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Chapter 15

this positive sense of death. Indeed, death is a universal law for living matter. One

cannot imagine that this phenomenon would in no way be represented in the or-

ganism, i.e., in the processes of life. It is hard to believe that death would have no

sense or just a negative sense. [27]

Engels [1925/1978, p. 554] expresses a similar opinion. He refers to Hegel’s

opinion that only that philosophy can count as scientific that considers death to be

an essential aspect of life and understands that the negation of life is essentially

contained in life itself, so that life can be understood in relation to its inevitable

result which is continually present in embryonic form: death. The dialectical un-

derstanding of life entails no more than that. “To live means to die.”

It was precisely this idea that I defended in the mentioned preface to Freud’s

book: the need for biology to master the concept of death from a fundamental

viewpoint and to designate this still unknown entity which no doubt exists—let it

be with the algebraic “x” or the paradoxical “death drive”—and which represents

the tendency towards death in the processes of the organism. Despite this I did

not declare Freud’s solution to this equation to be a highway in science or a road

for all of us, but an Alpine mountain track above the precipice for those free of

vertigo. I stated that science needs such books as well: they do not reveal the truth,

but teach us the search for truth, although they have not yet found it. I also reso-

lutely said that the importance of this book does not depend upon the factual con-

firmation of its reliability: in principle it asks the right question. And for the :~

statement of such questions, I said, one needs sometimes more creativity than for

the umptecnth standard observation in whatever science [see pp. 13-15 of Van dcr

Veer and Valsiner, 1994].

And the judgment of one of the reviewers of this book showed a complete

lack of understanding of the methodological problem, a full trust in the external

features of ideas, a naive and uncritical fear of the physiology of pessimism. He

decided on the spot that if it is Schopenhauer, it must be pessimism. He did not

understand that there are problems that one cannot approach flying, but that one

must approach on foot, limping, and that in such cases it is no shame to limp, as

Freud [1920/1973, p. 64] openly says. But he, who only sees lameness here, is metho-

dologically blind. For it would not be difficult to show that Hegel is an idealist, it

is proclaimed from the housetops. But it needed genius to see in this system an

idealism that stood materialism on its bead, i.e., to distinguish the methodological

truth (dialectics) from the factual falsehood, to see that Hegel went limping towards

the truth. [28]

This is but a single example of the path towards the mastery of scientific ideas:

one must risc above their factual content and test their fundamental nature. But

for this one needs to have a buttress outside these ideas. Standing upon these ideas

with both feet, operating with concepts gathered by means of them, it is impossible

to situate oneself outside of them. In order to critically regard a foreign system;

one must first of all have one’s own psychological system of principles. To judge

Freud by means of principles obtained from Freud himself implies a vindication in

advance. And such an attempt to appropriate foreign ideas forms the third type of

combining ideas to which we will now turn.

Again it is easiest to disclose and demonstrate the character of the new meth-

odological approach with a single example. In Pavlov’s laboratory it was attempted

to experimentally solve the problem of the transformation of trace-conditional sUm-

uli and trace-conditional inhibitors into actual conditional stimuli. For this one must

“banish the inhibition” established through the trace reflex. How to do this? In

order to reach this goal, Frolov resorted to an analogy with some of the methods

of Freud’s school. [29] ‘ilying to destroy the stable inhibitory complexes, he exactly