The Crisis in Psychology

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with its own material. The whole difference is that [general] biology begins where embryology, zoology, anatomy etc. stop, that it unites the material of the various sciences, just as a [special] science unites various materials within its own field.

This viewpoint can fully explain both the logical structure of the general science and the factual, historical role of the general science. If we accept the opposite opinion that the general science is part of logic, it becomes completely inexplicable why it is the• highly developed sciences, which already managed to create and elaborate very refined methods, basic concepts and theories, which produce a general science. It would seem that new, young, beginning disciplines are more in need of borrowing concepts and methods from another science. Secondly, why does only a group of adjacent disciplines lead to a general science and not each science on its own—why do botany, zoology and anthropology lead to biology? Couldn’t we create a logic of just zoology and just botany, like the logic of algebra? And indeed such separate disciplines can exist and do exist, but this does not make them general sciences, just as the methodology of botany does not become biology.

Like the whole current, Binswanger proceeds from an idealistic conception of scientific knowledge, i.e., from idealistic epistemic premises and a formal logical construction of the system of sciences. For Binswanger, concepts and real objects are separated by an unbridgeable gap. Knowledge has its own laws, its own nature, its a priori, which it projects unto the reality that is known. That is why for Binswanger these a priori, these laws, this knowledge, can be studied separately,! in isolation from what is cognized by them. For him a critique of scientific reason in biology, psychology, and physics is possible, just like the critique of pure reason was possible for Kant. Binswanger is prepared to. admit that the method of knowing determines reality, just as in Kant reason dictated the laws of nature. For him the relations between sciences are not determined by the historical development of these sciences and not even by the demands of scientific experience, i.e., in the final analysis they are not determined by the demands of the reality studied by this science, but by the formal logical structure of the concepts.

In another philosophical system such a conception would be unthinkable, i.e., when we reject these epistemological and formal logical premises, the whole conception of the general science falls immediately. As soon as we accept the realistic, objective, i.e., the materialistic viewpoint in epistemology and the dialectical viewpoint in logic and in the theory of scientific knowledge, such a theory becomes impossible. With that new viewpoint we must immediately accept that reality determines our experience, the object of science and its method and that it is entirely impossible to study the concepts of any science independent of the realities it represents.

Engels [1925/1978, p. 514] has pointed out many times that for dialectical logic the methodology of science is a reflection of the methodology of reality. He says that

The classification of sciences of which each analyzes a different form of movement, or a number of movements that are connected and merge into each other, is at the same time a classification, an ordering according to the inherent order of these forms of movement themselves and in this resides their importance.

Can it be said more clearly? In classifying the sciences we establish the hierarchy of reality itself.

The so-called objective dialectic reigns in all nature, and the so-called subjective dialectic, dialectical thinking, is only a reflection of the movement by opposition, that reigns in all nature [ibid., p. 481].