Rosa Lichtenstein
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
ALB:
“I think you need to re-read Dietzgen The Nature of Human Brain Work (1869). He didn’t pinch his basic idea from Hegel (there is no evidence that he had read any Hegel by then, Hegel being a “dead dog” by 1869). He got it from Kant. In fact, one way of seeing his theory is that it is Kant’s without the idea that behind what we experience there is a thing-in-itself that can’t know anything about. So all that exists is the ever-changing world of phenomena which humans try to understand by naming, describing and classifying its parts (Dietzgen’s theory of knowledge and of science). This doesn’t imply the existence of “cosmic energies” (in fact it denies this) or anything mystical like that (which I agree Hegel was).”
Well, his son tells us (in Some of the Philosophical Essays, p.
, that in his adolescence (i.e., in the early to mid-1840s) his father “assiduously studied…philosophy”, and since Hegel was still all the rage in Germany at that time, it is highly likely that his reading included Hegel. Given the additional fact that he hit upon ‘dialectics’ (another Hegelian invention), and the idea that everything is interconnected (an idea he either got from Hegel or other German philosophers who were peddling that very idea at the time, having pinched it from earlier mystics like Oetinger and Boehme), the conclusion is pretty safe that Dietzgen lifted this idea from these mystical German Idealists.
Sure, Kant had a hand in all this, since Kant was heavily influential on all of German philosophy at that time, and Hegel was the leading figure in the criticism of Kant’s noumena. So, your point merely serves to substantiate my allegations.
Furthermore, I agree that Dietzgen had stripped much of this mysticism away, but his core idea (that all things are interconnected) is no less mysterious, and was plainly lifted from Hermetic mystics.
“Actually, it would be interesting to discuss it. Do you mean that you don’t think that Leninism was an ideology for the state-capitalist development of economically backward countries?”
Well, I am a Leninist; I just reject Lenin’s version (and all versions) of Dialectical Materialism. But, we can discuss this another time.
“Yes you do, actually. It seems to be that (as in the quote from Glenn Magee) “the cosmos is … a loosely connected set of particulars”, ie that the “particulars” have an independent existence and are not parts of a greater whole (which inevitably means that there are inter-related if only for that reason). I don’t think this theory is non-sensical, just a different, less adequate one.”
Again, I do not have a philosophical theory, nor do I want one, and nor do we need one; you have yet to show otherwise.
And, I’m not sure you have quite grasped what I mean by ‘non-sensical’ — I explain what I do mean, and why all philosophical theories are non-sensical, at the link I posted earlier.
Here it is again:
http://www.revforum.com/showthread.php?788-Why-all-Philosophical-Theories-are-Non-Sensical
I go into this in extensive, almost PhD length detail here:
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2012_01.htm
ALB:
“Engels isn’t criticising Dietzgen in the quotes you give. If anything, Dietzgen would have criticised Engels’s approach which assumes that the so-called “laws of dialectics” actually exist in nature and can be discovered. Dietzgen’s argument was that what science is essentially doing is describing what we observe in nature (or, rather, in the world of experience) and that therefore the “laws of nature” are our decriptions of what we observe, with a view to predicting future experiences so as to better survive.”
I agree, and I don’t think I said he was. But, Engels is making a general point about a priori dogmatics (into which trap Dietzgen has fallen) — even though he (Engels ) is guilty of advancing plenty of his own dogmatic theses:
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2002.htm
However, Dietzgen is actually going further than you say here — indeed, as you pointed out earlier:
“In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.
No amount of evidence can show this to be the case (indeed, current theory tells us it can’t be the case).
“The theory of relativity does not refute Dietzgen’s theory of the nature of science. As a more accurate, and so more useful, description than previous ones of the same phenomena it was an example of what Dietzgen meant science was and how it progressed (by better and more useful descriptions).”
In fact, it shows that everything can’t be inter-connected. So, it does refute what Dietzgen has said as well as others who have said more or less the same sort of thing — for example:
“Another parallel between Hermeticism and Hegel is the doctrine of internal relations. For the Hermeticists, the cosmos is not a loosely connected, or to use Hegelian language, externally related set of particulars. Rather, everything in the cosmos is internally related, bound up with everything else…. This principle is most clearly expressed in the so-called Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which begins with the famous lines ‘As above, so below.’ This maxim became the central tenet of Western occultism, for it laid the basis for a doctrine of the unity of the cosmos through sympathies and correspondences between its various levels. The most important implication of this doctrine is the idea that man is the microcosm, in which the whole of the macrocosm is reflected.
“…The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.” [Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p.13. Bold emphases added.]
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm
This is indeed a feature of all mystical systems of thought, whose adepts were asserting such things before any evidence became available. So, Dietzgen more closely resembles these mystics than he does scientists. Indeed, he pinched this idea from Hegel and the German naturphilosophers — who in turn lifted it from Jakob Boehme and Plotinus, among others.
And thanks for the Pannekoek reference, but I have a copy of the book you mention, and have read it. In fact there is very little I haven’t read and studied about this theory over the last thirty odd years of researching this topic. And I thnk he is wrong about Lenin (but we can duiscuss this another time) — not that I want to defend Lenin’s version of dialectical materialsm, which is every bit as poor as Dietzgen’s and Engels’ versions
“You say we don’t need a “philosophical theory of the universe”, but surely we need a “philosophy of science” or, if you prefer, a theory of science? You must have one, even if only implicitly. What is it?”
No, I don’t have a theory of science, and nor do I want one — and nor do we need one. As I pointed out, all such theories are non-sensical — and I can prove it. [See the link I posted earlier.]
ALB:
“I don’t see how this refutes the philosophical assumption of the nature of “reality” made by Dietzgen that all that “exists” is the universe as a whole and that what humans do, to understand so as to better live in it, is to name parts of it as if they were separate things, to describe these parts and form theories on the basis of this. In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.”
Of course, what I posted wasn’t meant to refute Dietzgen’s method, but what you have posted above is yet another example of a priori dogmatics, of the sort that, for example, Engels opposed:
“Finally, for me there could be no question of superimposing the laws of dialectics on nature but of discovering them in it and developing them from it.” [Engels (1976), Anti-Dühring, p.13. Bold emphasis added.]
“All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought: the first, in the first part of his Logic, in the Doctrine of Being; the second fills the whole of the second and by far the most important part of his Logic, the Doctrine of Essence; finally the third figures as the fundamental law for the construction of the whole system. The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them. This is the source of the whole forced and often outrageous treatment; the universe, willy-nilly, is made out to be arranged in accordance with a system of thought which itself is only the product of a definite stage of evolution of human thought.” [Engels (1954), Dialectics of Nature, p.62. Bold emphasis alone added.]
“We all agree that in every field of science, in natural and historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, and when discovered to be verified as far as possible by experiment.” [Ibid., p.47. Bold added.]
“The general results of the investigation of the world are obtained at the end of this investigation, hence are not principles, points of departure, but results, conclusions. To construct the latter in one’s head, take them as the basis from which to start, and then reconstruct the world from them in one’s head is ideology, an ideology which tainted every species of materialism hitherto existing…. As Dühring proceeds from ‘principles’ instead of facts he is an ideologist, and can screen his being one only by formulating his propositions in such general and vacuous terms that they appear axiomatic, flat. Moreover, nothing can be concluded from them; one can only read something into them….” [Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 25, p.597, ‘Preparatory Materials’. Italic emphases in the original; bold emphasis added.]
Now, it’s possible to show that all such dogmatic philosophical theories are non-sensical — I have summarised the argument and posted it here:
http://www.revforum.com/showthread.php?788-Why-all-Philosophical-Theories-are-Non-Sensical
“You seem to be assuming that what Dietzgen was saying is that the world is made up of separate things and that these things are inter-related as separate things.”
I am not in fact assuming anything of Dietzgen.
“But that’s not what he was saying. Quite the opposite in fact. So light cones and so-called inaccessible regions of space and time do not invalidate his basic assumption. In fact, these are descriptions, based on our observations of part of the world of phenomena, which we use to try to explain what we observe (or, rather, in these cases, of what scientists use to explain what they observe). What Dietzgen was advancing was in fact a theory of the nature of science.”
But this is inconsistent with what you claimed above:
“In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.”
The point of my comment about light cones is that if modern science is correct, Dietzgen can’t be.
Of course, Relativity was introduced long after Dietzgen had died, but that just shows how unwise it is of any theorist to try to impose a dogmatic scheme on nature.
And, if we needed a philosophical theory of the universe (which we don’t), Dietzgen’s ideas wouldn’t even make the bottom of the reserve list of viable candidates.
AlanJ:
“Q: How many Hegelians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two, of course. One stands at one end of the room and argues that it isn’t dark; the other stands across from him and says that true light is impossible. This dialectic creates a synthesis when the bulb gets screwed in. (Explanation : Hegel and Marx use a logical procedure called dialectics to seek answers to seemingly mutual exclusive positions. Shortened it is “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”. Thus ‘no light’ and ‘no dark’ can arrive at a middle ground through logical examination ‘it’s dark but it can be made light’.)”
The correct answer is, of course, “None at all, the light bulb changes itself.”
But, Debs is seriously wide of the mark here. “Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis” is in fact Kant and Fichte’s method, not Hegel’s. Marx toyed with it in some of his early work, but it is arguable he is also lampooning it.
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Thesis_Anti-Thesis_Synthesis.htm
Moreover, for there to be a dialectical change here, light would have to ‘struggle’ with darkness. Has anyone ever witnessed this?
Can light ‘struggle’ with the absence of light?
Ok, JohnDWhite, you have posted an old address. The correct one is now:
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/index.htm
DJP:
“‘Dialectical-Materialism’ of the kind that used to be spread by the ‘communist’ parties is a sham and a fraud, its no wonder people are suspicious of it. The same can be said for Rosa Lichtenstein and her crusade”
Well, that is a far easier accusation to make than to prove. My site is in fact devoted to debunking all forms of dialectics that have descended with or without modification from Hegel, upside down or ‘the right way up’.
“If you want to know about dialectics read Dietzgen, it’s a shame he has pretty much dropped off the radar.”
In fact, Dietzgen’s rather poor, a priori speculations are far easier to refute than are those of Engels and Plekhanov. But we can discuss this further the moment you post something — anything — of his that is worthy of merit.
And by a priori speculation I mean assertions like this:
“As a review in the October 1998 Standard put it ‘dialectics means that, in analyzing the world and society, you start from the basis that nothing has an independent, separate existence of its own but is an inter-related and interdependent part of some greater whole (ultimately the whole universe) which is in a process of constant change.'”
Not only is there no proof of this, there couldn’t be. For example, how is it possible for everything to be ‘inter-related’ when there are vast regions of space and time that are, and always will be, inaccessible to us? On this, look up ‘light cone’ using Google — for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone
Indeed, I have shown this idea up for what it is, here (i.e., it’s a left-over from mystical Hermeticism — Hegel was a Hermetic mystic):
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2011_01.htm
“So there is something in what Lichtenstein is saying but she just gets lost in long and boring rants and hasn’t really studying her subject well enough.”
I am used to fans of the dialectic substituting personal abuse for contrary argument and/or evidence, but if my work is ‘boring’, then Dietzgen will positively put you to sleep for good.
And what, may I ask, is your proof that I haven’t studied this topic “well enough”?
