NGC 6357: Cathedral to Massive Stars

Hi Mr. Stanfield,

When I was still a young boy who was convinced by the explanatory power of Science, I had thought that we only need Reason to understand the world.

Now looking back as a 23 years old graduate student, I cringe at the naivete of myself back then.

Had it not been for my own Communist-leaning tendency, I wouldn’t have discovered Dialectical Materialism and would have been a dogmatist who only believes in cold Reason and Scientific Method alone.

Those who have renounced God but believe in Reason alone are nothing but priests in disguise.

Those who have upheld the Scientific dogma of dissecting the Whole and eternal unchanging of Scientific Laws will never embark on the correct way of Truth, because the Truth lies within the Whole, which is forever flowing.

The true Atheism is not a mere discarding of God, because something will just appear in place of his/her void, but the recognition that God is Nature in its totality, in its contradiction, in its never ending process of changing, developing and evolving.

Of course I don’t deny the importance of Science, but blind faith in just Science is not so different from the Religion which scientists mocked.

I must confess that when I grasped the method of Dialectics the first time, it had struck me like a divine revelation.

All the dogmas, which I had believed in, shattered like a castle of sand.

The correct way to understand the world is not standing far away from it, trying to become an objective watcher without emotion, but to immerse oneself in the world, to put yourself in the perspective of others, or as great mystics usually said, to become one with the Divine.

And Goethe had also said through the words of the devil: “All theory is grey, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.”

I often despair over the inability of scientists to grasp the method of Dialectics. Even people who called themselves “Marxists” didn’t understand Dialectics too.

Some are just repeating the word of Marx, Engels, Lenin… but when it comes into modern science, they readily accept anything coming from the scientists, not knowing that the bad philosophy of those scientists is a direct attack on Dialectical method.

But your blog has always reminded me that people like me are not alone, and one day, mankind will come to understand the method of their ancient ancestors, on a higher level.

Thank you for all your posts.

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Hi Anon,

thank you very much for your thoughtful and generous comment which I will make a post.

I do not doubt that just as dialectical materialism was the development of mechanical materialism, enabled by the incorporation of the consummate Neoplatonist Hegel’s philosophy, stood ‘the right way up,’ so developments on dialectical materialism are the way forward epistemologically (materialism, like the world it reflects, could never be a finished project).

These developments require above all, honesty

• the honesty to acknowledge (as Marx did) that his epistemology was profoundly indebted to mysticism, via Hegel

• the honesty to acknowledge that Hegel was obviously a mystic and a Neoplatonist and

• the honesty to pursue where these acknowledgements lead

A careful review of this entire current is necessary, from Plotinus to Marx and beyond because as well as drawing on Neoplatonism’s mighty potential, Marx incorporated important flaws and limitations of Neoplatonism in his own theory.

This was inevitable, because the orientations of Plotinus and Marx were diametrically opposed – Plotinus to the ‘world’ within, Marx to the world without.

Furthermore, as developments in science benefited Marx and Engels and were a stimulus to them, so the increasingly rapid growth in this knowledge now as it pushes ever more urgently against the constraints of bourgeois ideology should provide both benefit and stimulus to those eager to build on what they achieved.

My very best wishes to you,

Phil

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