The more the facts relevant to making any decision are known, the more rationality dictates the necessity of a certain conclusion. If the facts are not known, then the possibility of various conclusions arise, and the validity of any particular conclusion is uncertain.
“Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the facts. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite point in question, the greater the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and contradictory possibilities of decision, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is commanded by the very object it should itself command. Freedom therefore consists in the command over ourselves and over external nature, a command founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.” (p 144)
Engels makes the comparison between the discovery of the ability to produce fire by friction (mechanical motion) and the discovery of the ability to produce mechanical motion from fire, via the steam engine. The effect on production and the development of society by the latter is far greater than that of the former. However, the role of the former is far greater, because what it signifies is Man's separation from the animal kingdom for all time. It meant not only the ability to produce heat at will, reducing the constraint imposed by climate, but to cook food, considered important in the ability to consume and absorb sufficient nutrition for the development of the human brain. It also made possible the smelting of metals, production of pottery, glass and so on.
We might, now, draw a comparison with the development of cybernetics, genetics and so on, which offer the means of enabling human consciousness to free itself from the constraints of the human body, not to mention the implications of artificial intelligence.
“True, Herr Dühring's treatment of history is different. In general, as a story of error, ignorance and barbarity, of violence and subjugation, it is a repulsive object to the philosophy of reality; but considered in detail it is divided into two great periods, namely (1) from the self-identical state of matter up to the French Revolution, (2) from the French Revolution up to Herr Dühring; the nineteenth century remains
“still in essentially reactionary, indeed from the intellectual standpoint it is that (!) even more so than the eighteenth”. Nevertheless, it bears socialism in its womb, and therewith “the germ of a mightier regeneration than was imagined (!) by the forerunners and heroes of the French Revolution”. (p 145-6)
Duhring, therefore, sees no historical process, linking one epoch with another, and the creation of material conditions in one epoch, whose further development results in contradiction, and the resolution of that contradiction via social revolution, the replacement of the existing social relations by new ones, the creation of new forms of property, and social classes resting on them, as their personification, i.e. of class struggle, and consequently, also, to political revolution, as the political, ideological and legal superstructure is thrown into the air, and a new one, consistent with the new social relations is erected in its place.
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