On dialectics

1. What follows is a summary of Kolakowski’s historical outline of the philosophical and theological development of dialectical modes of thinking (“The Origins of Dialectic” in Main Currents of Marxism).

2. I’ve always been at my happiest in libraries, and I first read this in the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester 25 years ago. It seemed to me inconceivably strange and esoteric. But it stayed with me, niggling at the back of my brain on and off ever since. So I’ve always wanted to pin down: What is dialectics? How did it help to inform Marx’s social scientific approach? Is there anything to it, anything useful about it other than that? Or is it just an interesting way of thinking, a kind of literary presentation with no particular appeal or power from the point of view of generating practical, political knowledge and advice?

3. The dialectical outlook before Marx finds its roots in the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment its origins in the reaction against Christianity, by which it is nevertheless defined; and Christian theology through its absorption of elements of ancient Greek thought.

4. A focus and stimulus of Greek philosophy was contemplation of the human condition: in particular, that we are subject to time and decay, to non-existence before we were born and to death at some point afterwards. For Aristotle, it is a quintessential feature of humans that it is possible for them not to exist (in contrast, the Divine can neither come into existence nor exit from it). For Plato, the most tell-tale marker of human life is the gap between our knowledge from experience that our lives are subject to short time spans and the innate knowledge that we come from and belong to the eternal, which is built into the soul: we experience this gap as a nagging sense of incompleteness, unease, of alienation, angst, ennui. 

But if god is complete and self-sufficient, never changes and is outside the vicissitudes of time, for what reason does he create human beings, who are subject to both?

These views of the human-divine relation and this last question strongly influenced Christian theology (medieval and then north European Protestant mysticism). However, before that, we must first look at how the relationship between mankind and the eternal was handled by Plotinus, one of Plato’s followers.

5. For those plagued by a sense of incompleteness and separation from the eternal, Plotinus has an explanation of how this came about and advice on how to address or solve it.

Humans are partial creatures, and only get a glimpse of the possibility of their wholeness by remembering their past and anticipating their future, even though they only actually exist in the moment; whereas the One is all of a piece, undifferentiated, homogenous, outside time.

Nonetheless, Plotinus reasons, to get from the complete, timeless unity of the One to the flawed reality of human society and life, there must have been a process of degradation, first from unity to division (this is the development of intellect, of the self recognising the self, so that it becomes both the perceiving mind and the thing perceived, the subject and the object, divided, split); then from eternity to time (this is the same as the contamination of the soul by contact with physical reality, with the consequent possibility of evil, ie of death); finally, from stasis to movement with our entanglement and domination by matter (from the immobile self-sufficiency of the One to dependency, lack of self-determination).

For Plotinus, souls have created time by deigning to concern themselves with sensuous objects. Therefore, he recommends withdrawal from the physical world and the world of ideas as a way of reducing distraction from contemplation of the authentic within us that contains the knowledge that could lead back to the path of reunification with the One, a return home.

From the point of view of the influence on (early?) Marx, the important bit is the movement through degradation and fragmentation, followed by a return to completeness and authenticity.