Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group
The Text
We will study On Contradiction by Mao.
It is divided into 6 sections (7 if we count the very short conclusion), none of them will take you more than 20min to read (most will take less) :).
I think this essay can be summarized by its first sentence
The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.
And this is all it studies, starting to what is the difference between dialectics and metaphysics, the law of contradiction, what are contradictions, how are they defined, what are their different types, and so on. And of course what it means for Marxism.
The biggest question I am left with after reading this essay is the place of Nature in materialist dialectics...
Supplementary material
- On Practice by Mao Tse-tung. It is significantly shorter than On Contradiction, and they both go hand in hand.
This is meaningless to me. You can assert that all things are a unity of contradictions, but for understood phenomena, this involves the ad hoc labeling of things and contra-things, with no perscriptive guidance except that a contradiction must be found. So what's the point? What's the use?
Bohr didn't use the law of contradictions to develop his model of the atom, so what point is there in going back and labelling the positive nucleus and the negative electrons as contradictions? Is that what it means to be a contradiction, to have opposite electrical charges? Could be! Why not? There's no more specification. Oh, or what about the matter and the binding energy; those could be labeled the opposites (what does it mean to be opposite as opposed to be distinct ). What additional benefit does the law of contradictions provide when applied to such phenomena to be able to say that the law of contradictions is meaningfully applicable.
Contradiction have a specific meaning in mathematics, and these contradictions aren't those contradictions. Engel's Dialectics of Nature are replete with ad hoc labeling of contradiction that leave me as a math professor absolutely befuddled. There's no rhyme or reason to what makes something a contradiction apart from the fact that we know everything must contain one (apparently).
No.
No.
I feel the law of contradicition can be more intelligibly summarized as "things are made up of other, distinct things". We've managed to rehash atomism.
To be fair, Mao isn't talking about the mathematical concept of contradiction, but the Marxist one. The invocation of positive and negative does do a lot to reduce the credibility of the text though, and my impression of it struggles to recover from that moment. It feels like philosophical astrology.
Yeah, I was trying to call attention to that, although not very clearly. So the question then is "what is a contradiction?".
Which reminds me of a particular M.A.S.H, as Hawkeye pleads to know what B.J.'s actual name is, what does B.J. stand for, B.J. replies
"Anything you want"
The focus on calling out dogmatists makes me think the text is meant more as a blow to people holding onto old ideas rather than a specific framework for understanding the world. A seriously overwritten "fuck you, everything can change, everything will change, nothing is isolated, go get your hands dirty".
That's not a uniquely dialectical conclusion though, so even if that is the case, it's couched in all so much of this drivel that everyone who agrees with the conclusion has to swallow a mountain of methodological objections and cosign it, or get lumped in with the dogmatists.
I mean, you can create a seriously overwritten “fuck you, everything can change, everything will change, nothing is isolated, go get your hands dirty” polemic in the language of literal astrology, but doing so would be somewhat self-defeating.
In that scenario, the only rationale I can come up with for writing such a simple concept in such an obtuse way is that the obtuseness is the point, either to give the concept credence because people respect many big words strung together, or to get your good-faith ideological opponents stuck in the trap of trying to understand what you're saying. Not that either of these ends are necessarily bad, and it might well have been the right thing to do for someone trying to swat down dogmatism in the party.
Kinda strikes me as a loyalty test, in the same way the Word of Wisdom is for LDS types
Honestly, if your goal is to produce a party bureaucracy that moves and acts as a single unit, there's worse ways to go about it...
Wait wait, I unironically think I've figured it out.
The point of these works by Lenin, Mao, and Stalin, et al, is not to make sense or to accurately describe the world, but to show how the synthesis of ideological gibberish with material action can fundamentally bring about massive societal transformations.
So when leftists go about mining these tomes for intellectual insight, they're missing the point entirely. The point isn't in the gibberish, is in how the application and context of the gibberish is used to catalyze social change.
I'd say Lenin did both. Early in his life he was doing sociology to understand Russian class relations and imperialism. Later though he would do these weird justifications to practically run the ussr which went against some of his earlier theorizing.
Just emailed Chomsky about this.
Chomksy wrote back
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That's funny, he just replied "John Kerry" a thousand times to my follow up.
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Great, now he's bappin.
That might be a good take, do you mean it in the sense that they build in a "thinking framework" that allows people to consider and realize said massive societal transformations?
Think of it like the Book of Mormon; it isn't at all what it purports to be, and the people who wrote it knew that, but they used it as a springboard to be able to create a massive movement out of it that changed the course of history.
So Mao/Marx/Lenin would have more or less believed that Hegel is (more or less) full of shit but that it gives a near mystical/super deep appearance to whatever rigorous theory/social movement they were building, is that what you mean? I'm not necessarily disagreeing, and I can see the point of doing so, don't get me wrong. I am just not sure whether they thought Hegel was mystical "bs" or if they were carried themselves by said mystical "depth". I'd lean towards the later.
Also, I do believe there is something of value under all this, but yeah, this is belief :p
Sure, and I think it's plausible that Joseph Smith even came to genuinely believe and rationalize what he was doing; it's just that the content of these theoretical papers isn't what's important; thesis/anti-thesis, law of contradiction, dialectics, it's not what to take away from these historical works. The important bit, the thing to analyze, the meta-dialectic is how these theoretical works wore able to catalyze material change, and I think some of them (Lenin) may have been smart enough to realize that was the actual ballgame.
I think Lenin was smart enough to advance an intellectual argument in bad faith, because he's wasn't playing for a bourgeois intellectual win.
I think when you read Marx and Lenin in this light, especially when they go after other philosophers, you can see winks and nods of this all over the place.
I'm not saying this was definitely the case, but I like 3D Chess Lenin over unironic Dialectics of Nature Engels.
I like this angle because it doesn't matter if any particular thinkers were doing this on purpose, it reframes the creation of knowledge and the work of philosophy into something weaponizable, a pattern you can see in the neoliberal think tanks of the USA. It's impossible to ignore the leverage provided by dodgy science if it creates "knowledge" that advances a revolutionary cause.
Exactly!
The lesson isn't "the law of contradiction is present in all things"
The lesson is "If i tell people "the law of contradiction is present in all things", I can get them to shoot the tsar."
Might be the case, and it's plausible take (I guess it would be hard to prove or disprove). I do feel like Mao is quite serious when he writes On Contradiction and On Practice though, and even 30 years later is his still seriously talking about dialectical materialism.
My impression though is that there is something in there that "works". I mean, Žižek is one of the two writers who made me be able to move left, in the sense that I had some feeling something was wrong, but he helped me destroy some barriers that I wasn't able to overcome and my own, and well, I don't think we can argue that žižek does anything but dialectism (we certainly can't blame him for being too clear or too formal). I think part of the reason this worked is because it forced me to consider things in relation to each others in ways that I had not considered before, and this is what dialectical materialism is all about right, drawing all kind of connections between "things" and seeing how they come into play (through contradictions from which new things emerge yadda yadda).
Here's a thermonuclear take:
If you want to neutralize the bourgeois conditioning in someone's thought patterns, it's better to create the antithesis of that bourgeois thought pattern, resulting in something more akin to mutual annihilation rather than a mere convincing.
If the target bourgeois thought pattern isn't present in the reader's mind, the antithesis can sail harmlessly through their psyche like a radio wave through flesh.
So maybe the reason this bit of philosophy isn't playing nice with the bulk of this reading group is because those brainworms have already been annihilated.
And there is precedent for bureaucrats talking like that.
I think this is a fair point (I am only a few sections in though).
I certainly do wonder at times whether “opposites” would be a better word than “contradictions”, although both are used so they are probably not meant to be perfect synonyms.
I do find it interesting that the mathematical examples given (addition and subtraction, differentiation and integration) are examples of inverse process (in the mathematical sense, particularly the group-theoretical sense). In particular, I think this gels really well with the ending parenthetical in the Lenin quote with which the article starts:
I don’t know what to make of it, but it definitely makes the group theory part of my brain fire up. I don’t know how much of this sort of group-theoretical thinking Lenin was exposed to, but I do find it interesting.
All these writers keep dropping these words with highly specific meanings into applications where they clearly make no sense.
So lets take the rest as being fine. 1 and -1 one represent opposites (as opposed to just additive inverse?), and in their addition (unity?), you get (0). What sense does it make to describe 1 and -1 as mutually exclusive as opposed to just distinct?
I just want to preface this by saying that I am not well-read; I have read very little MLM and am not in a position to offer a coherent defense of their thoughts or writings.
I again think this is a fair point. At the same time, Lenin writing about dialectics or Mao on contradiction are surely trying to abstract features they see common to many different things (math, physical sciences, society, etc). They can either invent new terminology, or co-opt terminology from one (or several) of these subjects. I would expect there to be some friction when the latter happens. I personally find it excusable, but I do sympathize with the spirit of your critique (or at least what I perceive it to be).
I think this terminology--"opposites" or "contradictions" instead of the highly-specific "additive inverses"--would be excused by virtue of the fact that we're trying to generalize, or draw comparisons between things.
Perhaps in this example, it is the positiveness and negativeness which are mutually exclusive. In light of this, perhaps here the "unity" is the totality (or group) of the set of real numbers. The group as a whole decomposes into "opposites".
I do want to repeat that I would not consider myself to have even a basic understanding of what "dialectics" is. Maybe everything I've written is astrology for math nerds, and maybe Lenin and Engels did that too. But my background in math is evoking all of these vague ideas when I read some passages, and allowing me to say "OK, maybe in a given system (the additive group of real numbers, or a capitalist society) there is a feature or features we can pick out (positiveness vs. negativeness, wage-laborer vs. owner) which separates the components of our system into two mutually exclusive camps, that our system couldn't exist without these two camps, and that we can look at our system in terms of how these camps interact among and between themselves".
I also should add that these things did not immediately spring to my mind fully-formed, that your questions encouraged me to try and be more specific about vague analogies I felt. I'm also not trying to say that Mao's or Lenin's writings are faultless and that you're wrong, but I am trying to see if different framings might make more or less sense.
That's sorta my point; this commonality is found only if you presuppose it. Sure you can map the language of dialectics and contradictions onto literally any field you want by squinting hard enough and assign some notion of "oppositeness" to individual elements. But why bother? Is it so unquestionably useful that I should insist on thinking only dialectically, as so many on the leftists insist?
This is my biggest problem with dialectics of nature and I've had long discussions on the discord about it. It's all based in presupposing the universality of contradiction and adhoc finding it. There's no reason to do it and as a theoretical computer science person, yeah the math analogies are laughable. The whole western marxist tradition basically chucked dialectics of nature as not a useful thing and I'm inclined to agree with them. Look up a paper called on engles intentions in the dialectics of nature, it sums up the now century long debate on the whole thing really well.
Doing dialectics with history served the purpose of making a theory of history to interpret, and make predictions, and morally situate ourselves. Finding the contradiction in a rock or some mathematical object serves no purpose as far as I can tell.
Yeah I think that's the one you linked me.
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Imagine a scholar, upon realizing that any given word might be mapped, with some level of difficulty and precision, to the Greek language, proudly proclaiming "Every text is fundamentally Greek".
I agree with your point, and that section on the universality of contradiction bothered me quite a lot.
I think the problem comes from the very unclear concept of "thing". It is to say the least very ill defined, and because we don't know what "things" are then Mao is forced to try to find random examples here and there that are missing the target completely (like all his discussion on nature, and his attempt to find examples in mathematics).
That being said, you cannot just say "no" to this quote
I understand the problem with mathematics, not with this specific quote. On the contrary, in this quote I think this approach is particularly valid.
There you are missing his point. He is not just saying that "things are made up of other things", that would be tautologically pointless. He is saying that any "thing" (I have a very immature theory on how to define 'thing' and I am not ready to develop it but I will share it one day here, because I think we should strive to clarify that point), that is developing is developing because of inner contradictions (and in this case I think it would be correct to see contradictions as instabilities) that try to reach some equilibrium, and only when this equilibrium is reached on all aspect of the thing then the thing can stop evolving. For example, in the case of a war, the war stops developing when a peace treaty is signed (and many of the contradictions inherent to the war might be transferred to the peace of course), and for a peace treaty to be signed, some of the contradictions of the war must have been resolved (either one side crushing another, or a stalemate, etc...).
This is a quote from "Talks on questions of philosophy" that gives an example about what he means regarding war
Because these are not meaningfully contradictions, they are just distinct things. You can have a battle that is a tactical victory but a strategic defeat. That's not a contradiction. You can retreat toward enemy positions from another force in maneuver warfare. Nor do these two "contradictions" incorporate the totality of warfare. To advance and retreat, you can add static warfare.
It's developing (what does that even mean?) because of the relations between it's distinct sub-things. You can call those contradictions and dialectics if you like but it's just rehashed atomism and the notion of dynamical processes in the most roundabout way possible.
I think an important thing to note here is that even the concepts of strategic defeat or tactical victory or the totality warfare are themselves abstractions defined by the interaction between preconceptions of said terms and the processing/analysis of new experience in relation to the preconceptions and related concepts/context. Sure there are external definitions you could reference, but the mental representation of concepts aren't external definitions. The systems of processing and preconceptions are both in constant states of update and are, in of themselves, made up of a totality of inputs dependent on all the interconnected systems of perception, memory (which includes the aforementioned external definition), abstraction, etc... and ultimately the material conditions (whether it be genetics or environment). There is constant feedback from top to bottom and bottom to top; abstraction is necessary to contextualize/perceive experience of the concrete and abstraction arises from interactions between distinct experiences of the concrete. Furthermore, you can't just call it a dynamic process because the experiential, emergent nature of consciously interacting with said concept is irreducible. We have limited attention and cannot consciously perceive the totality from which the reified experience of consciousness arise. Whether it be top-down or bottom-up, we never experience the totality of our entire conceptual mapping nor the experience of physical phenomena from which they arise and which they contextualize; but we still interact with, make judgements, and alter the relationships between concepts arising from such processes despite our ignorance. The act of interacting with a concept (even so much as inquiring as to the nature of its existence as a one's own internal concept) in consciousness, more generally working memory, changes it's relationship to its context all while being unaware of the totality of its context. Even if we could fully map out all neural activity and their feedback loops, we couldn't confirm that these complex systems of input, memory, abstraction, perception etc. actually informed conscious thought in the manner in which we might predict/model due to the failure of introspection. And even if we could miraculously overcome this in study, the resulting knowledge would alter the relationship between all concepts with the inclusion of this new concept(s) informing all others.
I agree that Mao might fail in a metaphysical sense. However I think at least some of what Mao talked about with this work is super interesting in viewing the construction of mental representation of the world. As someone who has spent a decent amount of time studying cognition, I do find a lot of what I read here to be really fascinating in relation to what I've learned/researched.
I'm not sure if I explained this very clearly, but this is difficult shit to explain and deserves way more time and effort (which is actually something I am working on). I would ideally want to go into the models and studies I'm basing a lot of these claims on, but if you're interested I can try to come back and go into it sometime. I think my choice of terms is kinda shitty and something I want to work on. I also would would like to note that I'm not super well informed on Mao, just read this a few days ago and it's the first of anything I've read related to Maoism.
I don't disagree with any of the above, but I think the above blows the whole "materialist" bit of dialectical materialism out of the water. I know Marx and his descendants made efforts to distinguish themselves from "vulgar" materialists, but when you shift the goal from trying to describe the world to trying to describe the irreproducible interaction of the the concrete and abstract in consciousness, you're actually giving up the whole materialist ballgame and adopting a purely abstract or idealist perspective.
I lean more instrumentalist/pragmatist, so I can kinda just shrug at the forays than verge toward the realism/anti-realism debate.
I don't know if I'd call it purely idealist, it is determined by the evolutionary factors of Cognitive development and environmental adaptation. However I agree with the general idea with what you're saying and I think I'd lean more pragmatist. HOWEVER I'm very interested in the concept of Class Consciousness, what that actually could be (outside of the essentialist view that people will just see commonality and deduce nor it being a unique universal concept constant across all peoples), how could it form, and what historical/material and Cognitive factors could be involved. I mean there have been tons of examples of people acting in class interest, and with what I've said obviously they all didn't just follow some internal logic or well structured mode of recognition. Investigation of that requires understanding this process of abstraction. I guess I'd say the important thing in my mind isn't the specifics of the abstractions in of themselves, rather how abstraction arises in response to specific environments and Cognitive systems. Abstraction is only necessary to explain commonality between the previously unconnected, so there are some subset conditions in which commonality is witnessed leading to abstraction. We may never be able to actually map them out, but I think we can try to identify mechanisms that contribute to their arisal if that makes sense
Is that actually how it is, or is that just our abstraction for explaining and analyzing the mixture of abstract theoretical models with concrete empirical observations?
That's what I mean by the whole materialist ballgame getting washed away. Once you set about analyzing everything in this manner, even, your tools for analysis are up for grabs to be analyzed in this manner. So now we've got abstractions of abstractions and it all seems very divorced from the material world it's supposedly grounded in.
100% agree. You wanna shoot me some readings/vids you'd recommend on instrumentalism/pragmatism? At first glance it seems like a good way to explain my own views in general
Dewey's work provides a good primer on the notion if you want to check it out here on SEP
Thanks!!
By development he means the typical "thesis/antithesis/synthesis", and this is where the contradiction is, between the thesis and the antithesis, and the development is this new synthesis that emerges from both the thesis and the antithesis.
So of course, in the material world there is the difficult task of finding what is the thesis and antithesis of, in your example, a battle, a war, a victory etc. In your example
That is already the synthesis step of the battle, the thesis and antithesis were the two opposing armies and their goals and objectives. And I think this illustrates the hardest part of this discussion, is that it's hard to figure out what should be the "thing" studied, and what are its contradictory aspects, and that the more concrete the situation is (unlike for example the abstract system construct of "capitalism" vs its material realization) the harder it is to pinpoint these.
By the way, regarding the unity of opposite, I think I might have found something worth studying on ncatlab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/adjoint+modality and there is also https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Aufhebung
I did not read them yet (although I did read a few pages of a different paper that also formalizes the unity of opposites through adjoint functors, it made sense, but then there was the reverse question: how can I take this formalism and use it in the real world?)