Part 7 (1/2)

”One must subst.i.tute for false theories of freedom the actual conditions in which reason on the one hand and instinct on the other unite upon a middle ground. The fundamental facts of this sort of dynamics are to be learned from observation and as regards the calculation in advance of phenomena which have not yet occurred, we must judge of them in general terms according to their special qualities. In this way the silly speculations with respect to the freedom of the will which have wasted thousands of years are not only entirely removed but are replaced by something positive, something useful for practical life.” So freedom of the will consists in this that reason impels men to the right and irrationality to the left and according to this parallelogram of forces the true direction is that of the diagonal. Freedom would therefore be the average between insight and impulse, between understanding and lack of understanding, and its degree would to use an astronomical expression be empirically established by the ”personal equation.” But a few pages later we read ”We establish moral responsibility upon freedom by which we only mean susceptibility to known motives according to the measure of natural and acquired reason. All such motives in spite of antagonism realise themselves in action with the inevitability of natural law, but we count upon this inevitable necessity when we deal with morals.”

This second definition of freedom which is quite opposed to the first is nothing but a very weak paraphrase of Hegel's notions on the subject. Hegel was the first man to make a proper explanation of the relations of freedom and necessity. In his eyes freedom is the recognition of necessity. ”Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood.” Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence of natural laws but in a knowledge of these laws and in the possibility thence derived of applying them intelligently to given ends. This is true both as regards the laws of nature and of those which control the spiritual and physical existence of man himself,--two cla.s.ses of laws which we can distinguish as an abstraction but not in reality. Freedom of the will consists in nothing but the ability to come to a decision when one is in possession of a knowledge of the facts. The freer the judgment of a man then in relation to a given subject of discussion so much the more necessity is there for his arrival at a positive decision. On the other hand lack of certainty arising from ignorance which apparently chooses voluntarily between many different and contradictory possibilities of decision shows thereby its want of freedom, its control by things which it should in reality control. Freedom, therefore, consists in mastery over ourselves and external nature founded upon knowledge of the necessities of nature, it is, therefore, necessarily a product of historical development. The first human beings to become differentiated from the lower animals were in all essentials as devoid of freedom as these animals themselves but each step in human development was a step towards freedom. At the threshold of human history stands the discovery of the transformation of mechanical motion in heat, the generation of fire by friction; at the close of development up to the present stands the discovery of the transformation of heat into mechanical motion, the steam engine. In spite of the tremendous revolution in the direction of freedom which the steam engine has produced in society it is not yet half complete.

There is no question that the production of fire by friction still surpa.s.ses it as an agent in the liberation of humanity. Because the production of fire by friction for the first time gave man power over the forces of nature and separated him for ever from the lower animals. The steam engine can never bridge so wide a chasm. It appears however as the representative of all those productive forces by the help of which alone a state of society is rendered possible in which no cla.s.s subjection or pain will be produced by reason of the lack of means for the sustenance of the individual, in which moreover it will be possible to speak of real human freedom as arising from living in accordance with the recognised laws of nature. But considering the youth of humanity it would be absurd to wish to impute any universal absolute validity to our present philosophical views, and it follows from the mere facts that the whole of history up to the present time is to be regarded as the history of the period extending from the time of the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical movement into heat to that of the transformation of heat into mechanical movement.

(The above const.i.tutes a reply to the view which regards history simply as the record of human error and is followed by a discussion of Duehring's opinions in that regard.)

CHAPTER VII

THE DIALECTIC

_Quant.i.ty and Quality._

(Here Herr Duehring contends ”The first and most important statement with respect to the foundation logical properties of existence points to the exclusion of contradiction. Contradiction is a category which can belong to thought alone but which can pertain to nothing real.

There are no contradictions in things; in other words the law of contradiction is itself the crowning point of absurdity.” To which Engels replies as follows):

The thought content of the foregoing pa.s.sages is contained in the statement that contradiction is an absurdity and cannot occur in the actual world. This statement will have for people of average common sense the same self-evident truth as to say that straight cannot be crooked nor crooked straight. But the differential calculus shows in spite of all the protests of common sense that under certain conditions straight and crooked are identical, and reaches thereby a conclusion which is not in harmony with the common sense view of the absurdity of there being any ident.i.ty between straight and crooked.

Considering moreover the significant role which the so called Dialectic of the Contradiction played in the ancient Greek philosophy, a stronger opponent than Herr Duehring would be obliged to meet it with better arguments than a mere affirmation and a number of epithets.

As long as we regard things as static and without life, each by itself, separately, we do not run against any contradictions in them.

We find certain qualities sometimes common, sometimes distinctive, occasionally contradictory, but in this last case they belong to different objects and are hence not self contradictory. While we follow this method we pursue the ordinary metaphysical method of thought. But it is quite different when we consider things in their movement, in their change, their life and their mutually reciprocal relations. Then we come at once upon contradictions. Motion is itself a contradiction since simple mechanical movement from place to place can only accomplish itself by a body being at one and the same moment in one place and simultaneously in another place by being in one and the same place and yet not there. And motion is just the continuous establis.h.i.+ng and dissolving the contradiction.

Here we have a contradiction which is ”objective, and so to speak corporeal in things and events.” And what does Herr Duehring say about it? He affirms that ”in rational mechanics there is no bridge between the strictly static and the dynamic.” Finally the reader is able to see that there is behind this pretty little phrase of Herr Duehring nothing more than this--that the metaphysical mode of thought can absolutely not pa.s.s from the idea of rest to that of motion because the aforesaid contradiction intervenes. Motion is absolutely inconceivable to the metaphysician, because a contradiction. And as he affirms the inconceivability of motion he admits the existence of this contradiction against his will and therefore admits that it const.i.tutes an objective contradiction in actual facts and events, and is moreover an actual fact.

But if simple mechanical motion contains a contradiction in itself still more so do the higher forms of motion of matter and to a high degree organic life and its development. We saw above that life consists chiefly in this that a being is at one and the same time itself and something different. Life itself then is likewise a contradiction contained in things and events, always establis.h.i.+ng and dissolving itself, and as soon as the contradiction ceases life also ceases, death comes on the scene. Thus we saw also that we cannot put an end to the Contradictions in the realm of thought, and how for example the contradiction between the intrinsically unlimited possibilities of human knowledge and its actual existence in the persons of human beings with limited faculties and powers of knowledge, is dissolved in the, for us at least, practically endless progression of the race, in unending progress.

We stated just now that higher mathematics holds as one of its basic principles that straight and crooked may be identical under certain circ.u.mstances. It shows another contradiction, that lines which apparently intersect yet are parallel from five to six centimeters from the point of intersection, should be such as should never intersect although indefinitely produced, and yet, notwithstanding these and even greater contradictions, it produces not only correct results but results which are unattainable by lower mathematics.

But even in the latter there is a host of contradictions. It is a contradiction, for example, that a root of A should be and actually is a power of A. A to the power of one-half equals the square root of A.

It is contradiction that a negative magnitude should be the square of anything, since every negative magnitude multiplied by itself gives a positive square. The square root of minus one is therefore not only a contradiction but an absurd contradiction, a veritable absurdity. And yet the square root of minus one is in many instances the necessary result of correct mathematical operations, nay further, where would mathematics higher or lower be if one were forbidden to operate with the square root of minus one.

Mathematics itself enters the realm of the dialectic and significantly enough it was a dialectic philosopher, Descartes, who introduced this progressiveness into mathematics. As is the relation of the mathematics of variable magnitudes to that of invariable quant.i.ties, so is the relation of the dialectic method of thought to the metaphysical. This does not prevent the great majority of mathematicians from only recognising the dialectic in the realms of mathematics, a condition of things satisfactory to those who operate in the antiquated, limited, metaphysical fas.h.i.+on by methods attained by means of the dialectic.

(Duehring having made an attack upon Marx's ”Capital” because of its reliance upon the dialectic, and having indulged in the epithets to which he is too p.r.o.ne with respect to this work, Engels takes up its defence in that respect as follows):

It is not our business to concern ourselves at this point with the correctness or incorrectness of the investigations of Marx as regards economics, but only with the application which he makes of the dialectic method. So much is certain, that it is only now that the readers of ”Capital” will by the aid of Herr Duehring understand what they have read properly, and among them Herr Duehring himself, who in the year 1867 was still in a position, as far as possible to a man of his calibre, to review the book rationally. He did not then, it may be noted, first translate the arguments of Marx into Duehringese, as now seems indispensable to him. Even if he at that time made the blunder of identifying the Marxian dialectic with that of Hegel he had not altogether lost the ability to distinguish methods from the results attained by them and to comprehend that an abuse of the former is no contradiction of the latter.

Herr Duehring's most astonis.h.i.+ng observation is that from the Marxian standpoint, ”in the last a.n.a.lysis everything is identical,” that therefore in the eyes of Marx, for example, capitalists and wage workers, feudal, capitalistic and social methods of production are ”all one.” In order to show the possibility of such sheer stupidity it only remains to point out that the mere word ”dialectic” makes Herr Duehring mentally irresponsible and makes what he says and does so inaccurate and confused as to be in the last a.n.a.lysis ”all one.”

(Herr Duehring remarks, ”How comical for example is the declaration based upon Hegel's confused notions that quant.i.ty becomes lost in quality and that money advanced [i.e. for productive purposes. Ed.]

becomes capital when it reaches a certain limit merely through quant.i.tative increase.” To which Engels replies thus):

This seems peculiar when presented in this washed out fas.h.i.+on by Herr Duehring. On page 313 (2nd ed. ”Capital”) Marx, after an investigation of fixed and variable capital and surplus value, derives from his investigations the conclusion that ”not every amount of gold or value capable of being transformed into capital is so transformed; rather a certain minimum of gold or of exchange value is presupposed to be in the possession of the individual owner of gold or goods.” He thereupon gives an example, thus, in a branch of industry the worker works eight hours per day for himself, i.e. in order to produce the value of his wages, and the following four hours for the capitalist in producing surplus value to go into their pockets. One must have sufficient values to permit of the setting up of two workmen with raw material, means of labor and wages, in order to live as well as a workman. But since capitalistic production is not undertaken for mere livelihood but for increase of wealth, our individual with his two workmen would still be no capitalist. If he lives twice as well as an ordinary workman and transforms half of the surplus value produced into capital he will have to employ eight workmen and possess four times the aforementioned amount of value, and only after this and other examples for the purpose of ill.u.s.trating and establis.h.i.+ng the fact that not every small amount of value can effect a transformation of itself into capital, but that each period of industrial development and each branch of industry has its own minimum, fixed, Marx remarks ”Here, as in nature, the correctness of the law of logic, as discovered by Hegel, is established--that mere quant.i.tative changes at a certain point suddenly take on qualitative differences.”

One may remark the elevated and dignified fas.h.i.+on in which Duehring makes Marx say the exact opposite of what he did say. Marx says ”The fact that a given amount of value can only transform itself into capital as soon as it has attained a definite minimum, varying with circ.u.mstances, in each individual case,--this fact is proof of the correctness of the law of Hegel. Herr Duehring makes him say ”Because, according to the law of Hegel, quant.i.ty is transformed into quality therefore 'a sum of money when it has reached a certain amount becomes capital.'” He says just the opposite.