 Hi, welcome back. Last week we discussed the dialectical logic of development with the notion of the negation of the negation. This week we're going to discuss something kind of related, like the next step, which is the dialectical logic of complex systems and how those change over time. Now essentially essential for understanding this is grasping the dialectical contradiction of the universal and the individual or the gent, the part and the whole, shall we say. And this really gets at one of the fundamental problems of philosophy, which is whether or not universal concepts such as animal or color or any concept like that, whether or not they have a real existence or are just fictions of them, like convenient fictions perhaps, but have no real existence as such. Now our starting point on this is going to be the nature of thought itself. Thought is inherently universalising, okay? We deal with universals whenever we think it's unavoidable. And that's what separates thought from mere instinct and sensation. Hegel frequently pointed this out in fact when he said that it is impossible to speak of the purely individual thing because as soon as you do, you make it a universal. So for example, if I were to say this leaf is green, I'm actually making it a universal twice or I'm linking it to the universal twice. So I'm saying that this thing, this individual object is a leaf which is a universal thing and also that it's green, so it's a color, which is of course also a universal thing. And Hegel points out that if you leave these universal determinations out to merely say this in an attempt to make it really individual, in fact you end up making it even more universal because of course everything can be described as this. In order to make it more particular, more concrete, you have to give it these universal determinations. You have to say it's green, it's a leaf, you know, it's large, it's small, etc. So this kind of reveals the way in which thought is inherently about universals or rather it links the individual to the universal. It synthesizes them, shall we say. Now idealists like Plato have argued that these universals are the real truth, the real essence of existence, they're the most profound thing. And not only that, but they actually have a real existence. In other words, they actually exist. There is a kind of an ideal leaf, there is pure greenness. And all of the manifestations of these ideas are just that, they're just worse manifestations, if we like, imperfect forms of the ideal form that exists somewhere else in a kind of heavenly realm, shall we say. Now this concept usually strikes us as quite strange in today's more scientific world. However, actually in one form or another, this kind of idealist error really is still much more prevalent than we might think. So for example, God itself is a form of this idea, the idea of a God. Because on the one hand, this God is obviously a universal, is the essence of the universe, created the universe, unites it, is the reason that the universe is the way it is, etc. And yet at the same time is treated as a concrete being, as a distinct thing that has a real existence. So once again, this idea of universal is having a real and a prior or superior existence to concrete material things. And that is essentially the essence of this outlook, that the universal is a prior to the concrete particular forms of it, if you like. And again, we find this in other forms as well. We find it quite frequently actually in science, not usually stated in that way. But science, especially I think when a science is a particular branch of sciences new, and in older science, you often find this kind of this error really. So for example, in the past, it was thought that heat was determined by having hot force and cold force. In other words, these universal properties were rather than seen as being from the objects themselves, but somehow outside of the objects as distinct concrete things that were then sort of imposed on to them and gave them their qualities. And in fact, in another sense, you also find this kind of error of idealism in politics. When people say things, for example, when discussing the problems of capitalism, and they describe those problems as fundamentally about greed, which is usually what people say, when they describe that it's greed that is the cause of the problems, and that the solution to this must be to pick different universal values, such as altruism or something, and then go with those and then society won't have so many problems. That in a sense is a form of the same error of thought, because it assumes that these values have some sort of independent existence, almost as if there's a place that they exist, and you can pluck this or that idea at your will, separate from the material conditions, and then sort of impose it onto society somehow. So this is a very real problem, even though it might seem when it's stated bluntly as slightly ridiculous. Now, of course, as materialists, we do reject this outlook, right, because it is an idealist outlook. You know, universals do not exist as such. There is no place in which you can find pure color or something like that. There is only this or that object with this or that form of that color. Now, Hegel was, of course, himself an idealist, and in many respects he did reproduce this error, but at other times he understood it very well and criticized it. So for example, in the introduction to the shorter logic, he says the following, and I quote, When the universal is made a mere form and coordinated with the particular, as if it were on the same level, it sinks into a particular itself. Even common sense in everyday matters is above the absurdity of setting a universal besides the particulars. Would anyone who wished for fruit reject cherries, pears and grapes on the ground that they were cherries, pears and grapes and not fruit? In other words, what he's saying is that for a universal to be a universal, it cannot exist as such as soon as you were to make it an object, even if it's a very good object, better than all the others. It's merely a particular, it's just one object amongst many. He also says it in the phenomenology of spirits that, and again, I quote, Should it appear contradictory to say that the absolute has to be conceived essentially as a result, a little consideration will set this appearance of contradiction in its true light. If we say all animals, for example, that does not pass for zoology. So in other words, what he is saying here, which we as Marxists agree with, is that if you abstract the universal from its conditions and pretend that it creates those conditions, then you are left with a kind of inexplicable senselessness, zoology by itself is just a phrase. To give it any real content, you have to actually study the particular things that make it up. And if you remove it from that, then again, it just becomes a particular itself. He also says that the laws of the universe are not inscribed in the sky, they cannot be seen or heard. It's again the same point that you cannot find a place in which the laws sort of exist in pure form or something and then are imposed onto the universe. However, he then reveals his idealism when he says that these universal laws exist only for the mind, they cannot be seen, but they can be apprehended with the mind. And I think that he is beginning to slip into his idealism by sort of suggesting that there that there's some sort of other realm of mind that in which universals reside, which isn't quite what Marxists think, and I'll explain that. Marx also ridicules this kind of idealist era, you know, the era of treating universals as having an independent existence. In The Holy Family, one of his earlier books where he says that, you know, he takes the absurdity of it, he shows that if you think that, for example, fruit, again, for some reason, the example of fruit, if you take fruit as having an independent existence, and a superior existence to his actual manifestations as apples and pears or anything else, then the only way you can explain the actual existence of concrete apples and pears is by sort of saying that for some mystical reason, the fruit, the ideal fruit, must manifest itself, must sort of unfold itself into all these different forms. But of course, if that's the position, it remains a complete mystery as to why that happens. And that is the same argument that we would make, or one of the same arguments that we would make against any notion of God as a creator of the universe. Because the question always arises, well, why did God, if God is everything and is sort of self-sufficient and perfect, then what motivated God to create the universe at that particular time, and what motivated him to make it in this way and not that way? Why was he given these properties and not some other superior properties? And nobody can answer that question, because God is defined to begin with as perfect and superior to his creation. So, for materialists, we start out from the concrete material things. That is absolutely fundamental. The material world is the prior thing. That is what really exists. Concrete, specific material objects, they are what is real. Do we then deny the existence of universals? Do we say that these concepts, such as color or shape or whatever, cause and effect, time, et cetera, do we say that these universals are not true, that they're just convenient fictions of the mind? This does also relate to this stuff that we discussed in earlier weeks, if you remember, on the problem of knowledge, for example. And of course, we don't deny that they exist. If you do, that is essentially positivism. And the error of positivism is that in what positivism basically states is that only fact, only concrete facts of, you know, basically individual instances of things, you know, at concrete events, they are the only thing that has truth or that we can know. And therefore, any sort of broader category or generalization is untrue or is unfounded, essentially. And so theoretical generalizations are essentially ruled out by positivism. And the trouble with that is once again, we always end up finding that thought can't do without universals. Thought is inherently about universals and generalizations. And so if you write that out, you slip back into idealism because you end up concluding that those universals that we do clearly use are again just conventions, just arbitrary inventions of the mind, essentially. And we reject that as materialists, as consistent materialists. If we think about it, any real object that exists, any physical material object, is actually not really so unique. Because each object is different, that's true. But actually, everyone fits into a type. They will be made up of molecules and atoms, and there's only so many elements that exist. And we find them repeated again and again in the universe. And we find that all the objects are composed of these, you know, general forms of matter which obey predictable laws. And of course, if you go further into, for example, the organic world into life, we find that there are definite species. And it's true each member of that species is different from the next, but only so different. In reality, they are all, they will conform more or less, or the vast majority of them conform to their type and are predictable in the way that they behave. That really applies across the universe. And that, of course, is the reason why we are able to make universalizations which are useful. Otherwise, our universalizations would, you know, why would they work? Why would they correspond to our life and be useful? There'd be no basis for saying that at all. Again, it would just be random or luck or arbitrary. So in reality, things conform very much to their type, to a very large extent to the type. The universe is predictable. We can generalize. And of course, that's the basis of human society as well. The fact that we can create tools that are, that work in predictable ways that are made of, you know, certain kinds of material that we find consistently in the world. And it's reliable that it does work in that way. That is obviously the basis of the entirety of human society. We couldn't do that. We couldn't create useful things, useful technology with which to live better. And again, that's the basis of society or of civilization. So this or that object is, yes, it is unique. And yes, it passes away. Everything is finite. Everything dies or is destroyed at a certain point. But the new things that emerge in their place are also not so different. We find that again, there's this tremendous regularity and things. So behind or after all of this flux, if you like, of imperfect, concrete particulars, we find there is an abiding kind of image that we are given certain predictable laws, certain regularity that we do find in the universe. And we can call these laws basically the reason why things behave in certain ways. Essentially, that's what a law is. And therefore, these universals are real, in a sense, and they are enormously important. In a sense, a true universal or a law, a correctly understood law, is more important, in a sense, you could say, even more true than any fleeting instance of it, if you like. Does that mean that we're returning to idealism then, because of this, by holding up the universal as superior somehow to the concrete manifestations of it? Well, to resolve this problem, we have to use dialectical logic. In other words, a logic based on the inseparability of opposites, and the idea that the opposites condition and define one another. We have to get away from this thinking in terms of absolute antithesis. So it's either that there's only concrete objects, concrete material objects, and universals are just fictions. Or on the other hand, that the universals are the only thing that exists, and they have a real physical existence, and everything else is an imperfect kind of manifestation of them. Both of those are opposite extremes, which taken by themselves are false. For us, yes, we start out with the concrete material objects. Of course, those are those are the starting point for any materialist. But as I said, these objects fit into a type. And to help us understand this and how it is dialectical, let's take an example. Let's return to this example of fruit. And let's take an apple, for example. Now, a specific apple that we might have in front of us, that certainly exists. It is definitely real, obviously. But at the same time, it is an apple. It isn't just this individual thing in front of us. It does correspond to a type. Now, how did it get that apple-ness, if we like, if we can call it that? Where does that come from? Was there an ideal apple that somehow imposed onto all of this chaos of matter, the form of the apple? Obviously not. That would be the mechanism by which that would happen to be absolutely inexplicable. That's clearly not what happens. And apple has apple-ness because of the prior history of apples and indeed of evolution in general. It can only be an apple because before it there was an apple tree and there were seeds that were produced. And of course an apple tree can only do that because there's an environment at which it exists, which it is nourished by, and which it is adapted for. And it can only be adapted for it because of a long prior history of evolution, essentially. That is how an apple becomes an apple. So an apple is in a sense more than itself. It is more than merely this particular object. It has general or universal apple-ness within itself. It has, if you like, crystallized within itself the past forms of all of this development. And also it has the future because it's in its own nature, of course, to produce seeds, to die, and for those seeds to be spread around and in turn produce further apple trees. So yeah, so in a sense that the universal does exist, but it exists within those objects. It helps to mold those objects and it can do that not because of any mystical force, but because of the real history of material developments, the universal interaction of material objects over time. And also it is the case that the universal only exists through these particulars. So just as the particular has the universal, if you like, within it, the universal also is nothing other than the particulars that it is made up of. And those particulars have to do that because they are precisely because they are particulars. If you take, for example, your arm, that is merely a part of the whole of your body. And it can only, precisely because it is a part, it needs the rest of the body. It can only be a functioning arm because it's attached to a body with a heart that beats and blood and all the rest of it. That's what enables it to be an arm. So precisely the fact that it is merely a part is what binds it together into a definite whole. And what a universal is, what a correct universal law or concept is, is an adequate summation of that historical process of development, of the laws of motion, if you like, of complexes, of phenomena, such as apples or fruits or human bodies, etc. So that is how we sort of dialectically resolve this problem, which is, as I said, is a huge problem of philosophy, the problem of where universals come from and whether or not they are true. And the final thing that I want to say is this also helps us to understand, we're going to discuss this in later weeks in more depth, it helps us to understand how lawfulness and determination really operate. Because if laws do exist, if you like, and are very important, but on the other hand, they don't exist in an ideal form separate from the matter that they express or that they kind of yet express the lawfulness of that matter. They don't exist separate from that. Then it follows that the law is also, it's a result of the particular formation that the parts are in, if you like. So take the example of society, which is very obviously, as Marxists is what we're interested in, there are laws to society. So take capitalism, there is the law of economic crises, there are laws of revolution. We do find revolutions periodically take place and they have certain predictable features in the same, of course, for capitalist crises. But these laws, as I've said, do not exist outside of or prior to capitalist society. They exist in and through the many millions of individuals and the particular relations that those individuals have with one another. But of course, each capitalist society in each moment in the history of capitalism has different individuals, although only so different, of course, they're still composed of people belonging to definite classes like the proletariat, but nevertheless, concrete individuals with their own personal history, and the particular relationship that they stand in is obviously slightly different in different points of history. It's an enormously complex equation, if you like. And therefore, although there's only so much variation that capitalism can tolerate, and there will always be capitalist crises of a certain form that are similar, basically, there is also a uniqueness to each one because it can't exist separately from those particular people in that society. So the way in which a capitalist crisis will occur will be slightly unpredictable. It won't happen on an exact day that you can predict in advance, and it won't necessarily have the exact same cause each time. But on the other hand, it would be absurd to deny common features and certain predictable features to capitalist crises. So that is why this kind of understanding is so important. It helps us to grasp scientifically that capitalist society and the world in general is lawful, laws are real, and we can apprehend them. But at the same time, these laws are not ever perfectly or sort of simplistically manifested, and therefore we are not these kind of fatalists who just know how everything's going to happen in advance. Anyway, I'll stop there, and I think we're going to go into a bit more detail into some of these questions next week, so I'll see you then. 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 Wellread'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