Joseph Dj-elzgeD This article is the first of a series on neglected philosophers. Some subjects will, like Dietzgen, be largely unknown, others simply forgotten by British philosophy departments. Later articles will (we hope) include introductions to Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, Collingwood and Fouca~lt. Other suggestions would be welcome JOSEPH DIETZGEN is indeed a neglected philosopher. How many people know that he was the man ~arx introduced to the 1872 Congress of the First International as ‘our philosopher’? Or that it was Dietzgen, not Plekhanov, who first coined the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’? Or that for the first thirty or so years of this century Dietzgen’s Philosophical Essays were to be found on the bookshelves of any working class militant with Marxist pretensions? ‘ Who, then, was Dietzgen? What were his views? And, indeed, why has he been neglected? Joseph Dietzgen was born in December 1828 near Cologne. His father was a master tanner and ‘it was in this trade that Dietzgen was trained and worked. He was neither,a capitalist nor a property less worker but an artisan owning and working his own instruments of production. What distinguished him from other pioneer scientific socialists like Marx and Engels was that he never went to university; he was a self-educated man. Dietzgen was involved in the 1848 rising and after its failure left for America returning, however, after a couple of years. He spent another two years in America after 1859 and went there again in 1884, never to return. He died in 1888 and is buried in Chicago. Dietzgen was not just interested in philosophy, though this was his main interest. He was also a writer on economic and political matters for the German,Social Democratic press, especially in the 1870s. Marx commented favourably on Dietzgen’s review of Capital in his Afterword to the Second German Edition. 1 The two men were personal acquaintances. Dietzgen wrote in German, but a number of his writings, including the most important, were translated into English in the early years of this century and published as two books 2 by the Charles H. Kerr Co. of Chicago. The book bearing the title The Positive outcome of Philosophy contains not only this, his last work originally published in 1887, “but also his first work, The Nature of HUman Brainwork (1869), and also his Letters on Logic. The other book, Philosophical Essays, contains translations of some of the propagandist articles Dietzgen wrote in the 1970s and also his pamphlet Excursions of a Socialist into the Domain of Epi~temology. This pamphlet, especially Chapter 3, ‘Materialism versus Materialism’, is perhaps the b~st outline of Dietzgen’s views in his own words. For, frankly, Dietzgen’s works are not easy to read, partly because of the subject matter, but partly also because Dietzgen tended to express himself somewhat philosophically and to needlessly repeat himself. In his introduction, written in 1902, to the English edition of The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, the Dutch Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, described Dietzgen’s philosophical writings as ‘an important and indispensable auxiliary for the understanding of the fundamental works .of Marx and Engels.,3 Ernst Untermann, anether German Secial Demecrat who had emigrated to America, expressed a 1 Adam Buick similar view: ‘Dietzgen rounded .out the work .of Marx and Engels bK a censiste~~ monist conception .of the Universe.’ Are these opiniens justified? In this writer’s epinien, yes. Marx’s historical materialism is a materialist theery of history and society; it is not, and was net meant to be, a materialist philosophy. Of course, being an atheist, Marx must have had a materialist conception .of the universe but he never wrote much about it. Nor was there any reasen why he should have. His specialities were his~y, secielogy and economics, not philesephy or epistemolegy. Engels made an attempt to back up the materialist cenceptien .of history with a materialist philosephy but, in many respects failed te do this satisfacterily. It was Dietzgen who succeeded and in this sense can justly be said to have filled a ‘gap’ in secialist theery Dialectical Materialism Dietzgen was a thoroughgoing empiricist and materialist. For him all knowledge was derived from sense-perception; and what human beings perceived had a real existence independent of their perception of it. The Nature of … Continue reading Jospeh Dietzgen