How does the dialectical method connect inheritance, in Loïc Chaigneau's essay, with the critique of confusing natural determinism with social determinism?
In this preface to Loïc Chaigneau's book "Why I Am a Communist: An Essay on the Objectivity of Dialectical and Historical Materialism," Dominique Pagani starts from the dedication. It distinguishes inheritance from heredity and echoes the book's final sentence, about confusing natural determinism with social determinism. Between these two extremes, the middle term is the dialectical method, which Marx and Lenin regard as Hegel's legacy, along with its "speculative syllogism." Dominique Pagani shows that the author uses it against two positions: the irrationalist subjectivism that comes from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Popper's scientistic objectivism.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
Let us begin with the very beginning of the beginning, the address Loïc Chaigneau makes to his very young last-born, by way of dedication: “To Marceau, As a passing of the baton and so that our heritage may have a testament.”
At first sight, this incursion into the author’s private intimacy may seem somewhat intrusive. But in truth the eminently liminal position of this “envoi” at the outset indicates clearly enough that the author is here addressing the reader just as much. For it is indeed “heritage” that is at issue here, which amounts, “from the very first,” to insisting on what must be carefully distinguished from, and even opposed to, mere heredity pure and simple.
In this way, the course can be held right up to the last lines of the book, where the author specifies: “The whole ideological stake of capitalism is to conflate natural determinism with social determinism.”
Thus, whatever detours this inquiry into “dialectical and historical materialism” may lead us into, the coherence of the argument finds itself underpinned as though by an arch deployed by these two statements, the initial and the final.
Between these two extremes of the beginning and the end of nature and of history, there remains to be determined the middle term that will never cease to animate the argument. The extremes are elements that belong to the content. The middle term is the instance of form, of mediation, of the tool (the Aristotelian organon). The author has already named it in the subtitle. It is the “dialectical method” (which, in this case, could hardly be less Aristotelian).
It is not the least mischievous of the “ruses of reason” that Marx as well as Lenin should hold up the “dialectical method” as the most precious Hegelian legacy 1, if one cares to recall the manifest disdain of the author of the Science of Logic for any methodological consideration!
We know that the late Hegel, the Hegel of the Berlin lectures, increasingly replaces the syntagm “dialectical” with that of “speculative.” This is indeed a shift of syntagm, and not of paradigm, so true is it that the two terms express the same decisive operation, the very one that plays so important a role in Loïc Chaigneau’s book, and that renews the most difficult and, by the same token, the most fruitful gesture of high dialectics, the “speculative syllogism.”
It consists in dismissing both terms of an antinomy, the one as much as the other, by means of a third term that dissolves the illusory certainty of their spatial one-sidedness by raising it to their temporal truth (the very first triad of the Logic—being, nothing, becoming—is its emblematic illustration). Thus it is that the author of this “Essai sur l’objectivité…” never ceases to confront the objectivity of dialectical and/or historical materialism with the double impasse of the tedious opposition between:
— irrationalist subjectivism (The many Parisian epigones of Nietzsche or Heidegger who proliferate from the very beginnings of the liberal-libertarian Counter-revolution, like so many “destruction(s) of Reason” commissioned by the Cold War)
— and scientistic objectivism, which escapes this obscurantism only at the price of the most impoverishing reduction imaginable of objectivity to mere naturalistic spatial exteriority, as if the Other were not at least as external and objective as the thing!
The passages Loïc Chaigneau devotes to the neo-positivism of a Karl Popper are not the least of the high points of this most courageous stance, intellectually speaking, so true is it that it always amounts to fighting on the double front of “continental” sub-romanticism (Heidegger) and Atlanticist neopositivism (Popper): “To be where it is hardest, the privilege of communists,” proclaimed many a banner in the streets of the former German Democratic Republic (DDR); one can, one must, credit Loïc Chaigneau with the strength of having managed to develop the dialectical argument as well as the courage of having dared to hoist himself up to such a level of difficulty.
Dominique Pagani
1. Cf. Marx, Letter to Dietzgen in Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, reading of the Greater Logic.