Dialectics in Science: An Interview with Helena Sheehan
by Ben Campbell on December 15, 2012
While today’s left has frayed into many strands, there was a time when
the left presented, or at least aspired to present, a coherent
Weltanschauung. This was Marxism, founded on Karl Marx’s brilliant
synthesis of materialism and the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, which led
him and his collaborator Friedrich Engels to an unprecedented
coalescence of existing human knowledge.
Today’s crisis of capitalism has, unsurprisingly, led to a renewed
interest in Marxism. Yet any “return to Marx” will not be found in an
exegesis of ancient texts but in grounding Marx’s materialist
dialectic in the present. Just as Marx critiqued 19th-century advances
by incorporating them into his thought, so too must the most promising
developments of the last century be synthesized into a radical
understanding for the present. Unfortunately, today’s left has for too
long been relegated to social and cultural studies, ceding the “hard”
discourse in economics and science to a new generation of vulgar
scientistic “quants”. The resulting left has too often neglected a
dialectical critique, in favor of a dichotomous relation to science.
It was not always so. In an attempt to recover some of the lost spirit
of the scientific left, I will be interviewing subjects at the
interface of science and the left. I begin today with Helena Sheehan,
Professor Emerita at Dublin City University. Her research interests
include science studies and the history of Marxism, and she is the
author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History
(available on her website).
Ben Campbell: The advances of 19th-century science were inseparable
from the rise of “materialist” philosophy. While Marx certainly
belongs to this tradition, he was also strongly influenced by German
idealism, specifically the dialectical system of G.W.F. Hegel. What
did a “dialectical” materialism mean for Marx, and how did he see it
as an advance over the materialism of his day?
Helena Sheehan: The materialist philosophy of the 19th century was
tending in a positivist direction. It was inclined to stress induction
and to get stuck in a play of particulars. Marxism pulled this in the
direction of a more historicist and more holistic materialism. It was
an approach that overcame myopia, one that looked to the whole and
didn’t get lost in the parts.
BC: You’ve written, “It is no accident that Marxism made its entry
onto the historical stage at the same historical moment as Darwinism.”
What do you mean by this, and what do you see as the connection
between these two monumental figures?
HS: The idea of evolution was an idea whose time had come. It was in
the air. Historical conditions ripen and set the intellectual agenda.
Great thinkers are those who are awake to the historical process,
those who gather up what is struggling for expression. Marx and Darwin
were both great thinkers in this sense, although others were also
coming to the same conclusions. Marx and Engels were far bolder than
Darwin, carrying forward the realization of a naturalistic and
developmental process beyond the origin of biological species into the
realm of socio-historical institutions and human thought.
(Charles Brown: Although with significant "social darwinist" errors , Darwin did carry his natural historical materialism into the realm human history in _Descent of Man(sic)and Selection by Sex_, the first book on Biological Anthropology. )
BC: Engels also wrote extensively on science, particularly in his
manuscript Dialectics of Nature, unfinished and unpublished during his
lifetime. What is it about this document, and Engels more generally,
that has been so controversial in the history of Marxism’s relation to
science?
HS: There is a tension in Marxist philosophy between its roots in the
history of philosophy and its commitment to empirical knowledge. For
the best Marxist thinkers, certainly for Marx and Engels themselves,
it has been a creative interaction. However, some of those pulling
toward German idealist philosophy, particularly that of Kant and
Hegel, have brought into Marxism a hostility to the natural sciences,
influenced by the Methodenstreit, an antagonistic conceptualization of
the humanities versus the sciences, which has played out in various
forms over the decades.
The critique of positivism has been bloated to an anti-science stance.
The tendency of some to counterpose a humanistic Marx to a positivist
Engels is not supported by historical evidence, as I have demonstrated
at some length in my book.
BC: It seems to me that this synthesis of dialectical philosophy with
materialism has always been contentious. On one hand, as you say,
there is the danger of reducing an anti-positivist stance to an
anti-scientific stance. On the other hand, there is the threat of “the
dialectic” being reduced to a mere rhetorical flourish for an
otherwise bare scientism. Other writers, like John Bellamy Foster,
have argued that Marxism after Marx and Engels split along these
lines. Do you agree with this assessment? After Marx and Engels, what
or who best demonstrated the potential of a “dialectical” science to
transcend this divide?
HS: No, I don’t agree with it. There have always been those who
synthesized these two streams. Most familiar to me is the 1930s
British Marxism of Bernal, Haldane, Caudwell, and others, and post-war
Eastern European Marxism. Regarding the latter, it suffered from the
orthodoxy of parties in power, but it wasn’t all catechetical
dogmatism. In the United States, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin.
This would still characterize my own position today.
BC: Yet despite the ability of some to transcend it, there does seem
to have historically been much ambiguity concerning what a
“materialist dialectic” would really entail. Some, like philosopher
David Bakhurst, have traced some of this ambiguity back to the
philosophical writings of Lenin. Bakhurst argues that while Lenin
appeared at times to advocate a “radical Hegelian realism”, at other
times his philosophy failed to transcend a rather vulgar materialism.
How did any such ambiguities in Lenin’s own writings contribute to
subsequent debates in Soviet science?
( Charles Brown : "appeared" ? Lazy thinking)
HS: Yes, I would agree with that. Lenin could be very philosophically
and politically sophisticated, but I never thought his philosophical
position quite gelled. Some of his texts on reflection theory were
epistemologically crude. As to the effect on Soviet debates, these
were beset by the tendency to deal with writings of Marx, Engels, and
Lenin as sacred texts. This rigidified further after the
Bolshevization of all academic discipline, when there had to be one
and only one legitimate Marxist position on every question. A quote
from Lenin stopped any further debate.
BC: Such talk about the rigidity of Soviet science inevitably leads to
the specter of T.D. Lysenko. For readers who may not be familiar,
could you briefly describe Lysenko’s work? How would you respond to
those who use Lysenko as a cautionary tale about the danger posed by
Marxism or dialectical thinking to biology?
HS: T.D. Lysenko (1898–1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist who came to
prominence in the U.S.S.R. in 1927 when his experiments in winter
planting of peas were sensationalized by Pravda. He became lionized as
a scientist close to his peasant roots who could serve the needs of
Soviet agriculture in the spirit of the first Five-Year Plan. He then
advanced the technique of vernalization to a theory of the phasic
development of plants and then to a whole alternative approach to
biology. This was in the context of wider debates in international
science about genetics and evolution, about heredity and environment,
about inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was also in the
context of the Bolshevization of academic disciplines and the search
for a proletarian biology and the purges of academic institutions.
The issues were many and complex. There has been a tendency to flatten
them all out into Lysenkoism as a cautionary tale against
philosophical or political “interference” in science. However, I
believe that philosophy and politics are relevant to the theory and
practice of science. Lysenkoism is a cautionary tale in the perils and
pitfalls of certain approaches to that.
BC: If we turn from the Soviet philosophy of science to that of the
non-Marxist West, you see a greater reluctance to mix philosophy with
the content of science. Instead, a lot of canonical “philosophy of
science” (e.g., Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend) has more to do with
scientific method. What does Marxism, with its emphasis on
contradiction, have to say about the scientific method? I wonder
specifically about Lakatos’ background in Hegelian Marxism and whether
there are affinities there.
HS: One big difference between these two traditions in philosophy of
science is that Marxism pursued questions of worldview, exploring the
philosophical implications of the empirical sciences, setting it apart
from the narrow methodologism of the other tradition.
However, Marxism also addressed questions of scientific method. There
is an elaborate literature dealing with epistemological questions from
a Marxist point of view. There have been many debates, but the
mainstream position would be critical realism. What is distinctive
about Marxism in this sphere is how it cuts through the dualism of
realism versus social constructivism. Marxism has made the strongest
claims of any intellectual tradition before or since about the
socio-historical character of science, yet always affirmed its
cognitive achievements.
The fact that Lakatos had a background in Marxism made him inclined to
take a wider view than his later colleagues, but I find that he left a
lot to be desired in that respect. Nevertheless, contra Feyerabend, I
think that the project of specifying demarcation criteria, so central
to the neo-positivist project, is a crucially important task.
BC: Karl Popper famously invoked a “falsifiability” criterion as a
means of solving the demarcation problem, which refers to the question
of how to distinguish science from non-science (or if that is even
possible). Popper’s solution has influenced many scientists but has
been strongly critiqued in philosophical circles. How does a Marxist
approach inform this demarcation problem?
HS: There is a need for criteria to distinguish between legitimate and
illegitimate claims to knowledge. The positivist and neo-positivist
traditions contributed much to the formulation of such criteria. They
did so, however, from a base that was too narrow, employing criteria
that were too restricted, leaving out of the picture too much that was
all too real, excluding historical, psychological, sociological,
metaphysical dimensions as irrelevant. Marxism agrees with the
emphasis on empirical evidence and logical coherence, but brings the
broader context to bear. It synthesizes the best of other
epistemological positions: logical empiricism, rationalism, social
constructivism.
BC: Today, Marxism stands at its weakest historically, right as the
global economic crash seems to have most vindicated it. Similarly,
Marxism has almost no direct influence on 21st-century science, yet
discoveries and perspectives seem increasingly “dialectical” (e.g.,
biological emphases on complex systems, emergence, and circular
causality). What do you make of the situation at present? Would it be
possible to develop a “dialectical” or even “Marxist” science without
Marxism as a political force? Or will science always be fragmented and
one-sided so long as there remains no significant political challenge
to capital?
Helena Sheehan at SYRIZA solidarity rally
HS: Yes, Marxism is at a low ebb as far as overt influence is
concerned, precisely at a time when its analysis is most relevant and
even most vindicated.
I think that people can come to many of the same realizations and
conclusions as Marxists without calling themselves Marxists. However,
I don’t think there can be any fully meaningful analysis of science
that does not analyze it in relation to the dominant mode of
production. Such an analysis shows how the capitalist mode of
production brings about intellectual fragmentation as well as economic
exploitation and social disintegration.
I don’t think that left parties having any chance of taking power in
the future will be Marxist parties in the old sense, although Marxism
will likely be a force within them. I am thinking particularly of
SYRIZA, with whom I’ve been intensively engaged lately. One of the
leading thinkers in SYRIZA is Aristides Baltas, a Marxist and a
philosopher of science.
Thank you, Helena.
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