Galvano Della Volpe

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Recently I picked up a copy of Della Volpe's *Logic as a Positive
Science*
at a used bookstore.  Among the things that I have noteworthy about is
how
sparse the literature on him is in English as compared to other Marxist
writers of comparable stature (i.e. Lukacs, the Frankfurters, Sartre or
Althusser).
>From my attempts at doing Web searches on him, it would seem that
most commentary on him is still in Italian.  What little there is in
English
seems primarily concerned with his work in esthetics (there does appear
to have some interest in him by film scholars and art critics).  That
raises
the question of why this should be the case.  Is this simply the result
of a parochialism
that ignores work done in the Latin countries (in which case why has
Gramsci
drawn so much attention over the last thirty years)?  Or is it perhaps
the
substance of his message has ben unappealing to anglophone intellectuals.
His thesis in *Logic as a Positive Science* was basically that whatever
progress
has been made in philosophy has come out of struggles against apriorist
idealism and della Volpe provides in his book several case studies of
such
critiques of apriorism including Plato's critique of Parmenides,
Aristotle's
critique of Plato, Galileo's critique of scholastic science, Kant's
critique
of Leibniz's rationalism, and the young Marx's critique of Hegelian
idealism.
For della Volpe the thrust of all of these critiques of apriorism was a
movement
towards materialism even though that movement did not really come to
fruition
until Marx & Engels.  Della Volpe was also noteworthy for his
anti-Hegelian
interpretation of Marxism which put him at odds both with diamat and with
much of Western Marxism(i.e. Gramsci, Lukacs, the Frankfurters, Sartre)
which have to varying degrees emphasized the Hegelian roots of Marxism.
Indeed, della Volpe contended that Hegel in some respects represented
a regression from the achievements of Kant so that the young Marx in his
critique of Hegel was forced to recover some of the ground that had been
lost in the shift from Kantianism to Hegelianism.

Apparently, the key to della Volpe's understanding of the philosophical
bases
of Marxism lied in his treatment of the Aristotelian principle of
non-contradiction.
In della Volpe's view, Aristotle in formulating this law of logic treated
it not
only as a formalistic principle but also as an ontological principle as
well.
Here, the analysis of the relations between particulars and universals,
between subjects and predicates is of crucial importance.  Plato in his
critique of Parmenides, showed,  that discourse about the world becomes
possible once the duality of Being and Not-Being was replaced by the
dichotomy of sameness-otherness but Plato (in Della Volpe's view
failed to push this to its logical conclusion).  In analyzing the
relations
between species and general, Plato developed his famous theory of
forms which was bases on his method of diariesis but this attempted
to explain the lower genera in terms of the higher which required that
we tacitly presuppose the lower general so that we can discover what
the higher ones are in the first place.  Thus Plato claimed that true
knowledge transcended sense perception but he required sense
to apprehend reality in the first place.  As Della Volpe saw it,
Aristotle
exposed this contradiction within Plato's thinking.  Aristotle as an
ontological materialist saw that the substance of a species cannot
be different from the substance of any member of that species.
>From this he concluded that whatever exists is determinate and
non-contradictory and that to think is to think of some determinate
object.  Therefore, in a materialist ontology, subject and predicate
will always stand in synthesis in every judgement.  The predicate
is thus not induced from the subject nor is the subject deduced
from the predicate - both rationalism and empiricism were
thus in error.

At the same time Aristotle failed to push this critique to its logical
conclusion because he retained Plato's assumption that true
knowledge must be certain and permanent and so necessary
and unchangeable.  Therefore, he retreated from the nominalist
implications of his original insight by dividing the category of
substance into first and second substance so that individual
entities constituted one kind of substance while the genera
and species to which they belong comprise a second substance.
In this way Aristotle continued Plato's belief that the universal
has ontological primacy over individuals and so the empirical
world is subsidiary to a transcendent realm.

These notions continued to dominate Western thought into
the Renaissance when Galileo challenged the assumptions
of scholastic science. Galileo demanded that theories about
the natural world had to be empirically testable, that such theories
must be subjected to the test of experiment and observation.
Furthermore, Galileo outlined the essentials of the logic
of modern science by recognizing that experimental verification
works not by being able to prove a given hypothesis to be true
(which would involve committing the fallacy of affirming the
consequent) but rather by the elimination of its rivals as they are
disconfirmed or refuted experimentally.  Here, Della Volpe advances
an understanding of the logic of scientific verification that is not
unlike
the one that Karl Popper presented in his *Logic of Scientific
Discovery*.
However, as far as I can tell, Della Volpe did not rely upon Popper in
developing his analysis but on such writers as Galileo, Lord Bacon,
Claude Bernard, John Dewey, and Friedrich Engels.  Whereas, Popper
was concerned in *The Logic of Scientific Discovery* was concerned
with providing solutions to the demarcation problem (i.e. rules for
distinguishing science from non-science) and the induction problem,
Della Volpe was concerned mainly with demonstrating that the
"moral sciences" follow the same logic as the natural or positive
sciences, and with showing that Marx had likewise embraced what
Della Volpe called a "moral Galileanism."  Della Volpe contended
that Marx in such writing as his 1857 introduction and his *Capital*
had outlined then applied this moral Galileanism to his work
in political economy.  He argued that Marx demonstrated that
" . . . there is only one logic, there is only one one method, that is
of modern science understood and expounded in the materialist
sense, which has nothing whatever to do with any attempted
positivist or scientist justification of science."  Thus for Della Volpe
Marx had demonstrated the unity of science, although this defense
of the unity of science was different from the one that the logical
positivists later were to give.

For Della Volpe the Galilean logic of science (in both the natural
and moral sciences) was a dialectical one.  And in *Logic as a
Positive Science*, Della Volpe outlined his own conception
of dialectics or to be more specific materialist dialectics.
In this discussion, Della Volpe articulates his rejection of
Hegelian dialectics including the laws of dialectics such
as the law of the negation of the negation, the law of
the unity of opposites and the law of the transformation
of quantity into quality and vice versa.  For Della Volpe all
such formulations were in reality quite undialectical,
"...merely formulas of abstract thought, of a mystified and
therefore 'falsely mobile' and undialectical dialectic."  Rather,
for Della Volpe true dialectical thinking is represented by
the process of scientific inquiry in which proposed scientific
laws are formulated as hypotheses, which are tested against
empirical reality, and then are modified or replaced.  The
self-correcting nature of science was for Della Volpe, the
true embodiment of dialectics, not the abstract speculative
metaphysics of Hegel and his disciples.  For Della Volpe, in
scientific inquiry, induction and deduction are said to form
a methodological circle, along with matter & reason, fact
(or 'accidental') and hypothesis (or 'necessary').  And
these methodological circles constitute the basis for
scientific dialectics.  In Della Volpe's view scientific
dialectics was concerned with the formulation and
verification of hypotheses as opposed to hypostases

Della Volpe used these foregoing arguments to defend
the thesis that Marxism is a science insomuch as to the
extent that it relies upon a Galilean methodology, it is
examplifying the same osrt of logic as that which underlies
the natural sciences.  *Capital* is the best examplification
of this moral Galileanism in practice, with Marx exploding
the apriorist reasonings of the classical economists which
involved reliance upon 'speculative' or 'forced' abstrractions
which had implied the existence of natural and eternal economic
laws.  Instead Marx followed a methodology that relied upon
determinate abstractions instead.  Della Volpe analyzed Marx's
methodology as one which followed the pattern of Concrete-
Abstract-Concrete (C-A-C), which is the pattern or circle of
scientific materialist dialectics (as opposed to Hegelian
dialectics which follows the circle of Abstract-Concrete-
Abstract).

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