The positive outcome of philosophyDietzgen, Joseph
Philosophy
The positive outcome of philosophy
Dietzgen, Joseph
Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Philosophy
Class logic teaches that contradictory things cannot exist. According to
it, a thing cannot be genuine and false at the same time. This class
logic has a narrow conception of existence. It has only observed that
there are many different things in nature, but has overlooked the fact
that all these things have also a general nature. We, on the other hand,
recognize that every thing, every person, is a part of the infinite
world and partakes of its general nature, is eternal and perishable,
true and untrue, great and small, one sided and manyfold, in short
contradictory.
Before and after Socrates, philosophy and religion have searched for the
genuine, right, good, true, and beautiful, but have reached no
harmonious results. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the
centuries the problem has become clearer and clearer. The great names of
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Cartesius, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, are milestones on the highway of this progress.
The evolution is apparent, but the interrelation between the
intellectual and physical, and especially between intellectual and
economic evolution, is much ignored. The bridge between mind and body
was not found, and philosophical evolution has been regarded up to our
day as a purely mental process accomplished by one or two dozen of
famous brains. I wish to point out to you now, that proletarian logic is
the continuation of the preceding research after the genuine, true,
good, and beautiful. It teaches how to conceive of these ideals
logically, and it has not so much proceeded from any one talented
brain, but is rather the product of the entire cosmic process.
Philosophical brains have developed the science of logical thought only
to the extent that the material development of the world has stimulated
them to do so. You must regard the human brains only as secondary levers
of the universal lever which is not only genuine, true, good, and
beautiful, but truth, goodness, and beauty itself, or the world and the
absolute.
The understanding of the absolute which is called "good Lord," and then
again "the bad world," in other words the selfsufficient cosmos, is very
inconvenient to the wisdom of the professors, and they are attempting to
assign it to a special study which they call "metaphysics." This
division of labor is not introduced for the purpose of making research
more productive, but of surrounding this study by mysterious darkness.
The professors who lecture to the young people on formal logic set aside
the ancient research after the true, the good, the beautiful, and try to
place these ideals outside of the light of science in order to be able
to preserve them unchanged in the tabernacle of faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account