The positive outcome of philosophyDietzgen, Joseph
Philosophy
The positive outcome of philosophy
Dietzgen, Joseph
Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Philosophy
Our logic is the science of understanding. It teaches that you must not
search for understanding by cudgeling your brain, but only in connection
with experience, with the interrelation of things.
Since man in his experience also meets errors, science was dominated for
centuries by the question whether truth and experience are not two
different things, whether all our experience is only an illusion of our
senses. Cartesius replied to this: "No; the belief in a perfect, true
being cannot admit of such a delusion." By substituting the concept of
truth for the concept of God, we are certain that the world of
experience is not a ghost, but the most actual reality.
Although the great Kant called the cosmic truth a phenomenon, because he
could not divest his mind of transcendental faith, of the faith in a
transcendental truth, still we know today that all distinctions which
are ever made constitute but a nibbling at the universal unit. As
necessarily as all variety in baking produces bakery wares, just as
necessarily heaven and earth, and everything connected with them, are
parts of the indivisible truth which is also called nature, cosmos,
universe, God, and experience. Language gives to its darling truth many
different pet names, just as a happy mother calls her heart's treasure
by a thousand endearing terms.
Feuerbach reasons in this fashion: "If God is not a personal being
different from nature and man, then he is an entirely superfluous
being.... The use of the word God which is always combined with the
conception of a separate being, is a disturbing and confusing abuse. Why
do you want to be a theist, if you are a naturalist, or a naturalist if
you are a theist? Away with this contradiction! Where God is confounded
with nature, or nature with God, there is neither God nor nature, but a
mystical amphibious hermaphrodite."
Feuerbach is right. The name of God is much abused. But truth is also
blasphemed by negation and frivolousness. The sober understanding that
God, truth, nature, are various names for the same thing permits us to
play with them without despairing of the matter. Indeed, this play of
words serves to make the subject clear.
But logic demands that we recognize truth as the absolute, as the power,
the force, and the glory, which comprises all logical and illogical
distinctions, together with the things to be distinguished, even the
faculty of distinguishing itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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