherent concepts of space and time. However neat Leibnizian derivations (which presuppose the prior concepts of alterity and change) may be, once we allow emergent totalities or divergent world-lines, then we must budget for differential space-times, which require for their consistent description (and measure) only a zero-level or base space-time. And it is a contingent fact (1) if we can get this, and (2) whether the differential spatio-temporalities are or are not contradictory. This immediately undermines the palpably antiquated Kantian postulate of a necessarily unitary time-consciousness. Moreover, it is important to reiterate that rejection of actualism and its blockist dual allows for the co-occurrence of absence and presence within a distanciated temporal stretch and/or spatial spread, making possible, within the dialectics of co-presence of absence and presence, such phenomena as an existentially constitutive past within a tensed present, an intrinsic outside and an infra-active relationality within that distanciated stretch/spread.
(b) I do not intend to consume much space on the inverse mistake of detotalizing being by refusing to concede the existence of contradictions in reality, including logical contradictions in social reality (where else could they be?) — the error for which Hegel criticized Kant as being ‘too tender for things’. Rather I will turn to (c) the mistake of underestimating the significance of contradictions and (d) that of merely succumbing to them altogether. It will be convenient to illustrate my discussion by taking logical contradictions but, mediated by the theorem of the duality of theoretical and practical reason, much of what I have to say may be extended to quasi-logical, performative and axiological (theory/practice and practice/practice) contradictions.
The result of logical contradiction is, as I have noted, axiological indeterminacy, lack of dialectical universalizability and the absence of grounds for rational autonomy of action. Because many bases of criticism can be reduced to contradiction, it is important to notice that there are others which cannot, such as (1) incompleteness (simple absence), (2) irrelevance (absence of a connection), (3) vicious infinite regress (absence of non-homologous resolution) and (4) reductio ad absurdum (which may be defined as the absence of coherence). The most general criterion in epistemological dialectics is the absence or lack of progressive import, in what may be thought of as a roughly Lakatosian sense.39 The latter may serve as a template for evaluating processes in general. Now it is important to see that although the complete axiological indeterminacy that flows from formal logical contradiction places the agent in a potentially dilemmatic situation, all agency involves both a moment of indeterminate negation and a context of axiological underdetermination. There is nothing wrong with openness per se; it is a necessary feature of the world in which we must act. The world is not algorithmic. In general, we are situated, once again, within metacritical limits, with neither unconstrained (contrary to the paradoxes of material implication) nor predetermined choice. Epistemological openness is precisely necessary for that dialectical suspension of analytical reason essential to the σ and τ transforms in science. Such ‘suspension’ includes the ‘bracketing’ kind, which, I argued in C1.8, is how the Hegelian dialectic normally works, as distinct from the ‘transcendence’ that Hegel proclaims. There are a variety of species of ‘indeterminate negation’ from that which is a necessary moment of rational agency to that which occurs in intrinsically antinomial situations. What we have in science is a dialectic of dialectical and analytical reasoning (with ‘overreaching’ my alternative to Hegelian ‘transcendence’). What is needed is a criterion for distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ dialectics. One may call a dialectic a ‘bad’ one when one can explain it as based on transcendentally, dialectically (to which I will come in §6) or scientifically refuted categorial errors, typically constituting the common ground of duals, complements, inversions, ad hoceries and other counterparts, and depending upon such measures as illicit fusion or exchange of non-equivalents or illicit fission or non-parity of equivalents, revealing duplicity and equivocation, generating multiple opportunities for ideological pliability (so that, for instance, the same ensemble can legitimate almost any action). A ‘fruitless’ dialectic is just one, like a Lakatosian degenerating research programme, which is getting nowhere. A ‘good’ dialectic is one which is grounded and progressive, in a sense which I will explicate in due course. My main aim here, however, is not to provide criteria for evaluating dialectics, but to home in on a class of problematic axiological choice situations, where we do not know what to say or do; and to situate these within the class of nodal, switch, or limit situations, such as critical geo-historical turning points or crises. We are here looking at dialectic as process, both becoming and consisting in transformative negation, absenting or change as both co-presence and transition, boundary or intra-active frontier. The dialectic of co-presence of absence and presence is itself an affront to the pretensions of purely analytical reason — a theme which I shall resume in §10. But for the moment it is on the traditional paradigm of dialectic as involving contradiction and transition that I wish to latch. In focusing on problematic axiological choice situations I am in no way subjectivizing process or transition or restricting nodal episodes or moments (less indeterminate negation generally) to the human sphere. It is rather a consequence of not illogicizing being that makes it incumbent on me to consider what we should do in or say about such situations.
Examples of problematic axiological choice situations are (or are yielded by) (1) contradictions, (2) transitions, boundaries and frontiers, (3) nodal points and limit situations generally (e.g. junctions, branches), (4) 2E occurrences of the problem of induction (when there is a switch or transition in the causal powers constitutive of a thing), (5) the duration of the/a/some present,* or more generally that of some period or synchronic or locale or region of space-time, (6) the extent and degree of the dialectical suspension of analytical reason in a potentially promising, but highly anomalous, research programme, and (7) the satisficing or optimizing character or the wisdom or rationality of a particular description, action, way of life or social system.
* I talk of a or some present for two reasons. First, because it is in principle indefinite in extent. Second, because it, like the concept of real negation, qua absence, applies for any space-time region for any observer or any world-line from any reference frame; that is to say, it is not anthropocentric, although naturally any use of it will be relativistic, as with the concept of the past (or future) or elsewhere. (Insofar as determinate being, whether positive or negative, is spatio-temporal, this feature applies in principle to all our discourse. And the concept of the world-line may be used as a metaphor to illuminate phenomena of epistemic or ethical relativity generally.)
There are a number of generic responses to problematic axiological choice situations. Custom, tradition or routine is neither a good, nor a relevant, answer. For, whatever the virtues of routine (and routine is in general necessary for the cultivation of virtues), unless it is both accountable and accounted for, it is always liable to the Sartrian charge of ‘bad faith’. Moreover, it is not relevant because a problematic axiological choice situation is just one where we do not know how to go on or what to do. Of course agents may, by access to the resources of a privileged elite, evade the ‘axiological imperative’, and thereby the problem. But let us leave this ‘response’ aside. One must, of course, always bear in mind Aristotle's advice ‘to seek in each enquiry, the sort of precision the nature of the subject-matter permits’.40 This is different from the Rortian injunction to ‘change the subject’. In practice, principles of balance, compromise, maxi-minimization, as well as relevance or chance41 may all play a part, which contemporary decision theory (in a chaotic world) has helped to clarify.
In the case of an apparent or real contradiction the agent may do anything from repress it to exploit the opportunities it affords in a self-interested or neo-Machiavellian way. Or she may adopt the Zen (μ) practice of ‘unasking the question’.42 This is different from the Socratic (π) response of ‘problematizing it’, that is, of seeking the ground(s) of apparently mutually exclusive alternatives which, if and when found, can then be redescribed in the context of a transformed theoretico-practical context, in a non-contradictory way. This is undoubtedly the most progressive response to contradiction: resolution by revolution, i.e. abolition. But what if this strategy fails? And what do we say of the nodal moment of change? Or of the point of transition between two alternative correct descriptions of an entity or from one description to a more accurate one? One seems yet again faced with the options of accepting both the alternatives (‘it is raining and it is not raining’), i.e. denying non-contradiction, or rejecting both (‘it is neither raining nor not raining’), i.e. denying excluded middle. But there is also the ploy adopted by the late Plato in the concluding remarks of the Parmenides,* where he seems to want to affirm all combinations of (mutually exclusive) possibilities — in a meta-denial of non-contradiction; a position which Derrida often seems to want to invert by rejecting them all — in a meta-denial of excluded middle. (Hegel, wedded to the principle of preservative sublation, and under the influence of Lessing's doctrine of the cumulative character of wisdom as well as Leibnizian optimizing plenitude, tends to Platonism in this respect.) Then there is the ordinary language returned to pre-philosophical ‘reasonableness’.
* See the epigraphs at the beginning of the book.
The position I wish to argue for is ontological (and logical) polyvalence, including ‘non-valence’. Non-valence may be regarded as a propaedeutic to the Socratic strategy. Both seek to question whether it is a problematic axiological choice situation after all. The non-valent response is to say, quite simply: ‘this is the moment of change. The point of transition. The boundary. This is what needs explaining. Here is our explanandum’.* The non-valent-Socratic strategy is grounded philosophically in a conception of formal logic (and more generally analytical reason) as an invaluable, but also dialectically dependent, moment in the process of scientific thought. Thus to show the deducibility of a transfactually efficacious tendency from a description of deep structure is to satisfy the strongest possible criteria for both necessity and truth. But what we are concerned with is a dialectic, understood as dependent upon the practice of real transformative negation in the transitive process of science, not an analytic, of dialectical and analytical reasoning.** And the non-valent-Socratic response is grounded sociologically in the conception of the use of analytical choice operators such as √, x or / and the degree of freedom or, if you like, reality of choice as dependent on materialized social practices in the context of ideologically discursively moralized power2 relations in the heyday of consumer capitalism.
* And in the case of ultimata ‘this is rhythmic identity’.
** ‘We have the idea of a super-mechanism when we talk of logical necessity … we say that people condemn a man to death and then we say that the Law condemns him to death. “Although the Jury can pardon him, the Law can't” … the idea of something super-strict, something stricter than any Judge can be, super-rigidity … cf. a lever-fulcrum, the idea of a super-hardness. “The geometrical lever is harder than any lever can be. It can't bend.” Here we have a case of logical necessity. “Logic is a mechanism made of infinitely hard material. Logic cannot bend” … This is the way we arrive at a super-something.’43
The central category of dialectic is absence and absenting: for example, in the absenting of mistakes in dialectic conceived as argument,*** and of the absenting of constraints in dialectic conceived as the drive for freedom. Absentings are transformative and/or distanciating (mediating) negations, including disemergence and divergence. Dialectic can thus easily be seen as an onto-logic of change, as analytics is of stasis, and, ineluctably (I will argue), of reification. Now if time is, as classically conceived, the dimension of change,**** then it is clear why the issues of dialectic and space-time are so closely intertwined; and why both are central to axiology, understood as concerned precisely with the absenting of absences, e.g. in desire satisfied, but more generally in the theory of agentive as distinct from dummy (reductionist) or disembodied (dualist) agency. Now within the dialectic of dialectical and analytical reasoning necessary for science (and the education of desire for freedom) one can locate a distinctive dialectic of inconsistency and incompleteness. In this dialectic, absences generate relevant incompletenesses, which yield inconsistencies, necessitating completer totalities. However, since this world is open, not even constellationally closed, change is always liable (α) mediately to generate a further incompleteness, some relevant absence, at the cost of another inconsistency; or (β) to do so immediately by the transformative negation of some pre-existent, necessitating, mutatis mutandis, further completion or totality (enabling potentially greater rational autonomy of action). In an open world neither inconsistency nor incompleteness are ineliminable; and the possibility of both are transcendentally necessary conditions for science.
*** Argument provides a good antidote to Hegelian-derived conceptions of dialectics. Thus the contradictions one gets in, say, a grounded exchange combine elements of externality and internality, logicality and dialecticality proper. It will be discussed in its own right in §8.
**** This notion needs to be generalized by grasping four-dimensional space-time (in an expanding universe) and emergent spatio-temporalities as equally dimensions of change, entailing the tri-unity of space, time and causality in a tensed, divergent and emergent processual multi-componential, multi-perspectival pluriverse.
I will deal only briefly with the other three mistakes about contradiction I listed at the beginning of this section. In respect of (d) I have argued that the most rational response to contradiction is to resolve it (in a process that may require the non-valent/Socratic π problematization of the disjuncts), whether in the field of theoretical or practical reasoning. But, turning to (e), it may not always be possible to do this. It is a fantasy to suppose triumphalistically that all contradictions can always be resolved, even if only in principle. Some dialectical contradictions may have no Aufhebung. Equally the existential contradictions imposed by the sheer facts of finitude, or the constraints imposed by the laws of nature, ecological limits or scarcity in the context of a just distribution of resources in relation to experienced need, or the potential development of powers, may be effectively absolute in any space-time context. All human praxis is naturally, socially and psychologically constrained. If, as I have argued, constraint is a species of contradiction, then universal constants, such as the speed of light, impose absolute contradictions (limits on action, potential binds). One might say, in a Nietzschean way, that contradictions are among the conditions of life. Some of these may indeed be by no means absolute, but may require for their resolution conditions (either theoretical or practical or both) as yet not ripe, or even foreseeable. Other personal (intra-psychic) contradictions may just have to be come to terms with, either by ego-syntonic defence mechanisms or by the consciously elucidated experience of them.44
The sixth major error (f) is to suppose that contraditions, once they occur or are tolerated within a system, spread within it viciously and fatally. There is no doubt that contradictions of many types do have a proliferating tendency, but in real life, including that part of it which is logic, they can be isolated and contained by a whole number of 1M–4D type manoeuvres. Perhaps the simplest is to detotalize, sequester or compartmentalize them, or their source; and/or to isolate them, regarding them as tedious, time-consuming or distracting anomalies in an otherwise progressive process which may eventually be able readily to accommodate them. This is the lesson of the history of science, which has never been free from contradictions. The exploitation of Anderson and Belnap's ‘relevance logic’45 by R. and V. Routley, Meyer and others can also be seen as an application of this strategy. This can be partially ontologically vindicated by the consideration that the world does indeed contain compartmentalized sub-systems within systems, wholes with holes, themselves possible wholes (with holes, boundaries, frontiers and other limits). The classic case is that of those emergent totalities called persons. Logical techniques such as contraposition or disjunction are quite properly prohibited from stopping the discovery of a white shoe counting in favour of the proposition that all ravens are black — Hempel's paradox. Similarly one cannot deduce anything — or everything — from the co-inclusion within a discourse of the contraries that it is raining and that it is not raining — for instance, that microchips are ginger, upon the truth or falsity of which the question of whether or not it is raining has no conceivable bearing. (It is no accident that Hegel was an enthusiast for the disjunctive syllogism.) In practice, then, contradictions are sequestered by relevance, bracketing, distancing, type-levelling, erasing, palimpsesting, procrastinating, repressing or any other of a whole number of compartmentalizing, branching, inoculating or evading devices — as well as by simply refusing to employ contradiction-spreading procedures. The coherence of a piece of formal logical reason is, as I have argued, entirely meaning- and so ultimately action-dependent; and, in the context of the dialectic of dialectical and analytical reasoning which I am in the course of motivating, the best way to look at logic is to regard it as an important, but by no means the only, moment in the process of scientific, and more generally, rational thought and practice.
The final fallacy (g) is to take fright at contradiction, including logical contradication. Contradictions are indeed bearers of change, including intellectual change, and it is Hegel's great merit to stress this. To discover a contradiction, for example, along the σ transform is as worthy as to resolve one along the τ transform. Contradictions may be productive as well as destructive, and under the sign of transformation negation they are necessarily simultaneously both. They need not be antagonistic, i.e. involve conflict of interest. In general contradictions demand, and in some cases prepare the ground for, their resolution, though only at the limit will they be of the distinctively Hegelian preservative sublatory type. But in or after their resolution we may come to a more rational, wiser, deeper, more comprehensive, enlightening, sensitive, empowering or fulfilling way of being.
The first step in the direction of a more general dialectic can be taken by considering the nature of Marx's (and more generally ‘materialist’) criticisms of Hegelian dialectic. As we shall see, this permits the multiple diffraction of dialectic as dialectics to accord with the complexities, angularities and nuances of our pluriversal world. In C4.7-8 the nature of Marx's own positive debt to Hegel and some of its more negative consequences will be shown.
The most significant phases in the development of Marx's thinking on Hegelian dialectic can be divided into three. In the first (c. 1843-44), there is a brilliant analysis of its ‘mystified’ logic, most especially in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State, which is resumed in the final manuscript of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Hegel's idealist concept of labour attracts the spotlight. In the immediately subsequent works of the 1840s such as The Holy Family, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy his reception of Hegel tends to be assimilated to, or at least subsumed under, a virulent polemical assault on philosophy per se. However, from the time of the Grundrisse (1857-58) on there is a definite positive re-evaluation of Hegel, well documented in his letters to Engels and others. However, the extent, nature and reasons for this re-evaluation (which I will comment on in C4) remain matters of continuing controversy. But two propositions seem undeniable. Marx remained critical of Hegel's dialectic as such. Yet he believed himself to be employing a dialectic related to Hegel's. Thus he writes à propos of Dühring: ‘He knows very well that my method of development is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel's dialectics is the basic form of all dialectics, but only after [NB] it has been stripped of its mystified form and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method.’46 And in the famous 1873 ‘Afterword’ to the second edition of Capital he declares: ‘the mystifications which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’ (my italics). These two metaphors — of the inversion and the kernel — have engaged quasi-theological speculation. The kernel image seems to indicate that Marx thought it possible to extract, after a materialist inversion, a part, viz. its essence, but not all, of the Hegelian dialectic — against, on the one hand, positivistically minded critics such as Bernstein; and, on the other, the neo-Fichtean Young Hegelians and Engels. Unfortunately Marx never consummated his somewhat whimsical wish — ‘to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printers' sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered and at the same time mystified’.47
In C4 I shall argue that Marx's debt to Hegel turns largely, but not completely, on the notion of the dialectical explanation of contradictory forces in terms of a structured common ground. Be that as it may, there is a remarkable consistency in his criticism of Hegel, with which I shall be concerned here, from 1843 to 1873. (a) Formally, there are three chief targets — Hegel's principle of identity, his logical mysticism and his triple inversions (which I shall connect to the other two and his substantive critique). Each will be related to three principal motifs of Hegel's philosophy — realized idealism, spiritual (constellational) monism and (preservative) dialectical sublation — and Marx's criticism of them will be related to the three main forms of philosophical, viz. epistemological, ontological and practical, materialism to which Marx is, or at least ought to be, committed (and later I will show how they are connected to his substantive [geo-]historical materialism). Further, Hegel's failure to sustain these will be linked to the centrism, triumphalism and endism of which I have already indicted him. (b) Substantively, Marx once more pinpoints three principal failings — Hegel's inability to sustain the autonomy of nature, his cognitivism and his failure to uphold the (geo-)historicity of social forms. Here again I will relate these three critical substantive shafts to the dominant thematics of absolute idealism, the characteristic orientations of Marx's philosophical materialism and to the three aspects of Marx's formal critique. I shall argue that Marx's critique of Hegel can be organized in dialectical critical realist terms as entailing critiques of (α) the epistemic fallacy, i.e. the analysis, definition or reduction of statements about being in terms of or to statements about knowledge; (β) the speculative illusion, viz. the sublimation of social life, and, in particular, irreducibly empirically controlled scientific theory, into philosophy; and (γ) ontological monovalence, viz. a purely positive account of being. As (β) involves the ‘primal squeeze’ of the mediating term of natural necessity, I will thus be essentially organizing Marx's critique around what I have dubbed the ‘unholy trinity’ of irrealism. In all this I am going far beyond the letter of Marx's texts — at least in terms of conceptualization and systematicity — the better to demonstrate their rationale. This is no more than I attempted to do for Hegel in C1.8. But it should be said before I commence my exposition that, in endorsing (for the most part) Marx's critique of Hegel, I do not think the dialectic stopped with Marx, any more than I think it will end with dialectical critical realism. There is (ontological) stratification and process in philosophy too.
1. Marx's critique of Hegel's philosophy of identity, namely the identity of being and thought in thought (which I am subsuming under the epistemic fallacy), which is at one with Hegel's claim to have realized the goal of philosophy, idealism,* and generates his expressivist-centrism, is twofold. In his exoteric critique, he follows the line of Feuerbach's ‘transformative method’ showing how the empirical world appears as a consequence of Hegel's hypostatization of thought. However, in his esoteric critique, Marx contends that the empirical world (the world-as-experienced) is really its secret condition. Thus Marx notes how Hegel presents his own thinking (or the process of thought generally as mediated by Hegel, the embodied philosopher) transformed into an independent subject (the absolute idea) as the demiurge of being. He then claims that the content of the speculative philosopher's thought really consists in uncritically received empirical data, essentially the conceptualized (epistemic and social) actually existing order of things, which is in this way reified (and spiritualistically) eternalized. Figure 2.8 represents the gravamen of Marx's charge.
* ‘Every philosophy is essentially an idealism, or at least has idealism for its principle; and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.’48
This illustrates what will become a familiar dialectical figure, namely the tacit complicity of (apparent) dialectical antagonists, which, upon metacritical analysis, can be seen as really mutually presupposing dialectical counterparts or complements necessary for each other, grounded in a common erroneous (here irrealist) problematic. The counterparts in this case are objective (including absolute) idealism and subjective empiricism. Thus we have seen how, epistemologically, the subjective sense-certainty claimed by classical or positivistic empiricism must be presupposed by idealism in the shape of unreflected data. But, ontologically, the hypostatized ideas of objective idealism assume (as ontic entities) the guise of the reified facts of empiricism. Let us investigate the converse operation. Here the overt claim is that finite mind tacitly receives raw (unconceptualized) sense-data. The esoteric critique consists in showing how the reified facts of empiricist ontology covertly presuppose a tacitly transfigured reality, the Feuerbachian projection or alienated product of the positivist scientist's (or layperson's) own mind, facts and their (presumed constant) conjunctions which are, in this way, here again reified and (this time naturalistically) eternalized, as is illustrated by Figure 2.9.49
Concepts such as the notion (conceptually understood reality) and the empirical world (which I have used for hermeneutic accuracy in expounding Marx's critique*) embody the epistemic fallacy which co-acts in duplicitous equilibration with its dual, the ontic fallacy, the explication of, or presupposition of the determination of, knowledge by being. The key moves in both cases consist in inverses of each other: the positivistic and speculative illusions, both typically involving the operation I have dubbed ‘primal squeeze’, the elimination of the middle term of scientific theory or, more importantly, its intransitive object and ontological counterpart, natural necessity. The reduction of philosophy and theory, inter alia, i.e. the positivistic illusion, to a presumed, naturalistically given sense-experience and the reduction of science and social life, inter alia, in the speculative illusion, to a presumed, parthogenetically self-generating philosophy both substitute for empirically controlled critical scientific theory. This presupposes a real world capable of being differentially, changeably and better described, classified and explained. Instead: an ideologically saturated mediation of social (including epistemic) reality, viz. Das Bestehende and its existing power2 (master–slave), discursive and legitimating relations (which is the real condition of possibility of positivistic experience and speculative philosophy alike). This social reality itself embodies the interlinked epistemic and ontic fallacies that the transcendental deductions of the intransitive/transitive, philosophy/science and ontological/ontic distinctions (and the necessity of both terms) expose. We are always ‘thrown’ (as if into an already moving vehicle, so I shall sometimes refer to this as our ‘vehicular thrownness’) into an already preconceptualized being, whether in life generally or in science in particular. Figure 2.10 depicts the duality of the positivistic and speculative illusions.
* Only a tiny fraction of being is ‘empirical’, and our knowledge of that fraction is dependent on non-empirical, but transfactually efficacious, laws.
As Hegelian ‘uncritical idealism’ presupposes a converse ‘uncritical empiricism’, the reverse may equally be seen to be the case for Humean empiricism. At this juncture it is worth noting that there are at least four aspects in virtue of which Hegel may be said to be the supreme ‘logical positivist’, avant la lettre. (1) The dialectic is a logical process of reason, in which being is pan-logicized and the process encapsulated in the system expounded in the Encyclopaedia flows (or is supposed to) from the Logics, as the alienation and self-recognition of the absolute idea in absolute spirit. (2) As I have already argued, negativity is lost in a pacific sea of positivity. Supposedly replete/ complete (void-less), the polysemic concept of absence is annulled and contradiction cancelled in Hegel's ‘analytic reinstatement’. (3) The senses in which (a) on a transformative interpretation he explicitly presupposes the findings of the sciences of his day (or those findings which he favours), (b) on any epistemological interpretation, his dialectic tacitly presupposes positivistic empiricism (represented in Figure 2.8) and (c) empiricism must be accepted for the denizens of the demi-actual and the future, that is, for the non-Fichtean endless ending to which he is committed. (4) Insofar as Hegel is committed to the eternalization of the status quo, most explicitly manifest in his constellational closure of the future, he may be said to have reconciled himself to positivity, i.e. authority, in the specifically (early) Hegelian sense.
In what sense is Marx's critique materialist? It depends upon epistemological materialism, asserting the existential intransitivity and transfactual efficacy of the objects of scientific thought. This is in effect my transcendental realist interpretation of Marx (which I shall commend in C4). Hegel's position in contrast posits subject-object identity and, its generalized form, actualism, scouting alterity and difference, structure and transfactuality, absence and change, reflexivity and open totality, transformative agency and metacritique. (It is the realization of idealism in Hegel Mark II that accomplishes these effects.) In its subjective guise and empirical realist presupposition it is anthro-ethno-ego-present-centric, atomist, punctualist, extensionalist and individualist. In its objective presentation it is Geist-eidetically-centrist (which by Feuerbachian critique means, in effect, anthropomorphic), expressivist-holist, blockist, intensionalist and collectivist. I shall argue in C4 that these seeming antagonists, mediated by actualism, presuppose a common scientifically, transcendentally and dialectically refutable problematic. Marx's epistemological materialism meshes with the first aspect of Marx's substantive critique, launched in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse and countless other places, namely his incapacity to sustain the objectivity of nature and being generally, conceived as radically other to thought, as independently real and as neither teleologically dependent upon, causally necessitated by, nor conceptually reducible to alienations of spirit, thought or any kind of mind. These all amount to a critique of Hegel's irrealisms and his claim to have realized the primordial Parmenidean telos of philosophy.
Marx's analysis also has three other important implications. First, conservatism or apologetic is intrinsic to the Hegelian method, not (or at least not only) a result of some personal weakness or compromise. Second, that Hegel's logical theory is inconsistent with his gnoseological practice, in that his dialectical pirouettes and cartwheels turn out to be motivated by non-dialectical, more or less crudely empirical considerations. This theory/practice inconsistency enables us to secure a dialectical comment on/against him, showing that lack of ‘seriousness’ with which he never tired of taxing Kant. Third, critique of the principle of identity opens up the diffraction this section is about. Thus we can consider ontological and epistemological dialectics and their relations apart from one another, so potentially turning up very different dialectical structures. More generally the critique of a monistic dialectic which is centrist, expressivist, actualized and closed broadens the diffraction into a multiplicity of topological modes, including systematically intermingled and embedded ones. This I will come to in a moment.
2. Marx's critique of Hegel's ‘logical mysticism’ and the parthogenetic play of concepts and the ideological conjuring tricks it legitimates pivots on the notion of the autonomy, or final self-sufficiency of philosophy (and ideas generally). In his essential thrust Marx, as I am interpreting him, wants to affirm the heteronomy of philosophy, furnish (as we have already seen) an immanent critique of the speculative illusion, envisage philosophy as only a moment in a practical ensemble or totality and conceive any dialectic in philosophy to be jagged and non-linear and in science to be of a subject-specific kind. But now I am probably being too kind to Marx. For in his critique of Hegel's constellational spiritual monism, and the speculative illusion it depends on, it is not clear (leaving aside his youthful talk about ‘the realization of philosophy’) whether (α) Marx is wanting the complete abandonment of philosophy or its supersession by science (in effect the inverse mistake of the ‘positivistic illusion’), as is suggested by the polemics of the German Ideology period; or (β) he is advocating a transformed transformatively oriented practice in philosophy as dependent upon, and interwoven with, science and other social practices, but retaining relatively autonomous prerogatives of its own to exercise, as is more in tune with his post-1857 dicta and his support for Engels's own philosophical interventions. At a substantive level his critique of the speculative illusion turns on Hegel's cognitivism/theoreticism — for whom ‘the only labour … is abstract mental labour’,50 and is in turn based on the second form of philosophical materialism to which Marx is, except for a few early passages, committed, namely ontological materialism, asserting the unilateral independence of social upon biological (and more generally physical) being, and the emergence of the latter from the former. Constellationality, as used by Hegel, is tied to theoretical triumphalism (and thence to endism).* This mediates Marx's first and third lines of critique. Although it is clear that Marx is firmly committed to empirical inquiry and that both his critical and systematic/expository/presentational epistemological dialectics are, unlike both Hegel's and Engels's (which he nevertheless supported), in principle subject-specific (viz. to political economy), it is not so evident that he can be acquitted of the (different, but not unrelated) charges of (a) class/power2 one-dimensionality; (b) presentational linearity; (c) proleptic endism, mediated through the residues of (d) a technologically derived functionalism; (e) Prometheanistically displaced triumphalism; (f) a tendentially negentropic convergently centristic unfolding evolutionism; and (g), although he never disguised complexity, differentiation and multi-angularity in his theoretical works, a programmatic practical-expressivism.**
* Conceptually centrism entails triumphalism entails endism — though the converse is not the case.
** That said, corresponding to each charge, one can find contrary evidence in his oeuvre.
3. Hegel is guilty, according to Marx, of a triple inversion of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’. In each respect Marx describes Hegel's position as an inversion (of the real situation) and his own position as an inversion of Hegel's — the inversion of the inversion. Thus Marx comes to counterpose to Hegel's absolute idealist ontology, speculative rationalist epistemology and substantive idealist sociology, a conception of universals as properties of particular things (a reversal of the axis of domination in the concrete universal, one might say), knowledge as irreducibly empirical, and civil society (later, modes of production) as the foundation of the state. But here again it is unclear whether Marx is merely affirming the contrary of Hegel's position or rather transforming its problematic. In fact, he is normally doing the latter. Marx conceives infinite mind as illusory projections of alienated finite beings, in Feuerbachian fashion, and nature as transcendentally real, or so I would argue.51 Moreover, he replaces Hegel's immanent spiritual teleology of infinite, petrified and finite mind, which is the real dynamic of his principle of preservative dialectical sublation (as manifest in his actual transitions), with a methodological commitment to the empirically controlled investigation of the causal relations within and between (geo-)historically emergent, developing humanity and intransitively real, but modifiable nature. But Marx, following Hegel here, does not clearly differentiate ontology, epistemology and sociology, and so, a fortiori, the different inversions at stake, as I have done. Their distinctiveness is, however, entailed by Marx's first and second lines of attack, which I have interpreted as hinging on the critiques of the epistemic fallacy (the reduction of being to knowledge) and of the speculative illusion (that of science to philosophy).
It is his criticism of the third inversion that I want to associate with (i) the most distinctively Marxian species of philosophical materialism, (ii) the main animus of his substantive criticisms, (iii) my critique of ontological monovalence and finally (iv) with his lancing of Hegel's teleological gnoseo-onto-logical Odyssey.
(i) The most characteristically Marxian form of philosophical materialism is practical materialism, asserting the constitutive role of human transformative agency, based on a double freedom — from instinctual determination and to produce in a planned, premeditated way — in the reproduction and transformation of socio-spatio-temporal being. It is, or is close to, the conception I have elaborated as the transformational model of social activity and will further develop in §9, where we shall observe the crucial role which the dialectical figure of the hiatus plays in the dislocated duality and dialectics of structure and agency. Historical materialism presupposes epistemological, is rooted in ontological, but consists in a substantive elaboration of practical materialism (perhaps most succinctly, certainly most forcibly, expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach).
(ii) It was Lukács who first pointed out (in The Young Hegel) that the hub of Marx's critique of Hegel's Phenomenology was the absence of the distinction between objectification and alienation. For in identifying the terms, Hegel had rationally transfigured the present geo-historically specific alienated forms of human objectification in the reflection of the alienation of an absolute subject, thus pre-empting the possibility of more truly human, non-alienated modes of human objectification. The rational transfiguration of the present accompanied by the constellational closure of geo-history once again links cognitive and socio-geo-historical triumphalism and endism back to expressivist-centrism and actualism. Moving on to Marx's own critique of Hegel's concept of labour, he insists that this always both (1) presupposes ‘a material substratum … furnished without the help of man’52 and (2) involves real transformation, entailing at once (a) irredeemable loss and finitude, yet also (b) the possibility of genuine novelty and change — that is, of non-preservative transformative negation, including sublation. (1) ties in with Marx's arrows aimed at Hegel's idealism and spiritual monism; (2) with those directed at his presupposition of (additive) preservative sublation and immanent teleology; and both with his attack on Hegel's constellational closure. In any event it is patent that any Marxian dialectic, if it is to accord with Marx's own critique of Hegel's, must be objectively circumscribed, absolutely finitist and prospectively open, i.e. unfinished.
(iii) Hegel's elimination of the possibilities of non-preservative transformative negation and post-Mark II sublation, his absenting of the notion of absence, checks genuine change, betrays the positivity of absolute idealism and renders Hegel vulnerable to the charge of my critique of ontological monovalence. The very most a Hegelian could say is that he is only constellationally monovalent. But as Hegel is not concerned with the demi-actual, the demi-present (or i.e. the future), etc., this is a very weak response indeed.
(iv) As already intimated, it is by no means obvious that there is not a strain of teleology in Marx's work, but in his major theoretical and applied conjunctual analyses Marx's emphasis is on causal, not conceptual, necessity, and teleology is limited to its proper place in the intrinsic aspect of human agency, which presupposes intentional causality, and its appearance elsewhere is, as he writes, as an avowed admirer of Darwin, ‘rationally explained’.53 We can summarize this part of the discussion by saying that, whatever he took over from Hegel, in its most philosophically significant respects Marx's ontology is, or at least has become by the time of Capital (which has, or so I shall argue in C4, scientific realism as its explicably unreflected, non- articulated, methodological fulcrum), as much at variance with Hegel's as it is with that of the atomistic empiricism which, in his youthful critique, he shows absolute idealism tacitly presupposes. This would in any event have to be the case for anyone attempting to inaugurate a concrete science of human geo-history, where the 1M–4D conceptions of ontological depth, structural change, intra-active (organic and) open totality and transformative agency are indispensable. The first two may be said to find analogues in Hegel's notions of necessity and becoming, but they are no sooner in place than they are instantly dissolved* into actuality (and thus closure) and infinity (and thus into logico-divine eidetic eternity), and thence into the self-explanatory and completed field of the notion. This unites for a final time here the three aspects of Marx's critique, which I am proleptically interpreting here in my terms as evolving critiques of the epistemic fallacy (irrealism), ontological mono valence (positivity) and the speculative illusion (philosophical triumphalism, presupposing achieved identity and entailing endist closure).
* The flip side of conservative sublation is that one cannot isolate a concept from its future in Hegel.
Marx's epistemological materialism presupposes a differentiated world. Thus one consequence of it is that it may be wrong to talk as if ‘dialectic’ specified a unitary phenomenon. Rather it may designate a number of different topics and configurations. Moreover, breaking into the monistic circuit theoretically enforced by the Hegelian scheme permits us to call upon in the remainder of the chapter (and book) a galaxy of topologies, choreographies and genealogies — for instance, from those resuming the original sense of dialectic as dialogue (whose leading contemporary exponent is Habermas) to those deconstructing it as palimpsesting writing (above all Derrida) or those pursuing the materialist line of negation as essentially involved in the ambit of discursively moralized power2 relations.
Let us illustrate the possibilities opened up by the diffraction of the extension of dialectic. It may refer to patterns or processes or relations in philosophy, science or the world; being, thought or their relation (ontological, epistemological and relational dialectics); nature or society, theory or practice. It may be structural, synchronic, location- ally periodized or geo-historically dynamic, diachronic, processually spatio-temporalized, tensed or tenseless, generic or subject-specific, abstract or concrete, universal, mediated or singularized. It may utilize any network or rhythmic of 1M–4D figures, theses and themes. And within any such categorization further divisions may be of significance. Thus any epistemological dialectic may be meta-conceptual, methodological (critical, exploratory, activating; systematic, expository, presentational), heuristic or imaginary, descriptive and/or explanatory. A dialectic can be totally, partially or non-conceptual; and a conceptual or conceptualized dialectic may be philosophical (and if philosophical, metacritical or aporetic, autonomous or heteronomous, transcendent or immanent, phenomenological or not), hermeneutic or action-oriented. A social dialectic may focus on the condensation of rhythmics, of structurally sedimented institutions, the network of social relations between positioned practices, the mutability (or stasis) of inter-subjective inter-/intra-actions, the nature of their material transactions with nature or the kinetics of the intra-subjective sphere, the communicative, moral or power2 relationality of the social fabric. It may be totalizing or compartmentalizing; tendentiallyb directional and/or chaotic, dialectically or analytically universalizable, uniformal, differentiated or pluralistic, centrifying or localizing, grounded or not; anthropic or naturalistic; reificatory, voluntaristic or agentive; as we have seen, both empiricist and idealist; consequentialist or de-ontological; a priori or empirically controlled; established by dialectical, transcendental or scientific retroductive-explanatory arguments. To take the case of Marxism again. Marx's emphasis in his use of the term ‘dialectic’ (where, especially later, it often acts as a synonym for ‘scientific’) is primarily epistemological (though he is committed to a subject-specific ontological, relational, geo-historical reflexive and evaluatively and practically oriented dialectics too). Engels's is clearly ontological, while Lukács's is relational, setting the tone for the traditions of Marxian social science, dialectical materialism and western Marxism respectively. But a relational dialectic may be conceived primarily as an ontological process, as in Lukács, or as an epistemological critique, as with Marcuse. To take the vexed issue of the Marx-Hegel relation, it is worth noting that such different dialectical modes may be related by (a) a common ancestry and (b) their systematic interconnections within Marxism without being related by (1) their possession of a common essence, kernel or core, still less (2) one that can be read back unchanged into Hegel. Marx may still have been positively indebted to Hegel, even if in his work or the programmes he inaugurated it is, or were to have been, totally transformed (so that neither kernel nor inversion metaphor would apply) and/or developed in a variety of different ways.
Epistemological dialectics involve conceptual distanciation and transformation between at once the constitutive geo-history and intra-active relationality and the trace structure of signs and scientists alike, in the dialectic of inconsistency and incompleteness within the dialectic of dialectical and analytical reasoning in science, particularly in the search for greater depth and/or totality, that we will come, when referential detachment at a level or degree (of totality) is justified, to see as the reason, explanation, ground or truth of being at the next level or degree down. The class of ontological dialectics may vary from: (a) the dialectics of superstructuration or intrastructuration, emergence or disemergence, providing for the dialectician a non-arbitrary principle of stratification, so avoiding the homology or vicious regress or resort to (religious or social) fideism endemic to standard resolutions of the aporiai of philosophy; through (b) the dialectics of absence that will provide my key to the retotalization of a multiply diffracted dialectics; (c) the rhythmic mediation of tensed causally (transfactually) efficacious spatializing process which is the determination of transformative (or perhaps just distanciated) negation, expressed in the social world in the poiesis of praxis, the making of doing, including the recursive remaking or undoing of the structured transcendental conditions of any intentional doing at all; to (d) the existential contradiction expressed in the spatio-temporal finitude of human being in a multiple, de-anthropocentric metacritically Copernican-Darwinian-Marxian-Freudian-quasi-Nietzschean world dominated by the logic of commodification in the global village of late/postmodernity and consumer capitalism: a totalizing movement of extreme (inequitous) diversity in a structured ground. Relational dialectics typically express the Janus-faced nature of the causal efficacy and material conditioning of ideas. Ethical dialectics will take us, via ethical naturalism and moral realism, from the primal scream induced by the absent parent(s) through (to use slightly archaic language) the education imposed on desire by the reality principle or axiological necessity, in a dialectic of truth and freedom, mediated by wisdom to universal human emancipation in a society in which the free flourishing of each is the condition of the free flourishing of all. Absolute reason or dialectical rationality, alethia, theory/practice consistency and dialectical universalizability impose a tendential directionality to this rhythmic absenting of constraints on wellbeing and possibilities. But it is contingent upon a transformed transformative totalizing transformist praxis (which will revolve in large part around hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles in the context of discursively moralized power2 relations), itself dependent upon the rationality of agents and the contingency of accidents in a contradiction-riven but open systemic world whether freedom or rational autonomy of action will be. What is certain is that, so long as humanity survives, there will always be a conatus for freedom to become.
Having given some examples of the broadening of the extension of the concept enabled, even empowered, by the materialist diffraction of dialectic, let us take a look at that opened by a corresponding diffraction of its intension or connotation. A nominal definition of ‘dialectic’, for preliminary orientational purposes, was given in C1.2. This could be widened even further to subsume any kind of interplay between differentiated but related elements. In §3, in expounding the concept of dialectical connection, I showed that dialectic per se does not necessarily involve any kind of opposition or contradiction. It might be added here, in view of Hegel's obsession with ‘the problem of opposites’, that neither does opposition, qua alterity or sheer determinate other-being, entrain any sort of contradiction. Even more to the point, we observed that dialectical contradictions, whether described (as, sympathetically interpreted, by Marx) in the transitive dimension or suffered (as, described by Marx, by capitalism) in the intransitive dimension, do not, per se, violate the logical norm of non-contradiction. Dialectical and logical contradictions are intersecting (viz. when grounded in a common mistake) but non-equivalent sets. It is only epistemological dialectics, which may indeed be presupposed by other kinds of dialectics, that typically do so. And breaking with the epistemic fallacy means we need no longer go along with Hegel's epistemo-logicization of all dialectic. A map, chiasmus or question mark does not threaten logic any more than cooking an omelette or building a snowperson, although all may be related to or depend on reasoning processes of various types. Even here there are relevant distinctions: between (a) what logic prohibits or demands, (b) what it permits (both of which require the suspension of analytical reason in science) and (c) what it does not speak of. All this is to imagine, in an era of the flourishing of modal, relevance, tense (cf. ontological stratification, differentiation and contradiction, and change), many-valued and other non-standard or deviant logics, that it makes sense to talk of logic in the singular.54 I suppose one might take formulations of the principle of identity and non-contradiction as essential. But I shall be arguing for the conceptual and causal dependence of identity upon non-identity and non-contradiction on transformative negation or change. One might further want to distinguish between what a non-logical, dialectical heuristic of some specific kind (d) enables, (e) suggests, (f) encourages (supposing enablement implies empowerment in this case). I refer the reader back to Figures 2.5 and 2.6 on p. 68 above.
None of this means, as the reader will be able to discover in §10, that I am going to be ‘soft’ on analytical reason. Rather I will be arguing for its dialectical-dependency; and championing the idea of the constellational unity of analytical and dialectical reason within dialectical reason for the sake of absolute reason. And in my metacritical dialectics of irrealism I will be arguing that, despite his philosophical innovations (the most ‘dialectically crucial’ of which he was unable to sustain), Hegel acted as the chief mediating replicator of what I am going to call the (typically empirical realist) ‘analytic problematic’ up to its contemporary Humean, neo-Kantian and post-Nietzschean forms. Indeed I shall show the constellational unity and tacit complicity of analytical and dialectical irrealism under the dominance of the analytical wing. There is a common misapprehension that dialectics is all about contradictions and that all contradictions are logical. I hope by now I have spiked this. Slightly deeper is the misapprehension that dialectics is the study just of change and/or changes and interactions. It is indeed critical of the reifying and disconnecting ontology of analytics, and insists on transformative praxis and intra-active totality. But it is also concerned, as we have seen in some detail, in the case of the dialectics of co-presence (i.e. the co-presence of presence and absence in §3) and of the existential constitution of products by the processes of their formation and internal relationality (in §2), with alterity in the non-identity theory I am going to develop, depth and transfactuality, argument, hermeneutics and metacritique, sheer absence and meta-totalizing reflexivity, connection and tense, as well as with transition, limit and the other nodal situations examined in §4. No dialectic can ever leave form unmediated by content, however heteronomous its aspirations; or leave untouched concepts such as substance, form, being or activity, or fail to re-examine the connections between space-time and causality or structure, mechanism, process, mediation and result. In short, dialectic will reconceptualize reality and, in reconceptualizing it, help to change it too.
It may be apposite to close this section, as I have credited Marx with a proleptic critique of the epistemic fallacy, so enabling the diffraction of the concept at least tendentially uniformalized by Hegel, by tracing other genealogical lines, threading basic strands of meaning of ‘dialectic’, each of which Marx or Marxism was radically to transform and each of which, as I shall show in Dialectical Social Theory, remains of contemporary relevance for critical social science.
1. From Heraclitus, dialectical contradictions. These comprise internally related, mutually exclusive forces of non-independent origins. They are not Newtonian, Kantian or Walrasian equilibria; and they are identified by Marx as generative, essentially constitutive and tendentially transformative of capitalism.
2. From Socrates, dialectical arguments. Systematized but also subsequently modified by Aristotle, they remain differentiated from Sophistic ‘eristic’ by their orientation to the pursuit of groundable ideals. In Marxism the elenchus, on the one hand, (α) is transformed under the sign of the class struggle; and, on the other, (β) sometimes continues to function as, under ‘ideal conditions’ (e.g. in Gramsci, a communist society; in Habermas, an unconstrained consensus), a norm of truth. It is worth elaborating somewhat on (α). Arguments depend at once (a) on the mutual recognition of participants, which may involve a struggle, as Hegel famously recognized,* and (b) on some genuine attempt at understanding, as in the dialogical fusion of ‘horizons’ (Gadamer). Hence my concept of hermeneutic hegemonic/ counter-hegemonic struggles around structures of domination, exploitation and control, and more generally discursively moralized power2 relations of a potentially indefinite number of types (which does not warrant overlooking the more obvious ones — of sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, occupation, age, ability, etc., or failing to seek the causal inter-/intra-relations of each and their grounds).
* I cannot refrain here from pointing out that the struggle embodied in the argument may be about more than mutual recognition, just as it may be about more (or other) than absenting class relations.
3. From Plato, dialectical reason. This encompasses a spread of connotations, ranging from (a) that conceptually daring, creative, open-textured (Waismann) and flexible thinking processually essential to the epistemological dialectic in science, typically depending on the past or outside, often taking forms such as metaphor, metonymy, paleonymy or consisting in multiply displaced and recondensed paramorphs, constituting operations on as well as with meanings;55 (b) enlightenment and demystification as in the Baconian, Kantian and Nietzschean critiques of illusion, but also with a purchase that includes such radical liberals as J.S. Mill (in On Liberty), Dewey and Bobbio56 to (c) the depth rationality of what in C3 I will show can be alethically grounded and materialistically mediated practices of collective self-emancipation.
4. From Aristotle, dialectical propaedeutics. I discuss this in some detail in §8. In its broadest aspect it derives from Socratic dialectical argument and overlaps with Platonic reason. In the way I shall interpret it, it sets the boundary conditions for that continual circulation in and out of the sphere of formal reasoning, in which meanings and (e.g. truth) values remain fixed and determinate (or stable in their indeterminacy), characteristic of all (meaningful) discourse in science and ordinary life alike. Conceived in this way, Aristotelian dialectic should constellationally overreach an Aristotelian analytic (though it is worth stressing this is not the position he held).
5. From Plotinus and Schiller, a specific type of dialectical process. This normally postulates an original undifferentiated unity, geo-historical diremption or diaspora and an eventual return to a non-alienated but differentiated self or unity-in-diversity; and it constitutes a deep rooted theme in Judaic/Christian/neo-Platonic thought. In Marxism it remains (α) as the counterfactual limits or poles implied by the systematic dialectics of the commodity form, (β) a postulate in the form of the generative separation between the immediate producers and the conditions of their production, while (γ) acting as a spur in the struggle for a society involving the abolition of all systemic forms of exploitation, subjugation and repression.
6. From Hegel, dialectical intelligibility. In Hegel this depends upon the teleologically generated presentation, comment on (i.e. immanent critique of) and preservative supercession of conceptual and socio-cultural forms. In Marx it is transformed to comprise the explanatory critique of the causally generated production of social phenomena — from crises to categories — in terms of their underlying causal grounds.
7. From Marx, dialectical praxis. This is the unity of theory and praxis (‘absolute reason’) in practice (not, as Hegel, in theory) in the non-preservative transformative negation of oppressive social forms, most notably, in Marx's case, the capitalist mode of production.
8. From Kant, Hegel, Marx and dialectical critical realism, dialectical freedom. Dependent upon the achievement of absolute reason in dialectical praxis and the transformation of dialectical intelligibility (6) and reason (3), this encompasses the absenting of constraints, including ills generally, which comprise lack of freedoms. This includes the Hegelian dialectic of reciprocal recognition and the Marxian dialectic of real de-alienation, but generalizes, extends and radicalizes these dialectics (cf. C4.5) to aspire to the achievement of a naturalistically grounded social humanity in a trans-specific pluralistic global order subject to the material conditioning imposed by natural constraints, oriented to the self-realization of the concrete singularity of all — a true democratic socialist humanism. What it presupposes and what it implies will be documented in C3.
Dialectic has the closest possible etymological, historical and thematic links with argument. In this section I want to bracket off (α) the Socratic-Aristotelian tradition of dialectic as argument just mentioned, which I will discuss in §8, from (β) the respect in which commentators on the Kant-Hegel-Marx critical tradition might want to talk of characteristically dialectical, as distinct from other types of, arguments.* However, straight away, following the diffraction, we must distinguish (a) wide from (b) more rigorous senses of ‘dialectical argument’. The former (a) embraces anything from the expansive sense of interplay mentioned above, through any systematic interconnection that unites a body of thought, such as absolute idealism, Marxism or dialectical critical realism of a 1M–4D kind, which has any claim to be called ‘dialectical’, to my §3 definition of 3L dialectical connection as between distinct but inseparable elements. The latter (b) includes only arguments which turn in an essential way upon 2E notions or real negativity or contradiction, that is, which involve absence or mutual exclusivity (in addition to internal relationality). What distinguishes them ([β] [b]) is that, if sound, they establish false necessities, or at the very least significantly conditioned, limited or partial necessities. That is to say, dialectical arguments proper legitimate conclusions which are paradigmatically at once both false and necessary (or at least limited), contradictory, incoherent or incomplete in some relevant way, yet inexorable or indispensable. To put this in a quasi-Kantian manner, they establish the conditions of impossibility — in Hegel drk', in Marx the dialectically contradictory causal ground (dg') — of the conditions of possibility — in Hegel drj', in Marx, say, of capitalist accumulation — of some more or less transcendentally or otherwise significant result or phenomena (dri') which has already been established or can in any event be taken for granted. Moreover, they establish ontological conclusions; and they license negative evaluative or practical implications. They may be regarded as a species of the genus of transcendental arguments, provided the latter are interpreted sufficiently broadly (as in effect categorially significant forms of retroactive-explanatory argument) and so as to allow what I will refer to as ‘dialectical detachment’. Dialectical necessities are species of transcendental necessities and genera of natural necessities, each of which include, but only when epistemically mediated are co-extensive with, axiological necessities. But as false, or if merely limited outside their conditions of validity, they will generate a range of compromise formations, ad hoceries, equivocations, duplicities, pliabilities, etc. of metacritical-explanatory import.
* There may, of course, be dialectical arguments about argument as well as arguments about dialectical arguments.
It is time to expound and elucidate. An immediate difference between Marx and Hegel, readily explicable on my earlier analysis of §3, must be mentioned. In a Marxian dialectical explanation an explanandum can be shown simultaneously to be both necessary and false (e.g. the wage form) or limited (e.g. the value form), but in Hegelian dialectic when a conceptual or social form is shown to be necessary it requires an additional demonstrative step for it to be seen as incoherent, i.e. the characteristic combination of necessity and falsity requires distanciated time. In Hegelian dialectic the speculative result (dr') corresponds exactly to retroductive-explanatory arguments in science under which, I have argued elsewhere, once freed from their idealism, Kantian transcendental arguments can correctly be aligned.57 Does the Hegelian nodal moment proper (dc') correspond to the Kantian dialectical limit (dl')? No. For two main reasons. The Kantian dialectical limit is not surpassable, whereas, of course, the Hegelian dialectical comment precisely is. Then, for all Kant's architectonic encumbrances, the Kantian dialectical limit is characteristically separately established case-by-case, with an irreducible element of heteronomy. On the other hand, any Hegelian dialectical comment is part of a continuous parthogenetic process, systematically, globally, regionally and locally circular, in which each phase is shown to be untrue of or to itself (heterological), its notion or, as Taylor has glossed it, its criterial properties, in a self-propelling sequence of immanent critiques until the totality is completed. Next, the disanalogies with Kantian analytic should be registered. The categories do not apply to things-in-themselves, but only to our mode of apprehending them, whereas, in this respect, Hegel is, like Marx, very much a realist.58 Secondly, and consistently, Kantian transcendental arguments are designed to establish the conditions of possibility of experience. This may be broadened to social activity as conceptualized in experience, and to social practices or forms of a determinate kind, but must, to stay Kantian in spirit, retain some essential relation to human subjectivity. In this respect, Hegel remains true to his illustrious forebear. But for dialectical critical realism there are dialectical necessities (connections and contradictions), if there are such (and I am arguing that there are), just as there are natural necessities, quite intransitive and independently of our knowing them or any necessary relation to human subjectivity. This ‘detachment’ from our (subjective) premisses is what I will call ‘transcendental’ detachment.
Another sense in which dialectical critical realism licenses what I am going to call specifically ‘dialectical’ detachment is that once a phase is overcome in the history of philosophy or social life, such as the epistemic fallacy or the fear of death, we can discard it as an outmoded way of belief or being. We have seen how the magnificence of Hegelian dialectic stems from its being in effect a sequence of Achilles' Heel critiques, attacking a position at precisely its strongest point, showing it in effect to be its weakest. But we have no need to accept Lessing's principle enshrined in the figure of preservative sublation. The history of science, philosophy or humankind could be usefully written as a history of débâcles. As I am using the concept of ‘detachment’ in four different contexts in this book, it might be helpful if I comment on them. If ‘referential detachment’ (see §1) is ultimately for the sake of axiological need, ‘transcendental detachment’ is precisely from the same. If transcendental detachment is from our premisses, ‘dialectical detachment’ is from sublated conclusions. The ‘logical detachment’ (to be discussed in §8) critical realism permits, in contrast to Aristotelian dialectic, is for fully (alethically) adequately grounded conclusions of scientific arguments, enabling reference to the structural and transfactual reasons for, or truth of, phenomena.
It would not be true to say that Aristotelian dialectic has no connection with the critical realist concept I am developing. For typical of Aristotelian dialectic is, as we shall see, the dialectical remark or distinction (dd') — the comment on the (or a) preceding remark that it has a degree of truth, but also a degree of falsity, that is, that it is true in one respect but not in another. Is there a connection between dialectical arguments and narratives? Yes, for a (progressive) narrative will often take the form of a reflexively monitored episode or life, consisting of a sequence of phases in which each successive moment constitutes a quasi-propositional comment on the alterology or untrue-to-self-or-situation character of the preceding one. A dialectical life would be a kind of sequence of immanent critiques, comprising self-reflective overcoming or non-preservative sublation of a concretely singular self (containing an existentially constitutive geo-history and intra-active relationality), dispositionally identical with its changing (developing and waxing and waning) causal powers and tendencies, naturally interconnected with a changing fabric of contingencies, accidents, mediations, rhythmics and contradictions. Generally the beings of social continuants reveal dialectically contradictory, radically self-negating aspects, overladen with super-or intra-structural layers, deposits and residues and the effects of complex, plural, combined and uneven development, radical disjuncts ‘striving’ to overcome themselves. In C1.3 I referred to the fourfold polysemy of real negation. It is worth going over this again. (1) Simple absence, including nothing. (2) Absenting, including the possibilities of simple divergent distanciation and non-substantial process. (3) Absence as process-in-product, exemplified by existentially constitutive geo-history or intra-active relationality. (4) Absence as product-in-process, exemplified by ongoing social activity, whether reproductive or transformative, spatio-temporal spreading-stretching — for instance, in transfactually causally efficacious (1M) tensed rhythmic process (2E) of a reflexively self-monitoring (3L) competent agent in transformative praxis (including the possibility of sheer inaction) (4D). But in addition to sharing this tetrapolity, radical or self-negation has a fourfold polysemy of its own. It can connote (a) auto-subversion (encompassing anything from a counter-conative tendency to self-destruction, e.g. suicide); (b) self-transformation (in some or other respect, which may be more or less total, essential, valuable and/or consequential); (c) self-realization in the sense of the fulfilment of one's needs and potentials, including one's needs and potentials for potential fulfilment; and (d) self-overcoming, either in the Nietzschean sense, or as self-transcendence, or as what we might call auto-emergence. Figure 2.11 maps the four kinds of real negation with which I have been concerned. Whether absenting processes are substantial or non-substantial (as in action-at-a-distance), spatializing or non-spatializing (as in the abstractions involved in conceptual dialectics), they are always causally efficacious, irreducibly tensed. Moreover, every rhythmic presupposes causal efficacy and all causal efficacy presupposes depth, alterity and absence — which the unholy (voidless, replete) trinity of irrealism cannot, as we shall see shortly, sustain.
It is now time to address the issue of ontology directly. At the outset two prevalent misunderstandings must be cleared up. The sense in which (α) everything is ontological, i.e. falls within being (including the epistemic, non-being, etc.), must be distinguished from the sense (β) in which we may want to specify the ontological (as the domain of the existentially intransitive objects or ontics of some transitive or relational process of inquiry or field of action) in contrast to the epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, etc. Second, God has given ontological arguments a bad press. A simple unobjectionable ontological argument might go as follows. If (admittedly this is a condition) there is a word or concept or idea,* then there is at least something. Moreover, by Feuerbachian projective criticism, there must be an idealizer, and so at least one human being exists. Further, deploying Marx's critique of contemplative materialism,60 Wittgenstein's private language argument, Strawson's line in Individuals, Vygotskian linguistics, Kleinian object-relations theory, developmental psychology generally or the argument I advanced earlier against token monism, at the human level, more than one human being must exist. So the term ‘ontology’ must refer, and at least one ontological argument is valid.
* For instance, Descartes's project of radical doubt or Hegelian autogenetics (which has been styled nicely a self-perficient scepticism).59 I only start here because I am engaging in the strategy of immanent critique (in this case, of characteristically irrealist anti-ontological scepticism). The anti-ontologist must at least write something.
I have characterized dialectical arguments as species of transcendental arguments establishing, inter alia, ontological conclusions. But there is, especially once the materialist diffraction of dialectic is granted, no reason why this pattern of argumentation should not be used outside the sphere which would normally be called ‘transcendental’ and/or the categorial condition broadened in the manner of Ryle or Sommers (if one does not want to waive it completely), to designate the establishment of natural (by which I include social) false necessities generally. There are three terms at stake here: ‘ontology’, ‘dialectical’ and ‘transcendental’. Let us take them in that order. In respect of ‘ontology’ one might distinguish three senses of the concept specifying differences of level, degree or order, of abstraction, generality and detail. The first concept might demarcate philosophical from scientific ontologies — the former delineating the general categorial form of the world presupposed by the nature of scientific (or other) activities, the latter articulating the specific contents of the world, characterized as the intransitive ontic objects of specific epistemics or research inquiries.61 From this purview, which is the one I have hitherto adopted, philosophy does not exist apart from the sciences and other social practices (and arguably vice versa), and there dawns the vista of a dialectic of philosophy and science, ontology and ontics, etc. A second line pursues a gradation between degrees of distraction and licenses, within a unified concept of ontology, distinctions between global, continental, regional, domain-specific and local ontologies, figuratively and/or literally, setting up dialectics between the abstract and the concrete, the centre and the periphery, etc. Here again, on the configuration of the concrete universal to be explored in the following section, philosophy is concrete-dependent. A third line would be precisely to take some specific dialectical figure, such as the concrete universal, immanent critique, the hiatus, split or gulf, constellationality, unity-in-diversity or master–slave relations, and apply it across disciplinary boundaries. I do not see why these three strategies, and the distinctions upon which they depend, should be mutually exclusive. Thus one might want to talk of a dialectical ontology, not necessarily established by a dialectical argument in the strict sense, but just in virtue of say its inscape or topological mode.
As for ‘transcendental’, I think its characteristic categorial connotations should be retained.* But I want to insist (1) on the distinction between transcendental arguments and transcendental idealism (and, in parallel, between dialectical arguments and absolute idealism), (2) on an expanded (geo-historicized and/or domain-specific) concept of categories amongst which the commodity, for instance, would be included, and (3) that transcendental arguments are merely types of the retroductive-explanatory argument form familiar in science. Both transcendental and dialectical arguments, as defined in the first paragraph of this section, are, like retroductive-explanatory arguments, when achieved, two-way interlocking arguments, in which the order of epistemic discovery — in the retroductive, conjectural, critical phase of scientific breakthrough to a new level of ontological structure or of totality — is reversed in the order of explanation, matching the ontological order. The explanation is transitive, but it is of an intransitive object or domain. It establishes (normally) at best (in an open systemic totality) necessary conditions of being or existence (and hence also conditions of possibility), precisely at the point where referential detachment of the explanans becomes, in the judgement of the relevant scientific community, legitimate and inexorable. The science of the day then moves on to discover the explanans of the explanans. Science never stops still for a moment. It is always on the move. The Baron Münchausen position, of pulling oneself up by one's own boot straps, on which philosophers have spilt so much ink, just never arises. The scientific neophyte is from the beginning confronted with inter-subjectively established facts, which have become referentially detached. Her job is to discover the real reason or truth of these ontic entities, the Sj of Si. Starting life as a subjective hunch, it may become for her colleagues an empirical certainty. When its reality is established beyond reasonable doubt, science now knows the reason for, or one could say the truth of, Si — the alethic or dialectical reason (dr') of the phenomena it set out to explain. But by now the scientific avant-garde will be searching for the reason of Sj, Sk (which, once known, can be said to be its truth).
* However, it is not clear whether ‘category’ is supposed to be (a) a necessary condition for being (or, in idealist terms, for our apprehension of being) as such; (b) a necessary condition for some particular (e.g. geo-historically transient or otherwise conditioned) mode of being; (c) just a higher-order condition of a circumstance; or (d) even whether it can be defined other than negatively and/or in terms of the role that ‘categorial’ errors play in, say, ideology.
This scientific process can fairly be called dialectical, if we bear in mind that en route from any level of structure and/or margin of totality to the next, falsification and the elimination, that is to say, absenting, of inadequate theories, corresponding to the nodal dialectical comment (dc'), and retrospective correction of the account of the already established level of structure or realm of totality will occur. It is important to see that there are two distinct moments of criticism. There is the epistemically progressive moment after (1) referential detachment — say at Si. This is when an absence or anomaly or contradiction generated by, say, a relevant incompleteness (or the tedious homology induced by replication of already well established results), leads to the (2) retroduction of explanatory hypotheses. If (1) is ‘D’ (description), (2) is ‘R’ (retroduction). The known fragility of glass is explained by conjectures as to its molecular structure. In general a plurality of hypotheses will be considered (Feyerabend's moment) in a multiplicity of research programmes (Lakotos's moment) until all but one are (3) eliminated (Popper's moment) — ‘E’. This is the fallibilist absenting determination within the epistemically progressive movement in the dialectic of science. Now comes the moment of identification ‘I’ of the new level of structure — Sj — after which time referential detachment at that level will occur and a new round of scientific progress begin. But there is almost always some secondary epistemically regressive work to be done — detailed correction (‘C’) of the original level. This, like the tedium of initial replication, is part of Kuhnian, normal science; and yields a second moment of falsification in the overall model of theoretical science, which may be dubbed the DREI(C) model. The epistemically progressive and regressive moments are depicted in Figure 2.12. After the regressive correction of the facts at Si we now have the best possible grounds for both asserting the truth of those facts and demonstrating their natural necessity (via their deducibility from a description at Sj).* This is what I have called the Lockian level.62 After a further elapse of time the firmly established structure may be held to be definitional of a natural kind and we are now at the Leibnizian level in the dialectic of science. In this process we have now considerably refined our rudimentary Hegelian epistemological dialectic of C1.9.
* This is the analytic moment within the dialectic of dialectical and analytical reason in science.
I have already noted that the epistemological dialectic in science consists in or progresses largely by a process of immanent critique. However, it is important to register the vital point that in dialectical explanatory expositions — which in Hegel must accord with the order of discovery, but in Marx, as in a scientific textbook, or in the ex post Lockian or Leibnizian, explanation, need not — as distinct from the epistemological dialectic, what is false (as well as necessary) is in the ontological order itself, not (merely) in the epistemological order. This is a distinction which a Hegelian, whether on a hyper-intuitive, transformational or descriptive-phenomenological interpretation of his method, will find it difficult to sustain in virtue of his commitment to the principle of subject-object identity and the epistemic fallacy it entails. One final comment on Hegel's dialectical argumentation. I think in his emphasis on the immanence of critique, particularly in its Achilles' Heel form, he has brought out the characteristic pattern of disputational argument in science and philosophy, and in addition in civilized culture and conversation generally. But a much more typical dialectic will not be autonomous, smooth, continuous, unilinear and closed, but heteronomous and materially circumscribed, jagged, zigzag and cross-cutting, clumpy (interspersed by sidetracks, non-sequiturs and pauses) and open. This will also tend to be typical of conversation generally.
I now want to consider the effect of the unholy trinity of irrealism: ontological monovalence, the epistemic fallacy, both of which derive ultimately from Parmenides (although monovalence was mediated by Plato and Kant and epistemic fallacy by Aristotle, Hume and Hegel), and the primal squeeze on natural necessity, established on the Platonic/ Aristotelian fault-line. The effects of monovalence are easy to demonstrate. If thought is included within being, no change is possible; if it is excluded from being, epistemic but not ontic change is possible and so the world must be assumed to be closed. If being is now defined in terms of knowledge, as in Aristotelian hylomorphism, Humean empiricism or the Hegelian notion, and it is further assumed that knowledge is achieved as, for instance, Aristotle, Hegel and nineteenth- and twentieth-century positivism do, then the absence of the absenting of being established by monovalence entails actualism at the level of general knowledge, itself a presupposition of particular knowledge. As in practice the definition of being in terms of knowledge, viz. the epistemic fallacy, merely masks the dogmatic complacency that our knowledge is determined by being, i.e. the ontic fallacy, in the achievement of generalized subject-object identity theory, that is, paradigmatically knowledge as universal and necessarily certain. Whether the objective/ontic moment is dominant, as in hylomorphism, or the subjective/epistemic one (after the Cartesian turn), as in positivism, achieved subject-object identity theory entails the mutual presupposition of epistemic and ontic fallacies. And monovalence merely reinforces the impossibility of epistemic error or ontic change, or of disentangling the two; and hence we have the closed positivization of knowledge and being alike. Aristotle's critique of the middle Plato's doctrine of Forms led him directly to the aporiai of substance and essence. Because only accidental features could individuate substances (and the world was by definition closed) thus lacking a concept of the possibility of the achievement of natural necessity — of alethic truth (at the Lockian or Leibnizian levels) in science — which is what in his substantive work he actually did — Aristotle had to fall back on intellectual intuition (nous) as a supplement to induction. The problem of induction was already present on the Platonic/Aristotelian fault-line. Once intellectual intuition was discarded, the only answer was fideism of one kind or another. When rationalist epistemological criteria, following its inwardization and subjectivization by Descartes, eventually became unachievable, empiricist ontology came into its own. Now no concept of ontological stratification, indeed of ontology itself, or natural necessity (ultimately, in Quine, of necessity itself) became tenable. Science became unintelligible while a triple but now aporetic positivization of knowledge and being occurred. The quest for an unhypothetical starting point had led to a viciously interlocking circle. No absence meant, on the one hand, (a) no alterity, intransitivity or possibility of critique and, on the other, (b) no change. Both consequences of monovalence reinforced achieved subject-object theory and the tacit complicity of epistemic and ontic fallacies (which we have already witnessed at work in Figures 2.8 and 2.10). The primal squeeze between the speculative and positivistic illusions eliminated the middle terms of scientific theory, in the transitive, and natural necessity, in the intransitive dimensions essential for that knowledge of structure vital for that ontic and epistemic structural change, which the circle disavowed and only the absenting of ontological monovalence can restore. The outcome was that when fundamentalism was finally abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century, acceptance of epistemic relativism led to the intrinsic irrationalisms that dot our philosophical landscape. Most of these are embedded in a new unholy tetrapolity, of empirical realism, epistemological subjectivism and irrationalism, the linguistic fallacy and ontological monovalence. If this book has the effect of absenting the absence of, that is, in vindicating the concepts of, intransitive being (v. the epistemic fallacy, whether in linguistic guise or not), natural necessity (v. the primal squeeze that led to the victory of empiricist ontology) and absence (that is central to dialectic, and especially rational change) itself, then it will have achieved a good part of its aim.
In this section I discuss some characteristic dialectical mechanisms and manoeuvres, tropes and themes, several of which have already been floated. In §§1 and 6 above I mentioned ‘heterology’. This can mean one or more of the following: (1) not true of, or applicable to, itself (in which case its contrary is autology); (2) not the same as itself (where the contrary is homology); and (3) not true for and/or to itself (which is in part the contrary of autonomy, and which I shall sometimes specify as ‘alterology’). Its primary sense is (1), which can be exemplified by the fact that the word ‘cheese’ is not itself a cheese, whereas the word ‘word’ is a word. In Hegelian dialectic ‘A’ is necessarily also ‘not A’, and as such other than itself and generator of a determinate outcome, ‘B’. It is by means of heterology in senses (1) and (2) that the forwards or ex ante movement of the dialectic unfolds, with the dialectical comment (dc') in particular explicating what is true of, but not present in, some base concept or form. Only in the self-realization of the absolute idea in absolute spirit do we reach a plane which is not heterological. And in the translucent ex post or retrospective light — the analytic reinstatement in dialectical connection — it casts, each form building up to it can be seen as, after all, true of, for and to itself, as such, as contained within and mediated by absolute spirit, auto[U]-hetero[D]-auto[R]-logical (in the terms of C1.6). (This is the constellational identity of identity and difference within identity for the sake of identity.)
This brings us naturally to the key dialectical notion of mediation. Hegel might have remarked that all determination is mediation. Indeed Hegelians often use ‘to mediate’ as synonymous with ‘to negate’, and ‘self-mediation’ with ‘self-negation’. Only the beginning of a local dialectic is unmediated or immediate. This does not mean that the posited element is arbitrary, because it itself can be seen as mediated by the Hegelian systemic circle. (Wherever we begin, we will achieve the whole, although for presentational and quasi-transcendental reasons, Hegel usually begins with the intuitively simplest element in some regional domain, e.g. Being in the Logics.) Although it has philosophical antecedents in the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, its most usual philosophical employment is to specify an intermediary or means of some sort. Thus Marx conceives labour to be the primary mediator between humanity and nature, with various 2nd, 3rd … nth order mediations produced on or within (§2 models A and B respectively) the generative separation wrought by capitalism, including private property and the state.63 Mediation can connote both indirectness and hierarchy. The former is exemplified by the sense of mediation as a medium, and specifically as involving (a) spatio-temporal stretching or distanciation; (b) communicative mediatization (the press, TV, etc.); and (c) postmodernist virtualization or hyperrealization (as readily accommodatable as the figure of inversion within a stratified and non-detotalizing ontology). The latter is more characteristic of Hegel-derivative dialectics, and here the crucial figure is that of the concrete universal, which I shall discuss in some detail below. Typically the concrete universal manifests or individualizes itself via one or more particular differentiations in some (what I will call) concrete singular. Hegel identifies each of these terms as necessary moments of the notion and each can be seen to mediate the other two. (I give advance notice that I will object to the Hegelian account of the concrete universal, arguing for a conceptualization of it which is both more nuanced and complex.) Indeed, any aspect, (temporalized) moment or (spatialized) determination of a totality may be said to mediate any others and/or the whole. Process, as the mode of spatio-temporalizing structure, can be seen as a mediator, e.g. in the social world between structure and agency, or more generally between transfactual efficacy and eventual effect, or within the tensed tri-unity of causality, space and time. Most generally, if A achieves, secures or eventuates in C (either in whole or in part) via or by means of B, then B may be said to mediate their relation. It is in this sense that I will argue, for instance, that the past mediates the transition to the future, rhythmics mediate causality, social relations mediate individual agency and philosophy is mediated by the deep analogical grammars of lapsed science and contemporary society.
‘Alienation’, which will also be the subject of detailed scrutiny later, means being something other than, (having been) separated, split, torn or estranged from oneself, or what is essential and intrinsic to one's nature or identity. What is intrinsic to oneself need not be internal to, in the sense of physically inside, one — as in the case of a person's kindness or a magnet's field;64 and what is still essentially one's own at one level (e.g. one's humanity) may be alienated at another (e.g. by being subjugated to gross indignity). To be alienated is to lose part of one's autonomy. Also conceptually tied to ‘heterology’ is alterity. Thus language use, for instance, establishes a relation of sheer other-being, alterity or existential intransitivity, to what it is about. I have argued this cannot be diachronically reduced to an originary (or end) — the dialectical temptation — or synchronically eliminated in the elision of the referent — the converse mistake. Recognition of irreducible alterity, non-identity or difference is essential to any future socialist dialectics which would avoid the sinking back into a simple undifferentiated expressive unity, the most elementary stage of the Schillerian schema, that was part of the fate of the erstwhile ‘actually existing socialist states’.
‘Constellationality’ (although also to be found in Adorno) is my term of art. I have referred to both ‘constellational identity’, which is essentially a figure of containment (in the sense of being a part of), and ‘constellational unity’, which is essentially a figure of connection (in the sense of being bound together); and I have used it in both materialist non-pejorative and idealist pejorative ways. Thus one can write, within a materialist context, of the constellational identity of being and thought in the sense that thought is both (a) within being, but (b) over-reached by being, as (c) an emergent product of being. And one can write of the constellational unity of dialectical and analytical reason, meaning that they are bound together as essential and interdependent aspects of the transitive dialectical process of science. Hegel's principle of the identity of identity and difference makes it difficult for him to sustain the difference between identity and unity. And the concept is almost always used by him in a teleological context as a figure of closure: principally of (α) the closure of being within his system — hence the non-actual, non-rationalized demi-actual existent; or (β) the closure of the future within the present, as described by absolute idealism — hence the demi-present future. This is Hegel's great metaphysical ceteris paribus escape or λ clause (as I have called it elsewhere),65 which is in effect a weak actualism66 and its blockist analogue, weak blockism, of which (α) and (β) are indeed forms, conveniently detotalizing what Hegel cannot ‘explain’. Moreover, it is the principle of the constellational identity of opposites, of science within philosophy and of the future within the present, etc., that generates the centrism, triumphalism and endism that I taxed him for in §5 and which directly link to the three members of the unholy trinity, viz. the epistemic fallacy, the primal squeeze and ontological monovalence dissected in §6.
The theme of constellationality is affiliated to, but not the same as that of, duality. Duality normally connotes the combination of existential interdependence (or, even sometimes at some ontological level and/or from some perspective, identity) and essential (and therefore conceptual) distinction (including, at the limit, autonomy). It may be exemplified by the duality of absence and presence in spatio-temporal mediation, of theory or practice in absolute reason, or of structure and agency in social practice — where the figure of the hiatus-in-the-duality makes possible such important phenomena as dislocation, as well as preventing voluntaristic or reificatory collapse, of the dualities. Closely related to dualities are perspectival switches. Such switches may be realistically grounded, viz. in terms of some intransitive feature of the object under study, or given a neo-Kantian or Nietzschean interpretation, viz. in terms of the subject's epistemic or evaluative interests or her will-to-power (or caprice). A perspectival switch may be said to be transcendental, insofar as a switch constitutes a necessary condition of that from which it is switched, where the latter may be seen to be transcendentally significant in the sense specified in the previous section. Examples are the dyadic tacit/ explicit structure of knowledge as analysed by Polanyi67 or perception as construed by Merleau-Ponty. There are two types of dialectical perspectival switches: (a) those which are the results of a relevant valid dialectical argument, as elaborated in §6; and (b) those which may be said to constitute a ‘reflection’. This term can be introduced by noting that in Hegel each phase of the dialectical process can be regarded as a compounded product or boxed focus, consisting in the cumulative results of successive U-D-R sequences. Now Hegel's practice is not in fact conceptually uniformly linear and there is no reason in principle why any term in an organic totality should not be reflected into any other, including compounds of such. In fact, perspectival fluidity and multi-facetedness is an essential requirement for any concrete (and, a fortiori, totalizing) inquiry, particularly in the socio-sphere. It should go without saying that Hegelian dialectic purports to be the constellationally completed reflection on reflection.
The consequential heterological outcome of the ex ante or forward movement of some local Hegelian dialectic is, as I have noted, a theory/practice inconsistency. But what happens, more generally, if a transcendental or dialectical necessity, established (let us suppose) by sound argumentation, is contravened? To contravene such a necessity, in some theory or practice, is, insofar as the necessity pertains to the world in which we must act, to contravene an axiological (or practical) necessity too. I am going to call such necessities, after the watchword for Mrs Thatcher's commitment to an antiquated monetarism (and to remind us of the fallibility of our claims to knowledge of them), a TINA (‘there is no alternative’) necessity imposing TINA imperatives. Theories and practices which violate such necessities, if they are to survive and be applicable to the world in which we must — in virtue of the axiological imperative — act: (a) require some defence mechanism, safety net or security system, which may well, in systematically related ensembles, (b) necessitate supporting or reinforcing connections, in the shape of duals, complements and the like elsewhere; and (c) need to assume the cloak of some conjugated compromise formation in a world where axiological necessities press about them. Such mechanisms, connections and formations are Tina ones and the whole complex comprises the ‘Tina syndrome’. All transcendental and/or dialectical necessities, insofar as they potentially implicate our speech action, can be seen by a valid perspectival switch as axiological necessities too.
Thus consider subject-object identity theory, whether of a hylomorphic, (Hegelian) phenomenological or phenomenalist kind. This will appear explicitly anthropocentric from a metacritically realist dialectical perspective. Now such a theory, insofar as it is to be applicable to the transcendentally — axiologically — necessary real world of (relatively or absolutely) independently existing and spatio-temporally causally efficacious things, at the very least, will have to covertly graft onto or transmute itself into an anthropomorphic correspondence theory, adopting some amalgamation of them or shuttling between the two positions: a typical Tina compromise. However, for general knowledge to be possible (without which particular knowledge is useless), given such an anthropic base, an actualism, postulating the invariant invariance — or constant conjunctivitis — of the subjectively defined particulars, will be required: a typical Tina connection. Moreover, an empirical (or conceptual) realist actualism, to be applicable to the normal normic open-systemic world, where constant conjunctions rarely obtain outside the laboratory and a few other (e.g. astronomically) locally-temporally closed contexts, will need to invoke a ceteris paribus clause inconsistent with itself (for the generalization cannot be both actual and universal) to survive: a typical Tina defence mechanism — or metaphysical λ safety net; but also, of course, a performative contradiction — or theory/practice inconsistency. Metacritically, then, the denegation or violation of an axiological necessity must deploy itself as an auto-subversive, radically negating, internally split, axiologically inconsistent Tina compromise formation, necessarily presupposing what it (explicitly or implicitly) denies. In general, then, Tina formations are internally contradictory, more or less systemic, efficacious, syntonic (and, as I shall argue, regressive) ensembles, only demonstrable as such, of course, insofar as they have been transcendentally or otherwise refuted, displaying duplicity, equivocation, extreme plasticity and pliability and rational indeterminacy (facilitating their ideological and manipulative use). Moreover, they generate a characteristic range of paradoxes and effects, including the scotomatic (‘Stoicism’), schizoid (‘Scepticism’) and introjective or projective duplicative, replicative or fragmentary forms (‘the Unhappy Consciousness’), so well analysed by Hegel in the justly celebrated chapter on ‘Self-consciousness’ in the Phenomenology. We have already observed another instance of a Tina formation in the tacit duplicity of the dialectical antagonists of subjective empiricism and objective idealism in §6. Insofar as Hegel is aware of his tacit reliance on empirical data (that is, insofar as he wants to avoid reflexive inconsistency, another name for performative contradiction) this dialectic must take Hegel back in the direction of Kant: to epistemological heteronomy.68 Conversely Kantian ethical autonomy — the categorical imperative is the prototype of Hegelian autogenetics — is liable to an exactly parallel charge from Hegel.69
The invocation of a Tina λ clause can appear as a 2E inconsistency or contradiction, a 3L split or detotalization, but it can also assume the mantle of a straight 4D auto-deconstruction or the 1M non-identity of a theory besides, and requiring something other than, itself. In this respect is it akin to Derridean ‘supplementarity’, as comprising at once addition and substitution, and to the other members of what Gasché has described as the ‘infrastructural chain’.70 Together these may be regarded as so many metacritical or dialectical comments — a notion I will generalize to that of the dialectical remark (drk†) — on the hierarchies of traditional philosophy. But Derrida's models are too closely tied to the practice of hierarchical inversion, chiasmus and erasure. The more general concept of a Tina formation is required for the analysis of the effects of the violation of any axiological necessity, although the way it manifests itself, on any particular occasion, in a multiply determined, contradictory, agentive and internally and externally related world, will be both contingent and variable.
Tina formations are occasionally, although not always, repressed. They thus inevitably raise questions about ideology, power2 formations, hegemony and resistance. A classic instance, admirably analysed by Alasdair MacIntyre on a number of occasions,71 is that of ‘Diderot's Syndrome’. Diderot asked, in Le Neveu de Rameau, what happened when an axiological necessity, such as the sexual impulse — or, one might say, the need for food, recognition, de-alienation or autonomy — is denied overt expression. Freud's life work, from his commencement of the (soon to be abandoned) cathartic method,72 was, of course, a quest for an answer to Diderot's question. Marxists and Nietzscheans ask it too. More to the immediate point, so does Hegel. Indeed to say that some conceptual or social form is at once both false and necessary (which we have seen in §6 is a distinguishing feature of dialectical argument), incoherent yet indispensable, (for Hegel, logically) contradictory but dialectically essential is just to say that it is a Tina compromise formation. Indeed the Hegelian dialectic may be regarded as a progressive compounding of Tina compromise upon Tina compromise, until in the self-realization of the absolute idea and the final overcoming of its self-compromise, in the absolute spirit of absolute idealism we achieve, at once, absolute clarity and absolute compromise. But in the backwards or retrospective reconciliation that this Palladian vantage point affords, negativity is undone, contradiction is cancelled, the implicit explicit, the absent present, plenitudinous positivity restored and actuality rationalized and we are offered ex post, as the left Hegelians alleged, another sort of compromise: constellationally conciliatory compromise with the prevailing order of things, rationally transfigured under the configuration of the absolute idea.
Notice that both (a) the Tina compromise form, embodying theory/practice inconsistency,* performative contradiction or reflexive inconsistency, which the dialectical comment registers, and (b) the vicious regress inherent in the self-predicative and self-referential paradoxes and the Fichtean endless task issue in (α) axiological indeterminacy — in Wittgenstein's terms ‘we do not know how to go on [and/or, as in (b), when to stop]’ — and (β) the lack of progressive (e.g. informational) import, characteristic of degenerating programmes, practices, systems and pathologies generally. And the rational non-valent/Socratic response to both depends upon the explicit recognition and elimination of absences (e.g. of some relevant incompleteness) which Hegel, in his analytic reinstatement in dialectical connection, forecloses. For in closing a potentially, necessarily and actually open totality, and so shutting out the possibility of further essential progress, Hegel performs two self-deconstructive acts. First, he commits himself to that very Fichtean vicious regress which Hegelians know as the ‘bad infinite’.73 What could be more wearisome than merely replicating the status quo (constellationally/essentially or otherwise)? Second, because in overcoming it, he commits himself to the auto-subversion in the injunctive paradox intrinsic to it. We cannot just bring about what already is (although we can attempt to do so) — at the Plateau-nic incessantly revolving turntable that would constitute the constellational closure of geo-history.74 The transformational character of praxis will ensure that we are always also transforming the structures that we are in the very process of reproducing. In announcing the constellational closure of history, Hegel re-opened the floodgates of tensed geo-historical processes, most notably through the mediation of Marxism. His injunctive paradox is an ethical displacement of the problem of induction, homologous in form with the paradoxes I have already noted (in C1.9). The (1M) resolution of all these turns on the conception of ontological stratification (and alethic truth) and on an open epistemic and practical totality.
* The split in Hegel between theoretical and practical reason is epitomized by Hegel's unreciprocated recognition of Napoleon at Jena.
If ideology is most generally conceived, as I shall argue in §9 below, as generated and reproduced and/or transformed at the intersection of power, discursive and normative social, material, inter- and intra-subjective relations, then a narrower concept of it, encapsulating the pejorative connotations of the term, would see the ideological intersect of what I have called the ‘social cube’75 as embodying categorial error, of which paradox is just a surface form.76 The narrower concept may be exemplified by the view of war as a game or women as inferior to men or Marx's justly famous analyses of the value and wage forms.77 Ideologies, in this narrower sense, necessarily constitute Tina formations and, as such, are liable to explanatory critique (a concept I will resume in C3.7). But insofar as they are causally efficacious, the social relations and interests underpinning them (and thus also the ideologies themselves) will not bend to explanatory critique alone. Rather this will depend on a type of agency to which I have already alluded: transformed (autoplastic [cf. 1M non-identity]), transformative (alloplastic [cf. 2E negativity]), totalizing (all-inclusive and auto-reflexive [cf. 3L]) and transformist (oriented to structural change, informed by explanatory critique, concrete utopianism and participatory — animating/activating research) praxis (ideally comprising dra' in dφ at 4D). This will involve the intertwining of politics of at least four types: life (including e.g. health, career) politics, whose subjects are concrete singular agents, and whose ethical counterpart will be a consequentially derived virtue theory; movement (e.g. feminist, green) politics, motivated by the aspirations of differential collectivities and oriented to the extension of freedoms qua rights; representative politics, expressing the needs and interests of different communities but whose bottom line will be the preservation of existing freedoms qua rights; and participatory-emancipatory politics, coordinated by a concern with fundamental structural change in a rhythmic to eudaimonia, understood as universal human flourishing. Each itself depends on ergonically efficient ego-emancipatory existential security systems, grounded in relations of fiduciariness, care, solidarity and trust, oriented to reflexively monitored transformation, in the context of hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles over discursively moralized (ideologically constituted) power2, i.e. generalized master–slave, relations. The eventual dialectic, the grounds and directionality of which I will attempt to vindicate in the next chapter, will depend upon the sequence: ergonic efficiency → empowerment → emancipation → eudaimonia. A eudaimonistic pluriverse would consist in a plurality of processes in which heterology was minimized to a level in which it could be said that each was true to, of and for themselves and each other and the trends-specific contexts which they both contain and are contained by. (See Figure 2.13.)
There are two more major concepts to discuss: totality, including concrete universality; and levels. In respect of my section-unifying concept of heterology, they are, in a certain sense, polar opposites for whereas levels make heterology, e.g. in the form of depth, possible totality seeks to exclude heterology and to embrace all in a unity (albeit of differentiated aspects).
Totality ignites a principal point of difference between transcendental and absolute idealism, which deposits a source of tension within a materialist framework. The Hegelian dialectic is a concrete totality, generated by contradiction, in a process of continual Aufhebung, that is, of preservative superstructuration which, when it is achieved, as Hegel claims it is in his system, constellationally closes both being and knowledge, united by the principle of identity, alike. By contrast the Kantian dialectic is a comment (cf. dc') on the limits of finite human intelligence78 to the effect that it is incapable of knowing the infinite totalities of reason, and that the (perhaps eternally challenging) desire to do so plunges it into an intrinsically antinomic mire. This is dialectic as limit (dl'). Now suppose Hegel had claimed merely that we know the world and that it is in part contradictory (and perhaps that it must be so, even if only for us to be able to know it). Suppose, moreover, that Kant, for his part, had maintained that we do not know all of the world (or at the very most know that we do so) and that human powers are at least potentially limited. Then their respective positions would have been negotiably compatible and indeed arguably acceptable. If, further, neither had fallen sway to the conceptual realist aspiration and thought to ground the conditioned in terms of the unconditioned, but they had been content, instead merely to ground the more in terms of the less conditioned; and at the same time they had rejected an empirical realist account of embodied finite being (which Hegel, no less than Kant, accepts) — then their positions would have approximated those of critical realism (It is as I have already urged, the squeeze on natural necessity, ontological stratification and scientific theory between metaphysics [the sovereign of necessity] and experience [the clerk of contingency] that accounts for the antinomial dialectical duplicity of conceptual and empirical realism.) Let us speculate further that Kant had self-reflexively attempted to situate the critical philosophy in the context of his day (as Hegel did for absolute idealism). Then he could have contemplated the possibility of dialectical limits of the applicability of categories in virtue of the relativity of the geo-historical specificity of the objects to which they applied (as Marx was later to do) and trumped Hegel in virtue of the latter's constellational closure and fear of an open totality. Kant could have gone on to strengthen his hand by pointing out that, as inescapably finite, limited, embodied space-time voyagers, we are necessarily restricted to some local present, to some or other particular position on our epistemic-ethical-axiological world-lines, from which, in analogy to a light-cone, some but not other possibilities are open and some but not other positions visible to us. Thus transitive relativity — but meta-reflexively situated in the context of a common cosmos, punctuated by absence and alterity, from which we dumpily, chaotically and stochastically emerged to come to know, transcendentally and scientifically, the intransitive reality of a ‘growing-knowers'’ philosophically Copernican-Darwinian world.*
* This should not be taken as an endorsement of neo-Darwinist ideology, particularly in the light of current research.79
If, to continue the fable, Kant had rejected the second analogy and, with it, empirical realism tout court, he could then have discarded the presuppositions of the third antinomy and treated human beings as causally efficacious agents, with degrees of freedom (as Hegel correctly appreciated), in a world that is not determined before it is caused, so that if S1 causes S2 at s-ti and S2 causes S3 at s-tj it does not follow that S3 is determined at s-ti. Suppose, moreover, Kant's attention now swung to the practical sphere. He could have noted how the greater proportion of women (which has to be italicized, given his misogyny) and men had powers that could be, but were not, realized and needs similarly unsatisfied, despite the plenitude of possible resources; and he could have begun to seek the specific socio-geo-historical causes of this condition (as Marx was to do). Kant could then have conceived a practical totality, neither as a transcendent Jenseits nor as a Fichtean endless task, but as unachieved but realizable — in an open world, shaped and conditioned but dependent ultimately upon rational agency — informed by the supreme ethical virtue of wisdom — in a dialectic of truth and freedom that I will articulate in C3. In this way he could have played a part in forging that chain of identities-in-difference (or, if you prefer, non-equivalent equivalences) that unite the marginalized majority, and proleptically, under appropriately transformed descriptions, the entirety, of the human race. But then, of course, Kant would have been a dialectical critical realist.
The drive to totality in science is given by the need to maximize explanatory power. But it is up to science to discover to what extent a subject-matter is internally related and hence in the domain of the ‘intra-active’. We can define three basic kinds of intra-action: (1) existential constitution, in which event, one element or aspect (moment, determination, relation, etc.), e2, is essential and intrinsic to (in the sense explained earlier, in which it is not necessarily a physical part of) another, e1; (2) intra-permeation, when e2 is present within, although not essential to the nature of, e1, the sense in which e1 may be said to contain e2;, and (3) intra-connection, the sense in which one element, e2; is causally efficacious on an element internally related to it, e1. This raises a number of issues. It may be questioned whether permeation is really a case of internal relationality if the permeating element is not essential to the permeated one. But an element may be necessary to the existence of another (under the appropriate descriptions) without being essential to its nature. Do the other modes not depend on intra-connection? Sympathetic as I am to the force of this objection, there is no reason why a possible connection should not bind elements. (3) is tantamount to dialectical connection and we have already noted that dialectical connections may or may not be dialectically contradictory. More generally, all the basic modes of intra-activity may be reciprocal or non-reciprocal, transfactual or actual, positive or negative, polyadic or dyadic, and agentive or non-agentive. Can a transcendental deduction be given for totality (the key 3L concept) as has been done for real negation or absence (the principal 2E category in C1.3)?
This seems relatively easy for social life. Consider once more our paradigmatic book (with transcendentally necessary spaces, or level-specific voids, in it) in the library, whether it is ‘in’ (present) or ‘out’ (absent). There is an obvious sense in which the book, if recently published, existentially presupposes all, or at least many, of the others, and the spatio-temporal traditions which nurtured it (and may indeed be said to have conditioned, permeated or rhythmically generated it). That is to say, it would have been impossible without the others. Or consider the text itself. It is an internally related totality. As are the elements of a language, or the ebb and flow of a conversation, the sequential ‘habitus’ of a routine, the systemic interdependencies of the global monetary system, a play, a sculpture, or an experimental project oriented to the demediation of nature. Or consider simply a musical tune, melody, beat or rhythm. Or reflect on the semantic structure of a sentence, bound in a complex of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations (and metaphoric and metonymic presuppositions). Or on its physical structure — for instance, the location of the spaces and punctuation marks within it. Not to treat such entities as totalities is to violate norms of descriptive and hermeneutic adequacy. In particular, insofar as any or more of the above are transcendentally necessary conditions of science, as reflection will easily show that they are, as good a deduction of totality as transcendental realism demands has been found. (Later I shall consider how one might set about a deduction both of science and of transcendental realism without recourse to science.)
So totalities must exist for social life to be possible. But what of nature? First, it might be entered that unless there were internal, and specifically dialectical, contradictions (which presuppose internal relations), there would be no internal (radically negating) tendencies to change either for individual things or for their types (including natural kinds) or, more drastically, for the world as a whole, so that the emergence of, for example, science would have been impossible. If my first argument turns on the transcendental necessity of ontological change, my second turns on that of the transcendental necessity for taxonomy in science. Thus it could be argued that unless some explanatorily significant things had properties which were existentially essential to them, that is, such that they were not just necessarily connected, but internally related, to them, scientific classification, which depends upon the possibility of real (as distinct from merely nominal) definitions, would be impossible. Internal relationality, and so the conceptual possibility of the analytic a posteriori, is bound to the Leibnizian level of the identification of natural kinds, as natural necessity is tied to the demonstration of explanatory adequacy in the dialectic of explanatory and taxonomic knowledge in science. To revert to the model illustrated in Figure 2.12 on p. 110 above, when scientists have gone so far that they can deduce the reason Sj for the phenomena Si that their concerns are for the reason for that reason — along the epistemological dialectic to Sk — they make it definitional of the structural entities of Sj that they possess the explanatory essential properties that they do.80 Without them, the activity of classification, in an open-systemic world (in which events are normally ‘conjunctures’ and things are usually ‘compounds’ or ‘condensates’), would become as arbitrary as that of explanation. For if classification is justified only on the basis of superficial resemblance rather than real identity of structure, then there is no rationale for the stratification of science. This depends upon grasping suitably groomed structurata as tokens of real structures, whose intransitive existence and transfactual efficacy is a condition not only of science, but also of life. Resemblance, like regularity, theory generates insuperable paradoxes, as we shall note in due course. In what follows I will focus, however, on the social realm, where the concept of totality is so patently at home.
To grasp totality is to break with our ordinary notions of identity, causality, space and time, justified by the ‘analogical grammar’ of the classical mechanistic corpuscularian world view that I have criticized elsewhere.81 It is to see things existentially constituted, and permeated, by their relations with others; and to see our ordinary notion of identity as an abstraction not only from their existentially constitutive processes of formation (geo-histories), but also from their existentially constitutive inter-activity (internal relatedness). It is to see the causality of a upon b affected by the causality of c upon d. Emergent totalities generate emergent spatio-temporalities. Not only do we get overlapping spatio-temporalities (whether or not, the [non-]entities concerned are of the same or different kinds) but as the intrinsic is not co-extensive with the internal we also have real problems of identity and individuation. When is a thing no longer a thing but something else? When has the nature, and so the explanation for the behaviour, of a (relative) continuant changed? This may be due to either diachronic change (transition points), synchronic boundaries (borders), and/or changing constitutive intra-activity. Aporiai for philosophy, but real problems of individuation, definition, scope and articulation for science. I am going to argue for spatio-temporal, social and moral (real) relationism; in the domain of totality we need to conceptualize entity relationism.
How does one research a totality? Starting from any one element, one must in general investigate two margins of inquiry. At the intensive margin we will find more and more elements and/or the whole — and in principle their relations — ‘reflections’ (see p. 116) — contained, condensed, packed into, implicated in and causally efficacious on the initial element, in any number of modes; for instance, either by their presence or by their absence or both. (Thus ‘tomato’ and ‘sandwich’ are co-present even when unuttered [and so actually absent], in their paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, with an utterance of ‘cucumber’.) Similarly totalizing at the extensive margin, we will discover the initial element reflected, in different ways, into other elements of the totality and/or the whole. And the same applies to the whole itself. A wide variety of constitutive, permeative and causal relations may occur at the intra-active frontier of an aspect or totality. We must continually remember not to confuse the intrinsic and the (material object) internal, that permeation may show that non-corpuscularian fluidity revealed by physical fields and that, in defiance of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm of action, intra-active (organic) causality may be effected across a void, i.e. comprise action at a distance.* Reflections of whatever type (and in particular their nth order relations) may be exteriorized at the extensive margin and the saturated result re-interiorized or vice versa, and so on recursively. Compounding results of successive reflections may comprise totalities of their own. It is important here to discriminate between (α) totalities simpliciter (including allegedly ‘complete’ ones); (β) sub-totalities, which possess discontinuities, hiatuses, spaces, binds, barriers, boundaries and blocks between totalities; and (λ) partial totalities, which may also contain external, contingent or no connections between the elements of such sub-totalities. In the social world we are almost always concerned with partial totalities. However, once we introduce such 1M–4D motifs as stratification, intra-position, constitutive geo-histories, emergent rhythmics, multiple binds, reflexivity, openness and transformative agency in a materialist framework shot through by all manner, angle, level and kind of determination (on which more in a moment), the theoretical possibilities increase exponentially, approximating a Hegelian ‘bad infinite’ — a conclusion Hegel was able to avoid only by the arbitrary devices of constellational closure and generally unilinear presentation. That the exponential does not in practice materialize is due to the finite, limited and conditioned character of real partial totalities; and the requirement imposed by science that it is only after an a posteriori subject-specific inquiry that a totality, such as a mode of production, can be described, or the real definition of an object such as a crystal be furnished. However, thinking of totalities as intra-actively changing embedded ensembles, constituted by their geohistories (and/or their traces) and their contexts, in open potentially disjointed process, subject to multiple perspectival switches, and in structured open systemic flux, enables us to appreciate both the flickering, chameleon-like appearance of social being and the reason why narratives must be continually rewritten and social landscapes remapped.
*This may make it difficult to say whether a potential causal effect should be attributed to locations within the void, or even, given the conceptual connections between identity, causality, space and time, whether it is wholly intelligible to talk of individuating specific locations within it.
I now want to develop a concept of holistic causality and illustrate how it might be used in a dialectic of de-alienation. We already know that causality presupposes structural possibility, transfactual efficacy, possessual exercise, the possibility of mediation and the likelihood of multiple determination of results. It may take milder forms than the rather bold ‘determination’, such as conditioning, limiting, selecting, shaping, blocking, influencing, etc.; and it may stimulate, release, nurture, enable, sustain, entrain, displace, condense, coalesce, bind, in addition to the poietic ‘generate’ or ‘produce’. But let me subsume this variety under the generic ‘determination’. I will then say that holistic causality is at work when a complex ‘coheres’ in such a way that:
(α) the totality, i.e. the form or structure of the combination, causally determines the elements; and
(β) the form or structure of the elements causally codetermine each other, and so causally (α') determine or (β') codetermine the whole.
Case (β') applies where the totality is emergent (i.e. has emergent causal powers as a totality) and/or constitutes the ground of the elements. Several caveats must be immediately sounded. Remember we are dealing with partial totalities; so that my concept of holistic causality necessarily cannot be expressive or centred in the way that Hegel's totality is, although it is quite consistent with a gamut of species of domination. Moreover, one particular element within the totality, rather than the totality itself, may constitute the ground of the totality, which will in general be asymmetrically weighted and involve various degrees of attachment and detachment (‘relative autonomy’) of its elements. Alternatively, the totality may be grounded in a deeper structure (or totality) in which the holistic causality at work in this instance merely mediates the relationship between the super-ground and the elements of the totality. In either event, the totality is itself structured, and so may contain or be contained by dialectically contradictory (and more or less antagonistic) or, on the other hand, mutually reinforcing or supporting (e.g. Tina-connective), relationships. The efficacy of the elements and/or the totality may depend upon dual, multiple, joint or contextual action. Super- or intra-structures may be formed on or within in. The totality, at least partially constituted by its geo-historical formation and context, is in open process, intrinsically and extrinsically, so that its form, elements and effects will be continuously configurationally changing. These changes or determinations must be understood as transformative negations or absentings, rhythmically exercised, holistically explained and subject to or mediated by intentional causal agency in the social world. So that here we may talk of the constitutional unity and, to neologize developmentally, ‘fluidity’ of the concept of ‘[causal] determination’ as transfactual efficacy, transformative negation, tensed (spatializing) process, holistic causality and intentional absenting or agency.
A rudimentary dialectic may illustrate some of the relationships at stake. A generative separation, creating an alterity, may entrain an absence, or transformative negation, rhythmically exercised in virtue of the causal powers of the entities involved. Suppose N is an agent alienated from something essential and intrinsic, but now absented from and extrinsic to her. A happy retotalization occurs as a result of her (and let us suppose, collective) embodied intentional causal agency. And we have a dialectic of de-alienation in which N is reunited with a part of herself, now no longer divided and perhaps aware for the first time of the fact of how essential (transfactually real, although not actually experienced) the estranged aspect of the totality of her being was to her identity, and so, by difference, constitutive of her new sense of self-identity.
I now want to turn to the closely connected theme of the concrete universal, already mentioned when discussing mediation above. It is not essential to a concrete universal, as I shall develop the concept, that it, or its components, comprise totalities (although it is so for the restricted notion that Hegel deploys). What does it mean to call something ‘concrete’? We can get two purchases on this. First, it really makes sense only in contrast to its co-relative — ‘abstract’. Secondly, insofar as it has a positive meaning of its own, its nearest synonym might be ‘well-rounded’, in the sense of balanced, appropriate and complete for the purposes at hand. Actualities or their descriptions may be concrete (so that the term has a characteristic intransitive/transitive bivalency), as may my experience. But the concrete ≠ the actual ≠ the empirical. If Capital is regarded as an adequate description of the capitalist mode of production, the intransitive object of its theoretical result may well be said to be capital in-concretion,82 which will be transfactually applicable wherever the concept of capital is, but the results of which will be codetermined (a) by the residue of other economic modes, (b) by intra-structural mechanisms and intransitive objects only specifiable at a level of generality, detail and/or extension with which Marx did not attempt to engage (including much not set out in his famous ‘six brochures’ and much else not traditionally included in the Marxian superstructure or base, e.g. the reproduction of labour-power, the ecosphere, gender, ethnicity, the unconscious) and (c) by the other moments of the concrete universal I am about to describe — besides the pan-concrete totality (of totalities) that was the ultimate intransitive object of Marx's work. Capital-in-concretion is in turn not equivalent to Althusser's ‘concrete-in-thought’. Nor is it the same as the ‘synthesis of many determinations’ to which Marx refers in his Introduction to the Grundrisse, which articulates the logic of the (more or less concrete) conjuncture. Nor again is it the same as Hegel's famous example of a rose in his Introductory Lectures as ‘the unity of different determinations’ where he describes the multiplicity of aspects of, in my terms, a concrete singular.
The main differences between Hegel and dialectical critical realism turn on the (a) separability, (b) multiple determination and (c) spatio- temporalization of the concrete universal. The minimum formula necessary for the concrete universal (CU) is a multiple quadruplicity. Thus once the idea of process, conceived as the mode of spatio-temporalizing structural effects, is combined with the Hegelian emphasis on specificity or particularity (which may itself be more or less structurally sedimented and/or spatio-temporally localized), in addition to the moments of universality and singularity, then it is clear that the CU must reveal itself as a quadruplicity. Now, leaving aside for the moment the multiplicity of aspects of a totality, in open systems in any particular concrete instance, a multiplicity of mechanisms, specific differentiae, rhythmic processes and episodic events may all be at work as components of the concrete (whatever the focus of one's interest), so that the CU must be conceived at the very least as a multiplicity of quadruplicities or multiple quadruplicity.
For Hegel the concrete universal was constituted typically by a universal, a specific or particular and an individual or singular element; and these elements were inseparable, i.e. could not exist without each other. We can, of course, immediately ask Hegel (and even more pertinently, the British Hegelians) whether the CU is supposed to refer to something real or merely, in neo-Kantian fashion, imaginary; and, if the former, whether the universal is ultimately logico-divine (and therefore possessually space-time transcendent) or material (and so in space-time). Hegel's answer would be to reject the question. For him the real is ideal and the infinite is embodied. And his project is to establish this. So let us not pursue this point; but take up more concrete (less abstract) points of difference with Hegel. First, separability. In an experiment, otherwise efficacious determinants on causal outcomes are isolated out or otherwise controlled. This is demediation: the instantiation of a universal law in a singular, although of course normally replicable, instance or sequence. Second, let us take the missing term in Hegel. We have seen that once the Plateau-nic end is achieved, because everything is always stable, everything is always changing. The constellational closure of space-time is accompanied by the elimination of (post-Hegelian) structural change and thus of the concepts of periodicity and locality, as indispensable to socio-geo-historicity, where differential rhythmics or processes have to be related in an explanatory hierarchy of structural levels or modes articulated around transitions at the explanatorily most basic (or otherwise interesting) level or its rhythmic (and in relation to which other changes can be ordinated). A similar argument — from deep structural change — furnishes a minimal defence of some synchronic/diachronic distinction as necessary for explanatory social science. Third, Hegel's irrealism does not allow him the possibility of what I have called ‘referential detachment’, i.e. the ontological dislocation of referent from the act of reference, which in turn cannot be, in virtue of his commitment to the categorially duplicitous principle of subject-object (transitive-intransitive) identity, clearly differentiated from sense. Hence the genuine indexicality of sense of a word like ‘I’ becomes the impossibility of referential indexicality (and thence token-reflexivity) of a concrete singular, without which tensing, dating and locating (and hence any science, or even discourse, let alone geo-history) would become impossible. Finally, structures, including unknown ones, constituting sheer unactualized possibilities (which may embrace the dispositional identities of physical fields or agentive selves) or their transfactual efficacy in open systems manifest universalities without singularities — a situation which Hegel's actualism cannot permit.
But at this juncture we come head on to the multiple quadruplicity of the/a/some CU. In general in open systems we will be dealing with a constellation of mechanisms, mediations or differentiae and components of a conjuncture. Open systems characteristically make determination not only non-linear but also non-radical. The mediations may be mechanisms themselves or more or less idiographic contexts, episodes or objects (e.g. uniquely laminated structurata). Thus process was described earlier as the mode of spatio-temporalizing structure. However, there may be a number of such modes or rhythmics for any such structure; and in principle the same applies to the levels of specific mediation and concrete singularity. (Events or social singulars such as persons may have more than one rhythmic.) This gives us four modes of illicit abstraction, viz. destratification, deprocessualization, demediation and desingularization. But even this is too simple, taking into account 2E-4D desiderata. Elements at any one of the four levels of the CU may be totally or partially bound into totalities, and there may be internal relations between the levels Next 2E. Elements, whether internally related or not, may be efficacious as either absent or present, and if internally related, they may be dialectically contradictory or not, but this does not add a further difficulty of principle. Finally 4D. Human agency implicates a network of social relations, inter-personal action, intra- or inter-actions, material transactions with nature and inter-subjectivity that not only further complicates the CU but also requires investigative techniques sui generis as well as displaying an emancipatory conatus of its own, as I aim to show. Corresponding to 1M–4D requirements we have another set of four modes of illicit abstraction: destratification (again), denegativization, detotalization and de-agentification. Figure 2.14 illustrates multiple determination in the case of events. Figure 2.15 shows a case of the binding of structures in a totality codetermining a similarly based conjunctural context. Figure 2.16 depicts the basic concept of a CU as a multiple quadruplicity. But increasingly throughout this book I will be thematizing concrete singularity as the key to the realm of freedom, including the abolition of human heterology. As for the problems of individuation and articulation which I have left open, there is no resolution for them other than to allow this to be determined in the specific case by the theory or set of theories which maximizes explanatory power. Of course this will depend in part on one's explanatory objectives. This does not, however, subjectivize explanation. For there are clear principles of depth (stratification) and completeness (totality) which allow us to decide whether one theoretical, and, a fortiori, applied, explanation is better than another.
This allows me to move on to the final theme of this section — that of levels. If totality permits ‘within-ness’, levels allow ‘about-ness’. We have already witnessed it in the guise of ontological stratification providing both (α) the key to the 1M resolution of a whole class of philosophical problems of which the Platonic self-predicative (‘Third Man’) paradox and the problem of induction are the best known, and (β) the basic principle of theoretical explanation in science around which the DREI(C) model revolves, (α) resolves the problems of what I shall call, borrowing a term from Peter Manicas,83 'the transdictive complex', where transdiction for me connotes both the vertical or structural depth and horizontal or transfactually efficacious aspects of 1M transcendental realism. The basic principle behind the resolution of this problem-field turns around the concepts of ontological stratification and, as we shall see in C3, alethic truth, and the corresponding avoidance of vicious regress or cumulative homology, i.e. explaining something in terms of itself, rather than a new level of structure (or degree of completion or totality).
Is there a basic schema of applied scientific explanation? There is; and it is applicable in the fields of theoretical and practical reasoning alike. Like the theoretical model it has its primary progressive and secondary regressive moments. The first step in the explanation of some concrete phenomenon, say a conjunctural episode, composed, in the fashion of partial totalities, of both external and internally related elements, will be to resolve it into its components. The next step will be to redescribe these components in theoretically significant terms, so that the transfactually efficacious principles of theoretical science can be brought to bear on them. Then, employing those principles, taking into account the particular mediations and the operative geo-historical processes in the case at hand, to retrodict back to possible antecedent causes. Next, comes the elimination of what will always constitute a plurality of possible causes in open systems, until one has identified a full enough set (which may comprise a totality) of causes for a concrete applied explanation to have been said to have been provided, given one's explanatory objectives. There will almost always then follow a regressive movement in which the initial phenomenon is redescribed in the light of its causes. Hence we have the RRREI(C) model of applied scientific explanation, with the ‘C’ standing for correction. However, unlike theoretical explanation in at least many of the natural sciences, viz. from explanatory significant structures to their higher-order structural explanation, applied explanations of concrete singulars, like changes in a particular structuratum, are a much messier affair. In a dialectical pluriverse an event e at a level L is as likely to be (multiply) explained by elements at the same and lower-order levels in addition to higher-order (deeper) ones, and/or even laterally, diagonally, tangentially by elements not locatable in the categorial or generic order at all. Failure to distinguish theoretical and applied explanations, and to discriminate levels of abstraction, as well as topic, scope and perspective, have bedevilled disputes within Marxology in particular. In the first place we have here an intransitive object which is changing so that geo-historically specific theories, e.g. for contemporary ‘consumer capitalism’, are necessary. Second, one has to consider seriously whether a theory explicating the social presuppositions of capitalism and, allegedly, not just the contradictions and crises tendencies that flow from its deep structure but also its fundamental processual dynamic, should even attempt to explain relative prices (so that the ‘transformation problem’ may embody something akin to a fundamental category mistake). There is more than a hint of actualism here.
Alongside the ‘pure’ models of theoretical and applied scientific explanation, one can differentiate intermediate, regional, local-period- ized and idiographic studies exemplified by work on ecology, party politics. Fordism and biography respectively. Ontological extensionalism would disconnect and decompartmentalize phenomena. Despite my warnings about actualism and my stress on the complexity and differentiation of our world, dialectics will always strive to cut across disciplinary boundaries, as phenomena in a mish-mash world do, and to totalize, to draw together the intrinsically connected into an internally concrete (= well-rounded) whole.
Level-specific concepts, such as stratification, emergence, embedding, recursion, reflexivity, the dialectical comment (dc'), dialectical reason (dr'), are essential to the dialectics we have been investigating hitherto. It is therefore especially important to see that the concrete universal, and totality generally, do not negate, but depend upon them — just as the reverse is true. It is incompleteness (insufficient totality) in the shape of absence that must drive our dialectic on to consider non- and extra-Hegelian dialectics in the next section, before in §9 we turn to transformative agency itself as our paradigm.
Since §3 we have been witnessing a materialist dialectician on the scene, namely Marx, in counterposition to Hegel. In the present section I will be introducing motifs from other personnel, most notably Aristotle. Aristotelian dialectics, particularly in the notion of dialectical distinction (dd'), Kantian dialectics, most notably as dialectical limit (dl'), Derridean deconstruction, the Habermasian dialectical counterfactual ideal speech situation (and more generally his more recent theory of communicative action) and Engels, who I am summoning up here principally as the formulator of his so-called ‘dialectical’ laws, all share this feature in common with Marx's critique of and dialectical comment (dc') on political economy and capitalist society: namely that they must be understood as meta-level comments, and at least implicitly metacritical remarks, on some prior or pre-existing assertion, assumption or state of affairs (which need not be discursive). I am going to call such generalized comments, to discriminate them from Hegel's particular and limited dialectics (while possessing some connection with it), dialectical remarks. Such dialectical remarkers or their remarks typically find it difficult to detach themselves from the situation upon which they would remark. This may be regarded as typical of relational dialectics (and I will be viewing it in this light anon) but here I am more concerned to link it up to the theme of the all-pervasive presence of the past, to which it in a way testifies. My chief objective here is to press for a much more adequate and complex ontology than the one with which we have been hitherto provided. En route I hope to resolve the antinomy between deconstruction and speech action theory, showing it to be at once a case of the interdependence of the mediate and immediate and of the tacit complicity of dialectical antagonists. I will be developing the concept of a meta-reflexively totalizing situation to three main ends: (a) to show why we need not engage in the practice of Nietzschean forgetting (the truth of the talk about truth), Heideggerian erasure or Derridean play; (b) to redeem my earlier promise to show why, despite being ineluctably linguistified beings, we need not (epistemo-)logicize (or linguistify) being; and (c) to show how, despite its all-pervasiveness, we can escape the fate of being prisoners of the past. To illustrate this last point immediately here, the past brings possibilities and openings for the future and the best ‘ecstasis’ or orientation to it is one of creative transformative use of these.
The dialectical remark is characteristically contextualized, dependent upon the past and inexorably invoked and implicated in the hermeneutic and other struggles around ideologically discursively moralized power2 relations (into which Foucauldian ‘knowledge/ power’ can be inscribed, as will become clear in the next section). I shall start by focusing on ‘the philosopher’. But I am going to trifurcate Aristotle into Aristotle1, the actual historical philosopher to whom I referred in C1.6 and §5 in connection with ‘Aristotelian propaedeutics’; Aristotle2, a very broad-minded lover of wisdom who not only tolerates the dialectical suspension but also appreciates the dialectical over-reaching of analytical reason; and Aristotle3 a narrower (but by no means shallow) contemporary codifier of non-deductive procedures of inquiry.
I have already remarked on Aristotle's practice of dialectic as that of working through received opinions and aporiai until some sort of consensus was achieved as to a starting point for more rigorous-analytical — reasoning. Such an archē can be conceived as a dialectical comment or remark on the existing state of the subject. Now this procedure embodied two great insights. The first is that probative- introduction moves, such as that made possible by the decisive testing of genuine existential questions (which I am arguing the ontologically monovalent tradition cannot sustain), are just as important as — if not more so than - probative-derivation moves in science (and elsewhere). The second is that, provided that one remains tied to a particular level of ontological stratification, that is to say, that one cannot get a purchase on greater ontological depth (or, by 3L extension, totality), which I shall associated in C3 with a new alethic concept of truth, such dialectical non-deductive reasoning is the only way of augmenting the probative power — probative-augmentation — of a theory, position or proposition. Broad Aristotle2 sees the crossing in and out of the sphere of formal reasoning, in a dialectic of fact and meaning, as endemic to the hermeneutics of social life,84 understood as endlessly propaedeutic; even more to the point he sees it as essential to the creative and accomplished σ and τ transformations vital to the C1.9 epistemological dialectic in science which I have described in detail in earlier studies. Nietzsche would not have exaggerated if he had said that (a) meaning is and (b) truth depends upon a mobile army of metaphors — at least in science, as where in reading a contemporary research report in micro-physics one will find all manner of secondary and tertiary qualities, such as strangeness and colour, attributed to charges and particles (metaphors too) In his zoo the reader will find the bricolage of the past and outside ruthlessly and relentlessly exploited (what Bachelard politely referred to as scientific loans'). Here day is night and the exploitation of exterior cognitive, linguistic and material resources — of dead labour — whether affected by some lateral or polysemic condensation of the imagination, in a dream or over a cup of tea, (α) depends upon the bracketing of errors applicable only to signs fixed in meaning and assigned a uniform value (the `suspension') and (β) presupposes a transformative practice and social-relational network, mediated by inter-subjective dia-logical inconsistencies, for the consensual understanding necessary for the intelligibility of the formal derivation of the consequences of the conceptual mutation (the `over-reaching') Suspension, over-reaching and formal derivation are often co-occurrent facts of science. But both locally and globally the sciences are periodizable too. (Names: Copernicus, Galileo, Dalton, Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Aristotle [the formal logician and biologist].)
Aristotle3 codifies a non-deductive logic, in which (contra Aristotle2) meanings now remain stable,, at any level of discourse (so, for example there can be a discourse about meanings) but truth-values do not. This is essentially disputational in form. It proceeds by the assertion and contra-diction (denial), whether categorical cautious or provisoed; qualification, distinction, limitation (the move I have already connected with Kant as, metacritically, in effect, a dialectial comment on pre-critical metaphysics) and refinement of theses. This kind of dialectic — as ordered and disputational controversy between antagonists, typically a proponent and opponent of some thesis — has pre-Socratic origins, corresponds to the Roman and medieval tourneys or jousts or combat, to put it in Habermasian language, by the force of the better argument, and has been in contemporary times itself admirably mooted by Nicholas Rescher.85
Aristotelian3 dialectics has a number of interesting features. First, although two (or more) parties are in an obvious sense in contradiction, which is indeed, as in Hegel, the mechanism of the dialectic, the principle of non-contradiction is not broached, as in Marx, in the sense that the same person cannot both assert and denv the same proposition p at the same (space-)time in the same respect (including from the same perspective) in the same context (e.g. moot), definitionally at the same level of discourse. Second, as in intuitionism and constructivism, the law of excluded middle fails. Neither p nor -p may be the case for all the evidence to hand; that is, we may have to attribute a third epistemic truth-value — undecidability.86 Third, negation does not annul; instead, it typically takes the form of refinement (e.g. by a suitable qualification). And double negation does not reinstate the original thesis, but takes the form of its progressive refinement; so that the dialectic is cumulative and increasingly mediated. Fourth, it is inexorably (geo-)historical. Each utterance can be understood only in the context of what has gone before. Each such remark may be regarded as a dialectical comment on the one preceding it. As such, in an Aristotelian3, as in Hegelian, dialectic a position never sheds its probative origins, and any distinction between context of discovery and justification falls down. Next, let us consider what Rescher has dubbed ‘the most characteristic and creative of dialectical moves’:87 distinction (dd'). A disputant may be prepared to accept that P supports Q but contend that the operative situation is not P itself, but say P and R — P qualified by the presence of R — and that this motivates against rather than for Q — in effect a dialectical comment on it. In quasi-Hegelian terms a new mediation or determination has been added to the developing argumentative structure, which becomes progressively richer, in a not dissimilar way to that in which the category ‘being’ cumulatively unfolds to appear as the absolute idea in the Logics, and eventually absolute spirit in the System.
Finally, let us turn to what is perhaps the most interesting feature of the species of dialectic: the failure of detachment. In deductive logic one can argue from ‘if P then Q’ and ‘P’ to ‘Q’. But in Aristotelian3 dialectics one can at best argue from, say, P on the condition R to Q normally, generally, usually or ceteris paribus, or as a rule obtains, that is to say, writing Q/P, and dropping the condition R for expository convenience, one cannot detach Q from Q/P. Now looked at from a single-tiered (e.g. empirical realist) standpoint this is indeed the case in open systems. But this is so with all laws in such systems, which must be interpreted ‘normically’.88 But if we break free of the grip of actualism, and no longer see laws as empirical regularities, accept the ontological stratification posited by critical realism, then laws can be conceived as transfactually (universally) efficacious, even if their consequences are, as they normally are, outside the laboratory, unactualized. Detachment now does occur. Q is a real agency in the conjuncture, but it is now no longer interpreted actualistically (or empirically). This remains ontologically true of laws, whether or not we have epistemic grounds for asserting a particular law. Rescher's actualism and failure to differentiate ontological from epistemological considerations (the hallmark of the epistemic fallacy) leads him to confuse the ontological status of law-like generalizations with our (geo-)historical evidence for asserting them. In his actualism he mirrors the real Aristotle (and Hegel).
The reason why detachment fails in Aristotelian3 dialectics is twofold. The first is the ‘vertical’ actualism that would deny any ontological stratification. Now Aristotle did indeed seek (and sometimes find) good scientific explanations, but he failed to theorize ontological structure and he plugged the gap between induction and the deducibility (of a tendency), achievable at the Lockian or Leibnizian moment in science, with nous or, to anachronisticallv apply a Feuerbachian line of criticism, his own not inconsiderable intellectual intuition, as already noted in C1.6. But even if Aristotle had successfully accomplished the vertical leap to ontological stratification, his ‘horizontal’ actualism, of which the symptoms are his aporiai of matter, and accident,89 that is, his absence of the concept of transfactually efficacious tendencies (in any of the senses I distinguished earlier) in a differentiated, as well as structured, and open, world, would have let him down and made detachment impossible. If Aristotle's scientific analytics depends upon his dialectics, no Aristotelian science could ever get off the ground. Mutatis mutandis, the same considerations tell against Kant's and Hegel's actualism too. The absence of a concept of a transfactually efficacious natural necessity means that without their (so I shall show) illicit resort to the synthetic a priori and Geist, detachment should have failed them too. It is Hegel's merit, by seeing the dialectical process as always dependent upon a cumulative memory store (or ‘negative referral’), to have realized this. But I shall argue that, on any plausible epistemological interpretation, Hegel makes science impossible.
Before going on to explain legitimate senses in which, in virtue of the presence of the past or outside, detachment may be said to fail, it is worth adding a word or two on dialectic as argument. This leads back to the etymologically primordial sense of dialectic as the art of dialogue or conversation. And post-Schleiermachian hermeneutics may be regarded as a form of dialectic, with the four characteristic hermeneutical circles, each involving a fusion of horizons (in the Gadamerian image) or meaning-frames — of inquiry, communication, inquiry-into-communication and inquiry-into-text or text-analogue90 — be they real or groundedly imputed — seen as dialogical or dialectical ones. This gives us an important range of connotations of the term of dialectic to which I shall return.
I now want to pass from the logical (or more properly ontological) failure of detachment, rooted in actualism, to the real material spatio-temporal failure of detachment. Specifically I will be thematizing the presence of the past, and analogously of the intrinsic outside, in four basic modes — breaking from the (α) ego-present-anthro-centric, (β) punctualist and (γ) blockist conceptions of space-time characteristic of the irrealist tradition. One way (corresponding to one mode) is to think of existentially constitutive geo-historical process as the 2E counterpart to the existentially constitutive intra-active (internal) relationality at 3L discussed in the previous section. I will be motivating the presence of the past (and outside) in a much stronger sense than as a ‘negative presence’ in the moving finger of punctual time in a cumulative memory store such as in Hegelian dialectic, although I would not underplay the role of memory and one of my main modes will involve what I will call ‘strong negative presence’. My argument will also rum on stronger considerations than the partiality of all transformations, important again though this is, especially for the critique of voluntarism. This motif, considered as signifying the absence of the past (one of the four contraries of the presence of the past), has recently been much fussed over by Žižek under the rubric of ‘vanishing mediators’.91 But vanishing, or absenting, is integral to any non-preservative transformative negation, or transformative practice; and it is the fate of everything finite to perish, and thus truistic to say that all, not just some (as Žižek seems to suppose), mediators must vanish.
My four primary modes can be distinguished as:
(α) existential constitution;
(β) co-presence;
(γ) lagged or delayed efficacy;
(δ) agentive perspectivality.
(α) This first mode includes mere containment, mentioned in §2 The sense in which the geo-history of a thing is constitutive of its nature or identity is different from the sense in which a thing would not be what it is but for its process of spatio-temporal formation. The former — process-embodied-in-product — from an essential disposition to a merest trace (such as that of a pox-marked face), represents a clear sense of failure of material detachment (as distinct from the latter — a mere product of a process). It may sometimes be difficult to decide between the two in geo-historiography. Was the countryside constitutive of the mid-eighteenth-century town? (α) may be manifest collectively as ritual, habitus, tradition; individually as routine But it may be petrified, congealed, inert. As we are in the realm of the fourfold polysemy of real negation discussed in §6, let us consider the other senses. First the past may be present as product. For instance, a statue as dead labour, literally past commodified time Or as sediment, residue, deposit. Think of a disused coal site. Or of soot or dust. Or, and here we intersect with (β), think of the paradigm of the presence of the past as a rock containing layers of many ages a compound or condensate or different epochs. Or, if it be said that this is merely a case of overlapping durations,* think of a tree trunk as cohering as a whole. Secondly, the past may be present as product-in-(actual or potential) process — in any form from the possibility of cognitive exploitation (of the kind that Darwin used in constructing his theory) to the onset of a neurosis, the origins of which lie in early childhood (cf. paradigm γ).
*Even this constituting a case of (β), instances the presence of the past. To get an empirical purchase on overlapping spatio-temporalities we must choose a zero- or base-level space-time. In explanatory contexts the choice should be made in terms of the most explanatory significant rhythmic; for merely nominal purposes convention or consensus will suffice.
(β) We have already examined the dialectics of the co-presence of the past in the present (in §3 above). This depends on differentially distanciated space-times, established by disjoint, and possibly contradictory, rhythmics. This paradigm includes the ‘intersecting’ combination of rhythmically differentially sedimented structures on a single episode, such as that illustrated in §2 by the Queen's opening of Parliament; or by the launch of a ship; or a visit to a ‘theme park’ (but here the rhythmics, although intransitive, are ‘virtual’ so that the phrase ‘virtual reality’ is not a misnomer). Again the past may be encrusted, embedded in a landscape, say, or as an active part of the present. This is perhaps the point to state that in the case of all the modes I am discussing the past may be present as transfactual or actual, latent or manifest, agentive (and, if so, as living or dead) or not; it may have been continuously or discontinuously present; it may be internally related to other elements of the past and/or present and/or to processes oriented to and/or in anticipation of the future, and it may be present in a positive or negative mode. To illustrate this last prima facie paradoxical form, consider the presence of the absence (in the simple sense established in §1) of men of fighting age in Budapest after the uprising of 1956, which may be causally efficacious even now in 1993. It is worth stressing the role that explanatorily grounded localization/periodization plays within an internally tensed distanciated space-time in the dialectics of co-inclusion. Although the loco-periodization is a transitive act, the locations and periods are real, grounded in the real differentiations and changes in underlying (explanatorily significant) structures. There may be any number of important processes within a location/ period and hence any number of potentially different tenses, coordinated by the most explanatory significant or just a conventional base or zero-level space-time.
(γ) This takes me to my third paradigm of lagged, delayed potential or realized efficacy carried across a (spatio-)temporal level-specific void. This, which has an obvious paradigm in psychoanalytic explanation, is the temporal analogue of action at a distance. We can see it literally as such, when with powerful telescopes the past in some distant region of space is perceptually present to us now. (γ) depends upon explicit recognition of causality as not only a perfectly proper criterion for ascribing reality, but also that upon which the empiricist ‘esse est percipi’ ultimately depends. No one should underestimate the causal grip that the past exercises on any present, however inert it may appear to be. Think of a volcano. I referred earlier to Hegelian ‘negative presence’. One could develop a concept of ‘strong negative presence’ in the case of causally efficacious memory, but as the remembered is always liable to play a causal role and we are no longer dealing with purely Hegelian dialectic I would prefer not to embark on that road.
(δ) Perspective is ineliminable in dialectic. In §9 I shall discuss the duality of social structure and human agency as transcendentally necessary conditions for each other. So it might be thought that they are on a par. But from the agent's point of view they are not. She is always treading on pre-trodden ground. Wherever she goes ‘metaphorically’ there has always been someone else before. She is always — from birth to death — living in a pre-constituted world. She is always living in the past.
This discussion is connected to absence in the tree diagram (Figure 2.17) illustrating, inter alia, the recursive embeddedness required for the more complex ontology I am seeking to develop.
I mentioned earlier that the presence of the past has (at least) four contraries. The two most obvious ones are (a) the absence of the past, which needs no further discussion once non-preservative determinate negation (including ‘vanishing mediators’) is situated, and (b) the presence of the future. Now I have already argued in §4 above against the possibility of backwards causation, i.e. an effect preceding its cause. So the sense(s) in which the future is present has to be different from the sense in which the past is present, viz. as (potentially determining) determined. But I am going to argue in C3.6 for the reality of both time and tensing, the irreducibility of tense and the reality of the future. So it would seem prima facie paradoxical if I was to be committed to the reality of the future but not its presence. In fact I am going to argue that, if the future is paradigmatically shaped possibility of becoming (a possibility which may be closer or more distant from us, more or less about, and more or less likely to be actualized), the presence of the future is a perfectly kosher locution, but that it is always mediated by the presence of the past (up to the limit of the indefinite present). Thus we have to think the concept of the presence of the future as the presence-of-the-future-in-the-past-in-the-present. There are parallels or analogues of all at (α) -(δ).
(α') Pregnancy is constitutive geo-historical process of coming-to-be. Or consider the anthropic and/or causal closing of possibilities as an impeding event comes upon us. Or the pre-programming of a genetic code. Or a time bomb. Or salivation, exacerbated by routine (the presence of the past). As structured, entities such as people and institutions contain various possibilities (powers, liabilities and tendencies of the type discussed in §4, including recursively the power to acquire powers) some of which are more likely to materialize than others. (This is why the future must be seen as increasingly shaped possibility.) And so there is a sense in which we, and entities generally, may be said to contain possible futures within us, and these may be vital to our being. But there is also a sense in which these possible futures are so qua product-in-process, that is, as possibilities existentially constituted by their geo-histories; and therefore a sense in which the most interesting case of the present as a future is mediated by or even dependent upon the presence of the past.
(β') By symmetry of argument it could be said that the dialectics of co-inclusion must allow for the presence of the future. If x, a tensed past, is co-included within y, then y must be a tensed future co-included within x. But there is a trap here. The dialectics of co-inclusion is made possibly by the necessary but indefinite temporal stretching of an episode, event, or period. It lies either in the past or in the present. And in the latter case it defines a boundary state between what is determined and determinate and what is, even if it is practically inevitable, not yet. Suppose we are in an episode which is ongoing, tense is defined by the moment of becoming in the episode we are in. If we are living in or constituted by a multiplicity of differential rhythmic processes then we may indeed have to talk about the simultaneity of non-simultaneous becomings. There are two considerations here. Suppose we are in a episode which is ongoing, tense is defined by the moment of becoming in that particular episode. And in the case of differential rhythmics, if coordination is by reference to a future, the grounds for its expected causal efficacy must lie in the past and its not having become remains unaffected. Secondly, some socio-geo-historical processes representing world-lines which are future in respect of some other notional or possible world-lines are always past, in the sense of existentially intransitive and determined, in respect of any observer's/classifier's/ explainer's world-line, and so can only be known as past, and so as mediated by the past, relationally. We will never come across a future which is either determinate or completely closed.
(γ') The correlate of lagged efficacy is the role that anticipation, planning and projects play in action. The future is prevalent in the geo-historically mediated social present, from ‘futures markets’ and discount rates in the economy to trust in railway timetables or a parent's return. But we need not look so far away for the analogue of the presence of the past here. For the very paradigm of intentional agency is defined by its orientation to the future: rational agency is well grounded and executed intentional bringing about of a state of affairs that of necessity lies in the future and (unless it is overdetermined) would not have otherwise occurred, even if this event is only a redescription of the past. The future is the intentional object of every act. But it is always in a present and mediated by some past.
(δ') Does the transcendental perspectival switch have an analogue? Yes. For agents can, while deposited in the past, prefigure in their transformative praxis the future. A minimal condition for this would be that it be insofar as possible consistent with the intentional object of the praxis (ends/means consistency). But prefigurative politics should in some sense embody as a promissory note the vision of the future society it aims to bring about.
The two other contraries of the presence of the past worth mentioning are (c) the absence of the present and (d) the presence of the present. (c) has two paradigms. The first is provided by the observation of a distant present, which I will discuss in C3 6 The second is yielded by the phenomena of lapsed time, most obviously when asleep, but also in the case where a phenomenon is described as ‘late’ or, to take the opposite case, when the contemporary is described as ‘post’. This depends upon some present context being loco-periodized in a putatively explanatory or, perhaps, tendentially predictive theory. Once more the intelligibility of this locution depends upon the mediation of the presence of the past in senses (α)–(δ) above. The final contrary, (d) — the presence of the present the obverse of (c), paradigmatic simultaneity — only has a philosophically or sociologically interesting meaning when it is once again taken as mediated by the presence of the past. In short, the past is all pervasive.
In the sequel to this book, Dialectical Social Theory, I will set about developing the complex ontology that is required for a dialectical social theory fully adequate to the dialectical pluriverse in which we must act, and which in the next section I am going to begin to explore. Here I have time for only a few general pointers. First we should note the significance of the possibilities of recursive embedding, systematic intermingling and multiple mediation of concepts and their referents Thus we have noted how the transfactual efficacy of a tendency processually exercised through a rhythmic, may be multiply mediated by specific differentiate before contributing to the multiple determination, via the intentional causality of agency of a mixed (naturally circumscribed, socially-materially conditioned, contextually positioned) conjuncturally bound result. But the rhythmic may itself be transfactual, and the mediation processually spatio-temporalized, and the structured system which exercises its causal powers may, like any part of the ‘causal chain’, systematically cohere in a nexus or totality, which contains, as the ground of or as grounded in, dialectically contradictory radically negating tendencies. A stratified schema is represented in Figure 2.18. Take an even simpler case. In Figure 2.19 we have iconic representations of natural or social absences and hidden depths.
In §4 I distinguished different concepts of causal powers and tendencies. But one might well ask why cannot causal powers not just be processually exercised, but there be powers to process (consider ‘maturing’, ‘growing’, ‘developing’)? And, of course, one must think of the power (or liability) to acquire powers or needs; give full weight to the implicit, the latent; the delayed and distant; allow relations to be as real as their relata; break down, as the concept of the fourfold polysemy of real negation discussed in §6 does, the distinction between process and product, that is, see the synchronic/diachronic distinction, although realistically justifiable, as not categorially constitutive, any more than the distinction between the large and the small is. Considerations of this sort indicate that the geo-historicization of social theory is long overdue and that concepts like centre and periphery, with the periphery representing a marginalized (de-totalized) more or less essential split-off, may be as useful as (or more so than) the macro/micro contrast. Pursuing my catalogue, we must allow for a disjunctive plurality in addition to a conjunctive multiplicity of causes in open systems, and when one thinks causality, think in terms of categories of negation and their derivatives (such as contradiction); conceptualize intra- as well as inter-activity, -dependence and -connection; investigate both margins of inquiry in totalities, etc. Formalization can play a role here too — thus modal, relevance and tense logics have illuminated structure, differentiation and change respectively.
I now want to take the antinomy between Habermas (and more generally speech action theorists such as Searle) and Derrida (and deconstructionists generally) as illustrating the tacit complicity of dialectical antagonists to which I referred to §§4 and 6. I may here perhaps be guilty of anachronism in interpreting Derrida as a transcendental philosopher and dialectical commentator, as the disseminating remarker between 1967 and 1974 (i.e. up to Glas). His main dialectical comment has been on the traditional hierarchies of philosophy, from speech/writing on, which he typically juxtaposes, then inverts and subjects his inversion to erasure. It is less contentious to see Habermas as a transcendental philosopher and dialectical commentator from Knowledge and Human Interests (also 1967) on. Thus in his development of the concept of an ideal speech situation in the seventies, he metacritically claims to show how what is everywhere presupposed by communicative interaction is counterfactual, i.e. seldom if ever (and then only partially) realized. In a sense the communicants are guilty of performative contradiction, and form a normative Tina formative compromise. He then goes on to develop his counterfactual commentary in The Theory of Communicative Action into a systematic metacritique of the colonization of ‘life world’ by ‘system’ under the auspices of the steering media of money and power.92 Habermasians and speech action theorists can point out that Derrida is no Cratylus: he obviously intends to be read, and so communicate, which presupposes a necessary minimum quotient of logocentricity, and is thereby guilty of self-referential paradox. Deconstructionists, on the other hand, can respond by pointing out how the critiques of action theorists rely upon all kinds of unreflected metaphors and tropes, the genealogy and sense of which they do not even begin to thematize, invoking the non-self-present, tacit, past, absent, networks of networks, and more generally the tacit presuppositions of infrastructural spacing, iterability and so on, in practice self-deconstructing themselves. Thus we have a stalemate in which both sides accuse the other of self-referential paradox.
I will concentrate on the tradition which
begins with Nietzschean negligence, traverses Heideggerian
being and can only end in
writing itself out by erasure. But it is not my
intention here to take sides. Properly conceived
the programmes of deconstructive semiotics and
reconstructive hermeneutics are not only consistent but
interdependent, betokening the interdependence of the
mediate and the immediate,* the duality of structure and
agency, characterized by non-arbitrary
dialectical interconnection. What they share in common is
an irrealist, unstratified, actualist, and arguably a
punctualist and/or blockist and/or closed ontology —
and in particular an insufficiently stratified and
distanciated concept of the self and space-time.
* I shall want to insist on this point. Axiologically, and from the standpoint of practice (and hermeneutics), no action or understanding or communication would be possible — without interminable regress — unless some actions,93 including perceptions, were just done and sentences simply understood, not by virtue of other actions or sentences. Conversely, ontologically, and from the standpoint of theoretical reason (and semiotics), arguably any action, including our discourse, would be impossible except on the basis of an indefinitely extended geo-historical formation of the conditions that make basis actions and understandings possible.
The paradigm of the tradition of writing sous rature — under erasure — is that of the Nietzschean theses of the necessity and impossibility of knowledge, requiring an active forgetting of the illusory character of truth. But what is necessary is not what is untenable. It is not science, experience, signification, etc. which are untenable but metaphysical conceptions of them, on which the Nietzschean tradition imposes a quite appropriate dialectical comment. What it replaces them with are concepts like the trace structure of the sign, metaphoricity, etc. which are indeed conditions of the possibility of science and the like.* But it holds these equally to be conditions of their impossibility in that they cannot be lived by the agents concerned. And this depends upon unreflected and transcendentally refuted concepts of agency, experience, space-time, generally upon an unacceptable ontology. Let us take a temporarily stretched and spatially spread practice like a research project. Consider an agent N's participation in, say, an experimental programme. Amidst a multiplicity of practices and spatio-temporal paths she engages in a distanciated and self-reflexively monitoring participation in a particular aspect of it. Suppose she has to test, as a member of the research team, a particle's spin. She is focusing on untying a knot in a cord. She is competently doing so. She is aware of the role of her task in the context of the overall programme and in the context of the hierarchy and plurality of projects with their own rhythmics in her life. She could recall last night's TV, she is aware that she has an unconscious, that the sign has a trace structure, of the metaphoricity of language use, the very language she is using now, that she is subject, in a multiplicity of dimensions, to the inertial drag of the past and its delayed causal efficacy. She knows that she will die as so much cosmic dust at the same time as she is untying the knot and attending to the matter at hand; just as she knows about, and perhaps is skilfully employing, the metaphoricity of language while chatting to a colleague about last night's TV. She knows all this in a meta-reflexively totalizing (reflection on her praxis and) situation of her life. She is a stratified agent engaged in transformative practice, including intersubjective communication, immediately understood because mediately contextualized in an extended (non-punctualist) and open (non-blockist) stretch of time, who, in virtue of a being a stratified self, no more has to forget her Nietzsche in untying a knot than lose her capacity to speak French in saying ‘yes please’. This is illustrated in Figure 2.20, which will be amplified further anon. If one wanted to ask in what did such an agent's subjectivity or self consist, one could reply only that it consisted in her dispositional identity with her (changing) causal powers. To be is to be able to come to do.
* A more nuanced judgement of these Derridean concepts would have to note his elision of the referent from the semiotic triangle which I will develop in C3.2, the exaggerated character of Derridean claims and his relative silence on material infrastructures.
The same concept of a meta-reflexively totalizing situation allows the agent to understand both that her engagement with reality is inexorably linguistic and that reality must be referentially detached from her language use in a recognition of alterity or existential intransitivity that is a transcendental presupposition of the satisfaction of our most bodily urges. Her baby must ‘intuit’ the reality principle, perhaps first disclosed by the absence of her breast, just as she must understand the complicated experimental project in which she is at work. This can be put another way. At the level of ontogeny, language is being-expressive. But at the level of ontology, once we metacritically detach ourselves from the premisses of our transcendental argument, we can come to see that a world without humanity is a condition of the possibility of everything we call ‘human’, that the epistemic–ontic, expressive–referential duality of function of language which occurs within language is ontologically within an overarching objectivity. Only this standpoint allows us to ask the existential question that the tradition of monovalence forecloses; can we as a species survive and flourish? In C4 I will show the metacritical effects of not asking this question, which presupposes the possibility, for most of actualized space-time, of being without Dasein or human being. Figure 2.21 attempts to depict this situation. In C3 I will show how a genuinely ontological, rather than merely ontic, concept of truth is possible (and used).
It is also the concept of a meta-reflexively totalizing situation that allows us to appreciate how we can have a future despite the saturation of social (and to an extent natural) life with the past. We make use of some part or aspect of it against other parts to transform the transformative situation in which we must act or die. We change the mediations which project us into the future, and in so doing we claim it as our own.
Engels is the first of a line of dialectical commentators on both the Marx-Hegel relationship and the scientificity of Marx's metacritique of political economy. I promised to say something about Engels's dialectical laws. These, he argued in his Dialectics of Nature, can be ‘reduced in the main to three’ — viz. (1) the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; (2) the interpenetration of opposites; and (3) the negation of the negation. There are ambiguities in Engels's various discussions. It is unclear whether the laws are supposed to be more or less a priori truths or super-empirical generalizations; and whether they are indispensable for scientific practice or merely convenient expository devices. Besides the notorious arbitrariness of Engels's examples, the relevance of his dialectics for Marxism, conceived as a nascent social science, may be questioned, especially as Engels is opposed to any reductive materialism. While the evidence strongly indicates that Marx agreed with the general thrust of Engels's intervention, his own analysis of capitalism neither presupposed nor entailed any dialectics of nature. At the same time his critique of a priorism, mentioned in §5, implies the a posteriori and subject-specific character of claims about the existence of dialectical or other types of processes in reality. The relations between the Marxian, Engelsian and Hegelian positions can be represented as in Figure 2.22.
Engels's first law specifies dialectical thresholds, and might be exemplified by the phenomena of emergence, and levels generally. Its ancestry clearly lies in Hegel's nodal line of measure relations. Despite Engels's examples, transcendental arguments are constructable to the effect that in an originating, developing, non-reductionist totality at least the transformation of some quantitative into qualitative differences must be true, although, of course, as such it licenses no particular empirical claim. In any event Mao was wrong to reduce it to a special case of a second law which, after Stalin had abolished the third law, increasingly discharged the burden of the Marxian dialectic. A cynic might take the second law's popularity as referring to the ‘interpenetration’ between the USSR and the West. The term ‘opposite’ is notoriously vague, while ‘interpenetration’ suggests 3L dialectical connection without any necessary contradiction (which was perhaps why Stalin continued to approve of it). Insofar as it is supposed to stand for the unity, qua interdependency (which may take the form merely of existential dependency or internal relationality; or of tacit complicity; or of conflict, e.g. around a structure of domination), of dialectical antagonists, it may be highly contingent, localized and variable. But it is clearly meant to designate such phenomena as the internal relationality of proletarians and capitalists in capitalist society — which is not saying very much, especially if the tacit implication is that the abolition of the wage contract will result in the toppling of the potential transfinity of relations of subjugation (power2 relations). It is the third law which has the clearest meaning. In fact, in its Hegelian and Stalinist forms, it stands for the cancellation of contradiction. But in its Marxian and dialectical critical realist forms it indicates the geo- historical transformation of geo-historical products. As such it is a genuine dialectical comment on Hegelian preservative dialectical sublation. Moreover, insofar as it designates the absenting of absence, it correctly specifies what I am arguing dialectic is. Hegel lost not absence — of this he is full — but the concept of absence. In virtue of this absenting, plenitude, repletion, saturation (and the restoration of monovalence — positivity) were, it was hoped, secured. In it this ‘third law’ mediated by the tri-unity of (empirically grounded) causality, transformative praxis and (irreducibly specific and spatializing) tense that is crucial to any dialectic of human emancipation.
I have treated Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Habermas and Derrida as dialectical commentators and introduced the concept of a meta-reflexively totalizing reflection and situation. It might be asked what is the dialectical status of this book. This is not the place for reflexivity, which I will attempt in due course. But in the meantime it can be thought of as a dialectical comment on dialectic. Moreover, it stakes a further claim: namely to achieve the dialectically rational resolution of the contradictions and lacunae it identifies in hitherto dialectics, namely in dialectical critical realism. It is a metacritica1 comment at the τ transformation of C1.9, where I sketched a Hegelian (epistemological) dialectic — the basic form of which Marx rightly claimed Hegel glimpsed only to envelop (and transfigure) in mysticism. Whether it has succeeded in this is only for the reader to judge at the end of the book.
In this section I want to explain what critical realism has done; why, unwittingly, jt is a perfect vehicle for, or at least an exemplar of, social dialectics; and why, despite this, it must be itself dialecticized, and further generalized and substantialized. In prefigurative application of this I shall show both how the mechanism at the core of critical naturalism, the transformational model of social activity (henceforth TMSA), is a model of transformative praxis, absenting the given (and typically driven by and against absence) — that is, a model of transformative negation, now understood as incorporating the essential insights of §7 and §8, viz. the intra-active relational and geo-historical processual constitution of social products (people, institutions, etc.); and how the two-way interlocking pair of transcendental arguments necessitating a conceptualization of the duality (with the vital hiatus) of structure and agency establish, on the one hand, (α) in the argument from agency to structure, the possibility of a dislocated dialectics of structure and agency, and, on the other, (β) in the argument from structure to agency, through the theorem of the necessary embodiment of intentional causality, the inexorable spatio-temporality of social life, and a fortiori its processual (and contingently globalizing) character. (α) connects to the refrain of the presence of the past, (β) to that of emergent and differential rhythmics. Significantly (α) portends the negative (and other) generalizations of the TMSA, which, in my initial formulations of it, still bore the imprint of ontological monovalence.
Four dialectically interdependent planes constitute social life, which together I will refer to as four-planar social being, or sometimes human nature. These four planes are (a) of material transactions with nature; (b) of inter-personal intra- or inter-action; (c) of social relations; and (d) of intra-subjectivity. Important discriminations must be made at each level, thus at (c) we can differentiate power (including hegemonic/counter-hegemonic), discursive and normative relations (to which there correspond at [b] power, communicative and moral relations). And within the power sub-dimension of what I have characterized as the ‘social cube’, which I will briefly summarize below, it is essential both to distinguish between power1, as the transformative capacity intrinsic to the concept of agency as such, and power 2 as the (possessed, exercised, mobilized, manifest, covert, indirect, mediated or their contraries; globally, nationally, regionally, sectorally, locally; economic, political, military, symbolic, etc.; more or less ideologically legitimated or discursively moralized, more or less resisted or opposed, more or less successfully, etc.*) transf actually efficacious capacity to get one's way against either (i) the overt wishes and/or (ii) the real interests of others (grounded in their concrete singularities); and to thematize the plurality, which approximates to a potential transfinity of power2 or generalized master–slave-type relationships from class and gender to age and ethnicity.
* Needless to say all these, and other differentiations which could be added, transmute power from Steven Lukes's ‘3-dimensional’ to a poly-dimensional concept.
The use of the notion of generalized master–slave relations is deliberate. For in the first place, one can map certain general attitudes, from the sections immediately following Hegel's master–slave dialectic, which are conventionally associated with geo-historical periods, on to contemporary orientations to relations of domination, exploitation, subjugation and control. Thus to stoicism, corresponds indifference, and to scepticism the denial (or rather denegation — rejection in theory, acceptance in practice) of those relations. And one can align the unhappy consciousness (with which the chapter ends) to two phases, namely (i) the introjective internalization of the master's viewpoint or aspirations or ideology and/or (ii) the projective duplication of what the slave, lacking the imaginary world of religion (Kantian ‘rational faith’), finds in fantasy, film or soap in a surrogate compensatory existence.* In the second place, use of the master–slave trope enables us to pinpoint a characteristic feature of the capitalist mode of production: the exploitative relation intrinsic to the wage-labour/capital contract is hidden at the level of inter-personal transactions by fetishism and the causally efficacious category mistakes upon which it depends. This is one reason why any emancipatory axiology under capitalism requires the methodological resources of a depth-explanatory critical social science of the kind critical realism aspires to provide.**
* In Hegel scepticism is the archetypal figure for theory–practice inconsistency, as the unhappy consciousness is for split. At the same time the stoic may be regarded as the paradigmatic detotalizer.
** As Anthony Giddens's model of structuration is similar to the TMSA it might be worth noting that (1) a tendential voluntarism prevents Giddens from undertaking the negative generalization that dislocates structure from agency (a position championed from such different positions on the sociological compass as adopted by Margaret Archer and Ernesto Laclau alike) and (2), as Alex Callinicos has correctly pointed out, he fails to differentiate power as analytic to action (power1) from power expressed in relations of, albeit reversible, domination (power2).94
As critical naturalism is relatively well known, and since I have elaborated it in detail elsewhere,95 I will restrict myself to a statement of its most distinctive features. It attempts to overcome three dichotomies: (a) in opposition to the voluntaristic tendencies of the Weberian and the reificatory ones of the Durkheimian traditions alike, it articulates a conception, the TMSA, upon which social structure is a necessary condition for, and medium of, intentional agency, which is in turn a necessary condition for the reproduction or transformation of social forms; (b) against both individualist and collectivist conceptions of social science it argues (i) that all social life is embedded in a network (say a partial totality in the sense of §7) of social relations, and, more contentiously, (ii) that social relations constitute the paradigmatic subject-matter of social science and (iii) that social identities are constituted relationally, viz. in virtue of the changing/differentiating system of differences and/or changes; and (c) in contrast to positivistic hyper-naturalism and hermeneutical anti-naturalism, it claims to give an account — critical naturalism — of how the social sciences can be sciences in the same sense as the experimental sciences of nature, but in ways which are as different from the latter as they are specific to the nature of societies. Transformationalism. Relationism. Critical naturalism.
(a) is argued by showing, on the one hand, that intentional causality would be impossible without material causes which pre-existed it; and, on the other, that social material causes exist only in virtue of the embodied intentional agency which reproduces and/or transforms them. Thus we have the connected themes of (α) the duality of structure and agency — with the hiatus preventing a reductionist collapse in either direction; and (β) the duality of mediation and transformation — with the hiatus enabling non-substantial process and disembedding mechanisms. At the heart of this conception is the idea of praxis comprising the transformative negation, or change, of the given. Think of sewing, cooking a meal, or making conversation. Doing is making. Homo faber. At the same time this transformative activity reproduces and/or more or less transforms, for the most part unwittingly, its conditions of possibility, including, most notably, what, when fleshed out, appear as social structures and their generative mechanisms (e.g. ways of cooking, making micro-chips or production generally), the agent herself and, generally, what was given, the donné, and which has now been reproduced or transformed (e.g. by consumption, dissipation or less drastic changes). Figure 2.23 illustrates the basic model. The relationship between the social structure which constrains or enables the human agency which reproduces or transforms it can be regarded as mediated by process, the way in which structural powers are exercised and their causal effects materialize. This is the general form of the spatio-temporality of social life. Figure 2.24 situates the TMSA as a species of transformative negation. The TTTTφ (to which I have already alluded) stands for the transformed (autoplastic), transformative (alloplastic), totalizing, transformist (oriented to deep structure global and dialectically universal change) praxis which may come to reverse a simple dialectic such as
absence → alterity → detotalization (alienating split-off or marginalization) → impotent self.
It should be noted that unintended consequences and unacknowledged conditions at the level of social structure and unconscious motives and tacit skills at the level of human agency immediately afford social science a cognitively enhancing and putatively emancipatory role. I will return to the negativization of the TMSA made necessary by the critique of monovalence when the other basic features of critical naturalism have been demonstrated
(b), at least (b) (i), is readily understood. Try the mental experiment of subtracting from society for a moment the human agency required for it to be an ongoing affair. What we are left with are dual points of articulation (and process) of structure and agency, which are the differentiated and changing positioned-practices human agents occupied, engaged, reproduced or transformed, defining the system of social relations in which human praxis is embedded
(c) is also relatively easily established, on the premiss that the tensed intentional causal agency upon which the TMSA depend. entails that the social field is open. But one can quite easily establish this empirically. There are no explanatory significant empirical regularities yielded by social science, so the social domain is de facto open. To establish the limits on naturalism let us take, say, inorganic chemistry as a comparative backdrop (although in principle a variety of sciences should be considered96). The activity-dependence of social structures entails its auto-poietic character, viz. that it is itself a social product, that is to say, that in our substantive motivated productions, we not only produce, but we also reproduce or transform the very conditions of our production. The same premiss, of intentional embodied human agency, grounds both the conceptuality and the geo-historicity of social structures. (In both cases the relation is one of dependence not identity.) Thus we can situate the auto-poietic, conceptualized and geo-historically dependent character of social structures alongside their social relation dependence as four ontological limits on naturalism.
Epistemologically, the openness of social existence implies the necessary transfactuality of its subject-matter (if it is to be the object of science) and the impossibility of crucial experiments, its conceptuality establishes the necessity for a hermeneutic moment in inquiry, and its geo-historicity the transient character of social structures. This sets the basis for dialectical explanation, including concepts of contradiction, crisis and struggle and at least potentially dialectical arguments. The coincidence of the causal efficacy of ideas and their material conditioning will lend to any social dialectic a crucial relational (subject-object, agentive-structural, epistemic-ontic) aspect. Finally the condition that, as conceptualized, social forms are quasi-propositional (or even prepositional, as in the case of the mediation by ideas of deep structures), and, in addition, normally quasi-propositionally justified or legitimated under some or other description,* renders them liable to one or both of two modes of critique.
* In C3.2 I shall show how this requirement is intrinsic to the judgement form as such and also in turn flows from the sole premiss, activity-dependence, that we are employing to deduce the character of any conceivable social science.
First, social forms are subject to immanent critique, in terms of their theory/practice inconsistency. I have already remarked on the role that this plays in the context of hermeneutic hegemonic/counter-hegemonic struggles over discursively moralized power2 relations. Second, they are liable to critique, and especially to metacritique, as false — and in particular as at once necessary and false (or at least limited) — hence, as explained in §6, rendering them vulnerable to dialectical argument. (Such forms will typically necessitate Tina compromise and supplementarity, stoic compartmentalization [detotalization] and metaphysical λ's. They will be coupled in illicit exchange and tacit complicity, showing the duplicity and equivocation characteristic of the unhappy consciousness. Moreover, as axiologically, viciously and regressively indeterminate, they will display great power2 manipulability and ideological plasticity.) The ensuing model of social science as explanatory critique, which will be substantially developed in C3.7, can then be generalized to take in the non-satisfaction of other human interests besides truth and consistency (although some such interests, for example education, are straightforwardly necessary for them), for instance help, shelter or equity. Critical naturalism thus establishes a series of ontological, epistemological, relational and critical differentiations for the social sciences from a natural science like inorganic chemistry. There will be important differences within the various social sciences, of course. But the retroductive explanatory (DREI(C)) and retrodictive explanatory (RRREI(C)) models of theoretical or ‘pure’ and applied sciences developed in §§6 and 7 will be applicable to the social domain, including the possibilities that the explanatory moment in the transitive process of science will be dialectical in content and/or form.
So far I have presented the TMSA in a positive light. But there is its negative generalization to consider. For a structure may survive in one or more of the following modes:
(i) without any human agency, and even (i') despite any human agency;
(ii) in virtue of our (conscious or unconscious) attentive or inattentive (ii') inaction;
(iii) in virtue of our compliance or our passive or tacit acquiescence (or, in virtue of our neutrality or ‘neustic’ indecision); and/or
(iv) in virtue of the indirectness of the human agency which reproduces it.
(iv) is the least contentious. A power2 structure may be maintained via various institutional, ideological and personal intermediaries, mechanisms, delegacies and functionaries, or in virtue of its systematic interconnections in a totality. But this is quite consistent with the TMSA, which in no way requires understanding the range of unintended consequences of our actions (or not). Similar considerations apply to (iii). (ii) simpliciter may be said to involve forbearance, or leaving alone. But ‘letting be’ is, or may be, an act consciously performed. And this would be the essence of my rejoinder to Ted Benton's ‘ecological critique’, in which he proposes models of ‘eco-regulation’ and ‘primary appropriation’ as correctives to Marx's Promethean materialism and my TMSA.97 In the same way the ‘feminist critique’ which proposes a heuristic in which concepts such as ‘care’ and ‘nurturing’, convincingly formulated by Kate Soper, among others, in a number of places,98 take the place of male-oriented ‘working-class work’ is a valuable corrective, not least inasmuch as it focuses attention on the reproduction of labour-power. Also worth bearing in mind are the phenomena of, on the one hand, unemployment without leisure, and, on the other, dissipative collapse of either structure or agency. Other models, such as those based on a military paradigm, are much more readily locatable within the mainstream of the Hegelian (cf. the continuing reprise of the life-and-death struggle up to and including the non-sublation of war in absolute spirit) and Marxian traditions.
The negative generalization proper takes the form of (i) and (ii'). It recalls Adorno's famous adage that not just theory, but the absence of theory, becomes a material force ‘when it seizes the masses’. Two facts are of paramount importance to register. First, that inaction (whether held accountable or not) is as axiologically irreducible as non-being is ontologically. We cannot do everything at once or be aware of all the consequences of any one of our actions. What is open to us is to become aware of roundabout connections (cf. [iv] and the putative ‘holistic’ critique of the TMSA) and screened deep structures (cf. [ii] and the potential ‘transformist’ critique), and where the structures and connections are oppressive and congealing engage in the totalizing depth praxis necessary to negate them. But this leads into my second point. Given the presence of the past and the exterior and the depthless atomization characteristic of bourgeois individualism, but accentuated by certain features of late- or postmodernist society,99 by the merest transcendental perspectival switch, structure is always going to seem dislocated from, and pre-existent to, agency. We are faced starkly with the predicament posed by (i'). Only the mobilization of the totality of the globally oppressed by power2 relations can transform, rather than transfigure, this state of affairs.
Can the negative generalization be itself negatively generalized? Certainly there is no reason why the structures, mechanisms or forms in question should be positive. Negative existence is not the same as non-substantial process. Pierre's absence does not entail action at a distance. And, even if it did, both may be allowed in dialectical critical naturalism. Not all the components of the social cube may be negative if society is to be an ongoing affair, so that we may talk, if one likes, in terms of ‘inaction in virtue of our agency’. However, here again, employing a spatio-temporal perspectival switch on the negative generalization, we can sustain the thesis of the activity-dependence of social structures on the condition that they are seen as dependent upon the activity of the dead: of past as distinct from present praxis, labour or care. That is, as long as we conceive the TMSA as intrinsically tensed, geo-historicized, rhythmicized. But though, rejecting monovalence, there is, as we shall see in C3.5, a sense in which the positive and negative, paradigmatically, may be considered to mutually presuppose each other, both conceptually and causally, all the decisive moments in social life are negative.
I now want to further generalize, dialecticize and substantialize the TMSA. Figure 2.25 represents four-planar social being, encompassing the ‘social cube’, in terms of which we must understand social life. It has not been possible in this figure to represent the depth of the stratification of the personality, which we shall investigate anon. The separation of space from time in the figure is artificial and we should think instead in terms of a multiplicity of (potentially disjoint) rhythmics, conceived as tensed socio-spatializing process. The social cube should be thought of as a cubic flow, differentiated into analytically discrete moments, as I have detailed elsewhere,100 as rhythmically processual and phasic to the core. This is a feature which, as Margaret Archer has convincingly demonstrated,101 distinguishes it from structuration, or more generally any ‘central conflation’, theory. Moreover, the elements of each plane ought to be conceived as subject to multiple and conflicting determinations and mediations and as displaying to a greater or lesser extent (more or less contradictory) intra-relationality and totality; more generally, as embodying all the moments of the concrete universal. As should be clear from my earlier discussion, the power2 discursive/ communicative and normative/moral sub-dimensions of the social cube at planes C and B can be thought as ones whose point of intersection is ideology as exemplified in Figure 2.26. All power2 relations are power1 relations but the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, turning back to Figure 2.24 above, we must differentiate that constraint2 which is the effect of power2 relations and that constraint1 which is not. Constraints1 may be socially caused, and, as such, the object of rational transformative praxis, but some such contraints (such as those imposed by the laws of nature, and the material, ecological, [spatio-]temporal, ecological, entropic, and axiological asymmetries to which social life is subject) must be taken as unsurpassable. Power1 relations are manifest on plane A, but power2 relations, though they may be mediated by material transactions with nature, are limited to planes C, B and D (the last two of which are directly connected by the homonymy implicit in ‘intra-subjectivity’). As already mentioned, power2 relations may not be recognized; or they may be recognized on one plane but not another. Social or inter-subjective power must be distinguished from material power. This is not quite the same as Giddens's influential distinction between (power over) authoritative and (power over) allocative resources. For the former refers, inter alia, to ideologically legitimated power and the latter — economic power — depends upon social power2 relations.
The plurality of modes of power2 relations has already been aired. But discursive and normative relations can also be seen as or as dependent upon types of power2 relations. Moreover, when institutionalized and globalized, political power may take the form of ‘The New World Order’, economic power assumes the shape of the rapidly shifting structure of the global capitalist economy, moral-normative power is displaced by the sanctions of inter-national, intra-national or ethnic violence and discursive power is displayed by a homogenized ideological mediatization of ‘the news’ in a cultural matrix dominated by the co-existence of Disneyfication/McDonaldization, poverty and waste. Any attempt to put further institutional flesh on a model of this type depends on some hierarchization and this in turn is at least in part a function of which of the two models of superstructure outlined in §2 we deploy. Thus in model A in Figure 2.27 the global capitalist economy sets the boundary conditions on the nation state which sets the boundary conditions on civil society which sets the boundary conditions on the family which sets the boundary conditions on the rights of women. In model B capitalist relations of production constitute the conditions of possibility of the inter-/intra-national socio-politico-economic-military order which constitutes the conditions of possibility of civil society, state and family alike. These are merely exemplifying schematisms. What is vital to stress is that power2 relations are, when recognized, potentially or actually sites of struggle which may be of hermeneutic or more ‘material’ kinds, hegemonizing or detotalizing, readily reversible or not.
If a particular social cube is dialectically contradictory it may induce crisis tendencies which are (a) systemic and/or (b) structural and/or (c) implicate power2 relations and/or (d) effect legitimizing and/or (e) motivating ideologies. Unfortunately we must think ‘crisis’ with the negative generalization of the TMSA in mind — the possibility of inaction within zero-level agency. Crises may mark nodal points or episodes102 and/or stimulate or release transformative mechanisms and agencies. The social cube can be used to cast light on the Hegelian ‘speculative proposition’ and vice versa. The speculative proposition designates a subject (in this case, society) which is not fixed, but is in a process of formation (reproduction, transformation or dissipation), which can only be caught in a network of relations (or as Hegel would have it, predicates), i.e. as a concrete totality; which succeeds, insofar as it does, by bringing out the condition of possibility (dr') of the totality, sublating it via totalizing depth practice (TTTTφ). The social cube can also be used to criticize one-sided social epistemologies — such as a non-critical hermeneutics at B (or discourse theory at C). Thus, focusing on the face of communicative interactions from situations of co-presence to telephone calls takes in only one mode of social and inter-personal subjectivity (reducing the former to the latter), ignores such modalities as force, and such phenomena as power2, and ignores the plane of material transactions with nature or socialized material objects characteristic of work, the depth stratification of the personalities of the communicators (and the sense in which their speaking and writing expresses other aspects of their personality), the meshwork of institutions in which their exchange takes place and the social relations which are a condition of its possibility, and the criss-crossing of their communication by a differential array of causal space-time paths and rhythmics. Let us consider some of the rhythmics in which an agent may engage:
1. the narrative of her life, her biography;
2. the lagged causal efficacy of her unconscious, her unwritten biography;
3. her life cycle as an organism (a human being) and specifically as a woman;
4. the flow of her daily praxis (engaged in a variety of social practices with rhythmics of their own) as tracked by her space-time routes through the cities, dwellings, worksites, landscapes in which she lives;
6. the longue durée of differentially sedimented structural institutions and the social relations upon which they depend;
7. the development of specifically civilized geo-history in the context of human geo-history, inserted in the rhythmics of species, genera and kinds, located in a geo-physical development of a solar system, embedded in the entropy of an expanding universe.
At this point I want to switch perspectives (which is ineliminable in dialectic) from structure to agency. Figure 2.28 illustrates schematically the stratification of action, the existential intransitivity of intentionality and the distinction between real reasons for action (which may be more or less unconscious/ and to a greater or lesser extent ideologically formed) and mere ex post or pre-rehearsed rationalizations. Actions are accountable, even if they are routinized or habitual, and even if their reason lies in custom or convention. It is real reasons for action which comprise the existential agent's intentional causality, and without this concept structure would float free, in a noumenal or virtual cloud, of agency. It is embodied intentionality which earths social life. Figure 2.29 is a more complicated model of the components, or, if you like, the springs of action. It is informed (or misinformed) desire, propelled by absence, that powers transformative praxis or negation (and the durée of agency in Figure 2.25).
Properly conceived, action should be understood as a cognitive-affective-conative-expressive-performative vector, with a form, content, mood, style and efficacy of its own. A few brief comments on the model. Amour de soi is the basis of altruism, while amour propre is intrinsically egoistic. I believe that curiosity is a basic urge or instinct, essential to the learning process, in which the dialectic of desire becomes the dialectic of freedom. I have included as an example of mood an optative moment, incorporating that neo-Blochian hope which fuels that concrete utopianism that plays a crucial role in emancipatory axiology. I have also situated ‘motivation’ and ‘drive’, which encompasses an agonistic aspect and may be taken as one indication of the agent's sense of ease and confidence generally. Of course, there will be internal relations between the components or bases of action. Undergirding them all is a more or less ego-syntonic or ego-emancipatory existential security system, initially formed in the processes of primary polyadization in early childhood and ultimately nurtured and sustained by relations of fiduciariness, care, solidarity and trust. All the components of action constitute causal powers (or liabilities) of the agent, but I have differentiated powers (competences and facilities qua access to resources), in the sense of transformative capacity, from the rest.
Figure 2.30 is an elaboration on Figure 2.20. On this model the self is nothing other than the dispositional identity of the subject with her changing causal powers. The agent is consciously absorbed in a practice. This constitutes her praxis, i.e. her causal agency. But an agent may engage in a number of social practices on a particular day (child-minding, cooking a meal, driving a car, designing a book jacket, making small talk with Jemma, participating in a rally, etc.), so social practices cannot be identified with human praxes. Nor can the latter, as the flow of intentional agency, be identified either with specific actions (such as making a cup of coffee) or with the acts performed in or by the actions in which her intentional agency is the transformative force. Figure 2.30 does not identify the multiplicity of rhythmics involved, nor does it bring out the degree of centrification, fragmentation or alienation of the subject, or the fact that the double stratification of mind — of beliefs constituting a psyche and of projects articulating a life — have both conscious and unconscious aspects. Finally none of the models do justice to the open systemic, multiply and conflictually determined nature of the aspects at play in our internal pluriverses.
At this point I want to revert to the topic of ideology, and in particular ideology in the narrow sense as embodying categorial error. The archetypal figure of alienation for Hegel is the ‘beautiful soul’, the pure agent who will not reconcile herself to the norms of, and so is alienated from, her community. She is split off from just one of the four dimensions of the social cube. In contrast the prototypical Marxian generative separation, which articulates the conditions of possibility of capitalist society, produces a split both in all four dimensions or planes and in the agent's labour or activity itself — a fivefold alienation. The immediate producers, in being alienated from their labour, are cut off from (a) the means and materials of their production, (b) each other, (c) the nexus of social relations and ultimately (d) themselves. Let me approach the topic of categorial error by considering two of its basic forms — illicit categorial (a) fusion (e.g. of the transitive and the intransitive dimensions in subject-object identity theory) or (b) fission (e.g. the detotalization of being involved in an actualist account of laws). (These examples should show that these category mistakes are by no means opposed, rather they tacitly complement one another.) Now one example of illicit fusion is (a') the exchange of non-equivalents pivotal to the wage-labour/capital contract, made possible by the commodification of labour-power and the fetishism in which capitalist relations of production are enveloped. And from this — or rather the theory in which it is embedded — Marx hopes to demonstrate the dialectical necessity and falsity of the ‘wage form’; and, more generally, as conceptualized, the mode of production which is defined by it. A social example of illicit fission is the (b') non-parity of equivalents involved in paying female or immigrant workers less than native male workers for the same work. From considerations such as this I would like to derive an argument for a basic or core equity in C3. Now one of the chief ideological configurations at work in contemporary society is the cloaking, or, more generally, (a'') representation of sectional interests as universal ones. This is characteristic of free market ideologies. Less noticed is its inverse, (b'') the representation of universal interests as sectional. An example may be the British miners' strike of 1984-85. Of course there are other prevalent ideological mechanisms, including the naturalization, and thence eternalization, of the status quo (cf. §5); the screening of contradiction and conflict; organicism (natural law theory), social conventionalism, e.g. social contract theory, voluntarism (e.g. decisionism), etc. etc.
We have already seen that despite the particular value of immanent critique in hermeneutic struggles in discursively moralized power2 relations any social (and so conceptualized) system violating an axiological necessity will induce a range of responses from Tina compromise formations through theory/practice inconsistencies to pathologies of action entraining crisis tendencies and the like. Two questions immediately arise:
1. By what mechanism are the oppressed in power2 relations to achieve their emancipation?
2. In accordance with what standards of consistency and universalizability are they to reason?
1. It is informed desire that drives praxis on. Desiring agents have an interest in removing the constraints (including constraints2) on their freedom to satisfy their desires, more generally wants. Knowledge is intrinsic to power. (And focusing on the model in Figure 2.29 would show curiosity as intrinsic to the desire for knowledge.) Power, and so knowledge, is essential to the satisfaction of desire. Definitionally, then, there is a conatus to deconstraint or freedom, in a depth dialectic I will articulate in C3, and to the knowledge of the power2 relations constraining the satisfaction of wanted need. Absence will impose the geo-historical directionality that will usher in a truly humane human global society, mediated (or so I shall argue) by explanatory critical and emancipatory axiological social science.103
2. It could be said that to show an inconsistency or other weakness in an opposition's position does not oblige one to advance a position of one's own, especially if one is not in a situation to do anything about it.* Moreover, it could be argued that one need only put forward criteria of consistency and universalizability if one does not accept the dialectical critique of analytical reason, to which I turn in the next section. Further, it could be said that, following the line of the materialist diffraction, there is no reason why a single criterion or formula applicable to every situation should be forthcoming, and that the whole point of dialectical practice is that it requires the meta-ethical virtue of phronesis, demanding skilful application case by case. Moreover, it could be argued that judgements are per se patronizing and diminishing of the autonomy of the agents to whom they are addressed — that the most one can do is to assert a hypothetical second-person with a possible assertoric imperative embedded within it, along the lines of ‘if I were you and wanted shelter (which you do) then do x’. Every expressively veracious fiduciary remark would then have to take into account the concrete singularity of the agent to which it is addressed. It could additionally be claimed that perspectival relativity and pluralism are intrinsic to dialectic for which some kind of algorithm is being demanded. The value of these responses, individually and collectively, should not be under-rated However, it seems unlikely, in the context of counter-hegemonic struggle, that any objective such as emancipation from the constraints2 imposed by, say, the capitalist mode of production could be achieved without (α) a sketch of the principles and mechanisms under which agents would flourish without it, or (β), more generally a plausible strategy for advance in such a direction. The question is what is T/P consistency (which implies universalizability), unless there are specific grounds for withholding it?
* Thus there is a difference between being inconsistent and not being consistent in the sense of not being willing to formulate or act on a policy in terms of which one's consistency could be judged — akin to the difference between being immoral and being amoral.
It should be said that the provisional formula that I offered in §1 for T/P consistency in a praxis in a dialectical process, viz. as transfactual processual, concrete, agent-specific and transformative, not only needs full elaboration, which I shall supply in C3, but also remains a purely formal criterion with a content that has yet to be explicated However, it is not an objection to a criterion that it is formal if it can inform a substantive one, as the Lockian/Leibnizian moment of science is able to do. At this point one needs to distinguish between (a) dialectical universalizability, which is both a test for consistency and a criterion for truth, (b) the T/P consistency, which refers to the praxis that the logic of dialectical universalizability may inform and (c) the developmental consistency or coherence that designates the process in which the praxis is embedded. The point about developmental, directional or dialectical consistency is that no general formula for it can be given. It is necessarily intrinsic to the process concerned. Science seeks to resolve analytical inconsistencies but their very resolution depends upon the suspension of the axiom of (analytical) consistency; and an open totality will always convey the possibility of such inconsistencies. Think of it like this: at the end of the day, the cherry must blossom. (Once this book is finished, it must hang together.) But the cherry will perish. (Other books will be written.) This is existential contradiction expressed in the form of the finitude of any concrete singular. To be developmentally consistent is to know when to be inconsistent, when to grow, when to mature when to apply