Rogney Piedra Arencibia

This paper confronts the familiar prejudice in Western Marxism that Engels’ thought, as articulated in Anti-Duhring and the Dialectics of Nature, is of marginal interest and should be excised from Marxist theory. I argue that this view is mistaken. If we do not take seriously his insights about science, philosophy, nature, and history, his insights will take a fourfold revenge upon us. Natural science takes its revenge by unleashing technology that subjugates us in ways we cannot anticipate, understand or control. Philosophy, in turn, takes revenge on science for neglecting the philosophical presuppositions of its own worldview. Nature itself takes its revenge upon those who consider it to be some formless and passive matter, deprived of history and negativity, responding to our productive activity in surprising ways that, without a rational form of regulation, could lead to our own extinction. Lastly, history takes revenge on those ‘well intentioned’ actors who try to impose their will upon it without a scientific knowledge of its internal, necessary, and objective forces.

It is often believed that the only alternative to an idealist conception of natural phenomena excludes both the presence of objective universal forms and their progression towards higher forms as the finality of processes in the natural world. Realism regarding the universal and teleological approaches regarding processes are signs of idealism. Therefore, materialism, it would seem, must conform to a nominalist and mechanical view of nature. However, an intelligent materialist reading of idealism’s classics reveals a more complex scenario. A real fact is expressed in a mystical fashion in idealism’s conceptions of objective universals and teleology. This article attempts to show such a real fact in its authentic (materialist) form. With that goal in mind, the present article discusses the notion of nature’s alienation, the distinction between abstract and concrete universals, and the concept of dialectical interaction. The natural-historical emergence of a higher form of matter’s organization assimilates, as its organs, the conditions that preceded it in time, transforming itself into an active producer of such conditions. That is the secret glimpsed but not correctly understood by idealism that a consistent materialist should not ignore.

Para determinar el papel de la filosofía kantiana en la lógica dialéctica, se proponen ocho aspectos del aporte de Kant a su desarrollo. Kant, al mostrar la dialéctica inmanente de la actividad sintética del pensamiento teórico, marcó el punto de partida de la lógica dialéctica moderna como la filosofía epistémica acorde con la nueva cosmovisión científico-natural que él mismo iniciara. Sin embargo, al no llevar estos aspectos dialécticos hasta sus últimas consecuencias, la filosofía kantiana, quedó en el comienzo mismo del movimiento que, por mediación de otros pensadores, arribaría a la lógica dialéctica marxista

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity.