[STUDY GROUP] Socialism:Utopian and Scientific - Thread 4

[xnj]

text here

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-

[Severian]

I think I see where you left, off, so I'm going to post some questions about the rest of this chapter...see if that helps kick off some discussion better than the summaries.

*What are some good and bad points of Hegel's philosophical system? How did Hegel perceive human history?

*What scientific discoveries lead to or support a dialectical world-view? Or, if you prefer, what scientific evidence contradicts it?

*How has Engels' observation on the changing relationship between philosophy & the sciences played out since that time?

*What historical developments contributed to a materialist understanding of history?

*How did this change socialism?

***

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.

Also known as formal logic: Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Which was an advance in its time, and still works much of the time...when the things you're examining aren't changing across the boundaries of formal logic's rigid categories. When a thing's current position is more important than its direction of motion.

[Severian]

Well, lemme just comment on one thing Engels brings up:

In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.

Philosophy certainly has declined greatly compared to science....today, some even argue that philosophy has become wholly unnecessary and that areas of philosophical inquiry, like the nature of consciousness, are now areas for scientific investigation instead.