<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Re: nightmarish synthesis</title></head><body> <div>An exchange between Tahir and Lou:</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>-----Original Message-----</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>From: Tahir Wood <twood@uwc.ac.za></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>>>You don't need much Hegel to recognize the need for a synthesis.</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>>>Lou Paulsen</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br> Tahir Wood:</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>Actually for this you mustn't know any Hegel at all. Synthesis is something<br> superimposed onto Hegel by people who didn't understand aufhebung or<br> supercession. If you did know any Hegel, far from wanting a synthesis, you<br> would want something way, way better than the ham-fisted Leninists or the<br> anarchist demagogues. (God just imagine how ghastly the two rolled up into</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>one would be!)<br> </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>Lou Paulsen:</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>Well, you don't need MUCH Hegel, but you need more Hegel than Wood has.  The<br> 'synthesis' is not just an arithmetic average of the thesis and the<br> antithesis!!  It is something that overcomes the contradiction between the<br> two by putting forward something new, and would, in this case, be 'way, way</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>better.'  No time to elaborate on this at this moment though.</blockquote> <div><br></div> <div>Hegel didn't ever use the language of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and it's usually quite misleading to force his dialectics into that pattern, so Tahir is more persuasive than Lou so far.</div> <div><br></div> <div>But the bad habit of describing Hegel's dialectics in this way had become quite common by the time Marx was engaging with Hegelianism in the 1840s, so we do find him writing about "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" from time to time. Marx, however, (as far as I can tell) only uses this jargon to mock the shallow Hegelianism of his opponents, never as his preferred vocabulary for presenting his own dialectical arguments.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Here he is, for example, in "The Poverty of Philosophy" (1847), criticising Proudhon's economic theory (and, interestingly, making one of his characteristic arguments against the fetishisation of the value of "equality" by leftists):</div> <div> </div> <div>***</div> <div>"Just the as<i> antithesis</i> was before turned into an<i> antidote</i>, so now the<i> thesis</i> becomes a<i> hypothesis</i>. This change of terms, coming from M. Proudhon, has no longer anything surprising for us! Human reason, which is anything but pure, having only incomplete vision, encounters at every step new problems to be solved. Every new thesis which it discovers in absolute reason and which is the negation of the first thesis, becomes for it a synthesis, which it accepts rather naively as the solution of the problem in question. It is thus that this reason frets and fumes in ever renewing contradictions until, coming to the end of the contradictions, it perceives that all its theses and syntheses are merely contradictory hypotheses. In its perplexity, "human reason, social genius, returns in one leap to all its former positions, and in a single formula, solves all its problems". This unique formula, by the way, constitutes M. Proudhon's true discovery. It is<i> constituted value</i>.</div> <div><br></div> <div>"Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme well-being, the real practical aim, is<i> equality</i>. And why did the social genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, catholicism, or any other principle? Because "humanity has successively realized so many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis", which precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's ideal. He imagines that the division of labor, credit, the workshop - all economic relations - were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement."</div> <div><br></div> <div>From The Poverty of Philosophy, chapter two, "Sixth Observation". [Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 6, p.172; this text cut-and-pasted from <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo<span ></span>rks/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm>]</div> <div>***</div> <div><br></div> <div>Chris</div> </body> </html>