Duhring continues,
“Nor, again, can anything escape this unity of thought... The essence of all thinking consists in the union of the elements of consciousness into a unity ... It is the point of unity of the synthesis which gave rise to the indivisible concept of the world, and the universe, as the name itself implies, is apprehended as something in which everything is united into unity” (p 51)
Again, this is tautology and metaphysics. His description of nothing escaping this unity is reminiscent of the description of a black hole. Some years ago, Nick Rogers, in seeking to defend the syllogistic logic of the TSSI, and a denial of the fact that there is no such thing as a point in space-time, that has no dimension or duration, made reference to a black hole, and the notion of a singularity. But, as I pointed out, back then, his argument, as with that of Duhring, and of Burnham, who denied the dialectic, on his path to becoming an enemy of Marxism, was fatally flawed. We know from Einstein that time is relative. Time appears to stand still at the event horizon, for the observer, although Hawking, argues that its wrong to talk about such an event horizon, as opposed to an “apparent horizon”. But, time, itself, does not stand still. The black hole does not itself exist outside, or escape time, as seen from the fact that it emits Hawking Radiation, such that, even though over unimaginably long periods of time, everything in the universe, including black holes, falls apart into particles, as it suffers heat death. Although, as Penrose notes, this death is itself only the prelude to a new beginning.
Duhring says,
“Every question is to be decided axiomatically in accordance with simple basic forms, as if simple ... basic principles of mathematics were being dealt with.” (p 51)
This was also the method of Burnham popularised by Shachtman, and also, of the TSSI. What Duhring is working towards, here, is an ontological argument. The ontological proof of the existence of God rests upon the same tautology. It says our concept of God is of a perfect Being, but an aspect of perfection is itself being. Consequently, as we have in our mind this concept of a perfect being, and existence is a requirement of that perfection, that perfect being, God, must exist.
The connection with what was said earlier, in relation to the point, in geometry, can be seen. In order to model, mathematically, the real world, and its multitude of contradiction, mathematics, which cannot reconcile those contradictions to its axioms, is forced to develop abstract concepts of perfection, which do not, and cannot exist in the real world. A straight line cannot be a curved line, mathematics says, and yet it says that they are identical at the point of tangency. How to reconcile that? By making the point of tangency into something that cannot exist in the real world, a point with zero dimensions!
The same with God, it is not Man made by God, but God made by the mind of Man, an abstraction. But, Duhring's ontological argument is not to prove the existence of God. It is the opposite. He seeks to disprove the existence of God, by applying the mathematical axioms that the whole is greater than any of the parts, and that the whole is a unity, excluding everything outside it, i.e. excluding God.
“... Herr Dühring has transformed the oneness of being, by means of our unified thought, into its unit. As the essence of all thinking consists in bringing things together into a unity, so being, as soon as it is conceived, is conceived as undivided, and the concept of the world as indivisible; and because being, as conceived the concept of the world, is undivided, therefore real being, the real universe, is also an indivisible unity. Thus
“there is no longer any room for things beyond, once the mind has learnt to conceive being in its homogeneous universality” (p 51-2)
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