The Crisis in Psychology

255

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 sci-

ence and the factual, historical role of the general science. If we accept the op-

posite 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 pro-

duce 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 biol-

ogy? 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 be-

come biology.

Like the whole current, Binswanger proceeds from an idealistic conception

of scientific knowledge, i.e., from idealistic epistemic premises and a formal logi-

cal 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 cri-

tique 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 con-

ception of the general science falls immediately. As soon as we accept the realistic,

objective, i.e., the materialistic viewpoint in epistemology and the dialectical view-

point in logic and in the theory of scientific knowledge, such a theory becomes

impossible. With that new viewpoint we must immediately accept that reality de-

termines 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 rep-

resents.

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 hier-

archy 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].