The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. Joseph Dietzgen 1887
It is the merit of the philosophical outcome to have delivered the process of understanding from its mystic elements. So long as cause and effect are not recognized as a form of thought belonging to the same species with many other forms of thought, all of which serve the common purpose of illuminating the cosmic processes for the human mind by a symbolized picture composed of various conceptions, just so long will something mysterious adhere to the category of cause and effect.
Philosophy is particularly engaged in illuminating the understanding. It has learned enough of its specialty to know that it is a part of the universe performing the special function of arranging the world of phenomena and its smaller circles according to relations of consanguinity and chronology. Such an arrangement presents a scientific picture of the world. The well-known diagram of conceptions used by logicians, consisting of a large circle symbolizing the general, inside of which smaller circles crossing and encircling one another represent the specialties, is a fitting aid in explaining the method by which the faculty of understanding arrives at its scientific results. Science in general is the sum of all special kinds of knowledge, differing from them in no greater degree than the human body from the various organs of which it is composed. A bodily organ can no more exist outside of the body than any particular knowledge can exist outside of the generality of all sciences. No metaphysics is possible under this condition.
As surely as we know that two mountains cannot be without a valley between them, just so surely do we know that nothing in heaven, on earth, or in any other place can lie outside of the general circle of things. Outside of the worldly world there can be no other little world. A logically constituted human mind cannot think differently. And it is likewise impossible to discover such an outside world by the help of and within the limits of experience, because thought is inseparable from experience and there can be no experience without thought. A man who has a head upon his shoulders – and there can be no man without a head – cannot experience any unworldly metaphysical world. The faculty of experience, which includes the faculty of understanding or perception, is merely empirical. Our settled conviction of the unity of the universe is an inborn logic. The unity of the world is the supreme and most universal category. A closer look at it at once reveals the fact that it carries its opposite, the infinite multiplicity, under its heart or in its womb. The general is pregnant with specialties.
This is a comparison, and comparisons limp. A mother has other qualities beside that of motherhood, while the universe, or the absolute generality, is nothing but the bearer, the cause, of all special and separate things. It is “pure” motherhood which can no more be without children than the children without a mother. In this way, no cause can be without effects. A cause without an effect – let us dismiss it. The child is as much a cause in motherhood as it is its effect and product. In the same way the universe has never been, and could not be conceived, without the many special children which it carries in its womb.
If thought wishes to make for itself a picture, a conception of the cause of all causes, it must necessarily take cognizance of the effects. Thought may very well separate one from the other, but cannot think correctly without the consciousness that its separating and distinguishing is only a formality. Imagining, conceiving, knowing, perceiving, are so many formalities.[9]
But philosophy took its departure from the opposite, the wrong, view. It regarded perceiving, understanding, as the main thing. It did not use science as a formality, as something secondary, as something serving a nature, a cause, a purpose, a higher reason, but it started with the illogical and irrelevant assumption that the specialty of mind, understanding, conceiving, judging, distinguishing, is the primary, supreme, self-constituted cause and purpose, instead of being an element in logic. Even in Hegel’s logic, which, by the way, has given us much light on the process of thought, this confounding of the original with the copy is the cause of an almost impenetrable mysticism.
Not nature, but science is to those idealist philosophers the source of truth. The “true idea” surpassed everything with them. This “idea” is forced by Hegel to roll about, and wind, and twist as if it were not a natural child, but a metaphysical dragon. But we cannot deny that in these twistings and windings of the Hegelian dragon the condition of the mind is exposed in all its peculiarities and nakedness.
According to Hegel’s theosophical opinion I do not become aware of my friend in material intercourse and bodily touch. Hegel’s mark of a true friend is not that he proves true in life, but that he corresponds “to his idea.” The “idea” of true friendship is for the idealist the measure of friendly truth, just as Plato measures the ideal or true condition of states and cooking pots of this valley of sorrows by the standard of an “idea” of the state, or an “idea” of the cooking pot, supposed to be derived from some other world.
It is surely a valuable gift of nature that the human mind can form its ideals. But it is a gift that has also caused much trouble and which requires for its higher development the clear understanding that ideals are constructed out of real materials. Without this understanding the human race will never succeed in making a reasonable use of its ideal faculty. The beautiful ideal of true friendship may stimulate us to emulation. But the knowledge that it is nothing but an ideal which in reality is always mixed with a little falseness serves as no mean antidote against sentimental transcendentalism. And the same holds true of truth, liberty, justice, equality, brotherhood, etc.
The striving after an ideal is very good, but it does no harm to be conscious of the fact and clearly see that any ideal can never be realized without some admixture of its opposite. What is it that Lessing says? “If God were to offer me the search for truth in his left hand, and truth in his right, I should grasp his left hand and say: Father, keep truth, it is for you alone.”
It has not been the task of philosophy to give us a true mind picture of the world. This it cannot do, this cannot be done by any scientific specialty. It may be done by the totality of sciences, and even by them only approximately. Even with them striving is a higher truth and of higher value than knowing. I repeat, then: It is not the particular task of philosophy to furnish a true picture of the world, but rather to investigate the method by which the human mind arrives at its world pictures. That is its work, and it is the object of this book to sketch its outline.
A sketch is in itself an inexact piece of work. I may be blamed for jumbling together such terms as world, cosmos, universe, nature, or such others as ideas, judgment, conclusion, thought, mind, intellect, etc., and for using them as synonyms when many of them have already been assigned their fixed meaning in the classification of science. But this is the point which I emphasize, that the method of science, of thought, has the twofold nature of making fixed terms and still remaining pliable.
Science not only defines what this or that is, but also how it moves, how it originates, passes away, and still remains; how it is fixed and yet at the same time moving. The real being of which science treats, viz., the universe, is not alone present, but also past and future, and it is not alone this or that, but it is everything. Even nothing is something belonging to the aggregate life.
This dialectic statement is rather incomprehensible to the unphilosophical brain. Nothing and something are conceptions so widely diverging from one another in the unphilosophical mind that they seem far more apart than heavenly bliss is supposed to be separated from earthly misery, according to the declarations of clergymen. Clergymen are transcendental logicians, and it is likewise transcendental to regard nothing as an absolute nothing. It cannot be denied that it is at least a conception or a term. Therefore, whether little or much, it is something. We cannot get out of existence, out of the universe, any more than Münchhausen can pull himself out of a swamp by his pigtail.
There can be no absolute nothing, because the absolute is synonymous with the universe, and everything else is relative. So it is also with nothing. It simply has the significance of not being the main thing. To say: This is nothing means it is not that which is essential at this time and place. This man is nothing simply means that he is not a man out of the ordinary, and it does not at all signify that he is nothing at all.
The category of being and not being, like all categories,[10] which appear as something fixed to the sound but ill-informed mind, is really something shifting. Its poles fuse and flow into one another, its differences are not perfectly radical. These categories give us an illustration of the mobile universe, which is a unit composed of its opposite, multiplicity.
The positive outcome of philosophy has for its climax the understanding that the world is multifarious, and that this multiplicity is uniform in possessing the universal nature in common. The sciences must represent these objects in such a contradictory way, because all things live in reality in this contradiction. What the museum zoologists and the herbarium botanists have accomplished on the field of zoology and botany in the category of space, has been accepted by the Darwinians with the addition of the variety of those subjects in the category of time. Either class of scientists categorizes, classifies, systematizes. The chemists do the same with substances and forces, and so does Hegel with his categories of being and not being, quantity and quality, substance and attribute, thing and quality, cause and effect, etc. He makes all things flow into one another, rise, pass, move, and he is right in doing so. Everything moves and belongs together.
But that which Hegel missed and which is added by us consists in the further perception that the flow and the variability of the categories just quoted is only an illustration of the necessary variability and interaction of all thoughts and conceptions, which are, and must be, nothing but illustrations and reflexes of the universal life.
However, the idealist philosophers who have all of them contributed materially toward this ultimate special knowledge, are still more or less under the mistaken impression that the process of thinking is the true process and the true original, and that the true original, nature or the material universe, is only a secondary phenomenon. We now insist on having it understood that the cosmic interaction of phenomena, the universal living world, is the truth and life.
Is the world a concept? Is it an idea? It may be conceived and grasped by the mind, but it does and is more than that. It surpasses our understanding in the past, the present, and the future. It is infinite in quantity and quality. How do we know that? We say in the same breath that we do not know everything which is passing, has passed, and will pass in the world; we do not understand the whole, and yet we claim to have fully understood that this whole universe is not a mere idea, but something absolute, something more than a conception or an intuitive knowledge, something real and true, something infinite. How do we solve this contradiction?
The science of the limitation of the individual and of the collective human intellect is identical with the universal concept; in other words, it is innate in the human intellect to know that it is a limited part of the absolute universe. This intellectual faculty of ours is no less natural and aboriginal than the faculty of trees to become green in summer and that of the spiders to spread their nets. Although the intellect is a limited part of the unlimited and aware of this fact, yet its faculty of knowing, understanding, judging, is a universal one. No intellect is possible or conceivable which can do more than the instrument of thought given by nature to the human race. We may indeed conceive of a mental giant. But when we take a closer look, every one will perceive that this mental giant cannot get outside of the traditional race of thinkers, unless he is supposed to be the creature of imagination.
Thinking, knowing, understanding, are universal. I can perceive all things in about the same way that I can see all cobble stones. I can see them all, but I cannot see everything that they are composed of, I cannot see, for instance, that they are heavy and ponderable. In the same way all things may be perceived, but not everything that belongs to them. They do not dissolve in understanding, in other words, understanding is only a part of the universe, all of which may be perceived, but the understanding of which is not the whole, since our intellect is but a part of the universe.
Everything may be understood, but understanding is not everything. Every pug-dog is a dog, but every dog is not a pug-dog. The conflict of idealism and materialism rests on this same conflict between genus and subordinate species. The idealist incarnate contends that all things are ideas, while we strive to make him see that ideal things and material things are two species of the same genus, and that they should be given a common family or general name beside their special name, on account of their common nature and for the purpose of a sound logic. Wherever this understanding has been acquired, the quarrel between idealists and materialists appears in the light of a mere bandying of words.
Everything is large, everything is small, everything extended through space and time, everything cause and everything effect, everything a whole and a part, because everything is the essence of everything, because everything is contained in the all, everything related, everything connected, everything interdependent. The conception of all as the absolute, the content of which consists of innumerable relativities, the concept of the all as the universal truth which reflects many phenomena, that is the basis of the science of understanding.
9. A By means of which we picture and explain the monistic interrelation of all things, called universe, nature and cosmos. – Editor.
10. That is, like all categories that are subdivisions of the absolute being, of general existence, pertaining only to the phenomena or specialties which, however, in their entirety constitute the absolute being or monistic nature. – Editor.