Note from La Trinchera: A few days ago, an article was published in Rebelión that questions dialectics as a method. Fortunately, some of us don’t agree.
By: Néstor Kohan
The unburied ghost of dialectics
The self-proclaimed “contemporary thought,” largely dominated by “post” metaphysics (postmodernism, poststructuralism, post-Marxism, etc.), wrote the death certificate of dialectical logic during the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century (Jameson, 2013: 32). It not only abandoned it as a critical epistemology of the global system based on the market and capital. It was also expelled from philosophy and the social sciences and condemned to ostracism.
By transitive property, if it is true that dialectics is no longer relevant to the social disciplines, any exploratory attempt that focuses its interest and research on the dialectical theory of dependency, the title of a pioneering and paradigmatic work for all Third World Marxism that grew in the heat of Latin American rebellions (Marini, 1973), is meaningless. It is no coincidence, then, that these “post” metaphysics, stubborn and obstinate challengers of dialectical logic on the theoretical level, have simultaneously shared a genuine “anti-Third Worldist fury” on the political level (Cueva, 2007: 151).
In the case of postmodernism, this movement sought to retire dialectics by decree, characterizing it as “a metanarrative” of world history and a totalitarian legitimization of society (Lyotard, 1993: 80-81).
Within the ranks of post-structuralism, it was dismissed without much ado or effort, rejecting its supposedly “conservative” character and classifying one of its central categories – that of totality – simply as a “totality of the enemy” (Guattari-Negri, 1995: 108, 117 and 157; Negri-Hardt, 2002: 87-88).
Analytical Marxism, despite its claim to reinvent Marx to fit the Procrustean bed of technocratic, mechanical, and causal one-sidedness (Cohen, 1986: 31 and 163); in addition to game theory, rational choice logic, and methodological individualism, disqualified and mocked dialectics, blithely calling it “the yoga of Marxism” (Roemer, 1989: 219). In this way he did nothing more than prolong with new jargon, disjointed Marxist fragments and frayed quotations the old neopositivist challenge that reproached him (a) for his “logical inconsistencies”, (b) for mixing the formal-discursive levels with the factual ones, (c) for confusing the dialectical contradiction with the “fuzzy logics” (Lungarzo, 1971: 127), (d) for not respecting the principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle, that is, the “bivalence” in the truth tables (Garrido, 1986: 35 and 109).
Even those currents that in recent years have been encouraged and have returned to discussing Hegel in the name of the so-called “systematic dialectic”, also calling themselves “new dialectic”, ended up dismissing Marx as an “idealist”, accusing him of not having understood Hegel’s metaphysical mystifications (Christopher Arthur, 2014: 348).
The enterprise of expelling Hegel from Marxism (usually frustrated, though periodically recycled) and the attempt to erase from critical social thought all traces associated with the intoxicating scent of dialectical logic are by no means new. Both are long-standing and have a lengthy record. Nor do they belong exclusively to “contemporary thought” (we use quotation marks because this manipulative label is often used to identify a few currents of philosophy and social theory, mainly of French origin with some ramifications in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, but in no way does such a term encompass or exhaust the entirety of contemporary social thought). Despite its pretensions of “novelty” and “state-of-the-art,” the sources of this theoretical attack on the categories of dialectical Marxism and its critical epistemology are quite old and refer to a long and extensive intellectual history.
Already in the 1950s and early 1960s (before the emergence of dialectical dependency theory in Latin America), European schools of social thought were formed whose focus was precisely on aiming their darts at dialectical logic.
Of Italian origin, the school led by Galvano della Volpe (della Volpe, 1956, 1963 and 1971 and the same author’s preface to Marx, 1963) stands out for its logical rigor, supported by several of his disciples (Colletti, 1977 and 1985; Rossi, 1971; in Argentina represented by Dotti, 1983). The main thesis of this current classifies dialectical logic and its mediations as “a mystified hypostasis.”
In France, it is more notable for its literary fluency and the seductive use of its colourful rhetorical figures than for its logical or philological rigour in the study of Marxism, the very influential and widespread school of Louis Althusser and his disciples, who reject not only Hegel’s system but also the dialectical method (Althusser, 1988: 103; 1996: 274).
Both schools, which opened the door, in the Italian case, to the abandonment of Gramscian, historicist and dialectical Marxism (Gramsci, 2000, Volume 4: 293) and encouraged, in the French context, the displacement of radical positions towards the moderate ranks of Eurocommunism, shamefully and without mentioning it, took up the anti-dialectical and social democratic heritage of Eduard Bernstein.
The latter, an old moderate leader of post-Marxist and post-Engels German socialism (belonging to the Socialist International or Second International), not only criticized the dialectical methodology of Capital but also sought to “revise,” question, and delegitimize its theoretical conclusions. His passionate rejection of dialectics went hand in hand with his outright refusal to accept its political ramifications (challenged en bloc under the inquisitorial epithet of “Blanquism,” that is: “the conception of human history as a process of qualitative leaps,” “the revolutionary cult of plebeian violence and proletarian terrorism,” “the conception of permanent revolution,” “the Leninist theory of the seizure of power,” and other similar political nuances). Without a doubt, although his later epigones from the mid-20th century and his current followers in the 21st century do not do justice to his lineage and refuse even to mention his undisguised patronage, Eduard Bernstein was one of the great initiators of the “contemporary” anti-dialectical crusade. For the former German Social Democratic leader (so admired by our moderate Juan Bautista Justo), all those feared radical positions derived unequivocally from “the great fraud of dialectics” embedded in Marxism (Bernstein, 1982: 140). Hence his meticulous, erudite, and pioneering obsession with achieving the eradication of the dialectical virus in critical theory.
In this elastic sequence of challenges, rejections, questions and condemnations, dialectical logic was invariably associated with reactionary mysticism, a totalitarian social ontology and a hypostatized metaphysics.
The target of the crosshairs set its eye and aimed its missiles at Marx’s Capital . His supposed original sin would have consisted in explicitly declaring himself, with name and surname, “a disciple of that great thinker” called Hegel and in having “flirted” [sic] with the Science of Logic in the dialectical exposition of his discoveries within the framework of his ambitious project of critique of political economy, both of its scientific exponents and of its vulgar representatives (Marx, 1988, Volume I, Vol. 1: 20).
In most cases, the challenges to dialectical logic were presented as an epistemological broom whose primary task would have been to sweep away all traces of Hegel from the expository deployment of the categories of value theory in Marx’s Capital . By murdering Hegel’s dialectic (or treating him like “a dead dog,” in the author of Capital ‘s own words ), Marx was freed to be compatible with various philosophical and theoretical juggling acts that were averse to radical political positions. In the end, Bernstein would have been somewhat right: dialectical logic lay the forbidden philosophical fruit and the dark epistemological temptation that cultivated theories of uneven socioeconomic development and qualitative leaps in history, organized conspiracy and the exercise of plebeian violence in the face of the surveillance and tyrannical despotism of capital, the conception of crisis as the explosion of the antagonistic contradictions of the capitalist world system, political strategies of hegemony, the assault on power and permanent revolution, and the conception of war as the prolongation of politics by other means. To sweeten and soften Marx, render him inoffensive, remove all danger, and blunt his revolutionary edge, dialectics had to be eliminated from his theoretical corpus. It’s that simple.
What most of these (failed, frustrated and periodically recycled) attempts failed to take into account is that Marx not only sinned by biting the forbidden fruit of the Science of Logic , as Lenin aptly pointed out when he aphoristically wrote: “It is absolutely impossible to understand Marx’s Capital , and in particular its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic . Consequently, half a century ago, none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” (Lenin, 1974: 168).
Marx’s methodological framework and his rigorous critical treatment of the reified and fetishized categories of political economy of David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the entire chorus of economists he analyzes and unpacks in his Critical History of the Theory of Surplus Value and the other volumes of Capital draws on a far more complex, extensive, and ancient dialectical tradition of social and philosophical thought that goes back far beyond and extends below Hegel. Although the latter was undoubtedly its great modern systematizer, incorporating into his Logic each and every fragment of Heraclitus as well as Aristotle’s Metaphysics (in his doctrine of Being) and his Organon (in his doctrine of essence, in which he also incorporates the transcendental logic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ), he clearly did not invent dialectics ex nihilo . His critics and polemicists did not always recognize this (due to ignorance, theoretical limitations, or mental laziness), but Marx knew it in great detail, having dedicated decades of study to dialectics. Anyone who studies Capital with a careful eye will discover, at every step and on every page, the traces, echoes, lights, and shadows of that fascinating intellectual history fused with Marxist critical discourse.
Heraclitus’ Dawn
Contrary to the so-called “contemporary thought” which, in order to challenge dialectics, limits itself to revolving and wandering exclusively around the Hegel/Marx circuit (to affirm or deny their connection, as the case may be), Lenin was not wrong when he pointed out that the main nuclei of Marx’s dialectical conception were already summarized in the ancient fragments that are preserved from Heraclitus—probably the most brilliant and profound thinker of the pre-Socratics, belonging to the 6th century before our Christian era).
To provocatively support this hypothesis, Lenin took as his focus fragment number 30 (according to the traditional classification of H. Dielz and W. Kranz) in which the dialectical thinker from Ephesus expressed “This cosmos, the same for all, was not created by gods or men, but it always was, is, and will be a living fire, which lights up in measure and goes out in measure” (Llanos, 1984, vol. 1, 157; Mondolfo, 1983, p. 49). Another transcription of the same fragment is the following: “This world, the same for all, was not made by any of the gods or men, but it always existed, exists, and will exist as an ever-living fire, lighting up in measure and going out in measure” (AA.VV., 1978, vol. I, 173. Eggers, Lan, trans.).
Focusing his attention on that fragment while critically analyzing a book by F. Lassalle, Lenin identified Heraclitus as the great precursor of dialectical logic. This was not a joke , nor a wild or untimely statement typical of an amateur reader. Hegel himself, in his work Lectures on the History of Philosophy, went so far as to affirm: “There is not a single proposition in Heraclitus that we have not tried to incorporate in our Logic ” (Hegel, 1955, Vol. I: 220). Lenin knew well what he was writing about.
Although Heraclitus was most likely its brilliant historical precursor, the term is not widely used in his fragments. Its etymological origin refers to the Greek notion “dialetiké,” which in turn is associated with the verb “dialégomai” [to dialogue], linked to the art of dialogue and discussion (Llanos, 1986: 14). This verb, “to dialogue” as used in our language, is also transcribed as the origin of dialectics with another word: “dialégesthai,” which also refers to dialogue, but not in the sense of conversing amiably and passing the time, but rather in the sense of arguing and confronting with opposing arguments (Berti, 2008: 36-37).
Beyond its etymology, how can it be possible that dialectics, as a critical and polemical methodological core, was born at such an early age in humanity (many centuries before Hegel), when social, economic, and scientific development was still so precarious? Marx himself gives us the clue to answer this question when, challenging all the traditional accounts that identify him as an “evolutionary” thinker and attribute to him a linear, homogeneous, and brutally “progressive” conception of history, he writes: “Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, at the most beautiful moment of its development, exercise an eternal charm, like a phase that will never return? There are poorly educated children and precocious children. Many ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm we find in their art is not in contradiction with the weak development of the society in which they matured. It is rather its result” (Marx, 1988, Vol. I: 33). For Marx, there is no linearity or homogeneity between art, philosophy, science, and socioeconomic development. Marx’s historical conception has multilinear and discontinuous rhythms and temporalities (Bensaïd, 2003: 48). This is why dialectics was able to emerge even in the midst of extremely weak socioeconomic development.
Was that Greek awakening and dawn perhaps “a miracle”? This question hovers over many histories of ideas, mentalities, science, and philosophy. In reality, there was no miracle. Both the Ionian and Milesian islands were subject to a permanent sociocultural exchange between Greeks and Persians, as well as between other peoples who traded while waging war, enslaving each other, and fighting against slavery. This cultural exchange and political diversity allowed for new questions to be asked and opened the minds of the first scientists and philosophers of Western Europe and the Near East (Sagan, 1983: 175). The existence of a seed of a commercial community in the Ionian and Milesian areas of influence made it possible to begin to visualize the world (and the cosmos) as a perpetual process of becoming (Llanos, 1986: 22-23). According to some historians of philosophy, the birth of dialectics and its cult of struggle, war and conflict ( polemos ) all conceived as “the father of all things” (according to Heraclitus fragment 58), are strongly associated with a type of community where slave owners, merchants and slaves confront each other in a circuit where small city-states produce and exchange goods (Thompson, 1975: 311-313).
Within the framework of such a social context, the thinker Heraclitus emerges. (In complete contrast to Parmenides, who advocated an immobile cosmology) in all his fragments preserved to this day insists on emphasizing that the unity and struggle of opposites and antagonistic contradiction do not constitute an anomaly or an illusion of human perception but rather constitute the principle of all that exists in the cosmos. That is to say, for Heraclitus, the dialectic of contradictions and confrontation are not merely rhetorical or theoretical, nor are they limited to the realm of discourse. When Diogenes Lartius pointed out that Aristotle called Zeno (from the Eleatic school, heir of Parmenides) “inventor of dialectics”, he was probably referring to a conception of it restricted to the plane of discursive and argumentative controversies, without any extension into the ontological field (Astrada, 1970: 23), while for Heraclitus the antagonistic contradictions and the unity of opposites resided in reality itself, not only in discourse.
The contradictions Heraclitus attempts to reveal through his colorful, largely cryptic and sarcastic poetic language are embedded in the cosmos and also in human beings, at both ends of the equation. His contrasts and contradictions are theoretical but also ontological (Astrada, 1962: 23).
Appealing to metaphors, often enigmatic (which earned him the nickname “dark”), Heraclitus identifies in the permanent movement of material fire the nucleus of the great universal Logos (understood as a type of theoretical-discursive rationality [logic] that begins to move away from random magical thinking to find regularities and tendencies – general laws – of reality itself [ontological], condensed in his concise language with the expression “according to measure”). Its 130 preserved fragments, although they are presented as aphoristic and isolated, form a unified conception of the universe and of the human being [Llanos, 1986: 30).
His conception based on the Logos encompasses human thought and language but also and at the same time the governing principle of the universe, approaching the “ arjé ” of his predecessors (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, etc.). In this unitary conception: 1) harmony is always the product of opposites, therefore the basic fact of the natural world is struggle, 2) everything is in permanent movement and change, 3) the world is a living and eternal fire (Llanos, 1986: 36). Heraclitus summarizes his philosophy, in addition to fragment 30, in 51, when he states: “Men do not understand how that which differs from itself is in harmony, because harmony is composed of opposite tension, just like that of the bow or the lyre” (Llanos, 1989: 139).
Countless controversies arose regarding the material or immaterial nature of Heraclitus’ fire. Aristotle—in his own way, one of the first historians of philosophy before him—, while still taking sides with Parmenides’ principle of identity against the permanent contradiction of Heraclitus’ dialectical philosophy, recognizes that “Of those who were first to philosophize, the majority thought that the sole principles of all things are of a material nature: and it is that from which all things are constituted, and from which they are first generated and into which they are ultimately decomposed, the entity [a term the translator chooses to refer to “substance” (NK)] remaining, no matter how much it changes in its qualities, that is what they say is the element, and that is the principle of things that are […]” (Aristotle, 2014 c: 79). This brief but symptomatic Aristotelian synthesis of the first Western philosophers is adopted by the historian of philosophy G. Thompson as confirmation of the materialist character of the Milesians and Ionians, together with the thinker from Ephesus (Thompson, 1975: 345).
Marx himself, already in his doctoral thesis, attempted to highlight the materialist character of some of the main Greek philosophers. To this end, he studied the differences between the atomism of Democritus (in turn, heir to Leucippus) and that of Epicurus, defending the libertarian social and political implications that arose from the deviation from the straight line in the fall of atoms in the cosmology of the latter, in whom the determinism of the former was lightened and displaced, giving way to chance (Marx, 2013: 66-68 and 1982: 30-32).
If in his early student years—annoyed with Protestant religious institutions that preserved German backwardness—Marx was more attentive and aware of the physics and materialist naturalism of Greek thinkers, later, throughout his critical research program into political economy developed for more than three decades in his London exile, the author of Capital redirected his attention toward dialectical logic to question Ricardo, Smith, and the great British thinkers who admired the market, defended capital, and legitimized capitalism as if this world system were eternal and its categories ahistorical. Marx needed to demonstrate the perishability of this inhuman and alienating form of life and the transitory nature of the market as a fetishistic social bond between human beings. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the great strategist of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) chose precisely a fragment of the dialectic in Heraclitus to illuminate and highlight “the basic cell” of capitalism, that is, the process of simple commodity exchange [M – D – M, where “M” = commodity and “D” = Money. NK] in his logical-dialectical exposition of the theory of value at the beginning of the entire Capital : “All things are exchanged in fire and fire in all things,” said Heraclitus, “just as commodities are exchanged for gold and gold for commodities” (Marx, 1988. Vol. I, Vol. I: 128).
If this critical exposition of Marx’s mature social theory undeniably “flirts” with Hegel’s Science of Logic (of whom he explicitly declared himself a “disciple” in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital ), its nourishing sources in the field of dialectics are by no means reduced or limited to it .
Aristotle’s criticism of Platonism
For decades, the Marxist vulgate (both those sympathetic to Hegel and those bitterly opposed to dialectics and in favor of replacing him—as Marx’s epistemological predecessor—with Kant, Galileo, Spinoza, or even liberalism) scorned the figure of Aristotle. It froze him in the traditional image of his philosophy constructed by medieval scholastics and the religious literature of the three great monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, but primarily Christianity in its Thomistic version).
However, despite these simplified versions of scholastic Marxism, as was also the case with the (“forgotten”) case of Heraclitus, it was Lenin who also dared to draw attention to and delve without blinders or prejudice into the richest aspects of Aristotle’s thought. Therefore, during the First World War, more precisely in 1915, after patiently reading and annotating Hegel’s voluminous Science of Logic and writing the article “On Dialectics,” he read and summarized in a notebook another work no less extensive and important for understanding dialectical logic: Aristotle’s Metaphysics (the edition Lenin found in the Swiss public libraries he frequented at the time was a version translated from Greek into German by A. Schwegler and published in two volumes).
There Lenin highlights and emphasizes the “exploratory” nature that, from his perspective, Aristotle’s logical analyses possess, a perspective that was later lost or diluted in scholastic systematizations.
He also highlights the Stagirite’s polemics against his teacher Plato, exercises that he defines as “highly characteristic and profoundly interesting” and also “delightful for their naivety” (Lenin, 1960: 359).
What was Lenin referring to? It was Aristotle’s challenge to Plato’s dualism, which, according to his most brilliant and unruly disciple, ends up multiplying entities and substances ad infinitum, thereby believing that he would achieve an immutable and truly universal world—proper to scientific knowledge—imaginarily escaping the eternal flux and becoming of Heraclitean thought.
That at the origin of this transcendentalist and dualist hypostasis of Plato and that unnecessary and artificial duplication of sensible reality in a specular “world of Ideas” that are universal, archetypal, essentialist, immutable and eternal was the threatening shadow of the ghost of Heraclitus, Aristotle states unambiguously (Aristotle, 2014 (c): 419-420). However, instead of adopting the philosophy of the wise man from Ephesus, Aristotle ends up developing a dynamic system halfway through by using the distinction between the notions of “potency” and “act” (Llanos, 1986: 71) and by elaborating the passage of the four causes in order to account for movement (Aristotle, 2014 (c): 193, 368 and 374; as well as 2007 (b), Book I), thus avoiding the childish denial of movement as a “false appearance” in the style of the Eleatic school and its teacher Plato. Although he strives to account for movement, instead of turning his back on it or denying it, he ends up adopting the notion of the “first mover” (Aristotle, 2014 (c): 392 ff.). A hypothesis that he also adopts in Book VIII of his Physics , conceived as “pure form”, “pure actuality” and “thought of thought”, which evidently definitively distances him from that Heraclitean conception.
Lenin laments the distancing from Heraclitus that Aristotle ends up choosing, calling him, for this reason, “stubborn.” Even so, the Bolshevik thinker, reflecting on the Stagirite, adds: “Highly characteristic in general, throughout the entire book, everywhere, are the living germs of dialectics and research [Lenin’s emphasis] into it…” (Lenin, 1960: 360). There, too, Lenin notes: “Aristotle’s logic is an investigation, a search, an approximation to Hegel’s logic—and it, Aristotle’s logic (which everywhere, at every step, precisely poses the problem of dialectics [both Lenin’s emphasis]), has been turned into a dead scholasticism by rejecting all searches, vacillations, and ways of formulating problems” (Lenin, 1960: 360).
Lenin’s entire text on Aristotle revolves around the categorical problem of the universal and the particular. Lenin shares Aristotle’s questioning of Plato’s transcendentalist dualism. He calls the critique “delightful,” but complains that this Aristotelian quest ends in a dead end because “Man gets entangled precisely in the dialectic of the universal and the particular, of concept and sensation, of essence and phenomenon, etc.” In his summary, he states, “What the Greeks had were precisely ways of formulating problems, so to speak exploratory systems [Lenin’s emphasis], a naive disagreement of opinions that is excellently reflected in Aristotle” (Lenin, 1960: 360).
It is no coincidence that Lenin, throughout his intellectual life, sought to resolve precisely this dialectic of the universal and the particular that he found and emphasized in Aristotle. To this end, from his earliest essays in his youth—for example, in his polemical work Who Are the “Friends of the People” and How Do They Fight the Social Democrats? (1894), in which he analyzes sociology — through to his mature texts, he appealed to a category that appears in the prologues to Capital : the notion of the “economic-social formation” (ESF). That is, the category with which, to study society, Marx articulates genus and species, the universality of the global capitalist system and the particularity of each society, what is common and shared by all countries and the specific difference of each of them. For Lenin, this socio-historical category, of dialectical origin – which would resolve the logical problem initially formulated by Aristotle and much later addressed by Hegel, who takes up the “forgotten” path of Heraclitus – is fundamental in all of Marx’s Capital (Lenin, 1958: 205).
It should be noted that when Lenin analyzes Aristotle’s Metaphysics and rescues the “exploratory” nature of his reflection in the field of dialectics, he uses the latter notion in a different sense than that originally employed by the Stagirite. While for Lenin (and his teacher Marx) dialectics is an expository method that orders and derives in a certain way (in a perspective that goes from the abstract to the concrete) the categories of scientific theory, at the same time, these categories are not confined within argumentative discourse but at the same time express historical social relations that exist outside of discourse; For this reason, theoretical and scientific categories are usually considered by Marxists as relational (Zeleny, 1984: 43-61; Kosik, 1989: 40-41; Ilienkov, 1977: 5 and 182; Dussel, 1985: 55; De Gortari, 1970: 41; Samaja, 1987: 93, etc.).
That is to say, dialectical logic in the Marxist sense expresses the movement of thought as well as, and at the same time, the movement of being in becoming (Lefebvre, 1975: 127; 1984: 102). The relational character of its categories derives from the object of study that they attempt to understand and explain: historical social relations (which political economists, limited by their ideology and prisoners of fetishism, end up reifying and eternalizing (Rubin, 1987: 107; Lukács, 1984: Volume II: 126-127; Rosdolsky, 1989: 53; Mandel, 2015: 14-15; Löwy, 1985: 64 and 1986: 11).
For Aristotle, however, although he also uses and employs the term “dialectic,” this notion had a significantly different meaning than that employed by the Marxist paradigm. Let us recall that in the Topics (one of the main books that make up the Organon ) Aristotle defines dialectics as a type of reasoning whose premises are “plausible” (Aristotle, 2014 a: 53 and Berti, 2008: 42).
Unlike the dualist and transcendentalist doctrines of his teacher Plato, for whom dialectics consisted of a method of knowledge of pure universals, ideal forms and “essences in themselves of things”, radically separated and distinguished from the sensible and material world (Plato, 1978: 406-407 and 2014: 241-243); in Aristotle dialectics corresponds to a special type of argumentative reasoning, that is, a type of syllogism that is distinguished from two others (the apodictic and the eristic) and that does take into account the problems of the earthly world as an object of theoretical dispute.
According to the Stagirite philosopher, the apodictic syllogism would be proper to scientific demonstration (since it starts from absolutely true premises), while the eristic syllogism would correspond to and be characteristic of an imitation of true philosophy since its only purpose is to convince and win the discussion at any cost, completely forgetting the problem of the search for truth. Historically, this last type of reasoning and form of argumentation would have been cultivated by minor sophists such as Euthydemus or Dionysodorus (Llanos, 1969: 43), very different, in their ways of arguing and understanding philosophy and logic, from the most ancient and important sophists such as Protagoras, Gorgias or Hippias (despite this notable difference between both groups, Plato despised both equally).
The dialectical syllogism, according to Aristotle’s Topics , would then be halfway between the apodictic syllogism (typical of science) and the eristic syllogism (typical of sophistry in its decadent period). The dialectical syllogism is interested in truth (in contrast to eristic) but does not guarantee absolute necessity in its derivation and inference (as the apodictic would) since it starts from premises that, without being false, are barely shared by a community, that is, assumed to be valid and prestigious by a certain public (who attend the dialogue of the opponents and the dialectical discussion as arbiters of controversy and polemic). The premises of the dialectical syllogism, according to Aristotle, are not only “probable” nor exclusively “plausible.” In Aristotelian dialectical argumentation, the starting point is called ” endoxa ,” meaning that these premises are hypothetical and consensual, which means that they have a certain reputation accepted by a community, and are therefore shared and recognized by the discursive universe of those attending the dialectical discussion. They are neither absolutely evident nor are they barely or simply credible, but rather belong to an intermediate category: being accepted as valid, hypothetical, and recognized as plausible (Berti, 2008, 40-42).
Contradiction is also present in Aristotelian dialectics. But unlike Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx, or Lenin, the contradiction analyzed by Aristotle is a discursive contradiction and is found in the conclusion of the dialectical syllogism. It is used to refute the opponent in the polemic, starting from plausible premises (shared by both polemicists). Through inferences, the interlocutor before the public-arbitrator is led to fall into discursive contradictions (inconsistencies) for refutation purposes. Contradiction in Aristotle, if it has a positive utility, is precisely that of allowing the opposing hypothesis to be refuted and demonstrated. It never has a positive meaning in itself (as would happen in the Marxist paradigm, as the core of the becoming of an identity – for example, the commodity – which encloses within itself the negativity of a difference deployed in opposites and contraries that end up historically exploding in an antagonistic contradiction generating a crisis). For Aristotle, on the other hand, if there is a contradiction, it is purely discursive. There is no contradiction in reality itself, since one of the pillars of Aristotle’s philosophy is, precisely, the principle of non-contradiction (Aristotle, 2014 (c): 153, 357-361), which the Stagirite develops not only in his Metaphysics but also in his works On Interpretation ; Topics and On Sophistical Refutations (all three belonging to the Organon ). Although in these last three treatises the contradiction is addressed mainly as a problem of discourse and argumentation (that is, in the semantic and syntactical field) while in Metaphysics its existence is denied and its impossibility is affirmed at the level of ontology.
Aristotelian logic, then, is considered an “organ,” that is, a formal instrument valid for all scientific knowledge and which would guarantee the consistency and the “general rules of coherence” of the same (Mitelmann, 2009, in introduction to Aristotle, 2009: 10-11). In Hegelian language, this “organ” would correspond to a logic of understanding and not of reason (Artola Barrenechea, 1978: 30).
As a guarantee of discursive coherence, this logic would deserve to be assumed as its own (and therefore vindicated) by Marxism (Lefebvre, 1984: 92). If its restricted scope of application to the syntactic and semantic plane of coherence of meaning and argumentative consistency is accepted, the dialectical logic of Marxism should adopt the teachings of Aristotelian formal logic as its own (Novack, 1982: 23).
However, despite these essential clarifications that leave behind the most rudimentary and schematic versions of scholastic Marxism, this “broader” angle of logic employed by Marx does not invalidate or annul the two different meanings assumed by the term “dialectic” (associated, of course, with that of contradiction), since while for Aristotle dialectic corresponds to the field of syllogistic argumentation and instrumental discourse, in dialectical logic of Marxist origin dialectic also assumes a certain extradiscursive ontology (just like antagonistic contradiction, with a meaning different from that of logical inconsistency). That is to say, dialectics is not simply reduced to the role of an instrument of argumentative rhetorical analysis, but rather it aims to encompass both the theory and the contradictory social relations external to the theory itself, and that the latter aims to apprehend, capture, analyze and explain through the dialectical method (in the first drafts of Capital, its author accounts for both poles through the use of two distinct terms: “concrete thought” and “concrete real”; Marx, 1987, Volume I: 21-22).
Referring precisely to the topic of categories (not of forms of predication in general, as Aristotle analyses and explains them in the first part of the Organon [Aristotle, 2014 (a): 20-21]), but to that of the relational, historical and specific categories of political economy that Marx tries to dismantle and criticise), there, in the Grundrisse , the first drafts of Capital , its author writes: “As in general in every historical, social science, when observing the development of economic categories one must always bear in mind that the subject – modern bourgeois society in this case – is something given both in reality and in the mind (Marx, 1987, Vol. I: 27).
That is to say, the categories of Marxist theory express theoretical concepts that in turn aim to account for extra-discursive historical social realities (although not alien to the praxis of humanity [Sánchez Vázquez, 1980: 264 and 1982: 107]). The Marxist questioning of the dualism inherent in political economy in no way accepts that dialectics is reduced exclusively to “theoretical practice” (in the jargon of Louis Althusser) nor does it admit the arbitrary and captious distinction between “logical contradictions” and “real oppositions” (typical of Lucio Colletti’s anti-dialectical philosophy).
Even taking into account the different meaning that the term “dialectic” assumes in the thought of Aristotle and that of Marx, and without forgetting the differential treatment of what each of them understands by “category”, we believe that the historical importance of the Aristotelian criticism of the dualist metaphysics of his teacher Plato should not be overlooked, since said criticism has notable similarities with Marx’s criticism of the dualism of bourgeois economists who, in the field of political economy, assume as their own “the metaphysics of everyday life” characteristic of the market (Kosik, 1989: 83 et seq.).
Aristotle develops this critique of his teacher’s dualism in various passages and books of the Metaphysics, pointing out that Plato ends up artificially separating forms, ideas, concepts, and even numbers from sensible entities and individual substances. In this way, he constructs a phantasmagorical world of “incorruptible universals,” alien to space and time, paying the price of splitting the universal from the singular and multiplying entities to infinity (Aristotle, 2014 (c): 99, 237, 270-273, 277-278). One of the strongest arguments in Aristotle’s critique of Platonic dualism revolves around the “Third Man,” since a third term will always be necessary to compare an individual substance and its universal Idea, in which the former “participates.” But the criticism is not limited to pointing out this third term but attacks the very heart of Platonic metaphysics and extends to a large part of Aristotle’s work (Jaeger, 2013: 48).
The Marxist critique of metaphysics bears notable similarities to this anti-Platonic critique. For example, for Antonio Gramsci, the concept of “metaphysics” signifies “an abstract universal outside of time and space” (Gramsci, 2000, Vol. 4: 266). For the Marxist logician Henri Lefebvre, the notion of “metaphysics” defines beings and ideas outside of their relations (Lefebvre, 1984, 57).
The influence and seduction of Aristotle on Marx, unexpected and surprising only for the Marxist vulgate, is not limited to the level of ontological critique. It also reaches the anthropological and political levels. Let us not forget that in response to the classic question, “What is a human being?”, which also intimately permeates the materialist conception of history (Gramsci, 2000, Vol. 4: 220), Marx responded in the Grundrisse: “Man is, in the most literal sense, a zoon politikon [political animal], not only a social animal, but an animal that can only be individualized in society” (Marx, 1987, Vol. I: 4). This thesis Marx reiterates in the same book, stating, “Man only isolates himself through the historical process” (Marx, 1987, Vol. I: 457), which he will attempt to develop throughout the chapter on “cooperation” in Capital .
In this last book, he returns to that definition and maintains that “Man is by nature, if not, as Aristotle claims, a political animal, then at any rate a social animal” (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. II: 397). Obviously, both answers (one present in the first draft of Capital [the Grundrisse ], the other belonging to the fourth draft of the same work), central to Marx’s theory, refer directly to the thought of Aristotle, who develops it in his Politics (Aristotle, 2005: 57). Marx also compares—to differentiate them—the human being with a bee, in the fifth chapter of the first volume of Capital (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. I: 215-216) in exactly the same way as the Stagirite does in his Politics (Aristotle, 2006: 57).
On the other hand, in explaining the theory of value, Marx sharply criticizes the quantitative reduction of said theory in David Ricardo and Adam Smith (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. I: 97-100, footnote 31; Rubin, 1987: 210 and 225 ff.). He does so in a manner quite analogous to Aristotle’s criticism of the quantitativism of the elderly Plato who, towards the end of his intellectual leadership at the Academy, attempted to mathematically channel his imaginary “world of Ideas” in order to homologate it with the Pythagorean numbers (Jaeger, 2013: 106).
In this critical account of political economy, the pillar of the entire Capital , Marx refers by name and surname to Aristotle, whom he describes as “a genius of thought” (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. I: 100 and Vol. III: 1014); “the greatest thinker of antiquity” (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. II: 497) and “the great researcher who first analyzed the form of value, like so many other forms of thinking in society and nature” (Marx, 1988, Vol. I, Vol. I: 72).
What is striking and notorious is that in the midst of the polemic with political economy and while he is unfolding the various forms of value (from form I to IV, that is, from the simple form to the money form, following the style, modes of expression and dialectical categories of Hegel’s doctrine of the essence of the Science of Logic , as we have tried to demonstrate in another writing [Kohan, 2013: 461]), Marx dedicates a page and a half to analyzing the Aristotelian treatment of commodity exchange, the economy and chrematistics, present in the Politics (Aristotle, 2005: 78; Berti, 2012: 160).
The example of the value of the sandal, present in Politics , is also part of the same chapter of Capital (Marx, 1988, Volume I, Vol. I: 104), a work in which he later returns to Aristotle’s theory of economics and chrematistics (Marx, 1988, Volume I, Vol. I: 186-187).
Full of admiration, Marx concludes his analysis of Aristotle, in the midst of his polemics against the defenders of the Market and capital, stating: “Aristotle’s genius shines precisely in discovering in the expression of the value of commodities a relation of equality. Only the historical limitation of the society in which he lived prevented him from discovering what, in truth, this equality consisted” (Marx, 1988, Volume I, Vol. I: 74; Vol. III.: 1028-1029).
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