4. World Schematism¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, Engels dissects the opening of Dühring’s “world schematism,” exposing it as a thinly veiled plagiarism of Hegel’s Logic, despite Dühring’s own virulent anti-Hegelian polemics. Dühring attempts to deduce the unity of the world from the mere concept of being, employing what he calls the “mathematical method” of axiomatic decision. He begins with the tautology that “all-embracing being is one,” then, within a few lines, transforms this oneness into a unity by the act of conceiving it. Because thought unifies, Dühring argues, the real world must be an indivisible unity, thereby eliminating any “beyond” — God, heaven, hell, and the immortality of the soul — in a single stroke.
Engels demolishes this reasoning on several fronts. First, he notes that thought consists as much in analysis as in synthesis; Dühring’s claim that the essence of thought is unification is simply untrue. Second, thought can only unify elements whose real prototypes already possess that unity — one cannot make a shoe-brush a mammal by including it in the concept. Third, Dühring’s procedure is identical to the ontological proof for God’s existence: just as Anselm argued that a perfect being must exist because existence is a perfection, Dühring argues that being must be a unity because the concept of being is unified. The spiritualists, Engels observes, could simply reply that for them the universe is also a unity, and the division between this world and the beyond is merely a product of original sin.
Engels then delivers the chapter’s central theoretical claim: “The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science.” Being is merely a precondition of unity, not its content; it is an “open question” beyond the sphere of observation. Dühring’s subsequent categories — being-nothing, becoming, quality, quantity, the leap from quantity to quality — are shown to follow exactly the sequence of Hegel’s Doctrine of Being from the first part of the Science of Logic. Dühring even reproduces Hegel’s “nodal line of measure relations” (the transformation of quantity into quality at specific points, as with water boiling or freezing) while simultaneously denouncing Marx for using the same Hegelian concept as a “confused, hazy notion.” The chapter concludes by noting that Dühring’s “logical properties of being” — antagonism of forces, causality, necessity — are likewise lifted from Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence. Dühring, who boasts of not philosophising “out of a cage,” is in fact philosophising inside the cage of the Hegelian schematism he claims to despise.