Is nerd shit actually important?
As someone who never went to Uni and had no interest in anything I thought of as academic I am really surprised how much I enjoy reading philosophy. It can be dense depending on who you are reading but patience usually wins the day if the philosopher is trying to be understood (and this isn’t always the case).
I became interesting through my interest in class struggle leading me to Marxism. I was told that it’s really important to understand philosophy, to have a grasp on dialectical materialism as we need tools to understand the world in order to change it. This idea, and the arguments that being conscious of philosophy has always sat a little bit funny with me, so I wanted to go through them to figure out what if I really do think it’s important.
You must understand the world to change it
To me the fact that you have to understand the world in order to change it is deeply compelling but obviously incorrect. In fact, the people that a lot of the people who have changed the world in massive ways, have no clue what is going on. I feel like I am making a straw man out of this idea, but only because it is often expressed in an unclear manner that creates an issue.
I this idea stems from the classic quote in Theses on Feuerbach by Marx;
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
What he is saying to me is that philosophy should not be able navel gazing, but instead philosophy should be a tool in our arsenal to change the world. It’s not that we need a specific philosophy to see that how something is wrong but to understand the why something is wrong you would need a framework of a philosophy meant for that purpose. Assassination of a world leader ‘changes the world’ but the impact and direction that act has is just unclear if all you care about is the surface level opinion that that person fails a ‘vibe check’.
Ultimately what I feel this idea of ‘understanding the world to change it’ actually means is that if you have an end goal you need to be able to see why you are at your current point, the things that changed to lead to this current point and how we can affect the flow of history to put is towards our end goal. There is no master plan for communism or utopia, there are simply to many factors all at play at one time, but if we understand how to nudge things to travel towards that path, we can make it more likely.
I will say I don’t think a lot of philosophy is like this. Most philosophy is just about interpreting the world. Modern philosophy feels like it focuses a lot on the power of words and language have over a society. Dialectical Materialism uses the mode of production and economy as it’s starting point instead, which in my opinion leads to a much more complete understanding of how things are changing. Economics are the base that society is built on, that informs how we interact with the world, language is something that stems from that and while I am sure it is possible to work your way from the top down, modern philosophy just gets trapped chasing it’s tail on the surface.
Everyone must have a philosophy
This to me is the most compelling argument of all. Every human being on earth has a philosophy, they might just not be aware of it. Common sense is a philosophy. It is informed by the society that you live in, everything that you see as obvious and self-evident are because you have been conditioned by society to think it is obvious and self-evident.
To use an abstract example, you have two tribes. Tribe A buries it’s dead and Tribe B eats it’s dead. Tribe A (which I would assume you would see as the reasonable one) thinks Tribe B is barbaric. How can you defile your dead like that, they where people you once loved and instead of respecting them you eat their flesh? For Tribe B on the other hand, it is ridiculous to bury your dead. Your loved ones can become a part of you if you eat them, if you just bury them, you waste the food they could have provided you with and how is your loved ones becoming food for worms any different than being food for your family? Now ignoring the possible health risks of eating humans there is a logic, and in Tribe B’s society it is simply common sense that you should eat dead people.
If you do not consciously consider philosophy, you simply just float along in the societal stream absorbing the philosophy from the class in charge and let me tell you they don’t want to give up power or privilege. The American Dream, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and anti-other ideas all stem from the philosophy of the rulers. Tools they have not to change the world, but to try and keep it roughly the same, with them on top and you on the bottom.
Without something else there to be your compass to guide your thoughts, it is easy to be swept away (so many water themed metaphors).
Also, I find that people rely on this strong morale force inside them to guide their actions. That one side of an argument is evil and corrupt, and they are good and virtuous and must be stopped. There is something nice about that idea. It’s very black and white. It puts you on the side of justice and without something inside of you actually giving a shit about injustice in the world and having some kind of visceral response to it, you can just become overly objective and standoffish.
But it doesn’t really understand anything, does it. I am not here to say that everything is actually a shade of grey and empathise with why Zionists are the way they are, I frankly don’t give a shit about them, but if I don’t understand their core motivations (which they share with a lot of other equally fucked groups) all I can do is pass a purely moral judgement on them. The forces that motivate them aren’t just that they are evil Palestine hating shitheads, they have economic, political and philosophical reasons they do what they do. Zionists aren’t a particular special breed of evil, they are fact the same brand of ‘evil’ as all imperialists, of all the owning class across the entire world, they just aren’t hiding it anymore.
When you can start to see the picture like this, it opens how can understand the world and how you need to change it. Just like the polis, it’s not one bad egg, it’s the whole fucking basket of eggs and bringing that down is how we actually bring about a more just and fair system.
Dialectics aren’t magic
So, as I think through these ideas I do realise, I think having a philosophy and morality of the working class is actually really important to be able to make the changes that would really change society and the world for the better. The next question I must ask myself is Dialectical Materialism that philosophy. Sometimes people say Dialectical Materialism is the end of philosophy (and under capitalism you could make a solid argument that is the case in my opinion) but is it the best tool of understanding we have.
So firstly I do think Dialectical Materialism has some issues, not so much in what it says but in how it is used and discussed.
You have what I refer to as ‘Dialectics innit’. This is when someone has a contradictory perspective, has looked at evidence in a different way or just doesn’t see how certain conclusions are drawn and someone responses with ‘well you have to think Dialectically’. Now that can feel like an answer sometimes. Oh I am just a bit too thick to understand how these things all interpretation and link together, I am not seeing the flow and change properly at all but if I could see it more dialectically it would become clear.
But it isn’t an answer right. If you cannot clearly state how events actually have come together, how A goes to B goes to C, how A, B or C interpenetrations the others and how they could change, then you didn’t actually say anything at all. ‘Dialectics’ isn’t a magic work that explains anything, it’s a method to come to a conclusion. In the same way we show our working out in maths (and in basically no other subject as math is the only subject taught at all Dialectically) you gotta be able to show your working for any conclusions you draw using Dialectics.
The other thing that is closely related is an almost religious faith in how effect dialectical materialism is at prediction. Now obviously a method is only as reliable as the people who apply it, but I have always questioned if dialectical materialism actually has a better rate of success of prediction that something like empirical analysis. Thinking about trends is not something limited to dialectics, but I do think there is a difference.
An empirical look at a trend or shifts or motion or whatever you want to call it uses snap shots of certain moments and tries to think about how previous motion informs the possible future. It may even look at causes of this shifts and changes to see if it can build a pattern from them. In things like markets and the economy this is somewhat successful, especially when algorithms and computing is involved. However, the scope is narrow to the thing it is looking at. It also has the tendency to be unable to predict sudden negative or positive things, things that fall outside of the simplified trends and models it uses.
Dialectical materialism does something similar but larger in scale. Trying to pull together economic, political and social factors to see how events will unfold, not in a narrow or specific way, but in a general way. It is less effective at saying when something will happen, but that it will happen with a reasonable degree of accuracy. I would argue in fact that in terms of short-term prediction it is behind an empirical model.
When dialectics is wrong, it tends to be wrong small. Something unpredictable happens, or the person just lacks all the required information to make a properly informed analysis. When dialectics is right, and it is a reasonable amount of the time, its right big and in ways that completely surprise ruling class on lookers.
The other element is a lot of people who are fans of dialectical materialism are more optimistic on average. This can lead to them overselling Marxism as a whole as a predictive force, but I am not sure this is a bad thing. Having a few optimists in the world who can use their philosophy to see a future of hope in the chaos, without being ignorant to the challenges in the way is just really neat.
So do I think philosophy is important. Yeah, for the most part. I think its very important to be conscious of the way the world shapes our gut instinct. If we don’t challenge our pre-conceived idea and try and think about the why of the world you just can’t stay effectively grounded in your beliefs. Life teaches us a lot of lessons. Life radicalises us, not reading Marx, but that doesn’t mean that the outrage you feel at the way things are cannot be understood more clearly if you try and engage with it from a different perspective.
Leave a Reply