Peter Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888)

German Social-Democratic thinker and activist; outstanding Marxist philosopher and worker philosopher; great communist fighter.

Dietzgen was born in December 1828, in Blankenberg, a small town near Cologne in the Rhine province of Germany, into a tanner’s family. In 1844, Dietzgen dropped out of high school in the second grade because of his family’s poverty and returned home to join the labor force, and used his leisure time for self-education, delving into the writings of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and the German philosophers Kant, Fichte, and Feuerbach on his own. During the German revolution in 1848, Dietzgen was inspired and enthusiastically propagated the revolution, and from then on, he embarked on the path of studying philosophy and taking part in revolutionary activities. In 1852, he became a member of the Communist League. From 1867, he corresponded with Marx and Engels, and returned to Germany in 1869, where he took an active part in the activities of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. In 1872, he participated in The Hague Congress of the First International. In 1884, he moved to the United States, where he served as the editor of the weekly Der Sozialist as well as the Chicago Arbeiterzeitung, Fackel, and Vorbote. Dietzgen’s main works in his life include The Nature of Human Brainwork, Social Democratic Philosophy, Letters on Logic, and The Positive Outcome of Philosophy, etc. In these works, Dietzgen proved the materiality of the objective world and pointed out that matter is not limited to what is weighty and palpable, but that it is all that really exists, thus materialistically solving the basic question of philosophy. In the sphere of the history of society, Dietzgen endorsed the materialist conception of history founded by Marx and Engels, and tried to interpret historical materialism from the perspective of social development and class struggle. In the field of social consciousness, Dietzgen made his own original contribution. He abandoned the abstract theory of human nature and applied the fundamental principles of historical materialism to make a scientific analysis of ideological questions such as ethics and religion. In epistemology, he held that thinking is the function of the human brain, that everything can be known, and that the process of people’s knowledge of truth is a process of infinite deepening. In particular, Dietzgen was a self-taught philosopher, who arrived at a number of principles of dialectical materialism through his own independent research. Marx and Engels have all spoken highly of Dietzgen, and Marx pointed out that Dietzgen is one of the most gifted workers he knows. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels also pointed out that this materialist dialectics, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.

He died of a heart attack in Chicago on April 15, 1888.