Date: Tue, 21 Feb 1995 10:44:47 -0500 (EST) From: SCIABRRC-AT-acfcluster.nyu.edu Subject: a note about dialectics Just a note about dialectics, Marx, Hegel, etc. I think it is very revealing that Marx, Engels, and Lenin referred not only to Hegel, but to Aristotle for his contribution to dialectical method. Engels, in fact, called Aristotle "the Hegel of the ancient world" who "had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought." Marx saw Aristotle as "the greatest thinker of antiquity," who "was the first to analyze so many forms, whether of thought, society, nature, and amongst them also the form of value." And Lenin argued that within Aristotle lies "the living germs of dialectics and inquiries about it." I repeat these statements if only because dialectics is, at root, a methodology totally opposed to monism and to dualism, forms that can be found in the Kantian antinomies, but that are not to be found in the Aristotelian tradition. It was Aristotle's commitment to the analysis of the whole, his rejection of Platonic idealism and Democritean atomism, his rejection of the fallacy of reification, that was most dialectical and influential... and unfortunately, unheralded, by later "formalist" Aristotelians who viewed dialectical logic as antithetical to logical thought. It was Marcuse in REASON AND REVOLUTION who reminds us that even Hegel sought to recapture the dynamism of Aristotle's ontology, the simultaneous focus on both being and becoming. The methodological influence of Aristotle on Marx is also traced by Hook, Bernstein, Gould, Meikle, Copleston, and McCarthy. These intellectual-historical links are extremely important in any effort to understand the dialectic. - Chris =================================================Dr. Chris M. Sciabarra Visiting Scholar, N.Y.U. Department of Politics INTERNET: sciabrrc-AT-acfcluster.nyu.edu BITNET: sciabrrc-AT-nyuacf ================================================= --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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