Reading "Anti-Dühring" [1]: Introduction, Transcendentalism, General World Pattern Theory

Posted by Bruce Yu

(Other contributors: Fries Fries)

foreword

This article is an extension and summary of my own notes while reading Anti-Dühring. I hope that my personal understanding of Anti-Dühring can be a reference for others who want to understand the dialectics of Marxism and the socialist thought of the time. I will summarize my thinking while reading Anti-Dühring in four articles.

This article contains a brief reflection on the overall content of Anti-Dühring, an introduction to the introduction to Anti-Dühring, and an overview of Transcendentalist thought and the general world in the first volume of Philosophy Explanation of Pattern Theory.

Reflections on the Overall Content of "Anti-Duhring"

Regarding the content of the "Anti-Dühring", the CCP gave this paragraph: "[In the Anti-Dühring] Engels told us that the biggest problem of capitalist society is that it cannot solve the relationship between the rich and the poor, the labor-capital relationship, and thus the The problems of economic and social contradictions caused. Although capitalism has been developed for hundreds of years, today it seems that its biggest problems are still these problems. As long as there is capitalism, communism has not been realized, or has not been finally realized, these problems As long as it exists forever, the Marxist theory will always be valid.” This passage was directly intercepted by me from People’s Daily Online. Obviously, the CCP understands Anti-Dühring as similar to Mao Zedong's "On Contradiction" and "On Practice", which is supported by socialist theoretical thoughts, even beautified, certain political groups, political ideas, and political behavior articles.

Different from the official understanding given by the CCP, I personally think that the focus of Anti-Dühring is not the so-called political philosophy and scientific socialism (that is, the communism based on class contradictions and class struggle advocated by Marx and Engels at that time). ideology). The author of the article, Engels, did not rigidly use the textbook concept of class contradiction and class struggle to criticize Dühring in Anti-Dühring. Anti-Dühring does not, like most of the later articles on socialist political philosophy, put forward a certain point of view and then use socialist thought and dialectics to try to justify that point of view and the actions it supports. Although Engels did write "Anti-Dühring" for the purpose of refuting Dühring's political ideas and Dühring's views on natural and social philosophy in his book, Engels did not directly use his political philosophy, That is to say, instead of directly criticizing Dühring's thought with the thought of scientific socialism, he uses dialectics to explain that Dühring's socialist thought does not conform to science, that is, it does not conform to the objective law of the development of things, and then proposes He himself obtained the views of natural philosophy and social philosophy through dialectics and the research on nature and society of scholars at that time, thus corroborating the progress of his political philosophy thought compared with Mr. Dühring's thought. Thus, although Anti-Dühring is a "more coherent exposition of the dialectical method and the communist worldview as advocated by Marx and I [Engels]," contrary to what one might imagine, this essay does not merely define and Using the concepts of class and class struggle in Marxism, it is a systematic explanation, elaboration, and defense of the concepts of materialist dialectics, class, etc. in Marxist philosophy.

Preface and Introduction to Anti-Dühring

The introduction to Anti-Dühring is divided into two parts. The first part is an introduction, illustrating how the capitalist thought of the original Enlightenment scholars evolved into modern socialist thought, which includes the An analysis of the development of modern German philosophy (Weitling) and modern German philosophy (Hegel). The second part is "What promise did Mr. Dühring make". Engels cites and satirizes a series of rhetoric of Herr Dühring in his writings - namely Dühring's discovery of "absolute truth" - and Dühring's unrealistic critique of previous sociologists.

In the introduction, when analyzing the development history of socialism, Engels mainly expounded the correlation between history and the development of socialist thought: the chaos of the French Revolution and the establishment of the bourgeois dictatorship led to the transformation of idealistic enlightenment thought into idealistic thought. Utopian socialism; while Utopian socialism inherited the idea of "liberating all mankind" in the Enlightenment, but did not produce a materialist view of history; the fierce debate among the utopian socialist schools that insisted on absolute truth, rationality and justice deconstructed Elements of society, social philosophy is further developed within the framework of metaphysics; the complex metaphysical development of social philosophy prompts Hegel to propose scientific dialectics, which treats movement, development, and the relationship between things, rather than single, immutable, distinct, and mutual. The concept of independence, regarded as the framework of the world; the emerging labor movement exposed the problems of capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, prompting some sociologists - such as Marx in the Young Hegelian school - to use scientific dialectics to deconstruct history and society , and then realize that the struggle between classes based on material basis, production relations, and socio-economic structure, rather than the struggle of abstract concepts such as ideas, nations, and states, is the only driving force of history; The discussion of a discovery led to the birth of the materialist view of history; and through further deconstruction of the capitalist production structure relations, Marx put forward the concept of surplus value.

Obviously, Engels' analysis of the development of socialism in his introduction is contextual and related. This correlation is the embodiment of scientific dialectics. Historical limitation is a very important concept in Engels' materialist view of history, and it constructs the context of his materialist view of history. When reading the Introduction, be aware of the role that historical limitations played in the prevailing thought of the time.

Engels mentioned when discussing utopian socialism: because of the limitations of history, the utopian socialists at that time inherited the ideas of the Enlightenment period, believed in the concept of absolute truth, and believed that the development of ideas was accidental and promoted by some social elites .

"[In their eyes] true reason and justice have not yet ruled the world, only because they have not been properly known. All that is missing is the individual genius, who has now appeared and has known the truth; As for geniuses appearing now, it is now that truth is recognized, this is not an inevitable and inevitable occurrence in the course of historical development, but is purely a fluke accident." - Engels Dühring's Theory

When referring to Hegel, Engels, while acknowledging Hegel's own talent, explained the correlation between sociological research in the 19th century and Hegel's historic breakthrough, and further elaborated on Hegel at that time. its own historical limitations. Engels believed that because of the progress of sociological research in the 19th century, Hegel broke through the metaphysical concept of socialism of the past. However, due to the limitations of the research at that time and the idealism that he himself produced because of the times, he did not completely break through the concept of "absolute truth" of idealism, and once again tried to attribute the development of things to some people who were born with The immutable “ideas”—that is, seeing things as the embodiment of some kind of mysterious and mysterious Dao.

Likewise, in discussing historical materialism, Engels did not attribute the progress made by Marx to his own talent. He mentions that the labor movement of the 1830s and 40s contributed to the birth of the materialist view of history:

"But while this transformation of the outlook on nature can only be achieved as research work provides corresponding empirical material for knowledge, some historical facts have already occurred long ago, leading to a decisive shift in the outlook on history. Lyon, 1831 The first working-class insurrection took place; in 1838-1842 the first national working-class movement, the Chartist movement in England, reached its zenith. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, was The development of large-scale industry, on the other hand, with the development of the political domination of the new bourgeoisie, has risen to the fore in the history of the most developed countries in Europe. The doctrine that free competition will bring about universal harmony and national happiness is a complete lie.”

From utopian socialism to Hegel's philosophy to Marx, a very clear historical context has emerged. I think that Engels also gave some unique insights into history in this context. For example, Engels put forward: "Although Hegel, like Saint-Simon, was the most learned man of his time, he was, after all, limited." In Engels's view, erudition does not depend on whether his thinking is "correct", but whether his thinking partially breaks through the limitations of the history at that time. Aristotle's elemental theory of natural philosophy is, no doubt, wrong from start to finish, but that doesn't prevent him from being considered "learned" and "great." The ideas of Saint-Simon and Hegel, even at the time of Engels' writing, were considered incomplete and even wrong by progressive socialists, but that did not prevent them from being great. In the same way, the greatness of a person and thought does not affect the incompleteness and errors of his theory, which may be the development trend of Marxism today. The greatness of Marx and his historical materialism does not affect the criticism and revision of primitive Marxism by today's socialists. This kind of revision is different from revisionism that completely abandons historical materialism, but is an expansion and deepening of the correct dialectical Marxist research method. The revision of Marxism by today’s Marxists does not mean abandoning the idea of class struggle, but abandoning the rigid and stubborn Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought of the past and the limited and dogmatic content, and re-establishing the concept of class struggle in the new century. Thought.

"Anti-Dühring" is a serious sociological article, but it feels a little funny when seeing Herr Dühring's messy rhetoric. In Engels' excerpts, Herr Dühring declares that he has discovered a "final, ultimate truth" that "precludes any tendency to a dreamy and subjectively limited world-view" and that "this philosophy does not admit any mere A false horizon, but in its own powerful and transformative movement, revealing all the earth and heaven of outer and inner nature.” It is clear that Dühring's new infallible philosophy is only a superficial combination of a nondescript utopian socialism and Hegel's idealist dialectics. Dühring and his "Ultimate Truth" might still be called progressive in the pre-Saint-Simon and Hegelian era. However, in the same era as the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, this kind of thinking is undoubtedly retrogressive.

Engels' Criticism of Dühring's Transcendentalism and General World Pattern Theory

Before a formal introduction to the main text of "Anti-Dühring," I must make a personal critique of Herr Dühring because of the fright I received while reading this article. I hope this critique will serve as a reminder to others who want to read Anti-Dühring: Anti-Dühring is anti-Dühring, so don't be scared off by Dühring's words.

While reading "Anti-Dühring", I suddenly found that my reading level was so poor, much worse than when I read Hegel's "Principles of the Philosophy of Right", that I thought I had dyslexia disease. But when I covered up Herr Dühring's words and only looked at Engels's words, I found that this was not my problem, but Herr Dühring's. As an example, here is what I think is the simplest and most clearly structured sentence of Herr Dühring: "If you want to call the basic forms of consciousness and knowledge 'human', in order to exclude or even just doubt their primacy and their The unconditional right to truth of the . From ancient Greece to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, almost all ancient philosophers have proposed transcendentalism—that is, the existence of a certain, unchanging concept that overrides human activities but can be felt by people all the time (Dao , heaven and earth, mind, god, soul). And modern philosophers, not to mention, got stuck in a dead end on the road of metaphysics. Descartes' "I think therefore I am", Leibniz's monads and the concept of thinking, and even Hegel's logic and principles, these transcendental concepts have been put forward countless times by modern philosophers, but none of them have been proposed. As rambling as Herr Dühring is, not to mention how he plagiarized Hegel's thought and even complicates it (or rather clutters it).

Engels himself firstly criticized Dühring's plagiarism of Hegel's thought in the first volume of "Philosophy" but constantly belittling Hegel's behavior. The theoretical basis of Dühring's plagiarism is summarized by Hegel as transcendentalism and general world pattern theory. After criticizing the two, Engels pointed out Dühring's erroneous views on natural philosophy, human ethics and jurisprudence, as well as Hegel's scientific dialectics. I personally think that Engels' critique of Dühring mainly focused on natural philosophy, human ethics, and jurisprudence, rather than the metaphysical worldview in transcendentalism and general world pattern theory. This is of course not because of Dühring's own logical rigor, but because the rigor of Hegel's theory made Engels unable to find too many logical flaws.

Engels first criticized Dühring's transcendentalism. Transcendentalism holds that human knowledge exists prior to material and sensory experience. According to Dühring himself, his transcendentalism has transcended the traditional transcendentalism, reached the "negation of negation", and formed the "final denial" that "excludes any tendency of a dreamy and subjectively restricted world outlook". , the ultimate truth". After Engels compared Dühring's concepts with those in Hegel's writings, he found that Dühring's transcendentalism was only a plagiarism of Hegel. Dühring believes that philosophy is "the development of the highest form of consciousness of the world and life", including "the principles of all knowledge and will", and it is above the social activities of human beings. Engels criticized this idea, arguing that:

"Principles are not the starting point of research, but its final result; these principles are not applied to nature and human history, but are abstracted from them; it is not nature and human beings who adapt to principles, but principles only if they are applicable to nature It is only true in the context of history and history.”

In layman's terms, what Engels is referring to here is that the concept in philosophy itself is produced by human society's research on nature, not the concept that leads to the development of human society and nature. For example, the concept of "universe" does not exist in itself, and this concept did not lead to the birth of the universe; but because the universe was born, human beings have also studied the universe in nature, and thus have the concept of "universe". And, the concept of "universe" changes over time. The progress of human research on the universe will lead to changes in the concept of "universe", and changes in the universe in nature, such as the Big Bang and the redshift phenomenon, also change the concept of "universe" after this natural change.

To justify his transcendentalism, Dühring also arrogantly deconstructed philosophy—in his words: “reducing the “general state of things” to basic forms and elements”—and derived his Conclusion: "Besides all basic forms of existence, philosophy has only two real objects of study, the natural world and the human world" - namely, the theory of world patterns in general (logic), the doctrine of natural principles (natural philosophy), and Finally the doctrine of man (psychology, social philosophy, or Hegel's philosophy of mind). He believes that logic, natural philosophy, and social philosophy contain "a certain internal logical order". Indeed, there is a strong connection between logic, natural philosophy, and social philosophy. However, through the word "order" and Dühring's other remarks, Engels found that Dühring's focus was not on the logical relevance of the three concepts, but on the order of the three concepts.

Dühring here defaults to Logic > Natural Philosophy > Social Philosophy. In his view: logic is the root of everything, applying logic to nature produces natural philosophy, and applying natural philosophy to human beings produces social philosophy; logic contains the content of natural philosophy, and natural philosophy also Contains the content of social philosophy. In order to prove this "intrinsic logical order", he also introduced the concept of sets in mathematics. He tried to prove: because the collection of the universe > the collection of the earth > the collection of people, the concepts of philosophy universal to the universe (logic and mathematics) > the concepts of philosophy universal to the earth (natural philosophy) > the concepts of philosophy universal to human society ( social philosophy).

This logic looks right at first glance, but is actually quite wrong. Here, Mr. Dühring secretly changed the concept. He equates the concepts of logic and mathematics prevailing in human society with the "ultimate truth" of the universe he envisions, and equates the understanding of nature prevailing in human society with the whole truth of the earth he envisions . Engels refuted Dühring as follows: knowledge and thinking such as logic, mathematics, and philosophy do "have a meaning that is independent from any individual's special experience", but they cannot exist without human society, nature, and matter.

Engels does not discuss this point much here. Let me give a popular example to explain Engels' point: because of Newton's act of burning the portrait, the knowledge of what Hooke looked like disappeared. This disappearance is not because Hooke is faceless, but because this knowledge is divorced from human society (Newton burned Hooke's portrait) and from nature (Hooke died, the body decomposed, and the same period remembers what he looked like people have died). In order to better understand why natural concepts (such as mathematics) cannot be separated from human society and nature, let me give an extreme example: if people forget some natural concepts, these concepts will naturally disappear in human society. However, because this part of the concept of nature still exists in nature and is a part of nature, these concepts can be re-studied by human beings with the study of nature by human society. However, if the natural conditions change, the natural concepts in this part of nature will change, and the corresponding logical concepts researched by humans will also change. If the structure of human society changes, the concepts of mathematical logic and nature in human society will also change accordingly. Without the corresponding mathematical and logical concepts in nature, human beings would never be able to imagine existing mathematical concepts such as lines, points, surfaces, and bodies, or logical concepts such as AND or NON. If there is no summary of the mathematical logic concepts existing in nature in human society, the corresponding concepts cannot be understood by human beings, that is, they do not exist. Just as books need paper, information (including concepts, thinking, knowledge, and will) needs matter to exist. As long as anything is divorced from reality, it naturally does not exist.

Here, in order to illustrate the influence and role of entities in nature on human philosophical concepts, Engels also cites an example in linguistics: in Latin, a three-dimensional object is called corpus solidum, which can be touched. object. Of course, if Engels had known about the study of oracle bones and hieroglyphs in modern linguistics, he would not have to use such a troublesome example, and could have directly declared that without substance there would be no language and writing, and no philosophical concept.

What Engels later refuted was Herr Dühring's theory of general world patterns, that is, concepts of logic. Dühring's ideas in his general model theory of the world mostly plagiarize Hegel's ideas and are thus easily named by Engels. After Engels' analysis and arrangement, anyone who has known Hegel's dialectics can see that Herr Dühring completely copied Hegel's scientific dialectics. In his general world pattern theory, Dühring includes the elaboration of logical concepts such as uniqueness, unity, universality, existence and change, and the relationship between quality and quantity. Among them, uniqueness, unity and universality copied Hegel's law of unity of opposites; existence and change copied the model of being-nothing-change; the relationship between quality and quantity copied the law of mutual change of quality. In this part, Engels mainly explained the similarities between Dühring's concept and Hegel's scientific dialectics, and did not refute these concepts too much; Distortion of the law of the unity of opposites, the law of mutual transformation of quality, and the law of negation of negation.

Dühring believes: Because a being that contains all things is unique, and if there is one other thing that can be added to this being, it is not all-inclusive being, but the set that adds other things is all-encompassing Being, so a being that contains all things cannot add other objects, so this being that contains all things is unified and indivisible; and since this being is unified, every object in this being should have a universal element, Therefore it is universal. In order to prevent his own copying of Hegel's law of the unity of opposites from being seen through, and at the same time to cover up his transcendentalism, Mr. Dühring uses the mathematical concept of sets here, trying to explain from the perspective of "mathematics" His general world pattern theory. Mr. Dühring's remarks are roughly as follows: Since a supposedly "unique" and "uniform" set exists, all "unique" sets are "uniform". It is obvious that Mr. Dühring has not been exposed to any mathematical concepts about limits, infinity, calculus and linear algebra, and has not even systematically learned the concept of sets (of course, set theory has not been created at that time). You must know that there is no concept of so-called uniqueness and unity in sets. And Engels, because of the lack of mathematical knowledge in his time, was not able to answer this question from the root of the problem, and only satirized the logic of Dühring's argument.

Engels showed that Dühring blurred the distinction between unity and existence in his argument. The concept of unity is that things in a concept have the same characteristic. Existence, as the name implies, is that this thing has a physical existence. Engels pointed out that the precondition for the unity of the world that Dühring argues is existence. If a thing exists, then it is unified in existence; however, an object has unity, but it does not necessarily have unified existence. That is to say, if a thing exists in itself, then existence is one of its uniform properties, such as an apple has the property of existence; however, if the object has a uniform property, the object does not necessarily exist, such as a Philosophical concepts do not exist in the real world. Dühring, on the other hand, tried to use his previous fallacy to link unity and existence to justify his transcendentalism. He tried to argue that thought and knowledge exist because of their unity.

Dühring also tried to explain: "[The existence of thought and knowledge] is not the kind of pure existence, which is equal to itself, should have no special stipulations, and is in fact only the antithesis of the nothingness of thought or the absence of thought. language." Engels pointed out that here Dühring again rigged Hegel's model of being-nothingness-transformation, but distorted Hegel's words. The existence of thought and knowledge here is "that pure existence," what Hegel called existence-nothingness. Hegel's original words are as follows: "Pure existence is pure abstraction, and therefore absolute negation. This negation is directly nothingness." anything other than that; pure existence is therefore indeterminate, that is, existence cannot be precisely defined; Hegel regards this indeterminacy of existence as an absolute negation, Existence itself denies existence itself, because people cannot determine whether an existence is existence or not; and the negation and opposition of existence is nothingness.

Engels did not describe Hegel's being-nothing-transformation model and the law of the unity of opposites here. I'll make an addition here. Hegel believed that pure existence (being) and pure nothingness (nothingness) have in common that both properties cannot be defined, that is, both are indeterminate; the difference is only that existence is understood as Existence, and nothingness is understood as nonexistence. For example, the prisoners in Plato's cave confuse light and darkness, pure light and pure darkness are the same to the prisoners, only the whole of light and darkness can reflect the opposition of light and darkness, and then artificially. In the same way, pure existence cannot be understood, and only when existence and nothingness appear together can the opposition between existence and nothingness appear and be artificially defined. Hegel found that this situation is not a special case, but a universal one, such as: cold and heat are opposed to each other, but represent temperature, and without cold there is no heat; male and female are opposed to each other, but represent sex, without Males have no females; matter and vacuum are opposed to each other, and without matter there is no vacuum. And change (being-nothingness) is the totality of being and nothingness, a situation where being and nothingness appear together. There are two kinds of change - occurrence and disappearance; occurrence refers to moving from indeterminacy itself to immediacy; and disappearance refers to moving from immediacy to indeterminacy itself. To put it bluntly, to occur is to change from only being or nothingness to both being and nothingness; to disappear is to change from being and nothingness to coexisting, to changing to only being or nothingness. I use the concepts of light and dark as an example here to re-phrase the concept of change. Happening is when a light comes in from the dark night without light, and this light forms things and patterns; and disappearing is when this light disappears and the world returns to darkness. Of course, for Plato's cave prisoners, what happens is that the shadow puppets cover the light source, and darkness appears; and disappearing is when the world reverts to a curtain of light all over again. And the very nature of change itself—the fact that occurrence and disappearance are in themselves opposites and unity—cause change itself to negate itself, which in turn leads to the negation of negation.

Being-nothing becomes changeable because of its own changeability. Change leads to the denial of itself, which in turn promotes further change, which in turn forms a conception of a higher stage of existence, a conception of existence that includes immutability, change, existence, change. And this higher stage of existence leads to quality—that is, genus and species; and quality leads to quantity.

Because of my understanding of Taoism in the past, I prefer to understand Hegel's concept of change as the concept of Taiji, two ceremonies, four images and even the concept of gossip; I personally feel that this traditional Chinese ideal dialectics is better than Hegel's The ideal dialectics of , is much easier to understand. Taiji does not contain existence and nothingness, yin and yang; because Taiji cannot be considered to define what characteristics are, it cannot be defined as yin or yang, or something else; and yin and yang produce opposite concepts, However, this opposition itself is unified, it is Tai Chi; the opposition of Yin and Yang once again produces the four signs, that is, the concept of Sun Shaoyang Taiyin Shaoyin, at this time Yin and Yang begin to transform, reflecting the concept of change, change, The unchanging concepts - the sun and the lunar yin - also exist; the four signs produce the eight trigrams, the quality of the thing itself - that is, the genus and the species - is born, and the trigram images are linked with the concepts in nature; Two begets three, three begets all things, and finally gossip transforms all things, and quality leads to quantity. The traditional thought of Taoism fits perfectly with the scientific dialectics. Of course, the so-called metaphysical concepts such as gossip and five elements are unscientific and undialectical.

If you understand the existence-nothing-change model, the law of the unity of opposites, the law of mass mutual transformation, and the law of negation of negation in the above-mentioned scientific dialectics, you can roughly understand why Hegel's scientific dialectics is known as the Scientific and dialectical.

references:

F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, https://www.marxists.org/chinese/marx-engels/20/003.htm

Julie E. Maybee, Hegel's Dialectics, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/