Part 1, Philosophy, Chapter VII – Natural Philosophy. The Organic World
Duhring adopts the same concept of “intermediate steps”, of a causal chain when it comes to explaining the development of organic matter.
“A single and uniform ladder of intermediate steps leads from the mechanics of pressure and impact to the linking together of sensations and ideas” (p 82)
So, once again, Duhring works backwards through the causal chain, but, by this method can never arrive at an initial cause. It is the same story of movement arising out of immobility. Moreover, the method is teleological, and leads Duhring to imbue Nature itself with a conscious will.
As with his approach to all previous science and scientists, Duhring has only scorn for Darwin.
Duhring says that nature,
““is obliged incessantly to re-establish order in the world of objects” and in doing so she has to settle more than one matter “which requires more subtlety on nature's part than is usually credited to her” . But nature not only knows why she does one thing or another; she not only has to perform the duties of a housemaid, she not only possesses subtlety, in itself a pretty good accomplishment in subjective conscious thought; she also has a will. For what the instincts do in addition, incidentally fulfilling real natural functions such as nutrition propagation, etc., “we should regard not as directly but only as indirectly willed”. (p 83-4)
As for Darwin, Duhring criticises him for taking Malthusian population theory and applying it to natural science. Marx and Engels had dealt with this connection between Darwinism and Malthusianism themselves. Both were scathing of Malthus and his population theory, which itself fell into disrepute, as its prognostications were quickly shown to be false, and based on no factual evidence. As with all such ideas, it continued to have adherents, and was resurrected in the latter half of the 20th century, along with its Sismondist predecessor, as large sections of the petty-bourgeois Left collapsed into moral socialism, environmentalism, and catastrophism, in proportion to the decline of their own relevance and connection to the working class.
Marx noted in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9, that the catastrophism of Sismondi was only correct in so far that he recognised the potential for crises of overproduction of commodities, in a way that Mill, Say and Ricardo did not. But, as Marx, and later Lenin, note, Sismondi's conclusion from that was reactionary, as against the revolutionary optimism of Ricardo. Malthus plagiarised Sismondi's ideas, in relation to overproduction of commodities, and used it to his advantage as representative of the interests of the landed aristocracy. To avoid overproduction, he said, raise the revenues of the landlords and the state (rent and taxes), so that capitalists have less profit to accumulate productively, and the unproductive classes have greater revenues to consume unproductively.
The same idea was presented a century later by Keynes. According to Malthus, without such action, the capitalists would continue to accumulate capital and to employ labour. The labouring population would then grow and grow, whilst the ability of the land to produce food to sustain them would not keep up, leading to catastrophe. All these same ideas are put forward by environmentalists and modern-day Malthusians and catastrophists. But, it was nonsense, then, and is nonsense now.
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