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part 4

Dialectics

Dialectical thinking is thought to the second power: an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fiat, to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps. Faced the operative procedures of the nonreflective thinking mind (whether grappling with the philosophic or artistic, political or scientific problems and objects), dialectical thought tries not so much to compete and perfect the application of such procedures as to widen its own attention to include them in its awareness as well: it aims, in other words, not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at converting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research. This is indeed the most sensitive moment in the dialectical process: that in which an entire complex of thought is hoisted through a kind of inner leverage one floor higher, in which the mind, in a kind of shifting of gears, now finds itself willing to take what had been a question for an answer, standing outside its previous exertions in such a way that it reckons itself into the problem, understanding the dilemma not as resistance of the object alone, but also as the result of a subject-pole deployed and disposed against it in a strategic fashion -- in short, as the function of a determinate subject-object relationship. There is a breathlessness about this shift from the normal object-oriented activity of the mind to such dialectical self-consciousness -- something of the sickening shudder we feel in an elevator's fall or in a sudden dip in an airliner. That recalls us to our bodies much as this recalls us to our mental positions as thinkers and observers. The shock indeed is basic, and constitutive of the dialectic as such: without this transformational moment, without this initial conscious transcendence of an older, more naïve position, there can be no question of any genuine dialectical coming to consciousness. "Marxism and Form"

Empiricism

For the dominant ideology of the Western countries is clearly that Anglo-American empirical realism for which all dialectical thinking represents a threat, and whose mission is essentially to serve as a check on social consciousness: allowing legal and ethical answers to be given to economic questions, substituting the language of political equality for that of economic inequality and considerations about freedom for doubts about capitalism itself. The method for such thinking in its various forms and guises, consists in separating reality into airtight compartments, carefully distinguishing the political from the historical, so that the full implications of any given problem can never come into view; and in limiting all statements to the discrete and the immediately verifiable, in order to rule out any speculative and totalizing thought which might lead to a vision of social life as a whole. "Marxism and Form"

Dualism

The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only. In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect, does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a representation. Consider external perception : there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between the so-called perceptive faculties of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord. While the spinal cord transforms the excitations received into movements which are more or less necessarily executed, the brain puts them into relation with motor mechanisms which are more or less freely chosen; but that which the brain explains in our perception is action begun, prepared or suggested, it is not perception itself. Consider memory, the body retains motor habits capable of acting the past over again; it can resume attitudes in which the past will insert itself ; or, again, by the repetition of certain cerebral phenomena which have prolonged former perceptions, it can furnish to remembrance a point of attachment with the actual, a means of recovering its lost influence upon present reality : but in no case can the brain store up recollections or images. Thus, neither in perception, nor in memory, nor affortiori in the higher attainments of mind, does the body contribute directly to representation. By developing this hypothesis under its manifold aspects and thus pushing dualism to an extreme, we appeared to divide body and soul by an impassable abyss. In truth, we were indicating the only possible means of bringing them together.

All the difficulties raised by this problem, either in ordinary dualism, or in materialism and idealism, come from considering, in the phenomena of and memory the physical and the mental as duplicates the one of the other. Suppose I place myself at the materialist point of view of the epiphenomenal consciousness: I am quite unable to understand why certain cerebral phenomena are accompanied by consciousness, that is to say, of what use could be, or how could ever arise, the conscious repetition of the material universe I have begun by positing. Suppose I prefer idealism: I then allow myself only perceptions, and my body is one of them. But whereas observation shows me that the images I perceive are entirely changed by very slight alterations of the image I call my body (since I have only to shut my eyes and my visual universe disappears), science assures me that all phenomena must succeed and condition one another according to a determined order, in which effects are strictly proportioned to causes.

I am obliged, therefore, to seek, in the image which I call my body, and which follows me everywhere, for changes which shall be the equivalents-but the well-regulated equivalents, now deducible from each other-of the images which succeed one another around my body : the cerebral movements, to which I am led back in this way, again are the duplicates of my perceptions. It is true that these movements are still perceptions, 'possible' perceptions,-so that this second hypothesis is more intelligible than the first ; but, on the other hand, it must suppose, in its turn, an inexplicable correspondence between my real perception of things and my possible perception of certain cerebral movements which do not in any way resemble these things. When we look at it closely, we shall see that this is the reef upon which all idealism is wrecked there is no possible transition from the order which is perceived by our senses to the order which we are to conceive for the sake of our science, -or, if we are dealing more particularly with the Kantian idealism, no possible transition from sense to understanding.-So my only refuge seems to be ordinary dualism. I place matter on this side, mind on that, and I suppose that cerebral movements are the cause or the occasion of my representation of objects. But if they are its cause, if they are enough to produce it, I must fall back, step by step, upon the materialistic hypothesis of an epiphenomenal consciousness. If they are only its occasion, I thereby suppose that they do not resemble it in any way, and so, depriving matter of all the qualities which I conferred upon it in my representation, I come back to idealism.

Idealism and materialism are then the two poles between which this kind of dualism will always oscillate; and when, in order to maintain the duality of substances, it decides to make them both of equal rank, it will be led to regard them as two translations of one and the same original, two parallel and predetermined developments of a single principle, and thus to deny their reciprocal influence, and, by an inevitable consequence, to sacrifice freedom.

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