These comments are really depressing. I’ve no idea why the discussion’s digressed off to cognitive science here, but I couldn’t help being uneasy about Keynes’s surreptitious “left Hegelianism”…a word or two…
First, even though it is true that the ‘exact’ sciences were for a long time stuck in the false dualisms of Descartes and up to a point those of Kant, this is hardly reflective of the modern trend, you could check
- Einstein’s popularization of ‘Relativity’ (this is the title of it) one of whose sections is titled ‘On the Universe as a Whole’, sound hardly atomistic to me;
- David Bohm, one of the foremost innovators in Quantum Theory as well as one of Einstein’s protégés –as well as a radical for which he got summoned up by the House of Un-American activities-, wrote a lot about “organistic” physics, see the end of his book ‘Special Relativity’ for example;
- Kurt Gödel, the logician who shattered Bertrand Russell’s mathematical work and one of Einstein’s best friends, already adhered to several aspects of Kantian metaphysics, precisely those which were assumed valid by Hegel;
- many developments in mathematical logic itself, where the law of the excluded middle is forgone, thus leading to new models of logic (intuitionism, Dialatheism, paraconsistent logic, etc. check for example the work of Patrick Suppes, Graham Priest, etc.)), some of which are being currently proposed for a foundation of Quantum Mechanics, i.e. category theory. Graham Priest, in particular, is a staunch admirer of Hegel, hence his Diale-theism (for dialectic).
These are just some examples, but the trend is very much reflective of Marx’s prospects: “There will be only one science”, meaning you can only go so far with the mode of thinking in which reality is independent of our minds, with, that is, (pre)Kantian calisthenics. These limits push science to look back at itself, to theorize itself, making the atomistic metaphysics on the background self-implode. Hegel called this Aufheben, the resulting dialectic then explains the growth of knowledge. Some people are even trying to formalize such conceptualization with Set Theory but well let’s not lose track here. It is important to see though that the end of atomistic metaphysics has a political undertone as well, for it shatters any notion of crass ‘individualism’, so that if these developments in the philosophy of science are not that well known, there’s a reason for that.
So all of this leads back to the Logic of Hegel, who no one except Marxists (a painfully few of them at least), Hegelians and some philosopher or scientist here and there, cares to understand these days. The purpose of Hegel’s Logic is to truly show what logical necessity is about. (Contrariwise formal logic, “I am Nothing implies 2+2 = 4” is a valid statement since anything follows from a false antecedent.)
This has nothing to do with dialectics being The Truth, nor of proving this because Einstein happened to be a holistic thinker; it has to do with the overcoming of naïve aprioristic blabber. Much of the “cognitive science” verbiage above alludes to the “concreteness” of the brain over that of “logic”, the former being “matter”, the latter the “mind”, but no allusion whatever to the Concept of the brain, matter, mind, nor logic. These are all presupposed, indeed, in a false separation of logic and ontology, which will then lead to the habitual dilemmas of subjectivity vs. objectivity, the horrid mind vs. matter, determinism vs. chance, misconceptions of time, etc. and it will do this “behind the brain’s back.” Likewise, Marshall’s arguments, and Keynes’ approval thereof, are not based on a critical understanding of the logic which drives “organistic” thinking, hence the result that the social sciences “happen to be” not mathematically deterministic.
This is no place to expound a critique of modern science from the dialectical point of view, but there are of course books written on the topic, for example Errol Harris was an unusually clear and highly versed in science philosopher, see his ‘Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical thinking’ –this one starts with a very well-written and straightforward critique of the metaphysics of atomism- and ‘Commentary on the Logic of Hegel’. Harris, a catholic Hegelian, is to be read critically, but if anything he brings the (obscurely wrapped) incongruence of Hegel and many of his followers to light. Adorno is (was) someone to be read as well, though he wrote scurrilously, somewhat using philosophy to justify his ‘opinions’, many of which were reactionary.
Ralph Dumain’s site is an invaluable resource on these topics, http://www.autodidactproject.org/
On this score, blaming Marx, a self-avowed pupil of Hegel, for applying “axiomatic deductive reasoning to the "long run" (implications that Marx's deduction of the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation")…” and to further depict him as somehow not “organistic” enough (as opposed to Lord Keynes of course) is a crude cheap shot. True, to Us, words like ‘absolute’, ‘general’, ‘law’ (who knows, maybe even ‘capitalist’?) sound cultish, but this comes of course from Hegel, whom I hope needs no further associations with the Absolute. Their meaning is obviously more nuanced in this tradition. The reason for this usage is that in their metaphysics both Marx and Hegel were for the most part followers of Aristotle, whose concept of Nature in its unity stems from the manifestation of a primordial substance’s self-instantiation, its self-development; which is not to say that the substance is an ‘axiom’ one must start from, but that it (the substance) is necessitated by the internal logic itself, which is as per Hegel the only way to the System of Knowledge (whether Marx was a system builder or not, that’s a whole different issue which I can’t give any brief thoughts on here). For Hegel, the substance was Geist or the “Absolute Idea”, for Marx the substance (being a little unsophisticated here), insofar as the objectivity of Humanism is the obverse of Human self-making, was Praxis, as it was the historical period in which he lived vis a vis the ‘concrete’ which demanded a transcendence of epistemological redundancy, its practical resolution. Having Marx taken a lot from Hegel’s theory of the Concept, the language ensues. But Marx’s concept of Praxis (or living labor) is pivotal in Capital, this is revealed by Lucaks, Schlomo Avineri, Enrique Dussell, Richard Feinstein, etc. for example. Hence the “absolute law”, because as long as the capital - wage labor relation is maintained, capital is still the social relation which derives from the self-alienation of labor, it isn’t a question of what will happen to capital-‘ism’ but of what capitalism ‘is’. The point that actually drives Marx’s understanding of science is that in practice “everything is theory-ladden” and therefore science has to be understood, as David Bohm would explain, as an experiential endeavor.
This is as much as I can say here, but as far as Keynes’ “Hegelianism” is concerned, it’s clear this is quite belied by his grotesque anti-Marxism, which of course applies to DeLong. Could it be that His Lordship had no trouble in adducing Hegel in support of the philosophy of organism because he also ended up being pretty conservative? The Bloomsbury group never did care much for Hegel anyhow, except perhaps for historiographic factual analogy. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_explore_022009