23 june 2000
from peter jones
thanks to andy for some very insightful points. he is absolutely right i think
to object to the way in which dialectics was transformed in official soviet
philosophy into a general science of everything (including of course bagels,
whoever they belong to). For example, a sentence snipped from the definition
quoted by bill earlier:
'Materialist dialectics is a philosophical method of investigating nature and
society.' But what is a 'philosophical method' as opposed to a scientific
method? This implies, absurdly, that alongside (indeed above) the biologist
(for example) studying something, well biological with the practical and
conceptual tools of biology, there is a materialist dialectician studying the
same thing but with a 'philosophical method' (which alone will produce
objective truth, unfortunately for the poor biologist). However, it should be
stressed that Engels himself in Anti-Duhring mercilessly and wittily argued
against this kind of nonsense. And in fact the reference to 'official soviet
philosophy' is also misleading, because ilyenkov (to name one) , in an article
called 'dialectics and world outlook'), explicitly used engels' arguments to
attack similar nonsense in the soviet philosophical literature. these are
difficult issues i think, and i start to get dizzy when i think about it for
too long, but engels's position is far more nuanced than he is often given
credit for. his point was not to try and elevate 'materialist dialectics' into
a 'philosophical method of investigating nature and society', but quite the
opposite. take for example the followingquote: modern materialism is
essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the
other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its
position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a
special science dealing with this totality is superfluous [or unnecessary].'
for that reason he claimed that 'the advance of theoretical natural science may
possibly make my work (ie anti-duhring) to a great extent or even altogether
superfluous'. he later adds: ' That which still survives, independently, of all
earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws formal logic and
dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and
history. what's more, he calls 'modern materialism' (ie his materialism) 'no
longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook which has to establish
its validity and be applied not in a science of sciences standing apart, but in
the real sciences'. Dialectics, on this view, is not a 'science of sciences'
but a science amongst other sciences: a science of thinking, studying the real
development of knowledge; taking as its subject matter (for example) the
history and development of natural scientific thinking, but also the history of
thinking itself (eg in philosophy). this science of thinking, engels stressed,
is not some absolute universal truth about our thoughts or the mind, but 'like
every other [science], a historical science, the science of the historical
development of human thought'. what's the point? for engels, 'the endless
confusion now reigning in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers
as well as learners, of authors and readers alike' was caused by 'this conflict
of the results of discovery with preconceived modes of thinking', and by
preconceived modes of thinking he meant nondialectical modes of thinking. since
every scientific endeavour involves thinking about its subject matter,
dialectics (he argues) is crucial for scientific thinking because 'it alone
offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary
processes in nature, interconnections in general, and transitions from one
field of investigation to another'. so, in a nutshell, this makes dialectics
not the study of anything and everything (which = science, or Science with a
capital s) but (part of) the 'science of thinking'. dizziness sets in...
best wishes to all
P
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jul 01 2000 - 01:00:40 PDT