Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 11:35:36 -0500
Subject: Re: Darwin ( dialectics ? )


Adam:

>Oops ! Sorry, I thought for a moment there I was talking to people at least
>sympathetic to marxism.

Sorry, I'm not sympathetic to anything that doesn't make sense, whether it
calls itself Marxism or not.

>1. I wasn't criticising Newton and Darwin for not pondering the origins of
>the Universe and Life more. Newton and Darwin, while their theories were
>"in the air" so to speak, were a huge step forward for human understanding
>of the natural world. I was just saying that the relative "historicalness"
>of the three sets of theories seems to have a relationship to their
>relative "dialecticalness".

The principle of the negation of the negation is so clear in the Newtonian
solar system. When a particle (planet, etc.) loses orbital velocity, as it
must overall because of friction, if nothing else, it falls into a closer
orbit, which causes it to speed up, which clearly shows, among other
things, that falling into the sun is the attainment of the summum of the
species-being of planets.

Transformation of quantity into quality? Increase the eccentricity of the
orbit gradually, and suddenly you reach a point where a bound orbit turns
into an unbound one.

Interpenetration of opposites? Force and acceleration exist in a
dialectical tension, each constituting the other, yet even as they are
linearly related, each attempts to counteract the other's existence,
leading eventually to their mutual assumption into the synthesis of inertia
and motionlessness - a synthesis which the dialectical unfolding of Marxist
philosophy also seems to lead to.

>2. You are of course wrong about Newton and Engels ( but not Darwin ).
>You can quite easily get a solar system with a history out of Newtonian
>mechanics and a primal soup of gas ( apparently Kant + Liebnitz tried to
>do this ). Such developments were not looked into, did not gain in popularity,
>I think for ideological reasons - they did not fit in with the dominant
>spirit of the age.

I'll concede that Newton's attitude was not always what would be considered
scientific today. He was, as Keynes said, the last of the magi. I
understand he had certain religious reasons behind his formulation of
absolute space and time, though neither they nor his actual notions of
absoluteness have any bearing on his theory, which, of course, incorporates
Galilean relativity.

Your talk about the nonexistence of "history" in Newtonian mechanics is
arrant nonsense. Learn something before you speak about it:

>Paul McGarr talked about the undialectical nature of Newton's world view :
>although he had correctly worked of the laws of motion, they didn't give
>rise to an undialectical view of the universe simply because these rules
>didn't work for very small things and very fast things, it was also that
>they posited a system which didn't have a history. So while the planets
>obey rules, they started moving because God set them moving. Once set
>moving, they continued moving in the same way for ever. Newtons laws
>of motion have a static aspect to them - undialectical, and innacurrate,
>as we now know.

If you don't speak more precisely, it's going to be awfully difficult for
your statements ever to mean anything. What does "moving in the same way
forever" mean? If you mean according to the same natural laws, that is true
of every scientific theory, whether it looks "dialectical" to you or not.
If you mean along the same paths, you're wrong. Saying they started moving
because God set them moving simply means that the origins of their motion
or existence cannot be scientifically addressed, which was true in Newton's
time and not true later, because of the great accumulation of experimental
and mathematical results and methods, not because physicists started
reading "Dialectics of Nature."

>Darwin DID produce a book "The Descent of Man" , which
>I have not read ( yet ) , at a similar time as Engels wrote "The Role of
>Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" ( which makes an excellent charade,
>I have found ). [ I actually think the reason Darwin published "The
>Descent of Man"
>quite so late were basically political - while the immediate contrevery around
>Origin of the species was very much about the consequences for human evolution,
>Darwin deliberately avoided the subject for as long as he could. Even when
>he did publish, he was critisized for publishing in the aftermath of the
>Paris Commune. ]. When Engels wrote OFPPS and the "Role of Labour . . . ",
>he did so on the basis of the same "gentleman collector" tradition as Darwin.
>So if you think Engels was out of order, you should be consistent and have a go
>at Darwin.

Engels's OFPPS was garbage. Darwin's work was not. Why does consistency
require that I treat idiocy and brilliancy in the same manner?

Engels's "Role of Labour ..." presented an interesting hypothesis, albeit
in a mystical and aprioristic manner. He clearly did not understand natural
selection. But then, if you have the correct Marxist perspective, why let
little things like that stop you?

Rahul




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