Well, it uses the present participle of the verb to be, reifies it and makes
a big deal out of a syntactical blunder.
It is nit thgyat vthere is no such thing as Being, it is that the question
cannot even be asked.
A bit like saying:
"The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent
philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and Will Have Been".
Brainless.
I cover this at my site.
As I said, that is why I posted it.
How many more times!
Your comments of the dialectician dillemma are welcome, but recall I only
posted that material to you to show you my ideas are original.
I will reply to your errors later.
RL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
andthe thinkers he inspired'" <marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 7:54 PM
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] People's History of Science
rosa lichtenstein
Charles,
"What do you find naïve in Engel's views?"
Everything he wrote about science, mathematics and philosophy, although the
word "naive" was a little too mild.
I should have said "rubbish".
His other stuff I admire greatly.
RL
^^^^^
CB: Ok everything. How about this ? What is rubbish about it ?
The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent
philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. From the
very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of
their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to
believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their
bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at
death - from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation
between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of
the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct
death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of
development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which
it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive
misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what
to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death
of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way
to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner,
the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And
these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more
extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost
say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man's intellectual
development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods
there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the
monotheistic religions.
Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the
spirit to nature - the paramount question of the whole of philosophy - has,
no less than all religion, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant
notions of savagery. But this question could for the first time be put
forward in its whole acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only
after humanity in Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the
Christian Middle Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation
to being, a question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the
scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary, spirit or
nature - that question, in relation to the church, was sharpened into this:
Did God create the world or has the world been in existence eternally?
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two
great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and,
therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or
other - and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often
becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity - comprised
the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to
the various schools of materialism.
These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing
else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense. What
confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them will be seen below.
But the question of the relation of thinking and being had yet another side:
in what relation do our thoughts about the world surrounding us stand to
this world itself? Is our thinking capable of the cognition of the real
world? Are we able in our ideas and notions of the real world to produce a
correct reflection of reality? In philosophical language this question is
called the question of identity of thinking and being, and the overwhelming
majority of philosophers give an affirmative answer to this question. With
Hegel, for example, its affirmation is self-evident; for what we cognize in
the real world is precisely its thought-content - that which makes the world
a gradual realization of the absolute idea, which absolute idea has existed
somewhere from eternity, independent of the world and before the world. But
it is manifest without further proof that thought can know a content which
is from the outset a thought-content. It is equally manifest that what is to
be proved here is already tacitly contained in the premises. But that in no
way prevents Hegel from drawing the further conclusion from his proof of the
identity of thinking and being that his philosophy, because it is correct
for his thinking, is therefore the only correct one, and that the identity
of thinking and being must prove its validity by mankind immediately
translating his philosophy from theory into practice and transforming the
whole world according to Hegelian principles. This is an illusion which he
shares with well-nigh all philosophers.
In addition, there is yet a set of different philosophers - those who
question the possibility of any cognition, or at least of an exhaustive
cognition, of the world. To them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume
and Kant, and they played a very important role in philosophical
development. What is decisive in the refutation of this view has already
been said by Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist
standpoint. The materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious
than profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other
philosophical crotchets is practice - namely, experiment and industry. If we
are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by
making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making
it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the
Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself". The chemical substances produced in
the bodies of plants and animals remained just such "things-in-themselves"
until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon
the "thing-in-itself" became a thing for us - as, for instance, alizarin,
the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the
madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from
coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with
100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis.
But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only
deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also
calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily
occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune,
discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved.
If, nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian
conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England (where in
fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their theoretical and
practical refutation accomplished long ago, scientifically a regression and
practically merely a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting
materialism, while denying it before the world.
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