Ramkrishna Bhattacharya
The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Naure is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engles. The material was never published in Engles's life time although parts of it were published in1896 and 1898 posthumously. The full text of the manuscripts was first published in the the USSR in 1925 alongside a Russian translation. Later editions and translations mostly follow the text and arrangement of the folders made in the 1941 Russian edition.
|
Frederick Engles |
Neither Marx nor Lenin had seen the
drafts that Engels had been preparing for a long time. Yet Dialectics of Nature is Engels’s most significant contribution to
the extension of the area of dialectics to the natural sciences.1 Marx
had encouraged Engels to take up this work in right earnest and Engels felt it
incumbent upon him to establish dialectics in the domain of nature as in the
world of man. In spite of many errors and shortcomings in the work, nuggets of wisdom
as well as pregnant hypotheses make the work more valuable as a quarry of ideas
rather than a finished formulation to be treated as the outcome of detailed
research and analysis. Everything was in the draft stage. Engels certainly
would not have published the draft without drastic revision.
‘In the essay on “Tidal Friction,”
Engels made a serious mistake, or more accurately a mistake which would have
been serious had he published it. But I very much doubt whether he would have
done so. … I have little doubt that either he or one of his scientific friends
such as Schorlemmer would have detected the mistake in the essay on “Tidal
friction.” But even as a mistake it is interesting, because it is one of the
mistakes which lead to a correct result…. Such mistakes have been extremely
fruitful in the history of science.
Elsewhere there are statements which are
certainly untrue, for example, in the sections on stars and Protozoa. But here
Engels cannot be blamed for following some of the best astronomers and
zoologists of his day. The technical improvement of the telescope and
microscope has of course led to great increases in our knowledge here in the
last sixty years’ (xi).
In spite of all this, Haldane frankly
admitted: ‘Had his (sc. Engels’s) remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I
for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking’ (xiv). Hence,
what Sebastiano Timpanaro said about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism – ‘the value of which is no way
affected by the ten or fifty errors in physics which can be found in it’ (42) –
also applies to Dialectics of Nature.2
In what follows we propose to take up an observation made by Engels in
connection with dialectical thought.
#
In a section entitled ‘Understanding and reason’ Engels
justifies the Hegelian distinction between these two categories in the
following way:
‘We have in common with animals all
activity of the understanding: induction,
deduction, and hence also abstraction
(Dido’s generic concepts: quadrupeds and bipeds), analysis of unknown objects (even the cracking of a nut is a
beginning of analysis), synthesis (in
animal tricks), and, as the union of both, experiment
(in the case of new obstacles and unfamiliar situations). In their nature all
these modes of procedure – hence all means of scientific investigation that
ordinary logic recognizes – are absolutely the same in men and the higher
animals’ (223).
Engels was not so naïve as to believe that
no distinction is to be made between human beings and other animals. He pointed
out that even in the case of understanding
there was always a difference in degree. Yet, he insisted, ‘The basic features
of the method are the same and lead to the same results in man and animals so
long as both operate or make shift merely with these elementary methods’ (223).
The difference between understanding and reason becomes more palpable in the case of dialectical thought. Animals are incapable of it precisely because
it pre-supposes investigation of the nature of concepts themselves. It is
possible only for man. Engels adds: ‘and for him only at a comparatively high
stage of development (Buddhists and
Greeks), and it attains its full development much later still through modern
philosophy – and yet we have the colossal results already among the Greeks
which by far anticipate investigation!’ (223. Emphasis added.) 3
Neither the German nor the English
edition of Marx-Engels’s Works throws any light on this passage. Engels
definitely could not have learnt much about the Buddhists or the Buddhist
philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Buddhism was still an
area confined to the specialists only. Although he was a voracious reader and a
polymath, his range of study, howsoever wide it might have been, could not have
included the Tripitaka, the whole of
which had not yet been translated into any of the languages that Engels knew
well or at least could read (he is credited to have been acquainted with almost
all the major European languages, but not any Asian one). At best he might have
read some secondary work on Buddhist philosophy. Or he might have had some
discussion with Carl (Karl) Friedrich Koeppen (1808-63), a Young Hegelian and a
friend of both Marx and Engels in their early days. Koeppen, who dedicated his book
on Frederick the Great to Marx in 1840, was later recognized as a specialist in
Buddhist religion. When Marx visited Berlin in 1861, he was happy to meet his old
friend again and Koeppen presented him with his two-volume work, Die Religion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung
(The Religion of the Buddha and its Origin), originally published in 1857 and
1859 (McLellan, 291). Whether Marx ever cared to browse the bulky tomes is not
known.
However, a look at the indexes of the
two volumes by Koeppen reveals that there is no reference to the philosophical
basis of Buddhism in the work; it is all about Buddhism as a religion as practised
in Tibet and elsewhere. There is apparently nothing of what might have
suggested Engels as the early specimen of ‘dialectical thought’.4 What
else Engels might have read or whom else he could have turned to for learning
about Buddhist dialectics cannot be ascertained. From Hegel’s lectures on the
history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and religion or from his
studies in Logic, Engels could only learn about Tibetan Buddhism or Lamaism. Marx
could not have been of any help, although it is known from a letter (dated 18
March 1866) that he was acquainted with the later Buddhist concept of Nothingness
(sunyata).5 Another
reference to Buddhism – not in any philosophical context, but in the context of
religion – is found in Engels’s Ludwig
Feuerbach. He dismisses Feuerbach’s assertion that ‘the periods of humanity
are distinguished only by religious changes’ as ‘decidedly false’ and proposes
on the contrary:
‘Great historical turning-points have
been accompanied by religious changes
only so far as the three world religions which have existed up to the present –
Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – are concerned…. Only with these world
religions, arisen more or less artificially, particularly Christianity and
Islam do we find that the more general historical movements acquire a religious
imprint’ (Engels, Feuerbach, 239-40.
Italics in the original).
Here too Engels does not exhibit much
acquaintance with Buddhism. The spread of Buddhism all over South and
South-east Asia did not follow the pattern that can be traced in the case of
Islam and Christianity. As D.D. Kosambi points out:
‘In contrast, Indian religious
philosophy (sc. Buddhism) was welcomed in Japan and China without the force of
Indian arms, even though almost no Indians ever visited or traded with those
lands. Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, Burma, Ceylon certainly owe a great deal
of their cultural history to Indian influence without Indian occupation’
(Kosambi (1972) 9).
What is probable is that in course of
his study and discussion Engels came to know about the Buddhist doctrine of
Interdependent Origination or Discontinuous Continuity (paticca-samuppada in Pali, pratitya-samutpada
in Sanskrit), a fundamental concept enunciated by the Buddha in his
sermons. This, like the other fundamental doctrine of Four Aryan or Noble
Truths or Facts (cattari ariya saccani in
Pali, catvari arya satyani in
Sanskrit), constitutes the highest achievement of Buddhist thought. The
enlightenment of Gautama the Buddha begins with the realization of the four-fold
nature of everything on earth, beginning with Suffering, Cause of suffering,
Cessation of suffering, and the Way to the cessation of suffering (‘Dhamma-cakka-pavattana
Sutta’, The Setting in motion of the Wheel of the Law, in the Samyutta Nikaya (5. Mahavagga, 361 ff). This indeed is a brilliant formulation of the basic
principles of dialectics.
We may here recall an incident in Lenin’s
life when he was living in exile in Switzerland. While reading Ferdinand Lassalle’s book on
Heraclitus (? - after 480 BCE) he was
apparently thrilled to come across a formulation made by this Presocratic
philosopher. In his Notebook Lenin wrote down the literal translation of the
fragment: ‘The world, an entity out of everything, was created by none of the
gods or men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming
ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.’ Under this quotation Lenin added
his own observation: ‘A very good exposition of the principles of dialectical
materialism.’ (Lenin (1961) 349).
I venture to propose that Engels might
have had come across a statement that occurs again and again in the Buddha’s
sermons: ‘That being thus, this comes to be; from the coming to be of that,
this arises. That being absent, this does not happen; from the cessation of
that, this ceases.’ (‘Natumhasuttam’, Samyukta
Nikaya (2. Nidanavagga 12.37), 55; the translation is quoted from The Book of Kindred Sayings, 2:45). T.
W. Rhys Davids observes: ‘It is on all fours with the modern formulation of the
law of causation – “That every event is the result or sequel of some previous
event, or events, without which it could not have happened, and which, being
present, it must take place.”’ (Rhys Davids (1977) 42; this formulation is to
be found in several Suttas in the
Samyukta Nikaya (3. Mahavagga) 361 ff).
Rhys Davids highlights the significance
of this doctrine in the context of world philosophy. He waxes eloquent on the
first ever formulation of the regular causal sequence comparable to ‘the
theorem of Democritus and his master Leukippus, that “nothing happens by
chance, but everything through a cause and of necessity”’ (Rhys Davids (1977)
47).6 He laments:
‘Had the Fates been kinder to the
writings of the Atomist of Abdera [sc. Democritus], had the “teleological
reaction” not been led by two men of such extra ordinary genius as Plato and
Aristotle, it is conceivable that the whole philosophy, not to say the Dhamma,
of the West, might have flowed along a channel in which the influence of the micros and megas dia kosmos might have brought both that philosophy and that
Dhamma more nearly parallel to the informing principle of the
Paticca-samuppada. As it happens, Europe learned from Athens compromise and
comprehensiveness, learned to believe in a universe governed partly by
necessity and partly by chance, learned to combine belief in unchanging natural
law with belief in first and final causes’ (Rhys Davids (1977) 47).
Theodore Stcherbatsky, however, refused
to accept the view that Interdependent Origination has anything to do with
causality. He thought that the view of the world as momentary, a flow,
precludes such an explanation:
‘Matter (rupa) was conceived on the same pattern, as a flow of momentary
flashes without any continuant stuff, but characterized by impenetrability and
representing the senses… and sense-data…. The world was thus transformed into a
cinema…. Causation was called dependently-coordinated-origination (pratitya-sam-utpada) or dependent
existence. The meaning of it was that every momentary entity sprang into
existence, or flashed up, in coordination with other moments. Its formula was
“if there is this, there appears that”. Causality was thus assumed to exist
between moments only, the appearance of every moment being coordinated with the
appearance of a number of other moments. Strictly speaking it was no causality
at all, no question of one thing producing
the other’ (Stcherbatsky (1927) 40. Italics in the original).
Stcherbatsy therefore preferred to render
pratitya-samutpada as ‘Discontinuous
Continuity’.
Some scholars are also of the opinion that
‘Buddhism is not a theory of change, but of replacement. We loosely call it
change and erroneously liken it to the philosophy of Heraclitus.’ (Ganguli
(2003) 9). In spite of this difference in the very concept of change, the fact
remains that the Buddha insisted on a specific antecedent to every consequent.
Unlike the idea of chaturvyuha (four
cardinal articles) of medical science in India – disease, the cause of disease,
cure, and medicine – or the extension of this concept to the science of release
(mokshasastra) in the Samkhya and
Yoga systems of Indian philosophy,7 the Buddha’s doctrine insists on
learning the reason (hetu) behind the
rise of every phenomenon, and once the reason has been discovered, the move
towards the removal of the reason follows. As Hendrik Kern (who chose to style
himself as Bhatta Karna) observed:
‘The second formula, the Concatenation
of causes and effects, the twelvefold Pratityasamutpada or causal production,
otherwise termed “the 12 Nidanas” (causes) is intended to lay bare the root of
evil, and stands to the 4 Satyas in the same relation as Pathology (Nidana or
Nidana-sastra), to the whole system of medical science.’ (Kern 47).
Thus the Four Noble Truths (or Facts)
and Interdependent Origination form a thought complex that comprehends not only
the case of Suffering and its cessation but also that of all phenomena in the
universe.
This world-view is encapsulated in the
following gatha (epigram) in the Vinaya Pitaka (the Book of Discipline):
The
Buddha hath the causes told
Of
all things springing from a cause;
And
also how things cease to be –
’T
is this the Mighty Monk proclaims.8
This is the epigram that Assaji
(Asvajit), a novice in the Buddha’s Order, is said to have recited to Sariputta,
and Sariputta in his turn recited to Moggallana. Both of them were intelligent
enough to grasp the essence of the teaching: ’That whatever is subject to
origination is subject also to cessation.’ (Warren 89) They were then followers
of Sanjaya Belatthaputta, one of the fifty two itinerant monks of the Buddha’s
times, who used to roam all over north India with a large number of disciples.
But on hearing this brief and succinct exposition of the Buddha’s doctrine, Sariputta
and Moggallana decided to leave Sanjaya’s Order and join the Buddha’s.
This epigram contains the very essence
of dialectics. First of all, it asserts that all phenomena on earth spring from
a cause (hetu), that is to say,
nothing is accidental or fortuitous. Secondly, both appearance (samudaya) and cessation (nirodha) are parts of natural law. No
phenomenon can appear without any cause, and once appeared must also cease to
exist at some time or the other. Referring to the epigram recited by Assaji, commented
Kosambi:
‘That
all causation implies negation is the first step in dialectic. Advance to a
higher level (by the “negation of the negation”) necessitated far greater
progress through more productive types of society than could have been visualized
with the rudimentary productive mechanism of the 6th century B.C.’ (Kosambi (1975)
171).9
It is interesting to observe that Engels made much of the
doctrine of the inevitability of cessation as inherent in the history of the earth
as a celestial body. He made it a point to remind his readers:
‘Millions
of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but
inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no
longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when
the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no
longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace
of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the
moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the
equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it’ (Engels (1968) 35- 36).
Paradoxically enough, all this comes
after Engels’s assertion of faith in the future of man, when the class society
has been eliminated and conscious organization of social production has lifted
mankind above the rest of the animal world:
‘Historical evolution makes such an
organization daily more indispensable, but also with everyday more possible.
From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with
mankind all branches of its activity, and particularly natural science, will
experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest
shade’ (Engels (1968) 35).
In the draft introduction to Dialectics of Nature, he quoted a line
from Goethe: ‘All that comes into being deserves to perish’ (Engels (1968) 35).10
As with many other profound or pseudo-profound quotable quotes, whether from
Shakespeare or Milton or Goethe, this sentence is also spoken by a ‘negative’
character, hence an unreliable witness, Mephistopheles.11
Yet the basic truth of the statement
cannot be denied. The story of the conversion of Sariputta and Moggallana
contains the same view. Whether or not Engels had come across this passage in
the Mahavagga, the essence of
dialectics is present here as much as in Goethe’s ‘maxim’.12
In view of all
this, it may justly be claimed that Engels had read or heard about the Buddhist
doctrine of flux and mentioned it rather vaguely in his draft of Dialectics of Nature.
Notes and
References
1Whether
or not such an extension is valid has been hotly debated by later Marxists such
as Georg Lukacs. However, we need not address the issue here as it would make
us digress into a totally different area, not relevant to the subject under
discussion.
2Speaking
of the identity of opposites, Lenin too disapproved of the way Engels, like
Plekhanov, had taken it as mere sum-total of examples, but condoned this as it was ‘in the interest of
popularisation…’ . Lenin (1961), 359.]
3The
arrangement of the draft paragraphs in earlier editions of Dialectics of Nature seems to have been different from the edition
I have used (Moscow 1968). In the first English translation published from
London by Lawrence and Wishart (1946, first printed in 1940) based on Vladimir
Adoratsky’s edition of 1935 (which, J.B.S. Haldane says, was ‘more
satisfactory’ than the editio princeps
brought out by David Riazanov in 1927) this section (‘Understanding and
reason’) is placed in chapter VII, pp.203-04 instead of the section entitled
[NOTES AND FRAGMENTS] in the later Moscow edition.
4The book by
Koeppen is now available in internet. The first volume has also been reprinted
by BiblioBazaar in 2010 and the second by Nabu Press in 2012, both from
Charleston, South Carolina, USA. A selection of Koeppen’s other writings have
been edited by Heinz Pepperle and published in two volumes by Akademie Verlag,
Berlin in 2003.
5In a
light-hearted vein Marx writes, ‘… keeping my mind in that state of nothingness
which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss.’ Marx-Engels Collected Works 42: 241. The source must have been
Hegel, who in his lectures on the philosophy of history, said: ‘It is contained
in the fundamental dogma, that Nothingness is the principle of all things – all
proceeded from and returns to Nothingness’ (168). Nothingness, however, is
related only to one of the four later principal philosophical schools of
Buddhism, namely, Madhyamaka (Madhyamika), as formulated by its founder,
Nagarjuna (c. 150 CE). For further
details, see Ling 126, 147. However, unlike the Four Noble Truths and the
doctrine of Interdependent Origination or the Eight-fold Path or the Middle Way,
the doctrine of Nothingness (also translated as Emptiness and Void), sunyavada is not a basic tenet that all
Buddhists admit.
6The
words quoted within double quotation marks are taken from F.A. Lange’s History of Materialism (1866, 1873-75.
English trans. 1877-81), vol. I, ch.1.
7For
further details see Ramkrishna Bhattacharya (2003) 21 n7.
8Warren
89. The verse is taken from the Mahavagga,
a book in the Vinaya Pitaka. See The Mahavagga 39. The Pali gatha runs as follows: ye dhamma hetuppabhava tesam hetum tathagato
aha | tesam ca yo nirodho evamvadi
mahasamano ||
9For a
more detailed discussion of negation and the Hegelian concept of the negation
of negation (which involves both negation and sublation), see Ramkrishna
Bhattacharya 2009.
10The
sentence is quoted from Faust, Part I
[Scene 3], Study, lines 1339-40. Sebastiano Timpanaro (1975, 98) has called
this a ‘maxim so dear to him (sc. Engels)’.
11It
may be said in passing that Lenin too was fond of quoting from Faust , ‘Gray, my dear fellow, is all
theorizing, /And green, life’s golden tree.’ (Part 1, Scene 3, lines 2038-39).
See Lenin. Collected Works, 24:45.
This too is spoken by Mephistopheles, disguised as Faust, to a student.
12The
story of the conversion of Sariputta and Moggallaana is also found in the
Buddhist Sanskrit work, Mahavastu Avadana,
III.12. Assaji here is called Upasena
(81).
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Acknowledgements: Amitava
Bhattacharyya, Krishna Del Toso and Sunish Kumar Deb
This essay was first published in Frontier, Kolkota in its Autumn Number 2013 (Vol. 46, No. 13 - 16, Oct 6 - Nov 2, 2013)