 Hei, wrth agon nhw'n iawn. Y nyfanydd yma wrth gweithio'r yng Nghymru yn gŵr hwnnw'n jeithio'r ddiolch yn gwneud hynny'r ddiolch, yr y gŵr ffaith hwnnw'n gwneud hwnnw'n gweld y gwath, gyda'i chi'n gwneud fray yw dwylo. Efallai yma wrth gweithio'r ddiolch yn gwneud ei gŵr ffaith hwnnw, sy'n gweithio'r ymwneud. A'r gwneud hwnnw's dod dotty ni'r ddiolch, sgwrdd konig mewn gwneud o'rheill. yn y rhan oedd yn gwneud cwantifatol yn gwelodau. Mae'n rhoi'n ddweud i'r ffordd ffordd o'r ddechrau'n gweld ddweud felly ddweud pwyllfa'r dda, ddweud ddweud a gweld. Rhaid ddweud, mae'r ddweud y ddweud yn ymddangos, drwy'n adnoddiaeth, y brif yw gweld yw'r ddweud, ddweud yw'r ddweud. Ddylau'r ddweud y Llyfr yw'r ddweud yw'r ddweud yw'r ddweud, also what gives rise as we will discuss to the law of the transformation of of sorry to the law of the negation of the negation which I said explains developments this also involves the logic of contradiction so opposites that contradict one another that are involved in one another define one another but also in an antagonism with one another which is fundamental to understanding motion and developments this is very important because for us motion is not something that is external it's not just that we think it's very general and important but it comes from the inner nature of things which is not how it has been traditionally viewed for example in mechanical materialism or a newtonian mechanics which tended to treat anything that moves as a result of some external force or some object acting upon it bashing into it now of course there is such movement things do move because something else acted upon them but that would explain ultimately nothing because of course we don't have to ask how it came that that object came to have movements and therefore caused this object to have movement and so that ultimately therefore we need to be able to understand self movements the inner impulse of movement that all things must have because of course everything does change it's absolutely fundamental to matter for it to change so and in this idea of self movement we have what is essential to it is the idea of of of contradiction of inner contradiction between opposites that is what gives rise to movements and with this we also have the idea of the inseparability of opposites so in other words the opposites aren't to be understood as just things that are very different from one another you know but as like the most different that something can be that's that is often how the words opposite are taken but for us what it means is opposites that define one another and are inseparable from one another and in movement of course to have movements which as is a result of these contradictions whatever they may be no one side can gain preponderance over the other because if it did then all movement would come to an end because movement is a product not of this side of the contradiction or that side but of the fact of the contradiction itself of this unavoidable tension that that things are bound up with and if you if you take that away if you for example assert that there is only attraction and not repulsion um then you it will become inexplicable how change happens and that is also a problem for science for example you have this problem of of the second law of thermodynamics it explains entropy whereby things lose energy over time and they become disorganised and this is a problem for physics because many people say well if it's in the nature of things to lose energy to lose motion if you like then surely eventually everything will just die will just cease to move but of course there is also the other side to the equation the the the origins of energy which have to be explained and if you only take one side of it in other words the tendency towards losing energy then it becomes impossible to understand how you ever had energy in the first place the two must go together and and produce one another really um now anyway let's talk about some concrete examples because this is sounding rather abstract perhaps um so let's take the example of capitalist society which of course as Marxists we are very interested in here we have something that moves itself okay capitalism has a history it develops it goes forwards capitalism today is very different from what it was 200 years ago so it has something that makes it move and that is a whole host of contradictions but in particular the most fundamental one is the contradiction between the classes and particularly the capitalist class and the working class but the capitalist class and the working class are not to be understood separately in other words the capitalists aren't capitalist just because they sort of got the capitalist gene or something and in themselves they're just simply capitalists actually capitalists can only be capitalists because there are workers because capitalists collectively monopolise the means of production and therefore workers are forced to come to them to work and can therefore be exploited by capitalists and that's how capitalists generate profits of course um so capitalists can't be capitalist without the existence of workers and similarly workers as workers can only be like that because they are deprived of access to the means of production they don't own factories or anything like that and have to therefore go to those who do to the capitalists and sell their labour power to them and in doing so of course become exploited and get reproduced as workers now so you have these two sort of these two opposites that define one another that are inseparable that make no sense in isolation and also that are bound up not just not only are they different and depend upon one another but that also means that they must be in an antagonistic relationship in other words the interests of the capitalists are the opposites literally the opposite from the interests of the workers and that creates a tension that creates a struggle in other words a class struggle produces all kinds of effects but that effectively basically produces history and gives the capitalist system its impulse to drive it forwards if you like and to develop itself and but there are many many other examples take i mean everything is an example of it take the example of light and the ability to see things we have of course a whole host of colours and the general fact of light or the absence of light but by themselves each one of those things doesn't really produce anything that we can see so if you could only see lights like bright lights whiteness essentially or any particular colour that would effectively be the same as being blind so it's not this or that colour really that is the important thing but it's the contradictions between them if you like the antagonisms and the contrasts that they make that's what allows us to see anything and to distinguish objects essentially without that of course it'd be impossible to see anything um you can find these opposites everywhere you look part and whole you know up and down and we discussed when we discussed right back at the beginning of the course when we discussed the fact that anything that exists has to be determined in a definite way something can't just simply exist but it has to have specific qualities if you like and and that this creates its its behaviour well these qualities again are also always bound up in opposites so we say something's harder it is soft or it's larger it's small it's taller or it's shorter it's this colour which therefore means it's not another colour it's wet or it's dry etc we could go on forever this is really how everything stands in in these fundamental relations which and it is bound up in these relations as well we discussed how things are not merely parts that are indifferent to one another they are made up of parts that have you know that are dependent on one another that's how we get come to understand the qualities that something has and that was very important to discuss in quantity but it's also fundamental to discussing you know the interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation I'll let Hegel describe this because I think you can explain it better than me and he really brought back this study of opposites this dialectical study of opposites back into philosophy and he says the following in the encyclopedia logic section 119 he says positive and negative are supposed to express an absolute difference the two however are at bottom the same the name of either might be transferred to the other thus for example debts and assets are not two particular self subsisting species of property what is negative to the debtor is positive to the creditor a weight of east is also a weight of the west positive and negative are therefore intrinsically conditioned by one another and are only in relation to one another the north pole of the magnet cannot be without the south pole and vice versa if we cut a magnet in two we have not a north pole in one piece and a south pole in the other similarly in electricity the positive and the negative are not too diverse and independent fluids in opposition the different is not confronted by another but by its other now when we discussed quantity and quality which of course as I've already explained involves two opposites we discussed how this also unites the opposites of stasis and change and that if we understand everything just in one or the other if we just cling to one side of the opposition in other words if we just say or everything stays the same or everything changes then it ends up being nonsense there must be some synthesis between the two and that the law of quantity and quality really serves that purpose but I think stasis and change can also be rephrased ultimately as attraction and repulsion and for me that is the most fundamental opposite that exists in nature that anything that exists has to have can only exist by virtue of a certain attraction or stasis if you like it must be held together in a certain way in order to have definite quality but on the other hand it must also have repulsion in other words it must have change it must have movement must have tension within it otherwise again it wouldn't really exist it wouldn't have any reason to change or to express itself in any way it wouldn't have any actual behaviour or qualities and I think this is this is fundamental to all of existence and we see it across nature in for example the atoms you know even if you look at an atom you find these fundamental opposing particles you know electrons and positrons etc now many philosophical problems I think are a result of clinging one-sidedly to one part of an antithesis where it should be really brought together and there's so many examples of this you know is human nature a result of nature or nurture that would be one example as if it has to be one or just one or the other in perfect isolation stasis versus changed as we've already discussed another classic problem of the ancient Greek philosophers was whether or not we have the one or the many in other words is at bottom everything the same made of the same stuff always the most fundamental truth that everything is different as if it has to be one or the other in in in totality in isolation another example would be is something a product of its inward character or its outward character and this has a this is very old philosophical problem and it has an application in terms of ethics so we have this ethical problem of is is it um moral to if I want to do something good if I want to help someone if that's the if I try to help someone but if I end up hurting them is that have I committed an immoral act or is the fact that I intended genuinely intended something good does that enough to mean that I acted morally or that I am morally right well you would tend to say that yes you know it's a mistake and it's not your fault and so long as you intend good things then you are then you are moral however it would also be absurd to suggest that all you need to do is to have nice thoughts to want nice things for people but not actually make a serious effort to make sure that you achieve that in practice you know you just need to think then you don't even need to do anything at all really as long as you think nice thoughts that would also be ridiculous so the internal and the external need to be brought into relation to one another and again the the fundamental character of anything must be a combination of these opposites of the internal character and the external character so the inner nature of something as I said everything must have some inner impulse to movements movement is not merely from external you know objects but at the same time that inner character drives it outwards and gives it a certain relation towards another other things similarly the inner nature of anything is also just the product of the external environment acting upon that thing as well so let's take the example of an acorn which Hegel always liked to use an acorn is clearly not an oak tree it's not the same thing clearly in fact in a lot of ways it's completely different the shape of it is entirely different doesn't have any branches doesn't have any leaves and of course it's far far smaller so it's very very different thing and yet an acorn will given the right external conditions it will inevitably become an oak tree so there is some fundamental connection between the two things what we can say is that an oak tree is a result of the synthesis between an acorn or the inner character of an acorn and the correct external environmental conditions so this brings us on to the question of development right that developments passing from one to the other involves these contradictions of such as inner and inner and external for example I think all development takes place through this kind of oscillation between these opposites you know inner and external for example young and old parents and child are other examples and this brings us on to the law of the negation of the negation this is a very kind of misunderstood thing I'll just give a quotation from Engels just to um because I think he can explain it better than me again so Engels says let us take a grain of barley billions of such grains of barley are milled boiled and brewed and then consumed but if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it if it falls in on suitable soil then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change it germates the grain as such ceases to exist it is negated and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it the negation of the grain but what appears sorry but what is the normal life process of this plant it grows it flowers is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dice is and is in its turn negated and as um as a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley but not as a single unit but 10 20 or 30 fold these also involves another dialectical concept which is um known as sublation which Hegel developed to sublate something is to negate it but also to preserve it now in formal logic and in just normal kind of linear thoughts something is destroyed we just say it's destroyed the idea of it being preserved is kind of ignored or not thought about and it might seem rather strange thing to say but without that concept of sublation how do we explain the fact that um that an acorn once the tree has died or once it's departed from that tree it produces another tree remarkably similar to the one that gave rise to it so clearly there must be something that is preserved so this of course involves the concept of development this idea of sublation is all about the concept of developments um now once again I'm going to give a quotation from Engels I think it's very good he talks about um the opposite of development which is and the opposite of sublation and negation in the dialectical sense which is simply to destroy something he says the following he says negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no or declaring that something does not exist or destroying it in any way one likes long ago Spinoza said every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation and further the kind of negation is here determined firstly by the general and secondly by the particular nature of the process so the acorn in the acorn is crystallised the if you like the character of the oak tree and in fact all of previous development that gave rise to it it's not just an accident that an acorn happens to produce an oak tree didn't just pop into existence and miraculously had this characteristic it is a product of a process of of development in which the useful characteristics if you like of things get preserved and in a way that allows them to be grown once again so there's literally millions of years of development innocence is expressed in this acorn so we can say to go back to a Higaelian phrase in the acorn is its other its opposite which is the oak tree it may appear totally different from an oak tree but it inevitably gives rise to that oak tree it doesn't just might just might not just it's not like it might just turn out to give rise to a human being or or some other plant it will always give rise to an oak tree and nothing else so it's nothing accidental about it so the negation of the negation expresses the fact that movement is not arbitrary it's not just the case that everything moves but that matter is self-organised it's not just utter chaos but we have laws we have predictability and a kind of certain harmony if you like to nature and this and over time we have this phenomenon nature of development because of that self-organisation and we see that most clearly of course in evolution but i think you can see it not only in evolution but all across nature in which you know why does evolution work not because god intended it or anything or because it should happen but simply because what works is preserved in other words if an animal or a plant develops a mutation which helps it to produce or to to reproduce then that feature will be preserved and therefore over time we have intend to have increasing complexity and the useful features being preserved now of course it's not a simple or a uniform process but generally that is the case and the negation of negation helps us to understand this and this brings to brings us to a very interesting point which is that in philosophy there has always been this tendency to see matter as just chaos as meaningless you know unthinking matter that is as just a sort of you know meaningless chaos and its mind its consciousness that gives order and purpose to things and this this way of looking at the world was used by William Paley in his famous teleological argument to argue for the existence of god because he said well look if you look at the world you look at the solar system we see tremendous harmony we see predictability we see regularity you know we see nice shapes like spheres in the planets things like this and this is far too kind of ordered to have just randomly come together with no you know guiding consciousness so it must be that god gave rise to this that's the only explanation that there can be according to Paley therefore of course god exists um and a lot of people have do take a look at this and they think yeah this is very convincing it's very hard to see how nature could have just without consciousness given rise this incredibly ordered and harmonious system which include highly complex animals well what a dialectical materialist worldview and what the negation of the negation helps us to understand is that at bottom matter is organised as we discussed it must be organised you can't have utter chaos everything must preserve themselves at least for a time and have determinant qualities that's what existence is for anything to exist it must be like that and over time this general feature to matter gives rise to development where features get preserved and again the most obvious example of this is of course evolution in which the the laws of of matter are utilised in a sense to enable something to reproduce not because it wanted to or because god decided it should happen but simply because it can happen because the regular laws of nature enable this to happen and eventually it will happen and once it does happen such an animal or a single celled organism will be able to preserve those features which allow it to exist and of course variations get preserved as well and and this brings me on to the final point in fact which is that through the negation negation we have developments from the lower to the higher we don't simply have these cycles but we have cycles in a kind of upward spiral and and we can see an example of that in the case of the acorn Engels gives the example that the the acorn gets reproduced in greater numbers so one acorn produces one oak tree but then ultimately that oak tree produces many acorns but that's not all you also have evolution in which the new acorns have genetic variation from their parents most of the time of course that's fairly incidental and doesn't really produce any significant change but of course over a very long period of time and with changes in the external conditions those changes become important enough to say that we have a new species and of course that only happens if those changes are useful so we have preserved through this process that which is useful and therefore we have a kind of order built in a regularity built into nature without any recourse to God or any consciousness simply because that which it works preserves itself and I think that the law of the negation of the negation is fundamental to understanding that we have to have ultimately somewhere of explaining without recourse to God why nature is ordered why we have over time increasingly complex animals appearing and I think that without the negation of the negation it would be impossible to explain that so anyway that that really finishes our discussion of the negation the negation and the the interpenetration of opposites next week we will be discussing the relationship between part and whole which is quite closely related but also different so I'll see you for that. Lenin stated that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory we are bound to take in the ideas that surround us under capitalism these are ideas that ultimately defend the status quo in well read's upcoming book on the history of philosophy Alan Woods looks at the development of philosophical thinking from the ancient Greeks all the way through to Marx and Engels who brought together the best of previous thinking to produce the marxist philosophical outlook which looks at the real material world not as a static immovable reality but one that is constantly changing and moving according to laws that can be discovered through this we can learn how philosophy becomes an indispensable tool in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society pre-order your copy now at www.marxist.com.hop