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been influenced too much by the prominence and dogmatism that
dialectic acquired as an official philosophy of Stalinist communism.
If
Marx stood Hegel on his head and gave him a new life, and if
modern critics have laid them both out horizontally in their graves,
Wilson performs a crude autopsy in order to show that the belief
in dialectic was the cause of most of the ills of Marxism, its incon–
sistencies, its political errors and even the support of the World
War by the 2nd International and the acquiescence of the 3rd in
Stalin. In Wilson's account of this evil doctrine, the greatest
importance is given to its trivial formal side; the larger and more
interesting aspects of Marx's philosophy, the affirmation of process,
of history, of concreteness, of practice and social experience in his
conception of knowledge, are only barely indicated and nowhere
distinguished from the positions of German and English thought
of the same time. The triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is
triumphantly exposed as "simply the old Trinity taken over from
Christian theology, as the Christians had taken it over from Plato."
Wilson goes on to identify it with "the mythical magical triangle"
of the Pythagoreans, which "derived its significance from its cor–
respondence to the male sexual organs," and after a quotation from
Marx on idealistic philosophy as a kind of onanism, he concludes:
"Certainly the one-in-three, three-in-one of the
Thesis,
the
Antith–
es'is
and the
Synthesis
has had upon Marxists a compelling effect
which it would be impossible to justify through reason." (In the
same bang-up paragraph he also disposes of the whole of German
culture as incapable of drama and social observation and as essen–
tially myth-making-Goethe's "eternal feminine" and Kant's
"categorical imperative" are cited as examples of myths.)
Everything in Marx is colored by this Pythagorean-Christian–
German triangle; it "lies deep in all his work," "it formed his
technique of thought and his literary style"; it determined his
inconsistencies and inadequacies as a theoretician. Yet this doctrine
and method, which Wilson describes sometimes as an artistic
device, sometimes as a false law of nature, but always as "meta–
physical" and contrary to reason, can be "extremely effective" and
"provide a dramatic formula for the dynamics of certain social
changes." This mysterious dualism of the dialectic, whereby it is
the ground of great original insights and also of absurd specula–
tions, is never clarified by Wilson.
