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3rd July 2005, 00:23
text here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm)
Short Summary of Ch. 2 - Dialectics
In the 18th cent, a new philosophy was being developed in Germany by Hegel.
Hegel’s philosophy was dialectical rather than metaphysical.
Dialectics did not begin with Hegel. Ancient Greek thinkers employed dialectics, as well as more recent thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Diderot, and Rousseau.
Looking at nature or human history or our own activity, we first see everything in constant movement. Nothiing is permanent, everything is changing.
To get a deeper level of understanding, we have to look at specific things in isolation. That was the job of science, to collect and classify natural material. The job of history was to collect and classify historical material.
This “isolate, collect, and classify” approach led to the rise of a way of thinking: metaphysics. Bacon and Locke developed this into a philosophy.
The metaphysical way of thinking considers things in isolation: a cause is always a cause and an effect is always an effect. A living being is itself and nothing else. This is common sense.
But if we look more closely, metaphysical thinking falls apart. A cause in one case is an effect in another case. An effect in one case is a cause in another case. Each living being is constantly losing and gaining cells. At some point, the cells in its body are completely renewed. Therefore, at every moment, each being is itself and something else. [Engels gives a few other examples].
Unlike metaphysics, dialectics takes all of this into account. To think dialectically is to “comprehend things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.”
Darwin showed that nature goes through a process of change over millions of years. Nature is the proof of dialectics.
Kant was thinking dialectically when he theorized about the birth and death of the solar system, contradicting Newton’s idea of an eternal solar system. Kant’s theory was mathematically confirmed by Laplace.
-a few more paragraphs (probably the most important ones) to go-
Short Summary of Ch. 2 - Dialectics
In the 18th cent, a new philosophy was being developed in Germany by Hegel.
Hegel’s philosophy was dialectical rather than metaphysical.
Dialectics did not begin with Hegel. Ancient Greek thinkers employed dialectics, as well as more recent thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Diderot, and Rousseau.
Looking at nature or human history or our own activity, we first see everything in constant movement. Nothiing is permanent, everything is changing.
To get a deeper level of understanding, we have to look at specific things in isolation. That was the job of science, to collect and classify natural material. The job of history was to collect and classify historical material.
This “isolate, collect, and classify” approach led to the rise of a way of thinking: metaphysics. Bacon and Locke developed this into a philosophy.
The metaphysical way of thinking considers things in isolation: a cause is always a cause and an effect is always an effect. A living being is itself and nothing else. This is common sense.
But if we look more closely, metaphysical thinking falls apart. A cause in one case is an effect in another case. An effect in one case is a cause in another case. Each living being is constantly losing and gaining cells. At some point, the cells in its body are completely renewed. Therefore, at every moment, each being is itself and something else. [Engels gives a few other examples].
Unlike metaphysics, dialectics takes all of this into account. To think dialectically is to “comprehend things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.”
Darwin showed that nature goes through a process of change over millions of years. Nature is the proof of dialectics.
Kant was thinking dialectically when he theorized about the birth and death of the solar system, contradicting Newton’s idea of an eternal solar system. Kant’s theory was mathematically confirmed by Laplace.
-a few more paragraphs (probably the most important ones) to go-