Determining Your Philosophy Dialectically

By Gary Tedman
PoliticalAffairs.net

Philosophy, as it exists officially (academic and institutional), has a professional relationship to the sciences: it defends them, elucidates them, and provides a framework through which we can think them, especially in their combination. It tries to tell us what they mean, in human terms: how should we live our lives, according to science? You might say this is the function or purpose of philosophy today, it is its job.

Philosophy as we know it comes in two main strands, materialism and idealism.

Materialism is opposed to Idealism in the "theory of knowledge" - in the theory of how knowledge is derived. In the jargon, the "theory of knowledge" is called epistemology. For a Materialist, being (existence) comes before thought: you must be, first, in order to think. Idealists hold the contrary view: ideas come before existence. Note that we must not confuse the strict philosophical meaning of materialism with the casual sense of love of money and the things it can buy.

Marxism is essentially a materialist theory, but added to its theory of knowledge is always the dialectic, which furnishes the conception of development and change. This idea of development is known in philosophy as ontology, the theory of being or existence. So we have epistemology and ontology: materialism + dialectics, or dialectical materialism.

The dialectic was initially taken over by Marx from Hegel, the great idealist philosopher, but in a transformed way. To put it very schematically, Marx brought this process down to earth so that, afterwards, material (economic) factors determined social change in history, and not the human spirit or ideas. The resultant philosophy is materially "determinist," in that material factors cause events.

Determinism is the philosophical principle that material events that take place (in time) are caused by material events that happened previously, hence the simple idea of cause and effect in history. These causes can be worked out empirically, studied, tested, and in some cases reproduced, and so can also be predicted. This is a fundamental procedure of science (e.g. it leads to advances in technological products).

Reading Lenin 10

READING LENIN: Materialism and Empiro-criticism [ 10 ]
Thomas Riggins

Using our editor's blog to further Marxist education seems like a good idea. So here is a famous work of Lenin's that outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It's 100 years old this year and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophic developments in the last 100 years made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book section by section and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post weekly updates and Sunday seems the best day to this as it is a free day for me.

Chapter Two : Section Five: "Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels as Discovered by A. Bogdanov"

This great discovery was made, says Lenin, in the preface to Book III of Bogdanov's Empirio-monism. Bogdanov thinks he is ridiculing Engels when the latter gives as examples of "eternal truths" such statements as "Napoleon died on May 5, 1821" or "Paris is in France." To Bogdanov this is too trivial for words.

"What sort of 'truth' is that?", he asks, "And what is there eternal about it? The recording of a single correlation, which perhaps even has no longer any real significance for our generation, cannot serve as the starting-point for any activity and leads no-where." For some reason Bogdanov calls such "truths" eclectic, as if Engels is just uncritically adopting them from all different forms of materialism.

Of course the examples given by Engels are "trivial", but they are given to make a point, which is that there are many examples of objective and eternal truths all around us and that idealist philosophers are just being foolish when they try to make a big mystery about "truth." Bogdanov's objections are just "turgid nonsense" according to Lenin.

"To be a materialist," Lenin writes, "is to acknowledge objective truth, which is revealed to us by our sense-organs. To acknowledge objective truth, i.e., truth not dependent upon man and mankind, is, in one way or another, to recognise absolute truth."

What we have to do is get away from these trivial criticisms and examine DIALECTICALLY the distinction that Engels was trying to make between relative and absolute truth in his criticism of Duhring's philosophy. By ignoring the context of Engels' argument Bogdanov only reveals his own incompetence.

By thinking dialectically Engels arrives at a concept of absolute truth that grows out of relative truth. Each one of us as an individual has a part of the truth, relative truth, but absolute truth is the whole which gradually reveals itself, but only partially at any one time.

"For Bogdanov (as for all Machists)," Lenin writes, "recognition of the relativity of our knowledge EXCLUDES even the least admission of absolute truth. For Engels absolute truth is compounded from relative truths. Bogdanov is a relativist; Engels is a dialectician."

Absolute truth (the reality behind the world of our sensations) is built of the relative truths we gain from experience. Towards the end of this section Lenin says, "Dialectics -- as Hegel in his time explained -- CONTAINS an element of relativism, of negation, of skepticism, but IS NOT REDUCIBLE to relativism."

What is at issue, and which Bogdanov and the other Machists fail to see, is "the CORRESPONDENCE between the consciousness which reflects nature and the nature which is reflected by consciousness." This is something that Marx and Engels understood (and Dietzgen and Feuerbach as well). Bogdanov and the Machists, under the guise of modern science are just repeating "ancient trash."

SECTION SIX: "The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge"

"'The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from from practice is a purely scholastic question,' says Marx in his second Thesis on Feuerbach,'' Lenin points out, and Engels repeats: "The success of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived."

And what does Mach have to say about the criterion of practice? According to Lenin Mach, in The Analysis of Sensations, makes a distinction between theory and practice. Mach: "Physiologically we remain egoists and materialists with the same constancy as we forever see the sun rising again. But theoretically this view cannot be adhered to."

This is supposed to be the newest scientific viewpoint (1908). I won't go into the newest viewpoints (2008), but will remark that the battle continues! But it is an old battle. A hundred years before Lenin it was raging, Fichte, and two thousand years before that with the Greeks as well as in other philosophical traditions.

"Of course, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea COMPLETELY. This criterion too is sufficiently 'indefinite' not to allow human knowledge to become "absolute", but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism."

Next week we shall do the first 2 sections of Chapter Three.

See Reading Lenin 9 here...