Science versus Idealism
In Defence of Philosophy against Positivism and Pragmatism
by Maurice Cornforth
13. Dialectical Materialism
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cornforth7/SVI-13.html
This is the second longest chapter in the book, second only to chapter 18,
on pragmatism (of which I've uploaded only one section). I'm running out
of time to spend on doing this. My next candidate, if I continue, is
likely to be chapter 17, "Unified Science", another 30 pages or so.
Normally I wouldn't waste my time on an exposition of diamat. However,
this chapter is significant for primarily two reasons:
(1) the application of historical materialism to the history of philosophy;
(2) a critique of the objective idealist strand of 'emergent
evolution'--Spencer, Bergson, Shaw, Morgan, Alexander,
Whitehead. Cornforth gives a different slant on this history from what you
will find in the biased entries of reference sources like the Stanford
Encyclopedia of philosophy, and outlines what is wrong with metaphysical
system-building of this sort.
See the section:
Materialism versus Idealism in the Conception of Change and Development
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cornforth7/SVI-13.html#emerg1
For reference, there is my emergence blog, which I will now have to update:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/emergence-blog.html
From this point, it is instructive what he has to say in contrast about . . .
(3) dialectical materialism, its alleged abjuration of metaphysical
system-building and relation to science.
To read this, you will have to be able to stomach Stalin, Zhdanov, and
Mao. Good luck. But to the point, if you read this chapter, you perhaps
need not plow through at least two books of Cornforth's trilogy. (His take
on historical materialism--the third book--is likely to be objectionable
for other reasons--the laws and stages of history conception.) It becomes
clearer from reading this both the source of diamat's appeal and its
slippery finessing of the lapses in its own logical structure.
The larger picture here is the underlying dynamic of the self-deception of
the advocates of Soviet diamat outside the USSR. I'm working on a larger
project analyzing the history of philosophical schools including diamat as
a combination of logical and ideological (in the last instance social)
causation.
I will defer an extensive analysis for another occasion. I just want to
note that Cornforth's claim that diamat abjures metaphysical
system-building, whereas diamat builds on the latest results of science and
can even guide the development of science, is a red flag (no pun
intended). Elswhere Cornforth insists, correctly, that no empirical
consequences can be deduced from any ontology. Yet he finesses the logical
relationship between the categorial structure of diamat and the empirical
realities upon which it is alleged to generalize. Here the logical
ambiguity in the conception of dialectical laws (the conflation of logical
law with empirical law) is the entry point for all the ideological flimflam
of Stalinism.
Furthermore, while Cornforth's class analysis of the history of philosophy
may be broadly correct (though it is micro-incorrect in failing to account
for the subjective self-understanding of positivists and pragmatists), his
reduction of the contrast between Marxism and bourgeois philosophy to "two
camps" is Stalinist through and through. Not only is he wrong about the
nature of the Stalinist camp, but he is wrong about the relationship of
Marxist to non-Marxist philosophies. In practice, he treats Marxist
philosophy as a system opposed to other systems, though he denies doing
so. Like most philosophers influenced by diamat--in this period,
especially--he was very good at exposing both the social roots and the
idealist blinders of bourgeois philosophy--i.e., at exercising the
negative, critical function of Marxist philosophy--but diamat as a
constructive philosophy remained primitive, underdeveloped, stagnant,
locked into formulas and authorities. This is the tragedy of the whole
tradition.
Others have endlessly criticized the logical structure of diamat over the
past century. One could toss off hundreds of names. The first that pop
into my mind are Scanlan, Norman, and 'Rosa Lichtenstein'. There are some
who have argued that bad logic works to the advantage of bad
ideology--Popper, for example, and now 'Rosa'. However, there remains more
to be said about this, even at this late date. It is especially relevant
for recalibrating the relations among intellectual traditions, my larger
project.
The plausibility of a world view ambiguously formulated, in combination
with dogmatic authoritarianism, suckered the best minds. I learned this
from some rather obscure sources, for example J.D. Bernal's shameful
apologetics for diamat in the 1930s.
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