My argument is not that

March 22, 2012 at 8:38 am #87995

Keymaster

My argument is not that Dietzgen never read or studied Hegel but that, when he wrote The Nature of Human Brain Work in 1869, where he first put forward his view that all that existed was the ever-changing world of phenomena which was a whole, he was not influenced by Hegel and had probably never read him by then. Later he did, yes. Just re-read this work and with your knowledge of philosophy you should be able to conclude that there is no trace of Hegelian influence in it.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

If he read Feuerbach, then he will have read Hegel (in view of Feuerbach’s own concerns).

What sort of logic is that? Dietzgen read Feuerbach. Feuerbach read Hegel. Therefore Dietzgen read Hegel ! Come on, you’ll have to do better than that. I don’t know which of Feuerbach’s writings Dietzgen would have read but Feuerbach’s reputation and popularity was based on him being a materialist and an atheist, not on being an ex-Hegelian.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

The evidence of his son, and the circumstantial evidence I mentioned suggest that he was influenced by German idealism and/or mystical Hermeticism, most probably from Hegel himself.Indeed, we read this in Some of the Philosophical Essays:”Philosophy has discovered the art of thinking. That it has thereby occupied itself so much with the all-perfect Being, with the conception of God, with the ‘substance’ of Spinoza, with the ‘thing in itself’ of Kant, and with the Absolute of Hegel, has its good reason in the fact that the sober conception of the universe as of the All-One with nothing above or outside or alongside of it, is the first postulate of a skilled and consistent mode of thinking, which both of itself and of all possible and impossible objects that they all belong to one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” (pp.274-75.).

I don’t see anything wrong with this statement of Dietzgen’s. It’s merely saying that the unity idealist philosophers had talked about as being something non-material (God, etc), as did the famous Hermeticists you keep banging on about (was Buddha one?), was in fact something material. Or what do you think the universe is?

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Well, I didn’t mention the occult, so I think you and I are operating with a different understanding of the word ‘mystical’

You may not have done yourself but you quoted with approval this passage from Glenn Magee which certainly does:

Quote:

“…The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.” [Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p.13.

What are these “cosmic energies” if not occult forces? In any event, there is nothing in Dietzgen to suggest that he thought the universe was pervaded by such energies.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Be this as it may, the passage you quoted is full of a priori dogmatic pronouncements and Hegelisms. Dietzgen has plainly bought into Hegel’s mystical notion of a ‘contradiction’ (even though it is plain that the thing he calls a ‘contradiction’ isn’t one, and does not even look like one), among other things.

If you read that passage again you will see that the contradiction was one raised by Kant not Dietzgen and that Dietzgen says it can be resolved by dropping the whole idea that there is a world of things-in-themselves behind the ever-changing and single world of phenomena that we experience.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

It [the theory that everything is interconnected] becomes mystical when applied to the whole of nature since it pretends to give us knowledge that is way beyond anything we could ever espouse to, and which we could never confirm, no matter how hard or how long we tried

In Dietzgen’s version it is not a claim to knowledge but a methodological assumption. Your mistake is to assume that what Dietzgen is saying is that all the physical things in the universe exist as separate entities and are interconnected as such, and that this is statement of alleged fact that can be empirically verified or falsified. If he did make such a claim you might be right that it can’t be verified. But this is not what Dietzgen means. He is saying that, to understand the world around us, you have to start from the assumption that all that “exists” is the “one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” and so physical objects don’t exist as independent entities but as parts of this whole distinguished and named by the human mind.

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

Incidentally, this view also provides the ‘rationale’ for Astrology and other assorted ‘New Age’ nostrums. There’s hardly a mystical system on the planet, as far as we know, that does not or has not viewed the cosmos in this way.

Another example of your eccentric logic. Some “holists” are mystics. Dietzgen is a holist. Therefore Dietzgen is a mystic.