Ask Lemmygrad

Ultimately the embryo and its parents just are. We concoct categories like “chicken,” “not-chicken,” and “proto-chicken” in order to make some sort of clumsy sense of the world, but outside of our own inadequate thoughts, there’s no actually-existing dividing line between chicken and not-chicken.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Fundamental_principles_of_philosophy#Its_characters

We bought a pair of yellow shoes. After a while, after multiple repairs, refurbishment of soles and heels, gluing of parts, etc., we still say: “I'm going to put on my yellow shoes”, without realizing that they are no longer. the same. But we neglect the change that has occurred to our shoes, we regard them as unchanged, as identical.

This example will help us understand what a metaphysical method is. Such a method, to use Engels' expression, considers things "as done once and for all" as immutable. The movement, and therefore also the causes of change, escape him.

A historical study of metaphysics would leave behind the modest pair of shoes that would not suffice. Let us simply point out that the word “metaphysics” comes from the Greek meta, which can be interpreted as meaning beyond, and from physics, the science of nature. The object of metaphysics (especially in Aristotle) ​​is the study of the being which is found beyond nature. While nature is movement, the being beyond nature (supernatural being) is immutable, eternal. Some call it God, others the Absolute, etc. Materialists, who rely exclusively on science, consider this being to be imaginary (see lesson 9). But as the ancient Greeks could not explain the movement, it seemed necessary to some of their philosophers to pose,beyond nature in motion, an eternal principle.

If therefore we speak of the metaphysical method, we mean a method which ignores or ignores the reality of movement and change. It is a metaphysical attitude not to see that my shoes are no longer the same. Metaphysics ignores movement in favor of rest, change in favor of the identical. “There is nothing new under the sun,” she said. It is thus to reason as a metaphysician to believe that capitalism is eternal, that the evils and vices (corruption, egoism, cruelty, etc.) generated or maintained in men by capitalism will always exist. The metaphysician imagines an eternal man, therefore immutable.

Why ? Because it separates man from his environment, society. He said: “On the one hand, man, on the other, society. You destroy capitalist society, you will have a socialist society. And after ? Man will remain man ”. Here we grasp a second feature of metaphysics: it arbitrarily separates what in reality is inseparable. Man is in fact a product of the history of societies: what he is, he is not outside society, but through it. The metaphysical method isolates that which in reality is united. She classifies things once and for all. She says for example: here politics, there the union. Of course, politics and union are two. But life experience shows us that politics and trade unions are no less inseparable.What happens in the union reacts to politics; and conversely political activity (State, parties, elections, etc.) has an impact on the union.

Partitioning leads the metaphysician in all circumstances to reason as follows: “A thing is either this or that. It cannot be both this and that ”. Example: democracy is not dictatorship; dictatorship is not democracy. So a state is either democracy or dictatorship. But what does life teach? Life teaches that the same state can be both a dictatorship and a democracy. The bourgeois state (for example in the United States) is democracy for a minority of big financiers who have all the rights, all the power; it is dictatorship over the majority, over the little people who have only illusory rights. The popular state (for example, in China) is a dictatorship vis-à-vis the enemies of the people, the exploiting minority driven from power by revolutionary violence;it is democracy for the vast majority, for workers freed from oppression.

In short, the metaphysician, because he defines things once and for all (they will remain what they are!) And because he jealously isolates them, is led to oppose them as absolutely irreconcilable. He thinks that two opposites cannot exist at the same time. A being, he says, is either alive or dead. It seemed inconceivable to him that a being could be both alive and dead: yet in the human body, for example, at every moment new cells replace dying cells: the life of the body is precisely this incessant struggle between opposing forces.