Monday, October 8, 2012
Chávez Wins New Term in Venezuela, Holding Off Surge by Opposition
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/world/americas/venezuela-presidential-election.html?pagewanted=all
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez, long a fiery foe of
Washington, won re-election on Sunday, facing down cancer and the strongest
electoral challenge of his nearly 14 years in office and gaining a new mandate
to deepen his socialist revolution.
Though his margin of victory was much narrower than in past
elections, he still won handily. With 90 percent of the votes tallied, Mr.
Chávez received 54 percent, to 45 percent for his opponent, Henrique Capriles
Radonski, the national election council said. Fireworks erupted in Caracas
after the news, and Chávez supporters celebrated in the streets.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. local time, Mr. Chávez stepped out
onto the balcony of the presidential palace in Caracas and waved to a sea of
jubilant supporters. “My words of recognition go out from here to all who voted
against us, a recognition for their democratic temperament,” he said. A former
soldier, he called the election a “perfect battle.”
Still, after a spirited campaign, the polarizing Mr. Chávez
finds himself governing a changed country. He is an ailing and politically
weakened winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more
confident as the voting neared, and held out hope that an upset victory was
within reach.
Mr. Chávez has said that he would move forward even more
aggressively to create his version of socialism in Venezuela in a new six-year
term, although his pledges were short on specifics.
His health, though, remains a question mark. He has
undergone several rounds of treatment for cancer in the last 15 months, but has
refused to make public essential details of his illness. If he overcomes the
disease and serves out his new term to its end in 2019, he will have been in
power for two full decades.
Toward the end of the campaign, facing pressure from Mr.
Capriles, he pledged to make his government more efficient and to pay more
attention to the quality of government programs like education. He even made
appeals for the middle class and the opposition to join in his revolution.
But Mr. Chávez spent much of the year insulting and trying
to provoke Mr. Capriles and his followers. And on Sunday night, he had to face
the fact that the people he taunted as squalid good-for-nothings, little
Yankees and fascists, turned out to be nearly half the electorate.
As the opposition’s momentum grew, Mr. Chávez’s insults
seemed to lose their sting. By the end of the campaign, young people in Caracas
were wearing colorful T-shirts that said “majunche” or good-for-nothing, Mr.
Chávez’s favorite taunt.
Mr. Capriles was subdued on Sunday night, congratulating Mr.
Chávez and saying he hoped the president would see the result as “the
expression today of a country with two visions, and to be president means
working to solve the problems of all Venezuelans.”
He appeared poised to carry on his fight in the elections
for state governors in December. “You should all feel proud, do not feel
defeated,” he told supporters.
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a
research institute in Washington, called the presidential election “a
fundamental turning point.” He said Mr. Chávez was “going to have to deal with
a very different society than he dealt with in his last term, a society that’s
awakened and more organized and more confident.”
Even so, the opposition is a fragile coalition with a
history of destructive infighting, especially after an election defeat. Mr.
Capriles will have to keep this fractious amalgam of parties from the left,
right and center together in order to take advantage of the new ground they
have gained.
“The opposition has more power, it feels more support,” said
Elsi Fernandes, a schoolteacher, who voted for Mr. Capriles on Sunday morning
in Catia, a poor neighborhood in Caracas. “The difference is that we’re not
going to stay with our arms crossed.”
The turnout was more than 80 percent, the highest in
decades, the election council said. People stood in line for hours, although
the voting appeared in most cases to run smoothly.
Venezuela uses a touch-screen electronic voting system, and
voters are identified with a digital thumbprint reader; technical problems at
some polling places caused long delays and, in some, a resort to backup paper
ballots. Polling places were told to keep working until everyone in line at
closing time had a chance to vote.
Venezuela is mired in problems, including out-of-control
violent crime, crumbling roads and bridges, and power blackouts that regularly
plague much of the country outside the capital. Oil production, the country’s
mainstay, has plateaued in recent years, and other exports have not picked up
the slack. The overall economy grew this year, largely because of a huge
pre-election boost in government spending, but clouds loom. A devaluation of
the Venezuelan currency, the bolívar, is widely seen as inevitable, and
inflation remains stubbornly high.
Mr. Chávez has trumpeted his programs to help the poor, and
has pointed to a sharp reduction in the number of people living in poverty. But
he has governed during a phenomenal rise in oil prices, which have soared from
$10 in 1998, the year before he took office, to more than $100 in recent years
and the high $80s now, pouring huge amounts of revenue into Venezuela. Mr.
Capriles, who has served as a legislator, mayor and governor, campaigned almost
nonstop, seeking to contrast his energetic style with the reduced schedule of
Mr. Chávez, who received a diagnosis of cancer in 2011.
Mr. Chávez has kept most details of his condition secret,
refusing to say exactly what kind of cancer he has or where in his body it is.
He received chemotherapy last summer after an operation to remove a tumor, but
the cancer returned and he had another operation in February, followed by
radiation therapy. The operations and treatments were performed in Cuba, taking
Mr. Chávez out of Venezuela for extended periods.
His health, and whether he was well enough to serve a new
six-year term, always loomed over the campaign, but it receded as an issue as
Mr. Chávez gradually increased his public appearances. Still, he never threw himself
into campaigning at the frenzied pace of Mr. Capriles.
Opposition to Mr. Chávez has long been divided and easily
manipulated by Mr. Chávez, a master politician who kept his rivals off balance.
Mr. Capriles changed that. He crisscrossed the country, campaigning in places
long considered bastions of support for Mr. Chávez, including urban slums and
poor rural areas. He told voters that he was the future and Mr. Chávez the
past.
Mr. Chávez dismissed Mr. Capriles as an unworthy opponent,
accusing him of lying about wanting to continue Mr. Chávez’s social programs.
He called Mr. Capriles a right-wing oligarch in disguise who sought to bring
back the bad old days of rule by the rich. In Catia, María Elena Severine, 59,
who works as a cleaner in a bank, said that Mr. Chávez was still as fresh a
candidate as when he first ran in 1998. She lives in a rental apartment but
hopes someday to be given a new home government-built home.
“I like my president,” she said. “He is the revolution. He
is change.”
Capitalism: How the Left Lost the Argument
by Slavoj Žižek
One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious,
unregulated capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental
nature of the global economy.
One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of
anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought
on by the system's worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If
anything, we are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of
capitalism: Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us
of companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who continue
to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer money, and
sweatshops where children work overtime.
Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a
larger, more systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The
goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting excesses
and to extend democratic control of the economy through the pressure of more
media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police
investigations. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon
which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most
radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum
dare not touch.
It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist
expectations that the ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the
awakening from a dream -- turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year
2011 was indeed one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical
emancipatory politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new
proof of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The
enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious
fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the police
cleansing of New York's Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing in disguise.
It's the same story around the world: Nepal's Maoists seem outmaneuvered by the
reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela's "Bolivarian" experiment is
regressing further and further into caudillo-run populism; and even the
most hopeful sign, Greece's anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the
electoral defeat of the leftist Syriza party.
It now seems that the primary political effect of the
economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism,
more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening
divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of
their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the
first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return
to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not
put into doubt.
They are even more violently asserted.
Could we in fact be seeing the conditions for the further
radicalization of capitalism? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once told me
that, if there is a person alive to whom they will build monuments 100 years
from now, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who did more than anyone
else to promote and implement the marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism
-- an arrangement he euphemistically referred to as "Asian values."
The virus of this authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around
the globe, nowhere more so than China.
Faced with today's explosion of capitalism in China,
analysts often ask when political democracy as the "natural"
political accompaniment of capitalism will enforce itself. But what if the
promised democratization never arrives? What if China's authoritarian
capitalism is not a stop on the road to further democratization, but the end
state toward which the rest of the world is headed?
Leon Trotsky once characterized tsarist Russia as "the
vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock
market," but the description applies even better to today's China. In the
Chinese iteration, the combination may prove to be a more stable one than the
democratic capitalist model we have come to see as natural.
The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not
capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and
pernicious form, but democracy -- not to mention the left, whose inability to
offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It
was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as
if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure
of capitalism is more capitalism.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
yet another facile review of a Žižek book
The unbearable lightness of Slavoj Žižek’s communism
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - review.
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 142pp, £7.99
Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 142pp, £7.99
Marxism has always been, since the first collaborations of
Marx and Engels, a thoroughgoing critique of capitalist society from the
standpoint of a far less developed concept of socialism or communism. In this
sense, its premise is a utopian conclusion never yet demonstrated – namely,
that there can be a better form of modern society, based on a different regime
of property, than one dominated by the accumulation of private capital. No one
can in fairness require a detailed picture of this future condition but the
vision has to enjoy some minimum plausibility. Otherwise, only a description of
capitalism can be offered and some suggestions for reform but no fundamental
critique.
Since the 1970s – and especially since 1991 – perhaps the
greatest challenge for Marxism has been to keep alive the belief in the
possibility of a superior future society. The belief was trampled almost to
extinction by miscarried Third World revolutions, capitalist transformation in
China, the capitulations of European socialist parties, Soviet collapse and the
ostensible triumph of liberal capitalism.
The scepticism that replaced it was twofold. The would-be
revolutionary left seemed to possess neither a serious strategy for the
conquest of power nor a programme to implement, should power be won. In this
context, the maximalism of the left at its high-water marks could only ebb into
a kind of survivalist minimalism. The pith of minimalism lay in the
alter-globalisation slogan: “Another world is possible.” Its most eloquent
expression may have been Fredric Jameson’s book on Utopia, Archaeologies
of the Future (2005), which sought to preserve the concept of a break with
capitalism in conditions under which neither the bridge across the chasm nor
the institutions lying on the other side could be imagined.
These are the reduced circumstances in which the Slovenian
philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been, for at least the past dozen years or so, the
world’s best-known Marxist thinker. With graphomaniacal productivity and
postmodern range, Žižek writes mainly about contemporary ideology and culture
in the broad sense that covers everything from an animated Hollywood
blockbuster such as Kung Fu Panda to the forbidding ontology of Alain
Badiou. Corrugated with dialectical reversals and seeming at times to consist
exclusively of digressions, Žižek’s writing is often described, with some
justice, as elusive. Even so, his basic analysis of the end-of-history ideology
that swept the world after 1991 has been simple enough.
Žižek ventriloquised the mindset in First as Tragedy,
Then as Farce (2009), one of his many entertaining, funny and shamelessly
repetitive books: “Capitalism is a system which has no philosophical
pretensions . . . The only thing it says is: ‘Well, this functions.’ And if
people want to live better, it is preferable to use this mechanism, because it
functions.” As he went on to argue in his own voice, “The very notion of
capitalism as a neutral social mechanism is ideology (even utopian ideology) at
its purest.” In fact, neoliberal “post-ideology” resembled nothing so much as a
caricature of Marxist historical determinism. It merely substituted liberal
capitalism for communism in claiming that here we beheld the final form of
human society, as legitimated by science – in this case, sociobiology and
neoclassical economics – and as certified on the proving ground of history.
Such a view was often declared after the cold war in a
triumphalist spirit. Lately, with the outbreak, still uncontained, of the worst
economic crisis since the 1930s, it has persisted in a more resigned key. In
his latest book, Žižek quotes David Simon, creator, in the television epic The
Wire, of as damning a portrait of class-riven America as any Marxist could wish
for: “I accept that [capitalism] is the only viable way to generate wealth on a
wide scale.”
Žižek not only rejects this nearly unanimous conclusion but
discerns in unexpected places – whether in the chauvinist eruptions of the
political right or the low-grade commercial output of US cinema – the abiding
wish, however disfigured and denied, for a “radical emancipatory politics”. In
recent years, Žižek’s name for such a politics has been simply “communism”. He
has carried out this dual operation – against the supposed necessity of
capitalism, in favour of the renewed possibility of communism – by invoking a
remarkable roster of thinkers. Hegelian in philosophy, Marxist in economics,
Leninist in politics and an exponent of Jacques Lacan’s particularly baroque
strain of psychoanalysis, Žižek combined these ways of thinking at a time when
all of them separately, let alone together, had fallen into disrepute. He knew
the reaction this courted, as can be seen in a line from In Defence of
Lost Causes (2008): “What should have been dead, disposed of, thoroughly
discredited, is returning with a vengeance.” Nor did this foul-mouthed wise
guy, with an eastern bloc accent out of Central Casting, baiting his detractors
with talk of “good old Soviet times” and plucking at his black T-shirt with
Tourettic insistence, make himself much more presentable to conventional
opinion as a personality.
For many fellow leftists, it has been both a winning
performance and a vexing one. Žižek isn’t exactly to blame for his press, much
less for the failure of the media to pay similar attention to other left-wing
thinkers. Even so, his intellectual celebrity has seemed a symptom of the very
intellectual impasse he has diagnosed. A ruthless criticism of capitalism, it
turned out, could still be contemplated outside the academy – but only on condition
that it appear as the work of a jester or provocateur. In this way, the figure
of Žižek seemed to represent, encouragingly, the lifting of the post-cold-war
embargo on radical thought and at the same time, discouragingly, its
reimposition.
A similar ambiguity attaches to The Year of Dreaming
Dangerously, a brief consideration of several of the revolts and convulsions of
2011, from the Arab spring and Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre in Norway to
the London riots and Occupy Wall Street in the US. Did last year’s dreams, with
their conscious or unconscious emancipatory content, pose a danger to
contemporary capitalism or mainly to the dreamers themselves? In other words,
did they prefigure a revolutionary challenge to the system or merely
demonstrate that such an awakening remains all but inconceivable?
The book begins with Zizek’s general presentation of a
capitalism marked by “the long-term trend of shifting from profits to rents”,
“the much stronger structural role of unemployment” and the rise of a ruling
class defined more by high salaries than direct capital income. Only the last
of these features, however, is integrated into Žižek’s explanation of political
rebellion: some but not all protesters are recent graduates angry that a
college degree no longer assures them a good salary. More relevant to the rest
of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously is Žižek’s contention that
capitalism can’t be reformed. He disdains the idea, characteristic of “the
archetypal left-liberal European moron”, that we need “a new political party
that will return to the good old principles” and “regulate the banks and
control financial excesses, guarantee free universal health care and education,
etc, etc”.
He proceeds to examine last year’s rebellions not
chronologically but in order, it seems, of increasing approximation to his own
politics. For Žižek, the xenophobic Breivik’s intellectual error (not to speak
of his obvious moral catastrophe) is to misunderstand his own ideology: genuine
fidelity to Europe’s heritage of Christian universalism would seek to redeem,
for Muslim immigrants as well as all others, the “legacy of radical and
universal emancipation”.
Next, Žižek discusses the London riots. These illustrate not
an inversion of universalism but a post-ideology devoid of transpersonal
meaning; looters were, like other capitalist subjects, merely grabbing what
they could. “One danger,” Žižek writes, “is that religion will come to fill
this void and restore meaning.”
Precisely this danger has already been realised in much of the
Muslim world. Yet, in Žižek’s account, the popular overthrow of Arab
autocracies, even when couched in Islamist terms, contained a “radically
emancipatory core” to which the secular left should remain “unconditionally
faithful”.
Finally, in a chapter that revises a talk given before the
Occupy encampment in Lower Manhattan, Žižek explains something of what he
takes radical emancipation to mean. He praises Occupy for “two basic insights”.
The first is that the principal political problem is capitalism “as such, not
any particular corrupt form of it”. The second is that “the contemporary form
of representative multiparty democracy” can’t address the problem; therefore,
“Democracy has to reinvented.” My sense, as a participant in several Occupy
demonstrations and one of last’s years affiliated “working groups”, is that
disenchantment with representative democracy, at least in its American
travesty, does pervade the movement. The belief that capitalism can and should
be surmounted, on the other hand, is hardly unknown among Occupiers but doesn’t
seem general either.
Žižek sees in various popular discontents the chauvinist
misprision, the consumerist absence, the communalist disguise or the
anti-capitalist incipience of his own politics. Radical politics at its most
basic consists of two elements: strategy and programme or how to get power and
what to do with it. Žižek’s programme is straightforward: the replacement of
capitalism by communism. It’s not necessary to disclaim this ambition, however,
to see that his concept of capitalism is inadequately specified and his notion
of communism barely articulated at all.
In his brief against reformism, Žižek scorns the idea that
capitalism can be regulated “so that it serves the larger goals of global
welfare and justice . . . accepting that markets have their own demands which
should be respected”. This suggests that he has confused the existence of
markets with that of capitalism. The same goes for Žižek’s rudimentary positive
notion of communism. In Living in the End Times (2010), he describes
a future society in which the “exchange of products” would give way to “a
direct social exchange of activities”. This seems to imply that individuals
would no longer come by goods and services through market exchange but instead
in some immediate, “social” way, obviating the use of money.
Markets long predate capitalism. Capitalism is better
understood as designating a society that subordinates all processes – notably
the metabolism between humanity and nature, the production and distribution of
goods and services and the function and composition of government – to the
private accumulation of capital. As for communism, perhaps it goes without
saying, since Žižek doesn’t say so, that it means eliminating private capital
on any large scale and realising the Marxist goal of common ownership of the
means of production. Yet would productive enterprises be owned by those who
worked for them or by society at large – or somehow jointly between the two
groups? Žižek doesn’t ask, let alone answer, such questions.
Imagine, in any case, a society whose productive assets are,
in one way or another, the property, as Marx said, of “the associated
producers”. Such a society might also entail, let’s say, strict depletion
quotas for both renewable and non-renewable natural resources; welfare
guarantees not only for workers but for people too young, old or ill to work;
and democratic bodies, from the level of the enterprise and locality up to that
of the state, wherever it hadn’t withered away. These institutions might or
might not be complemented by the market. For now, however, to rule markets out
of any desirable future while saying next to nothing else about its
institutional complexion is to reproduce the intellectual blockage that Žižek
and others ascribe to a capitalism that simply can’t imagine how another kind
of society might “function”.
In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, even the “direct
exchange of activities” has vanished. Here Žižek counsels refusing capitalism
from the point of view of “a communism absconditus” without worldly
instantiation or conceptual content. He defends this featureless vision by
warning, with compact incoherence, against “the temptation of determinist
planning”: determinism refers to inevitability, while planning implies
voluntarism. Yet it requires no creed of either historical predestination or
revolutionary infallibility to hazard an idea, presumably subject to revision
both before and after the rupture with capitalism, of a better society. Whether
such a hypothesis is called communist is a secondary question; as the poet (and
revolutionary) John Milton put it in another context: “The meaning, not the
name I call.” At the moment, Žižek’s communism is a heavy name very light on
meaning.
His strategic notions, meanwhile, are various and
incompatible. At times, as in his advice to Occupy, he seems to advocate the
accomplishment of revolution through democracy, though he rejects parliamentary
democracy for a “reinvented” kind otherwise undescribed. More often he favours a
sort of Leninist quietism, according to which “those who refuse to change
anything are effectively the agents of true change”: withdrawal from the system
will speed its collapse. Yet he allows that: “A strategically well-placed,
precise, ‘moderate’ demand can trigger a global transformation.” The options at
least display Žižek’s dialectical facility. Apparent passivity can be the
highest form of activity; then again, moderation can have immoderate effects.
Despite this last caveat, Žižek is most often an enemy of
reform. However, the experience of western societies since the Second World War
suggests that the old opposition between reformism and revolution is no longer
useful. The heyday of the welfare state was accompanied, after all, by far more
worker and student radicalisation than the era of neoliberalism that followed
it, which demoralised radicals and reformers alike.
Projects of reform, in other words, have tended to nourish
hopes of revolution and vice versa. In present circumstances, the achievement
of reforms might well pave, rather than bar, the way to a new society, not to
mention relieving some of the human misery to be endured before the advent of
the communist millennium. If, on the other hand, the system were to prove
incapable of incorporating any serious reforms, this would demonstrate the need
for revolution that Žižek merely asserts.
This perspective, in which reform and revolution are allied,
can no doubt be intelligently contested. But the time is past for the left to
content itself with the blank proposition that another world is possible. What
traits, other than its otherness, would such a world possess? As liberal
capitalism saps its ecological foundations, defaults on its economic promises
and forfeits its political legitimacy, another world is becoming inevitable.
Which one do we want? And can we make this one into that one before it’s too
late?
[...]
Friday, October 5, 2012
Hegel on atomism
[…]
B. The One and the Many
This (a) One in its Own Self, standing in negative
relation to all its preceding moments, is entirely differentiated
from each of them. It is neither a Determinate Being, nor a Something, nor a
Constitution, etc. It is therefore indeterminate and unalterable. There is
Nothing in it.[39] Just
as there is no criterion to distinguish Being and Nothing despite the fact that
they are opposites, the One is also identical with its opposite, (b)
the Void. The Void can be said to be the Quality of the One.[40]
EXAMPLE: At this stage, the Logic has incorporated the
ancient atomism of Leucippus and Democritus.
Hegel actually held the ancient philosophical notion of atomism in higher
esteem than the scientific one of modern physics because the
former understood the void not just as the empty space between atoms, but as
the atom’s own inherent principle of unrest and self-movement. “Physics with
its molecules and particles suffers from the atom ... just as much as does that
theory of the State which starts from the particular will of individuals.”[41]
The original transition of Being and Nothing to Determinate
Being is again echoed here in the sphere of Being-for-Self. The One, though, as
negatively related to all aspects of Quality excepting its own Quality of being
the Void, cannot take on a Qualitative determinateness like Determinate Being
did. In its own self-differentiation, it can only relate to itself as another
self identical to it, that is, as another One. Since no new Quality has been
taken on, we cannot call this transition a Becoming, but rather a Repulsion,
i.e., the positing of (c)Many Ones.[42]
C. Repulsion and Attraction
Once these many Ones have been posited, the nature of their
relationship begins to unfold. Because it is the nature of the One to be purely self-related,
their relation to one another is in fact a non-relation, i.e., takes place
externally in the Void. From the standpoint of the one One, then, there
are no other Ones, that is, its relation to them is one of (a) Exclusion.
Seen from within the One there is only one One, but at the
same time the One only exists in the first place through its negative external
relation to other Ones, i.e., for there to be the one One
there must be Many Ones that mutually Exclude one another.[43]
EXAMPLE: The idea that the One is entirely self-subsistent
and can exist without the Many is, according to Hegel, “the supreme, most
stubborn error, which takes itself for the highest truth, manifesting in more
concrete forms as abstract freedom, pure ego and, further, as Evil.”[44]
Now that Many Ones have been posited out of their Repulsion
from the One, their original Oneness reasserts itself and their Repulsion
passes over to (b) Attraction. Attraction presupposes Repulsion: for
the Many to be Attracted by the One, they must have at first been Repulsed by
it.[45]
The One having been restored to unity by Attraction now
contains Repulsion and Attraction within it as moments. It is the Ideal One
of Infinite Being, which, for Hegel, actually makes it more “real”
than the merely Real Many. From the standpoint of this Ideal One,
both Repulsion and Attraction now presuppose each other, and, taken one step
further, each presupposes itself as mediated by the other. The One is
only a One with reference to another One―Repulsion; but this “other” One is in
itself identical to, is in fact, the original One―Attraction: each is
the moment of the other. This is the (c) Relation of Repulsion and
Attraction, which at this point is only relative.[46]
EXAMPLE: Although in Hegel’s estimation a triumph of the
explanatory power of metaphysics over the physics based on sense perception as
it was then practised, he believed that Kant’s Metaphysische
Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft [Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science] (1786) retained many of the errors committed by the
latter, foremost among these being that, since matter is given to the senses as
already formed and constituted, it is taken to be such by the mind as well. The
forces of Attraction and Repulsion that are supposed to act upon matter
to set it in motion, then, are not seen also to be the very forces though which
matter itself comes into being in the first place.[47]
Repulsion and Attraction are relative to one another insofar
as the One is taken either as the beginning or result of their mediation with
one another. Imparted with continuous, Infinite motion, the One, Repulsion and
Attraction become the sublated moments of Quantity.[48]
[…]
[…]
Atomic thinkers, according to Hegel, did not remain wedded
to the brute externality of the One and the Void. The Void was recognized as the
source of movement, which, of course, means that the One and the Void did not
have a purely external relation. Thus, the One can move only into unoccupied
space--not into space already occupied by a One.
But this "not trivial" (Science of Logic,166)
piece of information means only that the Void is the presupposition or
condition of movement--not its ground. In addition, the very idea of movement
is also presupposed in this view. That is, no logical connection between the
One and the Void is yet recognized. The profounder view is:
that the void constitutes the ground of movement. . . [I]n the
negative as such there lies the ground of becoming, of the unrest of
self-movement . . . (Science of Logic,166)
[…]
Democritus: atomic theory
The theory of Democritus and Leucippus held that everything
is composed of "atoms", which are physically, but not geometrically,
indivisible; that between atoms lies empty space; that atoms are
indestructible; have always been, and always will be, in motion; that there are
an infinite number of atoms, and kinds of atoms, which differ in shape, and
size. Of the mass of atoms, Democritus said "The more any indivisible
exceeds, the heavier it is." But his exact position on weight of atoms is
disputed.[1]
Democritus, along with Leucippus and Epicurus,
proposed the earliest views on the shapes and connectivity of atoms. They
reasoned that the solidness of the material corresponded to the shape of the
atoms involved. Thus, iron atoms are solid and strong with hooks that lock them
into a solid; water atoms are smooth and slippery; salt atoms, because of their
taste, are sharp and pointed; and air atoms are light and whirling, pervading
all other materials.[28] Democritus
was the main proponent of this view. Using analogies from our sense
experiences, he gave a picture or an image of an atom that distinguished them
from each other by their shape, their size, and the arrangement of their parts.
Moreover, connections were explained by material links in which single atoms
were supplied with attachments: some with hooks and eyes others with balls and
sockets.[29]
The Democritean atom is an inert solid (merely excluding
other bodies from its volume) that interacts with other atoms mechanically. In contrast, modern,
quantum-mechanical atoms interact via electric and magnetic force fields and
are far from inert.
Lucretius, describing atomism in his De
rerum natura gives very clear and compelling empirical arguments for
the original atomist theory. He observes that any material is subject to
irreversible decay. Through time, even hard rocks are slowly worn down by drops
of water. Things have the tendency to get mixed up: mix water with soil and you
get mud, that will usually not un-mix by itself. Wood decays. However, we see
in nature and technology that there are mechanisms to recreate 'pure' materials
like water, air, metals. The seed of an oak will grow out into an oak
tree, made of similar wood as historical oak trees, the wood of which has
already decayed.
The conclusion is that many properties of materials must
derive from something inside, that will itself never decay, something that
stores for eternity the same inherent, indivisible properties. The basic
question is: why has everything in the world not yet decayed, and how can
exactly the same materials, plants, animals be recreated again and again? One
obvious solution to explain how indivisible properties can be conveyed in a way
not easily visible to human senses, is to hypothesize the existence of 'atoms'.
These classical 'atoms' are nearer to our modern concept of 'molecule' than to
the atoms of modern science. The other big point of classical atomism is that
there must be a lot of open space between these 'atoms': the void. Lucretius
gives reasonable arguments that the void is absolutely necessary to
explain how gasses and fluids can change shape, flow, while metals can be
molded, without changing the basic material properties.
The atomistic void hypothesis was a response to the
paradoxes of Parmenides and Zeno,
the founders of metaphysical logic, who put forth difficult to answer arguments
in favor of the idea that there can be no movement. They held that any movement
would require a void—which is nothing—but a nothing cannot exist. The
Parmenidean position was "You say there 'is' a void; therefore the void is
not nothing; therefore there is not the void."
The atomists agreed that motion required a void, but simply
ignored the argument of Parmenides on the grounds that motion was an observable
fact. Therefore, they asserted, there must be a void.
[…]
Epicurean Atomism
[…]
Democritus' atomism was revived in the early Hellenistic
period, and an atomist school founded in Athens about 306, by Epicurus (341–270
BCE). The Epicureans formed more of a closed community than other schools, and
promoted a philosophy of a simple, pleasant life lived with friends. The
community included women, and some of its members raised children. The works of
the founder were revered and some of them were memorized, a practice that may
have discouraged philosophical innovation by later members of the school.
Epicurus seems to have learned of atomist doctrine through
Democritus' follower Nausiphanes. Because Epicurus made some significant
changes in atomist theory, it is often thought that his reformulation of the
physical theory is an attempt to respond to Aristotle's criticisms of
Democritus. Even more significant, however, is the increasing centrality of
ethical concerns to Epicurus' atomism, and the importance of the view that
belief in an atomist physical theory helps us live better lives.
Epicurus takes to heart a problem Democritus himself
recognized (see 2. above), which is that atomist theory threatens to undermine
itself if it removes any trust we can place in the evidence of the senses, by
claiming that colors, etc. are unreal. He notoriously said that ‘all perception
is true,’ apparently distinguishing between the causal processes which impact
our senses, all of which originate with the films of atoms sloughed off by
objects, and the judgments we make on the basis of them, which may be false. Reasoning
to truths about things that are not apparent—like the existence of
atoms—depends on the evidence of the senses, which is always true in that it
consists of impacts from actually existing films. For particular phenomena,
like meteorological events, Epicurus endorses the existence of multiple valid
explanations, acknowledging that we may have no evidence for preferring one
explanation over another.
It may be that Epicurus was less troubled by any such
epistemological uncertainties because of his emphasis on the value of atomist
theory for teaching us how to live the untroubled and tranquil life. Denying
any divine sanction for morality, and holding that the experience of pleasure
and pain are the source of all value, Epicurus thought we can learn from
atomist philosophy that pursuing natural and necessary pleasures—rather than
the misleading desires inculcated by society—will make pleasure readily
attainable. At the same time, we will avoid the pains brought on by pursuing
unnatural and unnecessary pleasures. Understanding, on the basis of the atomist
theory, that our fears of the gods and of death are groundless will free us
from our chief mental pains.
Epicurus made significant changes to atomist physical
theory, and some of these have been traced to Aristotle's criticisms of
Democritus. It seems that Democritus did not properly distinguish between the
thesis of the physical uncuttability of atoms and that of their conceptual
indivisibility: this raises a problem about how atoms can have parts, as evidenced
by their variations in shape or their ability to compose a magnitude, touching
one another in a series on different sides. Epicurus distinguished the two,
holding that uncuttable atoms did have conceptually distinct parts, but that
there was a lowest limit to these.
Epicurus' view of the motion of atoms also differs from
Democritus'. Rather than talking of a motion towards the center of a given
cosmos, possibly created by the cosmic vortex, Epicurus grants to atoms an
innate tendency to downward motion through the infinite cosmos. The downward
direction is simply the original direction of atomic fall . This may be in
response to Aristotelian criticisms that Democritus does not show why atomic
motion exists, merely saying that it is eternal and that it is perpetuated by
collisions. Moreover, although this is not attested in the surviving writings
of Epicurus, authoritative later sources attribute to him the idea that it
belongs to the nature of atoms occasionally to exhibit a slight, otherwise
uncaused swerve from their downward path. This is thought to explain why atoms
have from infinite time entered into collisions instead of falling in parallel
paths: it is also said, by Lucretius, to enter into the account of action and
responsibility.
[…]
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