Dialectical Negation Research Articles

Cooperation and contradiction: The dialectics of everday practice

or rational form, which says that something /s; the dialectical negation, which says what something is not, and the speculative-concrete comprehension: A is also that which it is not. A is non-A. These three aspects do not constitute three parts of logic, but are moments of everything that is logically real or true. They belong to every philosophical concept. Every concept is rational, is abstractly opposed to another, and is united inly opposed to another, and is united in comprehension together with its opposite. This is the definition of dialectic." (G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic, from, W. Wallace and A. Miller [trans.], Encyklop?die der Philosophischen Wissenschaften [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971]). 22. L. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971). Several writers have called attention to the underlying Durkheimianism of Althusser's theory of ideology; see, for example, J. Ranciere, La Legon d'Althussser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), and Sheelagh Strawbridge, "Althusser's Theory of Ideology and Durkheim's Account of Religion: an Examination of some Striking Parallels," Sociological Review, vol 30 (1982), pp. 125-140. 23. The secular alternative to a supernaturalized ideology is of course a naturalized one, when authentically human practice is claimed to flow from innate drives such as altruism, acquisitiveness, territoriality or whatever. The naturalistic premise is similarly called in to detach ideology from historical contingency. 24. Talal Asad, "Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology," Man (N.A.), vol. 14 (1979), p. 623. 25. Cf. Ricoeur: "Most basic to the ideology-praxis contrast is not opposition; what is most fundamental is not the distortion or dissimulation of praxis by ideology. Rather, most basic is an inner connection between the two terms."(Paul Ricoeur, in, George H. Taylor [ed.], Lectures on Ideology and Utopia [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], p. 10). 26. Bikhu Parekh, Marx's Theory of Ideology (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 48-49. One reading of Marx would depict ideology as ontologically false, since it is born of practical activity but represents that activity spuriously by inverting the subject-object relation, yet as sociologically true, since the dominant ideology comprises the ideas of the dominant class, which are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations . . grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which mae one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance." This content downloaded from 40.77.167.2 on Sat, 24 Sep 2016 06:19:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Lukacs: Horizons and Implications of the "Typical Character"

Lukacs: Horizons and Implications of the "Typical Character"

Neopositivism, Marxism, and idealization: Some comments on Professor Nowak's paper

The paper is a discussion of the idealizational interpretation of the dialectical Marxist methodology of science which has been worked out and applied in a diversity of ways by L. Nowak and the other members of the so-called Poznan school. I examine the sense in which, and the extent to which, this methodology is or can be said to be dialectical. Subsequently, I discuss and criticize Nowak's claim that this methodology can function at the same time as a meta-methodology; I do this in connection with a corresponding and equally questionable claim put forward by I. Lakatos, and with one of Nowak's concrete examples, which is meant to show that certain developments in neopositivist methodology of science followed his (meta-)methodology. Lastly, I comment on the normative-descriptive character of Nowak's methodology, examine its adequacy as a comprehensive account of science, compare it with alternative accounts of the place and role of idealizations in science, and raise the question of whether Nowak's idealizational theory of socio-economic formation is a refutation or a dialectical negation of Marx's historical materialism.

Negación dialéctica y lógica transitiva (I)

In this essay I bring up the issue of how to deal with dialectical views -especialIy with dialectic negation- from the standpoint of a transitive logic, which is a particular paraconsistent logic. After briefly tracing the development of the debate between dialectic thinkers and those who, hewing to entrenched logical theories, did out of hand reject any contradictorial proposal -up to recent developments of paraconsistent systems of mathematical logic- I canvass a variety of grounds shoring up the thesis of the contradictoriality of the world. Chief among them is fuzziness. The paper tries to show that fuzziness has nothing to do with uncertainty, and that accepting fuzzy sets and facts not only does not compel us to waive the law of excluded middle, but -on the base of reasonable presuppositions- entails recognition of that law's relevant instances -the ones that purportedly ought to be dropped as true sentences, should fuzziness be acknowledged. True enough, fuzziness plus excluded middle leads to contradiction, i.e. to negation inconsistency. But then fuzziness is -or can he viewed as being- negation inconsistency, since a fuzzy situation is one wherein something neither is nor fails to be the case: which -in virtue of involutivity of simple negation and De Morgan laws- means that something both ia and yet is not the case. [L.P.]

A Teaching Outline for A General Knowledge of Dialectical Materialism for Full-time Four-Year Higher Secondary Schools (Discussion Draft, January 1981)

1) Dialectical materialism is the science of the most general laws of the natural world and of the development of human society and thought, the foundation of all Marxist theory, the only scientific worldview and methodology, and the ideological weapon by which the proletariat and revolutionary people understand and change the world. Through studying A General Knowledge of Dialectical Materialism, students will achieve an elementary comprehension and grasp of the basic principles of the physical-material qualities of the world, the relationship between matter and mind, the universal interrelations and development of the world, the unity of opposites, quantitative and qualitative change, dialectical negation, knowledge and practice, the fact that truth is both objective and developmental, and that truth is discovered and developed in practice. They will gradually learn to distinguish clearly between what is materialism and what is idealism; between what is dialectical and what is metaphysical; between the theories of knowledge of materialism and of idealism, in order to establish a foundation for a scientific worldview.

Total Presence by Thomas J. J. Altizer

492 BOOK REVIEWS Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER. New York: Seabury Press, 1980. Pp. 108. Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few well-known contemporary American theologians who have produced a sizable body of work devoted to the elaboration of a single theological vision. Unfortunately, Altizer in his latest book comes no closer than before to giving us a convincing or even fully intelligible presentation of his vision. Altizer is continuing to elaborate the eschatological understanding of the Christian message and of Western history developed ten years ago in his The Descent into Hell. New in this book is his focus on the parables of Jesus. Altizer finds in these parables 'antistories ' which negate everything previously recognizable as meaning or identity. They actualize a presence that is total and that negates all horizons beyond the pure immediacy of its speech. In these parables, the Kingdom of God is immediately at hand. The eschatological message of Jesus is lost in the Church's pyrrhic victory over the Hellenistic vision. It is recaptured only in the modern revolution that has its roots in medieval apocalypticism, reaches its fullest philosophical expression in Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and is embodied in contemporary avant-garde poetry, painting, and music. The central targets of this revolution are, on the one hand, a transcendent God who can be spoken of as something other than totally and immediately present and, on the other, an interior, self-conscious center of individual identity. These interrelated concepts had an important part to play in the dialectical history of consciousness, but they are now dissolving and must dissolve before the advent of a new, total, and immediate identity in which God and humanity are anonymous, not because they are so distant from each other that naming is impossible, but rather because their presence to each other is so total and immediate that the distance involved in naming has been dissolved. In the new world of mass revolution and of an art in which the individual voice ceases to speak, the alienated, autonomous self-consciousness and the transcendent God which mirrored it both find realization only in their dialectical negation, universal presence. No one can deny the breadth of Altizer's religious vision or of his acquaintance with the Western avant-garde tradition. He writes well, almost too well. The rhythm of his rhetoric can tempt one to turn the page before one has grasped what has been said. Nevertheless, this book is unconvincing at a variety of levels. The presentation takes a form closer to a virtuoso soliloquy than to a contribution to public discussion. Contemporary theologians and philosophers are never mentioned, nor is their impact evident. Various major figures of the past are mentioned over and over again, but their ideas are never analyzed or discussed in detail. The book is-naturally-without footnotes. BOOK REVIEWS 493 The inadequacies of this mode of presentation are most obvious in the discussion of Jesus's parables. Here is one of the few places that Altizer's discussion becomes specific enough for critical evaluation. One presumes Altizer's interpretation grows out of the intense discussion, over the last decade, of the ways in which the parables mean. Altizer does not, however, explicitly draw on this discussion nor give us any idea of where he stands in relation to it. This omission would not be serious if Altizer's reading of the parables could stand on its own, but it cannot. Why should one think that ". . . the intention of parable is to realize an enactment of speech wherein a totality of speakable or realizable identity is wholly present and immediately at hand " (pp. 3f) ? What does it mean to say that parable shatters every speakable distinction (p. 12)? Altizer's interpretation would be easier to come to terms with if he analyzed even one specific parable instead of merely making generalizations about parabolic speech. Altizer's downfall in discussing the parables is the downfall of the entire book: sweeping statements with little evident supporting analysis. Sometimes his generalizations seem illuminating (e.g., that Greek philosophy...