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Commentary on HessenHessen’s well-known conference paper was intended as a brief example for western scientists of a soviet application of the materialist conception of history to science.  It is a fine short piece.I consider the following aspects that are relevant to the current thread.Practice precedes theory.  Newton “firmly stood at the centre of the physical and technical problems and interests of his time”.  “Applied mechanics … had already been elaborated, and his task consisted in teaching about nature, the mathematical bases of physics.”Newton’s Dualistic Materialism.  Hessen repeats about Newton what Engels said of Locke — that he “was a typical child of the class compromise of 1688.”  Newton was ten years younger than Locke.Newton was acutely aware, as were his contemporaries, that his mechanistic science sailed dangerously close to atheistic Epicureanism which taught “that the creation of the world could be explained by purely mechanical principles”.Newton couldn’t abandon his God to atheism; but nether could he abandon his materialism to God.  So finally, in a late insertion to his third edition, Newton introduced God in order to banish Him from everything except the initial act of creation [or to intervening from time to time for mechanical repairs, whenever the universal clockwork needed a rewind — Leibnitz].Most relevant to our thread is Hessen’s account of how Newton consciously defused Epicurean atheism.  The “universal chain of mechanical determinism ends in the original impulse.  The principle of pure mechanical causation leads to the notion of [God] … the necessity of a divine power as the organizing, moving and directing element of the universe.”“The planets could be set in motion as a consequence of the force of gravity [centripetal force], which was a natural cause, but could never achieve periodical rotation along closed orbits, which would require a [non-natural cause] tangential component” [the notorious, because apparent, centrifugal force].Newton, quite reasonably for the time, “pointed out that such a marvelously organized system, in which the speed and masses of bodies are selected in such a manner as to maintain stable equilibrium, could only be created by divine reason.”Conservation of MotionThe next most relevant account to this thread relates to Descartes and Toland, and their semi-speculative materialist conservation laws.Newton had disproved conservation of quantity of motion in his second law of motion.  It wasn’t until Newtonian mechanics discovered the abstract category of energy that it could properly comprehend conservation of quantity of motion — and reinstate it as conservation of energy.But Descartes had earlier considered Nature’s “supreme law is the law of conservation of quantity of motion.”  He also banished God from mechanics, only to re-admit Him for the sole purpose of proving “that the quantity of motion in the universe remains constant … since by assuming inconstancy in His creations we also assume inconstancy in Him.”Materialist Toland, in direct opposition to Spinoza, Descartes and Newton, wrote that “Motion is essential to Matter, that is to say, as inseparable from its Nature as Impenetrability or Extension, and that it ought to make a part of its Definition.”But Toland’s materialism couldn’t take the concepts of the conservation of matter and motion any further than his mentor Epicurus had taken them two millennia before him.It awaited future generations of chemists, in different social times — like Dalton and Lavoisier — to take the ancient [abstract] Epicurean category of the atom, and the new [abstract] Newtonian category of mass, as serious objects of cognition, and so further the concept of the conservation of matter, as the conservation of mass.It awaited future generations of thermodynamicists, in different social times — like Carnot and Clausius — to take the new [abstract] Newtonian concept of energy seriously as an object of cognition, and so further the concept of conservation of motion, as the conservation of energy.BolshevismThe last matter of significance to our present thread is Hessen’s compulsory nod to Lenin.Hessen, feels obliged to anachronistically, and so blatantly unfairly, oppose 19th century Engels — who knew the energy transformation laws — against 17th century Newton who suspects their presence but — in historical materialist terms — is not yet inhabiting a material world from which he can actually develop them out of the phenomena.In a subsequent post, I’ll examine these examples from the materialist conception of history of science upon scientific cognition.

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LBird wrote:

In a Communist society, … we assume humans can understand our society and its products.‘Is there an authority (like ‘science’ or ‘the market’) which is (or should be) outside of our democratic control?’.Scientists … who believe in private property in the means of production are suspect.

Please explain why you assert that “in a Communist society … we assume humans can understand our society and its products.”Please explain how you propose that we put the authority of the market under our democratic control.All scientists have worked under some form of private-property social system: ancient chattel slavery, medieval feudalism or modern capitalism.Most scientists of the past were inspired by social and religious precepts that we would now despise.Given the above, please show us just one instance of any piece of substantial scientific work performed by any natural or mathematical scientist which should, in your opinion, have been rejected but instead survived scrutiny merely because the scientist and the profession “believed in private property in the means of production”.[Here I expressly exclude those scientists who are the hired prize fighters of capitalism’s economics profession or its social scientists.]One instance please, so that we gain a clear understanding of what you are driving at.

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ALB wrote:

I'm beginning to wonder whether a socialist party needs to take sides in the debates on "the philosophy of science" beyond defending a general "realism" or "materialism". In other words, do we really need to take sides in the more detailed debates that go on between various schools of realist/materialist philosophies of science?

The Socialist Party gains its political practice from scientific practice.  That’s why it must comprehend scientific practice [Thesis VIII].Object.  Is our political Object coherent [as in a Kuhnian scientific paradigm]? Or is our political Object flexibly incoherent [as in a Lakatosian research program]?Principles.  Do we stick to our political principles and take a hostile stand towards violations of them [as in a Kuhnian scientific paradigm]? Or do we openly encourage fringe violations of our political principles [as in a Lakatosian research program]?Hostility.  Do we reject Leninism and Social Democracy as illegitimate violations of our political principles [chucking them out]? Or do we embrace Leninism and Social Democracy as legitimate alternatives to our principles [fraternizing with them]?Sure ALB, we can, and should, drop reference to Kuhnian scientific paradigms, etc. — they are merely significant in the current context in opposition to formally legitimized political casuistry.But we can never forget that Marx bequeathed us the only science we have.  We comprehend that science to gain our Object — a direct consequential outcome of that science.Our opponents thrive on an incoherent political Object and on flexible political Principles.  Their behaviour, though clearly politically opportunistic, is also clearly anti-scientific — pseudo science.Coherent science for Socialism!

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God Made the Sun Stand Still for JoshuaMention of Dawkins and Copernicanism in neighbouring posts brings to mind the celebrated Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ at Dayton Tennessee in 1925.Monkey TrialDarrow put Bryan [the ‘tin-pot pope of the Coca Cola belt’, according to Mencken] on the witness stand and cross-examined him.

Court recorder wrote:

Q — Now Mr Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the Earth if it [the Sun] stood still?A — No.Q — You have not?A — No; the god I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr Darrow….Q — Or have you ever thought about it?A — I have been too busy on things that I thought were more important than that….[Topic changes to when the Flood occurred]…Q — What do you think?A — I do not think about the things I don’t think about.Q — Do you think about the things you do think about?A — Well sometimes.(Laughter in the courtyard.)

The wonderful play, and movie, Inherit the Wind closely follows the court transcript.Joshua as Anti-Copernican WitnessThe biblical text most cited by the churchmen against the Copernicans was the clincher from the Old Testament in which God makes the Sun stand still for Joshua.Innocuous enough, perhaps.  The churchmen simply preferred the noble old biblical explanation to the brash young scientific explanation.But Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, reminds his readers of the far from noble reason God acceded to Joshua’s request.It turns out that a normal day didn’t give Joshua enough time to commit total genocide and senseless destruction of all livestock — something that troubled the churchmen far less than a perceived threat to their privileges.

Dawkins wrote:

Good old Joshua didn’t rest until “they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”    (Joshua 6: 21).

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LBird wrote:

I don't think that Kuhn's ideology of 'paradigms' and their 'shifts' is the best one to employ.  I prefer Lakatos' 'research programmes'.  The essential difference, I think, is that 'paradigms' are in 'series', so that a later one replaces an earlier one (a 'shift'). In contrast, 'research programmes' are in 'parallel', so that more than one is usually operative at the same time.

False.  Kuhnian paradigms, such as general relativity and quantum mechanics have no choice but to work in parallel.  Nobody convincingly yet knows how to unite them inside a common framework.Furthermore, Lakatos totally agreed that science progresses through successive paradigms.  He never challenged Kuhn’s revolutionary insight.  Rather it became the rock-solid foundation of his future thoughts on scientific practice.The discovery of scientific paradigms was, in its own Kuhnian terms, revolutionary science.  The deliberate invention of Lakatos’s research programs was, in Kuhnian terms, normal science, conducted inside Kuhn’s new conceptual framework.Why normal science?Firstly, because participation in a Lakatosian research program demands absolute allegiance to its hard core [abstract] principles.  However, that’s not even normal science, but trivial science.  It is a scientific necessity that was radically discovered and established over two millennia ago, and handed down to us by Euclid.  Nobody has ever seriously doubted it since.[Well, not nobody.  The rabid Popperian Fuller maligns such allegiance to principles as Kuhnian dictatorship.]Secondly, Lakatos’s research program accepts that the Kuhnian paradigm has effectively demolished Popperian falsification.But Lakatos wants to resurrect falsification in a new [post-Kuhnian] form inside his constructed research programs.  Popper’s disciple is not prepared to give up his master’s celebrated falsificationism without a fight.So Lakatos’s whole research program is an exercise conducted in the shadow of Kuhn’s paradigms precisely because they demolished comforting falsifiability.  Lakatos can never repudiate Kuhn’s paradigms without removing the ground on which he stands.Paradigms are the very edifices he seeks to amend.  Oh yes, he accepts them alright.To put it in this thread’s terminology:  the Kuhnian paradigm is Lakatos’s [abstract] object of cognition.But Lakatos has a higher allegiance than to his mentor and that is to his own past, that he must now come to terms with.  So Lakatos invents aberrant research programs as a mechanism for smuggling Popperian falsificationism into Kuhnian paradigms through the back door after Kuhn has gently but firmly shut the front door.So Lakatos’s research programs admit auxiliary hypotheses that are to be considered as non-binding ad hoc expendable [abstract] principles — kite flying exercises — to handle anomalous evidence.What an amazingly brilliant discovery — enough to immortalize a man!  Except that this is a well-known, but often dubious, practice for handling anomaly since science began.  When crisis mounts, this fringe practice ceases to be the exception, and increasingly takes centre stage, announcing itself as none other than Kuhnian revolutionary science.Lakatosian auxiliary hypotheses can’t even be dignified as normal science because they’re in part an overt endorsement of the unstoppable, but totally speculative, scientific practice which always goes on at the fringes of normal science.This Lakatosian endorsement of fringe speculative practice, of course, aligns with Popperian views of what normal scientific practice ought to be.  Popper, the revolutionary, lives on in Lakatos.One can’t help being reminded of the 1950s aging revolutionaries Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac enjoying themselves in lofty isolation within their scientific dotage, ever willing on [abstract] revolution when there was none to foment.Their younger contemporaries like Feynman simply rejected the speculative Lakatosian research programs of their former heroes, accepted the Kuhnian paradigm, got on with it, and gave us modern particle physics, modern cosmology — our modern universe.And Lakatos has the intellectual hide to accuse that miraculous achievement — ancient epicyclic astronomy — of being pseudo science, precisely because it necessarily behaved like his flexible research programs, but under totally different historical circumstances.And, of course, this is the very same Lakatos whose effulgent scientific acumen shines through his agreement, with his mentor Popper, that Darwinian evolution is not scientific to the exacting standards of the normally speculative Dr Lakatos.Poor modest Kuhn fled the field he plowed, leaving it to the grand egotists Lakatos and Feyerabend to pitch their tents upon their own precious patches of the field.  No sooner had Lakatos permitted formal flexibility, than Feyerabend ripped into it by pointing out that, in revolutionary science, formality be damned — “anything goes”.And the social sciences ignorantly lapped it all up, discovering in Kuhnian paradigms, as filtered through his speculative successors, ready-made support for “revolutionary” post-modernism.  We are all “revolutionaries” now, just like Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend told us to be!It was Marx, Kuhn and Gould who pointed out that stasis [a social formation, a scientific framework, a species] is the norm, and revolution is the exception [social revolution, paradigm shift, speciation].But, to return to Lakatos.  Just suppose he did manage to salvage falsifiability, doesn’t that circumvent the need for clumsy exogenous democracy?Lakatos’s falsifiability criterion, if it’s any good, should circumvent the need for any democratic adjudication.  And, if Lakatos’s falsifiability isn’t any good, so also aren’t his research programs either, for they were constructed to bring post-Kuhnian falsifiability back into science.[Note.  Everyone recognizes that a closed system comprised of a manageably countable number of components is a suitable domain for naive falsifiability.That is how a car mechanic decides what’s wrong with the engine, how a software engineer can debug a program, how some birds can tell if an egg is missingBut an open system, or a closed one with an enormous number of components, is a domain that defeats naive falsifiability, simply because it can’t be examined within a humanly feasible time frame.]

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For those interested, the equation given in post #160 on http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/organisation-work-and-free-access?page=15 describes the standard [quantum] model of particles and their interactions.It is the current tidied up form of the revolutionary equations developed by the “revolutionary” physicists of the 1920s [previous post]: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac and others, as fleshed out by their “conservative” followers Feynman and others.As with Marx for historical materialism [Kuhn for scientific theory, and Gould for natural evolution], stasis is the norm.   Revolution is the exception.   That is a constraint we must comprehend.

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Observation Precedes TheoryThe following discursive account of the quantum revolution of the 1920s perfectly exemplifies Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigm shift, and strikingly reveals just what is and isn’t possible when people consciously set out to cause an [abstract] paradigm shift entirely in the world of ideas freed from concrete empiricism.Einstein somewhere implies that he created general relativity independently of observation.   So we’ll examine Einstein in a following post.Physicist Freeman Dyson, The World on a String, New York Review [May 13, 2004].

Dyson wrote:

In the 1920s, the golden age of quantum theory, the young revolutionaries were Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac, making their great discoveries at the age of twenty-five, and the old conservative was Ernest Rutherford, dismissing them with his famous statement, “They play games with their [abstract] symbols but we turn out the real [objective] facts of Nature.”   Rutherford was a great scientist, left behind by the [abstract] revolution that he had helped to bring about.   That is the normal state of affairs.[In the 1950s], the revolutionaries were old and the conservatives were young.   The old revolutionaries were Albert Einstein, Dirac, Heisenberg, Max Born, and Erwin Schrödinger.   Every one of them had a crazy [abstract] theory that he thought would be the key to understanding everything.Einstein had his unified field theory, Heisenberg had his fundamental length theory, Born had a new version of quantum theory that he called reciprocity, Schrödinger had a new version of Einstein’s unified field theory that he called the Final Affine Field Laws, and Dirac had a weird version of quantum theory in which every [quantum] state had probability of either ±2.Each of the five old men believed that physics needed another [abstract] revolution as profound as the quantum revolution that they had led twenty-five years earlier.   Each of them believed that his pet [abstract] idea was the crucial first step along a road that would lead to the next big [abstract] breakthrough.Young people like me saw all these famous old men making fools of themselves, and so we became [abstract] conservatives.   The chief young players then were Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman in America and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in Japan.Anyone who knew Feynman might be surprised to hear him labeled an [abstract] conservative, but the label is accurate.   Feynman’s style was ebullient and wonderfully original, but the substance of his [abstract] science was [abstractly] conservative.   He and Schwinger and Tomonaga understood that the [abstract] physics they had inherited from the [abstract] quantum revolution was pretty good.The [abstract] physical ideas were basically correct.   They did not need to start another [abstract] revolution.   They only needed to take the existing [abstract] physical theories and clean up the [abstract] details.The result of our [abstract] efforts was the modern [abstract] theory of quantum electrodynamics, the theory that accurately [concretely] describes the way atoms and radiation behave.This [abstract] theory was a triumph of [abstract] conservatism.   We took the [abstract] theories that Dirac and Heisenberg had invented in the 1920s, and changed as little as possible to make the [abstract] theories [abstractly] self-consistent and user-friendly.[Concrete] Nature smiled on our [abstract] efforts.   When new [concrete] experiments were done to test the [abstract] theory, the [concrete] results agreed with the [abstract] theory to eleven decimal places.But the old [abstract] revolutionaries were still not convinced.After the [concrete] results of the first experiments had been announced, I brashly accosted Dirac and asked him whether he was happy with the big success of the [abstract] theory that he had created twenty-five years earlier.   Dirac, as usual, stayed silent for a while before replying.   “I might have thought that the new [abstact] ideas were correct,” he said, “if they had not been so ugly.”   That was the end of the conversation.Einstein too was unimpressed by our [concrete] success.   During the time that the young physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were deeply engaged in developing the new [abstract] electrodynamics, Einstein was working in the same building and walking every day past our windows on his way to and from the Institute.   He never came to our seminars and never asked us about our [abstract] work.   To the end of his life, he remained faithful to his [abstract] unified field theory.Looking back on this history, I feel no shame in being an [abstract] conservative today.   I belong to a generation that saw [abstract] conservatism triumph, and I remain faithful to our [abstract] ideals just as Einstein remained [abstractly] faithful to his.

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In other words, anomaly is, in Hegelian terms, contradiction. It is the only source of dialectical change in a coherent/consistent theory. Otherwise a coherent/consistent theory remains static. Why should it change?We should welcome anomalous observation.

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In other words, the scientist must adhere to the constraint of his system — his theoretical framework [or Kuhnian paradigm].That implies that, when nature throws back anomalous evidence at the scientist — evidence he necessarily must interpret within his community's shared theoretical framework — he has no choice but to stretch that framework to incorporate the anomaly.  Such anomalies include theretrograde motion of Mars that led the ancient theoretical astronomers to stretch what were originally circles into epicycles. This found its resolution in accepting the countervailing observation and changing the theory to a Copernican universe and Kepler's ellipses.the anomalous motion of Mercury that of necessity was explained by [Newtonian] gravitational perturbation by an as-yet-to-be-discovered minor planet. This found its resolution in accepting the countervailing observation and changing the theory to Einsteinian general-relativity.In other words, despite everything, the scientist must be conscious of being trapped within his abstract framework, but must nevertheless take every concrete observation seriously.  Anomalous observation may be the germ of a new more-embracing theory.The scientist, like any human being, cannot without violating intellectual integrity just brush anomaly under the carpet. 

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Albert Einstein Falsely QuotedWikiquotes for Albert Einstein reveals that this quote is almost certainly a false attribution, along with so many pinned onto this celebrated scientist by the vulgar to shine in his reflected glory, and that lurk for innocent propagation, to the unfortunate eroding of Einstein’s reputation.

It was NOT Albert Einstein who wrote:

“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.”The earliest published attribution of this quote to Einstein found on google books is the 1991 book The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain (p. 507), but no source to Einstein’s original writings is given and the quote itself is older; for exampleNew Guard: Volume 5, Issue 3 from 1961 says on p. 312 ( http://books.google.com/books?id=5BbZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22fit+the+theory%22#search_anchor ) “Someone once said that if the facts do not fit the theory, then the facts must be changed”, while Product Engineering: Volume 29, Issues 9–12 from 1958 gives the slight variant on p. 9 “There is an age-old adage, ‘If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory.’ But too often it’s easier to keep the theory and change the facts.”These quotes are themselves probably variants of an even earlier saying which used the phrasing “so much the worse for the facts”, many examples of which can be seen in this search ( http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=facts+fit+%22so+much+the+worse+for+the+facts%22&tbs=,cdr:1,cd_max:Dec%2031_2%201950&num=10); for example, the 1851 American Whig Review, Volumes 13–14 says on p. 488 (http://books.google.com/books?id=910CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA488#v=onepage&q&f=false) “However, Mr. Newhall may possibly have been of that casuist’s opinion, who, when told that the facts of the matter did not bear out his hypothesis, said ‘So much the worse for the facts’.”The German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte circa 1800 did say “If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts.”   The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in his “Tactics and Ethics” (1923) echoed the same quotation.

It’s rather appalling to find Fichte — one of the founders of German Idealism — convicted of spouting it, but no context is given.   The American Whig Review’s characterization of it as casuistry is spot on. When cited out of context, this quote can only be read as a base invitation to intellectual fraud.To stop promulgating falsehood, please repudiate it.

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Theory Decides What Can be ObservedWikiquotes gives the source for LBird’s significant Einstein quote:

Wikiquotes wrote:

“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”Objecting to the placing of observables at the heart of the new quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg’s 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted in Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam, ISBN 0521371406.

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Yes, by way of moving on, the object-oriented software cycle makes an excellent analog of Marx’s descent–ascent method.   And it works in practice.Marx’s method of descent from the concrete to the abstract corresponds to the software phase of abstraction — the writing of the program.   Here the programmer abstracts from a [concrete] domain to form [abstract] classes [Dietzgen’s abstract objects] that encapsulate [abstract] attributes [Dietzgen’s abstract predicates] and [abstract] behaviour [which, I consider analogous to abstract determinism].Marx’s method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete corresponds to the software instantiation phase — the running of the program. Here the program constructs [“concrete”] instance objects of its abstract classes, and applies them back to an instance of the concrete domain.Yes, Marx was a century ahead in a lot of things.   Except, that this was actually Hegel’s mystified method, as Marx acknowledges.   Hegel wrote his Phenomenology over 200 years ago.By the way, I think it’s clear that Dietzgen failed to adequately address the analog of [abstract] behaviour, which can only be abstract determinism — something I feel demands to be addressed eventually.   Marx consciously understood exactly what he was doing.All three of these folks are absolutely amazing.

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It ’s time now to move on.We socialists are daily confronted by fabricated truths [= blatant lies that prey upon the last surviving vestiges of our common sociability] as well as by the understandably-excusable socially constructed truths that emerge of necessity from our capitalist social being.Advocacy, or championing, of woolly truths quite naturally rings socialist alarm bells.   We’ve all been sickened by the social democratic and the soviet thriving on woolly truths to their short-term gain and to the long-term detriment of historical-materialist socialism.We’ll never forget that it was precisely you who advocated unswerving democratic agreement by the whole community upon all social truths.The sort of people you imperiously demand here agree with you without reservation inhabit a political world that contrasts starkly with the political world of enforced truths that you [apparently] just passed through.That’s one of the reasons why I pulled you up over both your pseudo-science reference and your ignorant denigration of Feuerbach’s achievement which, you no doubt failed to notice, has the unintended effect of diminishing and trivializing Marx’s astonishing critique of Feuerbach’s astonishing position.That was not nit-picking on my part.   It was keeping faith with scientific integrity — something, which you openly denigrated.   Why then should anyone trust you?I may be presumptuous but, for me, it’s time to move on to other content.

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Surely, ALB and DJP, you must acknowledge the historical materialist content of LBird’s assertion about truth.If “social being determines consciousness” then truth is socially determined like all consciousness.Truth is not a concrete object of cognition.   It is one of Dietzgen’s abstract objects of cognition.A central Earth simply was the truth for pre-Copernican society.   And all society was pre-Copernican once.Social practice, from the planting of crops, the telling of time, the calendar, the worship of gods, sacrifice, augury and divination, building of pyramids, the [Ptolemaic] science of astronomy, etc. was conceived as occurring within a pre-Copernican solar world.Copernican truth, like every social power, had to be fought for, in order to displace earlier truth.   Just as we must fight capitalist truth for our Object.LBird well knows my misgivings over his critical realism, but I support him on this.

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Why Dietzgen Is Not a Critical Realist      Because Schaff’s Subject is Transcendental

LBird, asserting the entities of cognition, wrote:

Here we have our three entities of cognition: [Object, Subject, Knowledge].

Dietzgen recognizes all three entities as objects of cognition. Schaff recognizes only the Object as an object of cognition.

LBird, revising the Object, wrote:

[#70] If the concept of the ‘universal object’ implies that the ‘object of cognition’ can only be ‘everything’, then I disagree.   A pre-selection must take place from ‘everything’…[#93] Object: concrete perpetual motion (not ‘fixed’ things to ‘discover’, once and for all);

LBird seems to revise the Object: #70 — [concrete] individual object [= mutable thing] #93 — [concrete] universal object [= ensemble of mutable things].Owing to changed context, LBird might clarify whether he thinks “concrete perpetual motion” is universal or individual.Either way, Dietzgen recognizes the universal object as well as the individual objects, which we carve out of it, as objects of cognition.

twc, asserting the universal object, wrote:

… the universal subject is a component of the universal object — exists within it — and so is not independent of the object of cognition.

Since we are part of the universe, subject [we] and object [universe] interpenetrate.   Subject and object are united through shared commonality.   As Dietzgen says “they share the same substance”, which he calls [historical materialist] matter.If they were constituted of different substances, it is impossible to understand — in materialist terms — how one could ever comprehend the other.   Their interpenetration opens up the possibility of cognition.Appearances to the contrary, the comprehending [abstract] subject and the comprehended [concrete] object both comprise [historical materialist] matter.   Comprehension is thereby possible.

LBird, denying the universal object, wrote:

Here, twc appears to deny the separateness of the entities of ‘object’ and ‘subject’. … this would undermine any tripartite theory of cognition, not just Schaff’s version.

That’s precisely why Dietzgen is not a critical realist.   He would not fetishize a tripartite model that separates, in imagination, that which he was at pains to show is united.Dietzgen openly acknowledges that the subject is very much a part of the object.   Subject and object are fundamentally entangled, and they can only be separated in imagination.Our social interpenetration with the universe is the fount and origin of dialectics — our attempt to free ourselves intellectually from that which we can never escape physically.Schaff valiantly attempts to free himself from the universe.   His transcendental subject stands above and beyond its alienated object, in imagined detachment from it.Because the critical realist thinks he transcends his object of cognition, he unconsciously fuels the following parody:The critical realist must, therefore, divide the universe into two parts, one of which [the transcendental subject] is superior to the universe [the alien object].   He is therefore the educator who stands in need of education.Schaff calls upon the magic of reflection between cognizing subject and alien object to unite these ‘fraternal twins’ that are separated at birth.   The possibility of their reunion — like the possibility of cognition — remains a mystery that must bridge an unbridgeable gulf while always preserving it.Why not simply recognize with Dietzgen that subject and object are of the same [historical materialist] substance?

[Author]

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