"Reality grows"...

"Reality grows", states a Marxist citation, "and the knowledge that results from this reality reflects it, grows as it grows, and becomes an effective element of its growth." Al-Sadr rejects this dialectical picture of the movement of thought for the two following reasons: The realm of nature involves fixed laws that reflect fixed truths in the realms of thought and knowledge. Scientific knowledge reflects the permanent underlying the transient in nature.

Firstly, concepts and ideas, no matter how accurate, do not possess the actual properties of the things to which they pertain (e.g. the idea of radium does not emit relation). Motion is one of those properties. A true idea, although it reflects objective reality, need not possess the actual properties of the reality it represents. Hence the concepts of changing things do not change in order to reflect the objective reality of those things.

Al-Sadr then takes up the second Marxist argument intended to demonstrate the dialectic development of thought, that knowledge is a natural phenomenon and therefore governed by the same laws that rule nature. It changes and grows dialectically as do all the phenomena of nature. The laws of the dialectic apply to both matter and knowledge. This argument rests on a pure materialistic explanation of knowledge.

Al-Sadr postpones the analysis of this view to an independent chapter, "knowledge", at the end of the book. Here it suffices to put a question to the Dialecticians : Is this materialistic explanation of knowledge reserved for the thought of the dialecticians or does it extend also to the thought of others who reject the dialectic?

It becomes contradictory for Marxists to accuse other's thought of being frozen and static; for if the dialectic is a natural law common to both thought and nature, then it must apply to all human thought alike. Thirdly, al-Sadr examines the Marxist effort to produce the history of science as an empirical evidence for the dialectical movement of thought.

Although progress and development in human knowledge is an undeniable fact of history, this development is not a kind of motion in the philosophic sense intended by Marxism. It is no more than an increase in the quantity of truth and a decrease in . the quantity of errors. When a theory moves from the level of hypothesis to that of law, it does not mean that scientific truth has grown and altered.