Engels wrote this in 1878 and he could have written it in 2010. It is a
stunning chapter on Absolute truth in Anti-Duhring, read it for yourself, he
is truly a master.
f580
"......Is human thought sovereign? Before we can answer yes or no we must
first enquire: what is human thought? Is it the thought of the
individual man? No. But it exists only as the individual thought of
many milliards of past, present and future men. If, then, I say that
the total thought of all these human beings, including the future ones,
which is embraced in my idea, is sovereign, able to know the
world as it exists, if only mankind lasts long enough and in so far as
no limits are imposed on its knowledge by its perceptive organs or the
objects to be known, then I am saying something which is pretty banal
and, in addition, pretty barren. For the most valuable result from it
would be that it should make us extremely distrustful of our present
knowledge, inasmuch as in all probability we are just about at the
beginning of human history, and the generations which will put us right
are likely to be far more numerous than those whose knowledge we —
often enough with a considerable degree of contempt — have the
opportunity to correct.
Herr Dühring himself proclaims it to be a necessity that
consciousness, and therefore also thought and knowledge, can become
manifest only in a series of individual beings. We can only ascribe
sovereignty to the thought of each of these individuals in so far as we
are not aware of any power which would be able to impose any idea
forcibly on him, when he is of sound mind and wide awake. But as for
the sovereign validity of the knowledge obtained by each individual
thought, we all know that there can be no talk of such a thing, and
that all previous experience shows that without exception such
knowledge always contains much more that is-capable of being improved
upon than that which cannot be improved upon, or is correct.
In other words, the sovereignty of thought is realised in a series
of extremely unsovereignly-thinking human beings; the knowledge which
has an unconditional claim to truth is realised in a series of relative
errors; neither the one nor the other can be fully realised except
through an unending duration of human existence.
Here once again we find the same contradiction as we found above,
between the character of human thought, necessarily conceived as
absolute, and its reality in individual human beings all of whom think
only limitedly. This is a contradiction which can be resolved only in
the course of infinite progress, in what is — at least practically for
us — an endless succession of generations of mankind. In this sense
human thought is just as much sovereign as not sovereign, and its
capacity for knowledge just as much unlimited as limited. It is
sovereign and unlimited in its disposition, its vocation, its
possibilities and its historical ultimate goal; it is not sovereign and
it is limited in its individual realisation and in reality at any
particular moment.
It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind ever reached the
stage at which it should work only with eternal truths, with results of
thought which possess sovereign validity and an unconditional claim to
truth, it would then have reached the point where the infinity of the
intellectual world both in its actuality and in its potentiality had
been exhausted, and thus the famous miracle of the counted uncountable
would have been performed.
But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt
of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes
four, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right
angles, that Paris is in France, that a man who gets no food dies of
hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless eternal truths, final and
ultimate truths {D. Ph. 2}?
Certainly there are. We can divide the whole realm of knowledge in
the traditional way into three great departments. The first includes
all sciences that deal with inanimate nature and are to a greater or
lesser degree susceptible of mathematical treatment: mathematics,
astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry. If it gives anyone any
pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted
that certain results obtained by these sciences are eternal
truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason these sciences are
known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their
results have this validity. With the introduction of variable
magnitudes and the extension of their variability to the infinitely
small and infinitely large, mathematics, usually so strictly ethical,
fell from grace; it ate of the tree of knowledge, which opened up to it
a career of most colossal achievements, but at the same time a path of
error. The virgin state of absolute validity and irrefutable proof of
everything mathematical was gone for ever; the realm of controversy was
inaugurated, and we have reached the point where most people
differentiate and integrate not because they understand what they are
doing but from pure faith, because up to now it has always come out
right. Things are even worse with astronomy and mechanics, and in
physics and chemistry we are swamped by hypotheses as if attacked by a
swarm of bees. And it must of necessity be so. In physics we are
dealing with the motion of molecules, in chemistry with the formation
of molecules out of atoms, and if the interference of light waves is
not a myth, we have absolutely no prospect of ever seeing these
interesting objects with our own eyes. As time goes on, final and
ultimate truths become remarkably rare in this field......."
READ ON
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch07.htm
".......But is it absolutely and finally true within those limits? No physicist
would assert that. He would maintain that it holds good within certain
limits of pressure and temperature and for certain gases; and even
within these more restricted limits he would not exclude the
possibility of a still narrower limitation or altered formulation as
the result of future investigations. *2
This is how things stand with final and ultimate truths in physics, for
example. Really scientific works therefore, as a rule, avoid such
dogmatically moral expressions as error and truth, while these
expressions meet us everywhere in works such as the philosophy of
reality, in which empty phrasemongering attempts to impose itself on us
as the most sovereign result of sovereign thought."
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