Thursday, December 04, 2014

Dialectical Materialism--Rubbishy Nonsense, Preposterous Piffle

Lest I be thought a mere captious Logical Positivist/Empiricist Evil Bee of Discord who     buzzes about troublesomely and maliciously making up my own poisonous and solipsistic definitions of things, I will quote a couple of (what anyone, I'm sure, must agree are) objective, non-biased definitions of Dialectical Materialism; the first is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the second is from the Concise Encyclopedia (both, I gather, being Encyclopaedia Britannica companies):

(Item 1):  "Dialectical Materialism: the Marxist theory that maintains the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process and the priority of matter over mind..."

[Dialectical Process:  Reasoning in which a question-answer approach (dialectic) is used to examine the correctness, legitimacy, or validity of an assumption, idea, opinion, etc.  Plato]

(Item 2):  "Dialectical materialism: Philosophical approach [to?] expressed through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later by Georgy Plekhanov, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Joseph Stalin [Stalin wrote?], the official philosophy of Communism.  Its central tenet, borrowed from Hegelianism, is that all historical growth, change, and development results from the "struggle of opposites."  (In philosophical terms, a thesis is opposed to an antithesis, which results in a synthesis.)  Specifically, it is the class struggle (capitalist and landowning classes [Thesis!] Vs. the proletariat and peasantry [Antithesis!] that creates the Dynamic of History [Synthesis!].  The laws of historical dialectics [!] are seen to be so powerful [!] that individual leaders are of little historical consequence [!].  Originally conceived [!] as operating in the realm of sociology, economics and politics, the principle [!] was extended in the 20th century to the scientific realm [!] as well, with major [notorious and deleterious] effects on Soviet "science."  Marx and Engels stated their philosophical views mainly in the course of polemics and brief historical [!] studies; there is no systematic exposition of dialectical materialism."

Where to begin?  Last things first:  The fact (If the Concise Encyclopedia tells us it's so, let's just assume that indeed it is so.) that "there is no systematic exposition of dialectical materialism" is a very good indication that there is, in fact, no such thing as dialectical materialism, and that its non-existence must be the inevitable conclusion of any principled, scrupulous, honest attempt to make a 'systematic exposition of dialectical materialism.'   As, for example, have been the conclusion of all principled, scrupulous and honest attempts to demonstrate the nature of the Ether--In which Lenin also, significantly, persisted in believing, long after the Michelson-Morley experiments (of 1881 and 1887) had established its non-existence.

Now, back to the very beginning:  Georg Hegel's "reading" of, "knowledge" of, and "intuitive understanding" of History--from which the rest of his "philosophy" is famously derived--I feel compelled to say immediately that there was nothing that the [silly, pompous little] man had more ridiculously wrong notions about,  or a less intuitively correct understanding of.  He was, moreover, so absurdly and overweeningly persuaded of the perfect correctness, nay sibylline profundity,  of his historicity that I find just about any opinion he held on any historical subject insufferable: Perhaps because it's a subject in which I have myself done considerable reading, and it's dear to me--my first impulse on reading or hearing of one of Hegel's historiffecations is, not to laugh, as probably it deserves, but to vomit, and then to slap the stupid, pompous face of the vainglorious little mind that imagined such fetid twattle.  In fact, after just a paragraph or two of Hegel's illucid prose, I find my palms tingling with undelivered slaps--Surely this cannot be good for my hypertension or my temper.

And/but, in at least the second place (or instance) ¿¡What the bloody fuck does "the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process" even mean!?  Or even more basically ¿Whatever--in a world that has long accepted Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy as true and valid--meaning or sense is there in "the material basis of...reality"?  much less "constantly changing in a dialectical process"?  ¿¡How (the bloody fuck) is it at all even conceivable that a process of any sort whatsoever (much less of a constantly changing reality) might be "dialectical"!?  And these are not, O Vladimir Ilyich, three different ways of asking the same bloody fucking question.

And lastly, is the question of "priority" of any fucking importance whatsoever? To anybody but snobs, that is, and those who serve them.  But if matter (what is talked about) has "priority" over mind (the organ of reason), doesn't that make it virtually impossible to talk about things?


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