This is a highly (and somewhat traditional) psychoanalytic article about the efforts of the neo-Freudians to reconcile his (Freud's) failed notion of a subpersonal unconscious with the personal, cognitive unconscious of modern neuroscience.

Full Citation: 
Di Francesco M, and Marraffa M. (2014, Oct 10). A plea for a more dialectical relationship between personal and subpersonal levels of analysis. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology; 5:1165. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01165

A plea for a more dialectical relationship between personal and subpersonal levels of analysis

Michele Di Francesco and Massimo Marraffa

1. Institute for Advanced Study IUSS, Pavia, Italy
2. Department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts, University of Rome ‘Roma Tre’, Rome, Italy

Bermúdez (2005) termed “the interface problem” the question of clarifying how typical subpersonal explanations in cognitive sciences, whatever is their specific form, are related to folk psychology. In this opinion article we will approach the interface problem from a specific angle, i.e., the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious as it has taken shape within cognitive sciences.

Our starting point is the contrast between the cognitive unconscious and the Freudian one. If examined from an orthodox cognitivist point of view, psychoanalysis turns out to be a brilliant but failed attempt to build a genuine subpersonal psychology. Freud aims to go beyond the psychology of his times, which is a psychology of consciousness; his theory of the unconscious is, therefore, programmatically against a “consciousness-centric” mentalistic framework. The problem is that, as a matter of fact, Freud failed to extricate himself from that framework. Like many psychoanalytic ideas, the Freudian unconscious is just an enlargement, or extension, of a psychology—folk psychology—hinged on the idea of a person who is able to have conscious mental experiences.

According to a number of philosophers this extension of our ordinary psychological conception of mind is a strength of psychoanalytic theory. In this perspective, the grounds for psychoanalysis “lie in its offering a unified explanation for phenomena (dreaming, psychopathology, mental conflict, sexuality, and so on) that commonsense psychology is unable, or poorly equipped, to explain” (Gardner, 1999, p. 684). This approach has been taken as the basis of a defense of psychoanalysis against well-known epistemological objections: like folk-psychological explanations, psychoanalytic explanations should be exempt from the epistemological and methodological requirements of experimental science (Manson, 2003, p. 179). Donald Davidson is one of the referents of this conception of psychoanalysis. On his view the personal level is autonomous and different from the subpersonal one, and is to be studied by means of different methods: you need hermeneutics, not the quest for natural laws. That is, the folk-psychological explaining is here viewed as an interpretive activity aimed to give sense to behavior—to “rationalize” it. Accordingly, when one runs across such a “pathology” of reason as self-deception, the personal psychology framework is not to be given up in favor of the subpersonal one, but rather it must be enlarged or extended so that one can find somewhere else the rationality set out by the principle of charity. In this vein, the psychoanalytic partitioning of the mind is seen as a metaphoric device to coherently describe within the personal-level explanatory framework a phenomenon (self-deception) that otherwise would be uninterpretable (Davidson, 1982).

This attempt to abandon Freud's positivistic naturalism and reconstruct psychoanalysis on hermeneutic grounds has a very long story. In the 1970s an influential version of this project was initiated by a number of psychoanalysts of Rapaport's school; especially George Klein and, close to his ideas, Roy Schafer. According to these psychoanalysts the “biologistic” Freud is no longer defensible, and the whole Freudian metapsychology is to be declared waned owing to its association to the drive-discharge theory. By contrast, we have to reconsider the psychoanalytic clinical theory insofar as it rests on the intentionality of the interpretive process.

This “clinical theory versus metapsychology” argument, however, tries to regenerate psychoanalysis by renouncing to its main legacy. For Freud's hypothesis of a biological component that is constitutive of mental life is just what ensures for the psychoanalytic theory its typical content of systematic objection against the claim of self-legitimation made by rational consciousness: therefore, it is the ground of the very idea of a subpersonal-level unconscious. The Freudian hypothesis, to the extent that it views human subject as “tossed about” by its own biologicity, rules out that inner life can regain its own center in the free intentionality of consciousness. Vice versa, a psychoanalytic hermeneutics entirely aimed at insisting on the theme of meaning at the expense of the “blind” and “biological” theme of drive dynamics, runs the risk of surreptitiously reintroducing the pre-Freudian picture of the conscious subject as primary subject.

In this perspective, the hermeneutical approach to psychoanalysis is to be contrasted with the project of replacing Freud's positivistic naturalism with a neurocognitive naturalism (see, e.g., the writings of other two members of Rapaport's group: Holt, 1989; Rubinstein, 1997). Thus, a dynamic psychology that aims to develop psychoanalytic theories under the guidance of cognitive sciences fully confirms the critical content of Freud's theory of unconscious, i.e., its being a repertoire of tools to penetrate the self-defensive nature of self-conscious subjectivity. But here the Freudian personal-level unconscious is superseded by a level of analysis that aspires to be genuinely subpersonal: the information-processing level, wedged between the personal sphere of phenomenology and the subpersonal domain of neurobiological events.

However, the advantage of a dynamic psychology driven by cognitive sciences against the hermeneutical approach to psychoanalysis might turn out to be problematic. The reason lies in the convergence of two related issues: the interface problem and “the mark of the mental” problem. If we try to solve the former in a strong reductive way, the personal mind is to be defined in terms of the subpersonal mind. But then the question arises whether we can really explain when a sub-personal phenomenon deserves the title of mental without any reference to personal, folk-psychological concepts. In the case of a negative answer, the overall strategy of superseding personal with subpersonal psychology would be in danger.

Let us see in more details how the problem arises. Any bottom-up approach to cognition that rejects the primacy of the personal level should explain how the personal phenomena described by commonsense psychology in terms of conscious, deliberate, linear processes, which introduce “prescriptive or normative” concepts that “have no echo in physical theory” (Bermúdez, 2005, p. 44), are in fact a product of unconscious, automatic, parallel, sub-personal mechanisms. If that is so, the attempt of the radical naturalist to explain the genesis of personal-level psychology starting from sub-personal, unconscious mechanisms is quite demanding, since the gap between the two levels looks wide and deep.

Apparently, the radical naturalist has a simple way out: the concepts that “have no echo in physical theory” should be eliminated from scientific psychology just as it happened in the past, when scientific progress led to drop the protoscientific theories of phlogiston and caloric fluid. Commonsense psychological explanation should not be taken at its face value, but (at best) as a useful device for practical purposes. But now the mark of the cognitive problem strikes: the radical naturalist who rejects the intuitions about the mental embedded in our folk-psychological explanatory practices must offer a criterion to distinguish the sub-personal processes that are genuinely mental from those that are not. Without such a criterion, the emancipation of subpersonal from personal psychology is illusory. Yet, the task of making a principled distinction is not an easy one. For it is quite obvious that in the brain there are many unconscious, automatic, parallel mechanisms that, albeit not mental in nature, have a basic role in the existence of mentality. As Damasio (2010, p. 73) noticed, for example, certain brain regions such as the spinal cord and the cerebellum give contribution to essential brain functions, but are not essential to mind-making.

In other words, when we try to understand the relation between subpersonal and personal levels of psychological explanation, we face a dialectic between dependence and autonomy. If we consider the personal mind as completely autonomous, we fall in hermeneutics and in anti-naturalism, losing contact with the scientific development. If we adopt a strong vision of the thesis of dependency, we end up adopting eliminative or reductive approaches that are at risk of losing the mental as their own object of study, replacing it with objects that belong to different levels of analysis. That being so, the wisest strategy may be to pursue reflective equilibrium between dependence and autonomy, namely, working back and forth between the ordinary image of ourselves as self-conscious, intentional, rational agents, and the scientific conception of ourselves as biochemically-implemented computational machines, by revising these two images wherever necessary so as to pursue the regulative ideal of a coherent self-conception.

A good example of a research area in which a dialectical relationship between personal and subpersonal levels of analysis turned out to be extremely fruitful is provided by the way in which psychological constructs very close to the personal level such as motivation and attachment served as bridges between dynamic psychology and cognitive sciences.

The notions of motivation and attachment are at the core of contemporary psychodynamic theories that are fruitfully interacting with cognitive sciences (see, e.g., Fonagy et al., 2002; Lichtenberg et al., 2011). Now, the constructs of motivation and attachment can be definitely considered an advancement over the concepts that were formerly used to account for the same phenomena. But as we said, the concepts of motivation and attachment are very close to the personal level, and what is more they are not very precise. In other terms, their usefulness notwithstanding, they did not undergo that process of “fragmentation and reconfiguration” through which experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have put folk-psychological categories like attention or memory (Churchland, 1986, p. 365). What can be said in favor of motivation and attachment is that these concepts are more precise and work better than others.

Therefore, when the term “motivation” is defined as the whole spectrum of those factors that trigger, maintain, intensify, modulate or terminate physical activities or psychological events of any kind, we easily realize that it is a term that groups a heterogeneous bunch of factors, which are very difficult to classify (Jervis, 1993, pp. 288–289). At times such factors are to be examined one by one; but often it is useful to consider them all together under the label “motivations.” The main point here is that in any case the use of such term was a conceptual progress—e.g., over the 19th Century concept of will.

The term “attachment” too does not refer to a homogeneous and well-identifiable phenomenon; it is a “bond,” a term that is to be strictly and exclusively construed as a metaphor. There are attachment behaviors (due to different factors), and there are subjective experiences of attachment, which also can barely be grouped together and classified; but attachment in itself is an idea between the imaginative and the abstract, which originates from the extension of expressions such as “to keep attached” or “adhered.”

The epistemological moral that can be drawn from this case of dialectic interaction between personal and subpersonal levels of investigation can be concisely expressed in the following way. According to the eliminativists, history of psychology consists in a linear process through which the systematic research supersedes and goes beyond commonsense psychology—and together with it philosophical psychology. But things are more complicated. The progress of psychology is not due only to the elimination of the concepts (and the models and metaphors) of commonsense psychology in favor of the constructs of scientific psychology. Sometimes progress occurs because non-strictly scientific and unclear concepts are superseded by new concepts that are as much insufficiently scientific and yet more appropriate and precise (Jervis, 2011, p. 167).

Thus, there can definitely be terms of the personal-level psychology that are “unsuited per se for scientific or theoretical purposes” (Wilkes, 1988, p. 196). The aforementioned concept of will is a case in point. However, in other cases—like those of “motivation” and “attachment”—the ontological vagueness of a concept may be compensated by pragmatic virtues such as, e.g., the potential to increase the explanatory resources in some area of scientific psychology. In short, the eliminativist primacy of metaphysical considerations over the epistemological ones cannot be generalized: it is necessary to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References

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Damasio, A. (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Davidson, D. (1982). “Paradoxes of irrationality,” in Philosophical Essays on Freud, eds R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press), 289–305.


Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., and Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. New York, NY: Other Press. Google Scholar

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Lichtenberg, J., Lachmann, F., and Fosshage, J. (2011). Psychoanalysis and Motivational Systems: a New Look. New York, NY: Routledge; Taylor and Francis Group.

Manson, N. C. (2003). Freud's own blend: functional analysis, idiographic explanation and the extension of ordinary psychology. Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 103, 179–195. doi: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00069.x CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

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From the Institute of Art and Ideas, this video offers an interesting discussion on the narrative construction of self between a developmental psychologist and neuroscientist (Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity), a philosopher who supports free will and panpsychism (Galen Strawson, author of Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics), and a philosopher of identity (Mayra Schechtman, author of Personal Identity and Fractured Selves: Perspectives from Philosophy, Ethics, and Neuroscience).

This is another great discussion - I recently posted "The Mind's Eye," also from the Institute of Art and Ideas, here as well.

Life Story - Bruce Hood, Galen Strawson, and Marya Schechtman Debate

We all create internal narratives of our lives. From moment to moment, but also spanning a lifetime. Do these stories of ourselves simply reflect our lives, or do they determine who we are and what we can achieve?

Watch more videos on iai.tv

The Partially Examined Life, Episode 71: Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”

The Partially Examined Life podcast took a look at Martin Buber's classic book, I and Thou. For more background, here is a bit about the book from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I and Thou is considered to have inaugurated “a Copernican revolution in theology (…) against the scientific-realistic attitude” (Bloch [1983], p. 42), but it has also been criticized for its reduction of fundamental human relations to just two — the I-Thou and the I-It — of which the latter appears as a mere ‘cripple’ (Franz Rosenzweig in a letter to Buber in Sept. 1922). Walter Kaufmann, who produced a second English translation of I and Thou, went further in his criticism. While he did not regard the lack of deep impact of Buber's contributions to biblical studies, Hasidism, and Zionist politics as an indication of failure, he considered I and Thou a shameful performance in both style and content. In style the book invoked “the oracular tone of false prophets” and it was ‘more affected than honest.’ Writing in a state of “irresistible enthusiasm,” Buber lacked the critical distance needed to critique and revise his own formulations. His conception of the I-It was a “Manichean insult” while his conception of the I-Thou was ‘rashly romantic and ecstatic,’ and Buber ‘mistook deep emotional stirrings for revelation.’ (Kaufmann [1983], pp. 28-33) 

Buber always insisted that the dialogic principle, i.e., the duality of primal relations that he called the I-Thou and the I-It, was not a philosophical conception but a reality beyond the reach of discursive language. In the initial exuberance of making this discovery Buber briefly planned for I and Thou to serve as the prolegomenon to a five-volume work on philosophy, but he realized that, in Kaufmann's words, “he could not build on that foundation” and hence abandoned the plan. It has been argued, however, that Buber nevertheless solved the inherent “difficulty of dialogics that it reflects on, and speaks of, a human reality about which, in his own words, one cannot think and speak in an appropriate manner” (Bloch [1983] p. 62) by writing around it, inspired by one's conviction of its veracity. 

The debate on the strength and weakness of I and Thou as the foundation of a system hinges on the perhaps fallacious assumption that the five-volume project Buber intended to write but soon abandoned was indeed a philosophical one. Buber's contemporaneous lectures at the Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus and at the University of Frankfurt as well as his letters to Rosenzweig indicate quite clearly that he was concerned with the development of a new approach to the study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) (cf. Schottroff) rather than with a new approach to the philosophy of religion.

Enjoy the podcast.

The Partially Examined Life, Episode 71: Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:58:21 — 108.4MB)

On Buber’s 1923 book about the fundamental human position: As children, and historically (this is his version of social contract theory), we start fully absorbed in relation with another person (like, say, mom). Before that point, we have no self-consciousness, no “self” at all, really. It’s only by having these consuming “encounters” that we gradually distinguish ourselves from other people, and can then engage in what we’d normally consider “experience,” which Buber calls “the I-It relation,” wherein we can reflect on and manipulate the world.

Buber thinks that unless we can keep connected to this “I-Thou” phenomenon, through real, mature relationships (dialogue!), and maybe also through art and the appreciation of nature (we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how, as he says, you can really have an I-Thou encounter with a tree), you’re spiritually dead, treating everyone as objects and sporting a thin, pissy sense of self to boot. If you get get in the groove, on the other hand, you’ll come off all shiny and ethical and ready to transform the world. Sweet! Oh, and by the way, the “Thou,” every thou, ends up also being a direct line to God, so all you “spiritual but not religious” folks are theists after all. Nyah nyah!

Mark, Seth, and Wes are rejoined by verbose lawyer Daniel Horne to hash through this difficult and possibly mystical text. Read more about it and get the book.

End song: “Luscious You” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Download it free.

Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

Henrik Juel - Social Media and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

This intriguing article comes from Triple C (cognition, communication, co-operation), an open access journal for a global sustainable information society - Vol 10, No 2 (2012).

Social Media and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Henrik Juel 

Abstract 

My reflections in this paper concern revitalizing the critical potential of certain core concepts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1944) and bringing it to bear on the digital era in general and in particular on the phenomenon of modern social media. I find that the central philosophical critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment runs deeper than just a critique of contemporary (and perhaps now out-dated) media technique and cultural habits. It is a critical view of the process of civilization, economy and enlightenment as such, a critical view of the seemingly self-evident notion of pure reason, science and technology. What Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to capture and reflect is the very process of rationality backlashing into irrationality. We seem to have reached the era of mathematics and exact calculation, but this leaves us with no sense of control or meaningfulness, and in the face of crisis and systemic contradictions in the now global society we tend to regress and rely on older, more primitive forms of sense-making and coping: magic, mythology and metaphysics - even ritual behaviour. But these philosophical reflections, can they help us evaluate the role of today's social media?

Full Text: PDF

Here is a brief excerpt from the article:

For me as a young student of philosophy even that strange notion of dialectic began to make some sense, once I got well into the book and the worst of the Hegelian fog lifted. Thus while it was invigorating and enlightening, I also felt the dialectic of it and I found its account of history, civilization, and rationality to be both quite captivating and disturbing. And certainly it was a very, very critical philosophy. So what would happen if I tried to let the critical theory of that book meet with the phenomenon of modern social media?

On the face of it that did not seem likely to turn out as a peaceful encounter. It is well known that The Dialectic of Enlightenment features a very pessimistic and condemning section devoted to "The Culture Industry". Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the book during the Second World War while they were refugees in America (the first version appeared in 1944), and they seem to have been rather disappointed or even shocked in meeting there the pop-culture and mass media of the day. To them the magazines, the cinema, the radio shows, the emerging TV-shows, and even the jazz music, seemed to be in the poorest of taste; stupefying in its effect; a prolongation of the production rhythm of the industry; and certainly not enlightenment. Some have objected that on the other hand they were simply displaying their elitist taste, favouring high art, the avant-garde and the obscure notion of authenticity. But as I see it, simplifying this to be a question of taste or of different modes of reception within different consumer groups would be to seriously reduce the scope of the problems they were trying to address.

Erwin Marquit - Contradiction as Source of Structure and Development in Nature, Society, and Thought

Americans like their politics in simple black and white, no ambiguities, no contradictions. That's part of the reason we hate European politics, I think - too many political parties, too much compromise, no clear and easy options.

This article takes a detailed look at the dialectics of contradiction in multiple quadrants of experience - from science to society and politics, and even human thought (cognition). Dialectics have not gotten much traction in the states, since the founding fathers, who were fans of the Socratic method (and thank them for that!) - we tend to prefer rhetoric these days (talking at, not talking with). Modern dialectics are too closely linked to Marx.

Which leads me to mention that this comes from PoliticalAffairs.net - Marxist Thought Online. Read at your own risk.

Contradiction as Source of Structure and Development in Nature, Society, and Thought

By Erwin Marquit

In developing the dialectical- and historical-materialist worldview, Marx and Engels found it necessary to test its appropriateness as a universally scientific methodology in the spheres of nature, society, and thought:

The fact that our subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws, and, hence, too, that in the final analysis they cannot contradict each other in their results, but must coincide, governs absolutely our whole theoretical thought. It is the unconscious and unconditional premise for theoretical thought (Engels 1987b, 544).

Scientific activity represents the dialectical unity of theory and practice. One aspect of this activity is the theoretical description of the structural development of material systems (in the social, biological, and physical spheres). This, of course, includes the investigation of the laws governing the motion and development of the system on specific levels of organization. In their intensive research activities, scientists often introduce fundamental concepts intuitively, without the conscious appreciation of their dialectical nature. This paper will explore the various ways in which dialectical oppositions, for which we have the philosophical term contradictions, form the basis for the existence of structures and the processes of development that these structures undergo. Familiarity with the various ways in which contradictions enter into the stability and development of material systems can serve as an important methodological tool for further scientific investigation.

To discuss contradictions as a source of structure and development, it will be useful to start with a few comments about the relationships expressed by the term structure. According to Hörz et al. (1980, 47), by structure we understand the totality of essential and nonessential, general and particular, necessary and contingent relations among the elements of a system in a definite interval of time.1 The term structure is generally used to denote the stable aspect of a system. The stability is always relative, determined by the time interval over which the system’s elements and relations show no significant qualitative change. [1]

The formulation of Hörz et al. is by no means exhaustive, as is the case with any statement about philosophical categories. For example, there is a hierarchical aspect implicit in every material structure, and the theoretical description of structures must also embrace this aspect. Analysis, however, must start at some level of organization and integration of a material system, so that we can include among “elements” the various hierarchically organized substructures. Then we can say that systems are characterized by the complex of elements and the relations among them. Thus, fundamental to the characterization of a system is the characterization of its elements and the relations among them. The elements and relations are examined first in terms appropriate to a given level. The connections to higher and lower levels of organization then also have to be examined to extract the fuller essence of the relations.

The need to examine the dialectical interconnections that unite elements and relations is readily seen when one tries to probe the content of fundamental concepts. In Newtonian mechanics, the principal elements to which the laws of motion refer are approximations of physical bodies; in particular, they are point masses (or mass points). This reduction of physical bodies to point masses was not postulated explicitly by Newton, but follows from his laws of motion. Newton’s first law (the law of inertia) did not allow for a body wobbling or twisting as it underwent inertial motion. Newton’s law of inertia postulates certain space and time relations for these bodies. Newton accepted the a priori existence of absolute space and time independently of these bodies or elements. We know today that these postulations about space and time are devoid of physical content. Nevertheless, Newton’s laws of motion were of great scientific importance and are still an adequate representation of the behavior of physical systems for a wide range of practical situations. Therefore the space and time of Newtonian mechanics must have had a physical content that had not been recognized by Newton. Since these laws involve the concepts of space and time, which cannot have an a priori meaning, the physical basis of these concepts is established by the manner in which they enter the laws and the way the laws appropriate the properties of the physical world. In other words, the nature of the elements of a system and the relations among them cannot at all be embraced independently of one another. When we say that “a” stands in some relation to “b” (symbolically aRb), we are introducing two “objects” – the elements and the relations—neither of which can arise as concepts independently, that is, without one another. Elements are distinct from relations; but the concept elements cannot arise without the existence of relations. The existence of elements is conditioned by the existence of relations and conversely. Elements and relations are therefore mutually exclusive and mutually conditioning. Hence they constitute a dialectical unity. This unity arises on both the logical and material levels. The deeper logical and material content of the elements and the relations is expressed through the laws that embrace them. The fundamental laws of the natural and social sciences bring out the material content of the elements and relations when the laws are associated structurally with material systems in nature and society.

Consider, for example, the physical property mass. In Newton’s laws, the magnitude of the mass is specified as the relationship between a force and the acceleration that results from the application of that force; but force, in turn, is that which causes a change in velocity. [2] Accelerated motion is thus placed in contrast with inertial (unaccelerated) motion, neither of which can be comprehended without the other, nor independently of the concepts of force and mass. Mass, therefore, enters Newtonian mechanics in the form of a dialectical unity of accelerated and unaccelerated motion as expressed in the first law (law of inertia) and the second law (force equals the product of mass and acceleration). Mass, force, uniform motion, and accelerated motion are thus found to be specialized categories of mechanics, and, as is the case with all philosophical categories, none of them can be defined independently of the other categories. As categories, these physical concepts and properties can only be understood through their mutually conditioned and mutually exclusive relationships to one another, which are disclosed in the process of investigation of the laws embracing them—and these laws not only embrace them, but arise together with them. In the case of mechanics, it was only after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry by Lobachevsky and, independently of him, by Bolyai that it became apparent that Newton’s a priori notions of space and time had to be abandoned, and that, as Riemann’s work suggested, a physical basis for establishing an appropriate geometry is needed. Newtonian mechanics was a logically consistent theory because Newton, unknowingly, gave us the physical basis for a straight line: a straight line is the trajectory of a physical body produced by inertial motion (Marquit 1990b, 869). To the extent that Newtonian mechanics is an adequate approximation of physical reality, this criterion of straightness is also adequate. We have here an example of the deeply dialectical content of Newton’s laws, although Newton, despite his genius, was unable to recognize this content.

In political economy, Marx unraveled the mystery of the exchange value of a commodity. Here we have a case in which dialectical thinking was consciously applied in research and the clarity that resulted from this consciously dialectical approach is so remarkable that Marx’s Capital is still regarded as contemporary, and not simply historical, scientific literature. According to the law of value discovered by Marx, the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time embodied in its production. Marx pointed out that while a commodity is a product of the concrete labor of its producer, this concrete labor “ranks as, and is directly identified with, undifferentiated human labour,” and it therefore ranks as identical to any other sort of labor.

Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour it is the labour of private individuals, yet at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in character.... [T]he labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in form. (Marx 1996, 69)

The exchange value of a commodity finds its quantitative expression through the law of value. Its qualitative side finds expression both through the law of value and through its dialectical opposite, use value, without which no object can be a commodity. A commodity is produced because it can be exchanged. It is exchanged for other commodities because of its use value. In Marx’s words: “use value becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite exchange value” (1996, 66). At this stage of his exposition, Marx had not yet come to the discussion of the relationship between price and value. Actually it is not value, but price that is the phenomenal expression of exchange value. While price can be measured directly – by direct observation in the marketplace—exchange value, which, in general, is different from price, cannot be measured directly. What is being said here is in sharp contrast with various empiricist views asserting that fundamental properties are first established by observation (for example, in the form of operational definitions denoting the procedures by which the observation is to be carried out) and that the laws describing the relationships among these properties are then established by further observation and theoretical deduction.

At the basis of the usual logical structure of a hypothetico-deductive system is the postulation of the existence of elements and categories of relations among them. These are the fundamental notions or concepts of the system. The elements and relations are then combined in more specific form as axioms (or laws) from which the theorems are derived. When we are dealing with objectively existing material systems, or generalizations of them, the elements, relations, and axioms are not the result of arbitrary mental activity, but are reflections of the material characteristics of the system. Although in the logical structure of the system, the elements, relations, and the axioms embracing them form a hierarchy in that order, ontologically and epistemologically they are mutually conditioning, as our examples have shown, and therefore they arise together, as if lifting themselves together by a common bootstrap, rather than arising one after the other. Moreover, as we pass from one level to another, elements can go over into their dialectical opposites—that is, into relations—just as relations can pass over into elements (Uemov 1963, ch. 4). For example, in physics the field concept was introduced to describe a relationship between an object and the space in which it is located. Thus an electric field represents the force on a charged particle at a given spatial position. On another level, the field acquires all the attributes of physical matter: mass, momentum, relative localization, and so on—that is, it becomes a physical object.

The recognition that categories become transformed into their opposites as we go from one structural level to another is essential for the recognition of the hierarchical structure of systems. The role played by the economic basis of society in Marx’s basic law of social development cannot be understood without this recognition. Thus the level of development of the forces of production is the essential content of the stage of development of a given socioeconomic formation. The relations of production represent the form in which this content is put to work. This form, however, becomes the content in relation to the superstructure, the latter being the form in which the relations of production are maintained relatively stable as the productive forces develop. Marx used the term economic basis of society to distinguish the different categorical role of the relations of production in relation to the superstructure from their role in relation to the forces of production.

With this brief discussion about the role of dialectical processes in the emergence of fundamental concepts associated with a system (or its reflection in theory), I can now proceed to questions related to stability and development. In particular, I shall consider the role of contradictions in the moments of motion, stability, growth, and transformation of a system. At first glance, it might seem that stability should precede motion in this discussion. It can be argued, however, that stability is subsumed under the concept of law-governed change (motion), just as rest in Newtonian mechanics is subsumed under the concept of uniform motion (constant velocity). Therefore stability and motion are not properly a set of objectively occurring dialectical opposites when we are dealing with the overall process of development. On the other hand, at a particular stage in the development of the system, stability and change do confront each other as opposites and their interpenetration must be examined dialectically.

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