Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive: History & Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Matthew Furlong joins the show to discuss the history and philosophy of dialectics and dialectical materialism. Working through keystone dialectical thinkers like Mao, Marx, Engels, Heraclitus and many more, Matthew and Breht explore the development of this fundamental element of Marxist Philosophy.  Read the supplement to this episode, written by Matthew after recording, for more: https://write.as/roarwithblood/the-beothuk-the-irish-the-island   Previous Episodes on Dialectics: - Hegelian Dialectics: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/hegel - The Principal Contradiction: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/contradiction - Red Menace "On Contradiction": https://redmenace.libsyn.com/on-contradiction-mao - Anarcho-Primitivism: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/anarcho-primitivism-civilization-symbolic-culture-and-revolutionary-rewilding Outro Music: "Education" by Modest Mouse ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I have a wonderful, exciting, wide-spanding episode for you today. I have my friend Matthew Furlong on to talk about the history of dialectics, the philosophy, the practice, the pedagogy, tracing its lineage back to Heraklitis, to Taoism, using figures. like Jesus to make sense of it, tracing it through thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza and ending on figures like Angela Davis and Foucault through Marx and Lennon and with a heavy emphasis of course on Mao. So this is a huge, fascinating whirlwind of an episode and you do not need to listen to other episodes necessarily to engage with this one first or in any sequence. But as I mentioned in the episode, we do have our episode with Torcolossin.

on the principal contradiction, which I'll link to in the show notes, and our episode with Todd McGowan on Higalian Dialectics, which I'll also link to in the show notes. And those might be some places if you want to set up this conversation, which is, I think, a deeper dive than we covered in those. Or if you would like to listen to this one first and go back to those, I'll make sure they're all in the show notes. So you can deepen your understanding of this stuff.

And, of course, at the end, he gives some more recommendations as well. Definitely going to have Matthew back on to talk about other. topics. He really is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to this stuff and a really unique and creative thinker. So we'll get into this episode, you know, as a kind of funniest side, I didn't mention this to him and I hope this doesn't offend him by any means, but he does kind of sound like Neil de Grouse Tyson, a much smarter, more philosophically informed version of Neil de Grouse Tyson. So if you hear that as well, let me know because I don't know if it's just me hearing that or if it's actually a close imitation. But I thought that was

kind of humorous, particularly because Neil de Grouse Tyson is sort of dunked on for not having any respect for philosophy. And this is, Matthew is a deeply creative philosophical thinker. So there's a little bit of irony there as well. So, and as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, you could always support us on Patreon. We really appreciate it. It keeps me and David's families, heads above water, and in exchange for your donations, of course, you get access to monthly bonus content. Rev. Left is and will forever be a show that is DIY, that is funded entirely and exclusively by our listeners. Nobody is going to offer a sponsorship or an advertisement contract with a communist philosophy podcast, and we accepted that early on. So we do depend on

listeners like you to support this project and we'll keep doing it as long as we have people who are willing to support it so without further ado let's get into this wonderful episode with my friend matthew furlong on the history of dialectics and so much more enjoy my name is matthew furlong i am something of a teacher and a guess a philosopher living in how Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, more properly known as Chibukduk, and its unseeded ancestral territory of the McMa people. And this land is known by them as Mikmaki. So I wanted to, I guess, start off before we really get into this by sort of situating how we came to even, I guess, talk or have this discussion in terms of my own experience as a person who's living in history. I was born in the west end of a city called St. John's in the province of Newfoundland

in 1979, 30 years after Newfoundland joined Canada in what I would say is the culmination of a criminal annexation, and hopefully I'll get a chance to talk about that. So when I came into the world, two of the first things I learned about the world was, first of all, Newfoundland was poor, and the second thing I learned. was that Newfoundlanders were not well liked within Canada or by Canadians. And so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling the hurt of things that Canadians would say about us. They would say that we're lazy freeloaders and we came to Canada because it's an act of mercy on their part. They would say that we're of low intelligence, that we're all alcoholics and that we're fundamentally incapable of governing ourselves.

and there were in fact even joke book collections that were published of what are called Newfi Jokes which is just about these negative jokes about the negative qualities that are attributed to us and when I moved to Canada because I do not consider myself a Canadian and a lot of us don't I had to deal with that and I was very confused about all this and over the years I started to learn about the history of my ancestors coming from Ireland to Newfoundland, the bulk of them coming

in the beginning of the 19th century just after the Irish Rebellion of 1798. That, and there was an uprising of a group called the United Irish in 1800 in St. John's that was thwarted and all the ringleaders were sent up to Halifax, and I believe they were all executors. And starting to realize that has been a big part of the development of my understanding of our relationship to the First Nations people here, and also to the sort of international struggle of small countries around the world that have sort of been dominated by imperialism, especially through finance. The reason why Newfoundland fundamentally came into Canada, was because we went into financial ruination after the end of the First World War.

We were at that point, having been Britain's first colony overseas, we had been in a period from around 1855 up until 1933 of what was called responsible government in which we were, quote, unquote, allowed to govern ourselves. And one thing that a lot of people don't know is that there are only two countries after the First World War that serviced their debts. And they were Newfoundland and Finland. And all the great powers sort of let each other off the hook. And so Canada forgave Britain's debts and Britain forgave Canada's debts and they just wrote it all off. And we were forced to continue paying. And it fundamentally got out of control and the social conditions, economic conditions got worse. And there ended up being an

uprising at the government building, which is called the colonial building in 1932. And after that we were made a colony again and then we were sort of handed off to Canada in this sort of backroom arrangement between Canada and Britain that has been written about in a book called Don't Tell the Newfoundlanders by the father of a high school buddy of mine named Greg Malone.

And so one thing that I think really has come to the fore for me in learning about this history in the light of understanding Marxist theory and especially Lenin and also Mao and all these thinkers that you're talking about is that in Newfoundland we always felt

there always seemed to be this feeling of something historically went wrong and we're alone and we got a shit deal and we don't know why but we're in this alone and I've realized that we're really not and that we're sort of reclaiming our own ability to not feel like shit about ourselves

involves, I think, has to involve cultivating a really strong internationalist mentality, and that includes radically fundamentally supporting the struggle of the First Nations people on this landmass. And I guess, yeah, sort of that's where I'm originally coming from. And my relationship to these forms of theory comes out of this experience, which has very much like shape my character and my understanding of reality. I guess. Yeah. Well, it's a pleasure and an honor to have you on. And we are going to be tackling a complex, you know, largely like sort of historical and philosophical subject that

is incredibly important and essential and a topic we've covered many times being that of dialectics. But it also can be very difficult for people who aren't really used to this topic and haven't dive deeply into it. And there are, of course, lots of people who throw the word around and the concept around with only a half-baked understanding of it at best. And at Rev. Left Radio, you know, of course, we want to tackle those tough topics to demystify them and to bring clarity into them so that we can be armed with real, you know, understanding. So before we get into the nitty-gritty of this conversation, I was hoping that we could just maybe lay some things out on the table first

regarding what you hope to, what we hope, to cover and accomplish in this discussion. sort of an intro paragraph to the rest of the conversation so as to orient our listeners to what we're going to do today. Okay. Well, the first thing I'd say is that I see this fundamentally, or first and foremost, as a companion piece to the episode with Torkel-Lawison about the principal contradiction. And the way in which I would like to complement that episode is by looking at the question of dialectics and dialectical materialism as at a really like micro level, at the level of our habits of thinking and acting, especially. And really this has to do, I mean, this all grew out of just the observation that you made in that episode and that you make another episodes that people, a lot of people, especially in, you know,

we live deep in the imperial capitalist core, have a really hard time wrapping their heads around this concept of dialectics. I mean, you even have someone as famous as Noam Chomsky swearing up and down that he cannot make heads or tails of this concept whatsoever, which I think is absolutely silly of him to say. And I would like, though, to examine some of the historical reasons why I think for people in societies like ours, it's really hard to think this way and to show that there are sort of positive driving factors in the history of what Mao calls, Mao Zedong, in on-contradiction calls metaphysics, that have shaped.

our habits of thinking and acting and that make it hard for us to understand dialectical thinking and praxis and this in turn creates all sorts of problems of one of the key one of which is we will unless we're able to grasp thinking and acting this way we will have a much harder time reconciling with the first nation's peoples of the indigenous peoples on this continent and repenting of our crimes against nature and going into a world where we can actually have like a livable planet. And so that's what I want to talk about. And also I would just hope to give some people some food for thought about how to do group work of learning these theories and these ways of thinking and acting and how we can engage the text in a really sort of like getting down to the nitty-gritty way, like doing close readings line by line and helping each other and supporting each other.

yeah absolutely and um you know for me it is a difficult topic to to fully grasp initially but once you put in the work and you commune with other thinkers who are trying to figure it out as well and you start to to see the world through the lens of dialectics and of course through materialism um it does have a profound shift in your in your perspective and your perception at least for me for almost everything that i encounter in the world my interest in science in nature, in my own personal development, and spirituality, which we might be able to touch on in a little bit. But for people who want to lead into this conversation, perhaps, I don't think you need to do it in any particular order, but we do have an episode called Hagellian Dialectics with Todd McGowan, which I'll link to in the show notes,

which might be a nice starting place, because it is more introductory to some of these concepts. And then, as you referenced Matthew, we have our episode with Torkel-Lossin called the principal contradiction applying dialectical materialism, which I will also link in the show notes. And then this one can be seen as diving even deeper, I think, in some ways, than those first two did, or at least taking

it in a new direction. So if you're interested in that, it will be right in the show notes so you can find it very easily. And with all of that preface, let's go ahead and just dive into it and there's no better place to start when we're talking about these topics than with Mao Zedong himself. So

how does what Mao calls metaphysics impact the ways we think today about matter and the natural world. Okay, well, to begin answering that, I kind of have to do a little bit of groundwork, and this touches on one of the ways in which people who perhaps have gone through Anglo-American academic institutions might get tripped up on terminology, and that has to do with the term metaphysics and the fact that the term metaphysics actually applies to more than one concept and that terminology or terms and concepts are not necessarily co-terminus all the time. And what I mean by that is, and I'll just, you know,

open up on contradiction here. And by the way, just in case, I'll mention the page numbers, I'm using the Foreign Languages Press edition that came out in 2018, five essays on philosophy. So on page 32, in the first full section of On Contradiction, Mao says, Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical conception and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks. Lenin said, and here he quotes Lenin from on the question of dialectics, the two basic or too possible or two historically observable, conceptions of development, and then in brackets he says evolution,

are development as decrease and increase as repetition and development as a unity of opposites, the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and the reciprocal relation. That's the end of the Lenin quote. Here, Lenin was referring to these two different world outlooks. In China, another name for metaphysics is Chuan Chui. For a long period in history, whether in China or in Europe, this way of thinking, which is part and parcel of the idealist world outlook, occupied a dominant position in human thought.

In Europe, the materialism of the bourgeoisie in its early days was also metaphysical. As a social economy of many European countries advanced to the stage of highly developed capitalism, as the forces of production, the class struggle and the sciences developed to a level unprecedented in history, and as the industrial proletariat became the greatest motive force in historical development, there arose the Marxist world outlook of materialist dialectics. then, in addition to open and bare-faced reactionary idealism, vulgar evolutionism emerged among the bourgeoisie to oppose materialist dialectics. The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static, and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms in their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable.

Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things, but outside them. That is the motive force is external. Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. So that's one concept of metaphysics. And I think it's interesting that Mao uses the term metaphysics, to name this concept. And it's worth looking at his,

this talk, it's called Talk on Problems of Philosophy. It's a text from 1964. And I didn't know this about him. This was very striking to me. He talks about his education. He says later, he did some little primary school and all this stuff. And he says, later, I attended Borswa schools for seven years. Six years plus seven years makes a total of 13 years.

I studied the whole bag of Borswa natural sciences and social sciences. I also studied education. I spent five years in normal school and two years in middle school, including my time at the library. At that time, I believed in Kant's dualism, especially idealism. I was originally a feudalist and a bourgeois Democrat. Society made me turn to revolution. For several years, I served as a teacher and principal of a four-year grammar school. I also taught history in Chinese literature in a six-year school.

Then I taught for a short while in middle school, though I knew almost nothing. I joined the Communist Party, joined the revolution, and knew only that I wanted to make revolution, but revolt against what and how? Of course it was to revolt against an imperialism and against the old society. What is imperialism? I did not understand it too well. I understood even less about how to make revolution. What I learned in 13 years was useless for making revolution.

I could only use the tool, language. Writing articles is a tool. As for the reasons, they are basically useful. useless. So I think it's really significant that Mao went to this kind of school because he probably would have received sort of teaching about philosophy, especially Western philosophy, in which people were positing unchanging, impenetrable, completely self-subsistent under themselves objects as the fundamental constituents of nature. But it's important also, you know, and again, you know, for people who've gone through Anglo-American academia

to know that there are other ways in which the term metaphysics is used to sort of denote a concept. And just to give an example, I'm going to read from a series, just a small passage from a series of lectures by Birch and Russell, who is, you know, well known as a socialist, but is not really considered a dialectical thinker, although I think he becomes one by the end of his life.

he says matter traditionally has two of those neat properties which are the mark of a logical construction first that two pieces of matter cannot be at the same place in the same time secondly that one piece of matter cannot be in two places at the same time experience in the substitution of constructions for inferences makes one suspicious of anything so tidy and exact one cannot help feeling that impenetrability is not an empirical fact derived from the observation of billiard balls, but is something logically necessary. This feeling is wholly justified, but it could not be so if matter were not a logical construction.

An immense number of occurrences coexist in any little region of space-time. When we are speaking of what is not logical construction, we find no such property as impenetrability, but on the contrary, endless overlapping of the events in a part of space-time, however small. And so in Russell's thinking, and this is typical of people who think like him, metaphysics, the term, is used to refer to the building of these logical tools that we use to try to understand the flux. It does not necessarily entail saying that the world is really made up of these things. And in fact, for Russell, somebody like Russell, metaphysics is about not saying that at all. and it's about linguistic tools to help us exist in nature, right?

So someone, a young person who reads, starts to read Mao and read on contradiction, might get tripped up by this. And so I just want to sort of throw that out there as kind of a cautionary note just at the very beginning. And just to point out to people like how much kind of depth and complexity there is between, like historically and conceptually between these terms and these words that we use and the concepts that they denote, because they can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. Absolutely. And there's lots of words like that. I mean, even the word materialism is used in different contexts in vastly different ways. And people can end up talking past one another

if those things aren't clarified up front. Because this is a difficult topic, I am going to continue to, like, promote other resources to deepen your understanding. And on our sister podcast, Red Menace, we have an entire episode working through. through Mao's on contradiction. So if you're particularly interested in that text and what Mao has to say in that, check that out because we don't only just talk about it. We teach it and then we reflect on it. So if you're interested, definitely check it out. So Mao lays out this sort of bourgeois metaphysical worldview. He calls it part and parcel with idealism. It's a way of viewing things as isolated, static, disconnected, impenetrable. And is it fair to say that he's arguing that

it arose historically in reaction to the arising of Marxist materialism and dialectics? It's interesting. I've been thinking a lot about this question and about the fact that a phenomenon doesn't necessarily have to be named in order for it to already exist. And so I think we really need to, if we want to be like responsible materialists about this, we need to start thinking about, you know, the beginnings of settled civilization. in the fact that class distinctions arise in that. And I'm sorry, class struggle arises in that. And you can go back and, you know, you can read like, you know, Babylonian tablets and stuff.

And you know that, you know, you have these sort of priest leaders imposing representations of the nature of the cosmos in order to effectuate power. And those representations almost, you know, you go all the way down. I mean, you can, you know, you see it in Christianity as well. they rest on the idea that the universe is underpinned by these sort of fixed realities or these fixed substances or whatever, you know, the more you try to talk about them, the less sense it makes, right? And even though the concept of metaphysics doesn't may not emerge for thousands of years, the sort of way of imposing power by fixing people's attention and their will and gaining their obedience through the use of images and statements about reality is already in play. So in one sense, Mao, in that sense, Mao is quite right to see this as a world historical struggle that's pretty much always been going on since civilization started. So the reality is there before we've even managed to conceptualize it. Right.

Okay, so then building off of that, the second question would be, how does what Mao calls metaphysics impact the ways that we think about cause and effect in terms of nature, society, history, and even the mind? Okay. Well, to answer that, I think we should back up a little bit and look at one of the antecedents of the text on contradiction, which is Engels is anti-During. And he gives a much more sort of historically precise account of the development of what Mao will call metaphysics following Engels and also Wennon. Engels, what he calls metaphysics, he sees emerging. largely out of intellectual and practical developments in England. And in particular, he mentions people like Francis Bacon, who is sort of known for being one of the innovators of the so-called scientific method. And because of that, he's also often condemned as one of the sort of pregenitors of the destruction of nature. but I think that the best example of what both angles and Mao are talking about comes out of Isaac Newton's work. And there's a really sort of very telling passage in a work by Newton called The Optics that sort of, I think, sums up and embodies what Mao is talking about and gives us indicators as to the implications for thinking about cause and effect in terms of nature and society and history and our own minds and our own experience.

So in the optics, which is from 1704, Newton writes, it seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable particles of such sizes and figures and with such other properties and in such proportion to space as most conduced to the end for which God formed them. And that these primitive particles being solids are incomparably harder than any porous body compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break into pieces, no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation. While the particles continue entire, they may compose bodies of one in the same nature and texture in all ages, but should they wear away or break into pieces, the nature of things

depending on them would be changed. And so what Newton is proposing is basically that the universe is funnily made up of a fixed volume of empty space, which has fixed coordinates, and it's partially filled up, because there is room for, like, a vacuum. It's partially filled up with these little tiny, impenetrable, qualitatively identical little things like pebbles or something like that. And underneath all of the appearances of change and flux and entanglement that, like, Engels talks about, that's what's really, really there, and it's fixed and it's unchanging, and it will always be the same, and it's what is really there when all the appearances go away. Now, in Ante During, Engels, I think also following Leibniz, who attacks Newton over this

concept of matter, Engels called this out as ridiculous. He says, matter as such is a pure creation of thought and an abstraction. We leave out of account the qualitative difference of things and lumping them together as caporially, this is a bodily existing things under the concept of matter. Hence, matter as such, as distinct from definite existing pieces of matter, like a chunk of an apple or something like that, is not anything sensuously existing.

If natural science directed its efforts to seeking out uniform matter as such to reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences in combining identical smallest particles, it would be doing the same thing as demanding to see fruit as such instead of cherries, pears, apples, or the mammal as such, instead of cats, dogs, sheep, et cetera, gas as such, metal, stone, chemical compound as such, motion as such. And in other words, he's saying that the concept of matter itself is, you know, what someone like Russell will later call a metaphysical construction. It's a logical construction that we use as a tool to sort of get a handle on the world.

And when you give matter as such, a sort of character of its own, you end up falling into all of these illusions. And so that's why you end up getting ways of thinking about cause and effect that are very prevalent in societies like Canada and the United States. We think about everything in terms of what Aristotle would have called a moving cause. You hit a cue ball with the pool cue and the cue ball hits the two ball and then the two ball bounces off the side of the pool table and then hits another ball and then it goes into the pocket. And we tend to think about causes and effects uniformly, almost universally in that way when that kind of idea of cause and effect is not always useful or applicable or true. And I think it really has to do with this metaphysical conception of matter as sort of a, anonymous, qualitatively identical little particles that can't be broken down any further, especially, you know, we know now that modern physics has moved beyond that way of thinking

about things, well, it did so a long time ago, but it still affects our habits of thinking and acting, including in terms of how we think about our own individuality. We think, you know, in Borswa society, it's just, you're just you, and your job is to exist as like a little particle in the world seeking its particle interests and you're not actually interconnected in this grand, I mean, symbiotic is not even a good enough word, right? This grand sort of interconnected, you know, entanglement that angle says, you know, when you look at the world as a whole, when you just sit down and think and look and observe things, you know that you're within it and there isn't necessarily an inside to you or that's not

necessarily outside. That's not a helpful way to think about things. But these kinds of metaphysical constructions that have arisen in societies, especially like England and Engels really singles out England, have been just very powerful sort of agents in terms of the way we think. And this, I would also contend, is tangled up with the development of industrial technology and the basic logic of experimental science. And those two things, these are very practical, these forms of praxis have contributed to and compounded the effects these sort of metaphysical concepts have on us. Yeah, one of the things it makes me think of, well, one, there's the inductive fallacy

of, you know, put forward by Hume about, you know, basically bringing some skepticism to this idea of cause and effect. But really what I thought of is talking about the static nature of bourgeois metaphysics is like, you know, before Darwin came along, there's this what, and this is, of course, you know, taking place in England, right? This, there's this widespread idea that the world as it existed was created, you know, by God and handed down to us as is. And so, you know, we often think of, oh, the evolution means there's no reason for God and that's why Darwin was controversial. Well, he was also controversial, even kind of before that insight came out and was popularized, just simply for the idea that the animals that existed

today, that the animals and plants, fauna and flora, weren't always there in their current states, right? And so you can see as Darwinian evolution starts to take hold, and it's not this static set of categorical animals handed down by God, but rather it's this hyper interdependent, fluid, constantly morphing relationship between organisms and their natural environment and every other organism in that natural environment. You can see why somebody like, you know, Angles and Marx would be very interested in Darwin, and in fact, reached out to him, wrote to him, There's very interesting letters where Marx is saying, you know, we loved origin of species and we love the theory and Darwin is very kind. And although I don't think he read Marx's literature sort of postured as if he did and was like giving him a pat on the back back and saying, you know, your theories are very interesting and well, I don't know exactly how much Darwin understood that.

But you can definitely see why that interest is there. And I think it's just one little flashpoint in this broader discussion we're having. but you're talking about the mind and how we see ourselves as individuals sort of separate from the rest of the cosmos, separate from the rest of the world, and even confusing linguistic structures and symbols for reality itself. You know, in Eastern mysticism, it would be like confusing the menu for the food. So I was wondering if maybe you could touch a little bit on what you were saying about angles, and maybe it's relationship to meditation or spiritual pursuits. So I don't want to get too far afield here, but do you have anything insightful to say on that front?

Well, the first thing, just to touch on Darwin for a minute, this is a really good sort of example of, or it can help serve as part of an example about this contradiction or opposition between what Mao calls metaphysics and dialectics. And you think about sort of before Darwin, you would have things like Carl Linnaeus's table of living forms. where it starts out, you know, with the broadest generalities you can possibly find and goes down to a species. And that is what Mao would call a metaphysical representation. It's just this one image of these forms that are fixed in their relations. And you were told, well, this is sort of the structure of nature, regardless of what your senses might tell you, these forms and the relations between them, that is a truly adequate account of what nature is really like.

But then Darwin comes along and that all gets completely overthrown because every species is in and of itself a transformation. And the theory of evolution, you know, Darwin's theory of evolution is a picture in which things that are becoming different from themselves at a sort of collective or group level are interacting with an environment that's always becoming sort of different from itself and it's just sort of differences colliding with differences and what we call forms that we identify by

fixing them in images and you go to Wikipedia and this is what our rhinoceros looks like and all that stuff but what's really running through all of these living forms is just this endless differentiation colliding with the differentiation of the environment and then sort of the natural

world around them that they are not that they're even in like they are it as well. And you know, like it reminds me of, you know, when I first started getting access to the internet in the late 90s and one thing, you go on discussion boards and you'd see the argument between creation and evolution is so absurd. And people would try to overthrow the theory of evolution by asking, demanding to see an intermediate species. And that concept is completely absurd. Um, like, every species, it just, it just doesn't make any sense. Everything that we call a species is just, it is itself a transition.

and a transformation, and the injection of a concept of an intermediate species, I mean, that's metaphysical thinking according to Mao in spades. Like, that's a really great example of it. As far as spiritual practices and meditation, you know, I think I would probably defer to your wisdom on a lot of these questions, but I think that when Engels, for example, describes nature is this sort of entanglement. And he says, when we look at it in the hole, in my experience, there's no better way to do that

than in meditation or in, you know, some Christian traditions you might call it contemplative prayer. You know, there's this, I guess, more secularized kind of mindfulness, which, you know, some of that gets pretty gross. But if you uncover the grossness, you can, and are historically responsible about it, it can do a lot for you.

And just sitting there, and doing the breathing exercises and allowing the thoughts to come and go as perceptions come and go just brings you back to that point that Engels talks about at this sort of like general sort of almost naive perception of nature

which even though it's not susceptible if you try to be exact about it you move back into speech and you move back into these logical or linguistic constructions and you get farther away from it when you are meditating or you're praying you get deeper and deeper into it, and you realize that you're part of these motions, you're one of these motions or you're many of these motions at once,

and that you're not separated from it at all. And speech kind of becomes superfluous at that point. Yes. I would add to that in the Buddhist tradition of meditation, there is this deconstructing of the sense that we all have, of an enduring static sense of self within our changing bodies and our changing outside world. It's not this thing that we have logically thought through, but it's this thing that we viscerally feel to be true, as if, you know, you at the age of five, at the age of 15, at the age of 30, have very

little in common, except that deep inside, you know, often behind the eyes and between the ears, there is a little you in there somewhere. And since the body is changing, it's not synonymous mess with my body. I mean, I'm something up here in the control room of my mind, and the body is something I'm sort of engineering, and we can get into Cartesian dualism in a second. But by paying very close attention, minute attention, millisecond by millisecond, and this is a capacity that is grown over time and through practice, you become viscerally aware, just as viscerally aware that you have, that you're a sense of a self, you become viscerally well that, you become viscerally well that that does not exist and that all there is is this extreme and as I said millisecond by

millisecond flux this constant stream of change emerging from emptiness right emerging from the formless realm into form constantly perpetually that realization if it's if it's achieved maybe prematurely or if it's stumbled into through drug use or spontaneous awakening can be incredibly disorienting. And there are, you know, if you want to learn more about that, look into the Dark Night Project where there are these experiences people have, sometimes even with very soft, low-level mindfulness practice. Like these things sort of happen on accident sometimes, where people fall into this realization

and become immensely disturbed by it. because it is a radical overthrowing of this feeling that there is a you that is more or less in control and you have this static self. But for most people it takes many years of practice, I think, to deconstruct that. And a sort of point that I want to make before I end this little rant is when you're constantly talking to yourself in your head all day, this constant interchattering that we all do all the time, you're constantly creating this veil between you and the world around you that is being solidified into thought form, into logical structures, into categorizations, into conceptualizations,

into words and ideas. And that is a process by which you take this influx, free-flowing, you know, chaotic cosmos, and you make sense of it by turning it into little bites in your head and conceptualizing it. So, you know, that tree out there is just a tree. And I don't need to really pay attention to it. I can just blast right past it. There's the sun. There are clouds. I have these little shorthand linguistic terms for them.

And if you're thinking to yourself in your head all day, you're projecting into the future, you're reminiscing about the past, you're taking yourself out of the present moment. And it's that linguistic, logical, never-ending, chattering inside the mind that acts as a barrier between you and this realization of profound and profound, permanence, profound selflessness, et cetera. And so what you're doing in meditation practice is you're learning to exist in the present moment without falling into the veil of constant inner dialogue and chattering.

And in the empty space that is created through many years of that practice, these realizations organically sort of blossom up. You're not really forcing these things. You're not doing anything except standing back. and letting things happen as they are without being constantly swept up in linguistic and logical structures inside your head. So, I don't know. Interesting.

Perhaps there's a whole episode on that alone. But anything you want to add before we move on? Yeah, I think just for me, one interesting twist, because I'm much more familiar with, like, pagan and Christian spirituality. I don't know if pagan's quite the right term. sort of conceptualized, like rationalized forms of paganism that you find, and this may sound kind of counterintuitive to many listeners who are in Canada and the States, that comes out of Plato's or interpretations of Plato's thinking. And in these sort of trajectory that you find in sort of what's called the Eastern, this is very, very broad, you might call the Eastern Church

or the what is, I guess, it's now known as the Orthodox Church. And then there were many divisions within that. In contemplative prayer, you encounter that kind of nothing that you or you, Brett, were just speaking about. And the sort of interesting thing about that is that that nothing, that is the most you, that thing that there is. Like, that is the self, that nothing. And so it's sort of interesting to see these different ways of talking about it in that, in, in, in, in, say Buddhism, you leave the self behind by finding that nothing. And in these sort of pagan and Christian approaches or these ways of thinking about it, you find the self by finding that nothing

and leaving behind. So that's just an interesting twist and sort of a historical complexity that I find interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. And within Buddhism, we talk about the groundlessness of being or emptiness as being the ultimate, you know, you can talk about it as no self, or you can talk about it as true self, right, taking it from the front door or the back door, but you're getting to the same place either way. And yes, sir, I wanted to comment to just that impression, right, that you talk about, that there's this like, there's a, there's a, there's a you inside there somewhere. And it's like a little, it's, it's, it, to me, the logic of that you that somewhere

maps on to the Newton's logic of matter. There's this impenetrable thing that cannot be broken down any further. and that's the driving cause of everything that you do. Yeah. And so you see the, it's not just even the object matter that Newton is talking about, but the logical structure of the concept that I think in our culture pops up in many, many different areas. Yeah, and in mainstream Christianity, it's even thrown into the heavens and becomes a soul

that exists infinitely as an impenetrable static thing, right? So that's interesting as well. But I'll get to Descartes and Cartesian dualism and objectivity in a second, but let's return to Mao for one more question, specifically focused on Mao before we go down that road. And that is around the question of this two-into-one logic. It gets talked about in Maoist circles. I think outside of Maoist milieu's, this is, if known at all, known only very vaguely and sort of confusedly. So what is the two-into-one logic, according to Mao Zedong thought? And why does Mao oppose it to a one-into-two sort of framework so vigorously?

Well, basically, this is kind of one of the weirdnesses of history, but it's also, this is a testament to the fact that we live in inside of Borseswa society. Two-into-one logic is, sadly enough, basically the kind of logic that many young people are introduced. to as dialectics in universities in societies like ours. And I don't know if they still do this anymore in intro classes or anything like that, but one of the sort of teaching formula for dialectics that I was first introduced to is the thesis antithesis synthesis synthesis structure. Are you familiar with that one? Absolutely.

Yep. Yeah. And that was taken to be a sort of a good, minimal sort of teaching formula for understanding Hegel. And, you know, there's lots of problems with Hegel, but that's not a true understanding of Hagellian dialectics whatsoever. But so basically two or to one, it's basically, it rests on the idea that objects are separate and impenetrable in and of themselves. And they can only sort of bounce off of each other and or maybe come into a conflict. And, you know, depending on the kind of thing that it is, maybe there can be some sort of a resolution or a synthesis between. them. So in other words, you get some flour and you get some eggs and, you know, a few other

ingredients and you put them all together and you make a pancake or a bunch of pancakes or whatever, make any, you know, any baked good you can think of. And according to two and to one logic, you would think that all of those ingredients were just sort of existing in and of themselves and they were just static unto themselves and they changed when you did something with them and you combined them. But the fact of the matter is, is that those goods that you use to make this thing were already changes in and of themselves. They were already something that was becoming something other than itself. Why this is dangerous and a problem for Mao is that it underpins revisionism and reformism,

which is basically the idea that somehow the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can work it out. And that in itself rests on the idea that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were just sort of these two clicks wandering around the world and they just happen to bump into each other and get into a spat and that if we can just, you know, get, you know, get on the same page in terms of what our shared interests are, then everything can work out. We can have a, you know, a nice, you know, peaceful, you know, social democratic, you know, parliamentary system or something like that. I mean, yeah, how many times have you heard a liberal say what we need is a little bit of capitalism and a little bit of socialism, right? Yeah, it's just, I've been hearing people say that since I was

14 years old. You know, I think the ideal is like two-third socialism and one thing. And it's just this, that's metaphysical thinking. Exactly. And what, you know, Mao's, this formula of one into two does or helps you to be able to see is to under, it helps you be able to understand is that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie came into being together. And the Greek economist, Janus Verifakis, does a nice reconstruction of this.

in this talk on YouTube called Capitalism, the Beast that's devouring our lives. And he talks about land enclosure policies in Ireland and as well as England. And, you know, as we know, the English conquered Ireland and what it was like 1169. And then they spent, you know, centuries crowding the Irish farmers out of their land and doing things like forcing them to produce cattle instead of vegetables and whatnot for subsistence. because the crown wanted to have meat to feed its armies and also to be able to trade at market on the continent. And people got pushed out more and more and more. And what it created was this roaming population of basically destitute impoverished people going around being, you know,

just let me do some work and give me some money. You know what I mean? And so the wage relation comes out of that, you know, that whole historical sequence. And the wage relation itself is the establishment of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they came into being together. They're like, you know, they're like, they're kind of like charges or something like that or this, you know, the poles of like one dynamic. And they're going to go out together again, you know. And in our academic ways of thinking, which, you know, we introduce kids to the concept of dialectics through this thesis, antithesis, synthesis, synthesis model, we boss the whole idea

of dialectics right from the start, and that's how, you know, part of how you end up with, like, well-meaning kids, being willing to engage stuff like social democracy for so much longer than they should, because they don't understand that the emergence of these classes, that itself is of one-into-two process, and it has nothing to do with these two subsubsistent communities of interest that just ran into each other and fought. Exactly. Yeah, so the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, far from being this, like, well, then there, there, the bourgeoisie. That's the thesis. And then the proletariat is the antithesis. And then together they combine and something new comes out. It's a little bit of both. The opposite is no with the death of

feudalism, the invention of private property, wage system, et cetera, grows simultaneously. Like, the moment the bourgeoisie is born, so too, by definition, is the proletariat. And the moment there's, like, another example in our modern day society is people think, you know, well, you can, You can have rich people in society and everybody else can still have a good standard of living, but this one into two logic on that front would be the very existence of rich people is the simultaneous creation of poor people, right? The category of rich is a relative category. It's opposite comes into existence.

The moment it itself comes into existence and vice versa. I mean, you can start with either one. It's the same process opening it up simultaneously. And so, no, we can't have billionaires without. having many, many, many more people who scrape by on a dollar, three dollars, five dollars a day. The existence of the billionaire requires the existence of the impoverished masses to exist in the first place. And that whole turning around the two into one logic into the one into two can be very clarifying when thinking through a multitude of different issues.

Absolutely. It's like Michael Parenti says wealth creates poverty. Exactly. Exactly. And it's not viewed that way. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and there's, you know, a lot of reasons why people, you know, as a society, we still have a hard time seeing that. And the ways that academia in our society mediates these concepts and these theories and these texts often botches them really severely with really bad social consequences. You know, another thing that Michael Parenti is very much right about. And also, Also, I remember when we were speaking on the phone, we talked about that podcast. It's not just in your head. And the episode about the professional managerial class. And there's a professor at, I think it's UC Irvine, in Catherine Liu, and she talks about this as well. And she says the purpose, well, Parenti says the purpose of universities in a capitalist society is to advance the interests of capital.

And you know that's true because if you look at any university in Canada, for example, and I'm sure it's the same in the states, Who runs the universities, a bunch of big capitalists? And they get appointed to these boards of governors and through processes where there's no accountability to the people whatsoever. And Catherine Leah, for her part, she says, you know, sadly, the role of the professorias in this context is to uphold the status quo. So, and the ones who do that better, they succeed more. And so you end up getting these kinds of, you may get access to, say, the communist manifest.

in university. I read the Communist Manifesto in first year university. My whole first year class did. But the way that it was taught to us obscured the meaning of the text. And the way that it was interpreted was, well, yeah, there's a lot of grievances that are given a voice in this text. And it's just really too bad that the, you know, somehow the communist manifesto always gets indexed by liberal academics to the Russian Revolution for some reason. It's just too bad that these socialists and these communists were so impatient and they couldn't do the hard work of building like access to parliamentary institutions so they could have their voice in parliament and we could mediate these differences right completely misses the point of the text which is

that these differences cannot be mediated and based on the way even that we teach abstract things like dialectics, teaching in a lot of, you know, university settings upholds these misunderstandings and makes people reject the insights of like Marx and Engels because of the structure they're thinking about it is botched. Exactly right. Exactly right. So, I mean, you know, we talk about Hegelian dialectics, this sort of bastardization of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which again, we discussed in like Hegelian dialectics with Todd McGowan,

which I'll link in the show notes. but this is really derived from the thinking of Johann Ficta, not necessarily, I mean, that whole framework is really advanced by Ficta, not necessarily by Hagegel. So before we get into Heraclitus and go forward, can you talk a little bit about René Descartes and his concept of objectivity as it relates to our understanding of dialectics? I think this is very interesting because I often think of Descartes, obviously tied to Cartesian dualism, which is an error in my opinion in a lot of ways and I wouldn't necessarily think of them as a dialectical thinker by any means

what say you on that entire approach and has your thought and thinking been changed by other people referencing Descartes and his mode of thinking? Well yeah I the reason that I came to this realization about Descartes is really just because of angles in Ante During where he says that Descartes was one of the best dialecticians in Europe. I was like, what? Yeah. And it really sort of peeled my wig back. I had to sit back for a while and be like, what's he talking about? And then I thought about the second meditation in the meditation was on first philosophy where he talks about individual things

and how we know what they are. And I'll just read a passage here from the meditation too. Let us consider those things which are commonly believed to be the most distinctly grasped of all, namely the bodies we touch and see. Not bodies in general mind you for these general perceptions are apt to be somewhat more confused, but one body in particular. Let us take, for instance, this piece of wax. It has been taken quite recently from the honeycomb. It has not yet lost all of the honey flavor. It retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was collected. Its color, shape, and size are manifest. It is hard and cold. It is easy to touch. If you wrap on it with your knuckle, it will emit a sound. In short, everything is present in it that appears needed to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible. But notice that. As I am speaking, I am bringing it close to the fire. The remaining traces of the honey flavor are disappearing. The scent is vanishing. The color is changing. The original shape is disappearing. Its size is increasing. It is becoming liquid and hot. You can hardly touch it. And now when you wrap on it, it no longer emits any sound. Does the wax still remain? I

confess that it does. No one denies that it does. No one thinks otherwise. So what was there in the wax that was so distinctly grasped? Certainly none of the aspects I reached by the senses, sorry, by means of the senses. For whatever came under the senses of taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing has now changed, and yet the wax remains. Perhaps the wax was what I think it is, what I now think it is, namely that the wax itself never really was the sweetness of the honey, nor the fragrance of the flowers, nor the whiteness, nor the shape, nor the sound, but instead was a body that a short time ago manifested itself to me in these ways, and now does so in other ways. But just what precisely is this thing that I thus imagine? Let us focus our

attention on this and see what remains after we have removed everything that does not belong to the wax, only that it is sometimes extended, flexible, and mutable. But is it to be flexible and mutable? Is it what my imagination shows it to be, namely that this piece of wax can change from a round to a square shape or from the latter to a triangular shape? Not at all, for I graph the wax is incapable of innumerable changes of this sort, even though I am incapable of running through these innumerable changes by using my imagination. Therefore, this insight is not achieved by the faculty of the imagination. So what Descartes is saying, you know, for Descartes, the standard of objective knowledge, and I should say in Descartes time, the distinction between subjective and

object. That's not really a concept. He has a distinction between what he calls formal thought and objective thought, and that's a whole can of worms that I cannot open up right now. But the main point is that for him, a truly clear and distinct idea of a thing outside of ourselves includes more changes than we'll probably ever be able to perceive about it. So it's not indexed to a visual representation of something. And I found this very interesting because it actually corresponds very closely, and this may surprise some people, to things that Mao says in the paper on practice. The real task of knowing is through perception, to arrive at thought, to arrive step by step at the comprehension of the internal contradictions

of objective things, of their laws and of the internal relations between one process and another, that is to arrive at logical knowledge. To repeat, logical knowledge differs from perceptual knowledge, in that perceptual knowledge pertains to the separate aspects, the phenomena, and the external relation of things, whereas logical knowledge takes a big stride forward to reach the totality, the essence and the internal relations of things, and discloses the inner contradictions in the surrounding world. Therefore, logical knowledge is capable of grasping the development of the surrounding world and its totality in the, in the, in the, in the internal relations of all of its aspects. So I find this very interesting because of how close

this kind of Mao's sort of epistemology is here to what Descartes is proposing. And it's also, this is just sort of a sidebar about Descartes and about Cartesian dualism. This is a really interesting example of how people can end up talking past each other about concepts because of terminological confusions. So in the third set of objections and replies to the meditations, one of the commenters is Thomas Hobbes. And Thomas Hobbs gets into a big argument with Descartes or tries to about the concept of substance and particularly the concept of incorporeal substance. He says that's absurd. You can't have an incorporeal substance because substance is fundamentally bodily. But Descartes' concept of substance is not the same as Hobbes as or generally the

more English concept of substance. For Descartes, he's taking that concept from medieval thinkers, and what substance means is just something that can be thought in and of itself. And the reason he divides these things up into corporeal and mental is because there are distinct vocabulary is available for each. And that's, so when he means corporeal substance, he doesn't necessarily, like, really mean stuff or anything like that. Now, Spinoza comes after Descartes and says that there are all these logical problems with the way you use the term substance.

So he says, my solution to that is to say that there's only one substance and that's just the infinite activity of the universe. And everything, every finite individual thing is just a mode of that substance. Spinoza's objection is like, look, this terminology creates a lot of confusion, and you're going to have people asking you questions sort of like Hobbs is asking, and they're going to ask you also questions like, well, if they're both called substance, what is it that they have in common that makes them both substances, and then you end up in this infinite regress of trying to figure out what the fundamental substance or what the fundamental meaning underpinning the dichotomy is. And Spinoza is like, well, there's only one sub. It's just the universe. That's it. It's just that activity.

that's all that it is fascinating i love spinoza and yeah the entire sort of revisiting of de cart and framing it in a dialectical way again with that with that wax substance just to sort of summarize there is this fluidity this this constant morphing the interpenetration of the wax with temperature with light with um de cart's perspective and spatial dimensions within the room de cart's consciousness itself right um and so that is that is incredible interesting. I haven't read Descartes since I was an undergrad, so perhaps we'll have to revisit him with this knowledge in mind. But that's all fascinating and wonderful. And let's go ahead and move forward now to actually going back in time, moving forward in our outline, Heraclitus.

So how does Heraclitus fit into the bigger picture that we're discussing here? And what is the relationship between his thinking and the history of the concept of dialectics? Mm-hmm. Well, it's another, Heraclitus, he offers, this offers another interesting example of how something can be going on before we've got a concept for it, because the term dialectics wasn't really used the way that we use it now or even in the Middle Ages or early modernity when Heraclitus was around. But Heraclitus is in the quoting, you know, I hate to use this term because it's not accurate, the quote-unquote Western tradition, I mean, he's from what would be now my modern-day Turkey, firmly part of what I would call the Mediterranean world, sort of like this historical conjuncture. He's the one-into-two guy that kicks it all off in the tradition of what we call Greek philosophy. And he's, I mean, the real famous maxim of Heraclitus is that you can't step into the same river twice. But to properly understand Heraclitus, you need to understand that what he says is that you can't even step into the same river twice. You can't even step into

the same river once because as you're stepping into it you are changing into something other than yourself or rather yourself is reconstituted by nothing but changes and he is the like so he's a huge influence on plato and plato is someone who has a certain way of being curated in western academia that's not necessarily accurate but he's heraclytis is sort of the progenitor of all of this stuff everything is coming and going it's everything is what it is because it's intermingled with all these other things and it's becoming all these other things. So he's sort of like ground zero for this way of thinking in the Hellenic tradition. Yeah.

And of course, there's other thinkers in that tradition that carry on aspects of it. And definitely in what is called the East, right, with Taoism and Eastern mysticism and Eastern philosophy dialectics was really part and parcel with how they viewed the world and their spiritual engagement with it. the Taoism Taoism itself the symbol is the

yin and yang right is as I've talked about in previous episodes an attempt to put into an image the idea of dialectics as this mutually interpenetrating coincidence of opposites giving rise to the world as it is

so which is very interesting to go back into the history of thought both east quote unquote and west quote unquote and see these seeds of dialectical thinking always being present. And we could go even further back and discuss indigenous conceptions of the world, which shows that the dialectical way of apprehending the world is very human in many ways. And I'm personally very interested in learning more about indigenous traditions

and how they relate to this concept as well. Yeah, and I think that's a really compelling motivator for breaking out of our sort of societal confusions about, what this way of thinking really is. Because in order to enter into an authentic relationship with what the indigenous people are really asking for, we need to bust out of all these kinds of forms of thinking that Mao calls metaphysical, including that the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, concept of dialectics, which is itself metaphysical in Mao's terms.

Absolutely. All right. You talked a little bit earlier about medieval Christianity in the Eastern Church. Did you have anything else to say on that front? Or would you want to move on? Just that there's a, you know, a whole sort of tradition that's, or strand or trajectory that's not really well known about. And, I mean, part of my motivation for all of this discussion is, is in a way to attack

Martin Heidegger. Because Martin Heidegger starts off being in time, his major work, with the claim that in the quote-unquote West, you know, we've basically lost what, you know, Mao, according to Mao's terms that we're talking about here, we'll call dialectics and we've just fallen into what Heidegger might call dogmatic metaphysics. And the structure and the content of what he calls metaphysics is very close to what Mao calls metaphysics. And unfortunately, we know how Heidegger dealt with these problems and the praxis that it led him into and that sucks and he's an asshole. But a way that he's also an asshole that we don't talk about is that he doesn't

know or mention anything about all of these thinkers that emerged in and around like Syria, Turkey, you know, all of these places that in what we would now call like the Middle East that are part of, you know, pagan and Christian and then eventually like Muslim developments that maintain this radical sort of one-into-two dialectics in like spiritual practice. And I find it really telling and really troubling and interesting that somebody who joined a Nazi party would erase this entire reality and give to, you know, and Heidegger was very influential in Western academia for a long time. And he probably, I mean, I'm not really in it.

So like maybe he still is, but he completely just cancels out. all of this sort of heritage that belongs to all of us. And as you said, dialectics, it's very human. And that humanity is preserved in these thinkers and in these trajectories that somebody like Heidegger ignores. And that has been largely ignored for a long time until relatively recently as, you know, more and more scholars are finding out about these people. So I'm thinking about theologians, you know, some of these people were monks.

like Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nissa, Basil the Great, John, what is it, John of Damascus, all of these people. And they basically have, in their own way, a one-intill-two logic about the relationship between divinity and finite nature. And they see it as one reality and not two realities where, you know, you die and you go to the other room, right? And I think a really good resource for understanding this in the context of this theological tradition is a podcast called Glory to God by an Orthodox priest named Father Stephen Freeman, and I believe he's in Tennessee. And he has like a, I think it's a 10-part series that these are the first 10 episodes of the podcast called their deal with the topic of what he calls a one-story universe.

And he lays out in really accessible language. how this orthodox theology requires that what we think of as divinity and what we think of as finite, changing, living, being born and living and dying nature, that's just one reality, and they're not two separate spheres at all. All right. So let's move on, and I want to ask you about a figure and his sort of contributions to this discussion, who is John Skodos, Iriugena, and how can his radically dialectical approach? to pedagogy help give us ideas for contemporary dialectical, materialist pedagogies. Okay, so John Scotiagena, and both of his last names mean the same thing, that he's Irish, was an Irish philosopher and teacher and theologian who lived from, I think it's 800 to 877. and he produced a masterpiece of thinking called the, it's a Greek or sort of a Greek derivation called the Perifurifusion or the Perifusian or the Perifusian merizmo,

which means concerning nature or concerning the divisions of nature. And he was really famous and actually quite sought after, and I learned through studying about him that at this time in history, the Irish were considered to be the masters of education and that Ireland was like a very culturally, it was really on the go and everyone was like lots of props for Ireland. And he came up with this,

his dialectic out of studying a number of the thinkers that I just mentioned, but also some what are called neoplatonist thinkers. And these are these interpreters of certain texts of play that give rise to this radical dialectics. And two big names for that in this trajectory are Proclos, who was the last headmaster of Plato's Academy at Athens. And I believe he, I think he might have originally,

might have been originally from Alexandria. No, he was born in Constantinople. So what is now Istanbul? And the other one is a very mysterious figure known as Dionysius, the pseudo-Ariopagite. He's called the pseudo-Ariopagite because he claimed to be the Dionysius that I think is in, he appears in the acts of the Apostles at the Ariopagus, listening to Paul preach. And then it was found out hundreds of years later that this guy was not from that time at all,

and he just made it all up, and nobody really knows who he is. But what Ariagena does in his thinking is come up with a radically dialectical conception of nature that is split into sort of what he calls these four divisions and they're all sort of interpenetrating into each other or they have a prior unity and in their forms they sort of interpenetrate when we try to study them logically but the really important one for him

it's what he calls the fourth species of nature which he calls the uncreated uncreater and it is this divine nothing. And when you engage in prayer, or, you know, what we also call meditation, you get in touch with that nothing. And he picks up on Orthodox theology by basically working from what it's called the Calcedonian definition. The Calcedonian definition is a definition in Christian theology of the nature, of Jesus Christ.

And it was worked out at the Council of Calcedon, which is in what is now, it's called Catecoy in Turkey. And it was voted on by all these bishops. They worked it out together. And what they were trying to do is, as I was talking about earlier, come up with a definition where Christ is like an icon or an image of the complete unity of the finite and the infinite. in the universe.

And so they say, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one of the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that once completed in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body of one substance, and the Greek term is homoosios, so essentially the same as the father as regards his Godhead,

and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood. And what this concept is doing is trying to build into liturgical practice this radical logic of one into two, according to which the finite and the infinite are like, well, they're basically unified and their separation is like a matter of perspective. And Aria Jaina takes this logic to radical extremes. Like, for example, he says in the fourth volume, and the Perifuzion is in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and a teacher. student. He says that when we engage in thinking together and learning together and we're talking, and this is in a dialogical fashion, we are actually creating each other's minds. He says, when I understand what you understand, I am made your understanding. And in a certain way that cannot be described, I am created in you. So come in you. In the same way when you

clearly understand what I clearly understand, you are made my understanding, and of two understandings is made one, formed from that which we both clearly and without doubt understand. For example, to take an illustration from numerology, you understand that the number six is equal to its parts, and I understand the same thing and understand that you understand it, just as you understand that I understand. Our two intellects formed by the number six have become one, and thus I am created in you and you are created to me, for we ourselves are not other than our intellect. for our true and ultimate essence is intellect specified by the contemplation of the truth. And the contemplation of the truth consists in seeing this entanglement of that is nature

in which everything is interpenetrating, everything is what it is by becoming different things, things that are other themselves, and they combine with other things which are themselves, becoming things other than themselves. And the really interesting thing about Eryogena is that this is more than just a mystical contemplation, he takes what are called the seven sort of classical liberal arts. So grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. And he treats, following his predecessor, one of his predecessors, this guy named Alquin of York, dialectics is the king, or, you know, the queen, the pinnacle of the liberal arts.

because they teach us, dialectic teaches us how to shape our minds to be in conformity with the character of nature, which is this endless changing, passing in and out of selfhood and otherness and all this kind of stuff. So he brings the mystical experience, you know, that moment when you get in touch with that nothing, he brings that into the heart of the sciences. And that's what I find really fascinating about him. And he has a lot of good sort of, I mean, if you want to read like a medieval text from the 800s and you think you can put up with it. There's a lot of good sort of, there's food for thought there about how in the contemporary world we might elaborate dialectical forms of education and teaching. I really, really love that. I think it's,

it's a profound way to view things. You could apply it to anything and you could apply it to Rev Left Radio. Like Rev. Left Radio is not this one thing. It is this constantly evolving morphing interpenetrated project that is not just me and David coming and putting a show together, but is like this constant interconnection with all the listeners, everybody offering topics, every guest that I have changes the structure of my thinking and adds something new to it and hopefully vice versa. And that's just one little silly example, but I mean, it can be applied to so many things. And really, to me, it reveals this deep beauty, this morphing fluid, constantly evolving,

and transforming beauty. And in philosophy, it's dialectics is a process philosophy. It's the opposite of this metaphysical, static categorization of things. And specifically, the entire concept of Jesus being an example of one into two in that it's this marriage of the infinite and the finite is particularly interesting to me. So I'll have to look into him as a thinker and dive deeper into that because it definitely piques my interest. Yeah, and I think one of the really sort of cool ways in which area Jane is thinking is kind of portable is that you can apply that logic that he,

you know, he ascribes to the liberal arts, you know, which is a pretty limited set of areas of study. And you can bring it into anything. I mean, if you're teaching young people how to farm and grow food, you can, you know, like read, you know, read the text, the land ethic by Aldo Leopold, the ecologist. And he, he'll give you an account of what the land is that is fully dialectical in that one into two cents. And you can use, you know, physical work out in, you know, in agricultural setting to acquaint people with the character of nature and the character of their own minds that just goes along with, like, you know, getting your hands in the dirt and grung stuff and pulling it out, you know. You can do that with culinary arts as well. You can do it with carpentry.

You can do it with anything pretty much. It's about sort of building a logic into it. And, you know, for that, you know, a really good example of this is that video of Fred Hampton talking to a group of guys that brought a plan for a community bank to him. And he was like, this looks great, but where's the educational component? We need to situate this idea in the dialectics of class struggle because otherwise we're just going to reproduce capitalist border. to our norms. We need to use this proposed institution if we're going to make it happen as a teaching tool for educating us away from the mental constraints of capitalism. Right. Yeah. And I mean, again, like bringing this back down to the crisis of our times, the climate crisis, it is a product

in part of this delusional idea that we are not interconnected and interconnected. dependent upon the natural world, that it is something outside of us, literally in the word externality, is the hidden concept that we are fundamentally separate from it. What we do to it is just in a utilitarian calculus, we can use it, we can dump stuff that we no longer need back into it, and that somehow that delusion says, implicit in that delusion is that, you know, we can treat the natural world however we want because it's something fundamentally separate from us. And that whole way of thinking, you know, focused on that issue has brought our species and our civilization to the brink of collapse. So this is not merely heady, abstract philosophizing. This has day-to-day

hardcore material consequences for us, our children, and everybody we know and love. And so, you know, I think that's an important point to highlight throughout this discussion and as we zoom in towards the end here. Yeah, and this is why I think it's really important to see how sort of like this kind of conception of fundamental matter that I just articulated from Newton is bound up with the development of industrial technology and the so-called scientific method because both of those praxis and theories depend on breaking things down to smaller components. and just manipulate them at the level of the smaller components, right?

So that's how you can get like, you know, these crazy, like really broadly distributed, like production chains where that's another form of alienation in production. And in sort of, what am I, congealing the scientific method into a metaphysics in and of itself, you also compound the effect of this perception of separateness of all things from each other and of us from all other things

including each other. And like you say, like this is going to get us all killed. Exactly. And it's not just an academic consideration. Academia has in, you know, the 20th and 21st centuries has really

in countries like ours has in many ways failed to convey that by sticking to forms of thinking that, you know, again, Mao would call metaphysical. Like the, you know, the two into one model of class struggle, right? If we don't break out of that, that's going to get us all killed. Exactly.

That's it. Nature isn't a billiard table. It's a spider web. Absolutely. Last question before the conclusion section. And you touched on this a little bit early in our conversation. How does categorizing corporeal and incumporeal things alike as material help us grow in the thinking and practice of dialectical materialism? Yeah, so this, okay, this one is kind of a, this is sort of a toughy.

When I say incorporeal things, I don't mean disembodied things. I mean things like, say, in chapter four volume one of Das Kapital, Marx, he lays out the general formula for capital, right? MCM prime. That is a really existing phenomenon that is not a body. It's a dynamic. And one of the big problems with the effect or one of the most negative things that the sort of, you know, if I can, Newtonian metaphysics, if I can put it that way, has one of the really bad things it's done to us is that it's made us believe that if we can't see or touch something, it's not real. When in fact, MCM Prime is very real. We know that because of all the great people that did the analysis of it.

And so incorporeals are nonetheless material because it's, I mean, it's very important to remember, too, right? What we think of as matter and material in many ways goes right back to Aristotle in the material cause. And he talks about this in the physics and in the metaphysics. And the Greek term for this material is hulae, which simply means lumber, like actual, like wouldn't, it's just it's sort of a figure of speech. And what Aristotle means when he talks about matter, the matter of something, it's just what happens to underlie this particular form at this given time. So, for example, there's a table that my laptop is sitting on right now that I'm talking to you, and the material of the table is wood. That's the material cause. But by the same token, you can take

something that's incorporeal, for example, to say, a language, right? And you can deal with it conceptually and you can analyze a language. You can break it down. You can divide up different components of it into categories and try to get a broader, more conceptual understanding of the language. This is what Mao is talking about with like logical knowledge over and above perceptual knowledge. And if we continue to think that only bodily things that we can see in touch are what are the facts of the matter and what the matter is, then we're never going to be able to again to break out of these metaphysical ways of thinking that are really harmful to us. And I take this idea of an incorporeal materialism,

which is sort of like a subset of dialectical material. It's written within the logic of dialectical materialism from someone who I think has been severely misunderstood, like many of this person's friends and comrades, which is Michelle Foucault, who I think his reception in Western academia has been a complete catastrophe, and it doesn't reflect the nature of his thinking at all. And by the way, if there's anyone that's interested, I can't remember the interview, I'll try to find it, but there is an interview where he says, if you want to understand what I'm doing, do not start with my books. My books are a way for me in a condensed form to expel something that's been troubled in me for a long time.

If you want to understand what I'm doing, start with my letters to the editor or interview in the newspaper. And if you like that, then come to some of my free lectures. They're all free, they're all open to the public, you can come to that.

But just don't start with the books. And Western academia starts with the books because, you know, they're dense and they're really complex and weird and, you know, the sexy, you're adventurous, right? And it, but it ends up botching

what he's talking about. So there's a, his inaugural lecture at the College to France, which is what inaugurated 14, years of weekly lectures free to the public that he gave, and that, you know, these lectures are all published in translation now. He talks about the sort of object that he's most interested in, which is what he calls an event. And he thinks of things like, you know, MCM Prime, the development, the establishment of that dynamic. MCM Prime is an event for Foucault. It's an

incorporeal thing. He says, in his analysis, he says, the fundamental notions that impose themselves are no longer those of consciousness and continuity with their correlative problems of freedom and causality, there are not those of sign and structure. They are those of event and series with the game of notions tied to them, regularity, contingency, dependence, transformation. But if discourses must be treated as sets of discursive events, what status much we give to this notion of event, which has been so rarely prized by philosophers. Of course, the event is neither substance nor accident, neither quality nor process. The event is not of the order of the body, yet it is not immaterial.

It is always at the level of materiality that it takes effect and is an effect. It has its place and it consists in the relation, coexistence, dispersion, narrowing, accumulation, and selection of material events. It is neither the act nor the property of a body. It produces itself as an effect from and within a material dispersion, let us say that the philosophy of the event must advance in the direction, at first glance, paradoxical of the materialism of the incorporeal. And so, you know, that's where I get that from. And so just to give an example of what he's talking about, in the book, Discipline and Punish, when he actually gets in the nitty-gritty of what constitutes discipline, like a lot of academics,

it sort of gets watered down to like being mean to something. until they do what you want or something like that. But if you read through the logic of discipline, what he's saying is that this is MCM Prime installed into your body to make you exponentially more productive of, you know, capital through your actions on the, on the factory floor or in whatever situation you're in where you're being, you know, you're undergoing alienation due to capitalism. So I think that we need to be able to think of things like concepts. So like the concept that Descartes has of the thing that the wax really, really is,

even though it's not reducible to a body, we can still treat it as material. And it can still, the analysis of incorporeal things can still belong to dialectical materialism. And in my view, it should. Incredibly fascinating. I'll have to sit with that argument, but I really like it. I think it's incredibly insightful. and the misreading, misunderstanding, or maybe misteaching of Foucault is perhaps a topic that you and I can explore in another conversation because I am very interested in hearing that

argument in its most robust form. But we are over an hour and a half right now. This has been a whirlwind of a conversation through centuries of time and dozens of historical figures and thinkers. Everything laid out as it is. What do you hope people listen to? ultimately take away from this discussion? For me, the parts of this discussion that mattered the most to me is just where I was sitting, you know, I'm sitting here talking to you and just literally picking up texts and going through just different like little chunks of them, you know, even just going line by line and digging up, you know,

even in a short passage, all of the complexity that's hidden behind, you know, Mao's very accessible language. And, you know, this is one of the beautiful things about these texts, like on practice and on contradiction, is just how available it is and how accessible it is. And even though it can give rise to, you know, really, you know, drilling down, it's, it's enough to really get people started. But in terms of teaching and, you know, this has to be, this kind of learning, this educating has to be done in groups, like it has to be done collectively.

And there are always going to be people who, you know, maybe they're a little bit older. They're just done a little bit more reading. And we really need to think, you know, for people who are in that position like me, about how to take responsibility for what we're able to do and introduce young people to this theoretical work in a way that's not threatening, that's not about judging people or demanding, you know, intellectual acrobatics or none of that kind of nonsense. But just to, you know, sit down and patiently work through, even a short passage it can give you so much like for example um and this is not a short passage this

is a chunk of 250 something pages you know i like to i like to lurk on like left discussion forms and see what people are saying yeah and you see this a lot right like you know someone comes in and they misunderstand something and everyone dogpiles them and then go read theory go read theory and you know that's a funny meme i get that but at the same time for those of us who have done this reading and are able to do this reading and communicate about it We need to do a little bit more than just say that. So, for example, Das capital, that's a big baby boy. And it's hard.

But you, you know, if you, like, if you're a young person out there right now and you're trying to get into it, if you can, with your friends, make it to the end of the chapter about the general formula of capital, sort of chapter four, you can sit with that, I mean, that, getting to that chapter. is enough to tell you why capitalism is an unstoppable death machine that needs to be destroyed at all costs. And if you can just get through those four chapters and sit with them, maybe sit with them for five years, you will have gained so much more than just forcing yourself to sit down and plow through these texts in a linear manner where you, you know, the idea is that you've

read the text just because your eyes went over every line and you got to the back page. I guess that's that's we need to come up with like techniques and and you know concrete practices for helping new people understand this stuff in a way that breaks down the impression that these are these big monolithic tomes that you need to just consume because it's not about consumption it's not about downloading content to your brain it's about entering or entering into a logic and the logic you know thanks to angles is terminology and the people that followed him is dialectical materialism. Beautifully said. Beautifully said. I echo all those sentiments, knowledge and its formation is and must be communal. You must come to it with a sense of humility, a sense of perseverance, a sense of patience and dignity.

And, you know, there might be chunks of even this discussion that went over your head. That is part and parcel with the learning process. And on that end, it requires just humility and perseverance. and on the other end, when you do know some things, it requires kindness, reaching out, sharing what you know to other people who might not be where you are yet. Looking back over your own political development,

it is without a doubt a process, an ever-evolving fluid-morphing process, and you did not get where you are in your understanding magically. It was through hard work, and often, without a doubt, required multiple thinkers and individuals and mentors and teachers

to help you along the way. So instead of just backhanding somebody for not knowing what you know, taking on the responsibility, as you said, Matthew, of handing down and teaching and making this information more and more accessible is the mature and comradly thing to do. This has been a wonderful discussion. It is incredibly fascinating you, yourself, are a fountain of wisdom and insight and philosophical knowledge.

Before I let you go, though, is there any recommendations you'd want to be? to offer to anyone listening who wants to dive deeper? Well, the first thing I would say is that if you want to read someone who's a powerful dialectician really good at it, that doesn't get into jargon, or doesn't make it like this abstract conceptual thing, but just weaves that logic into the object of their discussion, I would say read Angela Davis, for one thing. She's just, she blows me away with her analysis, there's dialectical analyses of things.

What else? I guess mainly when I recommend this, I'll recommend revolutionary life radio. If you're interested in some of the spiritual theological things I'm talking about, Father Freeman's podcast, the series about the one-story universe as opposed to the two-story universe, which is the one in which God lives upstairs and when you die, you go there or something like that and you wake up and he gives you treats or something. for anyone that's you know interested in or it's a practitioner of you know Christian spirituality or whatever and they're trying to see how they can bring that stuff closer to this stuff that we've been talking about today I think I think the one story universe series is is really fascinating and I'm sure there's all these things that I'll remember after I turn the microphone off but I really can't think of anything else right now well you did say this really interesting thing at the beginning of a conversation before we started recording about anarcho-primitivism and your engagement with

that episode. Did you want to say anything about that? Because that was sort of counterintuitive to me. Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, this was with Dr. Leila Abdel Rahim. And I think, like, this dovetails with what I was saying about incorporeals and materiality. Modern, and I draw also to some extent on the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan here, who is also misunderstood. and is extremely powerful as a dialectician. Due to these sort of metaphysical developments, as, you know, as Mao has characterized them, and I have tried to help Mao characterize for the listeners. We have what McCleumann calls a sense rate, a ratio of our different senses,

which really prioritizes vision because the metaphysics, the metaphysical sort of frame that we're trapped in depends on things being fixed. and, you know, when we represent, like the table of living beings that Carl Linnaeus comes up with, what I found really valuable in Dr. Abdel Rahim's discussion is, and also, you know, from a clue, and is, you know, ways of revitalizing our sense of hearing and just oral culture and transmitting things orally and orally. So, like, this might sound weird, but I mean, audio. books and people learning theory by listening instead of sitting down and reading, that's

something that we should cultivate. And the more we do cultivate our other senses other than sight, the more I think we'll be able to understand what someone like Mao is talking about and the jump from perceptual to logical knowledge, the more easy it is to understand that conception of objectivity that I just pulled out of Descartes. and the more we can understand why in corporeal things like, for example, MCM Prime are nonetheless real and material and do have a real causality in the world. So I think there's a lot of food. And then there's, I mean, obviously the stuff about reconciling with nature and all that.

There's so much beautiful discussion on an episode. But I just think that's a really good sort of accompaniment to some of the stuff I've been talking about. Wonderful. Well, we'll link to that show in the show notes as well. Very interesting take on that. I really appreciate that. Matthew, it's been a wonderful discussion. Let's absolutely do this again. I mean, we could have an episode on Angles, Ante During, we could have an episode on Foucault. We could have an episode on McLuhan or anything else that you wanted to.

I really appreciate you coming on, sharing your knowledge with us, and hopefully this is the first of many dialogues that you and I have together. Oh, I would love to tackle any of those topics, and I just want to, you know, just so the listeners know, like I'm not really an author. I don't have any profile or anything like that. I sort of just wandered in off the street by emailing you. And I've literally been sitting here with all these texts of my own preparation and just surrounding me and lifting them up and doing this on the fly as we've been going. And that's the way I prefer to work. And I want to thank you for giving me the venue to do that because there's not very many of them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, you have a good one and we'll be in touch for sure. Okay, peace and love. Somewhere in between You get me some sound advice But I wasn't listening After we had a cat's house I could tell you how you found

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