heiss93
30th April 2011, 17:08
The development of dialectical materialism in the USSR is a bit of a mystery to me. The official textbooks on diamat present it as a completed system, so it is difficult to trace the historic evolution of its' doctrines. Many of its' features were already laid out by Plekhanov and Deborin even before 1917. I think there was some talk about the issue of form and content in Deborin's work which Lenin commented on. But during Stalin's rule diamat was reduced to the 4 laws, and I'm not aware of any discussion of categories. In the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, A. P. SHEPTULIN made the case that the categories of diamat were even more important than the laws. You can read his works here-
http://leninist.biz/en/1978/MLP519/
http://leninist.biz/en/1977/PU268/
According to the sovietologist "studies in soviet thought", the categories were developed during the post-stalin thaw and were initially wide-ranging including physical ones like time-space and sociological ones like base-superstructure. They eventually solidified intot he 6 categories.
Although Mao's lectures on dialectical materialism includes the 6 lesser categories, based on 1930s Soviet textbooks, so it seems the categories go at least as far back to the 1930s. Chinese diamat also contains the categories, and they seem to be consitant with Mao's later view that the law of contradiction was the ONLY law of diamat, and all others were simply specific instances of the struggle of opposites. Each category consists of an antimony.
The categories have received far less attention than Engels' 3 laws, although in some ways they are more specific and relevant to direct praxis.
The 6 categories are
1. Cause and effect
2. form and content
3. necessity and chance (freedom)
4. essence (reality) and appearance (phenomenon)
5. possibility and reality
6. particular and universal
Most of these categories go all the way back to Aristotle and even Plato, and were developed in western philosophy by the stoics, scholastics, and eventually Kant and Hegel.
http://leninist.biz/en/1978/MLP519/
http://leninist.biz/en/1977/PU268/
According to the sovietologist "studies in soviet thought", the categories were developed during the post-stalin thaw and were initially wide-ranging including physical ones like time-space and sociological ones like base-superstructure. They eventually solidified intot he 6 categories.
Although Mao's lectures on dialectical materialism includes the 6 lesser categories, based on 1930s Soviet textbooks, so it seems the categories go at least as far back to the 1930s. Chinese diamat also contains the categories, and they seem to be consitant with Mao's later view that the law of contradiction was the ONLY law of diamat, and all others were simply specific instances of the struggle of opposites. Each category consists of an antimony.
The categories have received far less attention than Engels' 3 laws, although in some ways they are more specific and relevant to direct praxis.
The 6 categories are
1. Cause and effect
2. form and content
3. necessity and chance (freedom)
4. essence (reality) and appearance (phenomenon)
5. possibility and reality
6. particular and universal
Most of these categories go all the way back to Aristotle and even Plato, and were developed in western philosophy by the stoics, scholastics, and eventually Kant and Hegel.