Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 11:35:18 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Dialectical reasoning, science and imagination


Alex Trotter writes:

>Concerning Marx scientific and Romantic: you say this is a lie. But is
>it? He may never have abandoned his early themes, and indeed, they seem
>to resurface in spades at the end of his life, but the scientist
>'superego' really does seem to be in the saddle for most of his career.
>Perhaps Marx had, like Goethe's Faust, two souls in his breast--a real
>Romantic doppelgeanger. Freud was like that too--a German Romantic in his
>youth, a hard-nosed scientist in maturity. In both cases, the imaginative
>philosopher-poet overlayed by the highly systematic scientist.


This is the most alienated hogwash about imagination and science being
totally antagonistic human activities that I've seen for a long time. It's
intellectual level is way below that of C.P.Snow (planing out on the level
of CP Stalin!).

What would Trotter make of the part played by Einstein's imagination in his
discovery of the theory of relativity?

Or the whole process of dialectical reasoning needed to establish viable
axioms for a system of analytical logic to build on?


Cheers,

Hugh




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