Sci-curious

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Marxists have a very distinctive attitude to science, and also a very puzzling one.

They can hate science one moment, then they're grateful that it tells them what they want to hear, then dismissive because it doesn't, than patronising because they knew what it says all along, or filled with horror that it might cut away their humanity.

It's confusing because it's confused. They're trying to reconcile three irreconcilable views.

The first is the view that science is a dehumanising view of the world, one that reduces people to things and treats emotions with contempt. This comes from the hermetic philosophy that Hegel was building on, and in it science is the enemy of both happiness and 'true knowledge'. Science is evil.

The second is the view that marxism is confirmed by the natural sciences - even though scientists don't recognise it themselves. Discoveries are cherrypicked and reinterpreted to make them both agree with and support marxism. Indeed, marxism itself is sometimes called a science. This could be called the enlightenment view. Science is good.

The third is the view that marxism is like the natural sciences...but better. That marxists are waiting for the plodding positivists to catch up with them. This is the opposite of the enlightenment view, in that instead of science confirming marxism, marxism confirms science. Science is redundant.

Hegel held to the first and second views, both being inherent in his hermeticism. Engels vacillated between the second and third.

Bogdanov held to the second, even suggesting (quelle horreur) that science had something to teach marxists. Lenin slapped him down, citing the third view - but sometimes shifted towards the second.

Lenin studied Hegel extensively, claiming it was necessary to digest all of Hegel to understand Marx. But Hegel was a science-hating hermetic mystic, not a philosopher as such, which accounts for Lenin's hostile view of science as something which attacks marxism.

The three 'poles' give a vast number of permutations and attitudes to adopt and slide between, but there is no way they can be integrated or simultaneously dominant. This is why their attitude is so mercurial within individuals, and so perplexing even when it's constant.

There is of course one constant in nearly all marxists. They know nothing about science.

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