Duhring's ontological argument starts with being and the conception of being, and this thought of being is undivided. In just the same way, if I start with “society”, “people”, “nation”, as concepts, and the conception of wholes as undivided, tautologically implies unity, and that there cannot be anything beyond them. This same semantics and ontological argument results in the argument that Israel is a “Jewish” state, rather than a Zionist state, and given the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, any attack on that state is, then, tautologically an attack on all Jews, even if the majority of Jews are not part of that state, or themselves disagree with its actions, and so constitutes anti-Semitism. It has resulted in large numbers of Jews who oppose Zionism and the genocide committed by the Zionist state, being labelled anti-Semitic!!!
This is exactly what bourgeois-nationalism proposes. And, because, for Duhring, thinking and being must correspond to each other, being is undivided in reality too. So, too, for the bourgeois-nationalist. In the concept British “people”, or Ukrainian “people”, or Russian “people”, the whole implies unity, a lack of division, and so, also, implies that this is, also, what exists in reality, even though its clear that, within these categories, we see numerous divisions/cleavages, be it of class, status, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and so on. As with God, or the point in geometry, this abstraction “people”, or “nation” is something created in the mind that cannot exist in the real world.
“To attempt to prove the reality of any product of thinking by the identity of thinking and being that was indeed one of the wildest delirious fantasies of — a Hegel.” (p 53)
For Duhring, as with Hegel, the starting point is “being”, and yet this being turns out to be nothing. Again, the concept of zero is significant. There is no zero in the real world, and yet, if we consider a positive and a negative charge, of equal magnitude, they cancel out, become zero. If we take matter and anti-matter, they also cancel each other out. A condition of the universe as “nothing”, could also be considered as one containing equal quantities of matter and anti-matter. It is both something and nothing, as one unified thing “nothing” is differentiated into two new things.
If we consider, for example, the unified “thing” the “people”, consisting of the mass of independent peasants and commodity producers, the fact of this commodity production and exchange, involves competition between them, and this competition results in their differentiation into winners and losers. In turn, this differentiation results in the winners becoming bourgeois and the losers proletarians, i.e. two entirely new “things” emerge from this one, single undifferentiated thing. At first, the differences within the undifferentiated mass are merely quantitative, the more competitive commodity producers become more affluent, and more wealthy than their neighbours. They acquire more and better animals, tools and so on. However, at a certain point, this quantity turns into quality.
The competitive advantage these additional and better animals and equipment gives them drives their neighbours out of business, more quickly. To utilise these advantages, they must produce on a larger scale, for an expanding market. Their failed neighbours now become both the buyers of their commodities, in this expanding market, and their wage workers, producing those commodities. The additional means of production now become capital, in this new social relation, in which these wage workers produce surplus value appropriated by capital, and its means of further accumulation.
Engels gives the example of water which is heated, a quantitative change, until, at a certain point, the water turns into steam, a qualitative change in its condition. These same kinds of transition of quantitative changes turning into qualitative changes are replete in Nature, and form the basis of the theory of evolution, for example. Yet, as Engels notes,
“Not content with pilfering from his worst-slandered predecessor the latter's whole scheme of being, Herr Dühring, after he himself has given the above example of the sudden leap from quantity into quality, has the effrontery to say of Marx:
“How ridiculous, for example, is the reference” (Marx's) “to Hegel's confused, and nebulous notion that quantity changes into quality!”
Confused, and nebulous notion! Who has changed here, and who is ridiculous here, Herr Dühring?” (p 56)
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