Reality is not just a division of mind and matter, reality presents itself as a laminar stack flow of complex orders that rest on simpler orders. Love rests upon biology, which rests upon geology, which rests upon astronomy, and so on, and so on. This evolved naturally, from basic things into complex things, like how Amoebas evolved into People. This is unified as one coherent movement, and while it seemingly moves as one, it is also very turbulent. These principles are widely misunderstood and should be clarified.

In the real movement of the material world, there exists a universal dialectic of form and content. Below, Engels demonstrates this principle within Historical Materialism, i.e., as Base and Superstructure.

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and especially the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself.

Friedrich Engels

The division of the world that Engels implicitly poses here is simple. There is the real totality of being, and there is that which is reflected as a form, and among these forms, there is an additional layer of form up one higher level still - i.e. - there is a real constitutional form which exists in reality, and there is further the formal reflection of this “material form” which is grasped and acted upon directly by human consciousness. The materiality of form beyond the minds, as Marxist jargon, is also known as a Real Abstraction. Superstructure is not limited to the state - this is only a partial layer of reality which is further reflected and made manifest within the brains of human beings as part of our experiential and phenomenal reality. The real economic basis is not merely found in the particular relations of workplace production - who manages who, what orders they believe are given, or how hours may be rationally imposed - and so on - rather, Engels touches to the total materiality of Being in its own right. In summary, he validates form as part of reality while denying the claim that form is the basis of reality.

Onwards - it is naturally aligned to see that the total materiality of the Cosmos is not based on any particular system of equations, the “Rule of Law” expressed as the Laws of Physics. Rather, the Cosmos is an unfolding evolution of one basic principle: the indeterminacy of Being, its content, collapses of itself and coheres via a form. There is that which is vast, material, and fluid - akin to what Engels cites as economic factors, and then there is that which is fixed, point-like, and formal, such as constitutions. These engage in a dialectic. At the lowest level, this is known as Physics. At the highest level, this process is known as Consciousness. In between, this presents itself as Stars, Planets, Rivers, and Frogs. What is the equation of physics that best describes a frog? There isn’t one. It’s a frog. We should think in this unified manner because while humanity is very complex, the more complex layers of reality inherit the habits of lower layers. We are still subject to the constraints of biology and physics.

The dialectic of Form and Content is why Quantum Mechanics poses a wave-particle duality, which is the manner in which matter possesses a reflective capacity akin to sensation. Note how the existence of the wavefunction is doubted by bourgeois metaphysicians in the philosophy of Quantum Science. Similarly, the spectral objectivity of Value, a ghostly operation, (described as such ad verbatim by Marx) is mocked as a literal superstition. Value is never seen as Value, it is only disclosed as price. When the materiality of Being is given a form - such as in bottling objective Value as a price - or in naming an experienced color and bottling it via the word “blue” - something is necessarily lost in translation, and we cannot directly know the Value of any particular commodity, nor can we know if one person’s sense of color matches another person’s sense of color. And yet, Value exists, as does a rainbow. This operation is how and why reality collapses as a particle, i.e., as a form, generally.

As the cosmos evolves into more advanced systems, from Amoebas to People, there is the emergence of internal conflicts, such as the conflict between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. Life splits within itself. Conflicts can have many dimensions, but two sides is the simplest, and one primary axis of struggle typically dominates further dimensions. It is not simply that the proletariat is an underlying content of the bourgeoisie, rather, these are distinct classes of people which both objectively exist. However, the distinction of these classes speaks to the distinction of Form versus Content itself. Bourgeois society is the rule of form, and not just money, but money for the sake of money, and rights for the sake of rights. However, proletarian struggle is the actual, general, mass content of society’s formality. The real abstraction of bourgeois dictatorship comes to constitute a Real Delusion, which is capable of being defeated. As further example, the Merger Formula as enacted by the Bolsheviks, shows how reality takes a grasp upon itself as the informal mass motion of The People on one side, and as the formal socialist intellectual movement on the other side, which are dimorphically opposed, but yet then speak to one another and align via a Communist Party, and thus, it is truly the people which lead this process, and Bolshevism was truly democratic. This dialectical motion, with reality being grasped on each end, frankly, might even be the philosophical shark in the water lurking behind Gödel's incompleteness theorems, or even the incompatibility of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. A resonance with the dialectic of Man and Woman is also obvious, and is left as an exercise for the reader.

There are boundless distinctions which are not herein captured. That is part of the point. What is the material? As Lenin once put it, “The sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.” In other words, the material is just the content underlying the forms of reality, it is literally just the material of reality and nothing further, for all that can be said is that there is 13.8 billion years of evolution, and humanity is a complex version of very simple things. There is no absolute form, and it is just that simple.

Yours truly,

Karen Furgason