A fundamental law of dialectics: truth is concrete

Woods is no scientist – he has no grounding in science at all. Explaining the energy contained in a gram of mass, Woods gives the answer measured in ergs, an obsolete unit of energy universally replaced by the Joule in 1960. Science has accumulated many observations and has considerably changed in the near half-century since 1960 – some theories considered by scientists to be highly speculative in 1960 are now robustly proven, while others have long since been abandoned.

Woods approaches science as a philosopher of dialectical materialism. He claims that Reason in Revolt has had a “tremendous success internationally”. But it has had no impact whatsoever on science, undoubtedly for the reasons shown above.

Many readers of Reason in Revolt were no doubt attracted by the promise of an exposition of the philosophy of dialectical materialism and its relationship to science, or the development of an understanding of the world we live in – for instance, whether our universe has a definite origin in time and space, or is infinite. We will shortly discuss what the proponents of dialectics, from ancient Greece to modern times, said about these ideas, and discuss the relationship of these ideas to the development of science. It is indeed a fascinating subject.

But by disregarding the need for a thorough understanding of science – as if philosophy can substitute for a detailed understanding of the matter being studied – Woods does an immediate disservice to dialectics and, thereby, to Marxism. Woods forgets that Hegel himself sets out, from the outset, an important law: truth is concrete.

At the start of his Encyclopaedia, for example, Hegel says:

“Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgement upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone,

it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite.”

Encyclopaedia, paragraph 5

Nikolai Chernyshevsky said Hegel’s dialectical method insists that:

“Every object, every phenomenon has its own significance, and it must be judged according to the circumstances, the environment, in which it exists. This rule was expressed by the formula: ‘there is no abstract truth; truth is concrete.’”

Chernyshevsky, quoted by Georgi Plekhanov in The Development of the Monist View of History, pp103-4

Woods should be left in no doubt whatsoever about the importance of this principle of dialectics. Lenin echoes Chernyshevsky: “One of the basic principles of dialectics is that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete.” (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, last chapter)

Leon Trotsky says this about dialectics and science:

“Dialectics and materialism are the basic elements in the Marxist cognition of the world. But this does not mean at all that they can be applied to any sphere of knowledge, like an ever-ready master key. Dialectics cannot be imposed upon facts; it has to be deduced from facts, from their nature and development… You will get nowhere with sweeping criticisms or bald commands.”

Problems of Everyday Life, p 288

How can Woods construct a dialectical criticism of modern science when he does not understand how water boils? And how will he fare with Einstein’s theory of relativity? We will come to this later.

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Date: 2015-01-11; view: 787