Almost seven years ago, I concluded “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead” with “If you [visitors to this site] can shed any light on Novack’s life and times, please do so in the combox. Thanks.”
Well, yesterday, Michael Zimmerman, a diligent student of Novack’s writings, took the time to correct misapprehensions I was laboring under. He granted permission to publish our brief correspondence, all dated today, which I include below in full with gratitude.
A general, “metaphilosophical” answer to Novack and other philosophers may be inferred from my Philosophy after Christ. — A.G.F.
Here is Mr. Zimmerman’s first message:
I recently came across your blog post dated November 6th, 2019 titled “When George Novack was an ‘entranced disciple’ of Whitehead.” It caught the attention of my search engine while I was doing some research on the life of Novack. What immediately stood out is that you have mistakenly labeled a picture of novelist James T. Farrell as being that of George Novack. Farrell’s picture carries the caption “George Novack, 1905-1992. Circa early 1930s.”[I have corrected this. — A.G.F.]
You ended that entry with an open request for comments from anyone who can shed light on Novack’s life and times. As a student of his, I thought I would offer some insights into what his work has to say on the positions you have attributed to Novack.
Firstly, Marxism-Leninism became a term of self-reference for the petty-bourgeois Stalinist caste and its loyalists in the nationalist communist parties in order to conflate their counterrevolutionary movement with the workers and peasants revolution of the early 20th century. To my knowledge, Novack never called himself a Marxist-Leninist, but firmly aligned himself with the Trotskyist movement, having personally worked with Leon Trotsky politically and philosophically, and having given his life’s work in service of a Trotskyist party. This is an important clarification because search engines and large language models (such as ChatGPT and Gemini) are using your website to justify claims about Novack as a Marxist-Leninist, a title which cannot apply to Novack given the trajectory of his political life.
Secondly, if your open request for comment on Novack is representative of genuine scholastic interest in the man’s thought, I would be doing you a disservice by leaving you only with the corrections regarding the incorrectly labeled picture and political ideology.
In the work referenced by your blog, Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, as well as in his Introduction to the Logic of Marxism and others, George Novack makes explicit that the laws of development differ across three domains; nature, society, and thought. Novack understood, as did Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Trotsky, that because the laws which govern these three domains differ, it would be incorrect to suggest that the methods of natural science can be directly and immediately applied to social and philosophical problems. That is scientism to the Marxist and Novack explicitly rejected the misapplication of science in this way.
Your attribution of scientism to Novack suggests the term means something else to you. A serious treatment of the subject should acknowledge the distinction and that Novack polemicized against scientism as a reactionary philosophical tendency.
Marxists start with the world as it is. The method of Marxism — dialectical and historical materialism — holds that concepts should be combined according to the laws of the movement of their objects and by submitting the conclusions of theory to the continual tests of practice. This avoids the error of disconnecting the products of abstraction (concepts) from the real conditions they represent. George Novack acknowledged science as a part of the practical activities which ensure our concepts remain grounded, but the ground for Novack, as for all Marxists, are the mind-independent material conditions which precede other considerations ontologically and causally.
Given this, and the domains of being differentiated by their laws of development, it’s not difficult to imagine how Novack might respond to your challenge about the ontology of numbers, or why Marxists place supernatural claims in their broader social and historical contexts, even if that may frustrate apologists who wish for them to be considered in isolation from the conditions which bore them.
I appreciated your personal anecdote from your diary regarding being in attendance for one of Novack’s talks at the SWP’s Militant Labor Forum. I find what information I can that helps personalize the man in my own mind, having never met him myself. One of my teachers brought him a bundle of newspapers every day during his final days in the hospital. George Novack remained the vigilant theoretician and proletarian fighter to his last breath.
Kind regards,
Michael R. Zimmerman
I replied:
Thank you for such a timely response. Please feel free to post my correspondence in full on your website and comment on it, if you so choose.
The oldest photograph of George Novack that I was able to find is from The Militant newsweekly Volume 13, Number 9 dated Monday, February 28th, 1949 found here: https://themilitant.com/1949/
I have attached that picture to this email as well. [Please see above.]
I wish I could say that my research on Novack is directed toward publishing an exposition of his work, but my time is almost entirely consumed by finding ways to bring his ideas to a younger generation increasingly lost to short-form video content on social media. If young people rediscover literature, I would much prefer that they read Novack’s original work rather than my own. Further, I think any such exposition should be the work of people who knew him and worked with him.
There are many such people still active in the Socialist Workers Party today, but because most of their resources are expended on transitional party work, I do not expect the party’s publishing house, Pathfinder Press, to produce any further literature on Novack. Thankfully, he had the foresight to publish his own autobiographical foreword as part of Polemics in Marxist Philosophy.
Your commitment to truth is greatly appreciated, Anthony. I look forward to a time when such commitment as yours is represented in our educational institutions.
Warm regards,
Michael R. Zimmerman