Rev Left Radio - Deep Dive 5: Hegel and Deleuze on the Concept of Negation

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

In this fifth installment of the Dialects Deep Dive subseries, Matthew Furlong joins Breht once again - this time to discuss, at length, the concept of negation and its role in philosophy and dialectics.  Check out our first installment of "Dialectics Deep Dive" here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics Check out our second installment here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/spinoza Check out our third installments here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3a https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3b Here's a link also to the `974 Deleuze seminar from which I read: https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/anti-oedipus-iii/lecture-02   Ai Siqi, "Antagonistic and Non-Antagonistic Contradictions" (1957): http://marxistphilosophy.org/AntagonisticASQ.pdf   Mao Zedong, "Talk on Problems of Philosophy" (1964): http://marxistphilosophy.org/mao64.pdf   Outro music: 'Workers Song' by Michael Hanrahan from the album "Freeing Lonesome Tune". Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio    

Hello everyone and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have the fifth and perhaps final technical installment of our dialectics deep dive with Matthew Furlong. The reason I say technical is because Matthew and I have more projects and more topics that we want to cover, but it might be the end of this specific series, and we can move on to covering other things as like standalone episodes. episodes. But as always with these deep dive episodes, these are deep dives into philosophy. They can be very challenging and they are very lengthy. But for those that are interested in this sort of stuff, I think it's really a fascinating series overall on a fascinating episode. Matthew did lose a friend recently and would like for me to read this thing that he wrote for his friend who passed away

and it'll explain everything in this. So I'm going to read this from Matthew. to his friend Catherine. On February 11th in Ecuador, my friend Catherine and her partner, Jay, drowned while saving two children from rough waters. I'd known Catherine since our early high school years when we belonged to a large circle of friends

that mainly congregated in and through the local underground music scene. She was a sweethearted person, down to earth, incapable of pretense, incredibly funny and creative-minded. She was together with my best friend for many years,

and thus, well into adult, I was happy to see her and have a chat when I would visit my hometown. Catherine also struggled with a ferocious alcohol addiction in later years that, the last time I saw her, had seriously affected her physical, if not her mental health. I had not had contact with her in a couple of years, and do not know if she was in recovery when she died. I am ashamed to say that when I received word of her death,

I immediately assumed she had succumbed to that disease. Learning how she actually died left me shaken and humbled. As we know, addiction in this society is treated as a moral failing and a stain on one's character. Many, perhaps most, people would have written Catherine off due to her disease as somebody incapable of any great agency. And yet Catherine did what many people who have a far easier time in life are never able to do. She gave everything she had for the sake of others. To empty oneself out completely in loving kindness. This seems to me to be the most excellent expression of human beings.

freedom. It is certainly the most difficult, especially in a capitalist society that entices us, incites us, and coerces us at every turn to be selfish misanthropes. So I salute Catherine and thank her for setting an example. She died a hero, and I could not be more proud. Here's my episode with Madna. This is Matthew, and we're back again for Dialectics Deep Dive 5, which I think we've titled, was it Hegel and Deleuze on the concept of negation in the history of philosophy. and dialectical materialism. A real mouthful there.

Yeah, something like that. We'll see if the title characters allow for that long. Yeah, exactly. Some version of that name, yes. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess we should probably start off by talking about what we want to accomplish this episode. There's one definite thing I really want to accomplish this episode, and it's that I want

to, through sort of a close reading of some small passages, primarily of Hegel, in the phenomenology of spirit and the science of logic. And I want to try to help give the listener an intuitive grasp of Hegelian logic, using some concrete examples. And then hopefully that can sort of help us understand a little bit more intimately the nature of his thinking. And then that will help us, I think, clarify some of sort of like Deleuze's criticisms that we'll deal with at the end of the show.

Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, this is part five of an ongoing sub-series. You can listen to these episodes, you know, straight up without the previous ones. I think it would certainly help to have the previous ones. But if you're especially like somebody that's familiar with Hegel or familiar with philosophy and you feel comfortable jumping into these discussions somewhere in the middle, that's totally fine as well. It's every, you know, everybody's suited for something a little different here.

But also it's worth mentioning that Matthew came on our Patreon episode to talk about the Sopranos, psychology and capitalism and that was a really fun and highly well received a Patreon episode as well so I thank you for coming on and doing that as well anybody that signs up for the Patreon can have access to that immediately but yeah so let's go let's go ahead and get into it anything else you want to say up front before we get into the questions just in relation to the Sopranos yeah probably if people can get at that episode and have a listen it might be a little bit helpful because when I talk about Deleu's

near the end, I might return to some of the stuff in the many saints of Newark to help sort of illustrate Deleuze's concerns about the Hegelian logic when it comes to the development of like self-consciousness as a person and what the dynamic, what the sort of structure that looks like in the phenomenology of spirit, why Deleuze finds it troubling and why Guitari also finds it troubling and sort of like the kind of alternative that they try to set up in the work in Antioedipus and sort of like surrounding Antioedipus. But yeah, so just that little note there. Cool.

All right. Well, let's dive into the main discussion here. And let's start with a look at the concept of negation. We're going to follow this concept sort of chronologically through the history of philosophy and end up at Hegel. So let's start with Greek philosophy. Can you tell us why this concept of negation has such importance for the Greeks and their European descendants?

Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, it's really very simple. And we're going to start with looking at one or two pre-Socratic. So these are philosophers that were around when Socrates was a young guy and I think before Plato was born. And they're all really asking one question. And the one question is basically like, what the hell is happening? And it arises from the experience that we all have of knowing. that everything is in perpetual change and fluctuation, and yet nonetheless, there seem to be

sort of these like stabilities by which we can identify the worlds, right? Like we know that our friends, our family, they're aging and they will one day die, for example, but at the same time, they remain recognizable throughout our lives, you know, barring some kind of dramatic sort of transformation in, say, the structure of their brain or something like that. So the pre-Socratics are trying to come to terms with this sort of paradoxical unity of change and stability. And Plato is going to try to take this up in a systematic way and Aristotle and everyone that follows them. So the really important thing to keep in mind is that all philosophy emerging out of the Greeks, and I would say,

say this is the case for like the Vedic tradition or Buddhism or whatever you can pretty much find that all philosophy starts with difference and the question of difference and how within a world a cosmos that is defined by change or what Aristotle calls generation and corruption, the appearance of things into being and their disappearance out of being through organic death or you know through historical dismantlements or whatever we can think about. So how within that reality is it that there are recognizable entities that have some sort of duration and some degree of permanence, even though ultimately that permanence is delivered to us through a process of differentiation and change and ultimately disappearance? And so I'll just start with Heraclitus, who is, you could almost say that Hegel's entire philosophy is sort of, of contained embryonically in Heraclitus's thinking.

And the primary, the most significant difference is that Hegel works out a sort of rationalized dialectical, like methodical system composed of abstract concepts, whereas Heraclitus, all we really have is some fragments and they're very poetic and kind of, a lot of them are quite inscrutable. So I'll just start with possibly, I mean, the most famous, aphorism of Heraclitus. It's just two words in Greek. Metaballon and a poetai. And I'll just sort of do a quick explanation of what that means in Greek. So a metaballon is what's called a participle, which I've discussed a couple of times on the show so far. So basically a

participle is a verbal adjective. And we all know that adjectives qualify or modify, rather, they modify nouns, so a red man, like a rapper red man, a big cat or a small dog or something like that. In this case, we just have the adjective metabolon, which means that there's sort of an implied noun or an object or a subject that doesn't appear in the actual sentence itself. And what that indicates is that Heraclitus is trying to talk about a being or being that's indetermined. And so what it's really defined by is not something that could be captured in a noun per se, but rather what is captured agitivally in this participle. And what the participle basically means, the ballon part comes from a verb, Greek for balo, which means I throw. And the prefix meta means something like, I'm going to be impreciser, but it means something like over. It can mean other things, meta. Like in the case of metaphysics, metaphysique, it means something like what happens alongside nature, right? So we know that the Greek term fuchsis means nature.

It's derived from the Greek verb fu-o, which means something like I unfold or I flow. And so the fuses is like the flowing. And the metaphysike, what is metaphysical in this ancient mode, is these sort of concepts that we bring up alongside the flowing and the unfolding to try to like get a handle on it right so the metafusique is what happens alongside the fuses and in this case metaval i think means something more like over so it's like overthrowing that's what that's that's the sort of sense you can take out from metaballon overthrowing and then the greek verb anapauetai is interesting it's in the eti part the e the epsilon tau This part indicates that this verb is in what is called a middle passive voice. And what that means is that the action of the verb is reflexive to the subject that is carrying out the action, right? And as we know, the subject doesn't appear. It's only indicatorly denoted here by the participle.

And so in sort of what is called like the indicative, present active indicative mode of the verb and a palier, or enapauai, I think, if I remember him correctly, it means to give rest to something else. But since in the middle passive mode, the action of the verb refers back to the subject that's denoted by the participle, it means that the rest is something that it does to itself. So it's like anapatai means it rests as in it comes to a stop or it remains stable. So oftentimes the way that this aphorism is translated as a whole, is changing, right? So metabalon, overthrowing is sort of the sense of changing, and I prefer overthrowing, actually. So overthrowing, it rests, changing it remains the same. And this sort of like paradoxical

formulation is at the center of Heraclitus, and all philosophy that follows from Heraclitus, including Plato, I would say, revolves around this insight that this world, this cosmos that we belong to as the kind of beings that we are consists in this sort of yeah this paradoxical this one into two unity of change and stability and that they both belong together and this is what we will find in this is sort of the core of Hegel's thinking the Hegelian dialectic so that's just to get us started there with the Greek so is there any any questions about that yeah just the role that negation just making that clear in terms of what you just explained yeah so Yeah, another way to make that a little bit more clear is to think of the hieroclitean

aphorism or the sort of remark that you can't step into the same river twice. It's because in order to remain itself, the river has to be different. So it must be self-negating at all times in order to remain itself, right? It's flowing. There are different water molecules running by that are, you know, to be transformed and merged and split up and changed into other molecules and all that kind of stuff. And every moment of the river is not just a change in terms of, you know, the way that we can see with our eyes. It's, you know, the water is changing location, right? We imagine the riverbed

and the river banks are sort of like a coordinate system against which we could, you know, measure the, the journey or sort of track the journey of a little parcel of water or something floating in it. But the deeper sort of differentiation is this kind of self-negation of this sort of internal inherent change that is necessary in order for anything to remain at itself. So negation is kind of at the heart of this. But the other important thing to note and why it's important to go back to the Greeks is that they actually don't really, especially at Heraclitus's moment don't really have an abstract concept of negation per se. And it's really much later on, and I'll try to look quickly at some sort of Byzantine era philosophy, so somewhere between

the 400s and around like 900, where this language of negation per se starts to come out. But it's sort of just for Hegel, he would say that it's implicitly held in the Greeks. But it's not negation per se, doesn't exist as an abstract concept. And for Hegel, that's absolutely key. Yet, nonetheless, the logical sort of kernel of what Hegel is going to come up with can be found in Heraclitus in this sort of aphoristic, poetical form. I see. So in Heraclitus's formulation, the fact that the river is ceaselessly in a state of relentless, never-ending change negates the idea that it could have any, I don't know, a biting substance or self that remains the same through the change? Is that a fair way to think about it or am I missing something? I think what somebody like

Hegel would say is that the change is the engine of that identity. So that identity, that self-sameness, contains difference within it. I see. And this is the challenge really of like grasping the Higalian dialectic, but it's also the challenge of grasping, for example, like Mao Zedong thought, that there is an identity, this is Hegel says this most strongly, that there's an identity between identity and difference. And so you can find a sort of perpetual sort of self-sameness or a kind of substance, but the price to pay for that is that it itself is constituted as having difference within it. So even that is, Like, you're not going to get the kind of stability that you're hoping for if you're thinking in sort of like a bourgeois metaphysical mode.

I see. Okay. So, for example, right, like in Lacanian psychoanalysis, right, the petit object a is sort of the symbolic stand in for the object of your desire and the mistaken perception that you have that you can actually take it and hold it and keep it and it will never go away and it will always satisfy your desire. but in fact that sort of that perception of the object of your desire is an illusion and in order to fully acquire the object of your desire you have to let it go. Interesting. Does that help clarify it at all? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And we're going to get, as you know, you talked about Mao, we're going to get into Mao and angles for sure in this episode. So if you're interested in that, definitely stick around. But let's go ahead and move. Go ahead. Yeah, sure. Well, I was going to just pick up one more person from the pre-Socrat. era and this is Zeno of Aaliyah and he's very famous in like introductory philosophy classes

for his paradoxes of motion and so he is from the town of Aaliyah is I can't remember what it is known as in the present day but it's on the Italian peninsula and just to remember Heraclitus was from Ephesus in what is now like present day Turkey but the interest that you start to get more of a sense of this kind of negation or a kind of negation in Zeno's paradox of motion, the most famous one, which is that every time you take a step, you know, from the level of macro perception, what we would now call macro perception, your foot travels a determinate distance. So say every time you take a stride, your foot moves or two. Zeno points out that from a mathematical standpoint, he doesn't actually necessarily

clarify that you're speaking from a mathematical standpoint when he slips into this. But he's like, but don't forget that within that determinate magnitude, that, you know, that quantity of distance or whatever that your foot moves, there is a potential infinite, infinity of divisions that can be made. It can be halved indefinitely. It can be halved indefinitely, absolutely. And so for this reason, he says the paradox is that motion actually, if you pay attention to motion, it actually, it actually.

actually proves that motion is impossible because in order to move a determinate distance you have to move an indeterminate distance and so there's this kind of negation that becomes like a negation implied in uh, pardon me change um that is starting to become a little bit more like recognizable from the standpoint of someone like hegel uh but then the the outcome of zeno's paradox is simply he's like well motion is impossible and so you get like guys like Aristotle being like, oh, he's such a bullshitter and this is such sophistry and he's just

messing around and playing word games and all this kind of stuff. But it is, I mean, it is important, it is an important thing to think about that every determinant magnitude can be halved indefinitely. But that's sort of another component, right? So he presents this kind of challenge to the concept of motion. And then for a very long time, you know, starting with people like Aristotle and Plato, So the sort of like the sort of internal sort of absurdity of the conclusion that's, you know, comes to is sort of, you know, explored and unpacked and dealt with. And all that work is sort of helps lay the ground for someone like Hegel to say, without any anxiety, no, that's not the case.

It's just that infinity is positively contained within the finite and they both coexist together and one doesn't destroy the other. like they both, they both coenhear together, if I can use that term. So that's like really what is, you know, we could spend time looking at Plato's parmenides. We'd probably be here until your youngest kid is done high school. We started digging into that. But this kind of problematic that I just sort of indicated or pointed at in the thinking of Heraclitus and Zeno as just two examples among many people that were part of that world

at that time, there's just sort of, you can see. see this kind of questioning and these problems sort of like get it get on the go and get into motion and they help bring us to to Hegel and ultimately to Marx and then people like Deleuze and Lutari and all that. I see. So the important point here with the early Greek philosophers and of course always correct me if I'm wrong here, but that negation is lurking implicitly in some of these philosophical moves from Heraclitus and Zeno, et cetera, but that it has not been conceptualized as such. So while it's lurking implicitly in some of these philosophical, moves, negation itself has not been fully conceptualized and brought into philosophy. Is that fair?

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Cool. Yeah. With that in mind, and let's go ahead and move forward in time into later antiquity in the Middle Ages in both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. How does the concept of negation show up at these times and in these places? And how does it form or continue to form this essential backdrop to Hegel's thinking? Mm-hmm. I would say that Well, yeah, like this period, and I'm just somewhat arbitrarily just saying between like 400 and 900, there's, you know, there's some coloring outside the lines

at either end of this periodization. But this is when you really start to see the concept of negation emerging in an abstract form. And so one really important philosopher that I've mentioned before on the show, who was the last sort of principle of Plato's Academy at Athens is Proclus, who is from Constantinople, and he lived in the 400s, and you start to see the theme of negation becoming more clear in his work, and the main work is called, he did a

whole series of commentaries on Plato and on the geometrical work of Euclid, but his really major work is what's called the Elements of Theology, and just to forestall any misunderstanding, He's not talking about a sky god, anything up in another realm or anything like that. Much like Hegel, and this may surprise people who understand Hegel to be an idealist, he's absolutely committed to the one, sort of the one world hypothesis, that there is no second story, everything is here, and there's nowhere else for anything to be or to go. He's really key and started to work that out, but he's a very important influence on an Assyrian philosopher whom I've also mentioned, who is Dionysius, who has the epithet,

the pseudo-Ariopagite for a reason I've explained in a previous episode. And it's in Dionysius that you start to see him talking about negation and negativity in the mode of what he calls sort of two forms of theology. So what is called cataphatic theology, which means speaking according to, to, and I'll explain according to what in a second, and apophatic theology, which is speaking away from. And these theologies are known in more modern terminology as positive and negative theology. But they also take on a role in the medieval sciences. And now I'll sort of try to unpack what I mean by that. Starting with Aristotle in his, his, his,

work on the categories and then really put into more of a formal arrangement by a philosopher named Porphyry, who was the student of the very famous ancient philosopher Plotinus in a work called the Isog the Isogge. There are, I would say until Kant, there is this list. It's called the 10 categories. In the Latin, it's the category I deck him. And each one of these categories, which is people attribute the articulation of them to Aristotle, they're meant to cover every phenomenon that you can possibly encounter in space and time. And I'll just call them up here so I can read them off really quickly.

Yes, so Aristotle thinks there are 10 categories according to which you can describe and explain all of reality. And, oh, just one second, I'm going to have to open up, I have a little book here with the Greek, the Greek versions of these terms. Okay. Yeah, here we go. Okay, so I'm just reading off the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for the English version right now. So the 10 categories are substance, quantity, quality. This English translation says relatives, I would say relation or reference. In the Greek, they use the word, the term prostit, which means like towards something.

So it's meant to indicate a general sense of relation or referentiality between things. Then next, there's somewhere, sometime, I kind of don't like these translations, being in a position, having, acting, and being acted upon. And so I'll just read the Greek terms. So what his here translated in English as substance is the Greek word usia, which I've mentioned before, which means like essence, but like as essence takes on a very verbal sense of like the activity of sort of like being in existence. And posotes, which means quantity, poyotes, which means quality, prosti, which I've said means sort of like referentiality or relation. Kastai, which it's literal translation

means something like lying. So it's sort of like something like what's the right term? Something like place, I guess. Yeah. Or situation where something is situated. And then there's

hexis, which means like having or having a condition of being a certain way. Tapos, which means place, chronos, which means time. Prattain, which means acting, but we also get the word praxis out of this. And then lastly, the last two or last three are tempus.

Yeah, I already said tempest. That's time. And then, oh yeah, pathane is the 10th category, which means being acted upon, but a better translation might mean suffering, right? So when somebody is being patient, that mode, it comes out of Latin, the verb patio, which means I suffer. So when you're being patient with someone, you're suffering them in a way.

And so all of these 10 categories are used to, that's the basis of science in a way, up until we start getting into like Galileo and bacon and all of those sorts of people in the European tradition. And so the positive and the negative theologies, they do address, like they get into scripture and they do scriptural interpretations, but they also are carried out by philosophers and scientists in relation to these 10 categories. And what they're, the meaning of the positive and the negative theology is that, yes, you can immediately attribute each one of these categories or some combination of all of them to anything that we can find, but we also cannot forget that these things are in a process of changing into other things. So we also need to have a negation of them. We need to articulate that these are not what we've just said of them because they're changing into something else. And therefore, there's this sort of contradiction and this negation between the positive.

positive mode and the negative mode. And with the whole point of someone like Dionysius is to say that this contradictory unity of the positive and the negative brings us to, and this is sort of where the concept of negation of negation comes in, brings us to a sort of greater negation that shows us the unity of all things, sort of being what they can be said to be, what they can be said to be, and also not being those things because they're also changing into something. else. So here in, you know, the 400s, 500s, 500s, you see the kind of a paradigm being formed that Hegel can sort of work within, even if he's not 100% aware of what's going on. Like I've had to look at his lectures on the history of philosophy, and he does touch on some

of this stuff, but it doesn't seem like he has a lot of access to those texts. So he probably, like, didn't, didn't have a chance to read them as thoroughly as we might now because we've, we've uncovered more of these since Hegel was alive than were available when Hegel was alive. And sort of like the big sort of culmination of this mode and sort of what I would call the Byzantine era is the Irish philosopher I've mentioned a number of times, John Scotus area, Jaina, who has a really full-blown, really intense, highly developed dialectical system. system consisting in these two modes of positing and negating and showing the unity of both modes at the heart of every object, every substance. And you see Hagel sort of in his section on medieval philosophy, he sort of touches on Area Jena very briefly and says that, I can't remember this guy's name, he wrote sort of like a very brief sort of summary of Hagels of Area Jena's work in 1823, which is what Hagels looked

at. And it seems sort of, his remarks seem to suggest that he didn't have access to the full body of work that Area Jena left behind. So he could maybe not have seen how thoroughly developed Area Jena's dialectical system was. But nonetheless, the sort of double negation paradigm starts to emerge somewhere between roughly 400 and 800, 900, which is, you know, 1,400 years before Hegel. but it's a very important moment in the development of this whole mode of thinking. Yeah, wonderfully said. So here we have the early Greeks, you know, giving rise to implicitly the concept of negation without making it an explicit concept or abstraction.

Then we see the development of it as an abstract conception and the introduction of the double negation. So now we're sort of like, you know, tracing the chronology, if you will, the history of this concept to see the role it ultimately will play in dialectic. So let's continue to move forward and moving now into the, you know, more or less modern period with the philosophy, the father of modern philosophy, as he's often called René Descartes. So how does René Descartes project inform Hegel as well as others in the tradition of German idealism more broadly? Well, I think the number one thing is simply the introduction of what Descartes calls the Cajito in the meditations on first philosophy. Descartes works through a meditative process of trying to discern what we can actually be scientific about.

He's trying to divide up changeable things that can be grasped scientifically through experimentation and then this sort of descriptive of ontologies that we develop out of our experimental findings, and what doesn't fall, what cannot fall into that category of things that can be treated that way? And for him, the sort of immediate, what he finds when he says, okay, well, I can doubt that, I can doubt every other thing exists, but I realize that when I try to doubt whether or not I exist, I have to think in order to do that, which therefore nullifies my attempt to think that I don't exist because I prove that I do exist and trying to prove that I don't exist. And he then tries to build up a system out of that of distinguishing between what is simply,

and I hesitate to use this terminology because it risks plunging us back into like English metaphysics, but like what is simply out there and what is simply in here? And he starts to realize, well, there are certain representations that I have of things. And I know that they are mine. And I know that they can be mistaken. And I know that what I find out there can sort of falsify my representations of them and cause me to change and understand things better. So he's making this, like he's going through this division process of trying to figure out. out what you can be scientific about. But as he does so, and this is not necessarily his intention,

he sets up the question of individual sort of psychological cognition and the structures of cognition. And that sort of makes possible everything from, you know, Emmanuel Kant and everyone that's on the go around the time that he is, like Christian Volf and, you know, all these different, all these different people, Solomon Maimon, who I'm maybe talking about a little bit later, the Lithuanian philosopher, all the way up to like Edmund Husserl in the 20th century with his sort of his phenomenological work about the structures of consciousness and the structures of objects and all that kind of stuff. So that's a really, that's at the heart of what's going on, I would say, in the phenomenology of spirit is Hegel is applying his logic to the kind

of those questions of what constitutes the psyche and how it relates. relates to what is quote unquote outside of it. And I would also say, though, that, and probably return to this later, the thought experiment about the piece of wax and the sort of dialectic that's hidden inside of it. I remember, like, it was sort of surprising to find out Engels saying, well, Descartes was one of the best dialecticians in Europe. And you can really see, after getting over the puzzlement of that and finding out what he really means, you can sort of see this really wonderful sort of one-into-two dialectics.

in the heart of Descartes' thinking as in respect of the piece of wax. And that will maybe become a good sort of concrete example for us to think about and to use when we get to the direct discussion of Hegel very shortly. Yeah, do you want to say anything else about German idealism above and beyond Hegel himself in his connection to Descartes? Well, it's like a ficta, for example, in his work, he is really, he sort of like takes this sort of hardcore line that the, the sort of proper formula for the for consciousness or the individual mind is just i equals i

which runs like you know if you're not careful you can run it you can find yourself hanging out with iron rand with that kind of logic just a equals a um and so he he i think what what uh hegel is trying to do is respond to his sort of predecessors like ficta um like shelling who was really one of his friends in a contemporary. And I think, I think, you know, I don't want to just open the can of worms here and get too deep into it, but they're all sort of working on the problem of

what constitutes the psyche and what constitutes the objects that we find outside the psyche and sort of what, and most importantly, in respect of the psyche, what constitutes these sort of ideal objects that we find in our thoughts, like whether they're mathematical, objects or the concepts that we apply to things. Where do they come from, right? Do they fall out of the

sky? Or do they come from somewhere else, somewhere material? And I think that's where we might find some surprising features of Hegel, right? Because the real sort of, I don't know if you'd agree with this, Brett, but a really good sort of introductory formula for getting people to understand what idealism is, is something like, it's the theory that ideas drive material. reality and they exist somewhere else and there's sort of this unilateral or unidirectional relationship between these abstract ideas that exist in a weird platonic realm and the sort of like radiating out effect that they have into the material world and like structuring material things. And so Hegel sees his sort of contemporaries and his recent predecessors trying to work these

things out and I think he thinks that pretty much like all of them are basically inadequate and he responds to that by introducing that sort of Heracleitian vibe like into the center of everything that he's doing, whether he's talking about Kant or Ficta or Schelling or any of those people. Yeah, yeah. And philosophically, you know, idealism, like whether you're talking about Barclay's idealism or Hegel's idealism, you know, that's one. That's like a very philosophical version of what we mean when we say idealism.

But a lot of times when Marxists are critiquing liberal idealism, that idealism is often implicit and unexamined in like a regular run-of-the-mill, you know, liberal pundit or something, trying to understand and talk about social phenomena or history or whatever, that idealism comes up in much more subtle and implicit and un sort of analyzed ways. I just think it might be worth noting that so people don't become too confused and think that every time idealism manifests, it's in this highfalutant and conscious philosophical sense, you know. Yeah. And I mean, the go-to example I always like for explaining sort of liberal bourgeois idealism is this, you know, this infuriating thing we hear all the time.

Greed is human nature. Right, right. And it sounds persuasive maybe to some, to a lot of people on the, on the surface of it. But it's like, well, what are you really saying here? You're not saying that greed is human nature. What you're really saying is that human nature is greed because you are, you're, if you're not explicitly arguing this, you're implicitly arguing that every other human quality, like selflessness, for example, or compassion or any of these things.

are in some way or another a stand-in or sort of distorted or kind of disguise of the greed that underpins all of these other phenomenon, right? And it turns into this kind of like circular argument where we induce people to be greedy because we've accepted the proposition that human nature is greed. We articulated in a way that doesn't seem as vicious, although that's the only place that I can end up going to. And you kind of like, you know, you start accepting things like evolutionary psychology and Jordan Peterson and all of this is sort of in this lunacy, right? And it all rests on this kind of verbal sleight of hand that ends up entailing that underneath every sort of phenomenal feature of human beings, there's this

sort of invisible metaphysical, whatever you want to call it, thing called greed that's actually really driving everything else. And really when you take away the window dressing, that's what's really, really there. So that's a very, you know, common everyday form of the kind of idealism that we criticize as Marxists. And really, a lot of the idealists that we're dealing with, and then Hegel, most interestingly above all, they're not saying anything like that at all. But I think the big problem is, and I think like Marx will look at this and like DeLos will look at this. It's, it may just be, you could put it this way, it's sort of a semiological or a semi-aotic problem in terms of how do they present their systems, the concepts that they use,

the symbolic notation that they use, like A equals not A equals A prime, kind of like MCM prime. And the concern may be that even with really subtle, well-thought-out sort of philosophical systems, the presentation itself can lead you back down the road through sort of carelessness or an inability to access the full raft of like really what this means. It can lead you back into sort of bourgeois idealism. And for that reason, like as subtle as somebody like Cagle can be, there's still that danger there. And the danger is like sort of bound up in the symbolic dimension of the whole thing. Yeah. And just to kind of continue to make this point in Barclay's idealism, for example, it can really drive home the essence of it and show it

what idealism is in a very sort of hyperbolic way, which is, you know, very simply put, Barclay's ideas like, you know, the material world is literally a manifestation of God's mind, of God's ideas and, you know, there's this idea like, you know, when I turn away from a tree and nobody's looking at the tree, how does the tree continue to exist? Well, because the tree and everything else is held in God's mind and that gives it consistency over time, etc. So literally the world that we see, the phenomenal material world, is a product of God's ideas, God's mind. And so that's obviously one specific and very obvious version of idealism, but it might help somebody to understand it. And then another more everyday form of idealism that we see with

liberals today, I always use the example of Sam Harris's critiques of Islam because, you know, Sam Harris is wrestling like, well, how do we explain, you know, jihadism and why do they hate us, right? And so what he ultimately comes to, and this is very clear in his books, is like, the ideas within Islam are the main primary causal reason why we have Islamic terrorism in the world today. Now, a Marxist would say, hold on, hold on, hold on. The inherent ideas in Islam, you've not mentioned anything about the centuries of colonialism, of imperialism, of British colonists, separating borders and just drawing them up on a map for their own interests, separating tribes and ethnic groups and now saying that they're all within a innate, right? Like, that's a Marxist would begin to understand modern Islamic terrorism through a materialist history of the development, the unequal development of capitalism, the global north, the global south, colonialism, imperialism. Those words don't even come up in Sam Harris's lexicon.

You know, so that's just one, you know, pretty popular example of how idealism can just manifest in a million different ways and is very unexamined. And Sam Harris attempted a debate with Nome Chomsky, and Nome Chomsky actually explicitly advanced a more materialist understanding of Islamic terrorism. And the whole conversation fell apart because Sam, I don't even think Sam Harris can really think on those levels. So it very well fell apart. He was like, you're not listening to me, you're not taking me, blah, blah, blah. It's not even worth getting too far into. But those are just some examples because idealism can be a pretty complicated thing, especially for newer Marxists trying to understand. And how do I understand idealism versus materialism?

There's the hyper philosophical way. And then there's the everyday like liberal pundit way and everything in between. So just we're thinking about. Yeah. To pick up on the Sam Harris example and sort of give a sort of another sort of Twitter or perspective on that. More coming from like Peterson. And I'm sorry to say I'm I'm one degree of Kevin Bacon away from Jordan Peterson, unfortunately. Because I know someone, you saw the Slavoy's executive base.

Yes, yes. The moderator, I know him. Oh, interesting. Personally, like, he was my residence counselor in university for two separate years. Interesting, okay. And when I was, he was good to me and he helped me through some stuff, but has joined Peterson in this kind of like reactionary nostalgia. And I've seen a lot of this. come out of circles that he, this person grew up in, and a lot of their complaints

consists in, the reason why the world is shitty now is that people have lost their grasp on abstract values, like love, the good, the beautiful, the true. you know, I had someone that knows this individual say to me one time that they really think that the real problem in the world is that people just don't take enough time out to appreciate beauty, like going and contemplating a sculpture. And it's like, you know, it's easy for you to say when you, you know, you can go travel somewhere

and you can take the time off to spend two weeks in like Florence or something like that. But there ends up being this sort of reactionary idealism in the sense that, you know, this sort of Peterson camp and people sort of adjacent to that or connected to that, their big gripe is like, we've just lost touch with these like platonic ideals, basically. And much like Harris, they abhor any material analysis of why people might not be connected to beauty or might not be connected to love or, you know, any of those things. So there's a really, and there's a lot of this in Canadian circles that sort of, you know, Peterson moves in. And it's a really dangerous and insipid and insidious kind of idealism that can kind of

fly under the radar if you're not being paying attention or really being careful about it. And a lot of, you know, in many cases, well-meaning sort of middle of the road, quote-unquote, progressive liberals sort of take on this view too. It's like, we just forgotten how to be good to each other. Right. Yeah. Why can't we all get along? It's because we're so divided in a vacuum. We're polarized. Yeah, exactly. You know, you see this all the time. Like citations needed has done tons of episodes about this. Like polarization, divisiveness. And like these as sort of rhetorical political strategies that deliberately ignore the fact that the material conditions are not such that people can come together and uphold these virtues. Right. So they're, you know, complaining about something that they're not willing to do anything about because in many cases, they're class.

interest depend upon it yeah um like there might be property owners or investors or something like that or just you know they their their fortunes depend on being running dogs of of uh you know the likes of everyone from joe biden to Donald trump like there's that whole they belong to the same spectrum right so there's like you could call this like applied idealism that's being that's at work every day that's of the sam harris variety and all of this also of this kind of variety yeah yeah and the the class structure of modern society, the hierarchy of modern society is implicitly naturalized in their conception of the world. And just to like have a little thought experiment of idealism versus materialism, you know, for those listening right now, if you had to explain the state

of the world, right, the state of the United States internally, the state of the world, externally, globally, climate change, Russia, China, all these things. But you had no recourse to explaining these things through any critique of capital or any materialist analysis of class or anti-imperialist politics or any of that stuff, you know, what sort of, what would you come up with to describe what's wrong with the world? And in the Peterson, in the Sam Harris and in most liberals, there is an attempt to try to understand what's happening with no materialist analysis, no class analysis, and no critique of capital. Well, whatever you're going to spit out, whatever you're inevitably going to vomit up as the reason things are like this, it's going to be incorrect, which is not to say that having a critique of capital or having class analysis means you're always going to end up on the correct analysis and the correct conclusion, but it just means that they're absolutely necessary if you want to get anywhere close to a correct analysis of the president. And those are completely absent in Peterson and Harris, but in pretty much every liberal intellectual and their attempt to understand.

in the world so yeah and and um you know uh you and i are planning to have a chat about this either uh pursuant to this recording session or in another recording session but i'm even seeing that sort of pop up in the you know mainstream middle of the road liberal responses to these trucker convoy things that are going on um uh you know especially like two years after the george floyd and brian like brianna taylor all that stuff those uprisings that happens all that work that was put into clarifying these matters. It's just so disheartening to see people be like, well, why have these guys been like locking up downtown Toronto for two weeks?

And the cops are sort of just giving them hums and kisses and bringing them Tim Hortons. And they're not doing their jobs. They're, you know, they're in dereliction of duties. Like, no, they're not in dereliction of duty. They're helping organize these goons to be like the irregulars of capital, right? the cops in the military are the standing army and these are the irregular forces and the cops are helping them organize because they're all in the same side because they're all there to defend capital and their place within which they've been told they have right and so like that kind of

idealism of just this a historical anti-materialist kind of like well you know police forces just came into being because people needed to be protected and that's what a good society does um which is you know just like that's the kind of talk that keeps people getting killed right and so this kind of I you know it just it's it can seem so every day and just sort of innocuous and so kind of something that you should just be able to let's slide um like I hear that kind of stuff all around me from people and you know um I you know I was thinking back to that essay that we talked about by Hey Zhao called revolutionary tact um and about the problem of being like mega confrontational with people as a Marxist

or a revolutionary whatever and you you kind of want to like explode at people and be like how could you possibly believe this right but it's sort of written into the way that we're as altruits here would say interpolated as

subjects of capital that people are going to be prone to this kind of idealism because it advances the interests of the bourgeoisie. Right. Yeah. All right well yeah that's definitely a fascinating detour and definitely worth touching

on but let's go ahead and move forward so we went through the ancient greeks we went through the middle age philosophers we went through rene de cart and his influence on hagel as well as german idealism more broadly and finally um before catching up to the more modern air and getting closer to hagel we have spinoza and spinoza has obviously been a core feature of several uh you know episodes in this dialectics deep dive series so with that in mind in what way is spinoza's thinking essential for Hegel and how does Spinoza build on the stuff that we've been talking about in particular? Okay, well, I'm going to preface my answer to that by just making a more general observation, which is that both, so through this discussion, we're going to identify, by

the end, sort of conceptual divergence within dialectical materialism, historical and conceptual diversions within dialectical materialism. And in one of those branches or pathways, the concept of negation and double negation remains important. And in the other one that I think we'll associate with Mao Zedong thought, the concept of negation and the negation of negation plays a secondary rather than a primary role. And I've got a document from, it's like a record of a discussion, like sort of a seminar discussion or a roundtable discussion of Mao with various people talking about the one into two versus two into one issue. And someone, a comrade asks Mao to speak about the concept of negation.

And Mao explains why he doesn't really accept it. And this is going to be common. Sorry, he doesn't accept it as a primary category. And this is going to be common between him and Deleuze, And where this comes from in Deleuze are one of the real chief tributaries of this is the Lithuanian philosopher I mentioned earlier, Salomon Maimon, who in his work is sort of a critique of the forms of idealism that Kant and people like that were circulating. And the work is called an essay on transcendental philosophy. And he's going to offer a kind of, before Hegel even comes on the scene, he's going to offer a kind of alternative concept of difference in which, Negation is sort of a derivative stage, and there's this sort of like pre-negative difference that's pure, you don't have to say this, put it this way necessarily, but like a pure positivity, and negation is sort of a second moment.

And for both of these branches, Spinoza is sort of the figure that stands at the beginning. So in that fork in the road, Spinoza is the one that's standing there. And so, but just to, yeah, to table Maimon for a bit, I'm going to look quickly at the science of logic very, very quickly. And in the science of logic, he attributes to Spinoza the sort of discovery of negation and the negation of negation as sort of like the one proposition. or one idea or one insight that sort of helps mobilize all of Hegel's philosophy. And I think I said maybe in the first or second episode that, you know, Hegel made the remark that if you're not a Spinozaist, you're basically not a philosopher, period.

So, like, all of, all of Hegel's thinking is underwritten by Spinoza, Spinoza's system. And he attributes this to just this remark. that he draws out of Spinoza somewhere. So I'm just going to read very briefly from the science of logic. And we'll return to the science of logic later on, but right now we're just touching on the part where he mentions Spinoza. So this is in book one, which is called the Doctrine of Being.

It's in, let's see, section one, which is called determinateness. And in brackets, he has the word quality. So the word quality or the concept of quality, is meant to clarify or give us a little bit more information about what he means by determinateness, and we'll get into that. And it's in Chapter 2, Determinate being Section A, Determinant Being in general, and then in a remark, it's called Quality and Negation. And so I'll just read a little bit here. Determinateness is negation, positive as affirmative, and is the proposition of Spinoza.

Here he has a Latin phrase from Spinoza. Omnist determinatio est negatio. Now, you might also run into this somewhere or in certain places. It's written as omnis determinatio. Sorry, omnis determinatio negatio est. And it means all negation is, or sorry, all determination is negation, or every determination is negation. Hegel continues.

Oh, and I forgot to do the thing where I say quote and comment and then continue. I'll start now. So he continues, quote, this proposition is infinitely important. Only negation as such is formless abstraction. However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate. Okay, so comment. Hegel is going to intimately associate the concept of negation with the concept of what we'll call mediation. And you can say that, much like Herrickleus or Aeregiana, Hegel's

philosophy is a philosophy of mediation. So you can say the logic is a logic of mediation. The phenomenology is a phenomenology of mediation. Okay, continuing. Negation is as little and ultimate for philosophy as reality is for its truth. Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance, or that there is only one substance, and comment I just recommend anyone who hasn't heard it to go check out our episodes about Spinoza, continuing, that there is only one substance is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, so comment, being or extension, he equivocates here between those two, continuing. The two attributes, namely which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity deposit as one in this

unity. For as determinate realities, they are negations whose infinity is their unity. Okay, comment. So in the Cartesian philosophy, we find that thought and things outside of our heads, so to speak, are the opposites of each other. One has extension. One just has an incorporeal mental sort of composition. Mind and body dualism. And Spinoza, mind and body dualism. And Spinoza transforms this into, because Descartes makes of them two kinds of substances and runs into all these problems that we've talked about in the prior episodes because he does

that. Spinoza says, okay, no, there's just one substance and thought and extension are two attributes or two sort of expressions of this one substance. And therefore they're unified, even if from. our point of view as finite beings, they seem to be different. They're really, really one, right? Sort of that's what he means by these two things that appear to be opposite to each other, the corporeal and the incorporeal, are actually share a unity in the one substance that is we can call nature or that Spinoza also calls God. That's what

Hegel means by this. Okay, so continuing. According to Spinoza's definition of which more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. The infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them, that is to say, comment, that is to say thought and being, continuing, therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments, or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination, whatever, they are for him not even moments and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect. So Hegel is saying he's explaining what we have or he's describing what we've talked

about in Spinoza so far and he's saying that he's saying that okay so on on the on the surface of it these two things appear to be opposite to each other and to cancel each other out and then Spinoza makes this sort of move where they aren't negations of each other, and they actually share a unity. But then he will then go on to say, again, to repeat the Latin, omnis determinatio, negatio, est, or est negatio, which what he really means is that, or what Hagel takes Spinoza to mean, is that every individual thing, like you or me, or the microphone in front of me, or the book sitting around me or whatever, or a cloud or a neutrino or whatever, is a negation of the one infinite substance in the specific sense that the sort of basic building material, if I can put it that way, the basic material of the universe has to take on a specific form in order to be this thing, right? And this specific thing is composed of all these elements and components

each of which also has a very determinate form, which means that while this thing is what it is composed of all these things which make it is what it is, it can be nothing else other than what it is, and those things can be nothing else other than what they are, and therefore they are not available at that moment in that determinant, is to be something else. So therefore they negate the sort of infinite fluidity

and infinite changeability and origaminess, to use the term I've used before, of the one substance that is nature, But at the same time, in that negation, they are also an affirmation of it because they're expressing it. Does that make sense at all? Yeah, it's a complicated sort of line of reasoning. But yes, I understand it through my understanding of Spinoza. For people listening, it might be somewhat difficult to fully grasp. But basically, in its particular manifestation, it is determined and necessarily a particular that is in some sense negating. the universal because it can't be anything the cloud cannot be anything other than this specific cloud right but at the same time it's expressing it's it's a cohesion with the with the unity because it's a manifestation of that fundamental singular substance yes exactly 100% and then

and then furthermore it's an affirmation because you know once we get out of what hegel calls picture thinking in the german term is forstelung just like representations once we get past that and understand that, you know, in this moment, say if I'm sitting having a coffee with you somewhere and I'm, you know, we're looking at each other, we can see each other, you appear to me to be in this moment, you're, you appear to have this permanence to you, right? But we also know, like going back to what we just talked about with Heraclitus earlier, that you only appear to me that way because you are changing. And you are being carried away in time, in space, and being constituted. through all these kinds of, you know, molecular changes. You know, we're being bombarded by photons all the time and that's what enables us to see and all this kind of stuff. So there's kind of like these imperceptible differentiations going on that are also an affirmation of substance and a

negation of what we are. But at the same time, they make us, they make it possible for us to exist as affirmations of the same substance. So there's this sort of dialectic going on of positivity and negativity that Hegel finds here. Right. Okay. Yeah. And so he takes, therefore, this kind of dialectical negativity, which he sees as through the dialectical process, ultimately being an affirmation of nature.

He sees this as the ultimate insight in Spinoza's thinking, but he thinks that Spinoza doesn't quite get there for reasons that maybe after we talk about the phenomenology will become a little bit more clear. and maybe we can circle back around to that. Okay. But basically that, so this assertion that he takes out of Spinoza that all determinations are negations

or every determination is a negation. And so, but just to drill down into that a little bit more, I'm going to look at a book from 1979 by a French philosopher named Pierre Masheret, who was a student of Louis Alpheir, who I think broke with him at some point. I can't remember what the controversy was over. or whatever.

But he wrote this book. You put out this book in 1979 called Hegel or Spinoza. And it's in translation, who's translated it, Susan M. Ruddock, and it's available through the University of Minnesota Press.

And unfortunately, I don't think this appears on something like the Marxist Internet Archive, which is too bad because it's, Masheret is thinking about Marx through the whole thing. And this whole discussion of Hegel or Spinoza is kind of in light of

and in service of understanding Marx and dialectical materialism, I would say. So I'll just read a little bit from Asheret here. Under the section, it's called the finite in the infinite. Quote, let us return now to the formula Omnis determinatio est Nagathio and see what it means for Spinoza himself. It appears in letter 50 to Yales,

comment. This is sort of one of the people in the circle of friends that he worked who have thought with and hung out with him in Amsterdam continuing, which we have already referenced to explain that God as Spinoza understands him can only improperly

be characterized as a unique being. Literally, what is written there is the terminatio negatio est and it takes the form of an incidental assertion. In his comment on the ethics, Robinson goes so far as to assume that this phrase is not the work of Spinoza

from the letter written originally in Dutch, but that it must have been added in the form of a clarification in the Latin version. Without taking this extreme position, we see right away the disparity between this inscription as it appears in the Latin text of the letter of Spinoza and Watt Hegel concludes from it. From an incident that refers to a very particular context, which we will revisit, he created a general proposition, which takes on a universal significance by the addition of a lift word that changes everything and confound many things. Omnis, which is all or every. That was a comment. Continuing, rather, in letter 50 DeLs, Spinoza does not address the problem of determination in general. He takes it up in relation to a very particular case,

which is that of the figure. It is necessary. to return to the passage in its context. And now we're quoting Spinoza. With regard to the statement that the figure is only a negation and not anything positive comments, so just to think about a figure, just think about the ideal object of a triangle, the object called a triangle as a figure or a circle, continuing. It is obvious that pure matter considered in an indefinite manner, without limit, can have no figure and that the figure only exists in finite and determinate bodies.

For he who claims to have perceived a figure indicates nothing other than the fact that he conceives a determinate thing and the manner in which it is determinate. This determination is therefore, therefore does not pertain to the thing according to its being, but on the contrary to its non-being. This is why the figure is nothing but a determination, and the determination is a negation. It could not, as has been said, be anything but a negation. And we're end of quoting Spinoza, returning to Mascheray. This text allows no equivocation provided that one understands it integrally.

Its quote-unquote object is the figure, which is a very particular reality to the extent that it is neither an idea nor a thing but a limit. in this case it is not a real physical being but only a being of reason and this is why its content is negative thus to quote unquote perceive a figure is not at all to quote unquote perceive a thing such as it is but it is to quote unquote concede it as it is determined that is insofar as it is limited by another thing the figure expresses nothing other than this reciprocal limitation which exists between finite and determinate bodies and represents them not according to their own being, but according to what they are not. Okay, so that was a end quote.

So that was kind of a tough passage. But what he's trying to say is that what Mascheray is saying is that Hagel himself generalizes from Spinoza's proposition, but on the page, he directly attributes this generalization to Spinoza. So there's already kind of like a modification going on of Spinoza's thinking. And the reason why Spinoza, he considers these sort of ideal objects like geometrical figures to be negations is that they don't actually really exist in space and time. They're just sort of mental construction. So like one part of them, quote, is missing, if I can put it that way.

So like a perfect circle or a perfect triangle don't actually exist in nature. They're conceived by humans. Yes, exactly. 100%. And this is why we'll probably get to this later when we're talking about Salomon Maimon. But Spinoza says the geometrical, and Newton will sort of pick this up. I might read a little passage from Newton about geometrical figures. He says it's not just enough to present someone with a drawing of a circle or the definition of a circle. It's just postulating the existence of such a geometrical figure. It doesn't fully,

become a positive object until you take into account the fact that a being had to draw the circle. And so you can't fully understand the concept of a circle until you understand its material genesis as something that somebody has produced for a particular purpose. And that's something that, actually, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm going to hedge my bets a little bit here. I'm going to say rather that Hagel might struggle with that a little bit because of the symbolic notation that he uses. I'm not going to say that Hegel doesn't touch on this or understand this at all, but just there are certain other things going on in his system. So Spinoza is sort of the essential figure for Hegel, but at the same time, if you take Masheret's argument and

scholarship seriously, there's a little bit of sleight of hang going on that Hegel makes in treating or setting Spinoza up as his authority. It's kind of like Scooby-Doo where you pull the mask off at the end. It's like, it wasn't Spinoza. It was Hegel all along. And so, so like there's a little bit of that going on. So it's very important to Hegel, but at the same time, he does a little bit of a little bit of fancy footwork in making Spinoza be that figure for him, if I can put it that way. So by taking up a certain essential part of Spinoza, he also modifies it in the process a little bit. Yes, he does. But then he doesn't announce that he's doing it. It makes it look like he's just taking Spinoza as he, like, right off the page.

Objectively. And a lot of philosophers do this kind of thing. Totally. Like Bertrand Russell is someone who's really bad for that in his history of philosophy. There's a lot of cuteness, little people are being real funny. Oh, yeah. Yeah, reading Bertrand Russell's history of Western philosophy, like his sections on Marx and stuff, you can just see.

Like, he's bringing his own ideology to every single sentence. Yeah, I mean, Russell is someone. He, you know, who can be identified as a socialist, but he's a socialist purely out of sentiment, I think. He doesn't really have any real concrete theoretical analysis of any of this stuff. It's just sort of like, it's not that kind of different from Charles Dickens in a way where it's like we're a socialist because we love people. Right. Not because we necessarily understand the logic of capital. Sure.

Yeah, and it's interesting, too, like, just as an aside, that video where Russell talks about meeting Lenin, and, you know, I know, he was like, he was a great man. And at the other, on the other hand, he was like, but he was too harsh. And then he compares him to Oliver Cromwell of all people. It was so, oh, it was just horrible. And I was reading through documents about the Sino-Soviet split and, like, the sort of meetings that were going on. between like the Chinese and the Soviet groups and stuff like that. And I can't remember the context in which this occurs, but someone from the Chinese delegation starts talking about Russell talking that way about Lenin

and rips on him and it's sort of like, oh, well, it's all well and good for comrade Russell. You know, he's just a spoiled rich kid to make out like Lenin's just a hard ass for no reason and to sort of like, you know, be, well, I didn't have to be like that to the SARS, right? So it's very interesting to see, you know, quite a well-to-do, like he's aristocracy, Russell. I mean, like part of the House of Lords and all that kind of stuff, that's sort of sentimental socialism that runs into limitations because there's no principled socialism underpinning. Absolutely, yeah. And we see plenty of that in our own time today. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

All right. All right, well, let's go ahead and move on then. And so now we've sort of covered the trajectory of specifically first in negation and then just what Hegel takes from Descartes and Spinoza. But let's turn to Hegel himself. So let's talk first about his context and his body of work and then get into his dialectical method, focusing especially on his primary concepts, notion, negation, and double negation or negation of the negation as we've been leading up to. Keeping in mind our conversation in deep dive one, maybe we can elaborate on why Hegel's dialectical. is an example of what Mao calls one into two rather than what he calls two into one with which you have said Hegel has been unfairly associated. So big question. That's a sort of Russian

nesting doll of other questions, but tackle it as best as you can. Okay. Well, I'm going to be pretty scant about his sort of life details and all that kind. I mean, you could just spend ages exploring that. But the key things are, you know, he, he, he, he, He was born in August of 1770, and I think actually the period in which he was born may be the most interesting thing for our purposes. He was born on the 27th of August 1770 in Stuttgart, and he died on the 14th of November 1831. So this is like almost 15 years before the Communist Manifesto comes out. And that's sort of an important sort of time frame to keep in mind. And he died at the age of 61 in Berlin.

And he taught, like, he taught at the University of Yenna at Heidelberg, at Berlin, and he grew up hanging out with people like Friedrich Schelling, who sort of, his work actually came out before, before Hegel really got on the go. So like Schelling's first real major work, I think, is the system of transcendental idealism, which he put out when he was 24, which was just, just, blows my mind, like the only other people I can think of that got on the go that, like, Deleuze is like that. He put out his first paper when he was 20, and it's just insane. But, hey, you know, Schelling is one of those people that was just a real heavyweight at a young age. And Hegel was his friend and sort of came, he started putting stuff out a little bit after him and was, you know, critical of some aspects of the system of transcendental idealism. But what is sort of interesting is, to me anyway,

is Hegel's relationship to romanticism. And I think it's sort of, you can see that in forming the kind of tropes he uses to explain his thinking in, say, the phenomenology of spirit, where he continually turns to like Greek tragedies and it's like Antigone, like all that really hardcore stuff, to help explain psyche formation,

which I find very interesting. So there's something like this, by seeing Hegel in his conscience, context is somebody who was born in the last 30 years of the 18th century, the romanticism was really like at its peak. And then coming into the middle of the 19th century where you're about to have people like Marx and Engels and like you have like industrial technology really coalescing and capitalism really getting on the go. You can kind of see this, you know, in Hegel's work itself, it kind of wanted the two process of these sort of romanticist tropes that are

very much tied up with they could almost be tied to certain kind of like nationalistic sort of feelings and ideas that certain German philosophers have about Germany and its relationship they perceive to ancient Greece and like Heidegger is someone who gets into a lot of tangley like bad places

because of this but you also see it on the go and Hegel which is very interesting and he his first, his very, very early work was about Christian theology and the very last thing he wrote was the, it's called the elements of the philosophy of right,

which is a very interesting text. And I listened to, in this connection, I listened to the episode you did in 2019 with Todd McGowan about Hegelianism. A lot of good stuff in there, although I think, and I'm not trying to start an academic fight where it's like, I'm going to destroy this guy and put another bullet point on my CV with his paper

or something like that. I think I would want to hear a little bit more about some of his remarks on the elements of the philosophy of Wright because he seems to see, or seemed in 2019 in this episode, to see a kind of like sort of openness in Hegel's political theory, whereas what I found, and I've probably studied the philosophy of Wright more than all the other stuff by Hegel. I would say, for me, It's like the one I've read the most thoroughly is that, followed by the science of logic, followed by the phenomenology of spirit. And what I see in it is sort of a blueprint for the kinds of international relations that we've seen defined in the 20th century by the IMF and the World Bank. You could do a whole episode about that.

There's a lot of very interesting stuff going on in there about the development of the nation state. And Hegel's his belief that it's not possible for there to be any kind of lasting cohesive peace between nation states. Very interesting stuff going on. He makes this argument that the sort of ethical substance, and you could in brackets be like, maybe he meant ethnic. But ethical substance of each community composed as a nation state is so different from every other one. that there's no way that different peoples could have a lasting coalition. And he's directly attacking Emmanuel Kant's argument and work on the idea that you could have an organized international peace. And Kant's work is what directly underpinned the development of the League of Nations and then the United Nations.

And Hegel attacks that and says that Kant is naive to think that different kinds of peoples, can actually get along. Very interesting. Wow. Very interesting stuff. And I think that him coming to this, and we'll circle back around to this, when we get into the phenomenology a bit more, I think, comes out of his idea that, or it's related to his idea that the development of personal psychology, of self-consciousness of you as a person,

depends on a relationship to other self-consciousness consciousness of God I just consciousness you know what I'm saying other thinking that is somehow inherently violent

and antagonistic and that there's sort of like a cruel sort of competition between different self-conscious beings or like da science like Heidegger didn't invent that term Hegel uses that term too

self-conscious does signs being theirs that are formed in the relationship to each other in a violent antagonistic way. And I think you could, there's a lot of analysis there to be done about the continuity of that set of claims and the, between that and what he talks about in the elements of the philosophy, right, about the impossibility of different kinds of people's coming together and having a coalition or having some kind of social synthesis. And that therefore, the really most ethical disposition that nation states can have to each other is war and domination. I find that very interesting as well.

So that's really sort of where he's working in. That's the sort of philosophical or intellectual sphere. So early on, starting with this kind of, you know, this sort of interesting sort of, pre-Hagalian dialectical work on Christian theology and its sort of existential meanings coming into the real core of the work in the phenomenology of spirit and the science of logic, those two pillars of his system, and then ending up near the end of his life with this political theory that has a lot of interesting and also alarming relationships to the ways that nations interact today under the mode of capitalism.

So that's just sort of a preamble about sort of just Hegel more generally. So do you have any questions or anything? No, no questions except just to add, and this is neither here nor there, but you were mentioning philosophers that, you know, did their magnum opus or at least some of their greatest work early on. And I think Schopenhauer is another edition. I just did an episode on Schopenhauer over at Red Menace. And I think he wrote his masterpiece of the world as will and representation, which is a work of philosophical, transcendental idealism, I think in his late 20s, so 28, 29, and then just spent the rest of his life, mostly in obscurity sort of shoring up, the arguments laid down there.

So not quite as early as a 20-year-old to lose, but still in his 20s, which is endlessly fascinating and impressive to me, at least. Yeah, it's really interesting. And Fred Hampton is another person like this. Oh, of course. Yeah. Just to consider that he was 20 years old, for example, just makes me want to throw all my books in the trash and never study anything. All of the Black Panthers. All the Black Panthers, really 18, 19, 20, 21.

It's crazy. Yeah, exactly, right? And Huey Newton had his Ph.D., like, you know, sometimes these guys just make me want to hide under a floor tile and never come out again because they're so, especially Hampton. He's just so, so brilliant, like, just so on the go at 20 years old. Just incredible, right? Deeply.

Yeah. But anyway, so yeah, maybe we can get into some primary concepts and then move towards Mao? Yeah, yeah. So I would say before we get into the concept of negation, we really need to understand the concept of notion. And this is, this is a really tough one. But if we can get this one, a lot of other things become easier. And it helps explain if we can understand it what it is about Hegel's system that's idealist and how that differs dramatically from the sort of more everyday ideas of ideals or forms of idealism that we've been talking about. So the term notion, it's a translation of the German term begriff, which comes from a verb Begrafen, which means, like, to comprehend.

So we're thinking about sort of gathering maybe disparate sort of features of the phenomenal world up into different unities so we can grasp what they are, right? And there's a whole, you could spend a lot of time talking about the concept of a concept and what the history of the concept of a concept is. And in fact, nothing gets me more jazz as a philosopher than talking about the concept of a concept. You want to butter me up and get me talking forever? Just ask me about that. And, but it can also be, so notion, Begriff can also be translated as concept, concept or notion. Both of them, both of them work. And know that really interesting thing

to understand about the concept of, about Begriff is that it doesn't have any content in the way that the concept of a triangle has content or the concept of an umbrella has content or the concept of dialectical materialism has content. The sort of interesting thing about Begriff is that it kind of expels all content, but at the same time it envelops all content and helps explain it in an abstract, systematic, methodical way that makes you understand what Heraclitus means by Metabolone and Apatai. And so this is the real, okay, so this is one of the first examples that I wanted to use to try to explain what he means by negation and negation of negation, but I'm going to introduce it now to try to help, you know, working away at this concept of begrift, this concept of the concept, of the concept, and to help us sort of like open things up a little bit. So there's a kind of little sort of, it's not a card trick, but it's something you can do with a deck of cards.

It's called like a, it's a flourish. It's called a card spring. And basically it's just where you hold the deck of cards in one hand with your index finger on the bottom and your thumb on the top. And you position the thumb in such a way that it's going to release, like as you pull your thumb back, it'll release all the cards and they'll flick over into your other hand. We've all probably seen card players do this at some point. where it's just like the deck is full and whole and it's in one hand and you let it go, it goes over to your other hand and then it's completed again, and it's whole and it's itself again in your other hand.

Hegel would want, if you were here now, he would say, well, let's notice some things about this phenomenon that we're observing of a card spring. And it's that when you're watching it in the process of moving from one hand to another, there's a way in which you kind of do see each card, at least at one point while it moves, but you also, you don't just see like bare empty space between the cards. There's like kind of a blur.

There's sort of an aftershadow or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah. And what Hegel is, what he's saying is like, what you're seeing in a very real way is the absolute determinate position of each card. at each point in space on its journey from one hand to the other hand. And you're also seeing the determinate event, if I can put it that way or moment,

of it leaving that place. And that's sort of what accounts for this weird combination of seeing the cards and seeing the empty space in which they're still sort of there is this kind of blur. You see those two things simultaneously. You see those two things simultaneously. And now if we were going to, you know, you could take a video, make a video of a card player doing that from one hand to the other and they may have, you know, one hand fairly high up relative to the other or you could have them maybe positioning their hands so the palms are slightly up and you can almost imagine the cards being flicked over in an arc before they land in the other hand, like kind of like a little, making a little bridge or something like that. And if we were doing calculus, you could, you could draw a line in describing the arc of the deck of cards as they travel, and then you could come up with some sort of like a differential equation or something like that to describe the journey of each card and all the cards as they go from one position to another, from the beginning point to the end point. and you could also you could do that for the the center point of each card and you could do that for an infinity of points on the on the surface of all the cards and so you could just you come up with a sort of expression in calculus for the journey that each point each of the infinite points on each surface of every card makes on the way from from one to the other but in perception we see this weird we see this simultaneous

unity of the cards being there and not being there at each point. And there are infinite points on that journey. So just as there are infinite points on the surface of the card, mathematically speaking, there are infinite points in the arc that the cards make. And the deck of cards starts off as a unified, recognizable entity that appears to be one. It becomes many in the journey and that it ends up in the other hand that it's one again. Right. And what has, is trying to say is that notion is the sort of realization that that process that you that I've just described in seeing the cards being there and not being there as they're traveling actually pertains to every possible phenomenon that you can that exists and that when you understand the

universality of that sort of differentiation process that's held within um held within these objects as insofar as they're self-identical, then you've got, you're grasping the grip and you're starting to get an understanding of difference as a universal, you don't want to call it a phenomenon

necessarily, because it's sort of what underpins phenomena. It's like what's transcendental to all phenomena. It's what sort of structures them and characterizes them and makes them possible and also makes them possible

to transform into other things because someday those cards are just going to be dust again, right? So does that kind of, can I help, can I explain anything further or articulate it a different way? Or does that make any sense at all? So one way that I was thinking about it based on your explanation is like there's the, there's the determinant position of the card in flux. And then there's simultaneously the departure from that determinant position. And that can be applied to everything universally. everything is, I mean, in a determined place, but also is departing it, or am I way the fuck off?

No, no, no. You're not way to fuck off. Not by any means. Yeah, and I think what Hagel would say in responses, like, but it's really important to emphasize it, even what appears to us to be indeterminate, like the blurry part, those are also signs of absolute complete determinateness, because when that card is, um, is At this point, it cannot be at any other point. Right.

But it's also, it is at that point and not at any other point because it is in the process of moving from that point to the next point. I see. And so there's, for, Hegel will say, my philosophy is a philosophy of absolute determination, but that doesn't mean that I'm saying that things are just standing still. It's the determinateness that actually enables the Heraclytean flux, if I can put it that way.

Okay. Yeah. So it's, it's, and this is one thing I was really glad when I listened to your episode with Todd McGowan was just his, just laying it right out there. Like I kind of did when I first mentioned Hegel. This is not thesis, antithesis, synthesis. What Hegel is doing is starting with objects that on first glance, including our consciousness or self-consciousness, both of them, consciousness and self-consciousness, appear to be simply. self-contained and simply one and unto themselves and then as we start to explore them we find that this sort of differentiation and determinateness in flux and change is there inside and that's what we find out that that first appearance of ourselves is just this smooth self-contained entity is negated and then because we're like oh my god there's all this otherness so that's that's not there like we thought it was but then through that negation we at haggle we'll say we'll realize that our self-sameeness, the engine of our self-sameeness is that differentiation

and is that change and that determinateness in flux. And so just to go back to the card example, it's really important to remember that when the cards are actually in the air and traveling, the deck has not ceased to be a deck just because it's physically separated, right? So for example, we can, we know that it remains a deck because the figures on the cards have certain values that especially, you know, depending on the game you're playing at Crazy Aates, I can't

remember, I can't remember, crib, go fish, poker, whatever. The markings on the cards, the symbols on the cards, put all the cards each card into a certain kind of relationship with every other card and all the other cards, especially depending on the game that's being played, but nonetheless

because we know that due to this symbolic markings and the different practices of play that they have been developed for, we know that even if you, if I were to take a deck of cards right now and just flick them all over the ground, they wouldn't cease being a deck of cards. It would still be a deck of cards, but just in a disorganized manner. And the relations to them when you grab, you gather them up, would still be the same. And likewise, when they're in the air and they're

separated, there's still one thing. And they haven't ceased to be one. But you're also seeing this sort of like negation process of their motion in space and time. And that can help you start realizing like, oh, well, yeah, there's all the, and maybe I'm giving up the game a little bit too early, but what DeLose is going to say, well, it's like, but don't forget that even in terms of, or even if we're focusing on the differentiation process that delivers that self-sameeness, that identity to us, don't forget that there are all these other kinds of changes that are happening and that had to happen in order for the deck of cards to come into being as a deck of cards in the first place.

So it's interesting, like Hegel starts with the figure of a unified, simple, impermeable object, kind of like the concept of a piece of matter, like we talked about in Newton in the first deep dive. And then he sort of retro-engineers into it or through it, the Heracleitian logic, starting from stability and moving to instability and then finding out that that instability is what guarantees the stability. okay yeah it's heavy yeah it is it is yeah like I haven't read

until we agreed to do this I hadn't read Hagel in over a decade and it's like when you get you know you you get a few pages in and like this is an interesting philosophy book

and about 20 pages later you look up and you realize you're in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they hide the ark and you're just like where what happened is anyone here

or else you look up and you find out that you're in a labyrinth and you're like, is there a minotaur in here? And you realize, yes, there is a minotore in here. And the minotor is this thing, the griff, the notion that's like both complicates and problematizes every entity and every unity and then leads you to the rediscovery of that unity as whole and integral and complete with the differentiation inside it. And so this is why it's not. not thesis, antithesis, synthesis, because it's not about two foreign objects

encountering each other in this kind of negation. Fundamentally, as if we get a chance now to look at the phenomenology here, it's about you starting from the position of, you know, I'm just me, I'm fine, I'm integral and complete and whole, and then I encounter this other thing that apparently not me that complicates that impression. and then I have to deal with that and internalize it and then come back as a sort of augmented entity that now takes account of the difference that it carries within it. Yeah, that does make sense.

That's a very complicated concept and idea, but yeah, you're doing very good in trying to explain it to regular people. Okay, good, because, you know, I felt like I got weighing over my head. I think everybody, even with a cursory understanding of Hegel knows that he's notoriously. difficult his philosophy attempts to encompass literally everything and he writes in a in a very intense and hard to parse out way so uh so trying to wrestle and clarify these concepts these are what philosophers spend entire career is doing and we're just trying to introduce them so that we can get a deeper understanding of where he's coming from so yeah and and just you know so um just if it's any consolation to everyone i've read some over the years like

accounts of Hegel himself lecturing and it's important to note that Hegel himself didn't find this easy. So I remember reading this account of him like trying to deliver this at a lecture and he's like up there at the podium just like barely getting it out and just like sweating bullets and mopping his brow with

a handkerchief and just being like oh god damn like this is so tough. So it's not like it's it can be because Hegel is so venerated amongst so many different strands of philosophy that it can give you the impression that he's just freestyling and just coming up with it off the top of his head. But no, he put in a whole lot of

work to even get all this stuff out. And even with trying to talk in time to talk about it to other people, he found it difficult. So that's something we should all keep in mind, I think, that it's not it's not even necessarily Hegel that's difficult. It's that this is difficult. Right. That's a good point. Trying to grasp reality is difficult. It's not self-evident at all, right? So maybe just to get into a bit of an illustration here. Maybe we could, I could look a little bit, maybe at a couple of passages from the first chapter of the phenomenology of Spheres. Sure.

Yeah, whatever you want. Just sort of introduced, and also, like, I may turn to, if I can find something, I have a sticky note in here. Some of the commentary of Jean Hippolyte, who is Deleuze's, one of DeLuz's teachers who I mentioned last episode of the episode before, I would. was reading his book, The Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. And actually, I would say, like, if someone is interested in trying to understand this,

you could barely find a better book. Like, Hippolyte is so clear. And the English translation that I have, it's just, it's really well done. It's just exceptionally clear. And he makes it about as accessible as you could possibly ask for. So if anyone is interested in this book, the phenomenology of spirit, I would highly recommend genesis structure of Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, which came out in, I believe, 1946, so just after the Second World War ended. So I may jump into that really shortly.

So, but what I'm going to do is just talk about what the phenomenology is about in the most basic sense possible, and then maybe jump into a few passages in the first chapter and sort of, you know, make, maybe make some observations about that, or you can jump. jump in with your observations and response or whatever, and we can, like, try to think through this a little bit. Okay. So in entering into the phenomenology of spirit, and this is something that Hippelied and many commenters, I'd say pretty much every commenter on Hegel worth their salt, probably points this out early on,

which is that Hegel, the phenomenology spirit is in the first place about consciousness, about the conscious psyche. But it's not about what you might call the philosophical conscious psyche. It's not about like something you will find in Kant or John Locke or something like that where it starts out by saying, well, the mind is composed of a certain number of faculties and each faculty works in this way and they work this way together. Or in Kant's case, he would say they actually clash with each other and psychic experience comes out of this clash. Hegel starts at a much, much, much, much more basic level. And really what he's trying to do is come up with this sort of like

Neo-Heraklitean, if I can put it that way, description of any mind at all coming first to consciousness and then to the consciousness of a thing outside of itself. And this is the movement of the first chapter of the phenomenology of spirit. It's called consciousness. So I'm just going to look at the table of contents, too, to see if, let's see here. Hegel, his tables of contents are usually very nicely structured, so you can get a sense of how the different topics sort of fall into the concatenation with each other

and they work together. So this is, yeah, just the first chapter, or the first book, I get, no, first chapter, consciousness and the first section sense certainty or the this and meaning and this is the kind of like you now like what in the hell is he talking about and and this a lot of terminology can can just take you all over the place so we're just going to um maybe ignore for the moment the problem of meaning and stick to the problem of something being a this um so I'm just going to start at the the very beginning um The knowledge or knowing, sorry, quote, the knowledge or knowing, which is at the start, or is immediately our object, cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is.

Okay, I'm going to make a comment. So let's think about being babies and about, and most, you know, us, us coming to consciousness out of infancy is kind of like a murky, very ambivalence for the process where there's no, quote unquote, first memory that you can necessarily set up as like, this is the one, because then you would have to have contextualized it within this sort of, sort of sphere of all these other connected memories. So you could locate it that way. There's something very mysterious about coming to consciousness. Like, what would you say is your earliest memory? I feel like I had a very early memory of actually me still in diapers, but it's a dream that I was sitting in my grandparents' living room. And I looked out the long bay windows that they had.

And I saw King Kong's foot come down. Sick. Yeah. That's a good one. I had one kind of like that too. This isn't the earliest one, but since you had a dream example, I'll tell of mine as well.

this is when I was I think I was still in diapers and when I was born my mom and dad and I lived with my grandmother in the house that my grandmother and grandfather built in the west end of St. John's and I lived in my crib in my mom's room that she grew up in

and I had this dream because mom and dad and nanny they'd have grownups over on Friday night or whatever Uncle Joe and Aunt Jerry and the whole crowd would come down and I would get put to sleep in my in mom's room in my crib and I could hear everyone having fun and I'd be so just bombs right and I had this dream and I remember the dream was so vivid that at the moment I thought it was actually real I woke up and I could hear the grownups talking and laughing and having fun and I was

in complete blackness and I could just see a little line of light under the door and I thought to hell with this I'm going out to the party and I vaulted myself in the dream over the the the the railing of my crib and then in mid-air I like slowed down to this grinding halt stuck in mid-air and it's kind of like the I remember having the in the dream the bodily feeling that kind of like you get when you go over the top of a roller coaster and it drops yeah and just like and then I woke up wow so that was just to compliment your your dream very interesting about the king the king Kong foot but my I think one of my first memories um and possibly my first memory is me in my diapers in a little kind of, like a walker. Is that like a baby? You put them in so they can walk around and there's

like a tray and all that stuff. And in my grandmother's kitchen, there was a low-lying set of cupboards that had all these non-perishable food items in them. And Nanny used to put elastic bands on the doorknob so that I couldn't open it and like pull all the all the cans. So I used to go into the kitchen on my walker and go up to the elastic bands and just start playing them like their guitar strings like bam barram like that and then he's like oh jesus what have i done um but it's just a very early memory of an object presenting itself as an object for me as something like well this is interesting a feature of the world and it's one of the first sort of objects that i can remember presenting itself to me as an object so like the the doorknobs themselves were sort of like supporting players for the elastic band and the elastic band was the main character in this drama

right right put it that way and so what hagel is trying to say i'll just read the line again i read the line again um quote the knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is so what hegel would say is that well the story that you just told matthew about the elastic bands is already pretty far down the road of, you know, object permanence and sort of differentiation between self and other and all that kind of stuff. But before that, there was sort of a much more amorphous and ubiquitous universal sort of just like undifferentiated presence, put it that way, out of which these kind of specifications emerged. And you may not be

able to remember that because it didn't present itself to you as a discernible kind of like disparate object, but it was a form of experience and consciousness that is like a building block, if I can put it that way, or the kind of staging ground of this more complex, more differentiated experience that you've had. So he's really, in very like good faith, I would say, really trying to come up with a phenomenological or philosophical account of consciousness in that sense, like emerging out of the womb into space and time, as we know it, and then eventually assembling around ourselves through experience a universe of objects

or what maybe Guatari might call a universe of reference once we get really more into language or something like that. Is that, does that help at all? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. So, all right, continuing. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive. We must alter nothing in the object,

as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it. So in order, so comment, in order to sort of reconstruct this primordial experience philosophically, we have to imagine ourselves encountering something outside of ourselves that is this something, and yet we are not to ask ourselves what that is or what it means yet, if I can put it that way. And so he's going to continue, so I'll just continue here. So, quote, because of its concrete content, sense certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found,

either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense certainty appears to be the truest knowledge, for it has not as yet omitted anything from the object, but has the object before it in its perfect entirety. But in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and porous truth. Okay, comment.

He's saying it is the most certain, but it's also very much lacking because yet we don't know anything about this thing that's before is that we need to build up that knowledge out of the sensuous certainty that something is there, that's not me and that therefore I'm there we then the task remains to actually become cognizant of this thing

as not just a thing that's not us but as the thing that it is and that's this is like how we're how this is sort of like the ground of what he calls that I said earlier of forced a lot of picture thinking of being able to be like hey that's a can of soup or that's a rhinoceros right so he's showing the sort of like

primary logistics of the possibility of knowing particular things here continuing so yeah in the event this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth

all that it says about it what it knows all that it says about what it knows is just that it is and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing comments so the sheer being there of that it's just this thing is there

continuing consciousness for its part is in this certainty only as a pure I or I am in it only as a pure this and the object similarly only as a pure this okay so comment so right off the bat you can see that if someone is like read that fur and it's like okay I get it

they could easily run off and say Hagel is two into one a two into one thinker and this is about the sort of thesis antithesis synthesis synthesis synthesis model it's very easy to be sloppy and just have that takeaway and go away. So you can see that if you don't follow through and don't engage in a thorough reading, you can really mess up and end up being like, well, maybe the bourgeoisie and the proletariatia can work it out.

Hegel says that, doesn't he? Right, right. It's very easy if you're not careful. Even just, I haven't even gotten out of the second paragraph. Right. Where am I? Continuing, I, this particular I, am certain of this. particular thing, not because I, Quay consciousness, comments. So Quay just means like in respect of or in relation to continuing. Quay consciousness in knowing it, in knowing it, have developed

myself or thought about it in various ways. And also not because the thing of which I am certain in virtue of a host of distinct qualities would be in its own self a rich complex of connections or related in various ways to other things. Neither of these has anything to do with the truth of sense certainty. Neither I nor the thing has the significance of a complex process of mediation. Comment, so for example, something that has a nutritive cycle, something that engages in photosynthesis, or even things to just move, or the dissolution of salt and water, any of those kinds of changes in mediation

of one thing to another thing, or something undergoing a differentiation and then reconstituting itself or being reconstituted in light of these differences, continuing. The eye does not have the significance of a manifold, imagining, or thinking, nor does the thing, quote, unquote, signify something that it has a host of qualities. On the contrary, the thing is, and it is merely because it is. It is. Comment. If you read, haggle out in public, be very, very careful and watch yourself because you may very well burst out laughing in front of a whole bunch of people and make an ass out of yourself. And I've done this. So just be careful because I was in a food court at the Memorial University of Newfoundland about 20 years ago reading this. And I just was alone at a table. And I exploded in the laughter

in front of all these people. And it was a little awkward. But anyway, continuing. It is. This is the essential point for sense knowledge, and this pure being or this simple immediacy constitutes its truth. Similarly, certainty as a connection is an immediate pure connection. Consciousness is I, nothing more, a pure this. The singular consciousness knows a pure this or the single item. This is moving on to paragraph, the next paragraph. But when we look carefully at this pure being, which constitutes the essence of this certainty and which this certainty pronounces to be its truth, comments. In other words, there's that thing there. There's a thing there, right? That's the truth of sense certainty, continuing. We see that much more is involved.

An actual sense certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an instance of it. Among the countless differences cropping up here, we find in every case that the crucial one is that in sense certainty, pure being splits up, sorry, at once splits up into what we have called the two this is, one this as I and the other this as object. When we reflect on this difference, we find that neither one nor the other is only immediately present in sense certainty, but each is at the same time mediated. I have this certainty through something else, viz the thing. And it similarly is in sense certainty through something else, viz, through the I. So again, and that's an end quote. So again, we are not encountering two disparate things that run

into each other, have an antagonistic relationship, and then overcome that antagonism in what you might call the alfaybong, the sublation, right? It's that these two things appear to be just in and of themselves, unto themselves, and but by exploring them, we find out that each is contained in the other and that each creates the other, if I can put it in the manner of Erie Eugenia. So that's just a reading of like the first three paragraphs of the phenomenology, of the main body of the phenomenology of perception. So hopefully that, I'm hoping that that can give people like a little bit of an intuitive grasp of what's going on there.

And out of that, so he moves through this chapter and comes to the end of the chapter. And here I will, I will probably jump and just come to the end of the chapter. So he says, this is the thing about someone where the system is so fluid and flowing together that it's hard to find a point to jump in at okay I'm just going to rip the band-aid off I ended at paragraph 92 and I'm going to jump in a paragraph 109

is that okay yeah okay quote it is clear that the dialectic of sense certainty is nothing other or nothing else rather but the simple history of its movement or of its experience and self-certaincy itself is nothing else but just this history. That is why natural consciousness, too, is always reaching this result, learning from experience what is true in it and comment to what is most true in it is this mediation and

the pure, he extracts like purely out of that, that pure hieroclitean differentiation is what he means by begriff or notion or concept, right? Continuing, so this is why natural consciousness too is always reaching this result, learning from experience, what is true in it, but equally it is always forgetting it and starting the movement all over again. So comment, that's because after we come back down from thinking the Segalian way, that's still a can of soup to sit in there in front of me, despite the true fact that it's also going away. It will also turn into a hole, but it will turn into things that feed my body. It will turn into a tin can that will hopefully be recycled as opposed to just getting thrown into the ocean

or something like that. And then that will undergo further transformations. I will excrete out the nutrients or like the leftovers of the extraction process of the nutrients. And that will transform into other things. The nutrients will transform into energy and various expressions in my body. And so we're finding, since certainty finds this kind of mediation, process through this dialectical thinking, but then we still have to contend with the fact that because of, well, remember when we were talking about Spinoza and the commenter on Spinoza Beth Lord, where she's like, well, really, these stabilities that we perceive that make us think bad metaphysical thoughts, that stabilization or the stability of all of it is just a coordination

process between different types of formation. So for example, when you and I look at the deck of cards being flicked from one hand to the other hand, we see it in a sort of blurry way. But if you had the brain and eyes of like a housefly, you would be able to see that process playing up much more slowly in each moment being like more distinct, if I could put it that way. Yeah, absolutely. So continuing. It is therefore astonishing when in the face of this experience, it is asserted as universal experienced and put forward to as a philosophical proposition, even as the outcome of skepticism,

that the reality or being of external things taken as this is or sense objects has absolute truth for consciousness, comment, and it doesn't because we know that there's more than meets the eye to things in front of us that we can touch. Continuing, to make such an assertion is to not know what one is saying, to be unaware that one is saying the opposite of what one wants to say. The truth for consciousness of a this of sense is supposed to be universal experience. But the very opposite is universal experience. Every consciousness itself supersedes such a truth as, e.g., here is a tree, or now is noon, and proclaims the opposite.

Here is not a tree, but a house. And similarly, it immediately again supersedes the assertion, which set aside the first, so far as it is also just such an assertion of a sensuous this. So, in other words, in very will comment, in other words, in a very real way, this is also not a house. and we need to come to grips with that as well. And that's the truth of sense certainty, not the immediate presentation of the house in this instant. We don't, the instant is not the fundamental sort of nature of reality. Continuing.

And what consciousness will learn from experience in all sense certainty is in truth, only that what we have seen in respect of the this as a universal, the very opposite of what that assertion affirmed to be universal experience. So, end quote. So what we find out is that what appeared at the beginning of this chapter to be universal, which is thus the sensuous certainty that there's a this there, turns out not to be the universal thing, and it's subsumed by the universality of mediation and change and transformation.

And so it's through this process that he will say at the end of this chapter, quote, when I say a single thing, I am really saying what it is from a wholly universal point of view for everything is a single thing. And likewise, quote unquote, this thing is anything you like. If we describe it more exactly as, quote, unquote, this bit of paper, then each and every bit of paper is, quote, unquote, this bit of paper. And I have only uttered the universal all the time. But if I want to help out language, which has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all, by pointing out this bit of paper, experience teaches me what the truth

of sense certainty is in fact is. I pointed out as a hear, which is a hear of many other hears, or is in its own self a quote unquote simple togetherness of many hears, i.e. it is a universal. I take it up then as it as it is in truth. And instead of something knowing, knowing something immediate, I take the truth of it or I perceive it, end quote. And so what he's saying is that for the first time, when we come to perceive things, we then perceive that everything that in immediate sense, certainty just appears to be just there is actually a differentiated unity of many different qualities and many different processes. And so the first chapter of the phenomenology of spirit, using the dialectical method to find the difference

inside each thing that appears at first just to be simple and self-contained, shows us this sort of more fundamental truth that the unity of things, of each thing, is self-contained insofar as it contains differentiation in others. I see. Okay. Yeah. Very, very complicated stuff, but you do a good job going through it and trying to explain it. Is there anything else that you want to say on that front before we move on to

the next question where we really start getting into how all of this is ultimately taken up in the development of dialectical materialism? Yeah. Well, yeah. So I want to jump back to the science of logic and, oh, here it is. And just to say like the relationship between the phenomenology of spirit and the science of logic is very important in the sense that the phenomenology of spirit is about the structure of consciousness and the way that it relates to objects and the science of logic is about the objects themselves and hegel's whole sort of philosophical gambit is if what i'm saying is true about both of these registers of reality so consciousness and the things of which consciousness is conscious um then i'm able to

apply the same explanatory or sort of conceptual framework to them. And in doing so, I will demonstrate that mind and the things that are quote unquote are outside of mind are in fact in this sort of dialectical unity. And that's not just a theoretical statement in the sort of week since we mean, just a conjecture or something like that. He's going to say that by pursuing the pathway of the phenomenology of spirit, you will find the truth of the science of logic and show that the, you will see that the dynamic of objects outside of yourself makes you realize about the dynamic of your own mind. And then you will see that thought and extension are unified fundamentally, just sort of like at their source. And so for Hegel, this is kind of like his way of,

for him, like uplifting and like clarifying the Spinoza system through this kind of his form of the dialectic, like I put it that way. So very, very quickly, I'm just going to read maybe just a paragraph or two from the science of logic where in chapter two I think where he talks about determinate being from the standpoint of just dealing with objects without thinking about the relationship of consciousness inside them.

or in relation to them. So this follows on the passage that I read earlier about Spinoza. So this is under the section. It's just called Something. And it's in, well, I gave you the guys the section that this all is in earlier, so I won't repeat that. But in my copy, it's on page 114. And so this is translated by A.V. Miller, and it's published by Humanity Books. And I've had this, had this copy for a long time.

And I think it's still the standard English translation. So something. Quote, in determinate being, its determinateness, so the comment, it's the determinants of something, continuing, its determinateness has been distinguished as quality. In quality as determinately present, there is distinction of reality and negation. Now, although these distinctions are present in determinate being, they are no less equally void and sublated. So comment, just to think back to the deck of cards example again

when they're flying through the air and you can see cards, but you can also see the blur where the cards were and where they're going to be and all that kind of stuff. So that this determinateness of, you know, insofar as you can spy out one card making that journey through space, that kind of contains its own voiding in it because it's already moving and sort of like it's negating its own position and leaving you with the perception of that negation

in the form of the little aftershadow that's left behind or that kind of blurriness continuing. Reality itself contains negation is determinate being, not indeterminate abstract being. Similarly, sorry, in comment. So in other words, what Hegel's saying is that I am actually not promoting a philosophy of flux in the sense that there is nothing in my system

anywhere that's not determined, which is really important for Hegel continuing. So similarly, negation is determinate being, not the abstract, supposedly abstract nothing, but posited here as it is in itself as affirmatively present belonging to the sphere of determinate being. Thus, quality is completely unseparated from determinate being, which is simply determinate qualitative being. And so I won't go too much more into that. but just in other words he's applying um he's applying the same logic to two object domains if i can put it that way in the phenomenology and the science of logic and they interlock together and they work together and they make you see um or hegel his his his his whole thing is that he can make you

see the truth of aristotle's proposition that thinking and being are the same yeah fascinating that's crazy stuff. It's really wild. It really is. It really is. Yeah. So is there anything else that you want to say before we move into this next sort of section of the conversation? Yeah, just, I guess just to clue up by maybe just a little clarifying remark about the negation of negation part. And just to show how the terminology fits in, right? So you start off in the phenomenology.

You start off, you're at home with yourself. your own being and then you figure out that you realize that something else is there another thing is there at least one other thing is there so in my story like the elastic bands that i played like guitar strings when i was a kid just say and at first uh it seems like the presence and this this is one of the places where you can sort of fall into two into one logic the presence of the object negates your existence, or the sort of the existence of the object negates your existence in that, in the sense that before you recognize the existence of another object, it just can feel like your whole existence takes up all of reality, and it covers all of it.

And then something comes along to be like, oh, shit, no, there's limits to me, right? And so he's like, he's like, you start off with A, just me and my simple self-samedness. And then you find out that you're limited and that there's sort of like a negation of A, so not A. And then you realize that your perception of this object outside of you that immediately at the first seem to just negate, like limit your existence by posing some other thing is brought to you by your own cognitive activity. So in a sense, the object is sort of inside of you too. And that's how, like, you rediscover yourself as augmented by the realization that the outside is on the inside, if I can put it that way, which also means that the inside is on the outside. And so there's this, there's initial positing. There's just me.

Oh, God, there's something else. There's this negation. And then there's the negation of that negation by realizing the unity of. you and the other thing in your differentiation from each other. And in simplest terms, this is Hegel's sort of his explanation of the dialectical relationship between consciousness and the objects of consciousness, the inside and the outside. Yeah, exactly. Subject and object.

Yeah, exactly. And just to draw on the deck of cards one more time, you know, I just said, if we were houseflies or we had the brains and eyes of house. flies, we would maybe see the journey of the cards differently. And when you have a realization like that, you do realize how your composition as a certain kind of being shapes your perception of the thing outside of you. And so in that, it's not a, like, it's not a bad or vicious subjectivism, which is like, all these objects are just, they're just manufactured by my being. It's not that. It's that, the, the material nature of my being shapes the person.

perception shapes what the object gives to me and how it is therefore taken up in a kind of in the imaginary, you know, in my imagination and in my way of treating the object in sort of material concrete everyday relations. And so it's about really finding out that objects that appear to be impermeable, again, we've been saying this again and again, carry otherness inside themselves. and we could draw this back to Buddhism in like, you know, Tickna Han, who just died a week or two ago, so a rest in peace, Tickna Han, that there is no self without non-self elements. So that's another way you could sort of figure the Hegelian logic,

although it's important to note that Hegel sort of denigrates like Buddhism and the Vedic tradition and sort of sees it as like backwards, superstition because it doesn't deploy abstract concepts like European thinkers do. Right, right. And just in that connection for the listener, really want to recommend the stuff that you've done, I think, like on here in guerrilla history with Nick Estes. Yeah.

And also episode 90 of citations needed with Nick Estes where he talks about, I mean, for those who don't know who he is, like he's brilliant. Yeah, he's great. Brilliant. He talks about how science in the sort of Anglo-European modality of science is always bound up in colonialist violence because of the way that English, the English language, I mean, maybe among other European languages, but the English language was represented in and through colonialism as superior to indigenous language. which is, because if it's abstraction and its ability to separate out from nature and to separate nature from itself. And so just from the sort of standpoint of decolonization, it will be very interesting to

encircle Hagel by, and his concepts by the question of like indigenity. And the fact that these concepts themselves come out of material bases and have historical and material particularities and that they're the ungroundedness that um is that they that they have that is used to justify things like manifest destiny and sort of the idea that you know the indigenous people weren't cultivating the land and you know like they're in this simple animalistic unity with the land that's unreflective and you know what I mean like yeah hey Hegel kind of gets he goes down this direction too. Like the dialectic is not entirely safe from it in his hands, if I can put it that way. So I just wanted to put that out there in those listening recommendations as something

sort of very interesting to think about in terms of like what is troubling and what's problematic about hate, I guess. Absolutely. Definitely go check those out. Okay. So for the next step of our conversation, let's look at how Hegel's thinking, especially the concepts of negation and double negation is taken up in the development of dialectical materialism proper. Since Frederick Engels is responsible for conceptualizing a dialectical materialism as such, can you kind of talk about his perspective on the matter of negation? And then maybe touch on why in the eyes of Engels and Marx and others that Hegel in particular is considered an idealist.

Okay. Well, first I'm just going to read a little footnote from Das Kapital, Volume 1, because Engels' discussion of negation. in anti-Durring is in response to like During's criticisms of Marx about on the on the usage of negation so this this footnote is in there we go again the complicated table of contents of Das Kapital yeah so this is in part seven of volume one the process of accumulation of capital and it is in the chapter chapter 24, the transformation of surplus value into capital, and I think it's in the Section 3,

division of surplus value into capital and revenue, the abstinence theory. So I think we read from some of that last time in the last episode. So this is, actually, I think it may have been in this when we talked about the Sopranos. So this is one of the places where Marx dunks on John Stuart Mill. So I'll just quote, he who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment, which his expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the use of capital productively, which is the cause of profits. Comment Marx is just quoting a sort of bourgeois political economist there. Continuing, John Stewart Mill, on the contrary, both copies Ricardo's theory of profit and annexes it to seniors.

and this comment as seniors, this guy senior is the economist that Marx just quoted, continuing, he annexes it to seniors, quote unquote, remuneration of abstinence. He, comment, meaning mill, continuing, is as much at home with absurd and flat contradictions as he is at sea with the Hegelian, quote unquote, contradiction, which is the source of all dialectics. It has never recurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflection that, every human action may be conceived as an, quote-unquote, abstinence from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking is abstinence from standing still,

working as abstinence from idling, idling as abstinence from working, etc. These gentlemen would do well to ponder occasionally over Spinoza's, quote, determinatio es nagatio, end quote, and then end the broader quote. So I'd just like to say, too, so just in anticipation of Deleu's, when Mark says eating his abstinence from fasting as an example of negation in the Hagellian dialectic, Deleuze would jump in and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's slow down a little bit here. Is when you're not, when you cease, what do you mean by eating here? When you cease chewing and swallowing is the digestive process, you know, not still going on, right?

can you really like even when you're not eating your body is still engaging in sort of the digestive process so it's maybe not the best example to talk about eating as like a discreet example whose opposite is fasting because the process is continuous and goes from like one end to the other and it's all like when you start chewing your salivary glands kick into action and you know you're already starting to break down the food which is will be continued in your stomach and in your digestive tract, your intestinal tract. So there's another way of describing the difference

between eating and what you call eating and what you call not eating that doesn't depend on sort of these ideas mutually negating each other because there is an ongoing process at all times of conversion and transformation. So just a little comment on that there. And then so in anti-during,

this is, let's see, part one, philosophy, chapter 13 dialectics negation of the negation and just before that it's worth noting there's chapter 12 is dialectics quantity and quality and that's the relationship between quantity and quality is you know of the utmost importance for anyone practicing dialectical materialism so angles gives an example he uses the example of a barley seed to explain the idea of dialectical materialism So this is a passage that angles supplies for us to sort of contemplate this idea of the negation of negation. It's on page 186 in my copy. Quote, a very simple process which is taking

place everywhere and every day, which any child can understand as soon as it is stripped of the veil of mystery in which it was enveloped by the old idealist philosophy and in which it is to the advantage of helpless metaphysicians of here-durring's caliber to keep it enveloped. 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 on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture, it undergoes a specific change, it germinates.

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 is the normal life process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilized, and finally, once more, produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened, the stock dies, is in its turn, negated. 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. Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago.

But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example, a dahlia or an orchid, oh, comment, he doesn't, by plastic, he doesn't mean artificial. He means that it's more available to modification and manipulation and change. Pliable, yeah. continuing. And for example, a dahlia or an orchid and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener's art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation, not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation enhances this process of perfection. So that's just, and he gives another example following where he talks about,

butterflies, for example. And then he talks about the geological cycle and the earth's crust and all of this kind of stuff. It's a really interesting chapter. And then later on in the chapter, he kind of starts to introduce not really a criticism, but he starts to think about the limitations of this mode of explaining things, dialectically, according to the negation of the negation. Quote, and so what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general, and for this reason, extremely far-reaching and important law of development of nature, history, and thought. A law which, as we have seen, holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms in geology, in mathematics, in history, and in philosophy, a law which even here during, in spite of all his stubborn resistance,

has unwittingly and in his own way to follow. It is obvious that I do not say anything concerning the particular process of development of, for example, a grain of barley from germination to the death of the fruit-bearing plant if I say it is a negation of the negation. For as the integral calculus is also a negation of the negation, if I said anything of the sort,

I should only be making the nonsensical statement that the life process of a barley plant was integral calculus or for that matter that it was socialism. That, however, is precisely what the metaphysicians are constantly imputing to dialectics. When I say that all these processes are a negation of the negation, I bring them all together under this one law of motion, and for this very reason I leave out of account the specific peculiarities of each individual process. Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought.

So I think with this passage here, you're already starting to see angles introducing the possibility of taking up dialectical materialism in a way that doesn't necessarily rely so heavily on the negation of negation, depending on how close you zoom in to the object. objects that you're considering. And it sort of makes me think of this remark that Einstein made about mathematical exactitude. So it's like the more mathematically exact, your sort of representation of an object is the more precise it is, but the less true it is. And the truer, the representation you come up with, the less precise it is. So there's just sort of like one into two going on there in Einstein's thinking. And I think,

Let me just look here. I'm just going to reread my notes real quick here. So I think that we're also starting to see where Hegel might be sort of like dangerously idealistic. Or idealist, rather, not idealistic. In the sense that like the stuff that I read from the beginning of the phenomenology of spirit, and there's that little paragraph I just threw in from the science of logic to show the different object domains that Hegel is talking about. When it's in this sort of the early stages of the work

where it's much more abstract in general, it's not really that dangerous. But as I've said, as he moves further and further into the phenomenology of spirit and the psyche, the human mind, clothes itself ever more deeply, in sconces itself in the trappings of real concrete particular, you know, individual or singular human life, the more he, you might say he adds a lot of the prejudices of his own time.

And he sees these as all sort of world historically necessary. So like the bourgeois nation state that encounters other nation states in a necessarily fundamentally hostile manner, that is like an expression of, of speech. and the concept, and he's sort of like built up out of, you know, the sense certainty and the realization that there are other objects into, you know, a description of complex societies, and he doesn't, I guess what Marx and Engels and everyone else would say, you see these particular things as necessary, dialectically, because you don't really have a critical vantage point on your own material conditions, regardless of,

you might think. So you don't understand, or rather, you're not really paying full attention to the sorts of like material conditions that make, like, the bourgeois society that you live in possible. So therefore, you see, you see this kind of bourgeois nation state formation

that you describe in the elements of the elements of the philosophy of right as sort of kind of like an historical destiny that is kind of like the culmination. of rationality. It's, it's, it's, and group, like, not just individual, but group rationality. So in that sense, um, you, uh, you kind of lose the critical power of your thinking and kind of end up, uh, accepting in this weird dialectical roundabout way, uh, a kind

of like dogmatic, uh, picture of what a proper like political formation or political society looks like. And that ends up, uh, I, you know, to whatever extent is advertent or inadvertent, ends up upholding all like, well, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, imperialist war, like all the rest of it. And where we're going to see DeLuz come in is that he and Guattari are very, very concerned about this, as I said earlier on, very concerned about this generalized notion that the individual human psyche as a person or an individual self-consciousness necessarily comes out of a violent antagonistic relationship with other self-consciousness that is a relationship of domination and submission.

And they want to get away from that. And Deleuze is going to lean more into forms of what here we're calling dialectical thinking that don't center the negation of negation and treat it as something that sort of comes sort of like later on down the line. Is that helpful at all? Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. That critique by Angles in particular that Hegel's sort of philosophy is inherently sort of stunted or limited to the conditions that he existed in because he doesn't have a sort of ability to examine the underlying conditions that

gave rise to the way that things are in Hegel's time. Is that a good recapitulation of that point? Yeah, because for him, everything operates at the level. of consciousness. Right. And so it's not really available to Hegel to think of your, your consciousness as something that's underpinned by like a material unconscious, a historical unconscious. Because that would be more fundamental than consciousness itself. And that's where their materialism comes in?

Yeah, absolutely. And if I could just, hang on now, turn, actually turn very quickly to Michelle Foucault, this is a little passage that I translated a long time ago and he has a really interesting little remark about what constitutes the historical unconscious and this goes very, very well with like what Deleuze is trying to do and in a little bit I think we're going to

briefly look at that Lithuanian philosopher from the 18th century Solomon Maimon and to see how his thinking sort of backstops de Loz's concept of difference So Foucault says, quote, you read, for example, that a man killed his wife after a dispute. It's quite simple daily life, which at a given moment in the wake of an accident of a deviation of a little excess has become something enormous in which will disappear straight away like a rubber balloon. There you go. A daily life, an argument about a piece of land, about furniture, about old clothes. that's it, the unconscious of history.

It's not a kind of great force of a vital drive or death. Our historical unconscious is made up of these millions, of these billions of little events, which little by little, like raindrops, erode our body, our way of thinking, end of quote. And then I had a note I wrote at the end, and eventually these raindrops wash us away. And so that that's, I think, what all these,

you know everyone like especially when angle starts to get into the critique of the negation of negation and later we'll see how a mouse says i just don't believe in it at all and deluz basically says it's a load of crap um you can this is what they're talking about what what hegel is not really interested in paying attention to these little scraps um like what walter benjamin tries to like throw up into the air in his arcades project by you know literally finding scraps of posters and stuff and trying to develop a materialist history of Paris at this certain period of time. So, yeah, does that, does that help at all?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, very good. Okay, cool. So, yeah, I think there's so for, yeah, at a historical level, Hegel is dangerously idealist in the necessity that he projects onto the sort of European nation state paradigm. and at the level of individual psychology, Deleuze will say that he's dangerously idealist when it comes to the concrete structures of psyche formation, if I can put it that way. Yeah, so then you're ready to move into the next question with that in mind?

Yeah, sure. Okay, so let's pick up where we left off specifically last episode with diving a little deeper into Deleuze's thinking and his critique of Hegel's dialectic. For Deleuze, it is key that contradiction, which manifests in the form of negation, is a derivative rather than a fundamental mode of difference keeping in mind that we just discussed what we just discussed concerning angles and others how does that critique inform his shared work with guattari and the concrete social and political stakes of that work maybe you can answer that and then we'll get into how this all brings deluz and guatari's thinking into the proximity of Mao's thinking

in particular. Okay. Well, the first thing, sort of the first immediate inspiration for Deleuze to take up this question comes from his teacher, Jean Hippolyte's book, Logic and Existence, which I mentioned genesis and structure of phenomenology of spirit yesterday, which is quite a big book, and logic and existence is quite a little book. And Deleuze, when it came out, Deleuze wrote a book review about it and it's like no conflict of interest there and it's at the end of it he says and and I find logic in existence quite challenging so I haven't fully drilled down into it and I will refrain from trying to really deeply comment on it but Deleu says quote hippolyte says that an ontology of pure difference would return us to a purely external and formal

reflection and would prove in the final analysis to be an ontology of essence comment. So in other words, the project that Hippolyte is trying to undertake, he's trying to avoid a collapse back into like bad, bad metaphysical thinking. So just continuing. However, the same question could be posed otherwise. Is it the same thing to say that being expresses itself? and that it contradicts itself. If it is true that the second and third parts of Hippolyte's book ground a theory of contradiction

in being, where contradiction itself is the absolute of difference, in contrast, in the first part, theory of language, and the allusion throughout the book to forgetting, to remembering, to lost sense, does not Hippolyte ground a theory of expression where difference is expression itself and contradiction its merely phenomenal aspect, end quote. So Deleuze sort of finds one of the sort of components of the blueprint of the project that he will end up undertaking for the rest of his life. And he turns to Salomon Maimon, who has this concept of difference that uses imagery and sort of symbolism taken out of calculus. And I'll try to explain, I think the, I've been reading Maimon's book for a while, and it's so difficult. I'm not even going to try to get us into that, into this jackpot.

So what I'm going to try to do is just use an image that Maimon uses, and I think Hegel makes like quite good use of, sorry Hegel, Deleuze makes quite good use of in his book, Difference and Repetition in Chapter 4, it's called the ideal synthesis of difference. And remember in the very first episode of the deep dive series when we started, we talked about how the bourgeoisie and the proletariat weren't these two self-subsisting communities that ran into each other and fought and created this sort of class struggle. They sort of emerged together out of the transformation of feudal political economy, feudal mode of production into the, emerging nascent sort of like at first embryonic bourgeois mode of production. And so through my mandoluz would ask you to think about it this way. So imagine two points that, you know, on a coordinate plane that are at first indistinguishable from one another. And from the standpoint of, you know, masses of people turning into new kinds of classes, there's a certain degree of undifferentiation that that goes on at the early

stages of a new mode of production coming into being. And as the mode of production grows, develops, and matures, the distance, the difference between these two points, well, first you start to realize, wow, there are actually two points, and then they start to move away from each other. And as they do that, if we're still thinking of the image of a coordinate plane, the area under the slope of that arc or that line grows larger and larger and larger. And from, again, from a historical standpoint, the area under the slope is the mode of production itself growing and turning into ultimately like what we're living in right now. And as that grows, the two points, which are the two in this analogy, the two classes, get further and further away from each other. and become more and more and more antagonistic to each other.

And then ultimately you get, you know, the life and death conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that marks and everyone that's followed him as described. And so what we have in sort of as an alternative to what Hegel presents is really a kind of original or originary kind of indistinction between two terms that will become opposed. And then as the sort of mode or the milieu that they inhabit it becomes more developed, they become more antagonistic.

And we then get into the question of contradiction and negation and all that kind of stuff. So Deleuze isn't trying to, I mean, he's really snarky sometimes and stuff like that. But he's he's not trying to just say, like you shouldn't read Hegel anymore or something. He would never say that. No good philosopher would ever say just simply don't read someone except maybe like Ein Rand. Right. But what are you saying is that, you know, there's, you know, there's good things about this mode of symbolic presentation that Hegel uses to explain the dialectic, as he understands it. But there's also this really dangerous stuff.

And it has to do with the fact that Hegel puts negation and sort of antagonistic contradiction at the heart of the unity of opposites. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. So I'll just look at this, the seminar, anti-edipus 3 from 1974. Okay. So he, he, he's already sort of done some critique of like what Hegel's talking about. And he says, okay, quote.

Now, let's try to imagine how Spinoza. saw things. He did not see Gennara comment, which is a sort of general kinds continuing. He did not see Gennara species. He did not see categories. So what did he see? He saw differences

of degrees of power and comment. And here he doesn't mean social power in France, or power as might, as the ability to smash, for example. He doesn't mean that. He means more like potentiality or in Greek, they would say dunanus.

He saw continuing. He saw differences of degrees of power. I said broadly that to each thing will correspond a kind of degree of power and that if need be, two things said to be of the same species might have degrees of power much more different than two things of different species. To make this more concrete, we say that to each degree of power corresponds a certain power of being affected. Its power of being affected is what reveals the degree of the power of a thing, of an animal of, and then a comment, sorry, it says right here in brackets, gap in transcript.

So continuing. In other words, you will not be defined by your form, by your organs, by your organism, by your genus, or by your species. Tell me the affections of which you are capable, and I'll tell you who you are. Of what affects are you capable? It's, that between a draft horse and a racehorse, the power of being affected is not the same in a fundamental way. The proof is that if you put a racehorse into the assemblage, or in French comments, sorry, the agencement, again, a sort of formation that creates agency, continuing, it's quite likely that it will be worn out in three days. We have this group of notions. Being is said in one in the same sense of everything with which it said, hence beings are not

distinguished by their form, their genus, their species, they're distinguished by the degrees of power. These degrees of power refer to powers of being affected, the affects being precisely the intensities of which a being is capable. Now it's becoming more coherent. With the result that, I assume, when Spinoza directed his eyes towards whatever, he grasped powers of being affected. He grasped populations of intensities. He grasped capacities. And perhaps he confused an ox and a draft horse. And on the other hand, he did not confuse a racehorse and a draft horse. As we would say today, he makes these cuts differently than the others. Then there's no longer just an effort to do. In any case, it's not necessary to believe that power, comment in brackets,

it says, povoire, continuing, means a possibility that might not be fulfilled. Power, and here in a comment, here in brackets, he says puissance, which means more like might, continuing, and degrees of power. this is no longer the Aristotelian world, which is a world of analogy. It's not power which is distinguished from the act. The power of being affected in any case is, or will be fulfilled, is fulfilled at each instance. It's necessarily fulfilled. And why? It's necessarily fulfilled at each instant by virtue of the variable assemblages into which it enters. That is, the affect of the manner in which a degree of power is necessarily actualized, is a function of the assemblages into which the individual or the thing enters. A power of being affected is always fulfilled. It can be fulfilled in different ways. Everything depends on the assemblage. In what ways can it be fulfilled since it's fulfilled in any case?

This is Spinoza's last thought. He says broadly that it's fulfilled in any case, but it can be fulfilled in two fashions. A degree of power is necessarily realized, or a power of being affected is necessarily fulfilled. That refers to these same two propositions. But very broadly speaking, it can be fulfilled in two directions. Either my power of being affected is fulfilled in such a way that my power of acting increases

or in such a way that my power of acting diminishes. Spinoza specifies, when my power of acting diminishes, this means, very broadly speaking, that my affects are sad. My power of being affected is completely. completely fulfilled by sadness. For example, quote unquote, I'm guilty, or quote unquote, I'm depressed, or quote unquote, it's not going well. But quote unquote, it's not going well, completely fulfills my power of being affected. And why, when my affects are sad, is my power of acting diminished while my power of being affected is fulfilled? The way in which Spinoza views people is very, very beautiful.

It's even more beautiful when one sees the objections that people made to him. For example, that imbecile Hegel. When Hegel says against Spinoza, quote, Ah, that one never understood anything of the labor of the negative, end quote. It's perfect. The labor of the negative is a load of crap. It's not that he doesn't understand. Comment, he means Spinoza, continuing.

He understands very well. The labor of the negative or the sad passions are those which fulfill my power of being affected in conditions such that my power of acting necessarily diminishes. When I'm sad, my power of acting diminishes. It's obvious. Suffices to think about it. When you're affected with sad affects, there's an object, something, an animal, or a person, which combines with you, and that person or thing affects you with sadness.

But in the case of the sad affect, the power of the other thing and your own would be subtracted, since all your efforts at that moment would consist in struggling. against this sadness, and hence your power and the power of the thing which affects you would be subtracted, when, on the contrary, you are affected with joyful affects, the power of the thing which affects you with joyful affects and your own power are combined and added so that your power of acting for that same power of being affected, which is your own, is increased. Thus, everything is crystal clear. There you are, the linkage of notions, the univocity of being, differences of degree of power, powers of being affected, of each of which

corresponds to a degree of power, power of acting which increases or diminishes depending on whether the affects which fulfill your power of being affected are by nature sad or joyful, end quote. So that was a chunky boy right there, that passage. Do you have any questions about it before we just run over it? No, if you want to, yeah, if you want to kind of maybe articulate it in a way that, people can kind of like basically summarize it in a digestible way. That's a lot for somebody to try to, you know, follow. Okay, well, let's talk about the Sopranos.

Oh, yeah. Woo. And I really, when I, when I watched the many sense of Newark and were, was observing Tony and Tony and Livia, especially Livia, I thought a lot about that passage that I just read. And, you know, Livia, Livia's story, and again, recommend the listeners, go listen to the Patrion episode about the Sopranos and Brett's prior Patrion episode about this article about the Sopranos

that he read and commented on. Livia's story is really very sad. She escaped from an abuse of household and the quote unquote the person who quote unquote rescued her is Johnny Boy Soprano which is like saying that if you're drowning and somebody throws you a cinder block

that's rescuing you as opposed to like a life jacket. And you see in Livia, in the many saints of Newark, there are moments of genuine sweetness. And it's also important to remember the Sopranos when she dies. And remember Tony thinks that she hates him. He finds out that she only kept his childhood stuff. She didn't keep Janice's and Barbara's stuff, only Tony's stuff that she keep, which is very important, I think. And says a lot about the pain that she was in. So from a sort of Hegelian standpoint, and then it gets even more sort of tricky and dangerous once we introduce sort of like Freudian psychoanalysis and some of the ways that that's taken up, especially in terms of the idea that your psyche, like you have this kind of id, which has to be limited and shaped by the super ego, the social super ego, which is expressed through like the violent discipline that your parents

impose on you. And then you develop a sort of a societally acceptable ego formation out of that. From that standpoint, you would say that the real sort of the original livia, that idlivia, was just sort of castrated, if I can put it that way, and sort of like cut up or like blocked off or limited by the violence that she experienced. And so her psyche formation is like through this kind of negation process. So she is negated, and then she comes back from the negation by becoming over years and years harder and harder and harder and harder and harder. And Deleuze and Guittari are going to say, that's a fucking horrible way to think about these

things. And if you try to apply a kind of like therapeutic practice based on that idea, you're going to have horrible results. And so what Deleu, like in that passage that I just, read, Deleuze will say instead that the real originary Livia isn't just cut off and castrated and sort of deformed into this other thing. It's that she is fully realized, but in terms of sad passions because of the way that her being combines with Johnny Boys and then combines with her children and all the other people around her. And, you know, the sort of

therapeutic alternatives that someone like Guittari would offer would take place on that terrain, if I can put it that way. And it's really about realizing, like, you've really been here the whole time and you've been fully existing and you are fully engaged in being and you're not being amputated. But the problem is that the combinations that you've come into have enhanced your sad passions, which diminishes your power of acting. And so what we're going to do in therapeutic practice is adjust that so that you can try to overcome it. And this sort of corresponds to the sort of practices that he applied in the psychotherapy clinic at LaBorde where they would do things like have patients do dinner services for each other

and they would have like the doctors have, you know, one doctor say this week, the doctor would just do janitorial services all week or something like that. And they would change the combinations of the ways that they interact with each other so that the patients would have new, ways of sort of expressing themselves, whether it's in cooking for everyone or, you know, working the garden, you know, they, you know, they pick the vegetables or whatever, or just, you know, they would participate in janitorial work or even, I think in the paper I read by Gattari about LaBorde, I think that some of the patients were even involved in like clerical administrative work and stuff like that. So they really flipped up all of the different roles and

would change them around. And that would be for therapeutic purposes. And it really sort of like comes out of this logic. that Deleuze just articulated in the passage that I read. That's really, really interesting, yeah. That approach to, it informs the whole approach to therapy. It's very interesting. Yeah, it is. And I think like, let me just have a look here.

Can we flip over to talking about Mao? I think this might be a good moment to talk about Mao. So, oh, where did I put it? Drowning in paper. Okay, yeah, now this is from, I've mentioned this in a prior episode. It's from a discussion, like a roundtable discussion or a seminar discussion on the 18th of August, 1964, and it's called Talk on Problems of Philosophy. Okay.

So someone, this is on page seven of the text. All these texts can be found, by the way, on a website called Marxistphilosophy.org. So there's a section for English translations of Chinese materials, and you can find that in that section. And we'll probably put a link in the show notes for these papers. So Comrade Kang Shang asks Mao to speak about what he calls the three categories. And I'll just read Mao's response. Quote, Engels spoke about the three categories, but I don't believe two of them. And then in brackets comment, in brackets he says, unity of opposites is the most basic law.

Transmutation between quality and quantity is the unity of opposites between quality and quantity. But there is basically no negation of negation, end brackets, continuing. To take the laws of transmutation between quality and quantity, negation of negation, and unity of opposites together is the trinomial, not the monistic theory. What is most basic is the unity of opposites. Transmutation between quality and quantity is unity of opposites between quality and quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of negation.

Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation. In the development of things, there is in each phase both affirmation and negation. When slave society negated primitive society, it was affirmation in regard to feudal society. Feudal society was a negation of slave society and affirmation of capitalist society. Capitalist society was a negation of feudal society and also an affirmation of socialist society. Now, some people might be like, what, ha, but no, if you think about it for a second, then that makes sense. Continuing. How does one synthesize?

Could it have been that primitive society and slave society co-existed? There was coexistence, but only to a limited degree. In the last analysis, primitive society had to be eliminated. There were also stages of social development, primitive society being divided into several stages. There were then still no sacrifices of women at burials, but they had to obey the men. At first, it was the men who obeyed the women, but it was then reversed and women obeyed men. There were a million or more years during which this stage of history was confused. Class society has been in existence less than 5,000 years.

They were the so-called Longshan and Wanshao cultures, the last stage of primitive society, which featured pottery. I'm just going to comment. I'm just going to skip a paragraph here. Continuing, one eliminates another, growing, developing, and eliminating. This is true for all things. If one does not eliminate others, one will be eliminated themselves. Why must man die? Even the nobility must also die.

This is a natural law. The life of a forest is longer than human life, but it does not exceed a few thousand years. It won't do for there to be no death. If we could still see Confucius today, the earth would not be able to contain all mankind. I go along with Zhu's way of beating a basin and singing when his wife passed away. When someone dies, a celebration rally should be held. to celebrate the victory of dialectics and the elimination of old things. Even socialism must die, for if it does not, there will be no communism.

Communism will also last many millions of years. I don't believe that there won't be qualitative change in communism and that it won't pass through stages of qualitative change. I won't believe it. Quantity changes to quality and quality changes to quantity. I cannot believe that a specific characteristic can go on for millions of years without undergoing some change. according to dialectics, this is inconceivable. Take one principle, for example, quote,

from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, end quote. After one million years, this would have become a kind of economics. Do you believe this to have a, do you believe this and have you thought about it? When that day comes, you won't need economists since a textbook would do, and even dialectics would then be dead. And then he says, just to continue, the life of dialectics is that it continues to head towards its opposite. So he articulates a whole dialectical vision here that doesn't depend on this Hegelian movement of the negation of negation. And I think that this sort of non-antagonistic dialectical difference is really what grounds

some of the really lovely stuff that Mao does in like on the correct handling of contradictions among the people. And, you know, sort of relative to the sort of therapeutic picture we just talked about in DeLos and Guantari here, I think that what Mao Zedong thought offers, that's really, really special is a framework for interpersonal ethics in organizing. And I'm not going to read from it, but I'm just going to recommend it. There's, oh, where do I put this one? Oh, here it is. It's under a book. So this is a short, I think it's an excerpt from a lecture by ICC, who was on the go at the same time as Mao.

And it's called antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. And it's just about four pages long. And it's a good sort of compliment to Mao's stuff about how to correctly handle contradictions. And I think that if we were to do some sort of like concept mapping from one, what officially announces itself as dialectical materialism onto what Deleuze does, which he doesn't call it dialectical materialism, the sort of original, originary form of difference, the sort of pre-contradictory or pre-negational, if I can put it that way, concept of difference that Deleuze takes out of somebody like

Salomon Maimon is what Cici would call a non-antagonistic contradiction, but then when we get into those big, you know, molar contradictions, as well as like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that's an antagonistic contradiction. And what you find in Mao Zedong thought, again, is to put it another way, it's a framework for handling antagonistic contradictions and non-antagonistic contradictions properly

and being able to tell the difference between them. And I think that's really, really important for all of us. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah, I would love to have you on just to do like one of those works by Mao in particular because I don't think we've covered that specific one

on the correct handling of contradictions. Yeah, that would be, I'd like to do that at some point and also read from the ice-chi piece as well. I think that would be really helpful and give a lot of food for thought for people. Absolutely. All right. Well, this is a mammoth episode. I have one more question for you, which is let's just conclude by kind of summarizing what's been said so far and giving some general remarks maybe on the alternative pathways that open up within the history of dialectical materialism when we consider the concept. concept of negation. And just basically any final thoughts on top of that as well.

Yeah, I guess the one really big point I wanted to leave everyone with to think about is just like, again, like I found it very, very frustrating to try to read and understand all these thinkers inside academia because in academia, it's all about antagonistic contradictions. It's all about, oh, this person messed up at this conference presentation and made a mistake. And I'm just going to destroy them, like with my superior discourse. And, you know, I'm not going to really try to understand what this person was trying to say, or if there are problems, trying to help them work through it so we can come to a mutual understanding because of the sort of the character of academia, especially in the neoliberal era, it's about out-competing

everyone else so you can get a stable job. It's very, very hard to have a really honest, thoughtful and helpful dialogue. And so outside of that mode and you know you've provided me the venue for that and thank you um i just like to say we don't need to see things in that way and that i think that both of these pathways the one that goes down the pathway of the negation of negation and the one that sort of puts it to the side they should both be explored and they should both be affirmed and used for material analysis and organizing purposes and and especially in the sort of Mao's adong thought trajectory that i I would sort of, I would attach Delizum Guitary to that along the lines that we've been discussing today.

That's sort of that interpersonal and sort of that just inner process that we all have to go through of sorting out antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions so we know when to fight and when not the fight and when to work together. Both of these pathways are really helpful to us. And instead of one having to kill off the other, we should embrace them both as the two sort of primary expressions of dialectical materialism, even if, again, Deleuze and Guateri and those guys don't use that, that vocabulary, as DeLuz says, like, you should be able to recognize concepts beyond the words so that you don't, like, if you, you can see the same thought in different

words, you should be able to recognize it. And so, you know, in support of DeLuz on that point, and Mao, I would add, in addition to oppose book worship, I would also say oppose word worship. and get to the concepts and this kind of embracing this sort of duality within the history of dialectical materialism revolving around the question of negation. It's just, it's a good way to do that work and to get more familiar with and adept at understanding concepts without being trapped inside the words. Yeah. Yeah. And with regards to the antagonistic or non-antagonistic way of just doing things in general, you know, there's a, there's a, the Luz and Guatari, we're not, in a full-fledged way Marxists.

In fact, they had many critiques of Marxism proper, and that makes some people that consider themselves Marxists to actually just dismiss or turn away from their work altogether, seeing it as, you know, the same with Foucault and others, seeing it as like works of anti-Marxism and thus irrelevant.

And I think what you show here is a really nimble ability to go into thinkers of vastly different, you know, overall perspectives and through time and space and cultures and track down. a trajectory of a certain concept through thinkers that otherwise, you know, from a surface glance, you might think have nothing in common or are at loggerheads and thus have nothing that they

can say to each other. And so I think that is a particularly helpful and useful thing to do. And this episode has been sort of a master class on just that as well as the series overall. And that's a testament to you and your ability to engage with many different thinkers and pull out common threads through them all. So thank you for that. Man, thank you. Thank you, Brad. I mean, I wouldn't be able to do this without you. And this is sort of the point, like, in dialectical materialism, we all need each other. Absolutely. Especially since all of these texts and all of these problems, they offer different aspects of themselves to each of us.

And that's another reason why we all need each other. Absolutely. A liberal might say, we all have different takes in these texts. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say that they all offer different aspects of themselves to each other. And in terms of the question of concepts, we, I wish we had the time to get into it, but the chapter into Liz and Guateri's Watt is a concept is really great because they, instead of thinkers being the owners of concepts, they're the expressions of concepts, which are themselves expressions of material problems. And so they have this concept of the conceptual persona. So like negation of negation, Hegel is the personification of that concept, just as the capitalist is the personification of capital.

and so that that that that that sort of this kind of like materialist um uh idea this radical materialist idea of what a concept is in the relationship that concepts have to people that and you know in this account does have connections to dialectical materialism is also something that people should look into and think about because all too often concepts just seem to be these things just sort of exist in and of themselves and they just like they float out they come out of the darkness that you like at the beginning of law or like that word just comes. Yeah, exactly.

But that's not really what's going on at all. The concepts or expressions of concrete material problems and the people that articulate them and give them the names that they do, they're the conceptual personae that give them a human expression. Wonderful, fascinating. I absolutely love that idea. It's a historical materialist analysis of concepts themselves. Very cool.

All right. Well, as we end here, do you just want to mention where we're going next with this series? This series has spanned a lot already, and it can be challenging. I think it is, I think I would think it's fair to say that this series is probably more challenging than the average Revleft episode for damn sure. But it is a, it is a deep dive, and that's in the name. So where are we going next with this with this deep dive and the series overall? Yeah, and just before we do that, I'd like to say, I myself don't find this easy, and it's very challenging. So if anyone out there feels like they're in over their heads,

like you're underwater, look to your left or your right or whatever, and you'll see me holding my breath. This is heavy stuff. So, yeah, I guess, well, there are some options. We could come back and do some stuff on Mousa Dong and the correct handling of contradictions. We could do that. I still have in the hopper that trio of potential episodes of different Soviet thinkers. So again, Ziga Vyatov, Vian Voloshenov, and Naraez de Krupskaya.

Or, you know, we could, you know, if there's anything, anyone listening would like to hear us cover, take some suggestions. I think the terrain is pretty open. Yeah, absolutely. And there's also no barrier to us starting a new series and going down on a whole other path of investigation as well and not needing to necessarily, you know, continue this one indefinitely. that would open up a bunch of other opportunities as well but in any case you're going to come back on the show we're going to continue doing this stuff together and yeah if anybody has any recommendations

in particular me and Matthew would love to tackle them and hear about them so pass those along and whatever avenues you can but yeah until next time we'll do it again and I hope you stay safe up there in the great north with all the chaos happening around you but yeah love and solidarity and we'll be back at it very soon.

Okay, see you soon. who for centuries long past for no more than your bread have bled for your countries and counted your dead In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines Who've often been told to keep up with the times For their skills are not needed And they've streamlined the job And with slide roll and stop watch their pride they have robbed

But when the sky jocans and the prospect is war Who's given a gun And then pushed to the fore And expected to die For the land of their birth Though they've never owned One handful of earth

They're the first ones to starve They're the first ones to die They're the first ones in line For that pie in the sky But they're always the last When the cream is sheared out For the worker is working When the fat cat's about

I and all of these things That the worker has done From tilling the fields To carry in the gun They been yoke to the plow Since time first began And they're always expected To carry the can

I don't know. I think of it.