Engels, Hegel, and Nothing-That remains
Last year I did an excellent online course on Marxism presented by the Midwestern Marx institute. In the reading of Engels, something (pun intended) struck me as important;
A quote from Engels
“But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us.....”
My response -
does it? Has the question of the existence or non-existence of a thing ever arisen without a sentience there asking? A thing only becomes ‘some thing' when it is discriminated/abstracted/differentiated by consciousness from the panorama of the objective field. In other words, it’s existence as that particular is dependent on discriminating consciousness. Without a discriminating consciousness, what would it be? Engels following Hegel states that what remains is nothing but the fact that it exists without us. What I presume he means is that without being an object for a subject/s, it would simply ‘be’. However I also suspect that what he takes this to imply is that the objective world takes priority and could somehow exist as it appears apart from a subjective consciousness. This is simply unrealistic. The reality is such as it is, and any abstraction from the such-as-it-is of reality, the ‘fact’ as Engels/Hegel puts it is- including this positing of an objective world as if subjective consciousness did not exist, is unreal.
However, the ‘nothing’ he mentions in ‘nothing remains’ is, or could be seen to be, a flash of great insight. Nothingness is indeed prior to both subjectivity and objectivity- a no-particular-thingness from which both the subjective and objective fields develop as moments in consciousness.
Subjectivity and objectivity always appear together- never one without the other. Subjectivity does not arise out of objectivity, nor does objectivity arise out of subjectivity. They both arise together as moments in the activity of consciousness which is not separate from the activity of the entire world.
The world and consciousness are not separate. The world and awareness of the world are interwoven aspects of dependent origination- the great flux of phenomenal change and differentiated appearances. The illusion is believing in real separation or permanent individual independent beings. Wisdom is seeing the illusion as illusion. Everything exists as -
A bubble, a dream, a painting, a shimmering mirage.
Reality is a single undifferentiated tissue generating differentiated forms, appearing and disappearing in patterns of interdependence. The pattern and the root in the undifferentiated tissue is present in consciousness.