The Nature of Human Brain Work: An Introduction to Dialectics by Joseph Dietzgen

Author:Joseph Dietzgen [Dietzgen, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781604863796
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

(c) Force and Matter

The reader who has closely followed our main idea which will be further illustrated, will anticipate that the question of matter and force finds its solution in the understanding of the relation between the general and the special. What is the relation of the concrete to the abstract? This is the common problem of those who see the active impulse of the world either in the spiritual force or in the material substance, who think to find the nature of things, the non plus ultra of science, in either of these facts.

Liebig, who is especially fond of straying from his inductive science into the field of speculative thought, says in an idealist sense: “Force cannot be seen, we cannot grasp it with our hands; in order to understand its nature and peculiarities, we must investigate its effects.” And if a materialist replies to him: “Matter is force, force is matter, no matter without force, no force without matter,” it is plain that either has determined this relation only negatively. In certain shows, the clown is asked by the manager: “Clown, where have you been?” “With the others,” answers the clown. “And where were the others?” “With me.”

In this case we have two answers with the same content, in the other we have two camps which quarrel with different words about an indisputable fact. And this dispute is so much more ridiculous because it is taken so seriously. If the idealist makes a distinction between matter and force, he does not mean to deny that the real phenomenon of force is inseparably linked with matter. And if the materialist claims that there is no matter without force and no force without matter, he does not mean to deny that matter and force are different, as his opponent claims.

The dispute exists for a good reason and has its object, but this object is not revealed in the dispute is instinctively kept under cover by both parties so that they may not be in a position where they would have to acknowledge their own ignorance. Each wants to prove to the other that the other’s explanations are inadequate, and both demonstrate this sufficiently. Buchner admits in the closing statement of his “Matter and Force” that the empirical material is insufficient to permit definite answers to transcendental questions, and that therefore no positive answer can be given to them. And he furthermore says that the empirical material “is fully sufficient to answer them negatively and to do away with hypothesis.”

This is saying in so many words that the science of the materialist is adequate for the proof that his opponent knows nothing.

The spiritualist or idealist believes in a spiritual; which means in a ghostlike and inexplicable, nature force. The materialist thinkers, on the other hand are skeptical. A scientific proof of faith or of skepticism does not exist. The materialist has only this advantage over his idealist opponent, that he looks for the transcendental, the nature, the cause, the force, in back of the phenomenon, not outside of matter.

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