Engels isn’t criticising Dietzgen in the quotes you give. If anything, Dietzgen would have criticised Engels’s approach which assumes that the so-called “laws of dialectics” actually exist in nature and can be discovered. Dietzgen’s argument was that what science is essentially doing is describing what we observe in nature (or, rather, in the world of experience) and that therefore the “laws of nature” are our decriptions of what we observe, with a view to predicting future experiences so as to better survive.The theory of relativity does not refute Dietzgen’s theory of the nature of science. As a more accurate, and so more useful, description than previous ones of the same phenomena it was an example of what Dietzgen meant science was and how it progressed (by better and more useful descriptions).The Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek (who wrote A History of Astronomy which became a standard textbook) who accepted Dietzgen’s theory of science had no problem accepting relativity Here is what he wrote in chapter 6 of his book (originally written in German in 1938) criticising Lenin’s materialism Lenin As Philosopher:
Quote:
Hence, according to Lenin, “materialism” accepts Newton’s doctrine, the basis of which is that there exists an absolute space and an absolute time. This means that the place in space is fixed absolutely without regard to other things, and can be ascertained without any doubt. When Mach says that this is the point of view of contemporary physicists he surely represents his colleagues as too old-fashioned; in his time already it was rather generally accepted that motion and rest were relative conceptions, that the place of a body is always the place relative to other bodies, and that the idea of absolute position has no sense.Still there was a certain doubt whether or not space-filling world ether did not offer a frame for absolute space; motion or rest relative to world-ether could be rightly called then absolute motion or rest. When, however, physicists tried to determine it by means of the propagation of light, they could find nothing but relativity. Such was the case with Michelson’s famous experiment in 1889, arranged in such a way that in its result nature should indicate the motion of our earth relative to the ether. But nothing was found; nature remained mute. It was as if she said: your query has no sense. To explain the negative result it was assumed that there always occurred additional phenomena that just cancelled the expected effect – until Einstein in 1905 in his theory of relativity combined all facts in such a way that the result was self-evident. Also within the world-occupying ether – absolute position was shown to be a word without meaning. So gradually the idea of ether itself was dropped, and all thought of absolute space disappeared from science.With time it seemed to be different; a moment in time was assumed to be absolute. But it was the very ideas of Mach that brought about a change here. In the place of talk of abstract conceptions, Einstein introduced the practice of experiment. What are we doing when we fix a moment in time? We look at a clock, and we compare the different clocks, there is no other way. In following this line of argument Einstein succeeded in refuting absolute time and demonstrating the relativity of time. Einstein’s theory was soon universally adopted by scientists, with the exception of some anti-semitic physicists in Germany who consequently were proclaimed luminaries of national-socialist “German” physics.The latter development could not yet be known to Lenin when he wrote his book. But it illustrates the character of such expositions as where he writes:“The materialist view of space and time has remained ‘harmless,’ i.e., compatible, as heretofore, with science, while the contrary view of Mach and Co. was a ‘harmful’ capitulation to the position of fideism.” (210)Thus he denotes as materialist the belief that the concepts of absolute space and absolute time, which science once wanted as its theory but had to drop afterwards, are the true reality of the world.
In other words, it was Lenin’s version of “dialectical materialism” not Dietzgen’s that was repudiated by the theory of relativity.You say we don’t need a “philosophical theory of the universe”, but surely we need a “philosophy of science” or, if you prefer, a theory of science? You must have one, even if only implicitly. What is it?
