Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"

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Engels Friedrich. Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"

CHAPTER I. TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II. PREFACES

CHAPTER III. INTRODUCTION

PART I. CHAPTER IV. PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER V. NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VI. MORALS AND LAW

CHAPTER VII. THE DIALECTIC

PART II. CHAPTER VIII. POLITICAL ECONOMY

PART III. CHAPTER IX. SOCIALISM

LANDMARKS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM. APPENDIX

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The following work is by no means the fruit of some "inward compulsion," quite the contrary.

When three years ago, Herr Duehring suddenly challenged the world, as a scholar and reformer of socialism, friends in Germany frequently expressed the wish that I should throw a critical light upon these new socialist doctrines, in the central organ of the Social Democratic Party, at that time the "Volkstaat." They held it as very necessary that new opportunity for division and confusion should not be afforded in a party so young and so recently definitely united. They were in a better condition than myself to comprehend the condition of affairs in Germany, so that I was compelled to trust to their judgment. It appeared furthermore that the proselyte was welcomed by a certain portion of the socialist press, with a warmth, which meant nothing more than kindliness to Herr Duehring, but it was seen by a portion of the party press that a result of this kindly feeling towards Herr Duehring was the introduction unperceived of the Duehring doctrine. People were found who were soon ready to spread his doctrine in a popular form among the workingmen, and finally Herr Duehring and his little sect employed all the arts of advertisement and intrigue to compel the "Volksblatt" to change its attitude respecting the new teachings which put forth such tremendous claims.

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Marx and I were probably the first to import the well known dialectic of the German idealistic philosophy into the materialistic view of nature and history. But to a dialectical and at the same time materialistic view of nature there pertains an acquaintance with mathematics and natural science. Marx was a sound mathematician but the sciences we only knew in part, by fits and starts, sporadically. After I retired from mercantile pursuits and went to London and had time, I made as far as possible a complete mathematical and scientific "molting," as Liebig calls it, and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was occupied with this molting process when it chanced that I was called upon to busy myself with Herr Duehring's so-called philosophy. If, therefore, I often fail to find the correct technical expression, and am a little awkward in the field of natural science it is only too natural. On the other hand the consciousness of insecurity which I have not yet got over has made me cautious. Actual blunders respecting facts up to the present known, and incorrect presentations of theories thus far recognised cannot be proved against me. In this relation just one great mathematician, who is laboring under a mistake, has complained to Marx in a letter that I have made a mischievous attack upon the honor of the square root of minus one.

As regards my review of mathematics and the natural science it was necessary for me to reassure myself on some special points – since I had no doubts about the truth of the general proposition – that in nature the same dialectic laws of progress fulfill themselves amid all the apparent confusion of innumerable changes as dominate the apparently accidental in nature; the same laws whose threads traverse the progressive history of human thought, and little by little come to the consciousness of thinking men. These were first developed by Hegel in a comprehensive fashion but in a mystical form. Our efforts were directed towards stripping away this mystical form and making them evident in their full simplicity and universal reality. It was self evident that the old philosophies of nature – in spite of all their actual value and fruitful suggestiveness – could be of no value to us. There was an error in the Hegelian form, as shown in this book, in that it recognised no progression of nature in time, no "one after another" (Nacheinander) but merely "one besides another" (Nebeneinander). This was due on the one hand to the Hegelian system itself which ascribed to the Spirit (Geist) alone a progressive historical development, but on the other hand, the general attitude of the natural sciences was responsible. So Hegel fell far behind Kant in this respect for the latter had already by his nebular hypothesis proclaimed the origin and, by his discovery of the stoppage of the rotation of the earth through the tides, the destruction of the solar system. And finally, I could not undertake to construct the dialectical laws of nature but to discover them in it and to develop them from it.

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