Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/440

To have this make sense, I have to explain what I believe is true of the psyche and of dialectics. The part of Marx I always found least congenial was his dialectical materialism. It seemed an irrational mystical note in his supreme reasoning. And all the engineers of socialism have thrown away the theory for the practice, and converted Marxism to its vulgarization, the practice of socialism rather than the thrust to anarchism. Marx was a genius, he was even partly a saint, but he was both these things because he was not merely a realist and a rationalist, he was also a mystic, and dialectics are no more nor no less than the endless chain of give-and-take and take-and-give.

Society and history are the projection forward of the projection inward. Man is not simply a conscious and an unconscious. He is many levels of consciousness, each the mirror, the reflection of a state in the unconscious which is more pure, more the thing-in-itself which is nothing other than the polarity, the double—AP No thing in itself is a one but a two—the reflection in the conscious mind of an unconscious state. I believe that the unconscious of man is an endless chain inward, inward, inward to the point which is infinity. Put less crudely, put topographically, the conscious and the unconscious are the polarized “thing” of mind-and-body.

As we plumb nominally, plumb the unconscious, states of consciousness appear—in the conventional analysis what invariably appears is the malice under sweetness, the passivity under aggression, the chaos under order. But that is merely the first level inward of the unconscious, and it is the level most susceptible to socializing because the “moral-ethical” sense is already in the consciousness—therefore we see the unconscious as dirty, evel—evil—what-have-you? But beneath the sweetness of the sweet person, is malice, beneath the malice is real sweetness, beneath the real sweetness is real malice, beneath real malice is real real sweetness, beneath real real sweetness is real malice, beneath real real malice is real real real sweetness—and so forth. On to infinity in every person alive.

Which suggests that God when we reach him is God-and-Devil not God and Devil. Give-and-Take not give and take. For only through Give-and-Take, dialectics, is the world and nature advanced. Which is why the nature of man is both joyous-and-tragic. It is truly both, not one—the sentimental petrifaction into One of Society when it calls man joyous; nor tragic, also one, which is the social despairing of people who believe that man is one, all bad, all divided. What they sense is Good-and-Evil (Give-and-Take, And Take-and-Give) AP: the comma is the way we indicate a larger AND than ‘and’. The comma sets up the ‘and’ of equality. So good-and-evil (G-T And T-G) are the nature of progress, they are the nature of GO.