ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Critique of Marxist Philosophy Part 2 The Movement of Development The dialecticians reproach metaphysics and traditional logic for considering nature in a static state of unchanging frozenness and stagnant stability and for failing to reflect nature in its moving and progressive reality.

According to this claim, the poor metaphysician is an unperceptive being devoid of consciousness and awareness who tails to notice change, transformation and movement in the realm of nature. Al-Sadr briefly recapitulates the standpoints of Greek philosophers regarding motion. He refers to the paradoxes of Zeno (d.c. 430 B.C.) which were arguments put forward to demonstrate the inconceiv ability of motion and to the acceptance of motion by the Aristotelian school.

The problem is related to the manner in which motion was conceived: either as a succession of pauses in instants of time or as a gradual advance in which there is no pause or rest. Islamic philosophy pictures motion as the gradual actualization of the potentiality of a thing. Development always consists of something actual and something potential. Thus motion continues as long as a thing combines both actuality and potentiality, existence and possibility.

It possibility is exhausted and no capacity for a new stage remains, motion ceases. Mulla Sadra (1572-1641) demonstrated that motion does not pertain to the accidental surface of things but goes on inside their very substances. Not only that, he also showed clearly that motion and change is one of the necessary principles of metaphysics.

The accusation of the dialecticians that metaphysics views nature as static and frozen is due to their failure to understand motion in its proper philosophical sense. The difference between the ways metaphysics and dialectical materialism view motion consists of these two points: Firstly, dialectical materialism views motion as being based on contradiction and strife among contradictories.

According to the metaphysics of Muslim philosophers motion is a progression from one stage to an opposite stage without involving the union of these opposites in any one of its stages. Secondly, motion according to Marxism is not confined to external nature but is also common to intellectual truths and ideas. On the basis of this, there can be no absolute truths. According to Muslim philosophers, motion and development do not intrude into the realm of knowledge and thought.