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  Anti Duhring   PHILOSOPHY

III

CLASSIFICATION. APRIORISM

    According to Herr Dühring, philosophy is the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and of life, and in a wider sense embraces the principles of all knowledge and volition. Wherever a series of cognitions or stimuli or a group of forms of being come to be examined by human consciousness, the principles of these configurations are necessarily the object of philosophy. These principles are the simple, or the hitherto supposedly simple, constituents of which the manifold of knowledge and volition is composed. Like the chemical composition of bodies, the general constitution of things can also be reduced to basic forms and basic elements. These ultimate constituents or principles, once they have been discovered are valid not only for the immediately known and accessible, but also for the world which is unknown and inaccessible to us. Philosophical principles consequently provide the final complement required by the sciences in order to become a uniform system by which nature and human life can be explained. Apart from the fundamental forms of all existence, properly speaking, philosophy has only two subjects for investigation -- nature and the world of man. Thus we find our material quite spontaneously arranged in three groups, namely, the general schematism of the universe, the science of the principles of nature, and finally the science of mankind. At the same time, this succession contains an inner logical sequence, for

3

the formal principles which are valid for all being take precedence, and the objective realms to which they are to be applied then follow in the degree of their subordination.

    So far Herr Dühring, and almost entirely word for word.

    What he is dealing with are therefore principles, formal basic principles derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself? No, for Herr Dühring himself says the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms (the latter is wrong, as we shall see). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought ; but what we are dealing with here are only forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the question, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of the Idea, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere prior to the world, from eternity, just like -- a Hegel.

    In fact, let us compare Hegel's Encyclopaedia and all its delirious fantasies with Herr Dühring's final and ultimate truths. With Herr Dühring we have in the first place general world schematism, which Hegel calls Logic. Then with both of them we have the application of these schemata or logical categories to nature, the philosophy of nature; and finally their application to the realm of man, which Hegel calls the philosophy of mind. The "inner logical sequence" of the Dühring succession therefore leads us "quite spontaneously" back to Hegel's Encyclopaedia, from which it has been taken with a fidelity which would bring tears to the eyes of that wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin.

    That is what comes of accepting "consciousness", "thought", quite naturalistically as something given, something opposed to being, to nature, from the outset. If this were so, it must seem most odd that consciousness and nature, thinking and being, the laws of thought and the laws of nature, should so closely correspond. But if we then ask what thought and consciousness are and whence they come, we find that they are products of the human brain and that man himself is a product of nature, who has developed in and along with his environment; whence it is self-evident that the products of the human brain, which in the last analysis<"p44"> are also products of nature, do not contradict the rest of nature's interconnections but correspond to them.[21]

    But Herr Dühring cannot permit himself such a simple treatment of the subject. He thinks not only in the name of humanity -- in itself no small achievement -- but in the name of conscious and reasoning beings on all celestial bodies.

    Indeed, it would be "a degradation of the basic forms of consciousness and knowledge to attempt to rule out or even to put under suspicion their sovereign validity and their unconditional claim to truth by applying the epithet 'human' to them".

    Hence, in order that no suspicion may arise that twice two may make five on some celestial body or other, Herr Dühring cannot designate thought as human, and so he has to cut it off from the only real foundation on which we find it, namely, man and nature; and with that he tumbles hopelessly into an ideology which reveals him as the epigone of the "epigone", Hegel. In passing, we shall often meet Herr Dühring again on other celestial bodies.

    It goes without saying that no materialist doctrine can be founded on such an ideological basis. We shall see later that Herr Dühring is forced more than once to endow nature with conscious activity, with, therefore, what in plain language is called God.

    But our philosopher of reality also had other motives for shifting the basis of all reality from the real world to the world of thought. The science of this general world schematism, of these formal basic principles of being, is indeed precisely the foundation of Herr Dühring's philosophy. If we deduce this world schematism not from our minds, but only through our minds from the real world, if we deduce the basic principles of being from what is, we need no philosophy for this purpose, but positive knowledge of the world and of what happens in it; and what this yields is not philosophy either, but positive science. But in that case Herr Dühring's whole volume would be nothing but love's labour lost.

    Further, if no philosophy as such is needed any longer, then no system, not even a natural system of philosophy, is needed any longer either. The recognition of the fact that all the processes of nature are systematically interconnected drives science on to prove this systematic interconnection throughout, both in general and in detail. But an adequate, exhaustive scientific exposition of this interconnection, the formation of an exact mental image of the world system in which we live, remains impossible for us, as it does for all times. If at any epoch in the development of mankind such a final, definitive system of the interconnections within the world -- physical as well as mental and historical -- were constructed, this would mean that the realm of human knowledge had reached its limit, and that further historical development would be cut short from the moment when society had been brought into accord with that system -- which would be an absurdity, pure nonsense. Mankind therefore finds itself faced with a contradiction: on the one hand, it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interconnections, and on the other hand, this task can never be completely fulfilled because of the nature both of men and of the world system. But this contradiction not only lies in the nature of the two factors -- the world and man -- it is also the main lever of all intellectual advance, and constantly finds its solution, day by day, in the endless progressive development of humanity, just as for example mathematical problems find their solution in an infinite series or continued fractions. Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author's physical and mental constitution. But Herr Dühring explains in advance that his mode of reasoning is such that it excludes any disposition to take a subjectively limited view of the world. We saw above that he was omnipresent -- on all possible celestial bodies. We now see that he is omniscient, too. He has solved the ultimate problems of science and so nailed boards across the future of all science.

    As with the basic forms of being, so also Herr Dühring thinks he can produce out of his head the whole of pure mathematics a priori, that is, without making use of the experiences offered us by the external world.

    In pure mathematics, in his view, the mind deals "with its own free creations and imaginations"; the concepts of number and form are "its adequate object, which it itself creates", hence mathematics has "a validity which is independent of particular experience and of the real content of the world".

    To be sure, it is correct that pure mathematics has a validity which is independent of the particular experience of each individual, and this is true of all established facts in every science and indeed of all facts whatsoever. The magnetic poles, the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, the fact that Hegel is dead and that Herr Dühring is alive, are valid independently of my own experience or of that of any other individual, and even independently of Herr Dühring's experience, when he begins to sleep the sleep of the just. But it is not at all true that in pure mathematics the mind deals only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have been derived from no source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learnt to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, are anything but a free creation of the mind. Counting requires not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to abstract from all properties of the objects being considered except their number -- and this ability is the product of a long historical development based on experience. Like the concept of number, so the concept of form is derived exclusively from the external world and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought. There must have been things which had shape and whose shapes were compared before anyone could arrive at the concept of form. Pure mathematics deals with the spatial forms and quantitative relations of the real world -- that is, with material which is very real indeed. The fact that this material appears in an extremely abstract form can only superficially conceal its origin in the external world. But in order to make it possible to investigate these forms and relations in their pure state, it is necessary to separate them entirely from their content, to put the content aside as irrelevant; hence we get points without dimensions, lines without breadth and thickness, a 's and b 's and x 's and y 's, constants and variables, and only at the very end do we for the first time reach the mind's own free creations and imaginations, that is to say, imaginary magnitudes. Even the apparent derivation of mathematical magnitudes from each other does not prove their a priori origin, but only their rational interconnection. Before the idea was arrived at of deducing the form of a cylinder from the rotation of a rectangle about one of its sides, a number of real rectangles and cylinders, in however imperfect a form, must have been examined. Like all other sciences, mathematics arose out of the needs of men, from the measurement of land and of the content of vessels, from the computation of time and from mechanics. But, as in every department of thought, at a certain stage of development the laws abstracted from the real world become divorced from the real world and are set over against it as something independent, as laws coming from outside, to which the world has to conform. This is how things happened in society and the state, and in this way, and not otherwise, pure mathematics is subsequently applied to the world, although it is borrowed from this same world and represents only one part of its forms of interconnection -- and it is precisely only because of this that it can be applied at all.

    But just as Herr Dühring imagines that he can deduce the whole of pure mathematics without any empirical ingredients out of the axioms of mathematics, which "in accordance with pure logic are neither capable nor in need of proof", and then apply it to the world, so he imagines that he can first produce out of his head the basic forms of being, the simple elements of all knowledge, the axioms of philosophy, that he can deduce the whole of philosophy or the world schematism from them, and then, by sovereign decree, impose this constitution of his on nature and humanity.<"p49"> Unfortunately nature is not at all, and humanity only to an infinitesimal degree, composed of Manteuffel's Prussians of 1850.[22]

    Mathematical axioms are expressions of the scantiest thought content, which mathematics is obliged to borrow from logic. They can be reduced to two.

    1) The whole is greater than the part. This statement is a pure tautology, as the quantitatively conceived idea "part" is in advance related to the idea "whole" in a definite way, and particularly in such a way that "part" announces without further ado that the quantitative "whole" consists of several quantitative "parts". In stating this explicitly, the so-called axiom does not take us a step further. This tautology can to a certain degree even be proved by saying: a whole is that which consists of many parts; a part is that of which many make a whole, therefore the part is less than the whole -- in which the emptiness of repetition brings out even more clearly the emptiness of content.

    2) If two magnitudes are equal to a third, then they are equal to one another. This statement, as Hegel has already shown, is a conclusion, the correctness of which is guaranteed by logic, and which is therefore proved, although outside of pure mathematics.[23] The remaining axioms relating to equality and inequality are merely logical extensions of this conclusion.

    These meagre principles could not cut much ice, either in mathematics or anywhere else. In order to get any further, we are obliged to import real relations, relations and spatial forms which are taken from real bodies. The ideas of lines, planes, angles, polygons, cubes, spheres, etc., are all taken from reality, and it requires a pretty good portion of naive ideology to believe the mathematicians -- that the first line came into existence through the movement of a point in space, the first plane through the movement of a line, the first solid through the movement of a plane, and so on. Even language rebels against such a conception. A mathematical figure of three dimensions is called a solid body, corpus solidum, hence even in Latin, a tangible object; it therefore has a name derived from sturdy reality and not at all from the free imagination of the mind.

    But why all this prolixity? After Herr Dühring has enthusiastically sung the independence of pure mathematics from the world of experience, its a priori nature, its preoccupation with its own free mental creations and imaginations of the mind on pages 42 and 43, he says on page 63:[24]

    "It is, of course, easy to overlook that these mathematical elements" (number, magnitude, time, space and geometric motion) "are ideal only in their form . . . absolute magnitudes are therefore something completely empirical, no matter to what species they belong", but "mathematical schemata are capable of being described in a way which is adequate even though divorced from actual experience".

This last statement is more or less true of every abstraction, but in no way proves that it is not abstracted from reality. In the world schematism pure mathematics arose out of pure thought -- in the philosophy of nature it is something completely empirical, taken from the external world and then divorced from it. Which are we to believe?
 

IV

WORLD SCHEMATISM

    "All-embracing being is one. In its self-sufficiency it has nothing alongside of it or over it. To associate a second being with it would be to make it something that it is not, namely, a part or constituent of a more comprehensive whole. Since we extend our undivided thought like a framework, nothing that should be comprised in this unity of thought can contain a duality within itself. Nor again can anything escape this unity of thought. . . . The essence of all thinking consists in the union of the elements of consciousness into a unity. . . . It is the point of unity of the synthesis which gave rise to the indivisible concept of the world, and the universe, as the name itself implies, is apprehended as something in which everything is united into a unity."

    Thus far Herr Dühring. This is the first example of the application of the mathematical method:

    "Every question is to be decided axiomatically in accordance with simple basic forms, as if simple . . . basic principles of mathematics were being dealt with."

    "All-embracing being is one." If tautology, the simple repetition in the predicate of what is already expressed in the subject -- if that makes an axiom, then we have one of the purest water here. Herr Dühring tells us in the subject that being embraces everything, and he intrepidly declares in the predicate that in that case there is nothing outside it. What colossal "system-creating thought"!

    System-creating indeed! Within the space of the next six lines, Herr Dühring has transformed the oneness of being, by means of our undivided thought, into its unity. As the essence of all thinking consists in bringing things together into a unity, so being, as soon as it is conceived, is conceived as undivided, and the concept of the world as indivisible, and because being as conceived, the concept of the world, is undivided, therefore real being, the real universe, is also an indivisible unity. Thus

"there is no longer any room for things beyond, once the mind has learnt to conceive being in its homogeneous universality". <"p52">

    Here is a campaign which puts Austerlitz and Jena, Königgratz and Sedan completely in the shade.[25] In a few sentences, hardly a page after we have mobilized the first axiom, we have already abolished, eliminated, annihilated, everything beyond the world -- God and the heavenly hosts, heaven, hell and purgatory, along with the immortality of the soul.

    How do we get from the oneness of being to its unity? By the very act of conceiving it. In so far as we spread our undivided thought around being like a frame, individual being becomes undivided, a unity of thought; for the essence of all thinking consists in bringing together the elements of consciousness into a unity.

    This last statement is simply untrue. In the first place, thinking consists just as much in the splitting up of objects of consciousness into their elements as in the union of related elements into a unity. Without analysis, no synthesis. Secondly, without committing blunders thinking can bring together into a unity only those elements of consciousness in which or in whose real prototypes this unity already existed before. If I include a shoe brush in the unity of mammals, this does not help it to get mammary glands. The unity of being, or rather, the legitimacy of its conception as a unity, is therefore precisely what was to be proved, and when Herr Dühring assures us that he conceives being as undivided and not perchance as a duality, he tells us nothing more than his own humble opinion.

    If we try to state his process of thought in unalloyed form, we get the following: 'I begin with being. I therefore conceive being. The thought of being is undivided. But thinking and being must be in agreement, they correspond to each other, they 'coincide'. Therefore being is undivided in reality also. Therefore there cannot be anything 'beyond'." But if Herr Dühring had spoken openly in this way, instead of treating us to the above-cited oracular passages, the ideology would have been clearly visible. To attempt to prove the reality of any product of thinking by the identity of thinking and being, that was indeed one of the wildest delirious fantasies of -- a Hegel.

    Even if his whole method of proof had been correct, Herr Dühring would still not have won an inch of ground from the spiritualists. The latter would reply briefly: to us, too, the universe is simple; the cleavage between the here below and the beyond exists only from our specifically earthly standpoint which is imbued with original sin; in and for itself, that is in God, all being is a unity. And they would accompany Herr Dühring to his other beloved celestial bodies and show him one or more on which there had been no original sin, where therefore no opposition exists between the here below and the beyond, and where the unity of the universe is a requirement of faith.

    The most comical part of the business is that Herr Dühring uses the ontological proof for the existence of God in order to prove the non-existence of God from the concept of being. This runs: when we think of God, we conceive him as the sum total of all perfections. But the sum total of all perfections includes existence above all, since a non-existent being is necessarily imperfect. We must therefore include existence among the perfections of God. Therefore God must exist. Herr Dühring reasons in exactly the same way: if we think of being, we think of it as one concept. Whatever is included in one concept is undivided. Being would not correspond to the concept of being if it were not undivided. Therefore it must be undivided. Therefore there is no God, and so on.

    When we speak of being, and purely of being, unity can only consist in this, that all the objects to which we are referring -- are, exist. They are included in the unity of this being, and in no other unity, and the general statement that they all are not only cannot give them any additional qualities, whether common or not, but for the time being excludes all such qualities from consideration. For as soon as we stray even a millimetre from the simple basic fact that being is common to all these things, the differences between these things begin to emerge before our eyes, and we cannot decide from the fact that mere existence is in equal manner ascribed to them all whether these differences consist in some being white and the others black, some being animate and the others inanimate, some being perhaps here below and the others perhaps beyond.

    The unity of the world does not consist in its being, although its being is a precondition of its unity, since it must surely first be before it can be one. Indeed, being is always an open question beyond the point where our sphere of observation ends. The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggling phrases, but by a long and laborious development of philosophy and natural science.

    To return to the text. The being which Herr Dühring is telling us about is

"not that pure being which is self-identical, lacks all special determinations, and in fact represents only the counterpart of the thought of nothing or of the absence of thought".

    But we shall see very soon that Herr Dühring's universe starts with a being which lacks all internal differentiation, all motion and change, and is therefore in fact only a counterpart of the thought of nothing, and is therefore really nothing. Only out of this being-nothing does the present differentiated, variable state of the world develop, representing a development, a becoming ; and only after we have grasped this are we able "to hold fast to the concept of universal self-identical being", even within this perpetual variation.

    Thus we now have the concept of being at a higher plane, where it includes in itself both constancy and change, both being and becoming. Having reached this point, we find that

"genus and species, or generally speaking the general and the particular are the simplest means of differentiation, without which the constitution of things cannot be understood".

    But these are means of differentiation of quality; and after these have been dealt with, we proceed:

    "The concept of magnitude stands in opposition to genus as that homogeneity in which no further differences of kind exist";

and so from quality we pass to quantity, and this is always "measurable ".

    Let us now compare this "acute sifting of these general schemata of effects" and its "genuinely critical standpoint" with the crudities, ravings and delirious fantasies of a Hegel. We find that Hegel's logic starts from being -- as with Herr Dühring; that being turns out to be nothing, as with Herr Dühring; that from this being-nothing there is a transition to becoming, the result of which is determinate being (Dasein ), i.e., a higher, more replete form of being (Sein ) -- just as with Herr Dühring. Determinate being leads on to quality, and quality on to quantity -- just as with Herr Dühring. And so that no essential feature may be missing, Herr Dühring tells us on another occasion:

    "From the realm of non-sensation man enters that of sensation, in spite of all quantitative gradualness, only through a qualitative leap, of which we can say that it is infinitely different from the mere gradation of one and the same quality."

    This is precisely the Hegelian nodal line of measure relations, in which, at certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap ; for example, in the case of water which is heated or cooled, where boiling-point and freezing-point are the nodes at which -- under normal pressure -- the transition to a new state of aggregation takes place, where therefore quantity changes into quality.

    Our investigation has likewise tried to reach down to the roots, and it finds the roots of Herr Dühring's deep-rooted basic schemata to be -- the "delirious fantasies" of a Hegel, the Categories of Hegel's Logic, Part I, the Doctrine of Being, in strictly old-Hegelian "succession" and with hardly any attempt to cloak the plagiarism!

    Not content with pilfering from his worst-slandered predecessor the latter's whole scheme of being, Herr Dühring, after he himself has given the above example of the sudden leap from quantity into quality, has the effrontery to say of Marx:

    "How ridiculous, for example, is the reference" (Marx's) "to Hegel's confused and nebulous notion that quality changes into quantity !"

    Confused and nebulous notion! Who has changed here, and who is ridiculous here, Herr Dühring?

    Thus all these pretty knicknacks are not only not "axiomatically decided" as prescribed, but are merely imported from outside, that is to say, from Hegel's Logic. And in such a form that in the whole chapter there is not even the semblance of any internal coherence except in so far as it is borrowed from Hegel, and that it all finally trickles out in empty logic-chopping about space and time, constancy and change.

    From being Hegel passes to essence, to dialectics. Here he is dealing with the determinations of reflections, their internal opposites and contradictions, as for example, positive and negative; he then comes to causality or the relation of cause and effect, and ends with necessity. Not otherwise Herr Dühring. What Hegel calls the doctrine of essence Herr Dühring translates into "logical properties of being". But these consist above all of the "antagonism of forces", of opposites. On the other hand, Herr Dühring absolutely denies contradiction; we will return to this topic later. Then he passes over to causality, and from this to necessity. Therefore, when Herr Dühring says of himself, "We, who do not philosophize out of a cage," he apparently means that he philosophizes in a cage, namely, the cage of the Hegelian schema of categories.