Dialectics
The term is derived from the Greek verb "dialogizomai", which means to discuss, dialogue, reason together. Etymologically it means "art of conversation": of "day", reciprocity, exchange, and "logos", word, speech.
The first to use it in a general way was the classical Athenian philosopher considered one of the greatest, both in Western and universal philosophy, Socrates of Athens (470 - 399 BC), but according to the philosopher, Ancient Greek logician and scientist, Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) the progenitor was the Greek philosopher born in Elea, Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC). For the Greek philosopher, follower of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, Plato (427-347 BC), dialectics is the attitude of the true philosopher, one who tries to reach the truth through dialogue, a controversy in where statements are argued and disputed publicly.
In ancient Greece these statements appear, moreover, personified in a literary, theatrical way, as debates between characters who argue with each other. In his dialogues Plato contrasts the sophists as Socrates' interlocutors. The sophists seek adulation, that of power and that of public opinion, unlike Socrates, who personifies science.
The dialectic in Plato (427 - 347 BC)
Plato considers dialectics the most difficult science; the others serve as a preparation to enter into its knowledge because it is the most sublime, «… dialectics is, so to speak, the crowning and height of the other sciences; there is none that can be placed above it, and it closes the series of the sciences that it is important to learn », and continues by saying:“ The fault, which is incurred in our days and which has caused so much damage to philosophy, proceeds, as we have already said, of the little consideration in which the dignity of this science is held, because it is not made for bastard spirits, but for true and legitimate talents. ”(The Republic (in Greek politeia that means citizenship or form of government), seventh book). It is an upward movement of the intellect or, as the ancients said,a path in search of an ever deeper understanding of reality. It has nothing to do with mystical notions about intuition, revelation or any other way of obtaining knowledge by automatic and instantaneous means, once and for all. Knowing is a journey; it does not remain static but changes progressively. The knowledge process is a transition from past to future knowledge and from subjective to objective. In its advance it goes through intermediate stages that are inherent to becoming "because the intermediate always exists, just as there is generation between being and non-being; so too, between what is and what is not, there is what is being done; for he who learns is becoming wise, and this is what it means that he who learns becomes wise »(Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 2,Episode 2).
The dialectic in Aristotle (384 - 322 BC)
The sophists (they were the primitive sages who from Socrates and Plato lost their prestige, being designated with this name in a pejorative sense, were thinkers who in the fifth century BC were dedicated to teaching mainly rhetoric, that is, the art of speaking good and eristics, or art of persuading and convincing) knew the art of refutation; Aristotle learns it from them and exposes it for the first time in a forgotten book: Los topics (the common "places" of discussion). For our philosopher, dialectics is the art of interrogation, it is the science of discussing correctly in discourses that consist of questions and answers.
Dialectics as the logic of probabilities was, for Aristotle, a technique that helps to argue with skill. When presenting this technique, especially in the Topics, Aristotle showed the importance of knowing the common and recognized opinions, the ideas accepted by the majority in society, to use them when it comes to “fighting” and “defeating” the interlocutor.
Aristotle distinguished between the dialectic and the analytic; for him, dialectics only checks opinions for their logical consistency. Analytics, for its part, works deductively from principles that rest on experience and precise observation.
The dialectic of the Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
Kant defines dialectics as the logic of illusion, which studies the illusory character of transcendental judgments that go beyond the limits of experience.
For Kant, dialectics is nothing more than the logic of appearance and its object is the three ideas: the idea of the soul, as the absolute unity of the thinking subject; the idea of the world, as the absolute unit of the series of conditions of the phenomenon; and the idea of God, as the absolute unit of the condition of all objects of thought in general, on which the mind cannot but build paralogisms and contradictions.
In this way, Kant constructs, through the Transcendental Dialectic, a deep and subtle critique of all metaphysics, a critique of understanding and reason in its attempt to achieve the knowledge of things in themselves, of what is more beyond experience.
The dialectic of the German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
This German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, considered the revolutionary of dialectics, in order to understand the history of philosophy and the world itself, developed a totally different method from formal logic where he claimed that dialectics implies a conception of reality in a circular process of three moments whose motor is contradiction, this notion is based on the idea that everything carries within itself the seed of its own destruction, but that a new form will emerge from its ashes
- Thesis. Position. Immediacy. Indeterminacy. Being in oneself, antithesis. Negation or contradiction Synthesis. Denial of denial and overcoming.
The dialectic consists of discovering and rationally following the movement of the Idea, so that reason and reality express their true coincidence. Hegel, in effect, proposes a new logic different from the Aristotelian form that is based on the principle of identity. The infinite being is therefore a totality since nothing is isolated and everything is in relation. But it is a relationship of opposition and not of identity.
Dialectics is not only a method, but it is the way in which reality is constituted, and through this fundamental theory, philosophy comes to understand: the identity between being and thinking “everything real is rational and everything rational is real ”where the true is the whole.
The dialectic in Karl Marx (1818 - 1883)
The influence of Hegel on Marx is more than evident, he recognized that Hegel had been the first to fully expose the general forms of the dialectic movement but in 1873, Karl Marx, in the prologue to the second edition, in the volume I of Capital, tells us: «My dialectical method is not only fundamentally different from Hegel's method, but is, in everything and for everything, the antithesis of it. For Hegel, the thought process, which he even converts, under the name of idea, into a subject with a life of its own, is the demiurge of the real, and this is the simple external form in which it takes shape. For me, the ideal is, on the contrary, nothing more than the material translated and transferred to the head of man. "
Marx takes the concept of dialectics from Hegel and eliminates all theological interpretation, for Hegel the subject of dialectics is the Idea or God, for Marx the finite world, Nature, and the human being; for Hegel the moment of the negation of the negation (the synthesis) includes within it the previous moments (the thesis and the antithesis), for Marx the negation of the negation does not necessarily lead to it; Rather, Marx points to the moment of contradiction, the confrontation between opposing elements, and their ability to promote change.
The Laws of Dialectics
In the same way in which the foundations of axiology were developed ((from the Greek άξιος 'valuable' and λόγος 'treatise'), or philosophy of values, it is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of values and judgments evaluative), epistemology ((from the Greek ἐπιστήμη (episteme), "knowledge", and λόγος (logos), "study") is the branch of philosophy whose object of study is knowledge) and ontology ((from the Greek οντος, genitive of the participle of the verb εἰμί, to be, to be; and λóγος, science, study, theory) is a part of metaphysics that studies Being as such and its transcendental properties), the bases of the laws of nature were also empirically formed. dialectic because, inevitably, only a thought, with kinetic energy, in constant movement can follow the speed of movement of reality,and only a conscious thought of the contradiction can penetrate into the contradictions of the real and, at the same time, resolve its own internal contradictions.
First Law
Everything is united, nothing is isolated, there is a universal connection. The reciprocal action between two things and their complex relationships. The worker adapts to the conditions that he encounters in nature and that orders his movements; but he transforms it through work and this, in turn, has gradually transformed him.
The universal character of this law is completely demonstrated in nature, when verifying the unity and struggle of opposites as it clearly appears in the attraction and repulsion between neutrons and protons, with their reciprocal transformation, with the interaction of rejection and attraction of the particles with its quanta of energy, in the electromagnetic force the unity and struggle of opposites is even more perceptible and manifested in electrons, protons and other particles, inside the atomic nucleus, between matter and antimatter, etc. And, not to mention, its clear demonstration in the force of gravity where the unity and struggle of opposites can be seen both in the stars and stars, in galaxies and constellations, and in the very interior of the earth.
Second law
Everything changes. The reality is in constant transformation. The old remains while the new arises, the change is due to the struggle of opposing forces in the essence of things. Let us remember the Law of Conservation of Matter by Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier “matter is neither created nor destroyed, it only transforms”.
Without this 2nd law, the reason for the emergence of galaxies, planets, earth, nature, life, the human species itself, knowledge, etc., etc. would not be known, it confirms a and again by the theory of chaos, the theory of relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, the theory of the genome, etc.
Third Law
The negation of the negation, which allows us to understand something as simple as the emergence of a thousand different forms of life after the death of a body from its internal components and from the totality that surrounds that death. The substitution of the old for the new, of what dies for what is born, is precisely development; and the very expiration of the old by the new, which arises from the old, is called negation.
The term negation, Hegel introduced into philosophy, but giving it an idealistic sense. According to Hegel, negation is based on the development of the idea, of thought. Marx and Engels preserved the term of negation, interpreting it materialistically, they showed that negation constitutes an inseparable moment of the development of material reality itself.
What better demonstration of this law has been given to us by the history of society, with its clear example of a whole monumental chain of denials, and thus, primitive society was denied by the slave owner, the slave owner was denied by the feudal, the feudalism for capitalism and capitalism for socialism. Unquestionably, the negation does not reach the object from the outside, it is the simple and natural result of its own inner development.
Materialism
The first to use this term was the Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, Christian theologian, and inventor, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), in a 1674 paper entitled "The Superiority and Foundations of Mechanical Philosophy."
Materialism is known as the philosophical doctrine that consists in recognizing the material as the only substance, denying the spirituality and immortality of the soul. It is a philosophical current that in opposition to idealism, studies the relationship between thinking and being, between spirit and nature, postulating that matter is primary and consciousness and thought are a consequence of it, from a highly organized state. For materialism, not only is the real material, but the cause of all things in nature and the human "soul" can be explained exclusively from matter and the movements of that matter in space.
The German philosopher, L. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, a pupil of the eminent German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, as opposed to his professor, developed one of Germany's earliest materialistic philosophies which later developed as the theory of historical materialism.
Feuerbach, in 1841 in his key work “The essence of Christianity” changed the idea for nature, the spirit for matter and God for man; "Feuerbach applied the concept of alienation to the religious theme saying that the alienation of the human essence is the creation of the ideal image of man projected in an extraordinary being whom he called God."
On the other hand, Lenin in his attempt to give a new version to the concept of matter, in his work "Materialism and empirio-criticism" (Moscow 1947), tells us: "it is the doctrine according to which the object of knowledge exists independently of the knowing subject and it is not put into the act of knowledge. "
Now, Marxist theory is composed of a scientific theory of history or historical materialism and by the philosophical theory that corresponds to this revolution in the field of science: dialectical materialism.
Dialectical materialism
Based on the theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Dialectic and L. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach - Materialism, it contains the theoretical philosophy of Marxism. By dialectical materialism is understood the conception of the world maintained by Engels according to which there is only one material reality that has a dialectical character, that is: the cause of its changes and movements takes place by the struggle of opposites inherent in the matter itself and its continuous contradiction.
Engels formulates three laws (Anti-dühring, or, The revolution of science by Eugenio Dühring: introduction to the study of socialism / Federico Engels; translation by José Verdes Montenegro y Montoro, Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, cop. 1968), laws of the Materialist dialectic understood as "science of the universal laws of the movement of nature, of human society and of thought":
- the unity and struggle of antitheses the passage from quantity to quality the negation of the negation
Historical materialism
Or scientific theory of history, the expression "historical materialism" is somewhat strange, since, unlike the other sciences, they use the word "materialism" to define themselves as such. There is no talk, for example, of chemical materialism, or physical materialism. The term materialism, used by Marx to designate the new science of history, is intended to establish a line of demarcation between the previous idealist conceptions and the new materialist conception of history.
Historical materialism contains the practical application (praxis) of the fundamental laws of dialectical materialism in the field of social evolution in history.
Hegemony of Antonio Gramsci
The term hegemony derives from the Greek eghesthai, which means "to lead", "to be a guide", "to be a boss"; or perhaps from the eghemonian verb, which means "to guide," "to precede," "to lead," and from which it derives "to be in front," "to command," "to govern." By eghemonia the ancient Greek understood the supreme leadership of the army. It is therefore a military term. Egemone was the driver, the guide and also the commander of the army. At the time of the Peloponnesian war, there was talk of the hegemonic city, referring to the city that led the alliance of Greek cities fighting each other.
According to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: “According to this concept, the power of the ruling classes over the proletariat and all the classes subjected in the capitalist mode of production, is not given simply by the control of the repressive state apparatuses, since if it were, said power would be relatively easy to overthrow (it would be enough to oppose it with an equivalent or superior armed force that would work for the proletariat); This power is fundamentally given by the cultural "hegemony" that the dominant classes manage to exercise over the subject classes, through the control of the educational system, religious institutions and the media. Through these means, the ruling classes "educate" the dominated so that they experience their submission and the supremacy of the former as something natural and convenient,thus inhibiting its revolutionary potentiality. Thus, for example, in the name of the "nation" or of the "fatherland", the ruling classes generate in the people the feeling of identity with them, of sacred union with the exploiters, against an external enemy and in favor of a so-called "national destination." In this way, a "hegemonic bloc" is formed that amalgamates all social classes around a bourgeois project ”.
Basically hegemony is: the ability to unify through ideology and to hold together a social bloc, regardless of the fact that it is not homogeneous, but rather marked by deep class contradictions. A class is hegemonic, leading and dominant, while with its political, ideological, and cultural action, it manages to keep a group of heterogeneous forces together and prevents the contradiction between these forces from exploding, producing a crisis in the dominant ideology and leading to its rejection, the one that coincides with the political crisis of the force that is in power.
On the other hand, the Italian philosopher, Marxist theorist, politician and journalist, Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937), also called the theorist of superstructures, attributed a central role to the concepts of structure (the real basis of society, which includes: production forces and social relations of production) / superstructure («ideology», made up of the institutions, systems of ideas, doctrines and beliefs of a society), based on the concept of «hegemonic bloc».
Gramsci's Superstructure
The structure or economic base, is the relationship between the owner of the means of production and the worker, is at the base of the social fabric, and remains hidden.
The superstructure (forms of consciousness) is the legal - political (law and the State) - ideological assembly (the different ideologies, religious, moral, legal, political, artistic, common sense and folklore, etc.), that is, everything the set of beliefs and values, to justify a certain economic structure and is made up of legal, political, intellectual, etc. forms. In the event of a change in the relations of production, which occur at the level of the structure, this also forces the superstructure to change, which must seek other different justification criteria.
The fundamental thing in these Marxist concepts is the type of relationship that is established between the different elements of the whole. Not the relationship of an isolated element with the whole, but the different relationships that are established between each and every one of the elements, which are what ultimately determine the type of organization of the whole.
In 2010, as stated by Yoandris Sierra Lara in his work: "Theory of global capitalist development and its implications for the socialist transition in the periphery.", "The basic principle of historical materialism consists in the thesis that it is the process social production is the active and most determining factor in society, a factor capable of generating the set of social relations called superstructural and thus condition their character, nature, content and historical limits. In this sense, the social relations of production are constituted on the basis of society. Such relationships are objective, necessary, material, and are dialectically associated with the development of the productive forces.The latter are the driving force on the material plane of human existence and their influence is the ultimate cause of the changes that occur both in the social relations of production, the economic base and, by extension and objective necessity, in the so-called superstructure.. ».
Leafing through the document "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", Max tells us:
“In the social production of their life, men enter into certain necessary and independent relations of their will, relations of production, which correspond to a certain degree of development of their material productive forces. These relations of production as a whole constitute the economic structure of society, the real base on which the legal and political superstructure is built and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. "
On the other hand, the economist Carlos Emilio Betancourt in his work «Gramsci and the concept of the Historical Block», tells us that “the central approach of Antonio Gramsci's theory is the analysis of the relationships between the socioeconomic structure and the legal superstructure -political, which form a «historical bloc». Although this concept is not developed systematically, it is found explicitly or implicitly in various places in his writings. "
And he continues to tell us: “In the context of the historical bloc, the State is not only an apparatus of domination of one class by another, but also reflects the synthesis of coercion-consensus and the synthesis of hegemony-domination that characterize the exercise of political power. "
Obviously, we are in the presence of a new concept, the "Historical Block" but to try to elucidate it, we must first clarify what is understood by Civil Society, Political Society, the State, Regulated Society and the Intellectuals that we will touch on in another article.
Civil society
David Pavón Cuéllar from the University of Rouen, France and José Manuel Sabucedo Cameselle from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in their article "The concept of 'civil society': a brief history of its theoretical elaboration", published in Araucaria. Ibero-American Journal of Philosophy, Politics and Humanities, N ° 21. First semester of 2009. Pages. 63-92, they tell us: «The Spanish term of civil society comes from the Latin societas civilis. In this compound expression, the noun societas describes any society or association of groups or individuals, while the adjective civilis specifies a specific type of society: civil society, that is, the society of the cive or of the city. Etymologically, civil society is therefore neither more nor less than a citizen society.
The Latin societas civilis is the direct translation of the Greek koinona politike. Like societas, koinona describes any society. Like civilis, the adjective politike requires a kind of society: the political society of the Greek polis, that is, the civil society of the Latin cive or the citizen society of the current city (At the level of pure etymology, etumos logos or of the true sense, there is, therefore, no difference in meaning between the terms of “political society” and “civil society.” There is, therefore, no etymological basis for the theoretical differentiation between the two terms - such as this is done, later, by various authors, in particular by Gramsci.) »
Francisco Blanco and Peniley Ramirez in their article "Civil society and current situation" in Contributions to the Economy, December 2006 (full text at http://www.eumed.net/ce/) tell us:
«For Gramsci, it is constituted by the institutions that bring together individuals and are destined to produce a consensus. It encompasses economic relations and is articulated by multiple social organizations of a cultural, educational, religious, but also political and even economic nature. Civil society is made up of the set of organisms commonly considered "private" that enable the intellectual and moral direction of society through the formation of consent and adherence to the masses »
Gramsci affirms that civil society is the base of the superstructure, located below political society, it is in charge of transmitting the ideology that emanates from it, said ideology constitutes the cement of the historical block.
Basically, civil society receives the ideology from political society, adjusts and molds it in order to transmit and provide (through different organizations and the media) its ethical content, in order to link all social layers. with the ruling class. In this diffusion, educational organizations (at different levels), radio, television and the press, play a crucial and fundamental role.
Political Society
Gramsci affirms that the distinction between political society and civil society is of a methodological nature and not an organic one, and that, consequently, the economic is not exclusive to the structure, nor the political to the superstructure. On the other hand, he adds, in the actual reality, civil society and the State are identified.
Together with civil society, it is one of the great super-structural planes that corresponds to the State and operates in the public sphere, the political-legal sphere and coercion.
For Gramsci, political society is the part of the superstructure that exercises the function of domination through its legal and politico-military state apparatus, but political power does not consist simply in domination, but also in direction; that is, it combines coercion and consensus whose nature depends on the historically given dominant world view.
I think it is necessary to insist on the relationship between civil society and political society, as long as we do not have the "Regulated Society", each of these are "planes and moments of the superstructure"; that is to say, they are the dialectical unit that constitute the superstructure of the historical block. This dialectical pair can be defined in two ways: coercion-consensus and / or leadership-domination.
Using the same Gramscian lexicon, Political Society is the social stratum of the superstructure, this does not mean that philosophy or religion, forms of art and literature, morality or the legal, among others, cannot intervene with energy in the political future.
Engels said: “Here, the economy creates nothing new, but it determines the way in which the material of pre-existing ideas is modified and developed, and even this almost always in an indirect way, since it is the political, legal, and mortal reflections that to a greater degree they exert a direct influence on philosophy "
State
To use Gramsci's words: "The State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its rule, but also manages to obtain the active consensus of the governed."
In his Notes on Machiavelli, he continues to tell us: “it must be noted that the general notion of the State includes elements that must be referred to civil society (it could be pointed out in this regard that State = political society + civil society, that is, hegemony clad in coercion). "
Regulated Society
This is a new concept introduced by Gramsci, who starts from the fact that, if State = political society + civil society, the moment will come when the State element (coercion) can be considered exhausted as the two members of the equation mature their level of consciousness and refine their interrelationships, to this extent, the increasingly significant elements of the regulated society (or ethical State or civil society in full consciousness) are affirmed.
With this expression "Regulated Society", Gramsci refers to the classless society, where the anarchy of production has disappeared and a series of functions previously performed by the State are now carried out by various organizations of the people, thus preparing the extinction of the State (political society), in the end there would be a single society, civil society in full consciousness (the fullness of socialism where not only the means of production are socialized, but decisions are also socialized).
The Intellectuals
The term intellectual is a derivative of the Latin word "intelectus" and the Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset (1883 - 1955) tells us that the term intellectual was born "in the eastern Mediterranean… at the same time, with a strange coincidence chronological, in two civilizations and worlds, confining, but, then, without communication or homogeneity whatsoever, namely, in the Syriac world on one side and in the Hellenic world on the other, around the year 700 BC ».
Ortega adds that “exactly in the same years, the first sketch of an intellectual appeared in Greece with Hesiod and the first prophet, Amos, was raised on Hebrew soil. The prophets, Ortega points out, were the intellectuals of Israel.
However, this term began to circulate in the eighties, being used as a differentiating appellation that certain sectors exclusively applied themselves as a sign of distinction. The French historian, Charle Christophe (1951), tells us that years later (1903) the French writer and politician, Joseph Reinach (1856 - 1921), «the word had been sliding for some time in the small literary magazines, of young people that they despised politics and that they applied it to mark their superiority over the rest of the humans ».
On the other hand, the Spanish sociologist Amando de Miguel Rodríguez and the professor of sociology and political science, Roberto Luciano Barbeito Iglesias in their work «The end of a century of pessimism (1898-1998)», tell us that intellectual «is a concept which applies primarily to countries of Latin culture "and they point out that the term does not appear in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, although HW Fowler's Modern English Usage dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1965)," hardly recognizes the intellectual voice, but rather as an adjective ("an intellectual person") and in a derogatory sense. It is equivalent to saying that the person in question knows he is smarter than the others..
Alejandro Muñoz Aionso in 1999, in his work «The influence of intellectuals in French 98: the Dreyfus affair» (Papers of the Foundation • No 48, Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies, Madrid, Spain), points out to us that “For its part and even before the reported French vicissitudes, in the second half of the 19th century, in Russia the use of the word intelligentsia had spread, which means both a social category and a mental attitude, characterized by critical of the established system. The role of Russian intellectuals, of the intelligentsia, in the context of the confrontation between "Occidentalists" and "Slavists" is decisive, since it is impossible to understand the transformations that take place in Russian society in that historical period without considering the intelligentsia.This Russian word will also be used often in Western Europe. "
Like talking about the "Intellectuals" without mentioning the famous "Dreyfus" case.
The Dreyfus Affair
In the convulsed France of the 19th century, the Dreyfus case was one of the great political and economic crises that marked the development of the French Third Republic (1870-1940), and a judicial, social, political and moral scandal, interspersed with remnants of old social and ideological conflicts, with an eminently racist base, which muddied and divided French opinion between the condemnation of the polytechnic engineer and captain of the French army, of Jewish origin, Alfred Dreyfus (1855 - 1955) (on December 22, 1894), and the moment in which he is unanimously sentenced to life imprisonment (January 5, 1895), to military demotion and deportation to the penal colony of Devil's Island (near the coast of French Guiana in South America; was abolished in 1938, currently the cells are covered by jungle vegetation),public act carried out two days later. This case bitterly divided and practically immobilized the French government in the controversy that lasted approximately 12 years, between September 20, 1894, and July 12, 1906, the date on which the captain was declared innocent and his rehabilitation was decreed.
This unfortunate historical episode markedly divided French society, placing on one side the right-wing government, the nationalist army, the Catholic Church and the conservative parties, which joined forces on the anti-Dreyfus camp (with great anti-Semitic characteristics and particularly racist) and placed on the other the progressive forces - republican, socialist and anticlerical.
As a consequence of this very popular case, the term “intellectual” became popular and took shape, color and texture, calling in this way the group of illustrated people of science, art and culture who supported and demanded in favor of freedom of the aforementioned Captain.
Excellent, but what is an Intellectual?
What is an Intellectual?
From the semantic point of view, the most generally used meaning is the one that denotes a person endowed with a high level of knowledge, because as Robert Michels ("The intellectuals"; Encyclopedy of social sciences) said: intellectuals are those who are vocationally occupied of the things of the mind.
Intellectuals are a group or social stratum that has a broad education, not necessarily formal, on the other hand, the intellectual should not be confused with the professional, an intellectual can be a member of any profession, but technical knowledge is not what It makes him serve his profession, rather it is his constant devotion to thinking, creating and imagining new ideas that distinguishes him from his professional colleagues.
The paradigm of the committed intellectual of the 20th century tells us:
The only way to learn is to argue. It is also the only way to become a man. A man is nothing if he is not a being who doubts. But it must also be faithful to something. An intellectual, for me, is this: someone who is faithful to a political and social reality, but who never ceases to question it. Of course, there may be a contradiction between your fidelity and your doubt; but this is a positive thing, it is a fruitful contradiction. If there is fidelity but there is no doubt, things are not going well: he stops being a free man.
Excellent, we can then give the term "intellectual" to that individual who dedicates a large part of his life and professional activity to the study and critical reflection of reality, in fact, we can consider it, first of all and above all things, like a scientist, a researcher, a critic, an artist, an expert or a leader of the social movement.
In his never-ending quest for excellence and truth, he avoids by all means at his disposal that the monopoly of force becomes, at the end of the road, the monopoly of truth.
Unquestionably, every intellectual is not an apolitical being; Definitely, he does politics, but in a very different way from the political one, not from a political body, not from the party, but with the written or spoken word, with a single north, the eternal search for truth.
The critique of power and the power of criticism of the intellectuals basically lies in their moral, ethical and economic autonomy, that is, in the full exercise of their freedom.
Gramsci's Intellectual
The Italian philosopher, Marxist theorist, politician and journalist, Antonio Gramsci, the "Marxist of the superstructures", classified the Intellectual into five blocks: traditional, modern, organic, rural and urban.
And thus, Marsal, based on Gramsci, distinguishes three other types of intellectuals that are:
- The consciousness-makers of an ascending social class, what, as we have just seen, Gramsci called organic or revolutionary intellectuals; Those who represent a historical continuity, which Gramsci himself defined as traditional; The "institutionalized revolutionaries", which corresponds to those intellectuals who have served an ascendant class that has come to political power.
Gramsci analyzes in depth the organizational and connective function that intellectuals fulfill between the material economic base and the ideological substrate, which are the fundamental elements of a certain historical bloc, within which the hegemony of the dominant group is developed and established. For Gramsci "Intellectuals are the 'employees' of the dominant group for the exercise of the subordinate functions of social hegemony and political government."
In everyday vocabulary the term intellectual has been attributed to the artistic creator. Intellectuals would only be writers, poets, actors, visual artists, etc. But Gramsci shows us a different conception. Unlike crude Marxism, he sought their defining identity not in their intrinsic activity, but in the set of social relations in which they function. "What are the limits
Now, when reading the "Prison Notebooks", we find the opposition that Gramsci established between the organic intellectual and what he called the "traditional intellectual", in the latter we find the priests, scribes, government officials, etc. the rhetorician, who creates and disseminates high culture, who fulfilled intermediary functions between the masses and the different state apparatuses, and who legitimized the status quo. The organic intellectual is a new type of intellectual, he is a product of the capitalist process and industrial change, an intellectual who becomes a "technical organizer, a specialist in applied sciences." In this classification we find lawyers, teachers, priests and doctors, to pharmacists, natural scientists, researchers, architects, engineers and technical personnel in general,military personnel, judges and police personnel. However, despite the clear opposition, the distinction between traditional intellectual and organic intellectual is not at all easy, in fact, it is a complex distinction.
Historical Block
The historical block is nothing more than the dialectical unity between structure and superstructure and thus, in the know-understand-feel and feel-understand-know dialectic, the intellectuals produce a relationship of exchange of individual elements between the rulers and the ruled, between leaders and directed. That is to say, life as a whole is carried out, exclusively, in social force; the "historical block" is created - as the Italian thinker puts it - in the process of the construction of being.
The central approach of Gramsci's theory is the analysis of the relationships between the socio-economic structure and the legal-political superstructure, relationships that form a «historical block», “the structure and the superstructure form a historical block, that is, the whole of the social relations of production ”. If we asked Marx, he would say that the "historical bloc" is synonymous with "forms of economy and society."
While Marx circumscribes the relations in civil society as fundamentally economic relations, Antonio Gramsci separates these concepts, placing, with an autonomous character, civil society within the superstructure that together with political society and the economy make up the «bloc historical
The organic and dialectical interrelation between structure and superstructure -according to Gramsci- materializes concretely through intellectuals:
«If the relations between intellectuals and the people-nation, between leaders and those who are directed - between the rulers and the ruled, are given by an organic adherence in which the feeling-passion becomes understanding and, therefore, knowledge (not mechanically but in a living way), only then is the relationship one of representation and there is an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and the ruled, between the rulers and the ruled; only then is life as a whole realized, the only one that is a social force. A historical block is created »
Footnotes
- MARX, Carlos. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1966.ACANDA, Jorge Luis. Civil society and hegemony, Havana, Juan Marinello Center for Research and Development of Cuban Culture, 2002.GRAMSCI, Antonio. Notes on Machiavelli, on Politics and on the Modern State, p. 39, New Vision Editions. Madrid, Spain, 1980.ENGELS, F. Selected works Marx Engels in two volumes, (second volume), Moscow: MIR., 1952.GRAMSCI, Antonio. Notes on Maquiavelo, on politics and on the modern State, Ediciones Nueva Visión, Madrid, Spain, 1980.ORTEGA y GASSET, José. The historical reason, Complete Works, Volume 12. Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1983.CHRISTOPHE Charle. The birth of the "intellectuals." New Vision, Buenos Aires, 2009.AMANDO de Miguel and BARBEITO, Roberto Luciano. The End of a Century of Pessimism (1898-1998), Planet,Barcelona, 1998.SARTRE, Jean-Paul, according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905 - 1980), commonly known as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a philosopher, writer, novelist, playwright, activist French politician, biographer and literary critic, exponent of existentialism and humanist Marxism. He was the tenth French writer selected as the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1964, but he rejected it, explaining in a letter to the Swedish Academy that it was his rule to decline any recognition or distinction and that the ties between man and culture should develop directly, Without going through the institutions. MARSAL, Juan F. The sociopolitical essayists of Argentina and Mexico: contributions to the study of their roles, their ideology and their political action. Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella,Center for Social Research, 1969.GRAMSCI, Antonio. Intellectuals and the organization of culture, Juan Pablos Editor, México, 1975.MARX, Carlos. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1966.GRAMSCI, Antonio. The historical materialism and the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, Ed. Nueva Vision, Buenos Aires, 1971.
