Bob Ross... A Master Dialectician

On the homologies between the dialectical materialist method and comrade Ross's paintings.

In high school I was not a fan of school. If on any occasion you were to step into the classroom I was in and look at my laptop screen, you would see Bob Ross painting. I have sense changed these behaviors in the classroom, in part because over the last few years I have found myself more at the front of the classroom than in the chairs (i.e., teaching), and in part, of course, because Marxism and philosophy have helped me fall in love with learning.

However, I don’t want to talk about my life here, but about the experience I had when the algorithm lords of YouTube suggested a Bob Ross painting video a few days ago. One of the things I quickly noticed was how well the process of painting resembled the dialectical materialist method.

Sometime ago, I did a video on the dialectical materialist method, and I explained that it consisted of the ascension from the abstract to the concrete. The method, in short, aims at coming to know totalities in an integrative, holistic, comprehensive and dynamic manner, and it does this through this process of concretization, of going from abstract determinations or components towards an understanding of the whole, which is, of course, that which is most concrete because it is that which contains the most determinations. (Here is the corresponding article on “The Dialectical Ascension from the Abstract to the Concrete”).

The process involved in the Bob Boss painting was stunningly similar. You start with a blank canvass (which is the most abstract and empty starting point), and slowly you begin to add determinations to the canvass. As these proceed you begin to see what looks like a sky, and then some clouds are added, and under this you see a lake reflecting the light from the moon or the son in the middle. Pretty soon you begin to see trees, maybe a small patch of grass with a little cabin house on it. Then Bob begins to focus on the details of the trees, the grass, the cabin, and so on and so forth.

At the end you have this beautiful scenic landscape that just completely takes you back when you consider it started off 30 minutes before as a blank canvas.

What has happened here is an ascension from an empty canvas to a whole painting. In other words, what has occurred is an ascension from the most abstract starting point to the most concrete, to the whole. Every line painted represented a concretization towards this whole.

Now imagine if you hadn’t seen the process of the painting, if you skipped the video all the way to the end just to see the final landscape. Would you know the painting better if you did this? I think the answer is clear, NO.

This sort of engagement with the whole was what Marx called an ‘imagined concrete,’ it is the mistake of treating the concrete – or in other words, the most complex – as a starting point. Marx held that this was what many political economists did. Therefore, we cannot forget that to get to the concrete, as we explored in the last article on this subject, is “a process of concentration.” It is something you arrive at in the end, when you can see all the previous moments unfold, in an integrative manner, into a mature whole.  

Taking into account the fact that the painting recorded was always the second painting Bob did (he would do the same painting before the recorded segment), what Bob has done is basically the concrete reproduction of the concrete. The already existing landscape was deconstructed and then reconstructed according to a specific logical order required to reproduce the whole as closely as possible to the one that was already finished.

Is Bob Ross a master dialectician? Perhaps. The point is this, it is very easy, especially with these topics which deal with the method, to get bogged down on philosophical terminology. Although philosophical terminology is indeed indispensable, if philosophy is doing its task correctly, that is, if it is grasping the truth of the world and accurately reproducing it as knowledge in the mind, then we should see the philosophical terminology as tools which help us understand the truth we are already in contact with. Ortega y Gasset is correct in saying that “clarity is the form of courtesy that the philosopher owes.

Most of you have probably watched Bob Ross before, and have therefore engaged, albeit unconsciously, with something which resembles the method so often obscured by academic philosophers. Yet, I am sure if you really sit down and think about it, isn’t there something almost commonsensical in it?

There is no other way for Bob Ross to attain an accurate reproduction of the first painting without this process of concretization, of adding layers in a manner that is conscious of the necessity of process and of the universal character of interconnection. Likewise, the way in which we can reflect the objective world accurately in our minds is through a similar process of concretization which is mindful of the interrelations, dynamism, and integrated character of the determinations we concretize our understanding with in the hopes of reproducing the whole in our minds as accurately as possible.

This is what Marx does in Capital, he starts from the germ of capitalist society, the commodity, and concretizes all the way towards the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production as a whole in volume three. This is also what Hegel does in his Logic, he starts from the most abstract, with the concept of pure being, and concretizes through the unfolding of the contradictions the concept arrives at in its various stages until he gets to the absolute idea, the most comprehensive and integrative moment in the development of the concept.

Thanks for reading. If you want to learn more about the dialectical materialist worldview and the dialectical materialist method, check out my book, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism.

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Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube.