This excellent passage from Engels, which I just read yesterday, employs a mathematical metaphor to make the difference clear:
"Secondly, history is so made that the end-result always arises out of
the conflict of many individual wills, in which every will is itself the
product of a host of special conditions of life. Consequently there
exist innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite group of
parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant product – the
historical event. This again may itself be viewed as the product of a
force acting as a whole without consciousness or volition. For what
every individual wills separately is frustrated by what every one else
wills and the general upshot is something which no one willed. And so
the course of history has run along like a natural process; it also is
subject essentially to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that
the wills of individuals – who desire what the constitution of their
body as well as external circumstances, in the last instance economic
(either personal or social) impel them to desire – do not get what they
wish, but fuse into an average or common resultant, from all that one
has no right to conclude that they equal zero. On the contrary, every
will contributes to the resultant and is in so far included within it." -- Frederick Engels, letter to Bloch, 21 September 1890, Selected Correspondence, p. 475
Thursday, March 01, 2018
Why Determinism Is Not the Same As Fatalism
Posted by stripey7 at 8:54 PM
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