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Chapter 15

say of an engineer who is studying a blueprint of a machine that he is studying a

blueprint and not a machi~ie, or of an anatomist studying an atlas that he studies

a drawing and not the human skeleton. For concepts as well are no more than

blueprints, snapshots; schemas of reality and in studying them we study models of

reality, just as we study a foreign country or city on the plan or geographical map.

When it comes to such well-developed sciences as physics and chemistry, Bin-

swanger [1922, p. 4] himself is compelled to admit that a broad field of investiga-

tions developed in between the critical and empirical poles and that this area is

called theoretical, or general, physics, chemistry, etc. He remarks that natural-sci-

entific theoretical psychology, which in principle wishes to be like physics, acts like-

wise. However abstractly theoretical physics may formulate its subject of study, for

example as “the theory of causal dependencies between natural phenomena,” it

nevertheless studies real facts. General physics studies the concept of the physical

phenomenon itself, of the physical causal link, but not the various laws and theories

on the basis of which the real phenomena may be explained as physically causal.

The subject matter of investigation of general physics is rather the physical expla-

nation itself.

As we see, Binswanger himself admits that his conception of the general sci-

ence diverges in one point from the actual conception as it is realized in a number

of sciences. They are not differentiated by a greater or lesser degree of abstraction

of the concepts—what can be further from the real, empirical things than causal

dependency as the subject matter of a whole science?—but by theft ultimate focus:

general physics, in the end, focuses on real facts which it wishes to explain by means

of abstract concepts. The general science is in principle not focused on real facts,

but on the concepts themselves and has nothing to do with the real facts.

Admittedly, when a debate between theory and history arises, when there is a

discrepancy between the idea and the fact, as in the present case, the debate is

always solved in favor of history or fact. The argument from the facts may itself

not always be appropriate in the area of fundamental research. Then to the re-

proach that the ideas and facts do not correspond we are fully justified to answer:

so much the worse for the facts. In the present case, so much the worse for the

sciences when they find themselves in a phase of development in which they have

not yet attained the stage of a general science. When a general science in this sense

does not yet exist, it does not follow that it will never exist, that it should not exist,

that we cannot and must not lay its foundations. We must therefore examine the

essence, the logical basis of the problem, and then it will also become possible to

clarify the meaning of the historical deviation of the general science from its ab-

stract idea.

It is important to make two points.

1. Every natural-scientific concept, however high the degree of its abstraction

from the empirical fact, always contains a clot, a sediment of the concrete, real

and scientifically known reality, albeit in a very weak solution, i.e., to every ultimate

concept, even to the most abstract, corresponds some aspect of reality which the

concept represents in an abstract, isolated form. Even purely fictitious, not natu-

ral-scientific but mathematical concepts ultimately contain some echo, some reflec-

tion of the real relations between things and the real processes, although they did

not develop from empirical, actual knowledge, but purely a priori, via the deductive

path of speculative logical operations. As Engels demonstrated, even such an ab-

stract concept as the series of numbers, or even such an obvious fiction as zero,

i.e., the idea of the absence of any magnitude, is full of properties that are quali-

tative, i.e., in the end they correspond in a very remote and dissolved form to real,

actual relations. Reality exists even in the imaginary abstractions of mathematics.