Questions and Tasks for Self-Control:

1. What two meanings does the term dialectics have?

2. What are historical forms of dialectics?

3. How many principles of dialectics do you know?

4. How can you characterize development?

5. Which two aspects of the surrounding world does historism imply?

6. Does the universe have a code of laws of its own?

7. How can we classify laws?

8. What does the law of the transformation of quantity into quality reveal? Explain its relation with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites?

9. What is negation? How is it correlated with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites?

10. Can the laws of dialectics substitute some single scientific laws? If yes or no, then why?

11. Give your account to the categories of dialectics?

12. How are the categories of dialectics correlated with the laws of dialectics?

Literature:

Basic:

Alexander Spirkin. Fundamentals of Philosophy / Alexander Spirkin. — M. : Progress Publishers, 1990. — 423 p.

The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy / Edward Craig. – New York : Routledge, 2005. — 1077 p.

Supplementary:

Bertell Ollman. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method / Bertell Ollman. — Urbana, Ill. : University of Illinois Press, 2003. — 232 p.

Primary Sources:

Friedrich Engels. Dialectic's of Nature. — Eelectronic resource : http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ index.htm.

Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel. Science of Logic / Georg Hegel : [transl. by George di Giovanni]. — New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010. — 790 p.

George Edward Novack. An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism / George Novack. — New York, Merit Publishers, 1966. — 124 p.

Vagueness: a reader / Rosanna Keefe, Peter Smith. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 1996. — 352 p.

Unit 10

Philosophical theory of being

The aim of the theme is: to master one of the fundamental components of philosophical knowledge – ontology which enables us to grasp the world as a complex self-governed system with the unity of its structural elements; to reveal basic principles, forms and ways of its existence; to find the reasons of variability of things and phenomena of the world.

Key words of the theme are: being, matter, substance, motion, space, time, social space and social time.

10.1. “Being” as Philosophical Category. Unity and Structuredness of Being

What is reality? What are things made of? What is ultimate? What is it that everything depends on for its existence? What is really real? There are many ways of answering the question of reality. Your idea of reality may be only half-conscious but you do have some answers of your own to the question: What is really real? The point is to have a good answer, an answer that is well-conceived and well-evidence. Why is this so important?

Some philosophers would say that in some ways the question of reality is the basis of all the other questions of that matter. What you believe about reality determines to some degree what you believe about all sorts of things. If, for example, someone told you that he or she believes that all that exists is matter in motion, governed by fixed and unalterable laws, then you could predict pretty much what that person thinks about some other important things. If, on the other hand, you were informed that he or she believes in a supernatural and absolute being, then you could immediately guess that his other views on those matters would probably be quite different.

In this way, then, the question of reality is a fundamental one. “Fundamental” means the most “essential”, basic. And it is true. How we answer it will determine in a big way our perspectives on many issues, as well as our perspective on the universe and our experience generally.

Answers to the question of reality were represented by mythology, religion, science and philosophy. But these answers are different.

Mythological, religious, scientific, philosophical forms of worldview giving the versions of “the world as it actually is” could be mutually complementary, despite the fact they contradict one another.

Mythological understanding of the world represents the meditative basis of the answer. It is the concrete-perceptible appearance in which perceived and imaginary are united together, and the image of the world includes man in all aspects of the cosmic whole.

The main object of attention for the religious picture of the world is the difference between earthly everyday life and the beyond. Human and divine is the object of religious reflection. Thus the transcendent world, divine world determines people’s physical and spiritual life. The central point of the religious picture of the world is the image of the God (gods) as a higher true reality. Religious picture shows the hierarchical character of the created world and the place of man in it, depending on his attitude toward the God (gods).

Scientific approach puts in order the definite sphere of phenomena as a whole but according to the rules of the certain science with the use of its special language. The result is local pictures not enabling us to see the whole image of the world because every science represents its explanation and analyses.

The philosophical picture of the world comprehends the universe in mutual relations of man and the world in all aspects: ontological, cognitive, and axiological. That is why the philosophical pictures of the world are not alike. The common feature of them which distinguishes them from the religious and mythological pictures of the world, that philosophy relates to the theoretical method of mastering the world. This method is characterized by the fact that persons comprehend the world in concepts, speculatively (in an idea, in a word).

It is not introduced with the help of other categories, but could be compared with such categories as "essence”, “existence”, “substance”, “matter”, “nature”, which are derived from "being" and are its various sides and aspects. So, we can say that the complete picture of the world, representing the unity of human existence and other forms of material things and spiritual phenomena is expressed in the philosophical category of “being". On the one hand, the category of “being” is focused on the most common characteristics of existing and on the other, its content is achieved through a study of certain structures and forms of manifestation of all that exists.

Philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic category of “being” and their relations is called ontology. Principal questions of ontology are "What can be said to exist?", "Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?", "What are the meanings of being?", "What are the various modes of being of entities?". Various philosophers have provided different answers to these questions.

Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality. The single known work of Parmenides is the poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides described two views of reality. In The Way of Truth (a part of the poem), he explained how reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In The Way of Opinion, he explained the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful.

The details of Parmenides’ argument, which plays on the verb “to be” is extremely complex and obscure, and its meaning is a matter of bitter scholarly controversy even today. But in rather everyday terms, it amounts to this: if something can be thought of at all, it must exist, and so it does not make any sense whatever to speak about nothing (or something that does not exist, does not yet exist, or no longer exists). Therefore, whatever is must be eternal; it cannot come into being and it cannot be destroyed.

From this, Parmenides concluded that there can be no such thing as change. What is already is. And nothing can come to be out of what is not. He further concluded that there can be no time, that our sense of time passing is an illusion, and that space is an illusion too.

The thoughts of an eternal, unchanging, unknowable reality strongly influenced Plato. Central to Plato’s philosophy was his theory of Forms. This theory entailed a “two-world” cosmology. One world is our everyday world of change and impermanence. The other is an ideal world populated by ideal “Forms” or Eidoi (from the singular eidos). The first, the “World of Becoming”, was in flux, as Heraclites insisted, but the latter, the “World of Being” was eternal and unchanging, as Parmenides demanded. What made Plato’s new vision so appealing was that, first of all, the two worlds were interrelated, not unrelated as Parmenides and some of the Sophists had suggested. The World of Becoming, our world was defined by the World of Being that is the world of ideal Forms.

Whereas for Plato the Forms that defined individual things were quite distinct from them, for Aristotle the forms of things just were those guiding internal principles. And whereas Plato sometimes said that there would be one Form for infinitely many individuals “participating” in that Form (the pre-Socratic problem sometimes called “The One in the Many”), Aristotle insisted that what ultimately exists is nothing other than each individual thing, this horse, this tree, this man. There is no super-reality, no world of Forms, insisted Aristotle, but only the individual things of this world.

Other approaches to the analysis of the category of “being” were represented in the XVII-XVIII cc. At that time, most philosophers were involved in the study of natural phenomena and their properties, so being was identified with nature. For instance, Th. Hobbes developed a purely materialist and mechanistic model of the world – the world as mere “matter in motion”. He identified being and material substance. In dualistic philosophy of R. Descartes being was split into two opposite substances: material (physical) and spiritual (thinking). In his famous phrase “I think, therefore I am” he shifted accent from being to knowledge.

The concept of being in philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel provides an illustration of his dialectic. As initially conceived, being is entirely abstract; it is “indeterminate immediacy” as G.W.F. Hegel expressed it. This idea could be understood without the aid of any others (it is “immediate”), but that is only because it is entirely indeterminate: it applies to everything, and so says nothing in particular about anything. It follows that, in predicating being, we say nothing about what is. To say that there is being is therefore to say nothing. Hegel thought of this as a contradiction: we have applied not only the concept of being, but also that of nothing or non-being, which was lying concealed, so to speak within being. Non-being determines or limits being, and compels it to “pass over” into the next concept in the dialectical chain: that of determinate being, which is the instance, exists; but there is a limit to its existence: there are places where it is not, and when we apply the concept table, we divide the world into things that are tables, and things that are not tables. All this is comprehended in the though that tables have determinate being, in which both being and non-being are contained and transcended. Hegel used the German word dasein to denote this idea. (Dasein means to exist but signifies etymologically “being there”; “there” captures the determinate element in our idea of existence).

Then there arises a new dialectical opposition, between being and determinate being, which can be resolved, Hegel argued, only through temporal ways of thinking. We give sense to the idea that one and the same thing both is and is not, by postulating its existence at one time, but not at another. Through time we discriminate entities, counting and distinguishing them. Time provides us also with the concept of “becoming” (the next stage of the dialectic), through which we understand the being of organisms. Organisms are entities in a constant state of becoming, which yet remain the same.

As one can see Hegel proclaimed the principle of identity of thinking and being. It is an objective-idealistic understanding of being.

After G.W.F. Hegel his philosophy was radically transformed by Marxian philosophy. In particular, F. Engels dealt with the following structure of being of the material world: organic and inorganic nature; living nature; social being; individual being. The cornerstone of Marxian philosophy was his analyses of social being. K. Marx placed productive forces in place of Hegel’s World Spirit. In place of ideas in confrontation there were competing socioeconomic classes.

The XX century represented the new approaches to understanding of being. For instance, M. Heidegger in his book Being and Time said that the question of being arises in part from the “thrown-ness” of things, which are dumped in the world without an explanation. “I see them in this way, and myself also”. Yet there is no “necessary being” outside the world, no God who will remove the world’s contingency. Each of us must come to terms with his own contingence, and find a meaning in contingency itself: only then the question of being will be answered for us. The problem, and the solution to it, is existential: they concern our mode of being in the world. It is only by being in a certain way that we solve the problem of being. But we then find the meaning of being not in a theory or in an argument, but in the fact that being ceases to be an issue for us. The answer to the question of being comes when it ceases to be a question.

As the most common category of philosophy, "being" refers to the public relations, order and hierarchy of different objects, phenomena, processes, etc., that detect various forms of all that exists. All the philosophical concepts are united with the question about the quantity of ways and forms of being. The main forms of being are the following:

1. being of things, processes, states of nature which exist objectively (independent from man and his consciousness);

2. being of things of the “second nature” (material being created by man is called the "second nature"). This created world arising up once leads an independent life from man. Unlike natural things they are made for some purpose;

3) man’s being in the world of things (corporal existence of man as a part of nature and existence of man as an intellectual and simultaneously socially historical creature);

4) individualized spiritual being (ideas, persuasions, values, settings, reasons, ideas, impressions, senses, experiencing and so on, that is called “spiritual world”). ;

5) objectified spiritual being (social spiritual phenomena: customs, traditions, rites, science, political, legal, moral, aesthetical, religious consciousness of the society and etc. which have symbolic forms). The special place here is occupied by language, which fully reflects the unity of individualized and objectified spiritual, individual and social consciousness. Due to the language an individual absorbs social norms, principles, knowledge, ideals and so on;

6) social being (material and spiritual life of man and society). In detail this form of being will be analyzed in the theme “Social Philosophy”.

All the forms (or aspects) of being are allocated by man. Due to them an existence of a human being manifests itself as the process of realization of human essential characteristics (feelings, emotions, thinking, speech, freedom, creativity, activity, etc.). Human existence means not just a fact of his presence, but represents the human mode of existence in culture created by man’s spiritual and practical activity. Thus, being can be represented as a real process of life enabling man through various social practices to turn out the outer world for the conditions and means of self-development.