ALB: “My argument is not that
ALB:
“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.”
Well, we can speculate all day long about this. However, the evidence from his son, and the many Hegelisms that occur in that work suggest he was familiar with Hegel’s work (directly or indirectly).
But, wherever he got this idea, it is no less an example of a priori dogmatics, and is thus non-sensical.
“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.”
It’s a reasonable inference to make, given the fact that much of Feuerbach’s work is devoted to his criticism of Hegel. But, recall, that inference was explicitly connected with what Dietzgen’s son tells us — that his father read and studied the work of philosophers in the 1840s, when Hegel was all the rage.
“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?”
1) I quoted this passage not because I think it is wrong (or right!), but to show that Dietzgen was familiar with Hegel’s work.
2) I leave it to scientists (provided they too don’t indulge in amateur metaphysics), not dogmatic, aprioristic philosophers, to tell me what the universe is.
“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.”
I didn’t suggest he did. I quoted Magee (but there are many others I could have quoted) to support my allegation that this family of ideas has been shared by countless generations of mystics. I did not, nor do I, suggest that every single one of these mystics assented to all of these ideas, but they certainly agreed with many of them — Dietzgen included.
“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.”
And it was raised, too, by Hegel — who, like Dietzgen, thought we could move beyond this ‘contradiction’.
“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.”
Well, it doesn’t read like a ‘methodological assumption’ but an all-embracing truth he is prepared to accept.
Moreover, it’s far too vague to be a ‘methodological assumption’.
“Another example of your eccentric logic. Some “holists” are mystics. Dietzgen is a holist. Therefore Dietzgen is a mystic.”
Or, rather, another excellent example of your penchant for putting words in my mouth — Dietzgen’s ideas are mystical for the reasons I posted earlier:
“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.”
This is where he got this idea — as he himself acknowledged, and as his son confirmed — from reading ‘philosophy’.
Finally, you still haven’t shown where I equivocate.