The positive outcome of philosophyDietzgen, Joseph
Philosophy
The positive outcome of philosophy
Dietzgen, Joseph
Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Philosophy
From this it follows that the science of causality, though applicable
to all the phenomena of the world, does not apply to the universe. If it
is a fact that all wisdom is worldly, then one must not fly outside of
the world with the concept of causality.
This is the salient point at issue.
All things are one thing, are interdependent, stand in the relation of
cause and effect toward one another, or of genus and species. To say
that all things have a cause means that they have a mother. The fact
that every mother has a mother finds its final ending in the world
mother or mother world, which is absolute and motherless and contains
all mothers in its womb.
Causes are mothers, effects are daughters. Every daughter has not only a
mother, grand-mother, and great-grand-mother, but also a father,
grand-father, and great-grand-father. The origin, or the family
relationship, of a daughter is not one-sided, but all-sided. In the same
way all things have not one, but many causes which flow together in the
general cause.
The intellect which has the innate knowledge that everything has its
cause will accept the teaching that all causes in the world are founded
in the absolute world cause and must return to it. It is the
quintessence of logic not only to ascertain the true nature of the
intellect, but also to elucidate the nature of the universe by the help
of the intellect.
All things have a mother, but to expect that the world mother should
logically have a mother is to carry logic to extremities and to
misunderstand the intellect and its art of reasoning.
If you have recognized the faculty of understanding as a part of
existence, you will not wonder at its miraculousness. Existence is
wonderful. Its parts arise one out of the other, out of the universal
interrelations of the one world. They all have their predecessors and
causes. But what is true of the relative parts, is not true of the
absolute whole.
I am the son of my father and the father of my son. I am at the same
time father and son. In the same way all things are simultaneously cause
and effect. Although father and son are two different persons, still the
capacity of being father and son rest in the same person, and although
cause and effect are to be distinguished as two things, still they are
two relations of the same thing. Persons and things, causes and effects,
are not independent entities, but relative entities, are
interconnections or relations of the absolute.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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