When President Biden visited Vietnam recently and extolled his vision of a twenty-five year partnership in security and trade that reminded me of the history of Soviet and Russian relations with Vietnam during the Cold War. I wondered if the President’s outlook wasn’t somewhat one-sided and overly optimistic. Vietnam needs naval help in securing its offshore oil and fishing grounds against Chinese incursion such as the Spratly Islands. It would also like to increase domestic production to expand exports to nations besides China and India that are saturated with production as it is for domestic and foreign export (India less so presently though that may change). The U.S.A. is an obvious sales sump. Being a purchaser of products doesn’t imply any kind of allegiance from the seller when you have killed more than a million and a half citizens of the seller five decades before.
Vietnam and China are two communist countries sharing a history of border conflicts. China and India also have a history of border disputes. Russia has had very positive relations with Vietnam, China and India. They are something of a coordinator and enabler of an Eastern Eurasia economic and political synergetic surge of developing nations to the front of the first world economic stage. The west has a Pope trying flanking maneuvers in Mongolia, President Biden trying to put a wedgie in from the S.E. and President Zelenski appointing a Muslim to lead the Ukraine military that could in theory catalyze more Muslim terror in Russia from the South (though fate replied swiftly with an earthquake killing 2000 Muslims in Morocco; one of three traditional Muslim invasion routes to Europe. I am not confident that the Bidentate. method of expanding western market control over Eurasia will be effective in spite of the President’s optimism.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness after being released from capture and p.o.w. incarceration by Germany as a French conscript in the Second World War. The great philosophical tome of the 20th century was an remains quite influential in popular psychology. Most don’t develop and in-depth understanding of what its about; French rationalism following the footsteps of Rene Descartes. Sartre elaborates in a practical way on self-reliant epistemology wherein all one trust is one’s own awareness of perceptions and thought about them. Existentialism is a large word philosophy on the epistemology of existent experience of the world; considering existent perceptions and thoughts about them as well as thoughts about thoughts. The book is one-sided. It regards epistemology from the perspective on a sole individual and the content he experiences.
From Sartre’s point of view in Being and Nothingness there could be no other people in the world that are real. That is they could be regarded equally with material objects that aren’t animated as phenomena. He does describes the experience of being observed by others and how one reacts to that (e.g. ‘the look’), and his terminology is replete with terms like being-in-itself, being-for-oneself and being-for-others that describe the way an individual psychological reacts or presents himself while existing yet those descriptions all return or renormalize to the individual point of view as an existing, sentient individual. It is Sartre’s second great philosophical tome named ‘The Critique of Dialectical Reason’ that explains the way a few, or a society or civilization of individuals interact epistemologically from the ground of each phenomenally experiencing the existence of others in their own perception and cognitive field. Sartre’s Critique may have changed the world far more than Being and Nothingness, and today it is almost entirely forgotten.
French rationalism is quite conservative in its epistemology. One can rely solely on one’s own experience as being ‘real’. Descartes called the I think therefore I am (or exist) confirmation way of think a ‘first principle’. Bishop Berkeley developed his philosophy of idealism, originally called ideaism with the same founding principle. In the Three Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous Berkeley showed that content besides that of self-awareness could be created by God, an evil demi-urge, or in modern terms, a simulation by a quantum computer. It is possible that all that exists is the mind and that everything else is like a feely show from Orwell’s novel 1984 or an advanced artificial reality world-universe. The Critique of Dialectical Reason describes how individuals choose to interact, sometimes with social inertial behavior creating roles for them, in that common epistemological experience of existence.
Democrat Party ideology tends to be quite one-side in its outlook on the wold and politics. It is a very us vs. them party weltanshauung. Trump is them, Russia is them, political protesters bum-rushing an insecure capitol building are insurrectionists, Republican voters are ‘deplorables’. One is very common is the idea that some nations and organizations are ‘existential threats’. What is meant by that is either a threat to existence or an existing threat. President Biden’s Ukraine policy is an actual existential treat in that it may provoke global thermonuclear war, yet that is of course not talked about in the media. In the Democrat point of view the victory of everything they want is political inevitable. It an outlook something lie that describing kings with absolute power in his book ‘The Leviathan’.
If the epistemological criterion of Being and Nothingness is appropriate for an age of personal egoism and predatory capitalism rather than democracy, The Critique of Dialectical Reason is suitable for analysis or edification of a mass social environment. With the name and subject the Soviet Communists of Russia were interested. Since Karl Mark had adapted Hegel’s idea of an evolving world spirit coming to realize itself through history that Hegel wrote of in ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’ there had been no significant credible upgrade to the paradigm of evolving dialectical reason and dialectical materialism. Marxist philosophers were somewhat stranded standing upon the melting iceberg of Marxist dialectics that were fading in the science of the 20th century. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason personalized and shrank epistemological dialectics to that of French rationalism socially concatenated and occurring for the masses simultaneously. With the implicit French rationalist skepticism about everything perceived besides one’s own experience guiding social dialectics it became easier for some Soviet philosophers to jettison the metaphysics of dialectical materialism and move toward a more pragmatic view of social organization, individual and collective epistemology. Like the insight provide by W.V.O. Quine’s “Methods of Logic’ that taught readers of logic how to build their own system of logic from the bottom up instead of simply instructing students in a particular system of logic and how it worked, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason provided interested parties with the knowledge that collective social behavior is phenomenal, malleable and subject to change or improvement rather than necessarily being determined by evolving dialectical and material forces consistent with social Darwinism and a process of political class clash, synthesis and anti-synthesis evolution.
Sartre wrote part of The Critique of Dialectical Evolution in Moscow during several months of residence. It is entirely possible that Raisa Gorbachev- wife of President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, was familiar with the work as she was an academic philosopher. Sartre’s philosophical account of the phenomenality of social organization and the way praxis shaped it may have reinforced the paradigm for glasnost, perestroika and radical transformation of Soviet society from one of state socialism to one embracing free markets and democracy. The leap of faith into the new philosophical paradigm wherein social organization was believed to e within human power to improve rather than within the realm of dialectical material determinism was the greatest non-violent social change in mass politics that has occurred.
The late Soviets were pressured by a number of internal and external challenges to adapt, improve and move away from state socialism and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ Sartre’s avante garde philosophical work would otherwise have likely been ignored by the powerful political insiders of the Soviet Union as they would have been elsewhere other than by readers of philosophy books. Leadership of the west generally ignored The Critique. The term ‘dialectical’ was after all unfashionable after the fall of the Soviet Union. Twenty years after the fall the term existential threat became common in the discourse of Pentagon and White House spokespersons. Philosophically nothing much had changed in D.C. political circles since the end of the Cold War. Politicians were unaware of the epistemology of French rationalism developed by Sartre and the way it viewed collective social organizations phenomenally with egalitarian and equal individual experience of life differentiating itself into different roles. President Biden and other party lawyer President still regard the world empirically, sometimes with a touch of Catholic amillenialism or Protestant pre-tribulationism thrown in.
Though the social epistemology is very old and the political dialectic equally dated in the leadership of the Democrat Party, the consequences of such anachronistic viewpoints fueled with the aggressive litigant methods of a lawyer-President lead to needless political conflict along worst-case lines bilaterally. The Democrat Party leadership way of international relations seems to be of a square peg in a round hole approach with the power and ego to try to force matters its way. It is a philosophical paradigm that is closer to the mark of personal egoism and solipsism rather than pragmatic with awareness of the compound social dialectic that is the phenomenon of social reason.
