ALB: “I have been following
ALB:
“I have been following my own advice and re-reading Dietzgen’s The Nature of Human Brain Work (together with Pannekoek’s introduction to it). I can’t find any evidence for him having been influenced by Hegel either in ideas or terminology. The only philosophers mentioned are Kant, David Hume, Alexander von Humboldt and Ludwig Feuerbach.”
If he read Feuerbach, then he will have read Hegel (in view of Feuerbach’s own concerns). 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.).
Then we flip forward a few pages and we find a whole chapter devoted to ‘Hegel and Darwin’! [pp.314-41.], where we read:
“We wish to render the now almost forgotten Hegel what is due to him as the forerunner of Darwin. Mendelssohn, in a dispute with Lessing, called Spinoza a ‘dead dog’. Just as dead appears now Hegel…. Spinoza has long since undergone resurrection from the state of a ‘dead dog’, and so will Hegel, too, find his merits acknowledged by future generations. If he has lost his influence at the present time, it is merely a temporary eclipse.” (pp.314-15.)
The rest of that chapter shows he was thoroughly familiar with Hegel’s system and method.
This not only confirms he had read and studied Hegel, but also that he got many of his ideas from him and other assorted mystics and a priori dogmatists, as I alleged.
“Nothing mystical there. No occult forces at work. Nothing occult at all.”
Well, I didn’t mention the occult, so I think you and I are operating with a different understanding of the word ‘mystical’ (but see below).
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.
“You say, RL, that you accept the materialist conception of history. This means that, unless you think history is a series of unconnected events, you must accept the concept of history being a continuous stream and a “whole”, from which historians extract, describe and form theories about parts. So, if seeing things as an interconnected whole is acceptable here why does it suddenly become “mystical” when applied to nature and the universe?”
Just because I deny that everything is interconnected (or, rather, I claim the idea that everything is interconnected is far too vague to do anything with) does not imply I think that nothing is! Plainly, there is much in history that is connected — whether it all is, or whether it is all interconnected, will require proof (we certainly can’t assert it dogmatically).
It 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 — and it originated into the mystical contemplations about ‘god’ and ‘his’ cosmos, dogmatic pronouncements promulgated by generations of boss-class theorists and mystics — like Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Hermes Trismegistus, Jakob Boehme, Hans Christoph Oetinger, and Hegel, among many others.
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.
As Marx said: ‘The ruling ideas are always those of the ruling class’…
Check out this sacred Hermetic text, and you will see these open and honest mystics have also discovered their own form of dialectics not much different from that of Dietzgen or Engels and Plekhanov (except they did so nearly two millennia ago):
http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionhtm/kybalion.htm
Reading that work is like reading a religious version of Dietzgen, or Engels — or even Lenin!
‘The ruling ideas are always…’