Repository | Book | Chapter

The Marxist-Leninist doctrine of universals is fragmentary, not always consistent and for the most part obscure¹⁸⁵. The obscurity comes partly from Hegel, partly from other sources, and partly from itself. Besides Hegel, possibly Bradley's and certainly Whitehead's ideas have influenced Marxist-Leninist thinking on the subject¹⁸⁶. Several threads of Whitehead's organic cosmology can be found in the Marxist-Leninist theory of universals: the rejection of any sort of atomism; the reduction of qualities to relations; the reincorporation of the knower into the world as its homogeneous constituent, acted upon and reacting to what is around him; the repudiation of the "bifurcation of Nature'; the emphasis upon the internal relatedness and interfusion of events, as well as upon the whole as a determinant for its component parts. The powerful influence of Whitehead's metaphysics, abstracted from its intimate connections with science, above all, with mathematics and physics, which Marxist-Leninists ignore, will become clear in the further course of this account. For the moment another thread of the philosophic tradition which affects the Marxist-Leninist point of view on universals must be put into relief. For apart from the conspicuous upper layer of Hegelian origin, there is also an inconspicuous lower one of Aristotelian parentage. There is some truth in the assertion that dialectical materialism stands close to an "objectively interpreted conceptualism'.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3636-8_30

Full citation: