I’m reading through some of our literature (namely Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) and I really get the sense that many of our intellectual forebears think that everything important in philosophy happened in Europe. Granted, European philosophy is necessarily of primary relevance in a critique of early capitalism, but when Engels traces the history of these strains of thought (materialism, dialectics, etc.), they all go back to ancient Greece. I find this suspicious.
Is this a consequence of lopsided education, either of the target audience or of Engels himself? Have non-western Marxists grafted dialectical materialism onto Asian or African philosophy? Are there analogous movements within these cultures that dovetail nicely with Dialectical Materialism? Or do they more or less take Engels at his word here? Maybe I’m misinterpreting something.
Some parts of Mao’s On Contradiction come to mind here. In the opening section of this essay, “The Two World Outlooks”, Mao starts off with a Lenin quote: “The two basic (or two possible? or two historically observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).”
Then Mao explains that what Lenin is describing here are the metaphysical way of thinking and the dialectical way of thinking. He says:
On dialectical thinking, he says this:
Later, in a section of the essay that deals with avoiding one-sidedness when analyzing a contradiction, Mao draws on various Chinese works of writing in which he sees the underlying ideas of materialist dialectics being applied:
In these passages from Mao, we can see that Mao easily points to Chinese philosophy and literature for examples of dialectical and dialectical materialist thinking that originated on their own in China.
Dialectical materialism can basically be thought of/discovered by anybody, and so it can be found in various forms all over the world in various periods, with varying levels of similarity to Marx’s observations. Marx’s contribution did come from his historical place and time in Europe and therefore carries certain aspects of its European origin with it, and while it’s absolutely worthwhile to examine and consider the effects of that and of the historical influence of Europe at the time (and now), the European aspects are also not essential to the overall utility of dialectical materialism as a concept, and even if Marx never existed, we would still have what we could call a form of dialectical materialism develop somewhere, and it would carry influences of its place and time with it as well. I would appreciate any corrections on my description here, but that’s how I understand it.
This is super interesting and exactly what I was looking for, no offense to the other valid points made. I’ve also recently learned about Lao Tzu, who was a contemporary of Heraclitus, the “Father of Dialectics.”
awesome writeup, great read