Critique of Marxist Philosophy Part 2

The Movement of Development

The dialecticians reproach metaphysics and traditional logic for considering nature in a static state of unchanging frozenness and stagnant stability and for failing to reflect nature in its moving and progressive reality. According to this claim, the poor metaphysician is an unperceptive being devoid of consciousness and awareness who tails to notice change, transformation and movement in the realm of nature.

Al-Sadr briefly recapitulates the standpoints of Greek philosophers regarding motion. He refers to the paradoxes of Zeno (d.c. 430 B.C.) which were arguments put forward to demonstrate the inconceiv ability of motion and to the acceptance of motion by the Aristotelian school. The problem is related to the manner in which motion was conceived: either as a succession of pauses in instants of time or as a gradual advance in which there is no pause or rest.

Islamic philosophy pictures motion as the gradual actualization of the potentiality of a thing. Development always consists of something actual and something potential. Thus motion continues as long as a thing combines both actuality and potentiality, existence and possibility. It possibility is exhausted and no capacity for a new stage remains, motion ceases. Mulla Sadra (1572-1641) demonstrated that motion does not pertain to the accidental surface of things but goes on inside their very substances. Not only that, he also showed clearly that motion and change is one of the necessary principles of metaphysics.

The accusation of the dialecticians that metaphysics views nature as static and frozen is due to their failure to understand motion in its proper philosophical sense. The difference between the ways metaphysics and dialectical materialism view motion consists of these two points:

Firstly, dialectical materialism views motion as being based on contradiction and strife among contradictories. According to the metaphysics of Muslim philosophers motion is a progression from one stage to an opposite stage without involving the union of these opposites in any one of its stages.

Secondly, motion according to Marxism is not confined to external nature but is also common to intellectual truths and ideas. On the basis of this, there can be no absolute truths. According to Muslim philosophers, motion and development do not intrude into the realm of knowledge and thought.

In regard to the first point, al-Sadr quotes a passage of Engels wherein motion is conceived as continuous succession of contradiction and the temporary reconciliation of this contradiction. "The simplest mechanical change in place," says Engels, "cannot, in the last analysis, occur except by means of the presence of a certain body in a certain place at a certain moment and in another place at the same moment.

In other words its being and non-being are simultaneously in one place."

This shows that the Marxists have not made much progress since Zeno in conceiving motion. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi also raised similar objections against the gradual emergence of a thing. The Marxists however differ from the ancient Greek philosophers in that while the latter negated motion because it involves contradiction, the former use this conception of motion to justify contradiction.

The alleged contradiction in motion is only due to the confusion between potentiality and actuality. At no stage does motion involve a specific rank in actuality and another rank in potentiality. In other words, motion is a gradual actualization of potentiality. The confusion in the Marxist conception of motion arises due to its considering the entanglement of actuality and potentiality, or their union in all the stages of motion as a union of actual opposites, a continuous contradiction and a strife among the contradictories.

Now that motion is not the result of an inner cause in the form of conflicting contradictories, it is also impossible for motion to be self-sufficient or to be without an external cause that takes a thing continuously from potentiality to actuality. Applying this idea to material nature as a whole, al-Sadr derives a theological conclusion. The very existence of nature is a gradual progression and continuous departure from potentiality to actuality. Since there can be no self-sufficiency in the form of internal contradiction, the law of causality forces us to recognize a cause transcending the limits of nature.

Al-Sadr then takes up the second thesis of dialectical materialism, that dialectical change and development also occur in the realm of thought and truth, which could not portray nature if thought did not grow and develop dialectically like nature. "Reality grows", states a Marxist citation, "and the knowledge that results from this reality reflects it, grows as it grows, and becomes an effective element of its growth." Al-Sadr rejects this dialectical picture of the movement of thought for the two following reasons:

1. The realm of nature involves fixed laws that reflect fixed truths in the realms of thought and knowledge. Scientific knowledge reflects the permanent underlying the transient in nature.

2. Firstly, concepts and ideas, no matter how accurate, do not possess the actual properties of the things to which they pertain (e.g. the idea of radium does not emit relation). Motion is one of those properties. A true idea, although it reflects objective reality, need not possess the actual properties of the reality it represents. Hence the concepts of changing things do not change in order to reflect the objective reality of those things.

Al-Sadr then takes up the second Marxist argument intended to demonstrate the dialectic development of thought, that knowledge is a natural phenomenon and therefore governed by the same laws that rule nature. It changes and grows dialectically as do all the phenomena of nature. The laws of the dialectic apply to both matter and knowledge.

This argument rests on a pure materialistic explanation of knowledge. Al-Sadr postpones the analysis of this view to an independent chapter, "knowledge", at the end of the book. Here it suffices to put a question to the Dialecticians : Is this materialistic explanation of knowledge reserved for the thought of the dialecticians or does it extend also to the thought of others who reject the dialectic? It becomes contradictory for Marxists to accuse other's thought of being frozen and static; for if the dialectic is a natural law common to both thought and nature, then it must apply to all human thought alike.

Thirdly, al-Sadr examines the Marxist effort to produce the history of science as an empirical evidence for the dialectical movement of thought. Although progress and development in human knowledge is an undeniable fact of history, this development is not a kind of motion in the philosophic sense intended by Marxism. It is no more than an increase in the quantity of truth and a decrease in . the quantity of errors. When a theory moves from the level of hypothesis to that of law, it does not mean that scientific truth has grown and altered. Al-Sadr gives a few instances from the history of science to prove his point, He goes on to remark that Marxism seeks to achieve two ends by applying the dialectic to truth. First, it seeks to destroy metaphysics on which theology rests, by holding that since truth moves and grows there can be no fixed and absolute truth. Second, by denying absolute falsity it seeks to make all truth relative.