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Category Archives: Logic

Circular Reasoning

Leave a comment Posted by on May 13, 2009

I’ve just been reading a work that makes the very common argument that Hegel begins the Science of Logic with the category of Being because that category is the most abstract and free of determination possible – qualities that apparently assure us that Hegel isn’t presupposing any more than he absolutely has to, at the outset of his system. This interpretation is presented as though Hegel’s process was a sort of modified Cartesian method where, instead of trying to cast everything into doubt, he tries to come up with an indubitable abstraction – as though the starting point is chosen because, after trying to force himself to think of concepts increasingly free from concrete determination, he finally reaches a point where this process of abstraction can continue no further and, on this bedrock, constructs his system. For some reason, I always find this interpretation very irritating. Perhaps because Hegel says quite expressly that this is not what he is doing…

Specifically, he responds to hypothetical critics who might find the starting point – or, indeed, the subsequent exposition of the categories – to be arbitrary. Yes, Hegel responds: it looks arbitrary at first. This is because the non-arbitrariness of the categories and their relations cannot be demonstrated, other than through the presentation of the system as a whole. The justification for the starting point and for the order of exposition is not that, by starting with something as free of determinations as possible, we give ourselves the most solid possible anchor from which to derive the other categories – this would be a linear model of derivation, one that would rely on precisely the sort of exceptionalised, external starting point that, in Hegel’s view, would toss the starting point of the system outside the system.

For Hegel, this kind of move, when trying to construct a science of logic, is tantamount to claiming that the starting point of logic is illogical and that the ground of reason is irrational. Hegel knows no greater horror. The whole point of the system is to avoid precisely this problem. Everything must be in its place. Everything. Even the starting point. Especially the starting point. It is therefore of pivotal importance, not simply that the other categories in the system should be derivable from the starting point, but that the starting point should be derivable from the presentation of all of the other categories in the system.

What justifies the starting point and the subsequent order of exposition of the categories is therefore not some external criterion – not even the criterion that the starting category be as abstract as possible so as to smuggle as few assumptions as possible into the system – but rather the immanent criterion that the relations between the categories become visible only if the categories are positioned relative to one another in this exact way. As such, the “justification” can’t be evident at the start – or, indeed, at any point until the work has been presented in full. In Hegel’s inimitable formulation:

But to want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to demand that it be considered outside the science; outside the science this cannot be accomplished, at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner is alone here in place.

The notion that the starting point of the Logic is justified because it is the most abstract category thinkable to us, is precisely such an external justification. It offers a rationale outside the science. This is not sufficient for Hegel’s goal of justifying his categories in a “scientific manner”.

Reaching for terminology to describe his method, Hegel argues that the system must be conceived, not as a linear derivation of categories from an a priori foundational category, but rather as a circle, whose starting point is therefore encompassed within its own trajectory, implicated by all the other moments of the system, and derivable from those other moments:

Through this progress, then, the beginning loses the one-sidedness which attaches to it as something simply immediate and abstract; it becomes something mediated, and hence the line of the scientific advance becomes a circle. It also follows that because that which forms the beginning is still undeveloped, devoid of content, it is not truly known in the beginning; it is the science of logic in its whole compass which first constitutes the completed knowledge of it with its developed content and first truly grounds that knowledge.

Perhaps a better contemporary image for Hegel’s circle would be of a hologram – where it becomes possible to reconstruct an image of the original object from the recorded light scattered from its surface… Regardless, Hegel’s image of the circular character of the system is intended to map out an alternative to systems that rely on an exceptionalised starting point that is derived in some qualitatively different manner from the other components within the system.

Certainly this seems to be what Marx takes from the Logic in constructing the order of presentation in Capital – as he argues to Kugelmann:

even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science.

That Marx’s reference to “science” here is meant in a Hegelian inflection becomes clear a few sentences on (perhaps I shouldn’t have used the term “inimitable” in relation to Hegel above…):

Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself. So, if one wanted to ‘explain’ from the outset all phenomena that apparently contradict the law, one would have to provide the science before the science. It is precisely Ricardo’s mistake that in his first chapter, on value, all sorts of categories that still have to be arrived at are assumed as given, in order to prove their harmony with the law of value.

I have to admire Marx’s wild optimism here: yes – precisely what Capital needs is less discussion of value, since the need for this category is simply so obvious from the rest of the work… Marx may have been right that the demands that he “prove” the category of value are misplaced – but a bit of Hegelian stage whispering to clarify his method would not have been amiss, whether it breaks with the immanent presentation of his categories or not…

I’ve said more on this dimension of Hegel’s (and Marx’s) method in the thesis – apologies for the gestural repetition here – just venting in order to clear the system for more reading…

Abstraction, Capital v.1, Logic, Logic of Science, Self-Reflexivity

Thesis Workshop: What a Piece of Work Is Man

2 Comments Posted by on February 7, 2009

Okay. Last substantive chapter of the thesis. This chapter was very difficult to write. I think it was worth the difficulty. But perhaps that’s just relief at finishing the argument…

This chapter outlines the derivation of the category of labour-power, explores how this derivation fundamentally alters our sense of the opening categories, and generally tries to pull everything together. I’m queueing this piece for publication several days before it will appear on the blog, so I’m not certain whether there will be an introduction and conclusion to be posted hot on the heels of this chapter, or whether this will be it for a while. I have considered possibly just ending the thesis with this chapter, as anything that follows will likely be a bit more prosaic than the ground this chapter covers, ensuring the thesis ends, so to speak, on a whimper. I suspect, though, that I need a more formal conclusion just to get a quick outline of the major points all in one place… So: a concluding chapter probably still to come, and an introductory chapter definitely still to come (and, since we all know the beginning can’t really be fully grasped until it can be shown to be the necessary starting point of the system derived from it, it’s surely fitting that what should have been first in the order of presentation, will instead appear last… ;-P).

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]
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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Thesis, Transformation

Thesis Workshop: Crossed Circuits

1 Comment Posted by on February 5, 2009

After this chapter, readers will finally be able to make their escape from the deconstructive thicket that is the third chapter of Capital. Before we part ways with this chapter, though, Marx engages in some extremely clever moves to begin to open a wedge through which he will finally drive the category of capital in the following chapter. Here he begins to make the case that commodity circulation allows – and, in some cases, necessitates – exchanges that are not driven by the need to meet material needs, but rather by the need to make money. This may sound like an obvious point, but Marx needs to make it in a way that makes clear that this is not a possibility that arises extrinsically to commodity production, as some sort of corruption of a more fundamental process, but rather is implied by the very nature of the process itself. This chapter is also, by the way, where I most directly treat the issue of crisis – a topic I can approach only in an extremely preliminary way in the thesis, since I am focussing only on the opening chapters of Capital

So one last dance with chapter 3 – and then we get to meet the Geist!

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]
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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation, Writing

Thesis Workshop: Forms of Motion

1 Comment Posted by on February 4, 2009

Another thesis chapter in the series that focusses on Capital‘s third chapter. This chapter spends quite a lot of time using the new material Marx is providing to take a much closer look at the opening categories of value and abstract labour. It also explores the implications of some brief comments Marx makes about “real contradictions”. These comments are methodologically quite important: they indicate that, when Marx unfolds – as he continues to do throughout Capital – new forms whose implications “contradict” those of earlier forms, he does not understand the new stage of his analysis to have superseded the earlier analysis. To state it crudely: like Hegel, Marx rejects the notion that, when two things contradict, one of those things must be wrong. Pointing to contradictions, however, can be useful as a means of establishing the boundedness and limitations of particular interpretations of social experience – a point that is stated more clearly below than I can do so in brief here. Marx’s early statements about contradiction also begin to make clear that the existence of “social contradictions” does not, by itself, point beyond the existing form of social life – although such contradictions can make it easier to recognise the contingency and artificiality of this form of social life in specific ways. Much more on this below, plus – as always – a systematic move through the underbrush of the text.

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]

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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Thesis, Transformation

Thesis Workshop: How Does Essence Appear?

3 Comments Posted by on February 3, 2009

I’m going to be in transit for the next couple of days, with very limited net access, and so won’t be able to respond to comments or mails. This and the next couple of thesis chapter posts have been queued, so if the blog does its job, they’ll keep trundling their way into the world in my absence.

This chapter is part of a set of three that spends a possibly inordinate amount of time unpacking the implications of the complex third chapter of Capital, in which Marx undertakes an extensive deconstructive analysis of money – exploring all the various ways in which this “single” object takes on different roles, and as a result comes to carry radically different meanings, implications and consequences for practice. This chapter is perhaps the single best example of how Marx consistently under-signposts what he is trying to achieve when he makes specific argumentative moves. There is an enormous amount of work being done in Capital‘s third chapter – something you might guess by the sheer length of the thing, but which can be difficult to tell when actually reading the text, because Marx relentlessly refuses to pause and draw out the implications on his own. Often, he’ll point out several chapters later that he sees himself to have made a specific point in an earlier chapter; he rarely emphasises the significance of his argumentative moves at the time, for reasons I’ve explained in chapter 4 of the thesis. Understanding the reasons, however, doesn’t make the practice less frustrating… This is why a single chapter of Capital can blow out into three chapters of my thesis: I provide the signposts Marx should have, but didn’t…

This thesis chapter, as you would guess from the title, focusses a lot of its time and energy on Marx’s use of Hegel’s vocabulary of essence and appearance. The idealist loan words and style of expression often manage to conceal the fact that Marx means pretty much the exact opposite of what the text intuitively seems to be saying: when Marx talks about an essence (like value) expressing itself in a form of appearance (like price), this sounds as if value is an external causal factor, driving the play of appearances. What Marx means is very different: essences are essences of their forms of appearance – it is the play of appearance that constitutes an essence as an immanent pattern that emerges in the transformation of appearances over time. Honest. Trust me. Scout’s honour.

All this – and a lot of textual interpretation – below the fold…

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]

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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Thesis

Thesis Workshop: With What Must a Science Begin?

1 Comment Posted by on February 1, 2009

Another chapter whose contents may seem largely familiar to regular readers: this chapter deals with Marx’s relationship to Hegel’s Logic, and then, since this chapter is already more or less untethered from the text, it offers a number of other clarifications of aspects of Marx’s method. The chapter tosses around the term “real abstraction” quite often, as though readers will already know what I mean by this term. Folks who have hung around here for a while may well have a sense of this, but the reason I’m being so casual with the term in this chapter is because there is a lengthy discussion of this topic in the opening chapter of the thesis – the chapter I haven’t yet published to the blog, because I have to rethink it now that I know what the thesis will actually say… Hopefully it will be clear enough what I’m about without that information…

I’ve been meaning to mention, for those who haven’t yet seen them, that Limited, Inc. has also been posting a series on Marx recently – among other things, riffing on anthropological themes and – among my favourite topics when thinking about Marx – vulgarity. Where my work on Marx tends to inch its snail’s path through the micro-ecology of the text, Roger’s tends to explode small passages of text, chasing the embers to see where they land, examining what they set alight and, wherever possible, fanning the flames. Something about it reminds me of Marx’s comment from the Grundrisse:

…if we did not find concealed within society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic. (159)

It’s good stuff: go have a look.

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]

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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Thesis

Thesis Workshop: When Is It Safe to Go on Reading Capital?

7 Comments Posted by on January 30, 2009

I haven’t finished the chapter that will become the proper introduction to the thesis – in part because I have a cold (been fighting it off for weeks – my body obviously figured that, since I have finished my major writing, now must be a good time… ;-P). Below the fold, though, is the first substantive chapter. For those who have followed earlier drafts, this is a substantial rewrite of the first part of the old opening chapter (which I gather from various bits of feedback was too long, and so has now been split into two shorter chapters). It’s considerably clearer about the overarching stakes of the argument than the old version, but it’s still not as “new” as most of the thesis chapters may seem to regular readers here.

I keep considering fleshing out the discussion of Hegel’s Phenomenology – I have good draft material that does this, which I could technically splice in. I keep not including it, however, because the finer points of Hegel’s argument aren’t really important to the argument I’m making in the thesis. So I alternate between wincing because I can explain Hegel’s position much more adequately, and reminding myself that the thesis isn’t about doing justice to Hegel’s work, but only needs to talk about the much more limited topic of how Marx uses Hegel…

Since I haven’t put up a proper introduction, I should provide the context that the thesis focusses on a very close reading of the first six chapters of Capital, concentrating on how Marx effects the shift from the discussion of commodity circulation to the introduction of the category of labour-power. The guiding questions are how we should understand the analysis of “simple commodity circulation” in relation to the argument being made by Capital as a whole – and how the introduction of the category of labour-power transforms rather completely what these early chapters of the text seemed to be attempting to say. These quite specific questions, which provide the narrative thread that holds the thesis together, provide a sort of scaffolding for analysing the presentational and analytical strategy in Capital as a whole, interpreting how Marx understands the standpoint of critique in his text, and unfolding from Capital the nucleus of a quite sophisticated metatheory that casts Marx as offering a fundamentally deflationary, practice-theoretic account of phenomena that are usually explained in a far more mystical way. I’ll try to say all this much better in the proper introduction – just wanted to give some sense of what the thesis is trying to do.

One further idiosyncracy: I deal with the literature almost exclusively in footnotes – a habit I seemed to have picked up during my previous theses. The text has a very complex and cumulative argument to make, and one which runs across a great many different literatures: past experience has shown that it is incredibly distracting for readers when I interrupt the flow of the main argument to go chasing how specific topics have been dealt with by other authors. This strategy causes problems, however, when I reproduce chapters on the blog, since I don’t have a good system for managing footnotes here. When I have this thing properly completed, I’ll put up a PDF that includes the full text. Until then, unfortunately, you are just stuck with my argument, stripped of community context…

I don’t want to flood the blog with thesis chapters, so this post will be the first in a series – I’ll try to put up new chapters every few days or so, as I have time to handle the html. I should emphasise that these are still drafts – lots of cleanup left to do. But they are considerably less drafty than earlier posts and – for those who have followed as I’ve tried to work out pieces of this argument in dribs and drabs on the blog over the past 18 months – should be easier to follow and much more systematic than anything you’ve so far seen.

[Note: To read the thesis chapters in order, check the full list under the Thesis Tab. I will update the list as I add chapters, and also eventually publish the PDF of the entire thesis when I submit.]

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Abstraction, Capital v.1, Critical Theory, Drafts, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Thesis, Transformation

Abolishing the Quant/Qual (and Other) Distinctions

2 Comments Posted by on August 18, 2008

So today was the formal logic lecture in our newly designed social research course. In the spirit of the best pedagogical traditions we established in our quantitative methods course last year, my esteemed colleague L Magee set out to instil in our students the virtues of rigour and precision with a thorough discussion of the connections between logical operators, variable types, and research methods. For reasons that quite elude me, the normally intrepid LM seemed however to stumble when it came to explaining to our students the culminating point of one of his slides, which confidently informed:

Interval – constant intervals between values.

Consider temperature:

Arbitrary starting point

But degrees are constant and fixed units

Values are additive: 10 degrees + 10 degrees = 4 days

I’m not clear what the problem with this conclusion is meant to be? Why else were you recommending Lewis Carroll during this lecture, were it not to equip our students to parse conclusions such as this?

Logic, Overheard, Professional Life, Teaching

Scratchpad: Chapter 1 – The Play’s the Thing

2 Comments Posted by on June 10, 2008

Still effectively offline – apologies again for not being able to respond to comments. Below the fold is the first chapter of the (rather completely different) new revision of the thesis. Although the early sections walk some of the same ground as the recent Goldsmiths talk, there’s a great deal more here than I could fit in there, as well as substantial revisions to incorporate the fantastic suggestions and feedback I received there and at the earlier conference at John Cabot. John – if you’re reading – I had your questions in mind when writing this, as well: although it’s probably a bit much to ask you to read such a long piece, just to get to the sections where I answer what you’ve asked, the payoff is that I almost certainly say things more clearly and more systematically here than I would in the comments – particularly now, with my very limited online time.

And a special thanks to Praxis, who has read and/or listened to multiple iterations of every thought that has made its way into this draft. Read more of this post

Abstraction, Contradiction, Critical Theory, Empiricism, Fetish, Logic, Materialism, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Religion, Self-Reflexivity, Transformation

Science of Logic Reading Group: Essential Hegel

Leave a comment Posted by on March 17, 2008

Just a very quick note to folks following both the in-person and the online versions of the Science of Logic reading group. First, so that I won’t perpetually ping the good folks who have contributed to the online group, every time I do an organisational post like this one, I’ve finally created a page where all the contributions to the group are archived. On the organisational posts, I’ll profile anything new – this week, for example, folks might want to wander over to Monagyric, and take a look at Tom Bunyard’s “The ‘Ontologisation of the Ontical’ – Hegel’s ‘Sleight of Hand’ at the Opening of the Logic”, which discusses Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Plato’s Parmenides, and the opening to the Logic – arguing that Adorno might have misrepresented what Hegel is attempting to achieve, and threading a different path through Hegel’s opening gambit.

Second, for the in-person folks: this is a good week to catch up a bit. Those of us who are reading the whole Science of Logic will be trundling through everything up to the end of Book One – meaning that we finally reach the transition from Being to Essence. This transition provides a nice opportunity for those who are dipping in more selectively: jump in at Chapter 3: The Becoming of Essence (how can you possibly resist a chapter with a section on “Absolute Indifference”?) – the chapter isn’t long (and, if needed, you can skip the remark on Centripetal and Centrifugal Force to make it even shorter), but will give a feel for the movement of the text as Hegel effects this major transition. Then, if you can bear with just a little more reading, peek into the very beginning of Book Two, and read the opening paragraphs prior to Chapter One: Illusory Being.

Logic, Reading Group

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