To Quote Arendt At Length...

I cannot say precisely how much I enjoy studying Hannah Arendt. She is a most wonderful substitute for life, which life unfortunately has demanded that I seek!

Existentialism, the rebellion of the philosopher against philosophy, did not arise when philosophy turned out to be unable to apply its own rules to the realm of political affairs; this failure of political philosophy as Plato would have understood it is almost as old as the history of Western philosophy and metaphysics; and it did not even arise when it turned out that philosophy was equally unable to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is. The situation, however, became desperate when the old metaphysical questions were shown to be meaningless; that is, when it began to dawn upon modern man that he had come to live in a world in which his mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable of asking adequate, meaningful questions, let alone of giving the answers to its own perplexities.

Hannah Arendt, Preface to Between Past and Future

This to me is a great sum of what has occupied my mind recently, and it ties this pre-occupation into the history of Western philosophy. What is one to do when the spaces, the "ontological difference," in metaphysics are laid bare? I am recently turned toward another question, also uncovered I think by Nietzsche. Is it not the case that "history," a story authored and told by human beings, can be fundamentally ruptured by certain happenings that defy formalization into the constructive narrative of human happenings? Are there spaces, "between past and future," where we must devise a new set of rules in order to complete the story, or at least that chapter of the story? Morality, demonstrated by minds much greater than mine to be tied to the same conditions that accompany/create history, is also disrupted, even violently disrupted, by these spaces in the historical narrative. How does one move past?

Two Quotes

The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: in the singleness and simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening.

--Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

As for the meaning of Being, the meaning that the question of Being asks about, there exists another nice Zen dictum, entirely in Heidegger's spirit. It states that before concerning himself with Zen, a man sees mountains as mountains and waters as waters. Once he has attained a certain inner vision of the truth of Zen, he realizes that the mountains are no longer mountains and the waters no longer waters. But once he is illuminated, he again sees the mountains as mountains and the waters as waters.

--Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

Zizek and Lacan

I didn't really understand this, but I thought it was interesting. In fact, I find every little bit I hear about Lacan to be interesting so I guess I should read him. Anyway, this is from Zizek's The Ticklish Subject:

Classic onto-theology is focused on the triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. What Lacan does is to push these three notions to their limit, demonstrating that the Good is the mask of 'diabolical' Evil, that the Beautiful is the mask of the Ugly, of the disgusting horror of the Real, and that the True is the mask of the central Void around which every symbolic edifice is woven. In short, there is a domain 'beyond the Good' that is not simply everyday 'pathological' villainy, but the constitutive background of the Good itself, the terrifying ambiguous source of its power; there is a domain 'beyond the Beautiful' that is not simply the ugliness of ordinary everyday objects, but the constitutive background of Beauty itself, the Horror veiled by the fascinating presence of Beauty; there is a domain 'beyond Truth' that is not simply the everyday domain of lies, deceptions and falsities, but the Void that sustains the place in which one can only formulate symbolic fictions that we call 'truths'. If there is an ethical-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist disaster) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavour to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of the Truth and/or Goodness.

To which I am tempted to reply "duh," but then, as I said, I don't know much about Lacan.

Anaximander and the Ontological Difference

Perhaps the earliest surving fragment in the history of philosophy is Anaximander's sentence:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
- The condemnation for the crime -
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

More here, if you are interested.

I came across this while reading Vattimo on Heidegger. It is of particular importance for Heidegger's notion of overcoming metaphysics, which is also strongly tied towards being-towards-death and finitude as they are first expressed in Being and Time. It is an extraordinary fragment, extraordinary poetry really, and it is extremely difficult to make out the meaning of it. What is the crime? It would seem it is the "event" of my being, my singularity which only arises from the consideration of my death, that which Derrida notes in The Gift of Death is mine alone, the very thing which makes me "irreplaceable." My finitude is the condition for individuation (here I must say that Schopenhauer noted this in his way) and we might say that for Heidegger, and Vattimo, the "forgetting of Being" that takes place in metaphysics, the conflation of the ideal and the real, the ignoring of the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings), is precisely tied to this notion of a crime: my Being in place of something else; the tying together of my being with Being, and therefore the origin of the idea of immortality.

As Derrida notes, to accept one's death, to give it and to be given it by God (Being), that which is not me, is to take on responsibility for the crime of being.

Note: This post hopefully explains to some extent my undoubtedly bizarre affection for Schopehauer. I see him as a thinker who went some way towards a rigorous distinction between Being and beings, someone who strenously observed the ontological difference. The problem is, if the distinction is rigorous it completely devalues beings (value is a function of Being). To completely devalue beings seems to me to be possiblly another metaphysical error, though a very odd one. This is, however, the opportunity I see in Schopenhauer.

For us ordinary mortals, Schopenhauer included, if not Jesus and Buddha (and Zarathustra?), this clear distinction is impossible. As Cioran said, "God is, even if he isn't." We have to live in the "interval," as Vattimo puts it, between Being and beings. We have to try, as Nietzsche wrote, to know that I dream and that I must dream. The gift of death, as Derrida sees it, seems to enable this.

It should also, finally, be noted that the terms Being and Nothing are interchangeable. It is beings that must vacillate between themselves and Being, their negation. To be or not to be. So in that spirit I will close this out with Hamlet's extraordinary meditation on his own death. Where else to end but Shakespeare?

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

"Fear and Trembling"

Sometimes when we are called to drown, to go under, in that terrifying breathless state we see for one instant that which we ought not see. Was it "God" who invented "lovingness?" I think the urge to God and the urge to "Love" (conceptually) are similar, and perhaps indistinct. In the same manner, yet on the other hand, "godliness" and "lovingness" are similar, perhaps indistinct dynamics, out of which is born "God" and "Love." Born of the compulsion to ask things in their chaotic and dizzying state to harmonize, the first step toward trying to "know." Godliness and lovingness both live in the spaces between phenomenal experience (the spaces which do not exist in the world "in-itself"). God and Love are the names we give to the bridges we construct across these "spaces" of phenomenal existence. I am frightened of both godliness and lovingness, I am so truly terrified. I do not want bridges, I just want to fall. I do not want to know, I want to have faith that a seemless and powerful current will be there to catch me and carry me along. I want to be in and among lovingness, I want to be love becoming! Sometimes when we are called to drown, to go under, in that terrifying breathless state we feel for one instant that which we ought to feel.

Loving As It Is

At times its good to have a disclosure, to provide for an openness with the people you relate to...its is quite pleasant on both ends. Being at one with myself, amongst people I love, is the greatest moment of wholeness in my life.

Of course "to love" denies knowing, anyone who thinks they have "known love" has at once not known a thing, and, what is infinitely worse, has not felt love. Knowing, in a specialized sense, is the most distant thing from feeling. Knowing moves across particularity with the ease of a leaf lifted by the breeze (Socrates was fond of equating thought with "wind," which tells you what perhaps history's greatest "thinker" thought about the corporeality of "thinking"). Knowing dresses itself rather elegantly in universality.

Loving is much more humble, real, and at once more powerful than knowing simply because it is incapable of universalization. Loving only exists in particularity...in this sense it has the peculiar feature of paralyzing knowing, which relies on a conceptual schemata for its fluidity. Loving, so unique and particular in its every incantation, is accompanied by the most intense feelings, feelings of abysmal anxiety...sometimes fear and alienation, yet at the same time the highest pleasure and sense of oneness.

One may object, "how can a oneness and pleasantness arrive with anxiety, fear, and often pain?" One ought not reduce loving to the rules of logic, why should it not be the greatest contradiction we ever experience? Loving, as dynamic particularity, stands in great defiance against mindfulness, it dances brilliantly upon "non-contradiction," it asks itself to be joined by the "excluded middle."

We are not accustomed to confronting particularity or dynamicism...we ask that things stop moving, and that they reappear to Mind as absence, that they become static images for mind to behold, to possess, apprehend, re-cognize (I will spare the etymology that accompanies the significance of the graspingness of cognition, but, put simply, the mind must possess, and nothing is so defiant of the urge to possess than the aesthetic feeling generated by the dynamic particularity of love).

Why are we so often frustrated, deceived, hurt, and disappointed by love? Because we refuse to soak ourselves in lovingness on its own terms. It will always defy categorization, it will never identify with a preconception, and it will certainly not stand still or universalize...the two great demands, and contributions, of knowing (I say "contribution" because nowhere in the world as it is will we ever find stillness or universality...these are things Mind contributes to the world as phenomena for its apprehension).

In short, to love will never be known so long as it exists...I warn desperately that it is we who create love and are well capable of destroying it.

I used to think love did not exist, I was partly correct and mostly wrong. Love will never appear before my mind so it is not part of the "intelligible world" as metaphysicians say, but love carries us along from time to time...it is perhaps what helps us cross the spaces of being that can be confronted so tragically, if confronted at all.

Well, I must end this stream of consciousness essay on loving before it gets "carried away," as only a meditation on love can.

Dewey and Nietzsche

Recently I was discussing with a friend how I have long been interested in the relationship between American Pragmatism, Dewey in particular,and Nietzsche. Some of you will remember back in college when I had, what History will remember as, my "Lear Episode." At once that play, coupled of course with my life at the time, helped to rupture any illusion that "the loyalties which once held me" had any relationship whatsoever to objective reality. The assumption that these objects of loyalty do arise directly out of the world gave them a sort of permanence or stability, a permanence whose existence one ought not question as "understanding" so prudently teaches us. The Lear Episode allowed me to realize, as Nietzsche so beautifully put it in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (quoted from memory), that these "truths" I had clung so loyally to, had no real correlation to the world of being, that they were merely conceptual webs "spun delicately like a spider's web, flexible enough to be carried freely along the tumultous currents, but strong enough not to be blown apart by the gentl'st breeze."

Well, to put it squarely, King Lear, like life itself, is no gentle breeze, and once my web had been sufficiently destroyed I began to look frantically for something new to hold to (fortunately I was suffering from the most tortuous insomnia at the time which allowed me long spells of solitude to consume consolation from my vibrant German friend Nietzsche). I turned first to Nietzsche, in whom I found a healthy companion piece to Shakespeare and a deadly assassin to the "European Nihilism" that rode in on the heels of my awakening and threatened to lull me back into a circular sleep. Perhaps I would have enjoyed a more pleasant slumber (literally and figuratively!), but "for those of us to whom wakefulness is our task..."

In any case, Nietzsche was not forthcoming with a satisfying answer, although he was chock full of compelling questions, so I began a more sober turn for a guide to the "lived experience" (and anyway it is Nietzsche's counsel in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to "remain faithful to the earth"). Ultimately, via existentialism (particularly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Ryan White!), I found my way to pragmatism, and in that most fertile and American of philosophies I began to sense a way out. This has proceeded most fruitfully through Arendt, and I will not fully discuss it now because "what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence"(Wittgenstein).

At this point I will give an extended quote by John Dewey that I think well describes the problem, which is covered to an exhausting extent in Nietzsche's most urgent works, and most beautifully and frighteningly in the culmination of Lear that sees the King disrobed and open to the elements (Nietzsche is the philosophical "disrobing" of the West, and at once we are asked to laugh and dance in the spaces he has torn asunder...both him and Lear end up insane!).

"What here is meant by 'the lost individual' is, however, so irrelevant to this question that it is not necessary to decide between the two views.* For by it is meant a moral and intellectual fact which is independent of any manifestation of power in action. The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as the present. Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. There are, of course, those who are still militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed. But their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them. For others, traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or are openly repudiated, and they drift without sure anchorage. Individuals vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and emotion."

J. Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930)

*These "two views" he alludes to refer to a cursory argument from a previous paragraph about whether it is the powerful few or the disempowered many whose individuality is most threatened by modern society. It is, as he says, irrelevant for the rest of the passage, but I included the sentence because it introduces the idea of "the lost individual," which is important and closely related to the many ways Nietzsche characterized such a state...one of which was "European Nihilism."

I wish I had some of my Nietzsche with me to draw a closer parallel with text, but to those of you who have spent a little time with Nietzsche you will clearly see the similarities. I am certain I could find an extended quote in The Will To Power, Between Good and Evil, and On the Geneology of Morals that would be substantially indistinct from the Dewey quote above.

Quickly, I like Dewey's line about drifting "without sure anchorage," but I urge that this is not a new phenomenon. These things have always been adrift, as the earlier quote from Nietzsche suggests, upon a linguistic web that has been drifting and floating since its very birth. So long as we relate to the world through thought, and thought through language, we will always be adrift because this is the very nature of language. The apparent stability of language is deceptive and relative, and whats worse is that its point of relation is itself, so it is also circular! In any case, what gives the appearance of a recent "setting into motion" is that the former drifting edifice seemed stable in relation to us because we were adrift upon it. We looked at a stable and unmoving "world" because we were conflating the "world" with that drifting vessel upon which we stood. It was only once we looked over the sides of that mighty, yet delicate, ship that we first saw the dizzying and flux spaciousness of "world." It was only when the first fool among us dared to jump overboard that we caught a fleeing glance of the "motioness" of our ship. So one says, "Dear God, it appears the anchor has been lost!" My answer to this brave fool is, "My friend, I fear we may have been misled altogether of the existence of an anchor from the beginning..."

And new philosophy calls in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his antinomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation...

John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World," Lns. 205-214

Consumerism and Culture

"The point is that a consumers' society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches."

Hannah Arendt "The Crisis in Culture"

I will be sparing in my comments because I am short on time, but as a warning I will suggest that many key terms in the quotation are of a special meaning. "World," "space of worldy appearances," "appearances," "things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances" are all examples of concepts that have a meaning outside their normal usage. For the Heideggerians among us, first, we forgive you! Second, these ideas are very similar to the way similar concepts are used by Heidegger in his essays and sections on aesthetics.

Generally though, Arendt is trying to demonstrate how a consumer based society raised in "mass entertainment" poses a threat to cultural objects generally and works of art specifically. How the "attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches" is precisely by "consuming" them, by using them up. Being used-up deprives cultural and artistic objects of their vital element, the ability to hold and move people without a function or use, their ability to "endure" perpetually.

That is all I will say for now...it is a typically eloquent Arendtian comment. It suggests something I have tried to say about the commodification of culture for some time via my Kantian idea of aesthetics and Marxian idea of commodities. Arendt's aesthetics are clearly influenced by Kant and Heidegger, and Heidegger is very similar to, and strongly influenced by, Kant.

How do we say anything?

This problem of self-reference is not merely a logical problem, nor is it new. It continually presents itself as the defining problem of modernity. Once the apparently solid, external ground of tradition, God, and the monarchy was replaced by the exercise of rational self-grounding, self-reference in the guises of historicism (all statements, including this one, are historically conditioned), psychoanalysis (all intellectual achievements, including this one, are the result of sublimation), political philosophy (all philosophy, including this one, is ideological), and rhetorical analysis (all statements, including this one, rhetorical) becomes unavoidable. Of course, the "including this one" clause has generally been excluded: all other philosophies are ideological, etc."

--William Rasch, The Lyotard Archipelago

Dasein is the being of its basis, indeed.

More Nietzsche from an Insomniac

"For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them-- I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy."

For it should be noted: it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: "Why I Am So Wise"


When you are up at 3:45 a.m. its inspiring to think that physical irregularities can be a source of brilliance. If only my insomnia, my daily violent stomach pain, my nauseating headaches could serve more than to make my life a constant hellish nightmare. In any case, this quote is one of the most clear demonstrations of the role that Nietzsche's physical state played in his philosophy. He turned his "will to health, to life, into a philosophy." That sentence is a wonderful quick capture of Nietzsche and how brilliantly inspiring he can be, because if I could explain in one quick statement what he is about I would say he was trying to become healthful and vital. Earlier he declares, "I am a decadent, I am also the opposite. My proof for this is, among other things, that I have always instinctively chosen the right means against wretched states...[I] betrayed an absolute instinctive certainty about what was needed..." This is precisely the task he had set for himself, ridding Western philosophy and moral life of "decadence."

Nietzsche was trying to make vibrant and joyful, to render alive the decadent. I was decadent when I first encountered Nietzsche, I still have spells of periodical decadence, but I have begun to be more vibrant because I have tried to make my own philosophy out of a will to health, to life, and ultimately to the most unceasing and irresistable power.

"Why I Am a Destiny"

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous-- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.-- Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of religion-- religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.-- I want no "believers;" I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to the masses.-- I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: "Why I Am a Destiny"

V.I. Lenin on Communism and the Emancipation of Women

Lenin was considered, in his time, a champion of women's rights. Of course, Lenin was also a shrewd political operative, and in one of his earliest important writings, What is to be Done?, he urged Social Democrats to:

react to every manifestation of tyranny and
oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of
people it affects; [one] must be able to group all these manifestations into a
single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; [one] must be
able to take advantage of every petty event in order to explain [one's]
Socialistic convictions and his Social-Democratic demands to all, in
order to explain to all and every one the world historical significance
of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

There is some evidence in Lenin's writings on the emancipation of women that his attempts to "take advantage of every petty event in order to explain his Socialistic convictions" may have blinded him to his most significant insights. Lenin presented evidence that the oppression of women and the oppression of the working class were two different, albeit overlapping at times, phenomena. Yet, he glances over this insight in order to squeeze the oppression of women neatly into a dogmatic Marxist paradigm. It is helpful to look at the contradictions that are never resolved by such an approach to better understand the way economic oppression works together and through other forms of oppression to maximize exploitation and retard the potential for change.

"Large-scale machine industry...refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked be a 'truly contemptuous attitude to the past.'" At first glance such an assertion seems to run against the contemporary leftist attribution of capitalist oppression and patriarchal oppression to the same reactionary source, but a closer look reveals the truth, or perhaps partial truth, of the above assertion by Lenin. Lenin is suggesting that capitalist production would pay little regard to pre-capitalist social arrangements like the patriarchical family. After all Lenin was being true to doctrinaire Historical Materialism, and such social institutions are mere superstructural epiphenomena that arise out of the economic structure of society. Pre-capitalistic social arrangements, like the patriarchical family, are impediments to the development of capitalism because it removes two classes of persons from the potential labor pool, women and children. The result is a lower supply of commodified labor available to meet the demands of the labor market, and, as anyone with an elementary understanding of market forces knows, a scarcity of supply raises the cost of a commodity including commodified labor.

Another reason that such an argument seems so counterintuitive to the modern progressive is because measures to limit the exploitation of women's and children's labor were seem as progressive regulatory measures in the West. Such measures did alleviate the wanton economic exploitation of women and children as laborers, but they also reinforced the constructed gender and age roles of the pre-capitalistic patriarchical family order. In fact Lenin states explicitly, "drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive...endeavours to ban completely the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchical manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary..."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that the "traditional family" will become obsolete once a communist social structure had abolished capitalism. Let us quickly run through the dialectical progression of such a claim. As Lenin suggests, the capitalist mode of production cares little for the gender or age of the labor commodity it expropriates in order to produce (not quite true as I will explain later) so long as it is able to perform the necessary work at the lowest possible cost. This fact is in direct contradiction with the patriarchical ordering of the family, which favors men prior to women and the eldest prior to the youngest. So for the proletariat the traditional family is destroyed under a capitalist regime that has laid open the unreality of the old familial constructions. Dialectically this is the emergence of a synthesis within the proletariat class but a contradiction against the bourgeoisie, which retains something akin to the patriarchical family because the mode of production does not require their commodification. Under a communist order the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is synthesized into a new family structure whose seeds were borne in the latter stages of capitalism, as was illustrated by the breakdown of the proletariat family. Hopefully that was clear, the patriarchical family as a pre-capitalist social "superstructure" will be reordered partially under capitalism and then the dialectic will complete its movement when it arrives at communism and patriarchy has been thoroughly crushed.

Why has this not begun to be realized as we advance in late capitalism? Well, arguably in the lower strata of society the traditional family has almost completely broken down, and it is in the ideology of the middle class where it still "lives" if you wish. Still there is more to be said. Capitalist economic exploitation has found a willing partner in patriarchical gender and age exploitation. Capitalist production and the surplus value capital appropriates from exploited labor has an additional goal besides expanding the labor pool, which globally lowers the value of the labor commodity. In addition, capitalism seeks on an individual basis, in each individual relationship between owner and laborer, to keep the costs of that specific labor commodity down. The two goals are advanced by working in and through the oppressive relationships of patriarchy. Instead of destroying the patriarchical family order, it is most profitable to move such an oppressive set of relations into the economic realm. By doing so you have not just expanded the labor pool, but you have created a sub-class within the working class whose labor value is artificially held down by ideology. Furthermore, by creating a lower wage sub-class within the class of wage laborers you have created competition within the working class itself where the male sub-class feels threatened in a two-fold manner: 1) by the availability of an able sub-class of labor that demands a lower wages and creates a higher surplus value for capital, and 2) by reducing the substantial reality of patriarchy and maintaining its ideological form, you create a threat to the social superiority of men in their gender relations with women.

Capitalism relies on peripheries to keep the cost of labor down, and these peripheries need not always be national or geographical. Similar borders are drawn all over the social landscape of a given society creating a periphery out of race, gender, age, nationality, religion, etc... By lumping all these different forms of oppression under the monolithic Marxist paradigm of economic oppression socialists have helped perpetuate these other forms of oppression, and they have failed to educate the working class as to how such biases and power relations are counter to their long-term interest in economic emancipation. Marx's dialectic is like a bird's eye view of the societal landscape where only the largest items stand out. Upon closer inspection there are countless micro-dialectics that are working within and through the economic materialistic dialectic whose sum total has been powerful enough to fully thwart the march toward a rupture in the capitalist structure.

To better illustrate we return to the example of patriarchy in the working class of a capitalist society. By taking the ideological form of patriarchy and largely sapping it of its substance the capitalist class was able to set the working class against itself and thus prevent the unity that Marx foresaw as being the inevitable result of large-scale and socialized production. Within the working class you now have the patriarchical and short-term economic-corporate interests of the male sub-class set against the interests of women to go beyond patriarchy and to advance their short-term economic corporate interests. You have a micro-dialectic that must be overcome in order to achieve and sense of unity between men and women members of the working class, and this is just one of many micro-dialectics that result from the opportunistic exploitation by the capitalist structure of pre-capitalist ideologies to artificially deflate the value of labor.

Another example is the racial ideology that accompanied the pre-capitalist slave economy in the American South. It is evident to anyone who takes even the most cursory glance that any factuality of such an ideology has been completely disproven. What I mean is, regardless of the conceptual proclamations of race ideology, it is clear that racial orderings are artificial. Again though, there is an artificial deflation of the value of labor performed by racial minorities which creates another sub-class to compete for wages within the working class, and this sub-class cuts across, or intersects, with the aforementioned gender sub-class. You are provide white men and women with the tension of reinforcing the formal ideological aspect of racial oppression while ameliorating its substantive component; so they feel the ingrained ideological drive to maintain racial superiority in society while pursuing their short-term economic interests in the relations of production. These examples can be recounted ad infinitum I fear, which suggests that there are an incalculable number of tensions within the working class, which is an international class, before such a group is united enough for a thorough and final move toward socialism. Until these tensions are overcome they will be ready-made obstacles to the success of any socialist society.

I suggest that a strategic approach should place an immediate priority on confronting these social manifestations of oppression before moving on to the larger issue of economic oppression and not the other way around. Lenin was so saturated in Marxist dogma that he could not see that he had stumbled on evidence that challenged the traditional "structure-superstructure" formulation. Capitalism was programmed from the outset to maintain aspects of pre-capitalist social arrangements when such arrangements helped to produce a greater surplus value. It has been an added benefit to the maintenance of capitalism that these social arrangements have also placed numerous difficult, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles in the path of the emancipation of the working class. In effect, capitalism has created a bigoted Frankenstein out of the working class that perpetuates its own domination.

Later Heidegger

Only a god can save us.

--Martin Heidegger, 1966.

Why am I so drawn to the philosophies of old men, or more particulary the philosophies of brilliant young men grown old? Does the ever increasing certainty of death add weight to a man's words? I don't think so, we never feel death is near, we cannot ever really grasp it. It never really happens. I think instead that I am drawn to the sense of resignation, or more properly perhaps the endurance, demonstrated in old age. In any case, add these words to the long list of slightly disheartening utterances from great men grown old. (For even more read the late plays of Shakespeare, especially The Tempest: "We are the stuff that dreams are made of.")

Huh?

Continuing the new trend of short posts:

Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis.

--Heidegger, Being and Time
Just a taste of the sentences that you must continually try to get your head around while reading Being and Time. Surely a masterpiece of philosophy, but one that requires almost a new way of thinking in order to understand it.

The Middle American Myth

"People have always been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises."
V.I. Lenin