Engels uses "materialist dialectics" in _ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
German Philosophy_.
CB
>>> Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/24/00 10:31AM >>>
I wrote:
> >actually, there are good reasons to avoid the terms historical materialism
> >and dialectical materialism. They aren't Marx's terms.
Mine replies:
>Really? Marx says in Preface to the French edition of Capital (Tucker
>ed, p.301) the following:
>
>"My DIALECTIC METHOD is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its
>direct opposite.to hegel, the life process of the human brain, ie the
>proces of thiking, which, under the name of the idea", he even transforms
>into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the
>real world is only the external,phenomenal form of the idea. With me, on
>the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected
>by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought"
"dialectical method" is different from both "dialectical materialism" and
"historical materialism." "Marx's dialectical method" is also less ambiguous.
>I looked at the index of Tucker, Marx uses the concept "dialectic" in
>pp.68-69, 106-25, 301-2...
read what I said above. .
>ops,I forgot to mention Engels' _Letters on historical Materialism_
>written to to Joseph Bloch.. You may wish to consider Tucker p.760..
that's Engels, not Marx.
> > Marx referred to his "materialist conception of history." More
> >importantly, the terms have been much abused, at one point being reduced
> >to "histomat" and "diamat" by Stalin's ideologists .
>true however If Stalin abused these terms, it has nothing to do with the
>conceptual validity of the terms as developed by Marx.
>we are dealing with MArx here not Stalin...
I wasn't dealing with the "conceptual validity" of dialectical method. (I
think that a dialectical and materialist approach to understanding the
world is absolutely necessary.) I was instead dealing with the need for
terms that hadn't been formalized and denatured by generations of epigones
and anti-Marx types who apply "thesis/antithesis/synthesis" formulas in a
mechanical way.
BTW, some of the best stuff on dialectical method appears in Ollman's book
ALIENATION and Lewins & Lewontin's THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST. I think it's
important to distinguish between dialectical ontology, dialectical
epistemology, and dialectical mode of presentation (though of course these
are interrelated).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
