• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Dialectic

In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Ben Burgis, Brendan Larvor, Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Joseph Heath, Karl Marx, nescio13, Plato, Thomas Kuhn

There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

Continue reading →

What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, anna kw, Bill Clinton, G.W.F. Hegel, Iraq, Ken Wilber, Margaret Thatcher, New York City, Nicholas Thorne, Nikki the Hegelian, Plato, Ronald Reagan, Thrasymachus, Tony Blair, war

My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

Continue reading →

Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation

28 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard McGinn, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Colledge, Friedrich Engels, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Meister Eckhart, nondualism

The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal logic taught to analytic philosophers and computer scientists. There, the principle of double negation elimination tells you ¬¬P -> P: that is, the negative of the negative is the positive, and nothing more. Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica say simply: “a proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negation.” On that account, to “negate the negation” of something just leaves you with its affirmation, the original thing you were negating: all you’re doing is being unnecessarily wordy, by saying not-not-P when you could have just said P.

But in Marx’s inspiration Hegel, there is much more to the phrase than this redundancy. A great deal of Hegel’s thought proceeds in the kind of three-part progression that introductions to Hegel often call thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (though Hegel never used those terms in that way). When thinking through a particular idea we begin in a first, unquestioned or immediate, position – a prejudice. This idea gets challenged by its opposite, the negation or negative moment. The third and final step is in some ways closer to the first than to the second, but it is crucially different: it takes up the truth of the second within it, transcends and includes it. This is negating the negation: negating here is a process, not a simple inversion or opposite but a rational movement forward. That movement is at the heart of Hegel’s thought.

I was startled recently to encounter the phrase “negation of negation” in a rather different place: the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. At first, Eckhart’s only obvious commonality with Hegel and Marx is that they are all German. But the commonalities go deeper, at least with Hegel. Hegel isn’t obviously a mystic: his logocentrism leaves little room for ineffability or mystery, and leaves him to be disdainful of mystical experience. Yet depending on how one defines mysticism, there is a mystical dimension at least in Hegel’s nondualism, where everything comes back to a spirit or mind (Geist) that is both subject and object, both God and self. And Hegel traces that nondualism directly back to Eckhart himself. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel describes Eckhart as having “a thorough grasp of the divine depth” in this passage from Eckhart’s sermons:

Continue reading →

Tenets of a new movement

19 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

gender, identity, race, Regina Rini

In the mid-2010s in the English-speaking world there arose a left-wing social and political movement that has become enormously influential, one you are likely familiar with in one form or another. The movement has gone by many names: woke(ness), social-justice warriors (SJW), Progressive Activist, The Elect, Successor Ideology, Tumblr liberalism. What is notable about these names is that all of them have been applied to the movement primarily by people outside it. The only one coined from within the movement is “woke”, and recently many members of the movement have become suspicious even of that.

The movement, in other words, has shown a remarkable reluctance to name itself. What is clear to me is that the movement is a movement, with its own new and radically revisionary paradigm of inquiry, and therefore needs a name to identify it, even though its members seem reluctant to give it one. Perhaps this could be because they believe it is not a movement, it is just common sense. If so, I think a simple reflection on what was considered common sense ten years ago, within the same societies, is sufficient to show that belief false.

But this post is not about the name or lack thereof. Rather, the purpose of this post is to talk and think about the movement’s ideas, whatever it might be called. There are significant aspects of this movement that I agree with, and at least one that I have greatly benefitted from. I sympathize with its aims considered at the broadest level. Moreover I believe that there is truth in everything; I looked for the truth in the rise of Trump, and it is at least as important to do that here.

Continue reading →

The opposite of Christianity

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Dialectic, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Alexandra James, Anton LaVey, expressive individualism, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, gender, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hebrew Bible, John Milton, music, Satan, Satanism, Twin Temple

One philosophical principle I have tried to live by is: there is truth in everything. This is a weaker version of Ken Wilber’s “Everybody is right”: many people are wrong, about many things, but they come to their wrong views for a reason. I take this principle to underlie Hegel’s dialectical method: one should transcend and include every view, which is to say preserve the truth and the reasons underlying a wrong view while leaving aside what is wrong in it.

One thing that led me to this view: as a teenager I was deeply anti-Christian. I saw in Christianity only an oppressive anti-gay, anti-feminist politics – a pillar of Reagan’s Moral Majority coalition. As an adult, though, I came to appreciate Christianity – never adopting its worldview, but coming to see in Christianity a similar kind of self-cultivation to the Buddhist one that had changed my life.

But a true Hegelian, I think, needs to find the truth not only in Christianity but also in its opposite. Hegel himself spends a great deal of time in the Phenomenology looking for truth in Enlightenment anti-clericalism alongside Christian faith itself. In an era later than Hegel’s, though, we now see anti-Christian views taken further than the Enlightenment thinkers ever dreamed: a significant number of people now openly embrace Satanism. And I think it is also important to see the truth in that.

Continue reading →

How not to read Hegel

10 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, French Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alexandre Kojève, Chris Arthur, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, slavery

A major idea in the work of G.W.F. Hegel is best translated as the dialectic of master and slave. In this parable of social existence, the relationship between social superiors and inferiors is dialectical in the sense that both learn from and develop out of the relationship with each other. But the slaves are shown to understand their condition better than their masters in a way that leads them to overthrow the masters and establish a more adequate social order. The dialectic of master and slave is an idea central to Hegel’s entire work. In turn it provided the major inspiration for the work of Karl Marx.

Every sentence in the previous paragraph is false. Continue reading →

How can traditions be commensurable?

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Dialectic, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Darwin, Christian Hendriks, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn

I closed my previous post on method by noting I am getting increasingly skeptical of MacIntyre’s view that traditions are incommensurable with each other. Christian Hendriks made an excellent comment in response:

What would it look like for philosophical traditions to be more commensurable? It has seemed obvious to me for quite some time that many philosophical traditions are incommensurable; MacIntyre is attractive to me in large part because he addresses this problem (and addresses it as a problem rather than a neutral feature). I don’t mean “it seems obvious” to stand in for an argument here, but I can’t at this moment even imagine what it would look like for traditions to be more commensurable than MacIntyre claims. Can you elaborate on that? [emphasis in original]

It is a great question and one I will probably need to think through more fully. But I’d like to take a first stab at it here. Continue reading →

Roots of a project on method

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Dialectic, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

ACLA, Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, Imre Lakatos, Momin Malik, perennialism, relativism, Thomas Kuhn, Zhuangzi

How should one do philosophy across cultures? This is not an easy question, though too many people treat it as if it is. Mid-twentieth-century answers leaned to a perennialism like Ken Wilber’s, where at some deep level all the traditions are basically the same. That perennialism does not stand up to critical scrutiny: philosophical traditions are quite different from each other, and disagree with each other (and within each other) on crucial points.

But once one acknowledges those differences, one is still left trying to figure out what to do with them. It will not do to take one’s starting standard as given and judge everything that one encounters according to it – an approach characteristic of analytic philosophers, but also taken by Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Thought. Once one does that, there is scarcely much point left to thinking cross-culturally at all, for one already knows the answers. Given human finitude and fallibility, such confidence seems more like gross arrogance. But no better is the converse approach – typically labelled relativist – which views all the different traditions as equally right. Such an approach is a logical absurdity, since very few traditions themselves hold such a view: by declaring them right it declares them wrong.

What approach then should one take? Continue reading →

Choosing a few traditions

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Augustine, autobiography, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Madhyamaka, perennialism, Śāntideva, Scott Meikle, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha)

I have long had an ambition which, I am slowly realizing, is unlikely to be fulfilled. It is an ambition suggested in this blog’s title: the idea of putting together all the major philosophical traditions of the world into a full synthesis. Ken Wilber’s work has to date been the most valiant attempt anyone has made to fulfill that ambition. But I have argued in many ways that this attempt has failed. It must fail, in the perennialist form Wilber’s work takes: to claim that all the world’s wisdom (or “religious”) traditions are basically saying the same thing. That claim makes the attempt at putting the traditions together much easier. It is also false. Continue reading →

In which I am interviewed

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Christianity, Dialectic, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Sex

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, Augustine, Ayn Rand, Canada, conservatism, Damon Linker, Disengaged Buddhism, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, Heinrich Zimmer, interview, James Doull, Ken Wilber, Martha C. Nussbaum, Nicholas Thorne, Randall Collins, skholiast (blogger)

The always interesting skholiast, whose ideas have figured strongly in quite a few of my posts here over the years, took what I consider the enormously flattering step of interviewing me about my philosophy, in both oral and written form. He is posting the interview on his blog in two parts; the first of these is up now. I think the dialogue form is helpful for philosophical thought, and if you’re interested in my ideas I would highly encourage you to read it.

← Older posts

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Paul D. Van Pelt on If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
  • Amod Lele on If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
  • Paul D. Van Pelt on If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
  • Nathan on If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
  • Amod Lele on If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha C. Nussbaum modernity mystical experience nondualism Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (15)
  • Applied Phil (355)
    • Death (44)
    • Family (53)
    • Food (20)
    • Friends (20)
    • Health (31)
    • Place (32)
    • Play (17)
    • Politics (218)
    • Sex (23)
    • Work (45)
  • Asian Thought (448)
    • Buddhism (322)
      • Early and Theravāda (136)
      • Mahāyāna (135)
      • Modernized Buddhism (97)
    • East Asia (98)
      • Confucianism (60)
      • Daoism (22)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (145)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (16)
      • Jainism (24)
      • Modern Hinduism (43)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (16)
      • Vedānta (42)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (28)
  • Indigenous American Thought (8)
  • Method (271)
    • Metaphilosophy (176)
    • Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (152)
  • Practical Philosophy (417)
    • Action (15)
    • Aesthetics (51)
    • Emotion (184)
      • Anger (37)
      • Attachment and Craving (31)
      • Compassion (9)
      • Despair (7)
      • Disgust (5)
      • Faith (20)
      • Fear (14)
      • Grief (9)
      • Happiness (49)
      • Hope (18)
      • Pleasure (34)
      • Shame and Guilt (10)
    • External Goods (52)
    • Flourishing (99)
    • Foundations of Ethics (123)
    • Karma (44)
    • Morality (76)
    • Virtue (178)
      • Courage (7)
      • Generosity (14)
      • Gentleness (6)
      • Gratitude (12)
      • Honesty (14)
      • Humility (26)
      • Leadership (7)
      • Mindfulness (20)
      • Patient Endurance (30)
      • Self-Discipline (10)
      • Serenity (38)
      • Zest (7)
  • Practice (138)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (44)
    • Monasticism (46)
    • Physical Exercise (4)
    • Prayer (15)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (21)
    • Therapy (11)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (385)
    • Consciousness (21)
    • Deity (75)
    • Epistemology (137)
      • Certainty and Doubt (18)
      • Dialectic (19)
      • Logic (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (30)
    • Free Will (17)
    • Hermeneutics (61)
    • Human Nature (33)
    • Metaphysics (114)
    • Philosophy of Language (28)
    • Self (76)
    • Supernatural (53)
    • Truth (62)
    • Unconscious Mind (16)
  • Western Thought (499)
    • Analytic Tradition (101)
    • Christianity (160)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Eastern Orthodoxy (3)
      • Protestantism (27)
      • Roman Catholicism (60)
    • French Tradition (50)
    • German Tradition (94)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (122)
      • Epicureanism (25)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (8)
      • Stoicism (22)
    • Islam (42)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (10)
    • Judaism (35)
    • Natural Science (98)
      • Biology (29)
      • Philosophy of Science (50)
      • Physics and Astronomy (11)
    • Social Science (183)
      • Economics (43)
      • Psychology (79)

Recent Posts

  • Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson
  • Canadian psychedelic podcast interview
  • If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra
  • Kali’s Child at 30
  • Don’t think about Trump more than you have to

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2009-2025 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2009-2025 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.