Nothing New under the Sun |
Jan. 6th, 2011|01:11 pm |
The late Gerry Healy was certainly no stranger to this aprioristic tradition; in fact, if anything, he was the Dialectical Daddy:
"Dialectical Materialists get to know the world initially through a process of Cognition. It affects the sensory organs, producing sensation in the form of indeterminate mental images.
"As forms of the motion and change of the external world, these images are processed as concepts of phenomena. Upon negation their dissolution from the positive sensation into their abstract negative, they are negated again as the nature of semblance into positive semblance which is the theory of knowledge of a human being. During this interpenetration process, the images as thought forms are analysed through the science of thought and reason which is Dialectical Logic….
"…Thus, the everlasting material properties of thought in Dialectical Logic in self-relation between subject and object, coincide materially with the theory of knowledge….
"The category of 'Appearance' exists initially in the theory of knowledge as negative self-mediation. It is the movement of antithesis apprehended in its unity before Negative semblance interpenetrates Positive semblance, thus activating the theory of knowledge and Appearance as a category. Law as a category is reflection of Appearance into identity with itself….
"…The 'whole' must be seen as an inner force which will strive to manifest itself in external reality as essence which must appear. Real 'wholes' must have elements bound together by the interaction of 'parts' and 'whole'. Since the 'parts' and 'whole' are constantly changing, the 'whole' as such can never be a sum total of its 'parts'. It is instead the sum total and unity of opposites in constant change, which are simultaneously not only single 'wholes' but many 'wholes'. Thus 'wholes' change into 'parts' and 'parts' into 'wholes'."
[Healy (1982), pp.1-3, 57-58. Bold emphases in the original; italic emphases added. Recall that these articles originally appeared in Newsline, the daily paper of the old WRP!]
|
|