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I’m going to start delving back into the theoretical underpinnings of my Satanic philosophy, but I need to do it better than the last time I attempted such a thing, and that will require laying some groundwork. When I started this project last year, I dove right into the philosophy, but didn’t spend much time at all covering the underlying concepts, and the result was some obscure, muddy writing. So I’m going to spend a few weeks here and there covering some of the foundational concepts upon which my philosophy is grounded. I’ve already covered Nietzsche at length, so at least that’s out of the way. Here, I’ll be exploring the nature of dialectics, and the Hegelian approach to dialectics in particular.
Dialectic is not easily defined, in part because it’s an abstract concept and in part because it’s been used in different ways by different thinkers over the millennia. Speaking in the most general terms, a dialectic is an approach to philosophy that examines and deconstructs conceptual contradictions and the process resulting from the interplay between those contradictions. To examine the different understandings of and approaches to dialectics, we’ll take a historical look and work our way forward from Plato to Derrida.
Dialectics are found at the historical root of the Western philosophical tradition in the work of Plato, who lived in Athens from the year 429 (probably; there’s some uncertainty there) to 347 B.C.E. Plato was a student of Socrates and one of the most influential philosophers of all time. In many ways, the entire Western philosophical tradition was founded on his work. He covered a great deal of territory, but the method used in his writing was to explore ideas through a dialogue between Socrates and one or more other characters who might have differing opinions on the matter at hand, and these dialogues are the earliest written accounts we have of the dialectical method. Plato himself did not invent the method; in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, from the 3rd century, Diogenes credits the invention to Zeno. But Plato certainly made effective and extensive use of the method, and, unlike Zeno’s writings, much of Plato’s writings have survived to the present day.
In Plato, the purpose of the dialectical method is to uncover contradictions within a preliminary or superficial understanding of a concept in order to eliminate them, clarify and refine the understanding, and get at the truth. As an example, let’s take the dialogue Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro meet as Euthyphro is coming to court to charge his father with murder. Socrates himself has come to answer charges, specifically, that he has been corrupting the Athenian youth. When Euthyphro describes the charges he is bringing against his father, he mentions piety, and so Socrates initiates the dialectic by asking, “What is piety? And what is impiety?” Euthyphro responds by saying that his present actions, bringing charges against his father, are pious, and that is the initial understanding that Socrates will be working with in the dialectic. The first contradiction that Socrates brings up to counter Euthyphro’s view is that actions other than the ones that Euthyphro is presently undertaking could be considered pious, so what Euthyphro has offered must only be an example of piety.
Considering this, Euthyphro then offers that piety must be what is pleasing to the gods. Socrates responds with a series of questions to confirm what else Euthyphro believes that might contradict this understanding of piety: If two people disagree about a matter, they might do some math or some investigation and analysis and come to the same conclusion, correct? Euthyphro affirms this. But is it not true that not all differences can be resolved this way? Euthyphro affirms this as well. And do not the gods themselves quarrel on such matters? Euthyphro answers that they do. And thus might not the same thing be seen as both pious and impious, on the basis that the gods might disagree as to what is pleasing to them? And though Euthyphro has a counterargument that progresses the dialectic further, beyond what I’ll be exploring here today, he does confirm that this is the case and thus, that preliminary understanding of piety is flawed as well.
Ultimately, this dialectic leads nowhere. Socrates having revealed contradiction after contradiction in everything that Euthyphro offers, Euthyphro makes his excuses and hurries off, though not without receiving some sarcastic taunts from Socrates. But the point is not the conclusion of the argument or whether there even was one, but the process of the argument itself.
This notion of the dialectic was explored and codified by later thinkers up through early modernity but the core concept remained essentially the same.
The next major development in dialectics came from the 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant is another figure of exceptional importance to the Western philosophical tradition; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as “the central figure in modern philosophy [emphasis mine].” For Kant, dialectics were a problem. Dialectics are a means by which one might reason their way through a concept to get at a better understanding, but Kant understood reason as having limits. One of Kant’s central ideas was the distinction between phenomena, things as they appear to us, as we experience them; and noumena, things-in-themselves, things as they really are. Kant believed that, while things-in-themselves are real and cause phenomenal experience, they cannot be known by us; we can only know the phenomenal world, the world as it appears to us. But there’s no mechanism by which reason is prevented from attempting to go beyond its limits to try to understand things-in-themselves, and in doing so, it generates contradictions. So Kant would look at Platonic dialectics and say that, rather than being evidence of a process that is leading to knowledge, the contradictions are the result of reason attempting to know what cannot be known.
Following Kant, we have Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a contemporary of Kant who is mainly known for having developed Kant’s ideas but who also had a contradictory and more favorable view of the process of the dialectic. I see Fichte as a kind of pivot point between Kant, who rejected dialectics entirely, and Hegel, who used dialectics to transform the entire world of philosophy. Plato saw dialectics as a process of clearing away bad ideas in order to get at the truth. Kant saw dialectics as a process leading away from and obscuring the truth. Fichte was the first one to suggest that the dialectic was a mechanism by which the ideas themselves would be developed, and that was the turning point on which dialectical philosophy would be developed over the next two hundred years.
Fichte posited that any idea would eventually encounter some opposing idea. The initial idea, he called the thesis, and the opposing idea, the antithesis. Those two ideas would do battle until a third idea came along and integrated both thesis and antithesis, and this third idea he called the synthesis. As an example, consider capitalism (thesis), communism (antithesis), and social democracy (synthesis), or the way in which contemporary superhero movies like those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have evolved from earlier, modern superhero movies (like the Christopher Reeve Superman movies) by incorporating themes from postmodern superhero movies like the Christopher Nolan Batman movies or Watchmen (which themselves engage in a dialectic process called deconstruction, about which more later).
And that brings us to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, also a contemporary of Kant and both the main focus of my own dialectical approach and of this piece, although we’ll be continuing beyond Hegel to see how the dialectic continued to evolve and influence philosophy, with major import for the modern world.
I think of Hegelian philosophy as existing on two levels. First-order Hegelianism is the mechanical application of what is essentially Fichte’s dialectic approach and the conclusions resulting therefrom. For example, his epistemology, which he posited as a refutation of Kant’s insistence on the unknowability of things-in-themselves, arises from a dialectical method of examining consciousness and the contradictions it contains as it proceeds through the stages of coming to know something. When I say that his approach to dialectics is essentially Fichte’s, though, that comes with a big caveat. The triadic arrangement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is often mistakenly attributed to Hegel, but Hegel would not have wanted to see things partitioned off into neatly segregated boxes in that fashion, implying that some final resolution of the matter takes place. The core of the Fichtian dialectic — the evolution of ideas through contradiction — is certainly present, but Hegel was more concerned about the ongoing process of that evolution, as opposed to specific, neatly triadic instantiations of it. And that brings us to second-order Hegelianism, which sees the dialectic as the essential driving force of history, the evolution of the cosmos, and God. As one can read in the final chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit (entitled “Absolute Knowing”), Hegel believed that history has a direction and a purpose, driven by the mechanism of the dialectic towards greater and more comprehensive unity and self-knowledge, until at last the universe, which Hegel viewed in a kind of obscure pantheist fashion as being consubstantial with God, comes into awareness of itself as a unity.
First-order Hegelianism ended up being extraordinarily influential, but second-order Hegelianism (at least in its pure form), with its lofty, mystical overtones, has not been much considered except by Alfred North Whitehead, though Whitehead’s work ended up being influential in its own way. Second-order Hegelianism does, however, form a substantial foundation for the Satanic religion that I have created for myself. The details of that will be elaborated in another piece, and my prior attempts at doing so can be found in some of my earlier writings.
The Hegelian dialectic was famously taken up by Karl Marx in the mid-19th century and used to develop his theory of political economy. Hegel’s philosophy and certainly his dialectic were part of the tradition of German idealism, which sees the world in terms of ideas. The 17th- and 18th-century British philosopher George Berkeley, to take an example of an idealist philosopher, saw reality itself as being composed of ideas, and for Kant, the world of ideas was the only one that mattered because we can’t know anything about the world-in-itself. Hegel’s idealism was a more complex matter, but suffice to say that a view that sees ideas as the driving force of history is at least grounded in an idealistic stance. Marx is said to have “stood Hegel on his head” by turning Hegel’s dialectical idealism into dialectical materialism, in which the material conditions of the world (and the contradictions between them) are seen as driving ideas forward, rather than the other way around. In Marx we see a kind of variant of second-order Hegelianism where the dialectic remains the driving force of history, but in Marx the mechanism is the contradictions embodied in material reality rather than in ideas, and the dialectical progress of history manifests for Marx in the history of struggle between socio-economic classes.
Whether or not one agrees with Marx’s conclusions, his application of the dialectical method to the capitalist mode of production in his three-volume magnum opus Capital is fascinating to explore. Marxian scholar Bertell Ollman calls it “the dance of the dialectic.”1 I’ll just explore the beginning of Marx’s application of the dialectic by way of example.
Marx begins with the commodity. Let’s take, as an example, my car. As a commodity, my car embodies two contradictory concepts: use-value and exchange-value. Use-value is the practical value of the car as a means of transportation; exchange-value is the value of the car as something I can sell for money. And while both of these things are “value,” they’re not directly related: while the use-value of the car is largely static, so long as it continues to run, its exchange-value is steadily decreasing. If a 2004 Honda CR-V were to suddenly become a collectors’ item and its exchange-value were to triple as a result, its use-value would remain unchanged. These two concepts come together again in the notion of value as socially-necessary labor time: the commodity is produced in the first place because its use-value is desired (thus “socially-necessary”), and the exchange-value is set, in part, by the cost of the labor needed to produce the commodity. And value as socially-necessary labor time itself embodies both what Marx calls abstract labor and concrete labor, and this dialectic continues through many more iterations until we finally see class struggle as arising, through an extensive dialectical process, from commodities themselves.
Dialectics were used later by other thinkers, but I’ll skip forward here to the next major evolution of the dialectic itself, which occurs in the work of the late 20th-century French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. To understand Derrida and the dialectical approach he called deconstruction, it is first necessary to understand Derrida’s philosophical roots in the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure created a new philosophy of language oriented around signs, which embody both the signifier (the word or symbol) and the signified (the concept to which the signifier refers). And the meaning of a sign derives from its relationship to other signs in a complex network: continuing with the automotive example, the word “car” means what it means to me because of its relationship to other words like “wheel,” “drive,” “engine,” and so forth, and “wheel” is in turn related to “round,” “roll,” back to “car,” and so forth, and these chains of signification are the structure for which structuralism is named.
Derrida’s approach was to look at the trace of a sign, which is its connection to other signs, and look at how meaning is produced from the difference (différance in the original French, which is, notably, not the French translation for the word “difference” but rather a similarly-spelled word that is pronounced the same way) between the signs of the trace. These differences could then be used to take apart, to deconstruct, any text or artistic presentation or even any concept, from within, seeing how it all came together in the first place by seeing where it comes apart, and seeing especially where hidden assumptions and hierarchies between ideas have made their way into the text. Knowing that deconstruction could be applied as well to his own writing, Derrida wrote in a famously complex and difficult style which acknowledged that everything he said was itself inherently contradictory.
None of this should be taken as a complete history of the dialectical method and certainly not of the resulting thought; the scope of dialectics is wide and its results varied and far-reaching. This is just an overview of some of the stops along the way and, in particular, an attempt to clearly exposit the Hegelian dialectic, which forms a significant foundation for my own thought, and I’ll be returning to that in coming writings.
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