File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-02-28.000, message 202


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
=================================================











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