To All Comrades,
The Great Engels shared these thoughts below with the world in 1883 and it
could have been in 2010 for that matter since Capitalism has become ever so
more abominable. We need a revolutionary philosopher again like Engels who
would hurl bourgeois metaphysics and agnosticism into the museum of
absurdities. While mankind becomes more materialist in their thinking we
still encounter those who pretend to beam confusion our way tailing far behind
the commons sense of the working class.
f580
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Engels, Dialectics of Nature
"Natural scientists believe that they free themselves from philosophy
by ignoring it or abusing it. They cannot, however, make any headway
without thought, and for thought they need thought determinations. But
they take these categories unreflecting from the common consciousness
of so-called educated persons, which is dominated by the relics of long
obsolete philosophies or from the little bit of philosophy compulsorily
listened to at the University (which is not only fragmentary, but also a
medley of views of people belonging to the most varied. and usually the
worst schools), or from uncritical and unsystematic reading of
philosophical writings of all kinds. Hence they are no less in bondage [to]
philosophy but unfortunately in most cases to the worst philosophy, and
those who abuse philosophy most are slaves to precisely the worst
vulgarized relics of the worst philosophers.
* * *
Natural scientists may adopt whatever attitude they please, they are
still under the domination of philosophy. It is only a question whether
they want to be dominated by a bad, fashionable philosophy or by a form
of theoretical thought which rests on acquaintance with the history of
thought and its achievements.
“Physics, beware of metaphysics,” is quite right, but
in a different sense.[155]
Natural scientists allow philosophy to prolong an illusory existence
by making shift with the dregs of the old metaphysics. Only when natural
and historical science has become imbued with dialectics will all the
philosophical rubbish – other than the pure theory of thought – be
superfluous, disappearing in positive science."
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