This is all pretty juvenile leftism. Then again, it's not Kevin Trudeau. The entire history of philosophy to Rosa is a scheme, a ruse, duplicity.
Novack was indeed a hack. Anything of substance in this essay comes down to the criticism of Lenin. I don't have time for this but if anyone cares to review Lenin's remarks, go to it. At 01:23 PM 7/13/2007, Charles Brown wrote: >For instance, in his Philosophical Notebooks Lenin attempted to derive the >entire dialectic from a single sentence like "John is a man." [Lenin (1961), >p.359.] There, Lenin was quite happy to construct several tall stories atop >this alarmingly weak foundation, claiming to know what must be the case for >all of reality, for all of time. > > >However, John's material insignificance did not prevent Lenin from >uncovering a host of universal and omnitemporal truths concealed beneath >this fictional character's imputed manhood. Thus, from this figment of the >imagination, Lenin thought he could derive a number of seemingly eternal and >all-embracing scientific facts. Indeed, from sentences like these (all of >which were of the subject/predicate form -- a highly limited form of >discourse, anyway), and scarcely giving a thought to the epistemological >megalomania this implied --, Lenin was able to claim that not just John, but >everything in reality must be a UO, and thus that everything in existence is >contradictory. His reason? Simply that John cannot be identical with the >universal term "man", a subject cannot be identical with a predicate. > >.......................... > >Lenin thus calmly concluded that the principles he had uncovered while >reading Hegel's Logic -- and after tinkering with a few simple sentences -- >governed the "eternal development of the world." [Lenin (1961), p.110.] >Furthermore, and despite the fact that dialecticians repeatedly tell us that >their theory is not a "master key" to all that exists, Lenin let the >metaphysical cat out of the linguistic bag when he declared that: > >"[t]he identity of opposites.alone furnishes the key to the self-movement of >everything existing." [Ibid. p.358.] > > >One minute DM is not the key; next it is. One minute we are told dialectics >must not be imposed on reality; next it has been. All DM-theorists indulge >in this pragmatic contradiction: first they disarm the reader with an open >declaration that dialectics has not been imposed on reality (their favourite >way of making this point recently is to say that DM is not "a royal road to >truth"), then, sometimes on the same page or in the next paragraph -- or >even in the very next sentence -- they proceed to do the exact opposite, >claiming that this or that DM-thesis is universally true throughout all of >space and for all of time. >...................... _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
