ABSTRACT
Peter Joseph Dietzgen was born in Blankenberg in the Rhine Province of Prussia and worked as a tanner and occasionally as a teacher and painter. Central to Dietzgen’s critique was the rejection of a narrow definition of science and matter which Dietzgen associated ‘with physicalism and a belief in universal causal determinism’. Dietzgen even uses the oft-maligned Marxian ‘base-structure-superstructure’ metaphor to get around the problem of dualism. Dualism is tied up with the class nature of society. The material conditions for its existence simply did not exist prior to the advent of class society. Dietzgen’s conception of the universe is both ‘materialist and dialectical. Mechanical materialism might have been good at debunking some of the more absurd claims of the monotheistic godhead; however, ‘the old materialism takes anti-theological or anti-spiritual arguments so far that it will not countenance the existence of any mind at all – not even in the human mind’.
