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Limits Cognition

The Guy

• Joseph Dietzgen
  • Socialist philosopher
  • Met Marx in 1848 Rev in Germany (he was 20 at the time); and later Marx and Eleanor visited him
    • He’s praised in Capital
  • Influenced by Feuerbach, he independently developed dialectical materialism
  • He influenced Lenin and Bolshevik Rev
  • A tanner who visited US and Russia (eventually moved to Chicago)
  • Published 1870s-80s
  • Tried to reconcile communists and anarchists

The Works

• “Scientific Socialism” (1873)
  • Stick to facts: it’s not “idle speculation”
  • Why scientific? You must follow the evidence you see
    • Follows Engels’ critique of Proudhon, whose cure for society comes out of his head, in accordance with his ideas of justice, not by looking at the actual economic situation
  • All religion and philosophy try to debate the “divine” and “animal” in man, that is, idealism v materialism
  • His dialectical materialism
    • His mat is “scientific induction” (generalizes from specific example in order to establish laws or describe something)
    • “the metaphysical speculations of a Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel are the. inevitable paths leading up to the scientific proposition, that the idea, the conception, the logic or the thinking are not the premise, but the result of material phenomena.”
    • Shows how hist mat isn’t purely Anti-Idea, as if they don’t matter
      • “By granting that society is dominated by material interests we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind, science and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the production and distribution of earthly goods.”
  • Method
    • Empirical: uses facts
    • Inductive reasoning, which Marx uses and which Bacon had applauded
    • Dialectic: Hegel is just “materialism in disguise”
  • Imperative: change material conditions of working class
    • Against “preconceived unscientific notion that the spiritual salvation and the mental training of the masses are to precede the solution of the social question.”
• “Ethics of Social-Democracy” (1875): his materialism is the realization of an ideal
  • recognizes that ethics are changeable, depend on cultural moment, not eternal: there are no absolute truths
  • “moral truth, that is, an idea or ideal which has either become flesh or is on the point of becoming flesh”
  • What is this ideal? People increasing in intimacy: “The principle of morality is the principle of human association, and the principle of human association is progress. Social-democracy is nothing else, and desires nothing else, but social and co-operative progress, and that is the true moral perfection.”
  • Christianity has divorced body from spirit, thus allowing for exploitation: “The undue separation of the moral from the corporeal and of mental culture from material well-being is a theory which appears to be especially made for the benefit of the exploiters of the people. The bitter toil of the people is to be sweetened by moral sugar.”
  • Recognizes that words and ideas like “progress” and “morality” are often perverted (theme of words not being transparent)
• “The Limits of Cognition” (1877)
  • Wanted both scientific homogeneity of doctrine by party intellectuals, but admitted that people are so various that differences must be accepted and tolerated
  • Wants Social-Democracy to be scientific
    • Nothing permanent or eternal, but always changing (here’s the influence on Lenin)
  • Notes that the history of metaphysics is suspect: transcendence is used to control people
    • “without ‘something higher,’ without the inconceivable…the reins will break which keep the people strait and the ruling classes in wealth and dignity.”
      • Refers to moral systems as well as religion
  • Morals should “emanate from below,” from ourselves, not come down from high
    • We want to make our own morals!
  • The idea of “mental poverty” of people keep them down
    • Science is superior to the individual human intellect, but you shouldn’t underestimate human cognition, which is “limitless” and “fathomless” and full of possibility
  • A Bergsonian refutation of the inconceivable
    • “Whoever wants to conceive what he considers inconceivable, cannot be taken seriously. Just as with my eye I can only perceive the visible, with my ear hear only the audible, so with my faculty of conception I can only conceive the conceivable.”
  • Very Materialist: thought is experience, not set apart from it
    • “Thinking and being, subject and object exist in the domain of experience. To characterize one of these natural objects as absolute rest and the other as absolute motion is, since natural science has reduced everything to motion, no more permissible.”
    • Uses science, not just philosophy, to create hist mat
  • Philosophy overshoots life, the silly thing:
    • “Enquiry tends to a certain systematic arrangement of existence, i.e., to find out the laws of existence. If it exhibits the tendency to go beyond existence, it must go beyond itself, beyond all nature.”
  • Faith in science doesn’t mean that you can know everything by it. But we wouldn’t want to know everything:
    • “this fact that Being cannot be resolved into thinking can be a matter of lamentation only to the fantastic dreamer. If we could know of any one thing absolutely everything, then knowledge would be all and the object nothing. Knowledge and nothing left to know! Light and nothing left to see! Then it would be like of yore when nothing was �� �and the earth was without form, and void.�”
  • He doesn’t reject science: he’s quite the champion of it: but he recognizes its true place
    • He won’t say that it can understand everything, but instead gives the human power of cognition the creativity and boundlessness that science doesn’t bring
    • Ie, if you only thought everything, then the world wouldn’t be very interesting, would it?
  • He taxes philosophy with being part of the general striving after something Inconceivable and transcendent, which is really just a part of ruling ideology