The positive outcome of philosophyDietzgen, Joseph
Philosophy
The positive outcome of philosophy
Dietzgen, Joseph
Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Philosophy
What can a logic accomplish which divides thought into analytical and
synthetical thoughts, which speaks of inductive and deductive
understanding and of a dozen other kinds, but which finally declines to
meet the question of the relation of thought and understanding to truth,
and fails to indicate what and where is divine truth and how we may
arrive at it?
Pilate, the typical sceptic, shrugs his shoulders; the clergymen make a
mystery of divine truth; the natural sciences care only for the true
conceptions, but naught for the concept of truth; and then the special
science of understanding, formal logic, tries to refer its task to
philosophy or world wisdom.
I have already pointed out that the titles of the principal works on
philosophy indicate that the whole world wisdom turns around the
question: How can our brain be enlightened, how can it arrive at truth?
The naturalists answer that this can be accomplished by special studies,
and they are frequently opposed to philosophical research which makes
general truth its main object, and belittle it. You will readily see
that this is a mistake when you consider that, to illustrate, a machine
or an organism as a whole is still something more than a mere sum of its
parts.
No matter how well you may know each single part, yet you will not
understand the whole machine or organism by this means alone. The
universe is not an aggregation of unorganized parts, but a living
process which must be understood not only in its parts but also as a
whole. We may pass for the moment the question whether the Milky Way may
be dissolved into stars, and whether the stars may become globes like
our Earth which may develop plants, animals, and intelligent beings. The
thing which is evident is that there is a process of development, that
all nature takes part in this movement, that the universe is a whole
without end, composed of an infinite number of parts; a coming and
going, an eternal transformation, which is always identical with itself
and always the same world. What all this would be without our eyes and
ears and without the intellect by means of which we use eyes and ears,
what the world "in itself" is, that is a senseless and transcendental
speculation.
The science of logic must deal only with the actual world which is
inseparable from us and from our thoughts.
This world which we hear, see, smell, in which we live and breathe, is
the world of truth or the true world. That is a fact. Must I prove this?
And how is a fact proven? How do we prove that a peach is a delicious
fruit? One goes and eats it. In the same way, you may now go and enjoy
life, of course in a rational manner, and I am convinced that your own
love of life will tell you that it is proof positive of the truth of the
world, of its actuality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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