Nietzsche and Trotsky: Parallel Minds

Friedrich Nietzsche

Trot cultists would have you believe that dialectical materialism is a profound philosophy whose truths only Marxism and its ‘science’ could possibly have gifted to the world. So much of it turns out to be well-worn philosophical ground, stuff that we started taking for granted a while ago. Take the following statement from Trotsky’s 1939 The ABC of Materialist Dialectics:

I will here attempt to sketch the substance of the problem in a very concrete form. The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality ‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’. This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens—they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities, for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar—a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true—all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself “at any given moment”.

Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this “axiom”, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we really conceive the word “moment”? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that “moment” to inevitable changes. Or is the “moment” a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.

At first glance it could seem that these “subtleties” are useless. In reality they are of decisive significance. The axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ appears on one hand to be the point of departure for all our knowledge, on the other hand the point of departure for all the errors in our knowledge. To make use of the axiom of ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ with impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative changes in ‘A’ are negligible for the task at hand then we can presume that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This is, for example, the manner in which a buyer and a seller consider a pound of sugar. We consider the temperature of the sun likewise. Until recently we consider the buying power of the dollar in the same way. But quantitative changes beyond certain limits become converted into qualitative. A pound of sugar subjected to the action of water or kerosene ceases to be a pound of sugar. A dollar in the embrace of a president ceases to be a dollar. To determine at the right moment the critical point where quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge including sociology.

Here is Wittgenstein stating exactly what Trotsky did back in 1922 in his Tractatus:

“Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.”

Here is Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882) making precisely this observation almost 50 years before Trotsky’s text, when discussing the origin of logic in human thinking:

He, for instance, who did not know how to find ‘identity’ often enough, both with regard to nourishment and to hostile animals – that is, he who subsumed too slowly and was too cautious in subsumption – had a slighter probability of survival than he who in all cases of similarity immediately guessed that they were identical. The predominant disposition, however, to treat the similar as identical – an illogical disposition, for there is nothing identical as such – is what first supplied all the foundations for logic.-The Gay Science, aphorism 111

A year after The Gay Science came out, Engels repeated what was now becoming an increasingly banal insight in his Dialectics of Nature:

Abstract identity (a=a; and negatively, cannot be simultaneously equal and unequal to a) is likewise inapplicable in organic nature. The plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself, by absorption and excretion of substances, by respiration, by cell formation and death of cells, by the process of circulation taking place, in short, by a sum of incessant molecular changes which make up life and the sum-total of whose results is evident to our eyes in the phases of life – embryonic life, youth, sexual maturity, process of reproduction, old age, death. 

Of course, you can trace this argument back to 1812 with the publication of Hegel’s Logic, which boldly challenged the Aristotelian axiom of a = a. All Engels did was apply Hegelian thinking on this matter to the natural sciences (something which Marx was wary of doing until his dying day). In fact, we can go even farther, to Leibniz back in 1686:

It is not true that two substances resemble each other entirely and differ in number alone.

(“Discourses on Metaphysics,” §9, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, p.19)

Indeed, every monad must be different from every other, For there are never in nature two beings which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference.

(“Monadology,” §9, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, p.180)

There are no two individuals indiscernible from one another… Two drops of water or milk looked at under the microscope will be found to be discernible.

To suppose two things indiscernible is to suppose the same thing under two names.

(“Correspondence with Clarke,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, p.216)

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Trotsky was putting forward an argument that had been made a whopping 253 years ago, as if it were a truly profound philosophical statement that could not have been uncovered without diamat. What a load of presumptuous hogwash.