The Myth Of Dialectics

For a century now Marxists have been searching for a 'rational kernel' of Hegelian 'dialectics' inside the 'mystical shell' of the Hegelian system. As against this entire tradition, Rosenthal insists that Hegelian philosophy is mysticism all the way through. He argues that Marx's supposed `dialectic method' is simply a myth propagated by academics and proposes the provocative thesis that it is not, after all, Hegel's 'method' of which Marx made use in Capital but rather precisely Hegel's mysticism. The role of money in Marx and Hegel is examined in detail.

"The Dialectics of Myth is the last book of non-Marxist philosophy to have been published in Russia prior to the onset of Stalinism. It was suppressed during Stalin's regime, and its editions confiscated and destroyed, whilst its implicit attack on the authoritarian Soviet state resulted in Losev's arrest in 1930 and his confinement for three years in a forced labour camp. Following his release, Losev was never again permitted to write on spiritual or political themes. This new edition is based upon the definitive Russian text and includes a full introduction, chronology and notes."--BOOK JACKET.

For over fifty years, Hegel interpreters have rejected the former belief that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. In this incisive analysis of Hegel's philosophy, Leonard F. Wheat shows that the modern interpretation is false. Wheat rigorously demonstrates that there are in fact thirty-eight well-concealed dialectics in Hegel's two most important works--twenty-eight in Phenomenology of Spirit and ten in The Philosophy of History. Wheat also develops other major new insights: • Hegel's chief dialectical format consists of a two-concept thesis, a two-concept antithesis, and a two-concept synthesis that borrows one concept from the thesis and one from the antithesis. • All dialectics are analogically based on the Christian separation-and-return myth: the dialectic separates from and returns to a thesis concept. • Hegel's enigmatic Spirit is a four-faceted, deliberately fictitious, nonsupernatural entity that exists only as an atheistic redefinition of "God." • Spirit's "divine life" begins not with consciousness but with unconsciousness, in the prehuman state of nature-before Spirit acquires its human mind. • Hegel's concept of freedom is not a sociopolitical concept but release from bondage to religious superstition (belief in a supernatural God). • In Hegel's widely misinterpreted master-and-slave parable, the master is God, the slave is man, and the slave's gaining his freedom is man's becoming an atheist. • The standard non-Hegelian base-superstructure interpretation of Marx's dialectics is false. Marx's basic dialectic is actually this: thesis = communal ownership poverty, antithesis = private ownership wealth, synthesis = communal ownership wealth. Wheat also shows that Marx and Tillich, who subtly used Hegelian dialectics in their own works, are the only authors who have understood Hegelian dialectics. Thoroughly researched and exhaustive in detail, this radical reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophy should greatly interest Hegel scholars and students.

This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin's encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács's The Young Hegel and Marcuse's Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya's intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson's Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.

Plato's dialogue The Statesman has often been found structurally puzzling by commentators because of its apparent diffuseness and disjointed transitions. In this book David White interprets the dialogue in ways which account for this problematic structure, and which also connect the primary themes of the dialogue with two subsequent dialogues The Philebus and The Laws. The central interpretive focus of the book is the extended myth, sometimes called the 'myth of the reversed cosmos'. As a result of this interpretative approach, White argues that The Statesman can be recognized (a) as both internally coherent and also profound in implication-the myth is crucial in both regards - and (b) as integrally related to the concerns of Plato's later dialogues.

A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato’s Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play. Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of the dialogue’s underlying structure, related to both argument and myth, and shows that a dynamic link exists between Diotima’s higher mysteries and the organization of the dialogue as a whole. On this basis the authors argue that the Symposium, with its positive theory of art contained in the ascent to the Beautiful, may be viewed as a companion piece to the Republic, with its negative critique of the role of art in the context of the Good. Following Nietzsche’s suggestion and applying criteria developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, they further argue for seeing the Symposium as the first novel. The book concludes with a comprehensive reevaluation of the significance of the Symposium and its place in Plato’s thought generally, touching on major issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of art, the body-soul connection, the problem of identity, the relationship between mythos and logos, Platonic love, and the question of authorial writing and the vanishing signature of the absent Plato himself.