Karl Marx's Theory of Nature - Dialectical Materialism

[Petros Agapetos]

Immanuel Kanian Contradictions - Antinomies - Contradictions of the Cosms (= All of Existence, ["Harmony", in Greek])

1. The world is both limited and infinite

2. Matter is both made up of particles therefore discrete, and yet also continuous composite.

3. In existence there are both Natural laws that determine the future course of history, yet there are other causes apart from nature.

4. An absolutely necessary being both exists and doesn't exist in the world.

[Petros Agapetos]

“the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process – i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.” [Friedrich Engels - Socialism: Utopian & Scientific]

It was in the decade after Hegel’s death – the 1840s – when Hegel’s popularity was at its peak in Germany, that Marx and Engels met and worked out the foundations of their critique of bourgeois society.

Hegel’s radical young followers had in their hands a powerful critical tool with which they ruthlessly criticised Christianity, the dominant doctrine of the day. However, one of these Young Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach, pointed out that Holy Family was after all only a Heavenly image of the Earthly family, and said that by criticising theology with philosophy, the Young Hegelians were only doing the same as the Christians – Hegel’s Absolute Idea was just another name for God! For Feuerbach, ideas were a reflection of the material world and he held it to be ridiculous that an Idea could determine the world. Feuerbach had declared himself a materialist.

Marx and Engels began as supporters of Feuerbach. However, very soon they took up an opposition to Feuerbach to restore the Hegelian dialectic which had been abandoned by Feuerbach, and to free it from the rigidity of the idealistic Hegelian system and place the method on a materialist basis:

“Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the ‘Idea’, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. ” [Fredrick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]

[Petros Agapetos]

Thus, for Marx and Engels, thoughts were not passive and independent reflections of the material world, but products of human labour, and the contradictory nature of our thoughts had their origin in the contradictions within human society. This meant that Dialectics was not something imposed on to the world from outside which could be discovered by the activity of pure Reason, but was a product of human labour changing the world; its form was changed and developed by people, and could only be understood by the practical struggle to overcome these contradictions – not just in thought, but in practice.

Further Reading: [The Science of Dialectics], by Fredrick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, by Fredrick Engels, an example of dialectics in: The Metaphysics of Political Economy, by Karl Marx; The ABC of Materialist Dialectics, by Leon Trotsky; Lenin's Summary of Dialectics.

[Petros Agapetos]

In every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements, consequently to know, to comprehend an object , is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.
For Hegel, dialectics is essentially a matter of analyzing the issues of logic and the human spirit (mind), and an analytical tool for analyzing History, Nature, and making social change.

It is a beautiful, harmonic, orderly, progressive, truth synthetic, truth convergent, parsimonious (minimal necessary Ontology - Nature alone ------------> Mental Reality (Phenomenology)

Personhood: Id (Unconscious Mind) Ego (conscious self, agency, smallest social unit in system, the Individual) , Super-Ego (Collectivist)

Our super egos are accessible in Ideological realm, because they form cloud of intelligence when enough ideologically possessed gather together and speak their minds, building belief systems - hierarchies of beliefs, justification structure, value system with which one views the world.
Thought is a manifestation of the natural world.
Thoughts flow from our experiences and the material world in which our first person experiential world is embedded.

[Petros Agapetos]

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. “Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.” Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves – two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject.

Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.

The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom. On the threshold of human history stands the discovery that mechanical motion can be transformed into heat: the production of fire by friction; at the close of the development so far gone through stands the discovery that heat can be transformed into mechanical motion: the steam-engine.

[Petros Agapetos]

Morality and Law.

“In the sphere of politics and law the principles expounded in this course are based on the most exhaustive specialised studies. It is therefore ... necessary to proceed from the fact that what we have here ... is a consistent exposition of the conclusions reached in the sphere of legal and political science. Jurisprudence was my original special subject and I not only devoted to it the customary three years of theoretical university preparation, but also, during a further three years of court practice continued to study it particularly with a view to the deepening of its scientific content... And certainly the critique of private law relationships and the corresponding legal inadequacies could not have been put forward with such confidence but the consciousness that all the weaknesses of the subject were known to it as well as its stronger sides” {D. Ph. 537}.

[Petros Agapetos]

Positive & Negative

Positive and Negative may be used simply in the sense of polarity, in which case neither has any meaning other than in relation to the other. However, Positive and Negative are used in philosophy with quite distinct meanings: Positive knowledge is knowledge which affirms something, rather than denying (or negating) something or disproving something. In this sense we talk of something being “posited”, and the "positive sciences" which accumulate "positive knowledge" about the objective world. Negation on the other hand means rejecting what is immediately given as true in favour of what is possible or the ‘meaning’ of something. Dialectics is sometimes said to be negative in that its action destroys the immediately given certain of facts and ‘turns things into their opposites’.

Positivism

Positivism refers to those tendencies in philosophy, particularly epistemology, which place science, especially natural science, in pride of place, adopting the methods of science as a model for all theoretical and practical activity.

The term can have quite different meanings however, according to the particular historical stage in development of the natural sciences a writer associates with positivism. Positivism is generally understood as having three distinct stages, associated with the name of Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach and finally Carnap, the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism.

[Petros Agapetos]

Idealism is a thought process (ex. rationalism) of how the material world adheres to ideas. Idealists follow a certain ideal concept (ex. faith) and understand everything from its adherence to that concept.

Idealism is in contrast to materialism, a thought process (ex. dialectical materialism) of how the material world creates ideas. Such ideas thus created are not concrete and fixed, but are constantly changing and being remoulded by the differences and changes in the material world.

Idealism can also be understood as the practice of understanding abstractions through other abstractions; where an abstraction is something that does not necessarily have basis nor relation to reality, but only exists in relation to other abstractions. The primary concern for the idealist is to create concepts that adequately explain (and change of viewpoint of) the world as we know it.

Idealism may reject the existence of the external world all altogether (the world beyond thought, beyond sensation) or assert that while a world beyond sensation may exist, it is unknowable. These trends are known as Subjective Idealism. On the other hand, idealism may accept the objectivity of nature but regard the material as the expression of ideal forces such as the Will of God, the absolute Idea, etc whose nature is accessible to the Mind directly. These trends are known as Objective Idealism.

[Petros Agapetos]

"The basis of religious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion."

[Petros Agapetos]

Abstract and Concrete

Abstract and Concrete are philosophical concepts concerned with the development of conceptual knowledge. An understanding of what is meant by “abstract” and “concrete” is vital to making sense of dialectics. For Hegel and for Marx, the contrast between abstract and concrete does NOT mean the contrast between an idea and reality. Rather ‘A concrete concept is the combination of many abstractions’. A concept, such as a number or a definition, is very abstract because it indicates just one of millions of the aspects that a concrete thing has, or a brand new idea which has not yet accrued nuances and associations. Concepts are the more concrete the more connections they have. If we say “The British working class are those who work for a wage and live in the UK,” then we've made a very abstract concept. To make it more concrete is to show the many aspects of it; showing the historical circumstances of its rise and development, the state of the world it developed in, etc.