carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (03/28/85)
From Daniel Mc Kiernan: > To arrive at the interpretation of Marx given by Mr Carnes, we must > ignore Hegel's *Logic* and *Philosophy of History*, ignore Engels' > *Anti-Duhring* and *Dialectics of Nature**, and, indeed, take it that > Marx trivialized the definition of 'dialectic' to the point that its > essence vanishes in the rhetorical mists. OK, Daniel, you made me do it. Here is Engels on dialectic, from *Anti-Duhring*. This is a lucid, compact explanation of the meaning of "dialectic." Judge for yourself as to whether I have misrepresented it. Let me just add that higher education in the US consists to a large extent in training to think undialectically. ____________________ In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the eighteenth century had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel. Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning.... When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine and are connected. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research....But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century. To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. "His communication is `yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other. At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. [But] sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. For everyday purposes we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process. In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is compeltely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself. Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa. None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.... This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system -- and herein is its great merit -- for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.... --F. Engels _______________ Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes
tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (04/01/85)
> From Daniel Mc Kiernan: > > To arrive at the interpretation of Marx given by Mr Carnes, we must > > ignore Hegel's *Logic* and *Philosophy of History*, ignore Engels' > > *Anti-Duhring* and *Dialectics of Nature**, and, indeed, take it that > > Marx trivialized the definition of 'dialectic' to the point that its > > essence vanishes in the rhetorical mists. > > OK, Daniel, you made me do it. Here is Engels on dialectic, from > *Anti-Duhring*. This is a lucid, compact explanation of the meaning > of "dialectic." Judge for yourself as to whether I have > misrepresented it. Let me just add that higher education in the US > consists to a large extent in training to think undialectically. > (Rich Carnes) Probably so, maybe not. This is another exchange which seems to me to be badly out of date, both as an argument about Marx and as an argument about Marxism. Recent scholarship on Marx (especially the work of Terrell Carver [in a Modern Masters book on Engels and in the collection "After Marx" from Cambridge University Press, 1983 and 1984 respectively]) tries not to put Marx and Engels in the same boat. Much of it suggests that Engels did Marx a grave disservice in suggesting that Marx had a unified methodology or that Marx stuck to a physical-scientific view of social relations. Engels on Marx is far from Marx on Marx. Engels has become a hot issue recently after long years of having been unread. Now scholars are reading Engels and they can't stand what he says. Blaming Engels for much of the Marxist myth of dialectical materialism, etc., has become very popular. This isn't exceptional in scholarship; it's a less extreme version of the turnabout in Nietzsche scholarship when he was separated from his sister-guardian, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche. If the tide against Engels is correct (I think it is), then ignoring what Engels said about Marx is the right way to go. Dialectical materialism is metaphor posing as method. When people are lost and don't know how to judge which way to go in looking at society, it offers some guidance. But when people have a firm idea of what they are doing and why, DM should be replaced by rigorous thinking. That's why once Marx wrote Capital, DM never appeared in his writings again, except as thanks for some signposts on the road when he was lost and starting to speculate about society. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw