The Drama of the Hegelian Dialectic
Let's say within some domain of controversy there are two major perspectives represented, X and Y. X is obviously and persistently wrong on issue A, which Y correctly points out. Y is obviously and persistently wrong on issue B, which X correctly points out. X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test.
Trying to join the big visible organization doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa. X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted.
For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.
Because of the dishonesty involved, this sort of situation can't be explicitly negotiated; rather, there's a sort of collective sensing process whereby political cognition distributed across the two sides settles into some drama or another for a while.
This is a common pattern. It's why there are persistent unresolved philosophical disputes. Consider the Kant's distinction between "empiricists" and "rationalists." Rationalists are supposed to somehow believe in reasoning but not sense data, sometimes characterized as eschewing “looking at the world." Empiricists are supposed to somehow believe in the evidence of the senses, but not in reasoning.
This distinction was originally fake, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The last time I checked, the Wikipedia page on Rationalism began with portraits of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Spinoza was a lens grinder who worked closely with astronomer-physicist Christiaan Huygens and wrote in his magnum opus, Ethics, that we only know about things in the world through our bodies interacting with them. It is unclear to me how it is possible for someone to be more committed to looking at the world.
The last time I checked, the Wikipedia page on Empiricism began with portraits of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume. Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding includes the following, which implies that abstract mathematical reasoning is one of the two valid sources of knowledge, and refers to experimental reasoning, not just sense-data:
"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit recasts the entire history of ideas as fake oppositional dramas of this type, and after Kant and Hegel, we in fact see a profusion of schools of philosophy, permanently reifying commitments to pairs of opposite wrong answers.
Previously: Discursive Warfare as Faction Formation, The Two-Party Swindle
Originally a response to: Scissors Statements for President?
And here's a related joke from Spalding's Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor:
There were two carriage-drivers of Poland who were in constant rivalry for passengers. One was Ivan and the other Mikhail. One day, as Ivan was driving from Warsaw, and the other was approaching Warsaw from the opposite direction, they met on the road, several miles from the city.
When they recognized each other, they drew up their horses and exchanged chilly greetings.
“I see, Mikhail, that you have that crook, Yussel the Jew, as a passenger,” Ivan called, his voice dripping with Sarcasm.
"What do you mean, 'crook'!" Mikhail shouted back. "My Jew is ten times more honest than that Jewish money-lender you have as your own passenger."
"Now hold on there!" Ivan roared. "You can't insult my Jew like that and get away with it.”
"I'll insult him all I like! My Jew is better than your Jew, and I'm warning you, pig, one more word out of you and I'll punch your Jew in the nose.”
"Oh yeah! Well you just try it and see what happens!”
Good as his word, Mikhail climbed down from his wagon, crossed over to Ivan's cart and let fly a stinging blow to the Jewish passenger's nose.
When Ivan saw that his passenger's nose was bleeding profusely, he was beside himself with rage.
"Son of a horse-fly!" he yelled. "How dare you bloody my Jew's nose? If you think I'm going to let you get away with that you are sadly mistaken!" With that, he ran over to Mikhail's wagon and hit his passenger in the eye with all his might. "You hit my Jew, I hit your Jew," he shrilled angrily.
Mikhail was now almost hysterical in his fury. "I swear by the Czar and with God as my witness, you provoked me into this. Remember, I warned you!" And with that, he fell upon Ivan's passenger and pummeled him unmercifully.
"Don't worry," Mikhail called to his nearly unconscious passenger, "I'll take care of that dirty dog. Believe me, I'll give him something to remember me by for the rest of his life!" So saying, he grabbed Ivan's passenger by the throat and almost choked him to death, meanwhile pounding his head against a rock.
Then, glaring at each other out of hate-filled eyes, Ivan and Mikhail mounted their respective coaches and drove on their way.
"That will teach Ivan a little respect for the Jews," muttered Mikhail to himself.
"That will teach Mikhail a little respect for the Jews," muttered Ivan to himself.
4 Comments
I ALWAYS compose in Google docs for just this reason, EXCEPT when it matters. :P
"Consider Kant's distinction between "empiricists" and "rationalists." Rationalists are supposed to somehow believe in reasoning but not sense data, sometimes characterized as eschewing “looking at the world." Empiricists are supposed to somehow believe in the evidence of the senses, but not in reasoning.
This distinction was originally fake, but became a self-fulfilling prophecy."
No; this distinction was originally quite strict, but became fuzzier over time.
Plato specifically said that sense data was so deceptive as to be unusable. It's in Republic, in the section on the divided line, and derives from his theory that literally everything we observe, is /not real/, and is just a poor copy of the real, and we shouldn't study it. We can see the Real through introspection, or by recalling memory from past lives, or by dialectic; but not by observation.
Hume implied that we /can't use logical deduction/, and to rationalists from Plato to Hume's time, "rational" meant strictly logical or mathematical deduction, or dialectic (which was considered as good as formal math). Take a closer look at what Hume wrote:
<<<
Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding includes the following, which implies that abstract mathematical reasoning is one of the two valid sources of knowledge, and refers to experimental reasoning, not just sense-data:
"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
>>>
Hume didn't say that abstract mathematical reason was valid; he said abstract reasoning /concerning quantity or number/. Quantity is a qualitative difference. Euclid's geometry didn't concern quantity, nor did it count anything. He didn't use numbers at all; the closest he got was words like "triple" or "half". You can say the area of a rectangle is the product of its base and height, but you don't measure the base and height and plug in the numbers and compute them.
Euclidean geometry always had to have a physical interpretation. He wouldn't have called Hero's formula for the area of a triangle, A^2 = s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c), "geometry", because he would say you can't multiply four lengths together, as that has no physical meaning. And he didn't consider the lengths of lines to be numbers, because he knew they might be irrational, or a ratio, and to the classical Greeks, a "number" was a positive integer.
So Hume's claim here was much more radical than it appears to us today; he was, perhaps unintentionally, implying we should commit Euclid to the flames.
Today we think, of /course/ nobody actually meant that you literally couldn't use sense data. But for almost 2000 years, that was what nearly all philosophers said. Medieval Christian Europe was clear about this. It's why their maps, unlike Islamic maps of the same period, didn't conform to the territory.
That's why I'm constant ranting about Rationalism. "Rationalism" does, in fact, mean that school of thought which ignores sense data. There's too much philosophy built on that definition for us to change it now without having to rewrite everything. Continental philosophy literally makes no sense because continental philosophers literally don't believe in "making sense".
Unfortunately, Rationalists exploit this recent slippage of the term's usage to take credit for scientific advances when it suits them, and to deflect blame for Rationalism's failures onto science when it suits them, and all the while still hold onto their Rationalist metaphysical assumptions.
Hegelian dialectic is basically phenomenologist, which means Rationalism that takes subjective experience as axiomatic. Hegel notes that sometimes we notice something that makes our model of reality break down, and we must then take our /new/ subjective experience as axiomatic and start over. Hence, (A) truths are eternal and universal, but (B) progress is made by discarding one set of truths, and choosing another. "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" = We only realize the "truth" of an era just as it's being replaced by the next one. (I'm relying on a book about his "Philosophy of Logic"; I don't want to actually read the original. Life is too short to read Hegel.) I would say this was Hegel accidentally doing a /reductio ad absurdum/ of Rationalism, by exposing the uselessness of Rationalism without empirical grounding.
The divided line as presented in *Republic* is a way of relating different kinds of evidence. Logical evidence has to be lexically prior: if a proposition is ill-formed, there can't be evidence for or against it. If a set of propositions contradict each other, there's nothing empirical evidence can do to save them jointly. That's a functional articulation of dependencies, not a denial of the senses. The hypotheses from the sensory realm are what Plato calls steps and springboards to get to good premises; once you've got good premises you can start deducing without needing to keep checking against appearances, but getting good premises can take a while.
It's easy to take things Plato's Socrates said out of context and get a very wrong impression, because he explores a lot of hypotheses, because he talks with a lot of different people. But there's fairly direct textual support for denying any Platonic doctrine.
In Plato's Seventh Letter, he writes ([J Harward translation](https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/seventh_letter.html)):
>Thus much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries-that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.
The authorship of the letters attributed to Plato in his own voice is somewhat disputed, but Socrates argues much the same thing in the *Phaedrus*, that a genuinely philosophical book could not lay out doctrines, but would have to speak differently to different people.
And then in practice, Socrates never stops checking against concrete cases. In the *Gorgias*, Callicles complains that Socrates talks incessantly of shoemakers, cleaners, cooks, and doctors. Whatever the theoretical framework says about the self-sufficiency of the highest kind of knowledge, the philosopher Plato chooses to depict keeps going back to the cobblers. The emphasis on sensory and body health elsewhere in *Republic* (music and gymnastic) also makes no sense if our access to the ideas is independent of the body.
The cave allegory implies that one sees *through* false appearances to what's behind them, not that the appearances are not evidence about anything. The shadows are distorted but that positively implies that they are information produced by something real.