Harry makes a qualified argument for a dialectics of nature, on the
grounds that it is an alternative to mechanistic conceptions of nature.
But the truth is that scientists don't need dialectics to dispense with
mechanism. It is a conceit that say that the scientists are just
catching up with us. On the contrary, Marxism is way behind natural
science in this respect, as Marx understood when he cited Darwin as the
equivalent in the natural world to his own work.
More importantly though, the 'where's the harm' argument falls because
the harm has indeed been terrible. For sixty years soviet science was
bent and subordinated to the demands of fulfilling the schema of
'dialectical materialism' with crippling results upon its progress.
Despite the disproportionate resources the SU concentrated upon science
its results were meagre and fell badly behind the 'undialectical' West.
Evidence of the terrible consequences of the dialectics of nature
argument can be seen in the Lysenko scandal, when the soviet biologist
Lysenko developed a theory of the priority of cultural conditions over
genetic in the development of plants. Lysenko persisted in this dogma,
supported by Stalin as a test-case in the superiority of soviet
'dialectical' science, suppressing all of the evidence that disproved
it. Throughout the world scientists were hectored into making a
judgement of the theory not on the evidence, but according to
'dialectical' principles. Great scientists of the left, like JD Bernal
in England were convinced of the need to support Lysenko against the
'mechanistic' western biology.
But they were wrong. And the application of Lysenko's science to soviet
agriculture led to waste and hunger. It also made those scientists of
the left who had endorsed Lysenko into a laughing stock. Their authority
to stand up for scientific reason and progress was irreparably damaged
by the evident dogmatism of their support for a bogus 'dialectics of
nature'.
Tragically, this influence of the dogmatic 'dialectics of nature' is
still evident today. At the British Open University Bio-physics
department Dr Mae Wan Ho and Prof Steven Rose have drawn upon the
discredited tradition of the dialectics of nature to mystify genetics
today. Mae Wan Ho's book Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare?
invests the organism with a mystical wholeness that - she argues - makes
genetic engineering 'reductionist'. Her blanket argument against
scientific enquiry into the cell components is a disastrous influence
that puts the left once again on the opposite side of the fence from
scientific advance.
When I talked to Mae-Wan Ho she told me that her next book was going to
be about the 'life-force', at a higher stage from Bergson. Truly,
'dialectics of nature' leads to the most grotesque mysticism.
But let's leave the last but one word to Evald Ilyenkov, soviet
dialectician who struggled to correct the formalistic reading of
dialectics:
'dialectics, counterposed to the process of development of knowledge
(thought) in the form of a doctrine about "the world as a whole", in the
form of 'world schematics' is just as inevitably converted into a
collection of extreme statements about everything on earth and not about
anything in particular (something of the sort of that "everything in
nature and society is interconnected", or that "everything develops" and
even "through contradictions", and so on).
Dialectics, understood so, is tacked on to the real process of cognition
in a purely formal way, through examples "confirming" one and the same
general proposition over and over again. But it is clear that such a
formal superimposition of the general onto the particular does not
deepen our understanding of either the general or the particular by a
single jot, while dialectics is transformed into a dead scheme.'
Dialectical Logic, p 315, Progress Press, 1977.
And let's leave the last word to Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch Marxist
(very active, Rob) and also one of few Marxist theoreticians to be also
an accomplished scientist (an Astronomer of note):
'It is apparent that here [with Comte], just as it was with Descartes
and with Hegel, that philosophy must stumble when it tries to prescribe
and predict results, or even the methods, of science; its task is to use
them as materials for its own theory of knowledge, epistemology.'
A History of Astronomy, Dover Books, 1989, p407
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Harry Feldman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>Without
>pretending to understand this stuff, from what I read, one of the main
>barriers to scientists' understanding it is a futile attempt to address
>them mechanistically. Some scientists I've read (can't supply citation,
>I'm afraid, but probably something in Scientific American or New
>Scientist) seem to be on the verge of breaking with this, although they
>may not know where to turn.
>
>Evolutionary (punctuated equilibrium), geological and astronomical
>phenomena seem to me to unfold in a dialectical way and if we can
>understand such things dialectically, why should we hold back, whether
>or not the giants from whose shoulders we gain a wider perspective
>recognised it themselves?
--
Jim heartfield
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
