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.
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?)