Redefining Philosophy?
So, let us reveal the unavoidable trajectory of Mankind’s Intellectual Development into a real perspective. Rational Thinking of any developable kind is at most 2,500 years old, in an overall hominid historical Trajectory of several million years. Man began to try to think rationally in the last 0.0005% of that time, leaving 99.9995% when they didn’t, and indeed couldn’t think rationally at all.
And, of course, the actually-occurring tempos of that development have certainly not been embodied in a constant upwards climb: for sometimes progress was at zero for long periods. Sometimes things went backwards.
For 2,300 years after the Greek Intellectual Revolution it was fatally damaged by an assumption that few philosphers recognise - the hidden assumption of Plurality. This assumed that all relations, properties and Laws are fixed qualitatively and separable from one another.
Only in the early 19th century did Hegel, the German Idealist Philosopher, attempt for the first time to integrate Qualitative Change into General Reasoning.
But even that was not universally accepted.
Indeed, it couldn’t be, whilever Philosophy remained idealist: for the solution could not come from Thinking itself, but in the our understanding of Concrete Reality. Only with the extension and vast further development of those ideas, which Hegel termed as Dialectics, was the possibility of a breakthrough even possible.
And, when it was attempted by Marx in the limited area of Capitalist Economics, it took him the rest of his life to address that single discipline, And in doing so, he was developing the stance as much as applying it.
Qualitative development was in everything, and every significant area of study, such as Science, would have to not only receive the same sort of attention as Economics, but would also be as much another voyage of discovery, very much more complex and unknown than Economics had been for Marx.
And in the the 140 years since Marx’s death, this task wasn’r even attempted. It has taken this Theorist and Philosopher over 10 years to lay the most basic of foundations.
To even begin the process, a wholly new approach had to be researched which produced the wholly new. For all Qualitative Change must produce the wholly new.
In all reasoning previously established using Fixed Laws and Pluralist Logic, the rationality involved, when it could be used, produced actual results - and the same ones every time it was used, and whoever used it! But Qualitative Changes are Dialectical, produced in what used to be seen as impossible developments, for which they were termed Emergences.
To grasp what an Emergence actually is, we must compare it to one of the previous pluralistic Laws, all of which have predictable outcomes.
The outcome from an Emergence, on the other hand, is NEVER predictable prior to its commencement, Indeed, you have to be an exceptional Dialectician to even predict the next phase of such a transformation, and only when the final result is imminent, can the culmination of a completed Emergence be guessed at.
So clearly the revolution in Premises and Bases required here will be very different from the prior Pluralist Methods.
The classical Qualitative changes involved in an Emergence start with a Stability, the destruction of which originally appears to be totally impossible, but which is then threatened by a whole series of crises, which usually, but ultimately, would cascade down into a total dissolution of the Stability, towards what seemed to be impending doom, but could, and often did, begin via series of crises attempt to build towards a new, and finally achieved self-sustaining Stability!
The new philosophical approach would have to reflect all of that too, in order to deliver an understanding of Real Development.
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