10.15.08
Dialectics of science?
Dialectics of Science
The piece of email from Science For The People sailed in today, and I posted it without comment, in part because it is one of the players in the current Darwin debate. The views of Gould, Lewontin, Levins, et al, on science mixed with ‘dialectics’ were never very clear (despite a book on the subject), and never quite made it into the discussion of Darwinism. I fear the reason is the inadequacy of this brand of ‘dialectics’ springing, it seems, Engels’ Dialectics Of Nature, a text that is not adequate to the task of producing a dialectical biology, and pretty well exposed when it first came out from the archives in Russia in the thirties. It was a source of embarrassement to a number of leftist commentators at the time, e.g. Sidney Hook. Nonetheless the idea has helped many to ‘carry an idea’, without necessarily making it specific.
This discussion of the Enlightenment is one-sided, and omits the indirect primordial source of dialectics, the philosopher Kant, to say nothing of Hegel.
The idea of the dialectic as it arises in Hegel has been a source of hopeless confusion on the left, and has resulted in some distortions, e.g. the dialectic as the ‘algebra of revolution’, etc..
I would challenge the idea that Marx’s ‘materialist dialectic’ is a successful innovation. What to say of Hegel. In any case the dialectic does not give an adequate interpretation of the dynamics of historical change.
A study of the eonic effect provides a much better approach to the issues, as it remains near the more solid Kantian framework that provided the first and most penetrating critique of reductionism.
The materialism of the left in its nineteenth century brand is not very cogent anymore and misses the point that the ‘opposition’ of materialism and idealism is better resolved in the transcendental idealism of Kant (to say nothing of the realm seen in Quantum Mechanics).
More on this later when I review Monthly Review’s book on the Intelligent Design controversy.